RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(1803-1882)

Contents

The Poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE COMPLETE POEMS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Books

NATURE: ADDRESSES AND LECTURES

ESSAYS. FIRST SERIES

ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI by R. F. Fuller

ENGLISH TRAITS

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS

LECTURES AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

MISCELLANIES

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS

The Essays

LIST OF ESSAYS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF ESSAYS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Letters

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON

The Journals

SELECTED JOURNALS

The Biographies

RALPH WALDO EMERSON by Oliver Wendell Holmes

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by Edward W. Emerson

© Delphi Classics 2013

Version 1

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

By Delphi Classics, 2013

NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

The Poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts — the site of Emerson’s birthplace

A plaque commemorating the author’s birthplace

A scene of central Boston, 1803 — the year Emerson was born

BRIEF INTRODUCTION: RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 25, 1803 and he was the son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood and his father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before the poet’s eighth birthday. Raised by his mother, with the help of several other women in the family, Emerson was particularly inspired by his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, who lived with the family off and on, maintaining a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863. He later referred to his Aunt Mary as his “earliest and best teacher,” and a “spirited and original genius in her own right”.

Emerson’s formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine and in October 1817, aged 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president — a position that meant he had to fetch misbehaving students and send messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be later called Wide World. During this uncertain time, he took various outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including working as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher with his uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts. Serving as Class Poet, he presented an original poem on Harvard’s Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18 years old. Emerson was not conspicuous as a student and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 peers.

In 1826, suffering from poor health, Emerson decided to seek out warmer climates. He travelled to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach and began writing poetry in earnest for the first time. While in St. Augustine, he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat, who was the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. Only two years Emerson’s senior, they became close friends and enjoyed sharing one another’s company, engaging in enlightening discussions on religion, society, philosophy, and government; Emerson considered Murat an important influence in his intellectual education.

After completing his education at Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William in a school for young women that was established in their mother’s house, after he had successfully created his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. When William went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school all by himself. Over the next several years, he made his living as a schoolmaster, before deciding to study at Harvard Divinity School.

Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her when she was 18. The couple moved to Boston, with Emerson’s mother Ruth moving with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already sick with tuberculosis. Less than two years later, she died at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831, after uttering her last words: “I have not forgotten the peace and joy.” Emerson was heavily affected by her loss, visiting her grave in Roxbury daily. In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, he wrote, “I visited Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.”

Having completed his divinity studies, Emerson was invited by Boston’s Second Church to serve as junior pastor and he was ordained on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1,200 a year, increasing to $1,400 in July, but with his church role he took on other responsibilities, including the role of chaplain to the Massachusetts legislature and being a member of the Boston school committee. During this period, following the death of his wife, he began to doubt his beliefs, disagreeing with the church’s methods. Writing in his journal in June 1832, he records: “I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.” His disagreements with church officials over the administration of the Communion service and misgivings about public prayer eventually led to his resignation in 1832. As he wrote, “This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it.”

Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and later wrote of his travels in the 1856 book English Traits. He left aboard the brig Jasper on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing first to Malta. During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland, and had to be dragged by fellow passengers to visit Voltaire’s home in Ferney. Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. The latter in particular was a strong influence on Emerson, who would later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle and in March 1835, Emerson tried to convince Carlyle to come to America to lecture. The two writers would maintain a close correspondence until Carlyle’s death in 1881.

Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833, and lived with his mother in Newton, Massachusetts, until October, 1834, when he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his step-grandfather Dr. Ezra Ripley at what was later named The Old Manse. At this time he closely monitored the budding Lyceum movement, which provided lectures on many topics.  The lyceums, mechanics’ institutes, and agriculture organisations flourished in the United States before and after the Civil War. They were important in the development of adult education in America. During this period hundreds of informal associations were established for the purpose of improving the social, intellectual, and moral fabric of society. The lyceum movement — with its lectures, dramatic performances, class instructions, and debates — contributed significantly to the education of the adult American in the 19th century. Noted lecturers, entertainers and readers would travel the “lyceum circuit,” going from town to town or state to state to entertain, speak, or debate at a variety of locations. Emerson saw for himself a possible career as a lecturer and on November 5, 1833, he made the first of what would eventually be approximately 1,500 lectures, discussing The Uses of Natural History in Boston. This was an expanded account of his experience in Paris. In this lecture, he set out some of his important beliefs and the ideas he would later develop in his first published essay Nature, which is now regarded as a founding Transcendentalist text.

At this time Emerson had met Lydia Jackson, a devout Christian, who was a gifted debater that shared his Transcendentalist beliefs. On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lydia proposing marriage and she accepted. In July 1835, he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Concord, Massachusetts that he named “Bush”; which is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. Emerson quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town, where he gave a lecture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord on September 12, 1835. Two days later, he married Lydia Jackson in her home town of Plymouth, Massachusetts and moved to the new home in Concord together with Emerson’s mother on September 15.

On September 8, 1836, the day before the publication of his groundbreaking work Nature, Emerson met with Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam and George Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-minded intellectuals. This was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, which served as a centre for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836 and on September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together. Fuller would later prove to be an important figure in Transcendentalism.

In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau and encouraged the young writer to begin keeping a journal, which Emerson himself religiously adhered to throughout his life. In March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on The Philosophy of History at Boston’s Masonic Temple, which was the first time he managed a lecture series on his own, marking the beginning of a dedicated career as a lecturer. The profits from this series of lectures were much larger than when he was paid by an organisation to talk and Emerson continued to manage his own lectures often throughout his lifetime. He would eventually give as many as eighty lectures a year, travelling across the northern part of the United States, and as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis and California.

It was in 1841 that Emerson published Essays, his second book, which included the famous essay, “Self-Reliance”, receiving favourable reviews in London and Paris. This book laid the foundations for Emerson’s international fame. From 1847 to 1848, the author toured England, Scotland, and Ireland, and he also found time to visit Paris between the February Revolution and the bloody June Days. When he arrived, he saw the stumps where trees had been cut down to form barricades in the February riots. On May 21 he stood on the Champ de Mars in the midst of mass celebrations for concord, peace and labour. He wrote in his journal: “At the end of the year we shall take account, & see if the Revolution was worth the trees.” The trip left an important imprint on Emerson’s later work. Emerson later came to see the American Civil War as a ‘revolution’ that shared common ground with the European revolutions of 1848.

Emerson was staunchly anti-slavery and gave a number of lectures during the pre-Civil War years, beginning as early as November, 1837. From 1844 he took a more active role in opposing slavery, giving a number of speeches and lectures, and he notably welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown’s visits to Concord. Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made it clear that he advocated the immediate emancipation of the slaves.

Emerson visited Washington, D.C, at the end of January 1862, where he gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian on January 31, 1862.  In this lecture he famously declared: “The South calls slavery an institution... I call it destitution... Emancipation is the demand of civilization”. The next day, Emerson’s friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. The President was familiar with the author’s work, having previously seen him lecture. In 1865, Emerson spoke at a memorial service held for Lincoln in Concord: “Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain as this has caused, or will have caused, on its announcement.”

On May 6, 1862, Emerson’s protégé Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 and Emerson delivered his eulogy. For the rest of his life, Emerson often referred to Thoreau as his best friend, in spite of a falling out that began in 1849 after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.

In 1867, Emerson’s health was declining, as demonstrated by his writing less in his journals, and he also started having memory problems, suffering from aphasia. By the end of the decade, he forgot his own name at times and, when anyone asked how he felt, he responded, “Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well”.

The author’s Concord home caught fire on July 24, 1872 and Emerson called for help from his neighbours. The flames were too dangerous to tackle and they had to give up putting the fire out, concentrating instead on saving as many objects as possible. Donations were collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild, including $5,000 gathered by Francis Cabot Lowell, another $10,000 collected by LeBaron Russell Briggs, and a personal donation of $1,000 from George Bancroft. Support for shelter was offered as well; though the Emersons ended up staying with family at the Old Manse, invitations came from Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James Thomas Fields and Annie Adams Fields. The fire marked an end to Emerson’s serious lecturing career; from then on, he would lecture only on special occasions and only in front of familiar audiences.

While the house was being rebuilt, Emerson embarked on a final trip abroad, visiting England, continental Europe and, of all places, Egypt. He left on October 23, 1872, along with his daughter Ellen while his wife spent time at the Old Manse and with friends. Emerson and his daughter Ellen returned to the United States on the ship Olympus along with their good friend Charles Eliot Norton on April 15, 1873. Their return to Concord was celebrated by the town and school was cancelled for that day.

Sadly, the problems with his memory had become embarrassing to Emerson and he ceased his public appearances by 1879. In April 1882, he was found to be suffering from pneumonia and Emerson passed away on April 27, 1882.

As a lecturer and orator, Emerson gradually became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States, establishing himself as one of the pioneers of the lecturing system. He was well-respected by his fellow writers and lecturers, who easily acknowledged his ability to influence and inspire others.  Emerson’s poetry and other writings not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognise Emerson’s influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson’s godson. 

Emerson as a young man

Achille Murat (1801-1847) was the eldest son of the upstart King of Naples during the First French Empire and later in life mayor of Tallahassee, Florida in the United States. He was a great source of inspiration to Emerson in his early writings.

Murat’s house in St. Augustine, Florida, which Emerson visited many times

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era, who greatly inspired Emerson during his English travels.

Lydia Jackson Emerson and her son Edward Waldo Emerson

Emerson, c. 1862

Emerson, c. 1869

THE COMPLETE POEMS

CONTENTS

Poems of Youth and Early Manhood

Poems, 1847

May-Day and Other Pieces

Elements and Mottoes

Quatrains

Fragments

Uncollected Poems

Translations

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

Poems of Youth and Early Manhood

THE BELL

I love thy music, mellow bell,
  I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
  Which calls the sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep
  The home-bound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
  It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God and heavenly joys
  Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
  Disarmed the thunder’s fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell,
  Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
  That sweeps my native shore.

1823.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THOUGHT

I am not poor, but I am proud,
  Of one inalienable right,
Above the envy of the crowd, —
  Thought’s holy light.

Better it is than gems or gold,
  And oh! it cannot die,
But thought will glow when the sun grows cold,
  And mix with Deity.

BOSTON, 1823.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

PRAYER

When success exalts thy lot,
God for thy virtue lays a plot:
And all thy life is for thy own,
Then for mankind’s instruction shown;
And though thy knees were never bent,
To Heaven thy hourly prayers are sent,
And whether formed for good or ill,
Are registered and answered still.

1826 [?].

I bear in youth the sad infirmities
That use to undo the limb and sense of age;
It hath pleased Heaven to break the dream of bliss
Which lit my onward way with bright presage,
And my unserviceable limbs forego.
The sweet delight I found in fields and farms,
On windy hills, whose tops with morning glow,
And lakes, smooth mirrors of Aurora’s charms.
Yet I think on them in the silent night,
Still breaks that morn, though dim, to Memory’s eye,
And the firm soul does the pale train defy
Of grim Disease, that would her peace affright.
Please God, I’ll wrap me in mine innocence,
And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

CAMBRIDGE, 1827.

Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly
Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,
God hath a select family of sons
Now scattered wide thro’ earth, and each alone,
Who are thy spiritual kindred, and each one
By constant service to, that inward law,
Is weaving the sublime proportions
Of a true monarch’s soul. Beauty and strength,
The riches of a spotless memory,
The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got
By searching of a clear and loving eye
That seeth as God seeth. These are their gifts,
And Time, who keeps God’s word, brings on the day
To seal the marriage of these minds with thine,
Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be
The salt of all the elements, world of the world.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO-DAY

I rake no coffined clay, nor publish wide
The resurrection of departed pride.
Safe in their ancient crannies, dark and deep,
Let kings and conquerors, saints and soldiers sleep —
Late in the world, — too late perchance for fame,
Just late enough to reap abundant blame, —
I choose a novel theme, a bold abuse
Of critic charters, an unlaurelled Muse.

Old mouldy men and books and names and lands
Disgust my reason and defile my hands.
I had as lief respect an ancient shoe,
As love old things for age, and hate the new.
I spurn the Past, my mind disdains its nod,
Nor kneels in homage to so mean a God.
I laugh at those who, while they gape and gaze,
The bald antiquity of China praise.
Youth is (whatever cynic tubs pretend)
The fault that boys and nations soonest mend.

1824.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FAME

Ah Fate, cannot a man
  Be wise without a beard?
East, West, from Beer to Dan,
  Say, was it never heard
That wisdom might in youth be gotten,
Or wit be ripe before ‘t was rotten?

He pays too high a price
  For knowledge and for fame
Who sells his sinews to be wise,
  His teeth and bones to buy a name,
And crawls through life a paralytic
To earn the praise of bard and critic.

Were it not better done,
  To dine and sleep through forty years;
Be loved by few; be feared by none;
  Laugh life away; have wine for tears;
And take the mortal leap undaunted,
Content that all we asked was granted?

But Fate will not permit
  The seed of gods to die,
Nor suffer sense to win from wit
  Its guerdon in the sky,
Nor let us hide, whate’er our pleasure,
The world’s light underneath a measure.

Go then, sad youth, and shine;
  Go, sacrifice to Fame;
Put youth, joy, health upon the shrine,
  And life to fan the flame;
Being for Seeming bravely barter
And die to Fame a happy martyr.

1824.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE SUMMONS

A sterner errand to the silken troop
Has quenched the uneasy blush that warmed my cheek;
I am commissioned in my day of joy
To leave my woods and streams and the sweet sloth
Of prayer and song that were my dear delight,
To leave the rudeness of my woodland life,
Sweet twilight walks and midnight solitude
And kind acquaintance with the morning stars
And the glad hey-day of my household hours,
The innocent mirth which sweetens daily bread,
Railing in love to those who rail again,
By mind’s industry sharpening the love of life —
Books, Muses, Study, fireside, friends and love,
I loved ye with true love, so fare ye well!

 I was a boy; boyhood slid gayly by
And the impatient years that trod on it
Taught me new lessons in the lore of life.
I’ve learned the sum of that sad history
All woman-born do know, that hoped-for days,
Days that come dancing on fraught with delights,
Dash our blown hopes as they limp heavily by.
But I, the bantling of a country Muse,
Abandon all those toys with speed to obey
The King whose meek ambassador I go.

1826.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE RIVER

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came, —
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father’s fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing, — and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky: —
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho’ they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road —
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of ‘monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country’s primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

CONCORD, June, 1827.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

GOOD HOPE

The cup of life is not so shallow
That we have drained the best,
That all the wine at once we swallow
And lees make all the rest.

Maids of as soft a bloom shall marry
As Hymen yet hath blessed,
And fairer forms are in the quarry
Than Phidias released.

1827.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

LINES TO ELLEN

Tell me, maiden, dost thou use
Thyself thro’ Nature to diffuse?
All the angles of the coast
Were tenanted by thy sweet ghost,
Bore thy colors every flower,
Thine each leaf and berry bore;
All wore thy badges and thy favors
In their scent or in their savors,
Every moth with painted wing,
Every bird in carolling,
The wood-boughs with thy manners waved,
The rocks uphold thy name engraved,
The sod throbbed friendly to my feet,
And the sweet air with thee was sweet.
The saffron cloud that floated warm
Studied thy motion, took thy form,
And in his airy road benign
Recalled thy skill in bold design,
Or seemed to use his privilege
To gaze o’er the horizon’s edge,
To search where now thy beauty glowed,
Or made what other purlieus proud.

1829.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SECURITY

Though her eye seek other forms
And a glad delight below,
Yet the love the world that warms
Bids for me her bosom glow.

She must love me till she find
Another heart as large and true.
Her soul is frank as the ocean wind,
And the world has only two.

If Nature hold another heart
That knows a purer flame than me,
I too therein could challenge part
And learn of love a new degree.

1829.

A dull uncertain brain,
But gifted yet to know
That God has cherubim who go
Singing an immortal strain,
Immortal here below.
I know the mighty bards,
I listen when they sing,
And now I know
The secret store
Which these explore
When they with torch of genius pierce
The tenfold clouds that cover
The riches of the universe
From God’s adoring lover.
And if to me it is not given
To fetch one ingot thence
Of the unfading gold of Heaven
His merchants may dispense,
Yet well I know the royal mine,
And know the sparkle of its ore,
Know Heaven’s truth from lies that shine —
Explored they teach us to explore.

1831.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

A MOUNTAIN GRAVE

Why fear to die
And let thy body lie
Under the flowers of June,
  Thy body food
  For the ground-worms’ brood
And thy grave smiled on by the visiting moon.

Amid great Nature’s halls
Girt in by mountain walls
And washed with waterfalls
It would please me to die,
  Where every wind that swept my tomb
  Goes loaded with a free perfume
Dealt out with a God’s charity.

I should like to die in sweets,
A hill’s leaves for winding-sheets,
And the searching sun to see
That I am laid with decency.
And the commissioned wind to sing
His mighty psalm from fall to spring
And annual tunes commemorate
Of Nature’s child the common fate.

WILLIAMSTOWN, VERMONT, 1 June, 1831.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

A LETTER

Dear brother, would you know the life,
Please God, that I would lead?
On the first wheels that quit this weary town
Over yon western bridges I would ride
And with a cheerful benison forsake
Each street and spire and roof, incontinent.
Then would I seek where God might guide my steps,
Deep in a woodland tract, a sunny farm,
Amid the mountain counties, Hants, Franklin, Berks,
Where down the rock ravine a river roars,
Even from a brook, and where old woods
Not tamed and cleared cumber the ground
With their centennial wrecks.
Find me a slope where I can feel the sun
And mark the rising of the early stars.
There will I bring my books, — my household gods,
The reliquaries of my dead saint, and dwell
In the sweet odor of her memory.
Then in the uncouth solitude unlock
My stock of art, plant dials in the grass,
Hang in the air a bright thermometer
And aim a telescope at the inviolate sun.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

CHARDON ST., BOSTON, 1831.

Day by day returns
The everlasting sun,
Replenishing material urns
With God’s unspared donation;
But the day of day,
The orb within the mind,
Creating fair and good alway,
Shines not as once it shined.

* * *

Vast the realm of Being is,
In the waste one nook is his;
Whatsoever hap befalls
In his vision’s narrow walls
He is here to testify.

1831.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HYMN

There is in all the sons of men
A love that in the spirit dwells,
That panteth after things unseen,
And tidings of the future tells.

And God hath built his altar here
To keep this fire of faith alive,
And sent his priests in holy fear
To speak the truth — for truth to strive.

And hither come the pensive train
Of rich and poor, of young and old,
Of ardent youth untouched by pain,
Of thoughtful maids and manhood bold.

They seek a friend to speak the word
Already trembling on their tongue,
To touch with prophet’s hand the chord
Which God in human hearts hath strung.

To speak the plain reproof of sin
That sounded in the soul before,
And bid you let the angels in
That knock at meek contrition’s door.

A friend to lift the curtain up
That hides from man the mortal goal,
And with glad thoughts of faith and hope
Surprise the exulting soul.

Sole source of light and hope assured,
O touch thy servant’s lips with power,
So shall he speak to us the word
Thyself dost give forever more.

June, 1831.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SELF-RELIANCE

Henceforth, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be
Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart,
I hear continually his voice therein.

* * *

The little needle always knows the North,
The little bird remembereth his note,
And this wise Seer within me never errs.
I never taught it what it teaches me;
I only follow, when I act aright.

October 9, 1832.

And when I am entombed in my place,
Be it remembered of a single man,
He never, though he dearly loved his race,
For fear of human eyes swerved from his plan.

Oh what is Heaven but the fellowship
Of minds that each can stand against the world
By its own meek and incorruptible will?

The days pass over me
And I am still the same;
The aroma of my life is gone
With the flower with which it came.

1833.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WRITTEN IN NAPLES

We are what we are made; each following day
Is the Creator of our human mould
Not less than was the first; the all-wise God
Gilds a few points in every several life,
And as each flower upon the fresh hillside,
And every colored petal of each flower,
Is sketched and dyed, each with a new design,
Its spot of purple, and its streak of brown,
So each man’s life shall have its proper lights,
And a few joys, a few peculiar charms,
For him round in the melancholy hours
And reconcile him to the common days.
Not many men see beauty in the fogs
Of close low pine-woods in a river town;
Yet unto me not morn’s magnificence,
Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve,
Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls
Of rich men blazing hospitable light,
Nor wit, nor eloquence, — no, nor even the song
Of any woman that is now alive, —
Hath such a soul, such divine influence,
Such resurrection of the happy past,
As is to me when I behold the morn
Ope in such law moist roadside, and beneath
Peep the blue violets out of the black loam,
Pathetic silent poets that sing to me
Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife.

March, 1833.

Chronological List of Poems

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WRITTEN AT ROME

Alone in Rome. Why, Rome is lonely too; —
Besides, you need not be alone; the soul
Shall have society of its own rank.
Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,
The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome,
Shall flock to you and tarry by your side,
And comfort you with their high company.
Virtue alone is sweet society,
It keeps the key to all heroic hearts,
And opens you a welcome in them all.
You must be like them if you desire them,
Scorn trifles and embrace a better aim
Than wine or sleep or praise;
Hunt knowledge as the lover wooes a maid,
And ever in the strife of your own thoughts
Obey the nobler impulse; that is Rome:
That shall command a senate to your side;
For there is no might in the universe
That can contend with love. It reigns forever.
Wait then, sad friend, wait in majestic peace
The hour of heaven. Generously trust
Thy fortune’s web to the beneficent hand
That until now has put his world in fee
To thee. He watches for thee still. His love
Broods over thee, and as God lives in heaven,
However long thou walkest solitary,
The hour of heaven shall come, the man appear.

1833.

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WEBSTER

1831

Let Webster’s lofty face
Ever on thousands shine,
A beacon set that Freedom’s race
Might gather omens from that radiant sign.

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FROM THE PHI BETA KAPPA POEM

1834

Ill fits the abstemious Muse a crown to weave
For living brows; ill fits them to receive:
And yet, if virtue abrogate the law,
One portrait — fact or fancy — we may draw;
A form which Nature cast in the heroic mould
Of them who rescued liberty of old;
He, when the rising storm of party roared,
Brought his great forehead to the council board,
There, while hot heads perplexed with fears the state,
Calm as the morn the manly patriot sate;
Seemed, when at last his clarion accents broke,
As if the conscience of the country spoke.
Not on its base Monadnoc surer stood,
Than he to common sense and common good:
No mimic; from his breast his counsel drew,
Believed the eloquent was aye the true;
He bridged the gulf from th’ alway good and wise
To that within the vision of small eyes.
Self-centred; when he launched the genuine word
It shook or captivated all who heard,
Ran from his mouth to mountains and the sea,
And burned in noble hearts proverb and prophecy.

1854

Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail?
He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale.

* * * * *

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Poems, 1847

GOOD-BYE

Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I’m not thine.
Long through thy weary crowds I roam;
A river-ark on the ocean brine,
Long I’ve been tossed like the driven foam:
But now, proud world! I’m going home.

Good-bye to Flattery’s fawning face;
To Grandeur with his wise grimace;
To upstart Wealth’s averted eye;
To supple Office, low and high;
To crowded halls, to court and street;
To frozen hearts and hasting feet;
To those who go, and those who come;
Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home.

I am going to my own hearth-stone,
Bosomed in yon green hills alone, —
secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green, the livelong day,
Echo the blackbird’s roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

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EACH AND ALL

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it cheers not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky; —
He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As ‘mid the virgin train she strayed,
Nor knew her beauty’s best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; —
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, ‘I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood’s cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:’ —
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet’s breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky.
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

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THE PROBLEM

I like a church; I like a cowl;
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles
Yet not for all his faith can see
Would I that cowlèd churchman be.

Why should the vest on him allure,
Which I could not on me endure?

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano’s tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below, —
The canticles of love and woe:
The hand that rounded Peter’s dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew; —
The conscious stone to beauty grew.

Know’st thou what wove yon woodbird’s nest
Of leaves, and feathers from her breast?
Or how the fish outbuilt her shell,
Painting with morn each annual cell?
Or how the sacred pine-tree adds
To her old leaves new myriads?
Such and so grew these holy piles,
Whilst love and terror laid the tiles.
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon,
As the best gem upon her zone,
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids;
O’er England’s abbeys bends the sky,
As on its friends, with kindred eye;
For out of Thought’s interior sphere
These wonders rose to upper air;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted them an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat.

These temples grew as grows the grass;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o’er him planned;
And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within.
Ever the fiery Pentecost
Girds with one flame the countless host,
Trances the heart through chanting choirs,
And through the priest the mind inspires.
The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
I know what say the fathers wise, —
The Book itself before me lies,
Old Chrysostom, best Augustine,
And he who blent both in his line,
The younger Golden Lips or mines,
Taylor, the Shakspeare of divines.
His words are music in my ear,
I see his cowlèd portrait dear;
And yet, for all his faith could see,
I would not the good bishop be.

Chronological List of Poems

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TO RHEA

Thee, dear friend, a brother soothes,
Not with flatteries, but truths,
Which tarnish not, but purify
To light which dims the morning’s eye.
I have come from the spring-woods,
From the fragrant solitudes; —
Listen what the poplar-tree
And murmuring waters counselled me.

If with love thy heart has burned;
If thy love is unreturned;
Hide thy grief within thy breast,
Though it tear thee unexpressed;
For when love has once departed
From the eyes of the false-hearted,
And one by one has torn off quite
The bandages of purple light;
Though thou wert the loveliest
Form the soul had ever dressed,
Thou shalt seem, in each reply,
A vixen to his altered eye;
Thy softest pleadings seem too bold,
Thy praying lute will seem to scold;
Though thou kept the straightest road,
Yet thou errest far and broad.

But thou shalt do as do the gods
In their cloudless periods;
For of this lore be thou sure, —
Though thou forget, the gods, secure,
Forget never their command,
But make the statute of this land.
As they lead, so follow all,
Ever have done, ever shall.
Warning to the blind and deaf,
‘T is written on the iron leaf,
Who drinks of Cupid’s nectar cup
Loveth downward, and not up;
He who loves, of gods or men,
Shall not by the same be loved again;
His sweetheart’s idolatry
Falls, in turn, a new degree.
When a god is once beguiled
By beauty of a mortal child
And by her radiant youth delighted,
He is not fooled, but warily knoweth
His love shall never be requited.
And thus the wise Immortal doeth, —
‘T is his study and delight
To bless that creature day and night;
From all evils to defend her;
In her lap to pour all splendor;
To ransack earth for riches rare,
And fetch her stars to deck her hair:
He mixes music with her thoughts,
And saddens her with heavenly doubts:
All grace, all good his great heart knows,
Profuse in love, the king bestows,
Saying, ‘Hearken! Earth, Sea, Air!
This monument of my despair
Build I to the All-Good, All-Fair.
Not for a private good,
But I, from my beatitude,
Albeit scorned as none was scorned,
Adorn her as was none adorned.
I make this maiden an ensample
To Nature, through her kingdoms ample,
Whereby to model newer races,
Statelier forms and fairer faces;
To carry man to new degrees
Of power and of comeliness.
These presents be the hostages
Which I pawn for my release.
See to thyself, O Universe!
Thou art better, and not worse.’ —
And the god, having given all,
Is freed forever from his thrall.

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THE VISIT

Askest, ‘How long thou shalt stay?’
Devastator of the day!
Know, each substance and relation,
Thorough nature’s operation,
Hath its unit, bound and metre;
And every new compound
Is some product and repeater, —
Product of the earlier found.
But the unit of the visit,
The encounter of the wise, —
Say, what other metre is it
Than the meeting of the eyes?
Nature poureth into nature
Through the channels of that feature,
Riding on the ray of sight,
Fleeter far than whirlwinds go,
Or for service, or delight,
Hearts to hearts their meaning show,
Sum their long experience,
And import intelligence.
Single look has drained the breast;
Single moment years confessed.
The duration of a glance
Is the term of convenance,
And, though thy rede be church or state,
Frugal multiples of that.
Speeding Saturn cannot halt;
Linger, — thou shalt rue the fault:
If Love his moment overstay,
Hatred’s swift repulsions play.

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URIEL

It fell in the ancient periods
  Which the brooding soul surveys,
Or ever the wild Time coined itself
  Into calendar months and days.

This was the lapse of Uriel,
Which in Paradise befell.
Once, among the Pleiads walking,
Seyd overheard the young gods talking;
And the treason, too long pent,
To his ears was evident.
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
With a look that solved the sphere,
And stirred the devils everywhere,
Gave his sentiment divine
Against the being of a line.
‘Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.’
As Uriel spoke with piercing eye,
A shudder ran around the sky;
The stern old war-gods shook their heads,
The seraphs frowned from myrtle-beds;
Seemed to the holy festival
The rash word boded ill to all;
The balance-beam of Fate was bent;
The bounds of good and ill were rent;
Strong Hades could not keep his own,
But all slid to confusion.

A sad self-knowledge, withering, fell
On the beauty of Uriel;
In heaven once eminent, the god
Withdrew, that hour, into his cloud;
Whether doomed to long gyration
In the sea of generation,
Or by knowledge grown too bright
To hit the nerve of feebler sight.
Straightway, a forgetting wind
Stole over the celestial kind,
And their lips the secret kept,
If in ashes the fire-seed slept.
But now and then, truth-speaking things
Shamed the angels’ veiling wings;
And, shrilling from the solar course,
Or from fruit of chemic force,
Procession of a soul in matter,
Or the speeding change of water,
Or out of the good of evil born,
Came Uriel’s voice of cherub scorn,
And a blush tinged the upper sky,
And the gods shook, they knew not why.

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THE WORLD-SOUL

Thanks to the morning light,
  Thanks to the foaming sea,
To the uplands of New Hampshire,
  To the green-haired forest free;
Thanks to each man of courage,
  To the maids of holy mind,
To the boy with his games undaunted
  Who never looks behind.

Cities of proud hotels,
  Houses of rich and great,
Vice nestles in your chambers,
  Beneath your roofs of slate.
It cannot conquer folly, —
  Time-and-space-conquering steam, —
And the light-outspeeding telegraph
  Bears nothing on its beam.

The politics are base;
  The letters do not cheer;
And ’tis far in the deeps of history,
  The voice that speaketh clear.
Trade and the streets ensnare us,
  Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
  And we despoil the unborn.

Yet there in the parlor sits
  Some figure of noble guise, —
Our angel, in a stranger’s form,
  Or woman’s pleading eyes;
Or only a flashing sunbeam
  In at the window-pane;
Or Music pours on mortals
  Its beautiful disdain.

The inevitable morning
  Finds them who in cellars be;
And be sure the all-loving Nature
  Will smile in a factory.
Yon ridge of purple landscape,
  Yon sky between the walls,
Hold all the hidden wonders
 In scanty intervals.

Alas! the Sprite that haunts us
  Deceives our rash desire;
It whispers of the glorious gods,
  And leaves us in the mire.
We cannot learn the cipher
  That’s writ upon our cell;
Stars taunt us by a mystery
  Which we could never spell.

If but one hero knew it,
  The world would blush in flame;
The sage, till he hit the secret,
  Would hang his head for shame.
Our brothers have not read it,
  Not one has found the key;
And henceforth we are comforted, —
  We are but such as they.

Still, still the secret presses;
  The nearing clouds draw down;
The crimson morning flames into
  The fopperies of the town.
Within, without the idle earth,
  Stars weave eternal rings;
The sun himself shines heartily,
  And shares the joy he brings.

And what if Trade sow cities
  Like shells along the shore,
And thatch with towns the prairie broad
  With railways ironed o’er? —
They are but sailing foam-bells
  Along Thought’s causing stream,
And take their shape and sun-color
  From him that sends the dream.

For Destiny never swerves
  Nor yields to men the helm;
He shoots his thought, by hidden nerves,
  Throughout the solid realm.
The patient Daemon sits,
  With roses and a shroud;
He has his way, and deals his gifts, —
  But ours is not allowed.

He is no churl nor trifler,
  And his viceroy is none, —
Love-without-weakness, —
  Of Genius sire and son.
And his will is not thwarted;
  The seeds of land and sea
Are the atoms of his body bright,
  And his behest obey.

He serveth the servant,
  The brave he loves amain;
He kills the cripple and the sick,
  And straight begins again;
For gods delight in gods,
  And thrust the weak aside;
To him who scorns their charities
  Their arms fly open wide.

When the old world is sterile
  And the ages are effete,
He will from wrecks and sediment
  The fairer world complete.
He forbids to despair;
  His cheeks mantle with mirth;
And the unimagined good of men
  Is yeaning at the birth.

Spring still makes spring in the mind
  When sixty years are told;
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
  And we are never old;
Over the winter glaciers
  I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snow-drift
  The warm rosebuds below.

Chronological List of Poems

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THE SPHINX

The Sphinx is drowsy,
  Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
  She broods on the world.
“Who’ll tell me my secret,
  The ages have kept? —
I awaited the seer
  While they slumbered and slept: —

“The fate of the man-child,
  The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
  Daedalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking,
  Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
  Deep underneath deep?

“Erect as a sunbeam,
  Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
  Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
  The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
  Your silence he sings.

“The waves, unashamèd,
  In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
  Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
  Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
  By their animate poles.

“Sea, earth, air, sound, silence.
  Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
  One deity stirred, —
Each the other adorning,
  Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
  The vapor the hill.

“The babe by its mother
  Lies bathèd in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted, —
  The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
  Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
  In soft miniature lies.

“But man crouches and blushes,
  Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
  He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
  Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
  He poisons the ground.

“Out spoke the great mother,
  Beholding his fear; —
At the sound of her accents
  Cold shuddered the sphere: —
‘Who has drugged my boy’s cup?
  Who has mixed my boy’s bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
  Has turned my child’s head?’”

I heard a poet answer
  Aloud and cheerfully,
‘Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
  Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
  These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
  Their meaning sublime.

“The fiend that man harries
  Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
  Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of Nature
  Can’t trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
  Which his eyes seek in vain.

“To vision profounder,
  Man’s spirit must dive;
His aye-rolling orb
  At no goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
  With sweetness untold,
Once found, — for new heavens
  He spurneth the old.

“Pride ruined the angels,
  Their shame them restores;
Lurks the joy that is sweetest
  In stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
  Who is noble and free? —
I would he were nobler
  Than to love me.

“Eterne alternation
  Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure, —
  Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
  Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
  To the borders of day.

“Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits;
  Thy sight is growing blear;
Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx,
  Her muddy eyes to clear!”
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip, —
  Said, “Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow;
  Of thine eye I am eyebeam.

“Thou art the unanswered question;
  Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
  And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
  It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
  Time is the false reply.”

Uprose the merry Sphinx,
  And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
  She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
  She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:
  She stood Monadnoc’s head.

Thorough a thousand voices
  Spoke the universal dame;
“Who telleth one of my meanings
  Is master of all I am.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ALPHONSO OF CASTILE

I, Alphonso, live and learn,
Seeing Nature go astern.
Things deteriorate in kind;
Lemons run to leaves and rind;
Meagre crop of figs and limes;
Shorter days and harder times.
Flowering April cools and dies
In the insufficient skies.
Imps, at high midsummer, blot
Half the sun’s disk with a spot;
‘Twill not now avail to tan
Orange cheek or skin of man.
Roses bleach, the goats are dry,
Lisbon quakes, the people cry.
Yon pale, scrawny fisher fools,
Gaunt as bitterns in the pools,
Are no brothers of my blood; —
They discredit Adamhood.
Eyes of gods! ye must have seen,
O’er your ramparts as ye lean,
The general debility;
Of genius the sterility;
Mighty projects countermanded;
Rash ambition, brokenhanded;
Puny man and scentless rose
Tormenting Pan to double the dose.
Rebuild or ruin: either fill
Of vital force the wasted rill,
Or tumble all again in heap
To weltering Chaos and to sleep.

Say, Seigniors, are the old Niles dry,
Which fed the veins of earth and sky,
That mortals miss the loyal heats,
Which drove them erst to social feats;
Now, to a savage selfness grown,
Think nature barely serves for one;
With science poorly mask their hurt;
And vex the gods with question pert,
Immensely curious whether you
Still are rulers, or Mildew?

Masters, I’m in pain with you;
Masters, I’ll be plain with you;
In my palace of Castile,
I, a king, for kings can feel.
There my thoughts the matter roll,
And solve and oft resolve the whole.
And, for I’m styled Alphonse the Wise,
Ye shall not fail for sound advice.
Before ye want a drop of rain,
Hear the sentiment of Spain.

You have tried famine: no more try it;
Ply us now with a full diet;
Teach your pupils now with plenty,
For one sun supply us twenty.
I have thought it thoroughly over, —
State of hermit, state of lover;
We must have society,
We cannot spare variety.
Hear you, then, celestial fellows!
Fits not to be overzealous;
Steads not to work on the clean jump,
Nor wine nor brains perpetual pump.
Men and gods are too extense;
Could you slacken and condense?
Your rank overgrowths reduce
Till your kinds abound with juice?
Earth, crowded, cries, ‘Too many men!’
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat;
Stuff their nine brains in one hat;
Make his frame and forces square
With the labors he must dare;
Thatch his flesh, and even his years
With the marble which he rears.
There, growing slowly old at ease
No faster than his planted trees,
He may, by warrant of his age,
In schemes of broader scope engage.
So shall ye have a man of the sphere
Fit to grace the solar year.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MITHRIDATES

I cannot spare water or wine,
  Tobacco-leaf, or poppy, or rose;
From the earth-poles to the Line,
  All between that works or grows,
Every thing is kin of mine.

Give me agates for my meat;
Give me cantharids to eat;
From air and ocean bring me foods,
From all zones and altitudes; —

From all natures, sharp and slimy,
  Salt and basalt, wild and tame:
Tree and lichen, ape, sea-lion,
  Bird, and reptile, be my game.

Ivy for my fillet band;
Blinding dog-wood in my hand;
Hemlock for my sherbet cull me,
And the prussic juice to lull me;
Swing me in the upas boughs,
Vampyre-fanned, when I carouse.

Too long shut in strait and few,
Thinly dieted on dew,
I will use the world, and sift it,
To a thousand humors shift it,
As you spin a cherry.
O doleful ghosts, and goblins merry!
O all you virtues, methods, mights,
Means, appliances, delights,
Reputed wrongs and braggart rights,
Smug routine, and things allowed,
Minorities, things under cloud!
Hither! take me, use me, fill me,
Vein and artery, though ye kill me!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO J.W.

Set not thy foot on graves;
Hear what wine and roses say;
The mountain chase, the summer waves,
The crowded town, thy feet may well delay.

Set not thy foot on graves;
Nor seek to unwind the shroud
Which charitable Time
And Nature have allowed
To wrap the errors of a sage sublime.

Set not thy foot on graves;
Care not to strip the dead
Of his sad ornament,
His myrrh, and wine, and rings,

His sheet of lead,
And trophies buried:
Go, get them where he earned them when alive;
As resolutely dig or dive.

Life is too short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
‘T will soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

DESTINY

That you are fair or wise is vain,
Or strong, or rich, or generous;
You must add the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose.
There’s a melody born of melody,
Which melts the world into a sea.
Toil could never compass it;
Art its height could never hit;
It came never out of wit;
But a music music-born
Well may Jove and Juno scorn.
Thy beauty, if it lack the fire
Which drives me mad with sweet desire,
What boots it? What the soldier’s mail,
Unless he conquer and prevail?
What all the goods thy pride which lift,
If thou pine for another’s gift?
Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight:
When thou lookest on his face,
Thy heart saith, ‘Brother, go thy ways!
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest,
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;’
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten.
Surely he carries a talisman
Under his tongue;
Broad his shoulders are and strong;
And his eye is scornful,
Threatening and young.
I hold it of little matter
Whether your jewel be of pure water,
A rose diamond or a white,
But whether it dazzle me with light.
I care not how you are dressed,
In coarsest weeds or in the best;
Nor whether your name is base or brave:
Nor for the fashion of your behavior;
But whether you charm me,
Bid my bread feed and my fire warm me
And dress up Nature in your favor.
One thing is forever good;
That one thing is Success, —
Dear to the Eumenides,
And to all the heavenly brood.
Who bides at home, nor looks abroad,
Carries the eagles, and masters the sword.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

GUY

Mortal mixed of middle clay,
Attempered to the night and day,
Interchangeable with things,
Needs no amulets nor rings.
Guy possessed the talisman
That all things from him began;
And as, of old, Polycrates
Chained the sunshine and the breeze,
So did Guy betimes discover
Fortune was his guard and lover;
In strange junctures, felt, with awe,
His own symmetry with law;
That no mixture could withstand
The virtue of his lucky hand.
He gold or jewel could not lose,
Nor not receive his ample dues.
Fearless Guy had never foes,
He did their weapons decompose.
Aimed at him, the blushing blade
Healed as fast the wounds it made.
If on the foeman fell his gaze,
Him it would straightway blind or craze,
In the street, if he turned round,
His eye the eye ‘t was seeking found.

It seemed his Genius discreet
Worked on the Maker’s own receipt,
And made each tide and element
Stewards of stipend and of rent;
So that the common waters fell
As costly wine into his well.
He had so sped his wise affairs
That he caught Nature in his snares.
Early or late, the falling rain
Arrived in time to swell his grain;
Stream could not so perversely wind
But corn of Guy’s was there to grind:
The siroc found it on its way,
To speed his sails, to dry his hay;
And the world’s sun seemed to rise
To drudge all day for Guy the wise.
In his rich nurseries, timely skill
Strong crab with nobler blood did fill;
The zephyr in his garden rolled
From plum-trees vegetable gold;
And all the hours of the year
With their own harvest honored were.
There was no frost but welcome came,
Nor freshet, nor midsummer flame.
Belonged to wind and world the toil
And venture, and to Guy the oil.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HAMATREYA

Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,
Possessed the land which rendered to their toil
Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool and wood.
Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm,
Saying, ‘’Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s.
How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees!
How graceful climb those shadows on my hill!
I fancy these pure waters and the flags
Know me, as does my dog: we sympathize;
And, I affirm, my actions smack of the soil.’

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet
Clear of the grave.
They added ridge to valley, brook to pond,
And sighed for all that bounded their domain;
‘This suits me for a pasture; that’s my park;
We must have clay, lime, gravel, granite-ledge,
And misty lowland, where to go for peat.
The land is well, — lies fairly to the south.
’Tis good, when you have crossed the sea and back,
To find the sitfast acres where you left them.’
Ah! the hot owner sees not Death, who adds
Him to his land, a lump of mould the more.
Hear what the Earth says: —

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

EARTH-SONG

 ‘Mine and yours;
  Mine, not yours.
  Earth endures;
  Stars abide —
  Shine down in the old sea;
  Old are the shores;
  But where are old men?
  I who have seen much,
  Such have I never seen.

 ‘The lawyer’s deed
  Ran sure,
  In tail,
  To them, and to their heirs
  Who shall succeed,
  Without fail,
  Forevermore.

 ‘Here is the land,
  Shaggy with wood,
  With its old valley,
  Mound and flood.
  But the heritors? —

 Fled like the flood’s foam.
  The lawyer, and the laws,
  And the kingdom,
  Clean swept herefrom.

 ‘They called me theirs,
  Who so controlled me;
  Yet every one
  Wished to stay, and is gone,
  How am I theirs,
  If they cannot hold me,
  But I hold them?’

When I heard the Earth-song
I was no longer brave;
My avarice cooled
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE RHODORA: ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool.
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE HUMBLE-BEE

Burly, dozing humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.
Let them sail for Porto Rique,
Far-off heats through seas to seek;
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid-zone!
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines;
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.

Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion!
Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum, —
All without is martyrdom.

When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And with softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass.

Hot midsummer’s petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wildernesses found;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.

Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen;
But violets and bilberry bells,
Maple-sap and daffodels,
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder’s-tongue
And brier-roses, dwelt among;
All beside was unknown waste,
All was picture as he passed.

Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.
When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

BERRYING

‘May be true what I had heard, —
Earth’s a howling wilderness,
Truculent with fraud and force,’
Said I, strolling through the pastures,
And along the river-side.
Caught among the blackberry vines,
Feeding on the Ethiops sweet,
Pleasant fancies overtook me.
I said, ‘What influence me preferred,
Elect, to dreams thus beautiful?’
The vines replied, ‘And didst thou deem
No wisdom from our berries went?’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE SNOW-STORM

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

 Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WOODNOTES I

1

When the pine tosses its cones
To the song of its waterfall tones,
Who speeds to the woodland walks?
To birds and trees who talks?
Caesar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home.
He goes to the river-side, —
Not hook nor line hath he;
He stands in the meadows wide, —
Nor gun nor scythe to see.
Sure some god his eye enchants:
What he knows nobody wants.
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.
Knowledge this man prizes best
Seems fantastic to the rest:
Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,
Grass-buds and caterpillar-shrouds,
Boughs on which the wild bees settle,
Tints that spot the violet’s petal,
Why Nature loves the number five,
And why the star-form she repeats:
Lover of all things alive,
Wonderer at all he meets,
Wonderer chiefly at himself,
Who can tell him what he is?
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities?

2

And such I knew, a forest seer,
A minstrel of the natural year,
Foreteller of the vernal ides,
Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,
A lover true, who knew by heart
Each joy the mountain dales impart;
It seemed that Nature could not raise
A plant in any secret place,
In quaking bog, on snowy hill,
Beneath the grass that shades the rill,
Under the snow, between the rocks,
In damp fields known to bird and fox.
But he would come in the very hour
It opened in its virgin bower,
As if a sunbeam showed the place,
And tell its long-descended race.
It seemed as if the breezes brought him,
It seemed as if the sparrows taught him;
As if by secret sight he knew
Where, in far fields, the orchis grew.
Many haps fall in the field
Seldom seen by wishful eyes,
But all her shows did Nature yield,
To please and win this pilgrim wise.
He saw the partridge drum in the woods;
He heard the woodcock’s evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes’ broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him;
What others did at distance hear,
And guessed within the thicket’s gloom,
Was shown to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come.

3

In unploughed Maine he sought the lumberers’ gang
Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang;
He trode the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The all-seeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpecker.
He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
And blessed the monument of the man of flowers,
Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.
He heard, when in the grove, at intervals,
With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls, —
One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree,
Declares the close of its green century.
Low lies the plant to whose creation went
Sweet influence from every element;
Whose living towers the years conspired to build,
Whose giddy top the morning loved to gild.
Through these green tents, by eldest Nature dressed,
He roamed, content alike with man and beast.
Where darkness found him he lay glad at night;
There the red morning touched him with its light.
Three moons his great heart him a hermit made,
So long he roved at will the boundless shade.
The timid it concerns to ask their way,
And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray,
To make no step until the event is known,
And ills to come as evils past bemoan.
Not so the wise; no coward watch he keeps
To spy what danger on his pathway creeps;
Go where he will, the wise man is at home,
His hearth the earth, — his hall the azure dome;
Where his clear spirit leads him, there’s his road
By God’s own light illumined and foreshowed.

4

‘T was one of the charmèd days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow;
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.
The musing peasant, lowly great,
Beside the forest water sate;
The rope-like pine-roots crosswise grown
Composed the network of his throne;
The wide lake, edged with sand and grass,
Was burnished to a floor of glass,
Painted with shadows green and proud
Of the tree and of the cloud.
He was the heart of all the scene;
On him the sun looked more serene;
To hill and cloud his face was known, —
It seemed the likeness of their own;
They knew by secret sympathy
The public child of earth and sky.
‘You ask,’ he said, ‘what guide
Me through trackless thickets led,
Through thick-stemmed woodlands rough and wide.
I found the water’s bed.
The watercourses were my guide;
I travelled grateful by their side,
Or through their channel dry;
They led me through the thicket damp,
Through brake and fern, the beavers’ camp,
Through beds of granite cut my road,
And their resistless friendship showed.
The falling waters led me,
The foodful waters fed me,
And brought me to the lowest land,
Unerring to the ocean sand.
The moss upon the forest bark
Was pole-star when the night was dark;
The purple berries in the wood
Supplied me necessary food;
For Nature ever faithful is
To such as trust her faithfulness.
When the forest shall mislead me,
When the night and morning lie,
When sea and land refuse to feed me,
‘T will be time enough to die;
Then will yet my mother yield
A pillow in her greenest field,
Nor the June flowers scorn to cover
The clay of their departed lover.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WOODNOTES II

As sunbeams stream through liberal space And nothing jostle or displace, So waved the pine-tree through my thought And fanned the dreams it never brought.

‘Whether is better, the gift or the donor?
Come to me,’
Quoth the pine-tree,
‘I am the giver of honor.
My garden is the cloven rock,
And my manure the snow;
And drifting sand-heaps feed my stock,
In summer’s scorching glow.
He is great who can live by me:
The rough and bearded forester
Is better than the lord;
God fills the script and canister,
Sin piles the loaded board.
The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be;
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry, and one the living tree.
Who liveth by the ragged pine
Foundeth a heroic line;
Who liveth in the palace hall
Waneth fast and spendeth all.
He goes to my savage haunts,
With his chariot and his care;
My twilight realm he disenchants,
And finds his prison there.

‘What prizes the town and the tower?
Only what the pine-tree yields;
Sinew that subdued the fields;
The wild-eyed boy, who in the woods
Chants his hymn to hills and floods,
Whom the city’s poisoning spleen
Made not pale, or fat, or lean;
Whom the rain and the wind purgeth,
Whom the dawn and the day-star urgeth,
In whose cheek the rose-leaf blusheth,
In whose feet the lion rusheth,
Iron arms, and iron mould,
That know not fear, fatigue, or cold.
I give my rafters to his boat,
My billets to his boiler’s throat,
And I will swim the ancient sea
To float my child to victory,
And grant to dwellers with the pine
Dominion o’er the palm and vine.
Who leaves the pine-tree, leaves his friend,
Unnerves his strength, invites his end.
Cut a bough from my parent stem,
And dip it in thy porcelain vase;
A little while each russet gem
Will swell and rise with wonted grace;
But when it seeks enlarged supplies,
The orphan of the forest dies.
Whoso walks in solitude
And inhabiteth the wood,
Choosing light, wave, rock and bird,
Before the money-loving herd,
Into that forester shall pass,
From these companions, power and grace.
Clean shall he be, without, within,
From the old adhering sin,
All ill dissolving in the light
Of his triumphant piercing sight:
Not vain, sour, nor frivolous;
Not mad, athirst, nor garrulous;
Grave, chaste, contented, though retired,
And of all other men desired.
On him the light of star and moon
Shall fall with purer radiance down;
All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence;
The mounting sap, the shells, the sea,
All spheres, all stones, his helpers be;
He shall meet the speeding year,
Without wailing, without fear;
He shall be happy in his love,
Like to like shall joyful prove;
He shall be happy whilst he wooes,
Muse-born, a daughter of the Muse.
But if with gold she bind her hair,
And deck her breast with diamond,
Take off thine eyes, thy heart forbear,
Though thou lie alone on the ground.

‘Heed the old oracles,
Ponder my spells;
Song wakes in my pinnacles
When the wind swells.
Soundeth the prophetic wind,
The shadows shake on the rock behind,
And the countless leaves of the pine are strings
Tuned to the lay the wood-god sings.
  Hearken! Hearken!
If thou wouldst know the mystic song
Chanted when the sphere was young.
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells;
O wise man! hear’st thou half it tells?
O wise man! hear’st thou the least part?
’Tis the chronicle of art.
To the open ear it sings
Sweet the genesis of things,
Of tendency through endless ages,
Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old flood’s subsiding slime,
Of chemic matter, force and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm:
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.
O, listen to the undersong,
The ever old, the ever young;
And, far within those cadent pauses,
The chorus of the ancient Causes!
Delights the dreadful Destiny
To fling his voice into the tree,
And shock thy weak ear with a note
Breathed from the everlasting throat.
In music he repeats the pang
Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang.
O mortal! thy ears are stones;
These echoes are laden with tones
Which only the pure can hear;
Thou canst not catch what they recite
Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right,
Of man to come, of human life,
Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.’

 Once again the pine-tree sung: —
‘Speak not thy speech my boughs among:
Put off thy years, wash in the breeze;
My hours are peaceful centuries.
Talk no more with feeble tongue;
No more the fool of space and time,
Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme.
Only thy Americans
Can read thy line, can meet thy glance,
But the runes that I rehearse
Understands the universe;
The least breath my boughs which tossed
Brings again the Pentecost;
To every soul resounding clear
In a voice of solemn cheer, —
“Am I not thine? Are not these thine?”
And they reply, “Forever mine!”
My branches speak Italian,
English, German, Basque, Castilian,
Mountain speech to Highlanders,
Ocean tongues to islanders,
To Fin and Lap and swart Malay,
To each his bosom-secret say.

 ‘Come learn with me the fatal song
Which knits the world in music strong,
Come lift thine eyes to lofty rhymes,
Of things with things, of times with times,
Primal chimes of sun and shade,
Of sound and echo, man and maid,
The land reflected in the flood,
Body with shadow still pursued.
For Nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
The wood is wiser far than thou;
The wood and wave each other know
Not unrelated, unaffied,
But to each thought and thing allied,
Is perfect Nature’s every part,
Rooted in the mighty Heart,
But thou, poor child! unbound, unrhymed,
Whence camest thou, misplaced, mistimed,
Whence, O thou orphan and defrauded?
Is thy land peeled, thy realm marauded?
Who thee divorced, deceived and left?
Thee of thy faith who hath bereft,
And torn the ensigns from thy brow,
And sunk the immortal eye so low?
Thy cheek too white, thy form too slender,
Thy gait too slow, thy habits tender
For royal man; — they thee confess
An exile from the wilderness, —
The hills where health with health agrees,
And the wise soul expels disease.
Hark! in thy ear I will tell the sign
By which thy hurt thou may’st divine.
When thou shalt climb the mountain cliff,
Or see the wide shore from thy skiff,
To thee the horizon shall express
But emptiness on emptiness;
There lives no man of Nature’s worth
In the circle of the earth;
And to thine eye the vast skies fall,
Dire and satirical,
On clucking hens and prating fools,
On thieves, on drudges and on dolls.
And thou shalt say to the Most High,
“Godhead! all this astronomy,
And fate and practice and invention,
Strong art and beautiful pretension,
This radiant pomp of sun and star,
Throes that were, and worlds that are,
Behold! were in vain and in vain; —
It cannot be, — I will look again.
Surely now will the curtain rise,
And earth’s fit tenant me surprise; —
But the curtain doth not rise,
And Nature has miscarried wholly
Into failure, into folly.”

‘Alas! thine is the bankruptcy,
Blessed Nature so to see.
Come, lay thee in my soothing shade,
And heal the hurts which sin has made.
I see thee in the crowd alone;
I will be thy companion.
Quit thy friends as the dead in doom,
And build to them a final tomb;
Let the starred shade that nightly falls
Still celebrate their funerals,
And the bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory.
Behind thee leave thy merchandise,
Thy churches and thy charities;
And leave thy peacock wit behind;
Enough for thee the primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind:
Leave all thy pedant lore apart;
God hid the whole world in thy heart.
Love shuns the sage, the child it crowns,
Gives all to them who all renounce.
The rain comes when the wind calls;
The river knows the way to the sea;
Without a pilot it runs and falls,
Blessing all lands with its charity;
The sea tosses and foams to find
Its way up to the cloud and wind;
The shadow sits close to the flying ball;
The date fails not on the palm-tree tall;
And thou, — go burn thy wormy pages, —
Shalt outsee seers, and outwit sages.
Oft didst thou thread the woods in vain
To find what bird had piped the strain: —
Seek not, and the little eremite
Flies gayly forth and sings in sight.

‘Hearken once more!
I will tell thee the mundane lore.
Older am I than thy numbers wot,
Change I may, but I pass not.
Hitherto all things fast abide,
And anchored in the tempest ride.
Trenchant time behoves to hurry
All to yean and all to bury:
All the forms are fugitive,
But the substances survive.
Ever fresh the broad creation,
A divine improvisation,
From the heart of God proceeds,
A single will, a million deeds.
Once slept the world an egg of stone,
And pulse, and sound, and light was none;
And God said, “Throb!” and there was motion
And the vast mass became vast ocean.
Onward and on, the eternal Pan,
Who layeth the world’s incessant plan,
Halteth never in one shape,
But forever doth escape,
Like wave or flame, into new forms
Of gem, and air, of plants, and worms.
I, that to-day am a pine,
Yesterday was a bundle of grass.
He is free and libertine,
Pouring of his power the wine
To every age, to every race;
Unto every race and age
He emptieth the beverage;
Unto each, and unto all,
Maker and original.
The world is the ring of his spells,
And the play of his miracles.
As he giveth to all to drink,
Thus or thus they are and think.
With one drop sheds form and feature;
With the next a special nature;
The third adds heat’s indulgent spark;
The fourth gives light which eats the dark;
Into the fifth himself he flings,
And conscious Law is King of kings.
As the bee through the garden ranges,
From world to world the godhead changes;
As the sheep go feeding in the waste,
From form to form He maketh haste;
This vault which glows immense with light
Is the inn where he lodges for a night.
What recks such Traveller if the bowers
Which bloom and fade like meadow flowers
A bunch of fragrant lilies be,
Or the stars of eternity?
Alike to him the better, the worse, —
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.
Thou metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek’st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou askest in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.
He is the axis of the star;
He is the sparkle of the spar;
He is the heart of every creature;
He is the meaning of each feature;
And his mind is the sky.
Than all it holds more deep, more high.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MONADNOC

Thousand minstrels woke within me,
  ‘Our music’s in the hills;’ —
Gayest pictures rose to win me,
  Leopard-colored rills.
‘Up! — If thou knew’st who calls
To twilight parks of beech and pine,
High over the river intervals,
Above the ploughman’s highest line,
Over the owner’s farthest walls!
Up! where the airy citadel
O’erlooks the surging landscape’s swell!
Let not unto the stones the Day
Her lily and rose, her sea and land display.
Read the celestial sign!
Lo! the south answers to the north;
Bookworm, break this sloth urbane;
A greater spirit bids thee forth
Than the gray dreams which thee detain.
Mark how the climbing Oreads
Beckon thee to their arcades;
Youth, for a moment free as they,
Teach thy feet to feel the ground,
Ere yet arrives the wintry day
When Time thy feet has bound.
Take the bounty of thy birth,
Taste the lordship of the earth.’

 I heard, and I obeyed, —
Assured that he who made the claim,
Well known, but loving not a name,
  Was not to be gainsaid.
Ere yet the summoning voice was still,
I turned to Cheshire’s haughty hill.
From the fixed cone the cloud-rack flowed
Like ample banner flung abroad
To all the dwellers in the plains
Round about, a hundred miles,
With salutation to the sea and to the bordering isles.
In his own loom’s garment dressed,
By his proper bounty blessed,
Fast abides this constant giver,
Pouring many a cheerful river;
To far eyes, an aerial isle
Unploughed, which finer spirits pile,
Which morn and crimson evening paint
For bard, for lover and for saint;
An eyemark and the country’s core,
Inspirer, prophet evermore;
Pillar which God aloft had set
So that men might it not forget;
It should be their life’s ornament,
And mix itself with each event;
Gauge and calendar and dial,
Weatherglass and chemic phial,
Garden of berries, perch of birds,
Pasture of pool-haunting herds,
Graced by each change of sum untold,
Earth-baking heat, stone-cleaving cold.

The Titan heeds his sky-affairs,
Rich rents and wide alliance shares;
Mysteries of color daily laid
By morn and eve in light and shade;
And sweet varieties of chance,
And the mystic seasons’ dance;
And thief-like step of liberal hours
Thawing snow-drift into flowers.
O, wondrous craft of plant and stone
By eldest science wrought and shown!

‘Happy,’ I said, ‘whose home is here!
Fair fortunes to the mountaineer!
Boon Nature to his poorest shed
Has royal pleasure-grounds outspread.’
Intent, I searched the region round,
And in low hut the dweller found:
Woe is me for my hope’s downfall!
Is yonder squalid peasant all
That this proud nursery could breed
For God’s vicegerency and stead?
Time out of mind, this forge of ores;
Quarry of spars in mountain pores;
Old cradle, hunting-ground and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of observance searching space;
Factory of river and of rain;
Link in the Alps’ globe-girding chain;
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well,
And what obedient Nature can; —
Is this colossal talisman
Kindly to plant and blood and kind,
But speechless to the master’s mind?
I thought to find the patriots
In whom the stock of freedom roots;
To myself I oft recount
Tales of many a famous mount, —
Wales, Scotland, Uri, Hungary’s dells:
Bards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells;
And think how Nature in these towers
Uplifted shall condense her powers,
And lifting man to the blue deep
Where stars their perfect courses keep,
Like wise preceptor, lure his eye
To sound the science of the sky,
And carry learning to its height
Of untried power and sane delight:
The Indian cheer, the frosty skies,
Rear purer wits, inventive eyes, —
Eyes that frame cities where none be,
And hands that stablish what these see:
And by the moral of his place
Hint summits of heroic grace;
Man in these crags a fastness find
To fight pollution of the mind;
In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
Adhere like this foundation strong,
The insanity of towns to stem
With simpleness for stratagem.
But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in churls the mountain folk
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,
Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!
Perish like leaves, the highland breed
No sire survive, no son succeed!

Soft! let not the offended muse
Toil’s hard hap with scorn accuse.
Many hamlets sought I then,
Many farms of mountain men.
Rallying round a parish steeple
Nestle warm the highland people,
Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
Strong as giant, slow as child.
Sweat and season are their arts,
Their talismans are ploughs and carts;
And well the youngest can command
Honey from the frozen land;
With cloverheads the swamp adorn,
Change the running sand to corn;
For wolf and fox, bring lowing herds,
And for cold mosses, cream and curds:
Weave wood to canisters and mats;
Drain sweet maple juice in vats.
No bird is safe that cuts the air
From their rifle or their snare;
No fish, in river or in lake,
But their long hands it thence will take;
Whilst the country’s flinty face,
Like wax, their fashioning skill betrays,
To fill the hollows, sink the hills,
Bridge gulfs, drain swamps, build dams and mills,
And fit the bleak and howling waste
For homes of virtue, sense and taste.
The World-soul knows his own affair,
Forelooking, when he would prepare
For the next ages, men of mould
Well embodied, well ensouled,
He cools the present’s fiery glow,
Sets the life-pulse strong but slow:
Bitter winds and fasts austere
His quarantines and grottoes, where
He slowly cures decrepit flesh,
And brings it infantile and fresh.
Toil and tempest are the toys
And games to breathe his stalwart boys:
They bide their time, and well can prove,
If need were, their line from Jove;
Of the same stuff, and so allayed,
As that whereof the sun is made,
And of the fibre, quick and strong,
Whose throbs are love, whose thrills are song.

 Now in sordid weeds they sleep,
In dulness now their secret keep;
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech,
These the masters who can teach.
Fourscore or a hundred words
All their vocal muse affords;
But they turn them in a fashion
Past clerks’ or statesmen’s art or passion.
I can spare the college bell,
And the learned lecture, well;
Spare the clergy and libraries,
Institutes and dictionaries,
For that hardy English root
Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot.
Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
Squandering your unquoted mirth,
Which keeps the ground and never soars,
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars;
Scoff of yeoman strong and stark,
Goes like bullet to its mark;
While the solid curse and jeer
Never balk the waiting ear.

 On the summit as I stood,
O’er the floor of plain and flood
Seemed to me, the towering hill
Was not altogether still,
But a quiet sense conveyed:
If I err not, thus it said: —

‘Many feet in summer seek,
Oft, my far-appearing peak;
In the dreaded winter time,
None save dappling shadows climb,
Under clouds, my lonely head,
Old as the sun, old almost as the shade;
And comest thou
To see strange forests and new snow,
And tread uplifted land?
And leavest thou thy lowland race,
Here amid clouds to stand?
And wouldst be my companion
Where I gaze, and still shall gaze,
Through tempering nights and flashing days,
When forests fall, and man is gone,
Over tribes and over times,
At the burning Lyre,
Nearing me,
With its stars of northern fire,
In many a thousand years?

‘Gentle pilgrim, if thou know
The gamut old of Pan,
And how the hills began,
The frank blessings of the hill
Fall on thee, as fall they will.

‘Let him heed who can and will;
Enchantment fixed me here
To stand the hurts of time, until
In mightier chant I disappear.
  If thou trowest
How the chemic eddies play,
Pole to pole, and what they say;
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming,
Seest the smile of Reason beaming; —
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snowflake’s flight; —
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.

‘For the world was built in order,
And the atoms march in tune;
Rhyme the pipe, and Time the warder,
The sun obeys them and the moon.
Orb and atom forth they prance,
When they hear from far the rune;
None so backward in the troop,
When the music and the dance
Reach his place and circumstance,
But knows the sun-creating sound,
And, though a pyramid, will bound.

‘Monadnoc is a mountain strong,
Tall and good my kind among;
But well I know, no mountain can,
Zion or Meru, measure with man.
For it is on zodiacs writ,
Adamant is soft to wit:
And when the greater comes again
With my secret in his brain,
I shall pass, as glides my shadow
Daily over hill and meadow.

‘Through all time, in light, in gloom
Well I hear the approaching feet
On the flinty pathway beat
Of him that cometh, and shall come;
Of him who shall as lightly bear
My daily load of woods and streams,
As doth this round sky-cleaving boat
Which never strains its rocky beams;
Whose timbers, as they silent float,
Alps and Caucasus uprear,
And the long Alleghanies here,
And all town-sprinkled lands that be,
Sailing through stars with all their history.

‘Every morn I lift my head,
See New England underspread,
South from Saint Lawrence to the Sound,
From Katskill east to the sea-bound.
Anchored fast for many an age,
I await the bard and sage,
Who, in large thoughts, like fair pearl-seed,
Shall string Monadnoc like a bead.
Comes that cheerful troubadour,
This mound shall throb his face before,
As when, with inward fires and pain,
It rose a bubble from the plain.
When he cometh, I shall shed,
From this wellspring in my head,
Fountain-drop of spicier worth
Than all vintage of the earth.
There’s fruit upon my barren soil
Costlier far than wine or oil.
There’s a berry blue and gold, —
Autumn-ripe, its juices hold
Sparta’s stoutness, Bethlehem’s heart,
Asia’s rancor, Athens’ art,
Slowsure Britain’s secular might,
And the German’s inward sight.
I will give my son to eat
Best of Pan’s immortal meat,
Bread to eat, and juice to drain;
So the coinage of his brain
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars,
Nor pictures pale, but Jove and Mars,
He comes, but not of that race bred
Who daily climb my specular head.
Oft as morning wreathes my scarf,
Fled the last plumule of the Dark,
Pants up hither the spruce clerk
From South Cove and City Wharf.
I take him up my rugged sides,
Half-repentant, scant of breath, —
Bead-eyes my granite chaos show,
And my midsummer snow:
Open the daunting map beneath, —
All his county, sea and land,
Dwarfed to measure of his hand;
His day’s ride is a furlong space,
His city-tops a glimmering haze.
I plant his eyes on the sky-hoop bounding;
“See there the grim gray rounding
Of the bullet of the earth
Whereon ye sail,
Tumbling steep
In the uncontinented deep.”
He looks on that, and he turns pale.
‘T is even so, this treacherous kite,
Farm-furrowed, town-incrusted sphere,
Thoughtless of its anxious freight,
Plunges eyeless on forever;
And he, poor parasite,
Cooped in a ship he cannot steer, —
Who is the captain he knows not,
Port or pilot trows not, —
Risk or ruin he must share.
I scowl on him with my cloud,
With my north wind chill his blood;
I lame him, clattering down the rocks;
And to live he is in fear.
Then, at last, I let him down
Once more into his dapper town,
To chatter, frightened, to his clan
And forget me if he can.’

As in the old poetic fame
The gods are blind and lame,
And the simular despite
Betrays the more abounding might,
So call not waste that barren cone
Above the floral zone,
Where forests starve:
It is pure use; —
What sheaves like those which here we glean and bind
Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,
Thou grand affirmer of the present tense,
And type of permanence!
Firm ensign of the fatal Being,
Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,
That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring
Our insect miseries to thy rocks;
And the whole flight, with folded wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring, —
Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,
Replacing frieze and architrave; —
Where flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;
Still is the haughty pile erect
Of the old building Intellect.

Complement of human kind,
Holding us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,
O barren mound, thy plenties fill!
We fool and prate;
Thou art silent and sedate.
To myriad kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense;
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall,
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable good
For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.
Thou, in our astronomy
An opaker star,
Seen haply from afar,
Above the horizon’s hoop,
A moment, by the railway troop,
As o’er some bolder height they speed, —
By circumspect ambition,
By errant gain,
By feasters and the frivolous, —
Recallest us,
And makest sane.
Mute orator! well skilled to plead,
And send conviction without phrase,
Thou dost succor and remede
The shortness of our days,
And promise, on thy Founder’s truth,
Long morrow to this mortal youth.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FABLE

The mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel,
And the former called the latter ‘Little Prig;
Bun replied,
‘You are doubtless very big;
But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together,
To make up a year
And a sphere.
And I think it no disgrace
To occupy my place.
If I’m not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,
And not half so spry.
I’ll not deny you make
A very pretty squirrel track;
Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;
If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you crack a nut.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ODE INSCRIBED TO W.H. CHANNING

Though loath to grieve
The evil time’s sole patriot,
I cannot leave
My honied thought
For the priest’s cant,
Or statesman’s rant.

If I refuse
My study for their politique,
Which at the best is trick,
The angry Muse
Puts confusion in my brain.

But who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind,
Of better arts and life?
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife!

Or who, with accent bolder,
Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?
I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!
And in thy valleys, Agiochook!
The jackals of the negro-holder.

The God who made New Hampshire
Taunted the lofty land
With little men; —
Small bat and wren
House in the oak: —
If earth-fire cleave
The upheaved land, and bury the folk,
The southern crocodile would grieve.
Virtue palters; Right is hence;
Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.

What boots thy zeal,
O glowing friend,
That would indignant rend
The northland from the south?
Wherefore? to what good end?
Boston Bay and Bunker Hill
Would serve things still; —
Things are of the snake.

The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
‘T is the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete,
Not reconciled, —
Law for man, and law for thing;
The last builds town and fleet,
But it runs wild,
And doth the man unking.

‘T is fit the forest fall,
The steep be graded,
The mountain tunnelled,
The sand shaded,
The orchard planted,
The glebe tilled,
The prairie granted,
The steamer built.

Let man serve law for man;
Live for friendship, live for love,
For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;
The state may follow how it can,
As Olympus follows Jove.

 Yet do not I implore
The wrinkled shopman to my sounding woods,
Nor bid the unwilling senator
Ask votes of thrushes in the solitudes.
Every one to his chosen work; —
Foolish hands may mix and mar;
Wise and sure the issues are.
Round they roll till dark is light,
Sex to sex, and even to odd; —
The over-god
Who marries Right to Might,
Who peoples, unpeoples, —
He who exterminates
Races by stronger races,
Black by white faces, —
Knows to bring honey
Out of the lion;
Grafts gentlest scion
On pirate and Turk.

The Cossack eats Poland,
Like stolen fruit;
Her last noble is ruined,
Her last poet mute:
Straight, into double band
The victors divide;
Half for freedom strike and stand; —
The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ASTRAEA

Each the herald is who wrote
His rank, and quartered his own coat.
There is no king nor sovereign state
That can fix a hero’s rate;
Each to all is venerable,
Cap-a-pie invulnerable,
Until he write, where all eyes rest,
Slave or master on his breast.
I saw men go up and down,
In the country and the town,
With this tablet on their neck,
‘Judgment and a judge we seek.’
Not to monarchs they repair,
Nor to learned jurist’s chair;
But they hurry to their peers,
To their kinsfolk and their dears;
Louder than with speech they pray, —
‘What am I? companion, say.’
And the friend not hesitates
To assign just place and mates;
Answers not in word or letter,
Yet is understood the better;
Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects his figure that doth pass.
Every wayfarer he meets
What himself declared repeats,
What himself confessed records,
Sentences him in his words;
The form is his own corporal form,
And his thought the penal worm.
Yet shine forever virgin minds,
Loved by stars and purest winds,
Which, o’er passion throned sedate,
Have not hazarded their state;
Disconcert the searching spy,
Rendering to a curious eye
The durance of a granite ledge.
To those who gaze from the sea’s edge
It is there for benefit;
It is there for purging light;
There for purifying storms;
And its depths reflect all forms;
It cannot parley with the mean, —
Pure by impure is not seen.
For there’s no sequestered grot,
Lone mountain tarn, or isle forgot,
But Justice, journeying in the sphere,
Daily stoops to harbor there.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE

I serve you not, if you I follow,
Shadowlike, o’er hill and hollow;
And bend my fancy to your leading,
All too nimble for my treading.
When the pilgrimage is done,
And we’ve the landscape overrun,
I am bitter, vacant, thwarted,
And your heart is unsupported.
Vainly valiant, you have missed
The manhood that should yours resist, —
Its complement; but if I could,
In severe or cordial mood,
Lead you rightly to my altar,
Where the wisest Muses falter,
And worship that world-warming spark
Which dazzles me in midnight dark,
Equalizing small and large,
While the soul it doth surcharge,
Till the poor is wealthy grown,
And the hermit never alone, —
The traveller and the road seem one
With the errand to be done, —
That were a man’s and lover’s part,
That were Freedom’s whitest chart.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

COMPENSATION

Why should I keep holiday
  When other men have none?
Why but because, when these are gay,
  I sit and mourn alone?

And why, when mirth unseals all tongues,
  Should mine alone be dumb?
Ah! late I spoke to silent throngs,
  And now their hour is come.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FORBEARANCE

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?
At rich men’s tables eaten bread and pulse?
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?
And loved so well a high behavior,
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?
O, be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE PARK

The prosperous and beautiful
  To me seem not to wear
The yoke of conscience masterful,
  Which galls me everywhere.

I cannot shake off the god;
  On my neck he makes his seat;
I look at my face in the glass, —
  My eyes his eyeballs meet.

Enchanters! Enchantresses!
  Your gold makes you seem wise;
The morning mist within your grounds
  More proudly rolls, more softly lies.

Yet spake yon purple mountain,
  Yet said yon ancient wood,
That Night or Day, that Love or Crime,
  Leads all souls to the Good.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FORERUNNERS

Long I followed happy guides,
I could never reach their sides;
Their step is forth, and, ere the day
Breaks up their leaguer, and away.
Keen my sense, my heart was young,
Right good-will my sinews strung,
But no speed of mine avails
To hunt upon their shining trails.
On and away, their hasting feet
Make the morning proud and sweet;
Flowers they strew, — I catch the scent;
Or tone of silver instrument
Leaves on the wind melodious trace;
Yet I could never see their face.
On eastern hills I see their smokes,
Mixed with mist by distant lochs.
I met many travellers
Who the road had surely kept;
They saw not my fine revellers, —
These had crossed them while they slept.
Some had heard their fair report,
In the country or the court.
Fleetest couriers alive
Never yet could once arrive,
As they went or they returned,
At the house where these sojourned.
Sometimes their strong speed they slacken,
Though they are not overtaken;
In sleep their jubilant troop is near, —
I tuneful voices overhear;
It may be in wood or waste, —
At unawares ‘t is come and past.
Their near camp my spirit knows
By signs gracious as rainbows.
I thenceforward and long after
Listen for their harp-like laughter,
And carry in my heart, for days,
Peace that hallows rudest ways.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SURSUM CORDA

Seek not the spirit, if it hide
Inexorable to thy zeal:
Trembler, do not whine and chide:
Art thou not also real?
Stoop not then to poor excuse;
Turn on the accuser roundly; say,
‘Here am I, here will I abide
Forever to myself soothfast;
Go thou, sweet Heaven, or at thy pleasure stay!’
Already Heaven with thee its lot has cast,
For only it can absolutely deal.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ODE TO BEAUTY

Who gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast, —
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born, we are melting
Into nature again.

Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err!
Guest of million painted forms,
Which in turn thy glory warms!
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,
The swinging spider’s silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond,
In thy momentary play,
Would bankrupt nature to repay.

Ah, what avails it
To hide or to shun
Whom the Infinite One
Hath granted his throne?
The heaven high over
Is the deep’s lover;
The sun and sea,
Informed by thee,
Before me run
And draw me on,
Yet fly me still,
As Fate refuses
To me the heart Fate for me chooses.
Is it that my opulent soul
Was mingled from the generous whole;
Sea-valleys and the deep of skies
Furnished several supplies;
And the sands whereof I’m made
Draw me to them, self-betrayed?

I turn the proud portfolio
Which holds the grand designs
Of Salvator, of Guercino,
And Piranesi’s lines.
I hear the lofty paeans
Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music
And recount the numbers well;
Olympian bards who sung
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.
Oft, in streets or humblest places,
I detect far-wandered graces,
Which, from Eden wide astray,
In lowly homes have lost their way.

Thee gliding through the sea of form,
Like the lightning through the storm,
Somewhat not to be possessed,
Somewhat not to be caressed,
No feet so fleet could ever find,
No perfect form could ever bind.
Thou eternal fugitive,
Hovering over all that live,
Quick and skilful to inspire
Sweet, extravagant desire,
Starry space and lily-bell
Filling with thy roseate smell,
Wilt not give the lips to taste
Of the nectar which thou hast.

All that’s good and great with thee
Works in close conspiracy;
Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely
To report thy features only,
And the cold and purple morning
Itself with thoughts of thee adorning;
The leafy dell, the city mart,
Equal trophies of thine art;
E’en the flowing azure air
Thou hast touched for my despair;
And, if I languish into dreams,
Again I meet the ardent beams.
Queen of things! I dare not die
In Being’s deeps past ear and eye;
Lest there I find the same deceiver
And be the sport of Fate forever.
Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

GIVE ALL TO LOVE

Give all to love;
Obey thy heart;
Friends, kindred, days,
Estate, good-fame,
Plans, credit and the Muse, —
Nothing refuse.

‘T is a brave master;
Let it have scope:
Follow it utterly,
Hope beyond hope:
High and more high
It dives into noon,
With wing unspent,
Untold intent;
But it is a god,
Knows its own path
And the outlets of the sky.

It was never for the mean;
It requireth courage stout.
Souls above doubt,
Valor unbending,
It will reward, —
They shall return
More than they were,
And ever ascending.

Leave all for love;
Yet, hear me, yet,
One word more thy heart behoved,
One pulse more of firm endeavor, —
Keep thee to-day,
To-morrow, forever,
Free as an Arab
Of thy beloved.

Cling with life to the maid;
But when the surprise,
First vague shadow of surmise
Flits across her bosom young,
Of a joy apart from thee,
Free be she, fancy-free;
Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem,
Nor the palest rose she flung
From her summer diadem.

Though thou loved her as thyself,
As a self of purer clay,
Though her parting dims the day,
Stealing grace from all alive;
Heartily know,
When half-gods go.
The gods arrive.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH

The green grass is bowing,
  The morning wind is in it;
‘T is a tune worth thy knowing,
  Though it change every minute.

‘T is a tune of the Spring;
  Every year plays it over
To the robin on the wing,
  And to the pausing lover.

O’er ten thousand, thousand acres,
  Goes light the nimble zephyr;
The Flowers — tiny sect of Shakers —
  Worship him ever.

Hark to the winning sound!
  They summon thee, dearest, —
Saying, ‘We have dressed for thee the ground,
  Nor yet thou appearest.

‘O hasten;’ ‘t is our time,
  Ere yet the red Summer
Scorch our delicate prime,
  Loved of bee, — the tawny hummer.

‘O pride of thy race!
  Sad, in sooth, it were to ours,
If our brief tribe miss thy face,
  We poor New England flowers.

‘Fairest, choose the fairest members
  Of our lithe society;
June’s glories and September’s
  Show our love and piety.

‘Thou shalt command us all, —
  April’s cowslip, summer’s clover,
To the gentian in the fall,
  Blue-eyed pet of blue-eyed lover.

‘O come, then, quickly come!
  We are budding, we are blowing;
And the wind that we perfume
  Sings a tune that’s worth the knowing.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO ELLEN

And Ellen, when the graybeard years
  Have brought us to life’s evening hour,
And all the crowded Past appears
  A tiny scene of sun and shower,

Then, if I read the page aright
  Where Hope, the soothsayer, reads our lot,
Thyself shalt own the page was bright,
  Well that we loved, woe had we not,

When Mirth is dumb and Flattery’s fled,
  And mute thy music’s dearest tone,
When all but Love itself is dead
  And all but deathless Reason gone.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO EVA

O fair and stately maid, whose eyes
Were kindled in the upper skies
  At the same torch that lighted mine;
For so I must interpret still
Thy sweet dominion o’er my will,
  A sympathy divine.

Ah! let me blameless gaze upon
Features that seem at heart my own;
  Nor fear those watchful sentinels,
Who charm the more their glance forbids,
Chaste-glowing, underneath their lids,
  With fire that draws while it repels.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

LINES WRITTEN BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER SHORTLY BEFORE HER MARRIAGE TO MR. EMERSON

Love scatters oil
  On Life’s dark sea,
Sweetens its toil —
  Our helmsman he.

Around him hover
  Odorous clouds;
Under this cover
  His arrows he shrouds.

The cloud was around me,
  I knew not why
Such sweetness crowned me.
  While Time shot by.

No pain was within,
  But calm delight,
Like a world without sin,
  Or a day without night.

The shafts of the god
  Were tipped with down,
For they drew no blood,
  And they knit no frown.

I knew of them not
  Until Cupid laughed loud,
And saying “You’re caught!”
  Flew off in the cloud.

O then I awoke,
  And I lived but to sigh,
Till a clear voice spoke, —
  And my tears are dry.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE VIOLET

BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER

Why lingerest thou, pale violet, to see the dying year;
Are Autumn’s blasts fit music for thee, fragile one, to hear;
Will thy clear blue eye, upward bent, still keep its chastened glow,
Still tearless lift its slender form above the wintry snow?

Why wilt thou live when none around reflects thy pensive ray?
Thou bloomest here a lonely thing in the clear autumn day.
The tall green trees, that shelter thee, their last gay dress put on;
There will be nought to shelter thee when their sweet leaves are gone.

O Violet, like thee, how blest could I lie down and die,
When summer light is fading, and autumn breezes sigh;
When Winter reigned I’d close my eye, but wake with bursting Spring,
And live with living nature, a pure rejoicing thing.

I had a sister once who seemed just like a violet;
Her morning sun shone bright and calmly purely set;
When the violets were in their shrouds, and Summer in its pride,
She laid her hopes at rest, and in the year’s rich beauty died.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE AMULET

Your picture smiles as first it smiled;
  The ring you gave is still the same;
Your letter tells, O changing child!
  No tidings since it came.

Give me an amulet
  That keeps intelligence with you, —
Red when you love, and rosier red,
  And when you love not, pale and blue.

Alas! that neither bonds nor vows
  Can certify possession;
Torments me still the fear that love
  Died in its last expression.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THINE EYES STILL SHINED

Thine eyes still shined for me, though far
  I lonely roved the land or sea:
As I behold yon evening star,
  Which yet beholds not me.

This morn I climbed the misty hill
  And roamed the pastures through;
How danced thy form before my path
  Amidst the deep-eyed dew!

When the redbird spread his sable wing,
  And showed his side of flame;
When the rosebud ripened to the rose,
  In both I read thy name.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

EROS

The sense of the world is short, —
Long and various the report, —
  To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it;
And, how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,
  Not to be improved.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HERMIONE

On a mound an Arab lay,
And sung his sweet regrets
And told his amulets:
The summer bird
His sorrow heard,
And, when he heaved a sigh profound,
The sympathetic swallow swept the ground.

‘If it be, as they said, she was not fair,
Beauty’s not beautiful to me,
But sceptred genius, aye inorbed,
Culminating in her sphere.
This Hermione absorbed
The lustre of the land and ocean,
Hills and islands, cloud and tree,
In her form and motion.

‘I ask no bauble miniature,
Nor ringlets dead
Shorn from her comely head,
Now that morning not disdains
Mountains and the misty plains
Her colossal portraiture;
They her heralds be,
Steeped in her quality,
And singers of her fame
Who is their Muse and dame.

‘Higher, dear swallows! mind not what I say.
Ah! heedless how the weak are strong,
Say, was it just,
In thee to frame, in me to trust,
Thou to the Syrian couldst belong?

‘I am of a lineage
That each for each doth fast engage;
In old Bassora’s schools, I seemed
Hermit vowed to books and gloom, —
Ill-bestead for gay bridegroom.
I was by thy touch redeemed;
When thy meteor glances came,
We talked at large of worldly fate,
And drew truly every trait.

‘Once I dwelt apart,
Now I live with all;
As shepherd’s lamp on far hill-side
Seems, by the traveller espied,
A door into the mountain heart,
So didst thou quarry and unlock
Highways for me through the rock.

‘Now, deceived, thou wanderest
In strange lands unblest;
And my kindred come to soothe me.
Southwind is my next of blood;
He is come through fragrant wood,
Drugged with spice from climates warm,
And in every twinkling glade,
And twilight nook,
Unveils thy form.
Out of the forest way
Forth paced it yesterday;
And when I sat by the watercourse,
Watching the daylight fade,
It throbbed up from the brook.

‘River and rose and crag and bird,
Frost and sun and eldest night,
To me their aid preferred,
To me their comfort plight; —
“Courage! we are thine allies,
And with this hint be wise, —
The chains of kind
The distant bind;
Deed thou doest she must do,
Above her will, be true;
And, in her strict resort
To winds and waterfalls
And autumn’s sunlit festivals,
To music, and to music’s thought,
Inextricably bound,
She shall find thee, and be found.
Follow not her flying feet;
Come to us herself to meet.”’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE

I. THE INITIAL LOVE

Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces and parks,
And told the truant by his marks, —
Golden curls, and quiver and bow.
This befell how long ago!
Time and tide are strangely changed,
Men and manners much deranged:
None will now find Cupid latent
By this foolish antique patent.
He came late along the waste,
Shod like a traveller for haste;
With malice dared me to proclaim him,
That the maids and boys might name him.

Boy no more, he wears all coats,
Frocks and blouses, capes, capotes;
He bears no bow, or quiver, or wand,
Nor chaplet on his head or hand.
Leave his weeds and heed his eyes, —
All the rest he can disguise.
In the pit of his eye’s a spark
Would bring back day if it were dark;
And, if I tell you all my thought,
Though I comprehend it not,
In those unfathomable orbs
Every function he absorbs;
Doth eat, and drink, and fish, and shoot,
And write, and reason, and compute,
And ride, and run, and have, and hold,
And whine, and flatter, and regret,
And kiss, and couple, and beget,
By those roving eyeballs bold.

Undaunted are their courages,
Right Cossacks in their forages;
Fleeter they than any creature, —
They are his steeds, and not his feature;
Inquisitive, and fierce, and fasting,
Restless, predatory, hasting;
And they pounce on other eyes
As lions on their prey;
And round their circles is writ,
Plainer than the day,
Underneath, within, above, —
Love — love — love — love.
He lives in his eyes;
There doth digest, and work, and spin,
And buy, and sell, and lose, and win;
He rolls them with delighted motion,
Joy-tides swell their mimic ocean.
Yet holds he them with tautest rein,
That they may seize and entertain
The glance that to their glance opposes,
Like fiery honey sucked from roses.
He palmistry can understand,
Imbibing virtue by his hand
As if it were a living root;
The pulse of hands will make him mute;
With all his force he gathers balms
Into those wise, thrilling palms.

Cupid is a casuist,
A mystic and a cabalist, —
Can your lurking thought surprise,
And interpret your device.
He is versed in occult science,
In magic and in clairvoyance,
Oft he keeps his fine ear strained,
And Reason on her tiptoe pained
For aëry intelligence,
And for strange coincidence.
But it touches his quick heart
When Fate by omens takes his part,
And chance-dropped hints from Nature’s sphere
Deeply soothe his anxious ear.

Heralds high before him run;
He has ushers many a one;
He spreads his welcome where he goes,
And touches all things with his rose.
All things wait for and divine him, —
How shall I dare to malign him,
Or accuse the god of sport?
I must end my true report,
Painting him from head to foot,
In as far as I took note,
Trusting well the matchless power
Of this young-eyed emperor
Will clear his fame from every cloud
With the bards and with the crowd.

He is wilful, mutable,
Shy, untamed, inscrutable,
Swifter-fashioned than the fairies.
Substance mixed of pure contraries;
His vice some elder virtue’s token,
And his good is evil-spoken.
Failing sometimes of his own,
He is headstrong and alone;
He affects the wood and wild,
Like a flower-hunting child;
Buries himself in summer waves,
In trees, with beasts, in mines and caves,
Loves nature like a hornèd cow,
Bird, or deer, or caribou.

Shun him, nymphs, on the fleet horses!
He has a total world of wit;
O how wise are his discourses!
But he is the arch-hypocrite,
And, through all science and all art,
Seeks alone his counterpart.
He is a Pundit of the East,
He is an augur and a priest,
And his soul will melt in prayer,
But word and wisdom is a snare;
Corrupted by the present toy
He follows joy, and only joy.
There is no mask but he will wear;
He invented oaths to swear;
He paints, he carves, he chants, he prays,
And holds all stars in his embrace.
He takes a sovran privilege
Not allowed to any liege;
For Cupid goes behind all law,
And right into himself does draw;
For he is sovereignly allied, —
Heaven’s oldest blood flows in his side, —
And interchangeably at one
With every king on every throne,
That no god dare say him nay,
Or see the fault, or seen betray;
He has the Muses by the heart,
And the stern Parcae on his part.

His many signs cannot be told;
He has not one mode, but manifold,
Many fashions and addresses,
Piques, reproaches, hurts, caresses.
He will preach like a friar,
And jump like Harlequin;
He will read like a crier,
And fight like a Paladin.
Boundless is his memory;
Plans immense his term prolong;
He is not of counted age,
Meaning always to be young.
And his wish is intimacy,
Intimater intimacy,
And a stricter privacy;
The impossible shall yet be done,
And, being two, shall still be one.
As the wave breaks to foam on shelves,
Then runs into a wave again,
So lovers melt their sundered selves,
Yet melted would be twain.

II. THE DAEMONIC LOVE

Man was made of social earth,
Child and brother from his birth,
Tethered by a liquid cord
Of blood through veins of kindred poured.
Next his heart the fireside band
Of mother, father, sister, stand;
Names from awful childhood heard
Throbs of a wild religion stirred; —
Virtue, to love, to hate them, vice;
Till dangerous Beauty came, at last,
Till Beauty came to snap all ties;
The maid, abolishing the past,
With lotus wine obliterates
Dear memory’s stone-incarved traits,
And, by herself, supplants alone
Friends year by year more inly known.
When her calm eyes opened bright,
All else grew foreign in their light.
It was ever the self-same tale,
The first experience will not fail;
Only two in the garden walked,
And with snake and seraph talked.

Close, close to men,
Like undulating layer of air,
Right above their heads,
The potent plain of Daemons spreads.
Stands to each human soul its own,
For watch and ward and furtherance,
In the snares of Nature’s dance;
And the lustre and the grace
To fascinate each youthful heart,
Beaming from its counterpart,
Translucent through the mortal covers,
Is the Daemon’s form and face.
To and fro the Genius hies, —
A gleam which plays and hovers
Over the maiden’s head,
And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes.
Unknown, albeit lying near,
To men, the path to the Daemon sphere;
And they that swiftly come and go
Leave no track on the heavenly snow.
Sometimes the airy synod bends,
And the mighty choir descends,
And the brains of men thenceforth,
In crowded and in still resorts,
Teem with unwonted thoughts:
As, when a shower of meteors
Cross the orbit of the earth,
And, lit by fringent air,
Blaze near and far,
Mortals deem the planets bright
Have slipped their sacred bars,
And the lone seaman all the night
Sails, astonished, amid stars.

Beauty of a richer vein,
Graces of a subtler strain,
Unto men these moonmen lend,
And our shrinking sky extend.
So is man’s narrow path
By strength and terror skirted;
Also (from the song the wrath
Of the Genii be averted!
The Muse the truth uncolored speaking)
The Daemons are self-seeking:
Their fierce and limitary will
Draws men to their likeness still.
The erring painter made Love blind, —
Highest Love who shines on all;
Him, radiant, sharpest-sighted god,
None can bewilder;
Whose eyes pierce
The universe,
Path-finder, road-builder,
Mediator, royal giver;
Rightly seeing, rightly seen,
Of joyful and transparent mien.
‘T is a sparkle passing
From each to each, from thee to me,
To and fro perpetually;
Sharing all, daring all,
Levelling, displacing
Each obstruction, it unites
Equals remote, and seeming opposites.
And ever and forever Love
Delights to build a road:
Unheeded Danger near him strides,
Love laughs, and on a lion rides.
But Cupid wears another face,
Born into Daemons less divine:
His roses bleach apace,
His nectar smacks of wine.
The Daemon ever builds a wall,
Himself encloses and includes,
Solitude in solitudes:
In like sort his love doth fall.
He doth elect
The beautiful and fortunate,
And the sons of intellect,
And the souls of ample fate,
Who the Future’s gates unbar, —
Minions of the Morning Star.
In his prowess he exults,
And the multitude insults.
His impatient looks devour
Oft the humble and the poor;
And, seeing his eye glare,
They drop their few pale flowers,
Gathered with hope to please,
Along the mountain towers, —
Lose courage, and despair.
He will never be gainsaid, —
Pitiless, will not be stayed;
His hot tyranny
Burns up every other tie.
Therefore comes an hour from Jove
Which his ruthless will defies,
And the dogs of Fate unties.
Shiver the palaces of glass;
Shrivel the rainbow-colored walls,
Where in bright Art each god and sibyl dwelt
Secure as in the zodiac’s belt;
And the galleries and halls,
Wherein every siren sung,
Like a meteor pass.
For this fortune wanted root
In the core of God’s abysm, —
Was a weed of self and schism;
And ever the Daemonic Love
Is the ancestor of wars
And the parent of remorse.

III. THE CELESTIAL LOVE

But God said,
‘I will have a purer gift;
There is smoke in the flame;
New flowerets bring, new prayers uplift,
And love without a name.
Fond children, ye desire
To please each other well;
Another round, a higher,
Ye shall climb on the heavenly stair,
And selfish preference forbear;
And in right deserving,
And without a swerving
Each from your proper state,
Weave roses for your mate.

‘Deep, deep are loving eyes,
Flowed with naphtha fiery sweet;
And the point is paradise,
Where their glances meet:
Their reach shall yet be more profound,
And a vision without bound:
The axis of those eyes sun-clear
Be the axis of the sphere:
So shall the lights ye pour amain
Go, without check or intervals,
Through from the empyrean walls
Unto the same again.’

Higher far into the pure realm,
Over sun and star,
Over the flickering Daemon film,
Thou must mount for love;
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred, eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like;
Where good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.

There Past, Present, Future, shoot
Triple blossoms from one root;
Substances at base divided,
In their summits are united;
There the holy essence rolls,
One through separated souls;
And the sunny Aeon sleeps
Folding Nature in its deeps,
And every fair and every good,
Known in part, or known impure,
To men below,
In their archetypes endure.
The race of gods,
Or those we erring own,
Are shadows flitting up and down
In the still abodes.
The circles of that sea are laws
Which publish and which hide the cause.

Pray for a beam
Out of that sphere,
Thee to guide and to redeem.
O, what a load
Of care and toil,
By lying use bestowed,
From his shoulders falls who sees
The true astronomy,
The period of peace.
Counsel which the ages kept
Shall the well-born soul accept.
As the overhanging trees
Fill the lake with images, —
As garment draws the garment’s hem,
Men their fortunes bring with them.
By right or wrong,
Lands and goods go to the strong.
Property will brutely draw
Still to the proprietor;
Silver to silver creep and wind,
And kind to kind.

Nor less the eternal poles
Of tendency distribute souls.
There need no vows to bind
Whom not each other seek, but find.
They give and take no pledge or oath, —
Nature is the bond of both:
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns, —
Their noble meanings are their pawns.
Plain and cold is their address,
Power have they for tenderness;
And, so thoroughly is known
Each other’s counsel by his own,
They can parley without meeting;
Need is none of forms of greeting;
They can well communicate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves
Do these celebrate their loves:
Not by jewels, feasts and savors,
Not by ribbons or by favors,
But by the sun-spark on the sea,
And the cloud-shadow on the lea,
The soothing lapse of morn to mirk,
And the cheerful round of work.
Their cords of love so public are,
They intertwine the farthest star:
The throbbing sea, the quaking earth,
Yield sympathy and signs of mirth;
Is none so high, so mean is none,
But feels and seals this union;
Even the fell Furies are appeased,
The good applaud, the lost are eased.

Love’s hearts are faithful, but not fond,
Bound for the just, but not beyond;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind.
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly,
Without a false humility;
For this is Love’s nobility, —
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold;
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand and body and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
He that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all who dares be true.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE APOLOGY

Think me not unkind and rude
  That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
  To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I
  Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
  Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
  For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
  Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery
  But ’tis figured in the flowers;
Was never secret history
  But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field
  Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
  Which I gather in a song.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MERLIN I

Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader’s art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
Merlin’s blows are strokes of fate,
Chiming with the forest tone,
When boughs buffet boughs in the wood;
Chiming with the gasp and moan
Of the ice-imprisoned flood;
With the pulse of manly hearts;
With the voice of orators;
With the din of city arts;
With the cannonade of wars;
With the marches of the brave;
And prayers of might from martyrs’ cave.

Great is the art,
Great be the manners, of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But, leaving rule and pale forethought,
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
‘Pass in, pass in,’ the angels say,
‘In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.’

Blameless master of the games,
King of sport that never shames,
He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song’s sweet influence.
Forms more cheerly live and go,
What time the subtle mind
Sings aloud the tune whereto
Their pulses beat,
And march their feet,
And their members are combined.

By Sybarites beguiled,
He shall no task decline;
Merlin’s mighty line
Extremes of nature reconciled, —
Bereaved a tyrant of his will,
And made the lion mild.
Songs can the tempest still,
Scattered on the stormy air,
Mould the year to fair increase,
And bring in poetic peace.

He shall not seek to weave,
In weak, unhappy times,
Efficacious rhymes;
Wait his returning strength.
Bird that from the nadir’s floor
To the zenith’s top can soar, —
The soaring orbit of the muse exceeds that journey’s length.
Nor profane affect to hit
Or compass that, by meddling wit,
Which only the propitious mind
Publishes when ‘t is inclined.
There are open hours
When the God’s will sallies free,
And the dull idiot might see
The flowing fortunes of a thousand years; —
Sudden, at unawares,
Self-moved, fly-to the doors.
Nor sword of angels could reveal
What they conceal.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MERLIN II

The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king’s affairs;
Balance-loving Nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode;
Each color with its counter glowed;
To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;
Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough;
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
In one body grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.
Light’s far furnace shines,
Smelting balls and bars,
Forging double stars,
Glittering twins and trines.
The animals are sick with love,
Lovesick with rhyme;
Each with all propitious Time
Into chorus wove.

Like the dancers’ ordered band,
Thoughts come also hand in hand;
In equal couples mated,
Or else alternated;
Adding by their mutual gage,
One to other, health and age.
Solitary fancies go
Short-lived wandering to and fro,
Most like to bachelors,
Or an ungiven maid,
Not ancestors,
With no posterity to make the lie afraid,
Or keep truth undecayed.
Perfect-paired as eagle’s wings,
Justice is the rhyme of things;
Trade and counting use
The self-same tuneful muse;
And Nemesis,
Who with even matches odd,
Who athwart space redresses
The partial wrong,
Fills the just period,
And finishes the song.

Subtle rhymes, with ruin rife,
Murmur in the house of life,
Sung by the Sisters as they spin;
In perfect time and measure they
Build and unbuild our echoing clay.
As the two twilights of the day
Fold us music-drunken in.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

BACCHUS

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose tap-roots, reaching through,
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffer no savor of the earth to scape.

Let its grapes the morn salute
From a nocturnal root,
Which feels the acrid juice
Of Styx and Erebus;
And turns the woe of Night,
By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread;
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true, —
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms, and mould of statures,
That I intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well.

Wine that is shed
Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls,
Or like the Atlantic streams, which run
When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread,
Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,
Wine which is already man,
Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which Music is, —
Music and wine are one, —
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far Chaos talk with me;
Kings unborn shall walk with me;
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man.
Quickened so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice
For all I know; —
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls of use
Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus! the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine!
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lote!
Haste to cure the old despair, —
Reason in Nature’s lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;
Give them again to shine;
Let wine repair what this undid;
And where the infection slid,
A dazzling memory revive;
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And write my old adventures with the pen
Which on the first day drew,
Upon the tablets blue,
The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MEROPS

What care I, so they stand the same, —
  Things of the heavenly mind, —
How long the power to give them name
  Tarries yet behind?

Thus far to-day your favors reach,
  O fair, appeasing presences!
Ye taught my lips a single speech,
  And a thousand silences.

Space grants beyond his fated road
  No inch to the god of day;
And copious language still bestowed
  One word, no more, to say.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE HOUSE

There is no architect
  Can build as the Muse can;
She is skilful to select
  Materials for her plan;

Slow and warily to choose
  Rafters of immortal pine,
Or cedar incorruptible,
  Worthy her design,

She threads dark Alpine forests
  Or valleys by the sea,
In many lands, with painful steps,
  Ere she can find a tree.

She ransacks mines and ledges
  And quarries every rock,
To hew the famous adamant
  For each eternal block —

She lays her beams in music,
  In music every one,
To the cadence of the whirling world
  Which dances round the sun —

That so they shall not be displaced
  By lapses or by wars,
But for the love of happy souls
  Outlive the newest stars.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SAADI

Trees in groves,
Kine in droves,
In ocean sport the scaly herds,
Wedge-like cleave the air the birds,
To northern lakes fly wind-borne ducks,
Browse the mountain sheep in flocks,
Men consort in camp and town,
But the poet dwells alone.

God, who gave to him the lyre,
Of all mortals the desire,
For all breathing men’s behoof,
Straitly charged him, ‘Sit aloof;’
Annexed a warning, poets say,
To the bright premium, —
Ever, when twain together play,
Shall the harp be dumb.

Many may come,
But one shall sing;
Two touch the string,
The harp is dumb.
Though there come a million,
Wise Saadi dwells alone.

Yet Saadi loved the race of men, —
No churl, immured in cave or den;
In bower and hall
He wants them all,
Nor can dispense
With Persia for his audience;
They must give ear,
Grow red with joy and white with fear;
But he has no companion;
Come ten, or come a million,
Good Saadi dwells alone.

Be thou ware where Saadi dwells;
Wisdom of the gods is he, —
Entertain it reverently.
Gladly round that golden lamp
Sylvan deities encamp,
And simple maids and noble youth
Are welcome to the man of truth.
Most welcome they who need him most,
They feed the spring which they exhaust;
For greater need
Draws better deed:
But, critic, spare thy vanity,
Nor show thy pompous parts,
To vex with odious subtlety
The cheerer of men’s hearts.

Sad-eyed Fakirs swiftly say
Endless dirges to decay,
Never in the blaze of light
Lose the shudder of midnight;
Pale at overflowing noon
Hear wolves barking at the moon;
In the bower of dalliance sweet
Hear the far Avenger’s feet:
And shake before those awful Powers,
Who in their pride forgive not ours.
Thus the sad-eyed Fakirs preach:
‘Bard, when thee would Allah teach,
And lift thee to his holy mount,
He sends thee from his bitter fount
Wormwood, — saying, “Go thy ways;
Drink not the Malaga of praise,
But do the deed thy fellows hate,
And compromise thy peaceful state;
Smite the white breasts which thee fed.
Stuff sharp thorns beneath the head
Of them thou shouldst have comforted;
For out of woe and out of crime
Draws the heart a lore sublime.”’
And yet it seemeth not to me
That the high gods love tragedy;
For Saadi sat in the sun,
And thanks was his contrition;
For haircloth and for bloody whips,
Had active hands and smiling lips;
And yet his runes he rightly read,
And to his folk his message sped.
Sunshine in his heart transferred
Lighted each transparent word,
And well could honoring Persia learn
What Saadi wished to say;
For Saadi’s nightly stars did burn
Brighter than Jami’s day.

Whispered the Muse in Saadi’s cot:
‘O gentle Saadi, listen not,
Tempted by thy praise of wit,
Or by thirst and appetite
For the talents not thine own,
To sons of contradiction.
Never, son of eastern morning,
Follow falsehood, follow scorning.
Denounce who will, who will deny,
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Let theist, atheist, pantheist,
Define and wrangle how they list,
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer, —
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer,
Unknowing war, unknowing crime,
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;
Heed not what the brawlers say,
Heed thou only Saadi’s lay.

‘Let the great world bustle on
With war and trade, with camp and town;
A thousand men shall dig and eat;
At forge and furnace thousands sweat;
And thousands sail the purple sea,
And give or take the stroke of war,
Or crowd the market and bazaar;
Oft shall war end, and peace return,
And cities rise where cities burn,
Ere one man my hill shall climb,
Who can turn the golden rhyme.
Let them manage how they may,
Heed thou only Saadi’s lay.
Seek the living among the dead, —
Man in man is imprisonèd;
Barefooted Dervish is not poor,
If fate unlock his bosom’s door,
So that what his eye hath seen
His tongue can paint as bright, as keen;
And what his tender heart hath felt
With equal fire thy heart shalt melt.
For, whom the Muses smile upon,
And touch with soft persuasion,
His words like a storm-wind can bring
Terror and beauty on their wing;
In his every syllable
Lurketh Nature veritable;
And though he speak in midnight dark, —
In heaven no star, on earth no spark, —
Yet before the listener’s eye
Swims the world in ecstasy,
The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be,
And life pulsates in rock or tree.
Saadi, so far thy words shall reach:
Suns rise and set in Saadi’s speech!’

And thus to Saadi said the Muse:
‘Eat thou the bread which men refuse;
Flee from the goods which from thee flee;
Seek nothing, — Fortune seeketh thee.
Nor mount, nor dive; all good things keep
The midway of the eternal deep.
Wish not to fill the isles with eyes
To fetch thee birds of paradise:
On thine orchard’s edge belong
All the brags of plume and song;
Wise Ali’s sunbright sayings pass
For proverbs in the market-place:
Through mountains bored by regal art,
Toil whistles as he drives his cart.
Nor scour the seas, nor sift mankind,
A poet or a friend to find:
Behold, he watches at the door!
Behold his shadow on the floor!
Open innumerable doors
The heaven where unveiled Allah pours
The flood of truth, the flood of good,
The Seraph’s and the Cherub’s food.
Those doors are men: the Pariah hind
Admits thee to the perfect Mind.
Seek not beyond thy cottage wall
Redeemers that can yield thee all:
While thou sittest at thy door
On the desert’s yellow floor,
Listening to the gray-haired crones,
Foolish gossips, ancient drones,
Saadi, see! they rise in stature
To the height of mighty Nature,
And the secret stands revealed
Fraudulent Time in vain concealed, —
That blessed gods in servile masks
Plied for thee thy household tasks.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HOLIDAYS

From fall to spring, the russet acorn,
  Fruit beloved of maid and boy,
Lent itself beneath the forest,
  To be the children’s toy.

Pluck it now! In vain, — thou canst not;
  Its root has pierced yon shady mound;
Toy no longer — it has duties;
  It is anchored in the ground.

Year by year the rose-lipped maiden,
  Playfellow of young and old,
Was frolic sunshine, dear to all men,
  More dear to one than mines of gold.

Whither went the lovely hoyden?
  Disappeared in blessed wife;
Servant to a wooden cradle,
  Living in a baby’s life.

Still thou playest; — short vacation
  Fate grants each to stand aside;
Now must thou be man and artist, —
  ‘T is the turning of the tide.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

XENOPHANES

By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave
One scent to hyson and to wall-flower,
One sound to pine-groves and to waterfalls,
One aspect to the desert and the lake.
It was her stern necessity: all things
Are of one pattern made; bird, beast and flower,
Song, picture, form, space, thought and character
Deceive us, seeming to be many things,
And are but one. Beheld far off, they part
As God and devil; bring them to the mind,
They dull its edge with their monotony.
To know one element, explore another,
And in the second reappears the first.
The specious panorama of a year
But multiplies the image of a day, —
A belt of mirrors round a taper’s flame;
And universal Nature, through her vast
And crowded whole, an infinite paroquet,
Repeats one note.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE DAY’S RATION

           When I was born,
From all the seas of strength Fate filled a chalice,
Saying, ‘This be thy portion, child; this chalice,
Less than a lily’s, thou shalt daily draw
From my great arteries, — nor less, nor more.’
All substances the cunning chemist Time
Melts down into that liquor of my life, —
Friends, foes, joys, fortunes, beauty and disgust.
And whether I am angry or content,
Indebted or insulted, loved or hurt,
All he distils into sidereal wine
And brims my little cup; heedless, alas!
Of all he sheds how little it will hold,
How much runs over on the desert sands.
If a new Muse draw me with splendid ray,
And I uplift myself into its heaven,
The needs of the first sight absorb my blood,
And all the following hours of the day
Drag a ridiculous age.
To-day, when friends approach, and every hour
Brings book, or starbright scroll of genius,
The little cup will hold not a bead more,
And all the costly liquor runs to waste;
Nor gives the jealous lord one diamond drop
So to be husbanded for poorer days.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Why need I galleries, when a pupil’s draught
After the master’s sketch fills and o’erfills
My apprehension? Why seek Italy,
Who cannot circumnavigate the sea
Of thoughts and things at home, but still adjourn
The nearest matters for a thousand days?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

BLIGHT

           Give me truths;
For I am weary of the surfaces,
And die of inanition. If I knew
Only the herbs and simples of the wood,
Rue, cinquefoil, gill, vervain and agrimony,
Blue-vetch and trillium, hawkweed, sassafras,
Milkweeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sundew,
And rare and virtuous roots, which in these woods
Draw untold juices from the common earth,
Untold, unknown, and I could surely spell
Their fragrance, and their chemistry apply
By sweet affinities to human flesh,
Driving the foe and stablishing the friend, —
O, that were much, and I could be a part
Of the round day, related to the sun
And planted world, and full executor
Of their imperfect functions.
But these young scholars, who invade our hills,
Bold as the engineer who fells the wood,
And travelling often in the cut he makes,
Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.
The old men studied magic in the flowers,
And human fortunes in astronomy,
And an omnipotence in chemistry,
Preferring things to names, for these were men,
Were unitarians of the united world,
And, wheresoever their clear eye-beams fell,
They caught the footsteps of the SAME. Our eyes
Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,
And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,
And strangers to the plant and to the mine.
The injured elements say, ‘Not in us;’
And night and day, ocean and continent,
Fire, plant and mineral say, ‘Not in us;’
And haughtily return us stare for stare.
For we invade them impiously for gain;
We devastate them unreligiously,
And coldly ask their pottage, not their love.
Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us
Only what to our griping toil is due;
But the sweet affluence of love and song,
The rich results of the divine consents
Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover,
The nectar and ambrosia, are withheld;
And in the midst of spoils and slaves, we thieves
And pirates of the universe, shut out
Daily to a more thin and outward rind,
Turn pale and starve. Therefore, to our sick eyes,
The stunted trees look sick, the summer short,
Clouds shade the sun, which will not tan our hay,
And nothing thrives to reach its natural term;
And life, shorn of its venerable length,
Even at its greatest space is a defeat,
And dies in anger that it was a dupe;
And, in its highest noon and wantonness,
Is early frugal, like a beggar’s child;
Even in the hot pursuit of the best aims
And prizes of ambition, checks its hand,
Like Alpine cataracts frozen as they leaped,
Chilled with a miserly comparison
Of the toy’s purchase with the length of life.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MUSKETAQUID

Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low, open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear, dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And through my rock-like, solitary wont
Shot million rays of thought and tenderness.
For me, in showers, in sweeping showers, the Spring
Visits the valley; — break away the clouds, —
I bathe in the morn’s soft and silvered air,
And loiter willing by yon loitering stream.
Sparrows far off, and nearer, April’s bird,
Blue-coated, — flying before from tree to tree,
Courageous sing a delicate overture
To lead the tardy concert of the year.
Onward and nearer rides the sun of May;
And wide around, the marriage of the plants
Is sweetly solemnized. Then flows amain
The surge of summer’s beauty; dell and crag,
Hollow and lake, hillside and pine arcade,
Are touched with genius. Yonder ragged cliff
Has thousand faces in a thousand hours.

Beneath low hills, in the broad interval
Through which at will our Indian rivulet
Winds mindful still of sannup and of squaw,
Whose pipe and arrow oft the plough unburies,
Here in pine houses built of new-fallen trees,
Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell.
Traveller, to thee, perchance, a tedious road,
Or, it may be, a picture; to these men,
The landscape is an armory of powers,
Which, one by one, they know to draw and use.
They harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;
They prove the virtues of each bed of rock,
And, like the chemist ‘mid his loaded jars,
Draw from each stratum its adapted use
To drug their crops or weapon their arts withal.
They turn the frost upon their chemic heap,
They set the wind to winnow pulse and grain,
They thank the spring-flood for its fertile slime,
And, on cheap summit-levels of the snow,
Slide with the sledge to inaccessible woods
O’er meadows bottomless. So, year by year,
They fight the elements with elements
(That one would say, meadow and forest walked,
Transmuted in these men to rule their like),
And by the order in the field disclose
The order regnant in the yeoman’s brain.

What these strong masters wrote at large in miles,
I followed in small copy in my acre;
For there’s no rood has not a star above it;
The cordial quality of pear or plum
Ascends as gladly in a single tree
As in broad orchards resonant with bees;
And every atom poises for itself,
And for the whole. The gentle deities
Showed me the lore of colors and of sounds,
The innumerable tenements of beauty.
The miracle of generative force,
Far-reaching concords of astronomy
Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;
Better, the linked purpose of the whole,
And, chiefest prize, found I true liberty
In the glad home plain-dealing Nature gave.
The polite found me impolite; the great
Would mortify me, but in vain; for still
I am a willow of the wilderness,
Loving the wind that bent me. All my hurts
My garden spade can heal. A woodland walk,
A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild-rose, or rock-loving columbine,
Salve my worst wounds.
For thus the wood-gods murmured in my ear:
‘Dost love our manners? Canst thou silent lie?
Canst thou, thy pride forgot, like Nature pass
Into the winter night’s extinguished mood?
Canst thou shine now, then darkle,
And being latent, feel thyself no less?
As, when the all-worshipped moon attracts the eye,
The river, hill, stems, foliage are obscure,
Yet envies none, none are unenviable.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

DIRGE

CONCORD, 1838

I reached the middle of the mount
  Up which the incarnate soul must climb,
And paused for them, and looked around,
  With me who walked through space and time.

Five rosy boys with morning light
  Had leaped from one fair mother’s arms,
Fronted the sun with hope as bright,
  And greeted God with childhood’s psalms.

Knows he who tills this lonely field
  To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
  At midnight and at morn?

In the long sunny afternoon
  The plain was full of ghosts;
I wandered up, I wandered down,
  Beset by pensive hosts.

The winding Concord gleamed below,
  Pouring as wide a flood
As when my brothers, long ago,
  Came with me to the wood.

But they are gone, — the holy ones
  Who trod with me this lovely vale;
The strong, star-bright companions
  Are silent, low and pale.

My good, my noble, in their prime,
  Who made this world the feast it was
Who learned with me the lore of time,
  Who loved this dwelling-place!

They took this valley for their toy,
  They played with it in every mood;
A cell for prayer, a hall for joy, —
  They treated Nature as they would.

They colored the horizon round;
  Stars flamed and faded as they bade,
All echoes hearkened for their sound, —
  They made the woodlands glad or mad.

I touch this flower of silken leaf,
  Which once our childhood knew;
Its soft leaves wound me with a grief
  Whose balsam never grew.

Hearken to yon pine-warbler
  Singing aloft in the tree!
Hearest thou, O traveller,
  What he singeth to me?

Not unless God made sharp thine ear
  With sorrow such as mine,
Out of that delicate lay could’st thou
  Its heavy tale divine.

‘Go, lonely man,’ it saith;
  ‘They loved thee from their birth;
Their hands were pure, and pure their faith, —
  There are no such hearts on earth.

‘Ye drew one mother’s milk,
  One chamber held ye all;
A very tender history
  Did in your childhood fall.

‘You cannot unlock your heart,
  The key is gone with them;
The silent organ loudest chants
  The master’s requiem.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THRENODY

The South-wind brings
Life, sunshine and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire;
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost, he cannot restore;
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs;
And he, the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air’s cerulean round, —
The hyacinthine boy, for whom
Morn well might break and April bloom,
The gracious boy, who did adorn
The world whereinto he was born,
And by his countenance repay
The favor of the loving Day, —
Has disappeared from the Day’s eye;
Far and wide she cannot find him;
My hopes pursue, they cannot bind him.
Returned this day, the South-wind searches,
And finds young pines and budding birches;
But finds not the budding man;
Nature, who lost, cannot remake him;
Fate let him fall, Fate can’t retake him;
Nature, Fate, men, him seek in vain.

And whither now, my truant wise and sweet,
O, whither tend thy feet?
I had the right, few days ago,
Thy steps to watch, thy place to know:
How have I forfeited the right?
Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?
I hearken for thy household cheer,
O eloquent child!
Whose voice, an equal messenger,
Conveyed thy meaning mild.
What though the pains and joys
Whereof it spoke were toys
Fitting his age and ken,
Yet fairest dames and bearded men,
Who heard the sweet request,
So gentle, wise and grave,
Bended with joy to his behest
And let the world’s affairs go by,
A while to share his cordial game,
Or mend his wicker wagon-frame,
Still plotting how their hungry fear
That winsome voice again might hear;
For his lips could well pronounce
Words that were persuasions.

Gentlest guardians marked serene
His early hope, his liberal mien;
Took counsel from his guiding eyes
To make this wisdom earthly wise.
Ah, vainly do these eyes recall
The school-march, each day’s festival,
When every morn my bosom glowed
To watch the convoy on the road;
The babe in willow wagon closed,
With rolling eyes and face composed;
With children forward and behind,
Like Cupids studiously inclined;
And he the chieftain paced beside,
The centre of the troop allied,
With sunny face of sweet repose,
To guard the babe from fancied foes.
The little captain innocent
Took the eye with him as he went;
Each village senior paused to scan
And speak the lovely caravan.
From the window I look out
To mark thy beautiful parade,
Stately marching in cap and coat
To some tune by fairies played; —
A music heard by thee alone
To works as noble led thee on.

Now Love and Pride, alas! in vain,
Up and down their glances strain.
The painted sled stands where it stood;
The kennel by the corded wood;
His gathered sticks to stanch the wall
Of the snow-tower, when snow should fall;
The ominous hole he dug in the sand,
And childhood’s castles built or planned;
His daily haunts I well discern, —
The poultry-yard, the shed, the barn, —
And every inch of garden ground
Paced by the blessed feet around,
From the roadside to the brook
Whereinto he loved to look.
Step the meek fowls where erst they ranged;
The wintry garden lies unchanged;
The brook into the stream runs on;
But the deep-eyed boy is gone.

On that shaded day,
Dark with more clouds than tempests are,
When thou didst yield thy innocent breath
In birdlike heavings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee;
I said, ‘We are mates in misery.’
The morrow dawned with needless glow;
Each snowbird chirped, each fowl must crow;
Each tramper started; but the feet
Of the most beautiful and sweet
Of human youth had left the hill
And garden, — they were bound and still.
There’s not a sparrow or a wren,
There’s not a blade of autumn grain,
Which the four seasons do not tend
And tides of life and increase lend;
And every chick of every bird,
And weed and rock-moss is preferred.
O ostrich-like forgetfulness!
O loss of larger in the less!
Was there no star that could be sent,
No watcher in the firmament,
No angel from the countless host
That loiters round the crystal coast,
Could stoop to heal that only child,
Nature’s sweet marvel undefiled,
And keep the blossom of the earth,
Which all her harvests were not worth?
Not mine, — I never called thee mine,
But Nature’s heir, — if I repine,
And seeing rashly torn and moved
Not what I made, but what I loved,
Grow early old with grief that thou
Must to the wastes of Nature go, —
‘T is because a general hope
Was quenched, and all must doubt and grope.
For flattering planets seemed to say
This child should ills of ages stay,
By wondrous tongue, and guided pen,
Bring the flown Muses back to men.
Perchance not he but Nature ailed,
The world and not the infant failed.
It was not ripe yet to sustain
A genius of so fine a strain,
Who gazed upon the sun and moon
As if he came unto his own,
And, pregnant with his grander thought,
Brought the old order into doubt.
His beauty once their beauty tried;
They could not feed him, and he died,
And wandered backward as in scorn,
To wait an aeon to be born.
Ill day which made this beauty waste,
Plight broken, this high face defaced!
Some went and came about the dead;
And some in books of solace read;
Some to their friends the tidings say;
Some went to write, some went to pray;
One tarried here, there hurried one;
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all,
To aggrandize one funeral.
The eager fate which carried thee
Took the largest part of me:
For this losing is true dying;
This is lordly man’s down-lying,
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning.

O child of paradise,
Boy who made dear his father’s home,
In whose deep eyes
Men read the welfare of the times to come,
I am too much bereft.
The world dishonored thou hast left.
O truth’s and nature’s costly lie!
O trusted broken prophecy!
O richest fortune sourly crossed!
Born for the future, to the future lost!

The deep Heart answered, ‘Weepest thou?
Worthier cause for passion wild
If I had not taken the child.
And deemest thou as those who pore,
With aged eyes, short way before, —
Think’st Beauty vanished from the coast
Of matter, and thy darling lost?
Taught he not thee — the man of eld,
Whose eyes within his eyes beheld
Heaven’s numerous hierarchy span
The mystic gulf from God to man?
To be alone wilt thou begin
When worlds of lovers hem thee in?
To-morrow, when the masks shall fall
That dizen Nature’s carnival,
The pure shall see by their own will,
Which overflowing Love shall fill,
‘T is not within the force of fate
The fate-conjoined to separate.
But thou, my votary, weepest thou?
I gave thee sight — where is it now?
I taught thy heart beyond the reach
Of ritual, bible, or of speech;
Wrote in thy mind’s transparent table,
As far as the incommunicable;
Taught thee each private sign to raise
Lit by the supersolar blaze.
Past utterance, and past belief,
And past the blasphemy of grief,
The mysteries of Nature’s heart;
And though no Muse can these impart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.

‘I came to thee as to a friend;
Dearest, to thee I did not send
Tutors, but a joyful eye,
Innocence that matched the sky,
Lovely locks, a form of wonder,
Laughter rich as woodland thunder,
That thou might’st entertain apart
The richest flowering of all art:
And, as the great all-loving Day
Through smallest chambers takes its way,
That thou might’st break thy daily bread
With prophet, savior and head;
That thou might’st cherish for thine own
The riches of sweet Mary’s Son,
Boy-Rabbi, Israel’s paragon.
And thoughtest thou such guest
Would in thy hall take up his rest?
Would rushing life forget her laws,
Fate’s glowing revolution pause?
High omens ask diviner guess;
Not to be conned to tediousness
And know my higher gifts unbind
The zone that girds the incarnate mind.
When the scanty shores are full
With Thought’s perilous, whirling pool;
When frail Nature can no more,
Then the Spirit strikes the hour:
My servant Death, with solving rite,
Pours finite into infinite.
Wilt thou freeze love’s tidal flow,
Whose streams through Nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half-climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one, —
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone and lineament?
Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,
Talker! the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the private soul,
Beckon it when to go and come,
Self-announced its hour of doom?
Fair the soul’s recess and shrine,
Magic-built to last a season;
Masterpiece of love benign,
Fairer that expansive reason
Whose omen ’tis, and sign.
Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?
Verdict which accumulates
From lengthening scroll of human fates,
Voice of earth to earth returned,
Prayers of saints that inly burned, —
Saying, What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;
Heart’s love will meet thee again.
Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds;
Or like a traveller’s fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.
Silent rushes the swift Lord
Through ruined systems still restored,
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless,
Plants with worlds the wilderness;
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow.
House and tenant go to ground,
Lost in God, in Godhead found.’

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

CONCORD HYMN

SUNG AT THE COMPLETION OF THE BATTLE MONUMENT, JULY 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
  And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
  Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
  Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
  We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
  When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
  To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
  The shaft we raise to them and thee.

* * * * *

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

May-Day and Other Pieces

MAY-DAY

Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring,
With sudden passion languishing,
Teaching Barren moors to smile,
Painting pictures mile on mile,
Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths,
Whence a smokeless incense breathes.
The air is full of whistlings bland;
What was that I heard
Out of the hazy land?
Harp of the wind, or song of bird,
Or vagrant booming of the air,
Voice of a meteor lost in day?
Such tidings of the starry sphere
Can this elastic air convey.
Or haply ’twas the cannonade
Of the pent and darkened lake,
Cooled by the pendent mountain’s shade,
Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break,
Afflicted moan, and latest hold
Even into May the iceberg cold.
Was it a squirrel’s pettish bark,
Or clarionet of jay? or hark
Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads,
Steering north with raucous cry
Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown.
Come the tumult whence it will,
Voice of sport, or rush of wings,
It is a sound, it is a token
That the marble sleep is broken,
And a change has passed on things.

 When late I walked, in earlier days,
All was stiff and stark;
Knee-deep snows choked all the ways,
In the sky no spark;
Firm-braced I sought my ancient woods,
Struggling through the drifted roads;
The whited desert knew me not,
Snow-ridges masked each darling spot;
The summer dells, by genius haunted,
One arctic moon had disenchanted.
All the sweet secrets therein hid
By Fancy, ghastly spells undid.
Eldest mason, Frost, had piled
Swift cathedrals in the wild;
The piny hosts were sheeted ghosts
In the star-lit minster aisled.
I found no joy: the icy wind
Might rule the forest to his mind.
Who would freeze on frozen lakes?
Back to books and sheltered home,
And wood-fire flickering on the walls,
To hear, when, ‘mid our talk and games,
Without the baffled North-wind calls.
But soft! a sultry morning breaks;
The ground-pines wash their rusty green,
The maple-tops their crimson tint,
On the soft path each track is seen,
The girl’s foot leaves its neater print.
The pebble loosened from the frost
Asks of the urchin to be tost.
In flint and marble beats a heart,
The kind Earth takes her children’s part,
The green lane is the school-boy’s friend,
Low leaves his quarrel apprehend,
The fresh ground loves his top and ball,
The air rings jocund to his call,
The brimming brook invites a leap,
He dives the hollow, climbs the steep.
The youth sees omens where he goes,
And speaks all languages the rose,
The wood-fly mocks with tiny voice
The far halloo of human voice;
The perfumed berry on the spray
Smacks of faint memories far away.
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next into the farthest brings,
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

 The caged linnet in the Spring
Hearkens for the choral glee,
When his fellows on the wing
Migrate from the Southern Sea;
When trellised grapes their flowers unmask,
And the new-born tendrils twine,
The old wine darkling in the cask
Feels the bloom on the living vine,
And bursts the hoops at hint of Spring:
And so, perchance, in Adam’s race,
Of Eden’s bower some dream-like trace
Survived the Flight and swam the Flood,
And wakes the wish in youngest blood
To tread the forfeit Paradise,
And feed once more the exile’s eyes;
And ever when the happy child
In May beholds the blooming wild,
And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
‘Onward,’ he cries, ‘your baskets bring, —
In the next field is air more mild,
And o’er yon hazy crest is Eden’s balmier spring.’

 Not for a regiment’s parade,
Nor evil laws or rulers made,
Blue Walden rolls its cannonade,
But for a lofty sign
Which the Zodiac threw,
That the bondage-days are told.
And waters free as winds shall flow.
Lo! how all the tribes combine
To rout the flying foe.
See, every patriot oak-leaf throws
His elfin length upon the snows,
Not idle, since the leaf all day
Draws to the spot the solar ray,
Ere sunset quarrying inches down,
And halfway to the mosses brown;
While the grass beneath the rime
Has hints of the propitious time,
And upward pries and perforates
Through the cold slab a thousand gates,
Till green lances peering through
Bend happy in the welkin blue.

 As we thaw frozen flesh with snow,
So Spring will not her time forerun,
Mix polar night with tropic glow,
Nor cloy us with unshaded sun,
Nor wanton skip with bacchic dance,
But she has the temperance
Of the gods, whereof she is one, —
Masks her treasury of heat
Under east winds crossed with sleet.
Plants and birds and humble creatures
Well accept her rule austere;
Titan-born, to hardy natures
Cold is genial and dear.
As Southern wrath to Northern right
Is but straw to anthracite;
As in the day of sacrifice,
When heroes piled the pyre,
The dismal Massachusetts ice
Burned more than others’ fire,
So Spring guards with surface cold
The garnered heat of ages old.
Hers to sow the seed of bread,
That man and all the kinds be fed;
And, when the sunlight fills the hours,
Dissolves the crust, displays the flowers.

 Beneath the calm, within the light,
A hid unruly appetite
Of swifter life, a surer hope,
Strains every sense to larger scope,
Impatient to anticipate
The halting steps of aged Fate.
Slow grows the palm, too slow the pearl:
When Nature falters, fain would zeal
Grasp the felloes of her wheel,
And grasping give the orbs another whirl.
Turn swiftlier round, O tardy ball!
And sun this frozen side.
Bring hither back the robin’s call,
Bring back the tulip’s pride.

 Why chidest thou the tardy Spring?
The hardy bunting does not chide;
The blackbirds make the maples ring
With social cheer and jubilee;
The redwing flutes his o-ka-lee,
The robins know the melting snow;
The sparrow meek, prophetic-eyed,
Her nest beside the snow-drift weaves,
Secure the osier yet will hide
Her callow brood in mantling leaves, —
And thou, by science all undone,
Why only must thy reason fail
To see the southing of the sun?

 The world rolls round, — mistrust it not, —
Befalls again what once befell;
All things return, both sphere and mote,
And I shall hear my bluebird’s note,
And dream the dream of Auburn dell.

 April cold with dropping rain
Willows and lilacs brings again,
The whistle of returning birds,
And trumpet-lowing of the herds.
The scarlet maple-keys betray
What potent blood hath modest May,
What fiery force the earth renews,
The wealth of forms, the flush of hues;
What joy in rosy waves outpoured
Flows from the heart of Love, the Lord.

 Hither rolls the storm of heat;
I feel its finer billows beat
Like a sea which me infolds;
Heat with viewless fingers moulds,
Swells, and mellows, and matures,
Paints, and flavors, and allures,
Bird and brier inly warms,
Still enriches and transforms,
Gives the reed and lily length,
Adds to oak and oxen strength,
Transforming what it doth infold,
Life out of death, new out of old,
Painting fawns’ and leopards’ fells,
Seethes the gulf-encrimsoning shells,
Fires gardens with a joyful blaze
Of tulips, in the morning’s rays.
The dead log touched bursts into leaf,
The wheat-blade whispers of the sheaf.
What god is this imperial Heat,
Earth’s prime secret, sculpture’s seat?
Doth it bear hidden in its heart
Water-line patterns of all art?
Is it Daedalus? is it Love?
Or walks in mask almighty Jove,
And drops from Power’s redundant horn
All seeds of beauty to be born?

 Where shall we keep the holiday,
And duly greet the entering May?
Too strait and low our cottage doors,
And all unmeet our carpet floors;
Nor spacious court, nor monarch’s hall,
Suffice to hold the festival.
Up and away! where haughty woods
Front the liberated floods:
We will climb the broad-backed hills,
Hear the uproar of their joy;
We will mark the leaps and gleams
Of the new-delivered streams,
And the murmuring rivers of sap
Mount in the pipes of the trees,
Giddy with day, to the topmost spire,
Which for a spike of tender green
Bartered its powdery cap;
And the colors of joy in the bird,
And the love in its carol heard,
Frog and lizard in holiday coats,
And turtle brave in his golden spots;
While cheerful cries of crag and plain
Reply to the thunder of river and main.

 As poured the flood of the ancient sea
Spilling over mountain chains,
Bending forests as bends the sedge,
Faster flowing o’er the plains, —
A world-wide wave with a foaming edge
That rims the running silver sheet, —
So pours the deluge of the heat
Broad northward o’er the land,
Painting artless paradises,
Drugging herbs with Syrian spices,
Fanning secret fires which glow
In columbine and clover-blow,
Climbing the northern zones,
Where a thousand pallid towns
Lie like cockles by the main,
Or tented armies on a plain.
The million-handed sculptor moulds
Quaintest bud and blossom folds,
The million-handed painter pours
Opal hues and purple dye;
Azaleas flush the island floors,
And the tints of heaven reply.

 Wreaths for the May! for happy Spring
To-day shall all her dowry bring,
The love of kind, the joy, the grace,
Hymen of element and race,
Knowing well to celebrate
With song and hue and star and state,
With tender light and youthful cheer,
The spousals of the new-born year.

 Spring is strong and virtuous,
Broad-sowing, cheerful, plenteous,
Quickening underneath the mould
Grains beyond the price of gold.
So deep and large her bounties are,
That one broad, long midsummer day
Shall to the planet overpay
The ravage of a year of war.

 Drug the cup, thou butler sweet,
And send the nectar round;
The feet that slid so long on sleet
Are glad to feel the ground.
Fill and saturate each kind
With good according to its mind,
Fill each kind and saturate
With good agreeing with its fate,
And soft perfection of its plan —
Willow and violet, maiden and man.

 The bitter-sweet, the haunting air
Creepeth, bloweth everywhere;
It preys on all, all prey on it.
Blooms in beauty, thinks in wit,
Stings the strong with enterprise,
Makes travellers long for Indian skies,
And where it comes this courier fleet
Fans in all hearts expectance sweet,
As if to-morrow should redeem
The vanished rose of evening’s dream.
By houses lies a fresher green,
On men and maids a ruddier mien,
As if Time brought a new relay
Of shining virgins every May,
And Summer came to ripen maids
To a beauty that not fades.

 I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,
Stepping daily onward north
To greet staid ancient cavaliers
Filing single in stately train.
And who, and who are the travellers?
They were Night and Day, and Day and Night,
Pilgrims wight with step forthright.
I saw the Days deformed and low,
Short and bent by cold and snow;
The merry Spring threw wreaths on them,
Flower-wreaths gay with bud and bell;
Many a flower and many a gem,
They were refreshed by the smell,
They shook the snow from hats and shoon,
They put their April raiment on;
And those eternal forms,
Unhurt by a thousand storms,
Shot up to the height of the sky again,
And danced as merrily as young men.
I saw them mask their awful glance
Sidewise meek in gossamer lids;
And to speak my thought if none forbids
It was as if the eternal gods,
Tired of their starry periods,
Hid their majesty in cloth
Woven of tulips and painted moth.
On carpets green the maskers march
Below May’s well-appointed arch,
Each star, each god; each grace amain,
Every joy and virtue speed,
Marching duly in her train,
And fainting Nature at her need
Is made whole again.

 ’Twas the vintage-day of field and wood,
When magic wine for bards is brewed;
Every tree and stem and chink
Gushed with syrup to the brink.
The air stole into the streets of towns,
Refreshed the wise, reformed the clowns,
And betrayed the fund of joy
To the high-school and medalled boy:
On from hall to chamber ran,
From youth to maid, from boy to man,
To babes, and to old eyes as well.
‘Once more,’ the old man cried, ‘ye clouds,
Airy turrets purple-piled,
Which once my infancy beguiled,
Beguile me with the wonted spell.
I know ye skilful to convoy
The total freight of hope and joy
Into rude and homely nooks,
Shed mocking lustres on shelf of books,
On farmer’s byre, on pasture rude,
And stony pathway to the wood.
I care not if the pomps you show
Be what they soothfast appear,
Or if yon realms in sunset glow
Be bubbles of the atmosphere.
And if it be to you allowed
To fool me with a shining cloud,
So only new griefs are consoled
By new delights, as old by old,
Frankly I will be your guest,
Count your change and cheer the best.
The world hath overmuch of pain, —
If Nature give me joy again,
Of such deceit I’ll not complain.’

 Ah! well I mind the calendar,
Faithful through a thousand years,
Of the painted race of flowers,
Exact to days, exact to hours,
Counted on the spacious dial
Yon broidered zodiac girds.
I know the trusty almanac
Of the punctual coming-back,
On their due days, of the birds.
I marked them yestermorn,
A flock of finches darting
Beneath the crystal arch,
Piping, as they flew, a march, —
Belike the one they used in parting
Last year from yon oak or larch;
Dusky sparrows in a crowd,
Diving, darting northward free,
Suddenly betook them all,
Every one to his hole in the wall,
Or to his niche in the apple-tree.
I greet with joy the choral trains
Fresh from palms and Cuba’s canes.
Best gems of Nature’s cabinet,
With dews of tropic morning wet,
Beloved of children, bards and Spring,
O birds, your perfect virtues bring,
Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,
Your manners for the heart’s delight,
Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof,
Here weave your chamber weather-proof,
Forgive our harms, and condescend
To man, as to a lubber friend,
And, generous, teach his awkward race
Courage and probity and grace!

 Poets praise that hidden wine
Hid in milk we drew
At the barrier of Time,
When our life was new.
We had eaten fairy fruit,
We were quick from head to foot,
All the forms we looked on shone
As with diamond dews thereon.
What cared we for costly joys,
The Museum’s far-fetched toys?
Gleam of sunshine on the wall
Poured a deeper cheer than all
The revels of the Carnival.
We a pine-grove did prefer
To a marble theatre,
Could with gods on mallows dine,
Nor cared for spices or for wine.
Wreaths of mist and rainbow spanned.
Arch on arch, the grimmest land;
Whittle of a woodland bird
Made the pulses dance,
Note of horn in valleys heard
Filled the region with romance.

 None can tell how sweet,
How virtuous, the morning air;
Every accent vibrates well;
Not alone the wood-bird’s call,
Or shouting boys that chase their ball,
Pass the height of minstrel skill,
But the ploughman’s thoughtless cry,
Lowing oxen, sheep that bleat,
And the joiner’s hammer-beat,
Softened are above their will,
Take tones from groves they wandered through
Or flutes which passing angels blew.
All grating discords melt,
No dissonant note is dealt,
And though thy voice be shrill
Like rasping file on steel,
Such is the temper of the air,
Echo waits with art and care,
And will the faults of song repair.

 So by remote Superior Lake,
And by resounding Mackinac,
When northern storms the forest shake,
And billows on the long beach break,
The artful Air will separate
Note by note all sounds that grate,
Smothering in her ample breast
All but godlike words,
Reporting to the happy ear
Only purified accords.
Strangely wrought from barking waves,
Soft music daunts the Indian braves, —
Convent-chanting which the child
Hears pealing from the panther’s cave
And the impenetrable wild.

 Soft on the South-wind sleeps the haze:
So on thy broad mystic van
Lie the opal-colored days,
And waft the miracle to man.
Soothsayer of the eldest gods,
Repairer of what harms betide,
Revealer of the inmost powers
Prometheus proffered, Jove denied;
Disclosing treasures more than true,
Or in what far to-morrow due;
Speaking by the tongues of flowers,
By the ten-tongued laurel speaking,
Singing by the oriole songs,
Heart of bird the man’s heart seeking;
Whispering hints of treasure hid
Under Morn’s unlifted lid,
Islands looming just beyond
The dim horizon’s utmost bound; —
Who can, like thee, our rags upbraid,
Or taunt us with our hope decayed?
Or who like thee persuade,
Making the splendor of the air,
The morn and sparkling dew, a snare?
Or who resent
Thy genius, wiles and blandishment?

 There is no orator prevails
To beckon or persuade
Like thee the youth or maid:
Thy birds, thy songs, thy brooks, thy gales,
Thy blooms, thy kinds,
Thy echoes in the wilderness,
Soothe pain, and age, and love’s distress,
Fire fainting will, and build heroic minds.

 For thou, O Spring! canst renovate
All that high God did first create.
Be still his arm and architect,
Rebuild the ruin, mend defect;
Chemist to vamp old worlds with new,
Coat sea and sky with heavenlier blue,
New tint the plumage of the birds,
And slough decay from grazing herds,
Sweep ruins from the scarped mountain,
Cleanse the torrent at the fountain,
Purge alpine air by towns defiled,
Bring to fair mother fairer child,
Not less renew the heart and brain,
Scatter the sloth, wash out the stain,
Make the aged eye sun-clear,
To parting soul bring grandeur near.
Under gentle types, my Spring
Masks the might of Nature’s king,
An energy that searches thorough
From Chaos to the dawning morrow;
Into all our human plight,
The soul’s pilgrimage and flight;
In city or in solitude,
Step by step, lifts bad to good,
Without halting, without rest,
Lifting Better up to Best;
Planting seeds of knowledge pure,
Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE ADIRONDACS

A JOURNAL

DEDICATED TO MY FELLOW TRAVELLERS IN AUGUST, 1858

   Wise and polite, — and if I drew
    Their several portraits, you would own
    Chaucer had no such worthy crew,
    Nor Boccace in Decameron.

We crossed Champlain to Keeseville with our friends,
Thence, in strong country carts, rode up the forks
Of the Ausable stream, intent to reach
The Adirondac lakes. At Martin’s Beach
We chose our boats; each man a boat and guide, —
Ten men, ten guides, our company all told.

 Next morn, we swept with oars the Saranac,
With skies of benediction, to Round Lake,
Where all the sacred mountains drew around us,
Taháwus, Seaward, MacIntyre, Baldhead,
And other Titans without muse or name.
Pleased with these grand companions, we glide on,
Instead of flowers, crowned with a wreath of hills.
We made our distance wider, boat from boat,
As each would hear the oracle alone.
By the bright morn the gay flotilla slid
Through files of flags that gleamed like bayonets,
Through gold-moth-haunted beds of pickerel-flower,
Through scented banks of lilies white and gold,
Where the deer feeds at night, the teal by day,
On through the Upper Saranac, and up
Père Raquette stream, to a small tortuous pass
Winding through grassy shallows in and out,
Two creeping miles of rushes, pads and sponge,
To Follansbee Water and the Lake of Loons.

 Northward the length of Follansbee we rowed,
Under low mountains, whose unbroken ridge
Ponderous with beechen forest sloped the shore.
A pause and council: then, where near the head
Due east a bay makes inward to the land
Between two rocky arms, we climb the bank,
And in the twilight of the forest noon
Wield the first axe these echoes ever heard.
We cut young trees to make our poles and thwarts,
Barked the white spruce to weatherfend the roof,
Then struck a light and kindled the camp-fire.

 The wood was sovran with centennial trees, —
Oak, cedar, maple, poplar, beech and fir,
Linden and spruce. In strict society
Three conifers, white, pitch and Norway pine,
Five-leaved, three-leaved and two-leaved, grew thereby,
Our patron pine was fifteen feet in girth,
The maple eight, beneath its shapely tower.

 ‘Welcome!’ the wood-god murmured through the leaves, —
‘Welcome, though late, unknowing, yet known to me.’
Evening drew on; stars peeped through maple-boughs,
Which o’erhung, like a cloud, our camping fire.
Decayed millennial trunks, like moonlight flecks,
Lit with phosphoric crumbs the forest floor.

 Ten scholars, wonted to lie warm and soft
In well-hung chambers daintily bestowed,
Lie here on hemlock-boughs, like Sacs and Sioux,
And greet unanimous the joyful change.
So fast will Nature acclimate her sons,
Though late returning to her pristine ways.
Off soundings, seamen do not suffer cold;
And, in the forest, delicate clerks, unbrowned,
Sleep on the fragrant brush, as on down-beds.
Up with the dawn, they fancied the light air
That circled freshly in their forest dress
Made them to boys again. Happier that they
Slipped off their pack of duties, leagues behind,
At the first mounting of the giant stairs.
No placard on these rocks warned to the polls,
No door-bell heralded a visitor,
No courier waits, no letter came or went,
Nothing was ploughed, or reaped, or bought, or sold;
The frost might glitter, it would blight no crop,
The falling rain will spoil no holiday.
We were made freemen of the forest laws,
All dressed, like Nature, fit for her own ends,
Essaying nothing she cannot perform.

           In Adirondac lakes
At morn or noon, the guide rows bareheaded:
Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make
His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain,
He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn:
A paddle in the right hand, or an oar,
And in the left, a gun, his needful arms.
By turns we praised the stature of our guides,
Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill
To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp,
To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs
Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down:
Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount,
And wit to trap or take him in his lair.
Sound, ruddy men, frolic and innocent,
In winter, lumberers; in summer, guides;
Their sinewy arms pull at the oar untired
Three times ten thousand strokes, from morn to eve.

 Look to yourselves, ye polished gentlemen!
No city airs or arts pass current here.
Your rank is all reversed; let men or cloth
Bow to the stalwart churls in overalls:
They are the doctors of the wilderness,
And we the low-prized laymen.
In sooth, red flannel is a saucy test
Which few can put on with impunity.
What make you, master, fumbling at the oar?
Will you catch crabs? Truth tries pretension here.
The sallow knows the basket-maker’s thumb;
The oar, the guide’s. Dare you accept the tasks
He shall impose, to find a spring, trap foxes,
Tell the sun’s time, determine the true north,
Or stumbling on through vast self-similar woods
To thread by night the nearest way to camp?

 Ask you, how went the hours?
All day we swept the lake, searched every cove,
North from Camp Maple, south to Osprey Bay,
Watching when the loud dogs should drive in deer,
Or whipping its rough surface for a trout;
Or, bathers, diving from the rock at noon;
Challenging Echo by our guns and cries;
Or listening to the laughter of the loon;
Or, in the evening twilight’s latest red,
Beholding the procession of the pines;
Or, later yet, beneath a lighted jack,
In the boat’s bows, a silent night-hunter
Stealing with paddle to the feeding-grounds
Of the red deer, to aim at a square mist.
Hark to that muffled roar! a tree in the woods
Is fallen: but hush! it has not scared the buck
Who stands astonished at the meteor light,
Then turns to bound away, — is it too late?

 Our heroes tried their rifles at a mark,
Six rods, sixteen, twenty, or forty-five;
Sometimes their wits at sally and retort,
With laughter sudden as the crack of rifle;
Or parties scaled the near acclivities
Competing seekers of a rumored lake,
Whose unauthenticated waves we named
Lake Probability, — our carbuncle,
Long sought, not found.

           Two Doctors in the camp
Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout’s brain,
Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew,
Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth;
Insatiate skill in water or in air
Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss;
The while, one leaden got of alcohol
Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds.
Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants,
Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus,
Rosy polygonum, lake-margin’s pride,
Hypnum and hydnum, mushroom, sponge and moss,
Or harebell nodding in the gorge of falls.
Above, the eagle flew, the osprey screamed,
The raven croaked, owls hooted, the woodpecker
Loud hammered, and the heron rose in the swamp.
As water poured through hollows of the hills
To feed this wealth of lakes and rivulets,
So Nature shed all beauty lavishly
From her redundant horn.

           Lords of this realm,
Bounded by dawn and sunset, and the day
Rounded by hours where each outdid the last
In miracles of pomp, we must be proud,
As if associates of the sylvan gods.
We seemed the dwellers of the zodiac,
So pure the Alpine element we breathed,
So light, so lofty pictures came and went.
We trode on air, contemned the distant town,
Its timorous ways, big trifles, and we planned
That we should build, hard-by, a spacious lodge
And how we should come hither with our sons,
Hereafter, — willing they, and more adroit.

 Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery, —
The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquito
Painted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:
But, on the second day, we heed them not,
Nay, we saluted them Auxiliaries,
Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.
For who defends our leafy tabernacle
From bold intrusion of the travelling crowd, —
Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,
Which past endurance sting the tender cit,
But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,
Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

 Our foaming ale we drank from hunters’ pans,
Ale, and a sup of wine. Our steward gave
Venison and trout, potatoes, beans, wheat-bread;
All ate like abbots, and, if any missed
Their wonted convenance, cheerly hid the loss
With hunters’ appetite and peals of mirth.
And Stillman, our guides’ guide, and Commodore,
Crusoe, Crusader, Pius Aeneas, said aloud,
“Chronic dyspepsia never came from eating
Food indigestible”: — then murmured some,
Others applauded him who spoke the truth.

 Nor doubt but visitings of graver thought
Checked in these souls the turbulent heyday
‘Mid all the hints and glories of the home.
For who can tell what sudden privacies
Were sought and found, amid the hue and cry
Of scholars furloughed from their tasks and let
Into this Oreads’ fended Paradise,
As chapels in the city’s thoroughfares,
Whither gaunt Labor slips to wipe his brow
And meditate a moment on Heaven’s rest.
Judge with what sweet surprises Nature spoke
To each apart, lifting her lovely shows
To spiritual lessons pointed home,
And as through dreams in watches of the night,
So through all creatures in their form and ways
Some mystic hint accosts the vigilant,
Not clearly voiced, but waking a new sense
Inviting to new knowledge, one with old.
Hark to that petulant chirp! what ails the warbler?
Mark his capricious ways to draw the eye.
Now soar again. What wilt thou, restless bird,
Seeking in that chaste blue a bluer light,
Thirsting in that pure for a purer sky?

 And presently the sky is changed; O world!
What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
So like the soul of me, what if ‘t were me?
A melancholy better than all mirth.
Comes the sweet sadness at the retrospect,
Or at the foresight of obscurer years?
Like yon slow-sailing cloudy promontory
Whereon the purple iris dwells in beauty
Superior to all its gaudy skirts.
And, that no day of life may lack romance,
The spiritual stars rise nightly, shedding down
A private beam into each several heart.
Daily the bending skies solicit man,
The seasons chariot him from this exile,
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair,
The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.

 With a vermilion pencil mark the day
When of our little fleet three cruising skiffs
Entering Big Tupper, bound for the foaming Falls
Of loud Bog River, suddenly confront
Two of our mates returning with swift oars.
One held a printed journal waving high
Caught from a late-arriving traveller,
Big with great news, and shouted the report
For which the world had waited, now firm fact,
Of the wire-cable laid beneath the sea,
And landed on our coast, and pulsating
With ductile fire. Loud, exulting cries
From boat to boat, and to the echoes round,
Greet the glad miracle. Thought’s new-found path
Shall supplement henceforth all trodden ways,
Match God’s equator with a zone of art,
And lift man’s public action to a height
Worthy the enormous cloud of witnesses,
When linkèd hemispheres attest his deed.
We have few moments in the longest life
Of such delight and wonder as there grew, —
Nor yet unsuited to that solitude:
A burst of joy, as if we told the fact
To ears intelligent; as if gray rock
And cedar grove and cliff and lake should know
This feat of wit, this triumph of mankind;
As if we men were talking in a vein
Of sympathy so large, that ours was theirs,
And a prime end of the most subtle element
Were fairly reached at last. Wake, echoing caves!
Bend nearer, faint day-moon! Yon thundertops,
Let them hear well! ’tis theirs as much as ours.

 A spasm throbbing through the pedestals
Of Alp and Andes, isle and continent,
Urging astonished Chaos with a thrill
To be a brain, or serve the brain of man.
The lightning has run masterless too long;
He must to school and learn his verb and noun
And teach his nimbleness to earn his wage,
Spelling with guided tongue man’s messages
Shot through the weltering pit of the salt sea.
And yet I marked, even in the manly joy
Of our great-hearted Doctor in his boat
(Perchance I erred), a shade of discontent;
Or was it for mankind a generous shame,
As of a luck not quite legitimate,
Since fortune snatched from wit the lion’s part?
Was it a college pique of town and gown,
As one within whose memory it burned
That not academicians, but some lout,
Found ten years since the Californian gold?
And now, again, a hungry company
Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade,
Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools
Of science, not from the philosophers,
Had won the brightest laurel of all time.
’Twas always thus, and will be; hand and head
Are ever rivals: but, though this be swift,
The other slow, — this the Prometheus,
And that the Jove, — yet, howsoever hid,
It was from Jove the other stole his fire,
And, without Jove, the good had never been.
It is not Iroquois or cannibals,
But ever the free race with front sublime,
And these instructed by their wisest too,
Who do the feat, and lift humanity.
Let not him mourn who best entitled was,
Nay, mourn not one: let him exult,
Yea, plant the tree that bears best apples, plant,
And water it with wine, nor watch askance
Whether thy sons or strangers eat the fruit:
Enough that mankind eat and are refreshed.

 We flee away from cities, but we bring
The best of cities with us, these learned classifiers,
Men knowing what they seek, armed eyes of experts.
We praise the guide, we praise the forest life:
But will we sacrifice our dear-bought lore
Of books and arts and trained experiment,
Or count the Sioux a match for Agassiz?
O no, not we! Witness the shout that shook
Wild Tupper Lake; witness the mute all-hail
The joyful traveller gives, when on the verge
Of craggy Indian wilderness he hears
From a log cabin stream Beethoven’s notes
On the piano, played with master’s hand.
‘Well done!’ he cries; ‘the bear is kept at bay,
The lynx, the rattlesnake, the flood, the fire;
All the fierce enemies, ague, hunger, cold,
This thin spruce roof, this clayed log-wall,
This wild plantation will suffice to chase.
Now speed the gay celerities of art,
What in the desert was impossible
Within four walls is possible again, —
Culture and libraries, mysteries of skill,
Traditioned fame of masters, eager strife
Of keen competing youths, joined or alone
To outdo each other and extort applause.
Mind wakes a new-born giant from her sleep.
Twirl the old wheels! Time takes fresh start again,
On for a thousand years of genius more.’

 The holidays were fruitful, but must end;
One August evening had a cooler breath;
Into each mind intruding duties crept;
Under the cinders burned the fires of home;
Nay, letters found us in our paradise:
So in the gladness of the new event
We struck our camp and left the happy hills.
The fortunate star that rose on us sank not;
The prodigal sunshine rested on the land,
The rivers gambolled onward to the sea,
And Nature, the inscrutable and mute,
Permitted on her infinite repose
Almost a smile to steal to cheer her sons,
As if one riddle of the Sphinx were guessed.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

BRAHMA

If the red slayer think he slays,
  Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
  I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
  Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
  And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
  When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
  And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
  Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Chronological List of Poems

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NEMESIS

Already blushes on thy cheek
The bosom thought which thou must speak;
The bird, how far it haply roam
By cloud or isle, is flying home;
The maiden fears, and fearing runs
Into the charmed snare she shuns;
And every man, in love or pride,
Of his fate is never wide.

Will a woman’s fan the ocean smooth?
Or prayers the stony Parcae soothe,
Or coax the thunder from its mark?
Or tapers light the chaos dark?
In spite of Virtue and the Muse,
Nemesis will have her dues,
And all our struggles and our toils
Tighter wind the giant coils.

Chronological List of Poems

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FATE

Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great:
Unknown to Cromwell as to me
Was Cromwell’s measure or degree;
Unknown to him as to his horse,
If he than his groom be better or worse.
He works, plots, fights, in rude affairs,
With squires, lords, kings, his craft compares,
Till late he learned, through doubt and fear,
Broad England harbored not his peer:
Obeying time, the last to own
The Genius from its cloudy throne.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.

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FREEDOM

Once I wished I might rehearse
Freedom’s paean in my verse,
That the slave who caught the strain
Should throb until he snapped his chain,
But the Spirit said, ‘Not so;
Speak it not, or speak it low;
Name not lightly to be said,
Gift too precious to be prayed,
Passion not to be expressed
But by heaving of the breast:
Yet, — wouldst thou the mountain find
Where this deity is shrined,
Who gives to seas and sunset skies
Their unspent beauty of surprise,
And, when it lists him, waken can
Brute or savage into man;
Or, if in thy heart he shine,
Blends the starry fates with thine,
Draws angels nigh to dwell with thee,
And makes thy thoughts archangels be;
Freedom’s secret wilt thou know? —
Counsel not with flesh and blood;
Loiter not for cloak or food;
Right thou feelest, rush to do.’

Chronological List of Poems

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ODE SUNG IN THE TOWN HALL, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857

O tenderly the haughty day
  Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
  And one in our desire.

The cannon booms from town to town,
  Our pulses beat not less,
The joy-bells chime their tidings down,
  Which children’s voices bless.

For He that flung the broad blue fold
  O’er-mantling land and sea,
One third part of the sky unrolled
  For the banner of the free.

The men are ripe of Saxon kind
  To build an equal state, —
To take the statute from the mind
  And make of duty fate.

United States! the ages plead, —
  Present and Past in under-song, —
Go put your creed into your deed,
  Nor speak with double tongue.

For sea and land don’t understand,
  Nor skies without a frown
See rights for which the one hand fights
  By the other cloven down.

Be just at home; then write your scroll
  Of honor o’er the sea,
And bid the broad Atlantic roll,
  A ferry of the free.

And henceforth there shall be no chain,
  Save underneath the sea
The wires shall murmur through the main
  Sweet songs of liberty.

The conscious stars accord above,
  The waters wild below,
And under, through the cable wove,
  Her fiery errands go.

For He that worketh high and wise.
  Nor pauses in his plan,
Will take the sun out of the skies
  Ere freedom out of man.

Chronological List of Poems

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BOSTON HYMN READ IN MUSIC HALL, JANUARY 1, 1863

The word of the Lord by night
To the watching Pilgrims came,
As they sat by the seaside,
And filled their hearts with flame.

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball
A field of havoc and war,
Where tyrants great and tyrants small
Might harry the weak and poor?

My angel, — his name is Freedom, —
Choose him to be your king;
He shall cut pathways east and west
And fend you with his wing.

Lo! I uncover the land
Which I hid of old time in the West,
As the sculptor uncovers the statue
When he has wrought his best;

I show Columbia, of the rocks
Which dip their foot in the seas
And soar to the air-borne flocks
Of clouds and the boreal fleece.

I will divide my goods;
Call in the wretch and slave:
None shall rule but the humble.
And none but Toil shall have.

I will have never a noble,
No lineage counted great;
Fishers and choppers and ploughmen
Shall constitute a state.

Go, cut down trees in the forest
And trim the straightest boughs;
Cut down trees in the forest
And build me a wooden house.

Call the people together,
The young men and the sires,
The digger in the harvest-field,
Hireling and him that hires;

And here in a pine state-house
They shall choose men to rule
In every needful faculty,
In church and state and school.

Lo, now! if these poor men
Can govern the land and sea
And make just laws below the sun,
As planets faithful be.

And ye shall succor men;
’Tis nobleness to serve;
Help them who cannot help again:
Beware from right to swerve.

I break your bonds and masterships,
And I unchain the slave:
Free be his heart and hand henceforth
As wind and wandering wave.

I cause from every creature
His proper good to flow:
As much as he is and doeth,
So much he shall bestow.

But, laying hands on another
To coin his labor and sweat,
He goes in pawn to his victim
For eternal years in debt.

To-day unbind the captive,
So only are ye unbound;
Lift up a people from the dust,
Trump of their rescue, sound!

Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him.

O North! give him beauty for rags,
And honor, O South! for his shame;
Nevada! coin thy golden crags
With Freedom’s image and name.

Up! and the dusky race
That sat in darkness long, —
Be swift their feet as antelopes.
And as behemoth strong.

Come, East and West and North,
By races, as snow-flakes,
And carry my purpose forth,
Which neither halts nor shakes.

My will fulfilled shall be,
For, in daylight or in dark,
My thunderbolt has eyes to see
His way home to the mark.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

VOLUNTARIES

I

Low and mournful be the strain,
Haughty thought be far from me;
Tones of penitence and pain,
Meanings of the tropic sea;
Low and tender in the cell
Where a captive sits in chains.
Crooning ditties treasured well
From his Afric’s torrid plains.
Sole estate his sire bequeathed, —
Hapless sire to hapless son, —
Was the wailing song he breathed,
And his chain when life was done.

 What his fault, or what his crime?
Or what ill planet crossed his prime?
Heart too soft and will too weak
To front the fate that crouches near, —
Dove beneath the vulture’s beak; —
Will song dissuade the thirsty spear?
Dragged from his mother’s arms and breast,
Displaced, disfurnished here,
His wistful toil to do his best
Chilled by a ribald jeer.
Great men in the Senate sate,
Sage and hero, side by side,
Building for their sons the State,
Which they shall rule with pride.
They forbore to break the chain
Which bound the dusky tribe,
Checked by the owners’ fierce disdain,
Lured by ‘Union’ as the bribe.
Destiny sat by, and said,
‘Pang for pang your seed shall pay,
Hide in false peace your coward head,
I bring round the harvest day.’

II

Freedom all winged expands,
Nor perches in a narrow place;
Her broad van seeks unplanted lands;
She loves a poor and virtuous race.
Clinging to a colder zone
Whose dark sky sheds the snowflake down,
The snowflake is her banner’s star,
Her stripes the boreal streamers are.
Long she loved the Northman well;
Now the iron age is done,
She will not refuse to dwell
With the offspring of the Sun;
Foundling of the desert far,
Where palms plume, siroccos blaze,
He roves unhurt the burning ways
In climates of the summer star.
He has avenues to God
Hid from men of Northern brain,
Far beholding, without cloud,
What these with slowest steps attain.
If once the generous chief arrive
To lead him willing to be led,
For freedom he will strike and strive,
And drain his heart till he be dead.

III

In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom’s fight, —
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay
And quit proud homes and youthful dames
For famine, toil and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

IV

O, well for the fortunate soul
Which Music’s wings infold,
Stealing away the memory
Of sorrows new and old!
Yet happier he whose inward sight,
Stayed on his subtile thought,
Shuts his sense on toys of time,
To vacant bosoms brought.
But best befriended of the God
He who, in evil times,
Warned by an inward voice,
Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
Biding by his rule and choice,
Feeling only the fiery thread
Leading over heroic ground,
Walled with mortal terror round,
To the aim which him allures,
And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
Peril around, all else appalling,
Cannon in front and leaden rain
Him duty through the clarion calling
To the van called not in vain.

 Stainless soldier on the walls,
Knowing this, — and knows no more, —
Whoever fights, whoever falls,
Justice conquers evermore,
Justice after as before, —
And he who battles on her side,
God, though he were ten times slain,
Crowns him victor glorified,
Victor over death and pain.

V

Blooms the laurel which belongs
To the valiant chief who fights;
I see the wreath, I hear the songs
Lauding the Eternal Rights,
Victors over daily wrongs:
Awful victors, they misguide
Whom they will destroy,
And their coming triumph hide
In our downfall, or our joy:
They reach no term, they never sleep,
In equal strength through space abide;
Though, feigning dwarfs, they crouch and creep,
The strong they slay, the swift outstride:
Fate’s grass grows rank in valley clods,
And rankly on the castled steep, —
Speak it firmly, these are gods,
All are ghosts beside.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

LOVE AND THOUGHT

Two well-assorted travellers use
The highway, Eros and the Muse.
From the twins is nothing hidden,
To the pair is nought forbidden;
Hand in hand the comrades go
Every nook of Nature through:
Each for other they were born,
Each can other best adorn;
They know one only mortal grief
Past all balsam or relief;
When, by false companions crossed,
The pilgrims have each other lost.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

UNA

Roving, roving, as it seems,
Una lights my clouded dreams;
Still for journeys she is dressed;
We wander far by east and west.

In the homestead, homely thought,
At my work I ramble not;
If from home chance draw me wide,
Half-seen Una sits beside.

In my house and garden-plot,
Though beloved, I miss her not;
But one I seek in foreign places,
One face explore in foreign faces.

At home a deeper thought may light
The inward sky with chrysolite,
And I greet from far the ray,
Aurora of a dearer day.

But if upon the seas I sail,
Or trundle on the glowing rail,
I am but a thought of hers,
Loveliest of travellers.

So the gentle poet’s name
To foreign parts is blown by fame,
Seek him in his native town,
He is hidden and unknown.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

BOSTON

Sicut patribus, sit Deus nobis.

The rocky nook with hilltops three
  Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice each day the flowing sea
  Took Boston in its arms;
The men of yore were stout and poor,
And sailed for bread to every shore.

And where they went on trade intent
  They did what freemen can,
Their dauntless ways did all men praise,
  The merchant was a man.
The world was made for honest trade, —
To plant and eat be none afraid.

The waves that rocked them on the deep
  To them their secret told;
Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep,
  ‘Like us be free and bold!’
The honest waves refused to slaves
The empire of the ocean caves.

Old Europe groans with palaces,
  Has lords enough and more; —
We plant and build by foaming seas
  A city of the poor; —
For day by day could Boston Bay
Their honest labor overpay.

We grant no dukedoms to the few,
  We hold like rights, and shall; —
Equal on Sunday in the pew,
  On Monday in the mall,
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The noble craftsman we promote,
  Disown the knave and fool;
Each honest man shall have his vote,
  Each child shall have his school.
A union then of honest men,
Or union never more again.

The wild rose and the barberry thorn
  Hung out their summer pride,
Where now on heated pavements worn
  The feet of millions stride.

Fair rose the planted hills behind
  The good town on the bay,
And where the western hills declined
  The prairie stretched away.

What care though rival cities soar
  Along the stormy coast,
Penn’s town, New York and Baltimore,
  If Boston knew the most!

They laughed to know the world so wide;
  The mountains said, ‘Good-day!
We greet you well, you Saxon men,
  Up with your towns and stay!’
The world was made for honest trade, —
To plant and eat be none afraid.

‘For you,’ they said, ‘no barriers be,
  For you no sluggard rest;
Each street leads downward to the sea,
  Or landward to the west.’

O happy town beside the sea,
  Whose roads lead everywhere to all;
Than thine no deeper moat can be,
  No stouter fence, no steeper wall!

Bad news from George on the English throne;
  ‘You are thriving well,’ said he;
‘Now by these presents be it known
  You shall pay us a tax on tea;
’Tis very small, — no load at all, —
Honor enough that we send the call.

‘Not so,’ said Boston, ‘good my lord,
  We pay your governors here
Abundant for their bed and board,
  Six thousand pounds a year.
(Your Highness knows our homely word)
  Millions for self-government,
  But for tribute never a cent.’

The cargo came! and who could blame
  If Indians seized the tea,
And, chest by chest, let down the same,
  Into the laughing sea?
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?

The townsmen braved the English king,
  Found friendship in the French,
And honor joined the patriot ring
  Low on their wooden bench.

O bounteous seas that never fail!
  O day remembered yet!
O happy port that spied the sail
  Which wafted Lafayette!
Pole-star of light in Europe’s night,
That never faltered from the right.

Kings shook with fear, old empires crave
  The secret force to find
Which fired the little State to save
  The rights of all mankind.

But right is might through all the world;
  Province to province faithful clung,
Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled,
  Till Freedom cheered and joy-bells rung.

The sea returning day by day
  Restores the world-wide mart;
So let each dweller on the Bay
  Fold Boston in his heart,
Till these echoes be choked with snows,
Or over the town blue ocean flows.

Let the blood of her hundred thousands
  Throb in each manly vein;
And the wits of all her wisest,
  Make sunshine in her brain.
For you can teach the lightning speech,
And round the globe your voices reach.

And each shall care for other,
  And each to each shall bend,
To the poor a noble brother,
  To the good an equal friend.

A blessing through the ages thus
  Shield all thy roofs and towers!
GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
  Thou darling town of ours!

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LETTERS

Every day brings a ship,
Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear.
Looking seaward, well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.

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RUBIES

They brought me rubies from the mine,
  And held them to the sun;
I said, they are drops of frozen wine
  From Eden’s vats that run.

I looked again, — I thought them hearts
  Of friends to friends unknown;
Tides that should warm each neighboring life
  Are locked in sparkling stone.

But fire to thaw that ruddy snow,
  To break enchanted ice,
And give love’s scarlet tides to flow, —
  When shall that sun arise?

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MERLIN’S SONG

I

Of Merlin wise I learned a song, —
Sing it low or sing it loud,
It is mightier than the strong,
And punishes the proud.
I sing it to the surging crowd, —
Good men it will calm and cheer,
Bad men it will chain and cage —
In the heart of the music peals a strain
Which only angels hear;
Whether it waken joy or rage
Hushed myriads hark in vain,
Yet they who hear it shed their age,
And take their youth again.

II

Hear what British Merlin sung,
Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
Usurp the seats for which all strive;
The forefathers this land who found
Failed to plant the vantage-ground;
Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
But wilt thou measure all thy road,
See thou lift the lightest load.
Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,
And thou, Cyndyllan’s son! beware
Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,
To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, —
Only the light-armed climb the hill.
The richest of all lords is Use,
And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
Drink the wild air’s salubrity:
When the star Canope shines in May,
Shepherds are thankful and nations gay.
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech:
Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
Of all wit’s uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.

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THE TEST

(Musa loquitur.)

I hung my verses in the wind,
Time and tide their faults may find.
All were winnowed through and through,
Five lines lasted sound and true;
Five were smelted in a pot
Than the South more fierce and hot;
These the siroc could not melt,
Fire their fiercer flaming felt,
And the meaning was more white
Than July’s meridian light.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive?

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SOLUTION

I am the Muse who sung alway
By Jove, at dawn of the first day.
Star-crowned, sole-sitting, long I wrought
To fire the stagnant earth with thought:
On spawning slime my song prevails,
Wolves shed their fangs, and dragons scales;
Flushed in the sky the sweet May-morn,
Earth smiled with flowers, and man was born.
Then Asia yeaned her shepherd race,
And Nile substructs her granite base, —
Tented Tartary, columned Nile, —
And, under vines, on rocky isle,
Or on wind-blown sea-marge bleak,
Forward stepped the perfect Greek:
That wit and joy might find a tongue,
And earth grow civil, HOMER sung.

 Flown to Italy from Greece,
I brooded long and held my peace,
For I am wont to sing uncalled,
And in days of evil plight
Unlock doors of new delight;
And sometimes mankind I appalled
With a bitter horoscope,
With spasms of terror for balm of hope.
Then by better thought I lead
Bards to speak what nations need;
So I folded me in fears,
And DANTE searched the triple spheres,
Moulding Nature at his will,
So shaped, so colored, swift or still,
And, sculptor-like, his large design
Etched on Alp and Apennine.

 Seethed in mists of Penmanmaur,
Taught by Plinlimmon’s Druid power,
England’s genius filled all measure
Of heart and soul, of strength and pleasure,
Gave to the mind its emperor,
And life was larger than before:
Nor sequent centuries could hit
Orbit and sum of SHAKSPEARE’S wit.
The men who lived with him became
Poets, for the air was fame.

 Far in the North, where polar night
Holds in check the frolic light,
In trance upborne past mortal goal
The Swede EMANUEL leads the soul.
Through snows above, mines underground,
The inks of Erebus he found;
Rehearsed to men the damned wails
On which the seraph music sails.
In spirit-worlds he trod alone,
But walked the earth unmarked, unknown,
The near bystander caught no sound, —
Yet they who listened far aloof
Heard rendings of the skyey roof,
And felt, beneath, the quaking ground;
And his air-sown, unheeded words,
In the next age, are flaming swords.

 In newer days of war and trade,
Romance forgot, and faith decayed,
When Science armed and guided war,
And clerks the Janus-gates unbar,
When France, where poet never grew,
Halved and dealt the globe anew,
GOETHE, raised o’er joy and strife,
Drew the firm lines of Fate and Life
And brought Olympian wisdom down
To court and mart, to gown and town.
Stooping, his finger wrote in clay
The open secret of to-day.

 So bloom the unfading petals five,
And verses that all verse outlive.

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HYMN SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS

We love the venerable house
  Our fathers built to God; —
In heaven are kept their grateful vows,
  Their dust endears the sod.

Here holy thoughts a light have shed
  From many a radiant face,
And prayers of humble virtue made
  The perfume of the place.

And anxious hearts have pondered here
  The mystery of life,
And prayed the eternal Light to clear
  Their doubts, and aid their strife.

From humble tenements around
  Came up the pensive train,
And in the church a blessing found
  That filled their homes again;

For faith and peace and mighty love
  That from the Godhead flow,
Showed them the life of Heaven above
  Springs from the life below.

They live with God; their homes are dust;
  Yet here their children pray,
And in this fleeting lifetime trust
  To find the narrow way.

On him who by the altar stands,
  On him thy blessing fall,
Speak through his lips thy pure commands,
  Thou heart that lovest all.

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NATURE I

Winters know
Easily to shed the snow,
And the untaught Spring is wise
In cowslips and anemonies.
Nature, hating art and pains,
Baulks and baffles plotting brains;
Casualty and Surprise
Are the apples of her eyes;
But she dearly loves the poor,
And, by marvel of her own,
Strikes the loud pretender down.
For Nature listens in the rose
And hearkens in the berry’s bell
To help her friends, to plague her foes,
And like wise God she judges well.
Yet doth much her love excel
To the souls that never fell,
To swains that live in happiness
And do well because they please,
Who walk in ways that are unfamed,
And feats achieve before they’re named.

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NATURE II

She is gamesome and good,
But of mutable mood, —
No dreary repeater now and again,
She will be all things to all men.
She who is old, but nowise feeble,
Pours her power into the people,
Merry and manifold without bar,
Makes and moulds them what they are,
And what they call their city way
Is not their way, but hers,
And what they say they made to-day,
They learned of the oaks and firs.
She spawneth men as mallows fresh,
Hero and maiden, flesh of her flesh;
She drugs her water and her wheat
With the flavors she finds meet,
And gives them what to drink and eat;
And having thus their bread and growth,
They do her bidding, nothing loath.
What’s most theirs is not their own,
But borrowed in atoms from iron and stone,
And in their vaunted works of Art
The master-stroke is still her part.

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THE ROMANY GIRL

The sun goes down, and with him takes
The coarseness of my poor attire;
The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame
Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;
You captives of your air-tight halls,
Wear out indoors your sickly days,
But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,
And say it frankly without guile,
Then you are Gypsies in a mask,
And I the lady all the while.

If on the heath, below the moon,
I court and play with paler blood,
Me false to mine dare whisper none, —
One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek’s rose from the rain,
For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;
My swarthy tint is in the grain,
The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in our lungs,
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,
The birds gave us our wily tongues,
The panther in our dances flies.

You doubt we read the stars on high,
Nathless we read your fortunes true;
The stars may hide in the upper sky,
But without glass we fathom you.

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DAYS

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

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MY GARDEN

If I could put my woods in song
And tell what’s there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void.

In my plot no tulips blow, —
Snow-loving pines and oaks instead;
And rank the savage maples grow
From Spring’s faint flush to Autumn red.

My garden is a forest ledge
Which older forests bound;
The banks slope down to the blue lake-edge,
Then plunge to depths profound.

Here once the Deluge ploughed,
Laid the terraces, one by one;
Ebbing later whence it flowed,
They bleach and dry in the sun.

The sowers made haste to depart, —
The wind and the birds which sowed it;
Not for fame, nor by rules of art,
Planted these, and tempests flowed it.

Waters that wash my garden-side
Play not in Nature’s lawful web,
They heed not moon or solar tide, —
Five years elapse from flood to ebb.

Hither hasted, in old time, Jove,
And every god, — none did refuse;
And be sure at last came Love,
And after Love, the Muse.

Keen ears can catch a syllable,
As if one spake to another,
In the hemlocks tall, untamable,
And what the whispering grasses smother.

Aeolian harps in the pine
Ring with the song of the Fates;
Infant Bacchus in the vine, —
Far distant yet his chorus waits.

Canst thou copy in verse one chime
Of the wood-bell’s peal and cry,
Write in a book the morning’s prime,
Or match with words that tender sky?

Wonderful verse of the gods,
Of one import, of varied tone;
They chant the bliss of their abodes
To man imprisoned in his own.

Ever the words of the gods resound;
But the porches of man’s ear
Seldom in this low life’s round
Are unsealed that he may hear.

Wandering voices in the air
And murmurs in the wold
Speak what I cannot declare,
Yet cannot all withhold.

When the shadow fell on the lake,
The whirlwind in ripples wrote
Air-bells of fortune that shine and break,
And omens above thought.

But the meanings cleave to the lake,
Cannot be carried in book or urn;
Go thy ways now, come later back,
On waves and hedges still they burn.

These the fates of men forecast,
Of better men than live to-day;
If who can read them comes at last
He will spell in the sculpture, ‘Stay.’

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THE CHARTIST’S COMPLAINT

Day! hast thou two faces,
Making one place two places?
One, by humble farmer seen,
Chill and wet, unlighted, mean,
Useful only, triste and damp,
Serving for a laborer’s lamp?
Have the same mists another side,
To be the appanage of pride,
Gracing the rich man’s wood and lake,
His park where amber mornings break,
And treacherously bright to show
His planted isle where roses glow?
O Day! and is your mightiness
A sycophant to smug success?
Will the sweet sky and ocean broad
Be fine accomplices to fraud?
O Sun! I curse thy cruel ray:
Back, back to chaos, harlot Day!

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THE TITMOUSE

You shall not be overbold
When you deal with arctic cold,
As late I found my lukewarm blood
Chilled wading in the snow-choked wood.
How should I fight? my foeman fine
Has million arms to one of mine:
East, west, for aid I looked in vain,
East, west, north, south, are his domain.
Miles off, three dangerous miles, is home;
Must borrow his winds who there would come.
Up and away for life! be fleet! —
The frost-king ties my fumbling feet,
Sings in my ears, my hands are stones,
Curdles the blood to the marble bones,
Tugs at the heart-strings, numbs the sense,
And hems in life with narrowing fence.
Well, in this broad bed lie and sleep, —
The punctual stars will vigil keep, —
Embalmed by purifying cold;
The winds shall sing their dead-march old,
The snow is no ignoble shroud,
The moon thy mourner, and the cloud.

 Softly, — but this way fate was pointing,
‘T was coming fast to such anointing,
When piped a tiny voice hard by,
Gay and polite, a cheerful cry,
Chic-chic-a-dee-de! saucy note
Out of sound heart and merry throat,
As if it said, ‘Good day, good sir!
Fine afternoon, old passenger!
Happy to meet you in these places,
Where January brings few faces.’

 This poet, though he live apart,
Moved by his hospitable heart,
Sped, when I passed his sylvan fort,
To do the honors of his court,
As fits a feathered lord of land;
Flew near, with soft wing grazed my hand,
Hopped on the bough, then, darting low,
Prints his small impress on the snow,
Shows feats of his gymnastic play,
Head downward, clinging to the spray.

 Here was this atom in full breath,
Hurling defiance at vast death;
This scrap of valor just for play
Fronts the north-wind in waistcoat gray,
As if to shame my weak behavior;
I greeted loud my little savior,
‘You pet! what dost here? and what for?
In these woods, thy small Labrador,
At this pinch, wee San Salvador!
What fire burns in that little chest
So frolic, stout and self-possest?
Henceforth I wear no stripe but thine;
Ashes and jet all hues outshine.
Why are not diamonds black and gray,
To ape thy dare-devil array?
And I affirm, the spacious North
Exists to draw thy virtue forth.
I think no virtue goes with size;
The reason of all cowardice
Is, that men are overgrown,
And, to be valiant, must come down
To the titmouse dimension.’

 ‘T is good will makes intelligence,
And I began to catch the sense
Of my bird’s song: ‘Live out of doors
In the great woods, on prairie floors.
I dine in the sun; when he sinks in the sea,
I too have a hole in a hollow tree;
And I like less when Summer beats
With stifling beams on these retreats,
Than noontide twilights which snow makes
With tempest of the blinding flakes.
For well the soul, if stout within,
Can arm impregnably the skin;
And polar frost my frame defied,
Made of the air that blows outside.’

 With glad remembrance of my debt,
I homeward turn; farewell, my pet!
When here again thy pilgrim comes,
He shall bring store of seeds and crumbs.
Doubt not, so long as earth has bread,
Thou first and foremost shalt be fed;
The Providence that is most large
Takes hearts like thine in special charge,
Helps who for their own need are strong,
And the sky doats on cheerful song.
Henceforth I prize thy wiry chant
O’er all that mass and minster vaunt;
For men mis-hear thy call in Spring,
As ‘t would accost some frivolous wing,
Crying out of the hazel copse, Phe-be!
And, in winter, Chic-a-dee-dee!
I think old Caesar must have heard
In northern Gaul my dauntless bird,
And, echoed in some frosty wold,
Borrowed thy battle-numbers bold.
And I will write our annals new,
And thank thee for a better clew,
I, who dreamed not when I came here
To find the antidote of fear,
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paean! Veni, vidi, vici.

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THE HARP

One musician is sure,
His wisdom will not fail,
He has not tasted wine impure,
Nor bent to passion frail.
Age cannot cloud his memory,
Nor grief untune his voice,
Ranging down the ruled scale
From tone of joy to inward wail,
Tempering the pitch of all
In his windy cave.
He all the fables knows,
And in their causes tells, —
Knows Nature’s rarest moods,
Ever on her secret broods.
The Muse of men is coy,
Oft courted will not come;
In palaces and market squares
Entreated, she is dumb;
But my minstrel knows and tells
The counsel of the gods,
Knows of Holy Book the spells,
Knows the law of Night and Day,
And the heart of girl and boy,
The tragic and the gay,
And what is writ on Table Round
Of Arthur and his peers;
What sea and land discoursing say
In sidereal years.
He renders all his lore
In numbers wild as dreams,
Modulating all extremes, —
What the spangled meadow saith
To the children who have faith;
Only to children children sing,
Only to youth will spring be spring.

 Who is the Bard thus magnified?
When did he sing? and where abide?

 Chief of song where poets feast
Is the wind-harp which thou seest
In the casement at my side.

 Aeolian harp,
How strangely wise thy strain!
Gay for youth, gay for youth,
(Sweet is art, but sweeter truth,)
In the hall at summer eve
Fate and Beauty skilled to weave.
From the eager opening strings
Rung loud and bold the song.
Who but loved the wind-harp’s note?
How should not the poet doat
On its mystic tongue,
With its primeval memory,
Reporting what old minstrels told
Of Merlin locked the harp within, —
Merlin paying the pain of sin,
Pent in a dungeon made of air, —
And some attain his voice to hear,
Words of pain and cries of fear,
But pillowed all on melody,
As fits the griefs of bards to be.
And what if that all-echoing shell,
Which thus the buried Past can tell,
Should rive the Future, and reveal
What his dread folds would fain conceal?
It shares the secret of the earth,
And of the kinds that owe her birth.
Speaks not of self that mystic tone,
But of the Overgods alone:
It trembles to the cosmic breath, —
As it heareth, so it saith;
Obeying meek the primal Cause,
It is the tongue of mundane laws.
And this, at least, I dare affirm,
Since genius too has bound and term,
There is no bard in all the choir,
Not Homer’s self, the poet sire,
Wise Milton’s odes of pensive pleasure,
Or Shakspeare, whom no mind can measure,
Nor Collins’ verse of tender pain,
Nor Byron’s clarion of disdain,
Scott, the delight of generous boys,
Or Wordsworth, Pan’s recording voice, —
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse’s sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher;
Saw bonfires of the harlot flies
In the lowland, when day dies;
Or marked, benighted and forlorn,
The first far signal-fire of morn.
These syllables that Nature spoke,
And the thoughts that in him woke,
Can adequately utter none
Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
Therein I hear the Parcae reel
The threads of man at their humming wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain,
So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
And best can teach its Delphian chord
How Nature to the soul is moored,
If once again that silent string,
As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.

 Not long ago at eventide,
It seemed, so listening, at my side
A window rose, and, to say sooth,
I looked forth on the fields of youth:
I saw fair boys bestriding steeds,
I knew their forms in fancy weeds,
Long, long concealed by sundering fates,
Mates of my youth, — yet not my mates,
Stronger and bolder far than I,
With grace, with genius, well attired,
And then as now from far admired,
Followed with love
They knew not of,
With passion cold and shy.
O joy, for what recoveries rare!
Renewed, I breathe Elysian air,
See youth’s glad mates in earliest bloom, —
Break not my dream, obtrusive tomb!
Or teach thou, Spring! the grand recoil
Of life resurgent from the soil
Wherein was dropped the mortal spoil.

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SEASHORE

I heard or seemed to hear the chiding Sea
Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?
Am I not always here, thy summer home?
Is not my voice thy music, morn and eve?
My breath thy healthful climate in the heats,
My touch thy antidote, my bay thy bath?
Was ever building like my terraces?
Was ever couch magnificent as mine?
Lie on the warm rock-ledges, and there learn
A little hut suffices like a town.
I make your sculptured architecture vain,
Vain beside mine. I drive my wedges home,
And carve the coastwise mountain into caves.
Lo! here is Rome and Nineveh and Thebes,
Karnak and Pyramid and Giant’s Stairs
Half piled or prostrate; and my newest slab
Older than all thy race.

           Behold the Sea,
The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;
Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
Giving a hint of that which changes not.
Rich are the sea-gods: — who gives gifts but they?
They grope the sea for pearls, but more than pearls:
They pluck Force thence, and give it to the wise.
For every wave is wealth to Daedalus,
Wealth to the cunning artist who can work
This matchless strength. Where shall he find, O waves!
A load your Atlas shoulders cannot lift?

 I with my hammer pounding evermore
The rocky coast, smite Andes into dust,
Strewing my bed, and, in another age,
Rebuild a continent of better men.
Then I unbar the doors: my paths lead out
The exodus of nations: I disperse
Men to all shores that front the hoary main.

 I too have arts and sorceries;
Illusion dwells forever with the wave.
I know what spells are laid. Leave me to deal
With credulous and imaginative man;
For, though he scoop my water in his palm,
A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds.
Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore,
I make some coast alluring, some lone isle,
To distant men, who must go there, or die.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SONG OF NATURE

Mine are the night and morning,
The pits of air, the gulf of space,
The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
The innumerable days.

I hide in the solar glory,
I am dumb in the pealing song,
I rest on the pitch of the torrent,
In slumber I am strong.

No numbers have counted my tallies,
No tribes my house can fill,
I sit by the shining Fount of Life
And pour the deluge still;

And ever by delicate powers
Gathering along the centuries
From race on race the rarest flowers,
My wreath shall nothing miss.

And many a thousand summers
My gardens ripened well,
And light from meliorating stars
With firmer glory fell.

I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.

And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;

What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.

Time and Thought were my surveyors,
They laid their courses well,
They boiled the sea, and piled the layers
Of granite, marl and shell.

But he, the man-child glorious, —
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,
Forthright my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the whole.

Must time and tide forever run?
Will never my winds go sleep in the west?
Will never my wheels which whirl the sun
And satellites have rest?

Too much of donning and doffing,
Too slow the rainbow fades,
I weary of my robe of snow,
My leaves and my cascades;

I tire of globes and races,
Too long the game is played;
What without him is summer’s pomp,
Or winter’s frozen shade?

I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.

Twice I have moulded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand,
Made one of day and one of night
And one of the salt sea-sand.

One in a Judaean manger,
And one by Avon stream,
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe.

I moulded kings and saviors,
And bards o’er kings to rule; —
But fell the starry influence short,
The cup was never full.

Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,
And mix the bowl again;
Seethe, Fate! the ancient elements,
Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.

Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones and countless days.

No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.

Chronological List of Poems

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TWO RIVERS

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream, —
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness stains its equal gleam.
And ages drop in it like rain.

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WALDEINSAMKEIT

I do not count the hours I spend
In wandering by the sea;
The forest is my loyal friend,
Like God it useth me.

In plains that room for shadows make
Of skirting hills to lie,
Bound in by streams which give and take
Their colors from the sky;

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,
Or down the oaken glade,
O what have I to do with time?
For this the day was made.

Cities of mortals woe-begone
Fantastic care derides,
But in the serious landscape lone
Stern benefit abides.

Sheen will tarnish, honey cloy,
And merry is only a mask of sad,
But, sober on a fund of joy,
The woods at heart are glad.

There the great Planter plants
Of fruitful worlds the grain,
And with a million spells enchants
The souls that walk in pain.

Still on the seeds of all he made
The rose of beauty burns;
Through times that wear and forms that fade,
Immortal youth returns.

The black ducks mounting from the lake,
The pigeon in the pines,
The bittern’s boom, a desert make
Which no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,
Where bearded mists divide,
The gray old gods whom Chaos knew,
The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,
Blows the sweet breath of song,
O, few to scale those uplands dare,
Though they to all belong!

See thou bring not to field or stone
The fancies found in books;
Leave authors’ eyes, and fetch your own,
To brave the landscape’s looks.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;
For a proud idleness like this
Crowns all thy mean affairs.

Chronological List of Poems

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TERMINUS

It is time to be old,
To take in sail: —
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: ‘No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There’s not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And, — fault of novel germs, —
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins, —
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.’

 As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
‘Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.’

Chronological List of Poems

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THE NUN’S ASPIRATION

The yesterday doth never smile,
The day goes drudging through the while,
Yet, in the name of Godhead, I
The morrow front, and can defy;
Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,
Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ah me! it was my childhood’s thought,
If He should make my web a blot
On life’s fair picture of delight,
My heart’s content would find it right.
But O, these waves and leaves, —
When happy stoic Nature grieves,
No human speech so beautiful
As their murmurs mine to lull.
On this altar God hath built
I lay my vanity and guilt;
Nor me can Hope or Passion urge
Hearing as now the lofty dirge
Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,
Nature’s funeral high and dim, —
Sable pageantry of clouds,
Mourning summer laid in shrouds.
Many a day shall dawn and die,
Many an angel wander by,
And passing, light my sunken turf
Moist perhaps by ocean surf,
Forgotten amid splendid tombs,
Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms.
On earth I dream; — I die to be:
Time, shake not thy bald head at me.
I challenge thee to hurry past
Or for my turn to fly too fast.
Think me not numbed or halt with age,
Or cares that earth to earth engage,
Caught with love’s cord of twisted beams,
Or mired by climate’s gross extremes.
I tire of shams, I rush to be:
I pass with yonder comet free, —
Pass with the comet into space
Which mocks thy aeons to embrace;
Aeons which tardily unfold
Realm beyond realm, — extent untold;
No early morn, no evening late, —
Realms self-upheld, disdaining Fate,
Whose shining sons, too great for fame,
Never heard thy weary name;
Nor lives the tragic bard to say
How drear the part I held in one,
How lame the other limped away.

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APRIL

The April winds are magical
And thrill our tuneful frames;
The garden walks are passional
To bachelors and dames.
The hedge is gemmed with diamonds,
The air with Cupids full,
The cobweb clues of Rosamond
Guide lovers to the pool.
Each dimple in the water,
Each leaf that shades the rock
Can cozen, pique and flatter,
Can parley and provoke.
Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
Know more than any book.
Down with your doleful problems,
And court the sunny brook.
The south-winds are quick-witted,
The schools are sad and slow,
The masters quite omitted
The lore we care to know.

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MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP

Soft and softlier hold me, friends!
Thanks if your genial care
Unbind and give me to the air.
Keep your lips or finger-tips
For flute or spinet’s dancing chips;
I await a tenderer touch,
I ask more or not so much:
Give me to the atmosphere, —
Where is the wind, my brother, — where?
Lift the sash, lay me within,
Lend me your ears, and I begin.
For gentle harp to gentle hearts
The secret of the world imparts;
And not to-day and not to-morrow
Can drain its wealth of hope and sorrow;
But day by day, to loving ear
Unlocks new sense and loftier cheer.
I’ve come to live with you, sweet friends,
This home my minstrel-journeyings ends.
Many and subtle are my lays,
The latest better than the first,
For I can mend the happiest days
And charm the anguish of the worst.

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CUPIDO

The solid, solid universe
Is pervious to Love;
With bandaged eyes he never errs,
Around, below, above.
His blinding light
He flingeth white
On God’s and Satan’s brood,
And reconciles
By mystic wiles
The evil and the good.

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THE PAST

The debt is paid,
The verdict said,
The Furies laid,
The plague is stayed.
All fortunes made;
Turn the key and bolt the door,
Sweet is death forevermore.
Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,
Nor murdering hate, can enter in.
All is now secure and fast;
Not the gods can shake the Past;
Flies-to the adamantine door
Bolted down forevermore.
None can reënter there, —
No thief so politic,
No Satan with a royal trick
Steal in by window, chink, or hole,
To bind or unbind, add what lacked,
Insert a leaf, or forge a name,
New-face or finish what is packed,
Alter or mend eternal Fact.

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THE LAST FAREWELL

LINES WRITTEN BY THE AUTHOR’S BROTHER, EDWARD BLISS EMERSON, WHILST SAILING OUT OF BOSTON HARBOR, BOUND FOR THE ISLAND OF PORTO RICO, IN 1832

Farewell, ye lofty spires
That cheered the holy light!
Farewell, domestic fires
That broke the gloom of night!
Too soon those spires are lost,
Too fast we leave the bay,
Too soon by ocean tost
From hearth and home away,
         Far away, far away.

Farewell the busy town,
The wealthy and the wise,
Kind smile and honest frown
From bright, familiar eyes.
All these are fading now;
Our brig hastes on her way,
Her unremembering prow
Is leaping o’er the sea,
        Far away, far away.

Farewell, my mother fond,
Too kind, too good to me;
Nor pearl nor diamond
Would pay my debt to thee.
But even thy kiss denies
Upon my cheek to stay;
The winged vessel flies,
And billows round her play,
        Far away, far away.

Farewell, my brothers true,
My betters, yet my peers;
How desert without you
My few and evil years!
But though aye one in heart,
Together sad or gay,
Rude ocean doth us part;
We separate to-day,
        Far away, far away.

Farewell, thou fairest one,
Unplighted yet to me,
Uncertain of thine own
I gave my heart to thee.
That untold early love
I leave untold to-day,
My lips in whisper move
Farewell to …!
        Far away, far away.

Farewell I breathe again
To dim New England’s shore,
My heart shall beat not when
I pant for thee no more.
In yon green palmy isle,
Beneath the tropic ray,
I murmur never while
For thee and thine I pray;
        Far away, far away.

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IN MEMORIAM E. B. E.

I mourn upon this battle-field,
But not for those who perished here.
Behold the river-bank
Whither the angry farmers came,
In sloven dress and broken rank,
Nor thought of fame.
Their deed of blood
All mankind praise;
Even the serene Reason says,
It was well done.
The wise and simple have one glance
To greet yon stern head-stone,
Which more of pride than pity gave
To mark the Briton’s friendless grave.
Yet it is a stately tomb;
The grand return
Of eve and morn,
The year’s fresh bloom,
The silver cloud,
Might grace the dust that is most proud.

 Yet not of these I muse
In this ancestral place,
But of a kindred face
That never joy or hope shall here diffuse.

 Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star!
What hast thou to do with these
Haunting this bank’s historic trees?
Thou born for noblest life,
For action’s field, for victor’s car,
Thou living champion of the right?
To these their penalty belonged:
I grudge not these their bed of death,
But thine to thee, who never wronged
The poorest that drew breath.

 All inborn power that could
Consist with homage to the good
Flamed from his martial eye;
He who seemed a soldier born,
He should have the helmet worn,
All friends to fend, all foes defy,
Fronting foes of God and man,
Frowning down the evil-doer,
Battling for the weak and poor.
His from youth the leader’s look
Gave the law which others took,
And never poor beseeching glance
Shamed that sculptured countenance.

 There is no record left on earth,
Save in tablets of the heart,
Of the rich inherent worth,
Of the grace that on him shone,
Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit:
He could not frame a word unfit,
An act unworthy to be done;
Honor prompted every glance,
Honor came and sat beside him,
In lowly cot or painful road,
And evermore the cruel god
Cried “Onward!” and the palm-crown showed,
Born for success he seemed,
With grace to win, with heart to hold,
With shining gifts that took all eyes,
With budding power in college-halls,
As pledged in coming days to forge
Weapons to guard the State, or scourge
Tyrants despite their guards or walls.
On his young promise Beauty smiled,
Drew his free homage unbeguiled,
And prosperous Age held out his hand,
And richly his large future planned,
And troops of friends enjoyed the tide, —
All, all was given, and only health denied.

 I see him with superior smile
Hunted by Sorrow’s grisly train
In lands remote, in toil and pain,
With angel patience labor on,
With the high port he wore erewhile,
When, foremost of the youthful band,
The prizes in all lists he won;
Nor bate one jot of heart or hope,
And, least of all, the loyal tie
Which holds to home ‘neath every sky,
The joy and pride the pilgrim feels
In hearts which round the hearth at home
Keep pulse for pulse with those who roam.

 What generous beliefs console
The brave whom Fate denies the goal!
If others reach it, is content;
To Heaven’s high will his will is bent.
Firm on his heart relied,
What lot soe’er betide,
Work of his hand
He nor repents nor grieves,
Pleads for itself the fact,
As unrepenting Nature leaves
Her every act.

 Fell the bolt on the branching oak;
The rainbow of his hope was broke;
No craven cry, no secret tear, —
He told no pang, he knew no fear;
Its peace sublime his aspect kept,
His purpose woke, his features slept;
And yet between the spasms of pain
His genius beamed with joy again.

 O’er thy rich dust the endless smile
Of Nature in thy Spanish isle
Hints never loss or cruel break
And sacrifice for love’s dear sake,
Nor mourn the unalterable Days
That Genius goes and Folly stays.
What matters how, or from what ground,
The freed soul its Creator found?
Alike thy memory embalms
That orange-grove, that isle of palms,
And these loved banks, whose oak-bough bold
Root in the blood of heroes old.

* * * * *

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Elements and Mottoes

EXPERIENCE

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

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COMPENSATION

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

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

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POLITICS

Gold and iron are good
To buy iron and gold;
All earth’s fleece and food
For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,
Proved Napoleon great,
Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft and Avarice
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust,
Walls Amphion piled
Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
here the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat, —
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come,
The republican at home.

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HEROISM

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves,
Sugar spends to fatten slaves,
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;
Thunder-clouds are Jove’s festoons,
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread,
Lightning-knotted round his head;
The hero is not fed on sweets,
Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head-winds right for royal sails.

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CHARACTER

The sun set, but set not his hope:
Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye;
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of time.
He spoke, and words more soft than rain
Brought the Age of Gold again:
His action won such reverence sweet
As hid all measure of the feat.

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CULTURE

Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man’s or maiden’s eye:
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.

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FRIENDSHIP

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs,
The world uncertain comes and goes;
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled, —
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness,
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red;
All things through thee take nobler form,
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

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SPIRITUAL LAWS

The living Heaven thy prayers respect,
House at once and architect,
Quarrying man’s rejected hours,
Builds therewith eternal towers;
Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil;
Forging, through swart arms of Offence,
The silver seat of Innocence.

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BEAUTY

Was never form and never face
So sweet to SEYD as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone,
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
He smote the lake to feed his eye
With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
He flung in pebbles well to hear
The moment’s music which they gave.
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
From nodding pole and belting zone.
He heard a voice none else could hear
From centred and from errant sphere.
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.
In dens of passion, and pits of woe,
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sun the dark and solve the curse,
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him in vain
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

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MANNERS

Grace, Beauty and Caprice
Build this golden portal;
Graceful women, chosen men,
Dazzle every mortal.
Their sweet and lofty countenance
His enchanted food;
He need not go to them, their forms
Beset his solitude.
He looketh seldom in their face,
His eyes explore the ground, —
The green grass is a looking-glass
Whereon their traits are found.
Little and less he says to them,
So dances his heart in his breast;
Their tranquil mien bereaveth him
Of wit, of words, of rest.
Too weak to win, too fond to shun
The tyrants of his doom,
The much deceived Endymion
Slips behind a tomb.

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ART

Give to barrows, trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance;
Bring the moonlight into noon
Hid in gleaming piles of stone;
On the city’s paved street
Plant gardens lined with lilacs sweet;
Let spouting fountains cool the air,
Singing in the sun-baked square;
Let statue, picture, park and hall,
Ballad, flag and festival,
The past restore, the day adorn,
And make to-morrow a new morn.
So shall the drudge in dusty frock
Spy behind the city clock
Retinues of airy kings,
Skirts of angels, starry wings,
His fathers shining in bright fables,
His children fed at heavenly tables.
‘T is the privilege of Art
Thus to play its cheerful part,
Man on earth to acclimate
And bend the exile to his fate,
And, moulded of one element
With the days and firmament,
Teach him on these as stairs to climb,
And live on even terms with Time;
Whilst upper life the slender rill
Of human sense doth overfill.

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UNITY

Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day were tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.

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WORSHIP

This is he, who, felled by foes,
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:
He to captivity was sold,
But him no prison-bars would hold:
Though they sealed him in a rock,
Mountain chains he can unlock:
Thrown to lions for their meat,
The crouching lion kissed his feet;
Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,
But arched o’er him an honoring vault.
This is he men miscall Fate,
Threading dark ways, arriving late,
But ever coming in time to crown
The truth, and hurl wrong-doers down.
He is the oldest, and best known,
More near than aught thou call’st thy own,
Yet, greeted in another’s eyes,
Disconcerts with glad surprise.
This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,
Floods with blessings unawares.
Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

PRUDENCE

Theme no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young;
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.

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NATURE

I

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

II

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows
And hints the future which it owes.

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THE INFORMING SPIRIT

I

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

II

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

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CIRCLES

Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

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INTELLECT

Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals; —
The sower scatters broad his seed;
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.

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GIFTS

Gifts of one who loved me, —
‘T was high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame.

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PROMISE

In countless upward-striving waves
The moon-drawn tide-wave strives;
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives;
So, in the new-born millions,
The perfect Adam lives.
Not less are summer mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.

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CARITAS

In the suburb, in the town,
On the railway, in the square,
Came a beam of goodness down
Doubling daylight everywhere:
Peace now each for malice takes,
Beauty for his sinful weeds,
For the angel Hope aye makes
Him an angel whom she leads.

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POWER

His tongue was framed to music,
And his hand was armed with skill;
His face was the mould of beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.

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WEALTH

Who shall tell what did befall,
Far away in time, when once,
Over the lifeless ball,
Hung idle stars and suns?
What god the element obeyed?
Wings of what wind the lichen bore,
Wafting the puny seeds of power,
Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?
And well the primal pioneer
Knew the strong task to it assigned,
Patient through Heaven’s enormous year
To build in matter home for mind.
From air the creeping centuries drew
The matted thicket low and wide,
This must the leaves of ages strew
The granite slab to clothe and hide,
Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.
What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled
(In dizzy aeons dim and mute
The reeling brain can ill compute)
Copper and iron, lead and gold?
What oldest star the fame can save
Of races perishing to pave
The planet with a floor of lime?
Dust is their pyramid and mole:
Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed
Under the tumbling mountain’s breast,
In the safe herbal of the coal?
But when the quarried means were piled,
All is waste and worthless, till
Arrives the wise selecting will,
And, out of slime and chaos, Wit
Draws the threads of fair and fit.
Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,
The shop of toil, the hall of arts;
Then flew the sail across the seas
To feed the North from tropic trees;
The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,
Where they were bid, the rivers ran;
New slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream,
Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.
Then docks were built, and crops were stored,
And ingots added to the hoard.
But though light-headed man forget,
Remembering Matter pays her debt:
Still, through her motes and masses, draw
Electric thrills and ties of law,
Which bind the strengths of Nature wild
To the conscience of a child.

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ILLUSIONS

Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation;
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
House you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat lightning
And fire-fly’s flight.

When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Behold the shimmer,
The wild dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world, —
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.

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Quatrains

A.H.

High was her heart, and yet was well inclined,
Her manners made of bounty well refined;
Far capitals and marble courts, her eye still seemed to see,
Minstrels and kings and high-born dames, and of the best that be.

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HUSH!

Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide;
Thy gossips spread each whisper,
And the gods from side to side.

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ORATOR

He who has no hands
Perforce must use his tongue;
Foxes are so cunning
Because they are not strong.

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ARTIST

Quit the hut, frequent the palace,
Reck not what the people say;
For still, where’er the trees grow biggest,
Huntsmen find the easiest way.

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POET

Ever the Poet from the land
Steers his bark and trims his sail;
Right out to sea his courses stand,
New worlds to find in pinnace frail.

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POET

To clothe the fiery thought
In simple words succeeds,
For still the craft of genius is
To mask a king in weeds.

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BOTANIST

Go thou to thy learned task,
I stay with the flowers of Spring:
Do thou of the Ages ask
What me the Hours will bring.

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GARDENER

True Brahmin, in the morning meadows wet,
Expound the Vedas of the violet,
Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,
See the plum redden, and the beurré stoop.

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FORESTER

He took the color of his vest
From rabbit’s coat or grouse’s breast;
For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,
So walks the woodman, unespied.

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NORTHMAN

The gale that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row;
The storm is my best galley hand
And drives me where I go.

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FROM ALCUIN

The sea is the road of the bold,
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,
The pit wherein the streams are rolled
And fountain of the rains.

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EXCELSIOR

Over his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,
And over the moon were the starry studs
That drop from the angels’ shoon.

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S.H.

With beams December planets dart
His cold eye truth and conduct scanned,
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand.

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BORROWING FROM THE FRENCH

Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

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NATURE

Boon Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,
And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old:
But blest is he, who, playing deep, yet haply asks not why,
Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

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FATE

Her planted eye to-day controls,
Is in the morrow most at home,
And sternly calls to being souls
That curse her when they come.

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HOROSCOPE

Ere he was born, the stars of fate
Plotted to make him rich and great:
When from the womb the babe was loosed,
The gate of gifts behind him closed.

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POWER

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

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CLIMACTERIC

I am not wiser for my age,
Nor skilful by my grief;
Life loiters at the book’s first page, —
Ah! could we turn the leaf.

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HERI, CRAS, HODIE

Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen,
To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between:
Future or Past no richer secret folds,
O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.

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MEMORY

Night-dreams trace on Memory’s wall
Shadows of the thoughts of day,
And thy fortunes, as they fall,
The bias of the will betray.

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LOVE

Love on his errand bound to go
Can swim the flood and wade through snow,
Where way is none, ‘t will creep and wind
And eat through Alps its home to find.

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SACRIFICE

Though love repine, and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply, —
‘‘T is man’s perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.’

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PERICLES

Well and wisely said the Greek,
Be thou faithful, but not fond;
To the altar’s foot thy fellow seek, —
The Furies wait beyond.

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CASELLA

Test of the poet is knowledge of love,
For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove;
Never was poet, of late or of yore,
Who was not tremulous with love-lore.

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SHAKSPEARE

I see all human wits
Are measured but a few;
Unmeasured still my Shakspeare sits,
Lone as the blessed Jew.

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HAFIZ

Her passions the shy violet
From Hafiz never hides;
Love-longings of the raptured bird
The bird to him confides.

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NATURE IN LEASTS

As sings the pine-tree in the wind,
So sings in the wind a sprig of the pine;
Her strength and soul has laughing France
Shed in each drop of wine.

[Greek: ADAKRYN NEMONTAI AIONA]

‘A New commandment,’ said the smiling Muse,
‘I give my darling son, Thou shalt not preach’; —
Luther, Fox, Behmen, Swedenborg, grew pale,
And, on the instant, rosier clouds upbore
Hafiz and Shakspeare with their shining choirs.

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Fragments

THE POET

I

Right upward on the road of fame
With sounding steps the poet came;
Born and nourished in miracles,
His feet were shod with golden bells,
Or where he stepped the soil did peal
As if the dust were glass and steel.
The gallant child where’er he came
Threw to each fact a tuneful name.
The things whereon he cast his eyes
Could not the nations rebaptize,
Nor Time’s snows hide the names he set,
Nor last posterity forget.
Yet every scroll whereon he wrote
In latent fire his secret thought,
Fell unregarded to the ground,
Unseen by such as stood around.
The pious wind took it away,
The reverent darkness hid the lay.
Methought like water-haunting birds
Divers or dippers were his words,
And idle clowns beside the mere
At the new vision gape and jeer.
But when the noisy scorn was past,
Emerge the wingèd words in haste.
New-bathed, new-trimmed, on healthy wing,
Right to the heaven they steer and sing.

A Brother of the world, his song
Sounded like a tempest strong
Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
And stars from the ecliptic road.
Times wore he as his clothing-weeds,
He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
As melts the iceberg in the seas,
As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
As snow-banks thaw in April’s beam,
The solid kingdoms like a dream
Resist in vain his motive strain,
They totter now and float amain.
For the Muse gave special charge
His learning should be deep and large,
And his training should not scant
The deepest lore of wealth or want:
His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
Every maxim of dreadful Need;
In its fulness he should taste
Life’s honeycomb, but not too fast;
Full fed, but not intoxicated;
He should be loved; he should be hated;
A blooming child to children dear,
His heart should palpitate with fear.

And well he loved to quit his home
And, Calmuck, in his wagon roam
To read new landscapes and old skies; —
But oh, to see his solar eyes
Like meteors which chose their way
And rived the dark like a new day!
Not lazy grazing on all they saw,
Each chimney-pot and cottage door,
Farm-gear and village picket-fence,
But, feeding on magnificence,
They bounded to the horizon’s edge
And searched with the sun’s privilege.
Landward they reached the mountains old
Where pastoral tribes their flocks infold,
Saw rivers run seaward by cities high
And the seas wash the low-hung sky;
Saw the endless rack of the firmament
And the sailing moon where the cloud was rent,
And through man and woman and sea and star
Saw the dance of Nature forward and far,
Through worlds and races and terms and times
Saw musical order and pairing rhymes.

II

The gods talk in the breath of the woods,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine;
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey:
One who having nectar drank
Into blissful orgies sank;
He takes no mark of night or day,
He cannot go, he cannot stay,
He would, yet would not, counsel keep,
But, like a walker in his sleep
With staring eye that seeth none,
Ridiculously up and down
Seeks how he may fitly tell
The heart-o’erlading miracle.

Not yet, not yet,
Impatient friend, —
A little while attend;
Not yet I sing: but I must wait,
My hand upon the silent string,
Fully until the end.
I see the coming light,
I see the scattered gleams,
Aloft, beneath, on left and right
The stars’ own ether beams;
These are but seeds of days,
Not yet a steadfast morn,
An intermittent blaze,
An embryo god unborn.

How all things sparkle,
The dust is alive,
To the birth they arrive:
I snuff the breath of my morning afar,
I see the pale lustres condense to a star:
The fading colors fix,
The vanishing are seen,
And the world that shall be
Twins the world that has been.
I know the appointed hour,
I greet my office well,
Never faster, never slower
Revolves the fatal wheel!
The Fairest enchants me,
The Mighty commands me,
Saying, ‘Stand in thy place;
Up and eastward turn thy face;
As mountains for the morning wait,
Coming early, coming late,
So thou attend the enriching Fate
Which none can stay, and none accelerate.
I am neither faint nor weary,
Fill thy will, O faultless heart!
Here from youth to age I tarry, —
Count it flight of bird or dart.
My heart at the heart of things
Heeds no longer lapse of time,
Rushing ages moult their wings,
Bathing in thy day sublime.

The sun set, but set not his hope: —
Stars rose, his faith was earlier up:
Fixed on the enormous galaxy,
Deeper and older seemed his eye,
And matched his sufferance sublime
The taciturnity of Time.

Beside his hut and shading oak,
Thus to himself the poet spoke,
‘I have supped to-night with gods,
I will not go under a wooden roof:
As I walked among the hills
In the love which Nature fills,
The great stars did not shine aloof,
They hurried down from their deep abodes
And hemmed me in their glittering troop.

   ‘Divine Inviters! I accept
The courtesy ye have shown and kept
From ancient ages for the bard,
To modulate
With finer fate
A fortune harsh and hard.
With aim like yours
I watch your course,
Who never break your lawful dance
By error or intemperance.
O birds of ether without wings!
O heavenly ships without a sail!
O fire of fire! O best of things!
O mariners who never fail!
Sail swiftly through your amber vault,
An animated law, a presence to exalt.’

Ah, happy if a sun or star
Could chain the wheel of Fortune’s car,
And give to hold an even state,
Neither dejected nor elate,
That haply man upraised might keep
The height of Fancy’s far-eyed steep.
In vain: the stars are glowing wheels,
Giddy with motion Nature reels,
Sun, moon, man, undulate and stream,
The mountains flow, the solids seem,
Change acts, reacts; back, forward hurled,
And pause were palsy to the world. —
The morn is come: the starry crowds
Are hid behind the thrice-piled clouds;
The new day lowers, and equal odds
Have changed not less the guest of gods;
Discrowned and timid, thoughtless, worn,
The child of genius sits forlorn:
Between two sleeps a short day’s stealth,
‘Mid many ails a brittle health,
A cripple of God, half true, half formed,
And by great sparks Promethean warmed,
Constrained by impotence to adjourn
To infinite time his eager turn,
His lot of action at the urn.
He by false usage pinned about
No breath therein, no passage out,
Cast wishful glances at the stars
And wishful saw the Ocean stream: —
‘Merge me in the brute universe,
Or lift to a diviner dream!’

Beside him sat enduring love,
Upon him noble eyes did rest,
Which, for the Genius that there strove.
The follies bore that it invest.
They spoke not, for their earnest sense
Outran the craft of eloquence.

He whom God had thus preferred, —
To whom sweet angels ministered,
Saluted him each morn as brother,
And bragged his virtues to each other, —
Alas! how were they so beguiled,
And they so pure? He, foolish child,
A facile, reckless, wandering will,
Eager for good, not hating ill,
Thanked Nature for each stroke she dealt;
On his tense chords all strokes were felt,
The good, the bad with equal zeal,
He asked, he only asked, to feel.
Timid, self-pleasing, sensitive,
With Gods, with fools, content to live;
Bended to fops who bent to him;
Surface with surfaces did swim.

‘Sorrow, sorrow!’ the angels cried,
‘Is this dear Nature’s manly pride?
Call hither thy mortal enemy,
Make him glad thy fall to see!
Yon waterflag, yon sighing osier,
A drop can shake, a breath can fan;
Maidens laugh and weep; Composure
Is the pudency of man,’

Again by night the poet went
From the lighted halls
Beneath the darkling firmament
To the seashore, to the old seawalls,
Out shone a star beneath the cloud,
The constellation glittered soon, —
You have no lapse; so have ye glowed
But once in your dominion.
And yet, dear stars, I know ye shine
Only by needs and loves of mine;
Light-loving, light-asking life in me
Feeds those eternal lamps I see.
And I to whom your light has spoken,
I, pining to be one of you,
I fall, my faith is broken,
Ye scorn me from your deeps of blue.
Or if perchance, ye orbs of Fate,
Your ne’er averted glance
Beams with a will compassionate
On sons of time and chance,
Then clothe these hands with power
In just proportion,
Nor plant immense designs
Where equal means are none.’

CHORUS OF SPIRITS

Means, dear brother, ask them not;
  Soul’s desire is means enow,
Pure content is angel’s lot,
  Thine own theatre art thou.

Gentler far than falls the snow
In the woodwalks still and low
Fell the lesson on his heart
And woke the fear lest angels part.

POET

I see your forms with deep content,
I know that ye are excellent,
  But will ye stay?
I hear the rustle of wings,
Ye meditate what to say
Ere ye go to quit me for ever and aye.

SPIRITS

Brother, we are no phantom band;
Brother, accept this fatal hand.
Aches thine unbelieving heart
With the fear that we must part?
See, all we are rooted here
By one thought to one same sphere;
From thyself thou canst not flee, —
From thyself no more can we.

POET

Suns and stars their courses keep,
But not angels of the deep:
Day and night their turn observe,
But the day of day may swerve.
Is there warrant that the waves
Of thought in their mysterious caves
Will heap in me their highest tide,
In me therewith beatified?
Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,
The moon comes back, — the Spirit not.

SPIRITS

Brother, sweeter is the Law
Than all the grace Love ever saw;
We are its suppliants. By it, we
Draw the breath of Eternity;
Serve thou it not for daily bread, —
Serve it for pain and fear and need.
Love it, though it hide its light;
By love behold the sun at night.
If the Law should thee forget,
More enamoured serve it yet;
Though it hate thee, suffer long;
Put the Spirit in the wrong;
Brother, no decrepitude
  Chills the limbs of Time;
As fleet his feet, his hands as good,
  His vision as sublime:
On Nature’s wheels there is no rust;
Nor less on man’s enchanted dust
  Beauty and Force alight.

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Alphabetical List of Poems

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT

I

There are beggars in Iran and Araby,
SAID was hungrier than all;
Hafiz said he was a fly
That came to every festival.
He came a pilgrim to the Mosque
On trail of camel and caravan,
Knew every temple and kiosk
Out from Mecca to Ispahan;
Northward he went to the snowy hills,
At court he sat in the grave Divan.
His music was the south-wind’s sigh,
His lamp, the maiden’s downcast eye,
And ever the spell of beauty came
And turned the drowsy world to flame.
By lake and stream and gleaming hall
And modest copse and the forest tall,
Where’er he went, the magic guide
Kept its place by the poet’s side.
Said melted the days like cups of pearl,
Served high and low, the lord and the churl,
Loved harebells nodding on a rock,
A cabin hung with curling smoke,
Ring of axe or hum of wheel
Or gleam which use can paint on steel,
And huts and tents; nor loved he less
Stately lords in palaces,
Princely women hard to please,
Fenced by form and ceremony,
Decked by courtly rites and dress
And etiquette of gentilesse.
But when the mate of the snow and wind,
He left each civil scale behind:
Him wood-gods fed with honey wild
And of his memory beguiled.
He loved to watch and wake
When the wing of the south-wind whipt the lake
And the glassy surface in ripples brake
And fled in pretty frowns away
Like the flitting boreal lights,
Rippling roses in northern nights,
Or like the thrill of Aeolian strings
In which the sudden wind-god rings.
In caves and hollow trees he crept
And near the wolf and panther slept.
He came to the green ocean’s brim
And saw the wheeling sea-birds skim,
Summer and winter, o’er the wave,
Like creatures of a skiey mould,
Impassible to heat or cold.
He stood before the tumbling main
With joy too tense for sober brain;
He shared the life of the element,
The tie of blood and home was rent:
As if in him the welkin walked,
The winds took flesh, the mountains talked,
And he the bard, a crystal soul
Sphered and concentric with the whole.

II

The Dervish whined to Said,
“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.
Beware the fire that Eblis burned,”
But Saadi coldly thus returned,
“Once with manlike love and fear
I gave thee for an hour my ear,
I kept the sun and stars at bay,
And love, for words thy tongue could say.
I cannot sell my heaven again
For all that rattles in thy brain.”

III

Said Saadi, “When I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver’s door,
I scorned the fame of Timour brave;
Timour, to Hassan, was a slave.
In every glance of Hassan’s eye
I read great years of victory,
And I, who cower mean and small
In the frequent interval
When wisdom not with me resides,
Worship Toil’s wisdom that abides.
I shunned his eyes, that faithful man’s,
I shunned the toiling Hassan’s glance.”

IV

The civil world will much forgive
To bards who from its maxims live,
But if, grown bold, the poet dare
Bend his practice to his prayer
And following his mighty heart
Shame the times and live apart, —
Vae solis! I found this,
That of goods I could not miss
If I fell within the line,
Once a member, all was mine,
Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains,
Fortune’s delectable mountains;
But if I would walk alone,
Was neither cloak nor crumb my own.
And thus the high Muse treated me,
Directly never greeted me,
But when she spread her dearest spells,
Feigned to speak to some one else.
I was free to overhear,
Or I might at will forbear;
Yet mark me well, that idle word
Thus at random overheard
Was the symphony of spheres,
And proverb of a thousand years,
The light wherewith all planets shone,
The livery all events put on,
It fell in rain, it grew in grain,
It put on flesh in friendly form,
Frowned in my foe and growled in storm,
It spoke in Tullius Cicero,
In Milton and in Angelo:
I travelled and found it at Rome;
Eastward it filled all Heathendom
And it lay on my hearth when I came home.

V

Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white,
As Jelaleddin old and gray;
He seemed to bask, to dream and play
Without remoter hope or fear
Than still to entertain his ear
And pass the burning summer-time
In the palm-grove with a rhyme;
Heedless that each cunning word
Tribes and ages overheard:
Those idle catches told the laws
Holding Nature to her cause.

God only knew how Saadi dined;
Roses he ate, and drank the wind;
He freelier breathed beside the pine,
In cities he was low and mean;
The mountain waters washed him clean
And by the sea-waves he was strong;
He heard their medicinal song,
Asked no physician but the wave,
No palace but his sea-beat cave.

Saadi held the Muse in awe,
She was his mistress and his law;
A twelvemonth he could silence hold,
Nor ran to speak till she him told;
He felt the flame, the fanning wings,
Nor offered words till they were things,
Glad when the solid mountain swims
In music and uplifting hymns.

Charmed from fagot and from steel,
Harvests grew upon his tongue,
Past and future must reveal
All their heart when Saadi sung;
Sun and moon must fall amain
Like sower’s seeds into his brain,
There quickened to be born again.

The free winds told him what they knew,
Discoursed of fortune as they blew;
Omens and signs that filled the air
To him authentic witness bare;
The birds brought auguries on their wings,
And carolled undeceiving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Things writ in vaster character;
And on his mind at dawn of day
Soft shadows of the evening lay.

* * *

Pale genius roves alone,
No scout can track his way,
None credits him till he have shown
His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster’s wine,
Nor land, nor gold, nor power,
By want and pain God screeneth him
Till his elected hour.

Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals: —
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.

I grieve that better souls than mine
Docile read my measured line:
High destined youths and holy maids
Hallow these my orchard shades;
Environ me and me baptize
With light that streams from gracious eyes.
I dare not be beloved and known,
I ungrateful, I alone.

Ever find me dim regards,
Love of ladies, love of bards,
Marked forbearance, compliments,
Tokens of benevolence.
What then, can I love myself?
Fame is profitless as pelf,
A good in Nature not allowed
They love me, as I love a cloud
Sailing falsely in the sphere,
Hated mist if it come near.

For thought, and not praise;
Thought is the wages
For which I sell days,
Will gladly sell ages
And willing grow old
Deaf, and dumb, and blind, and cold,
Melting matter into dreams,
Panoramas which I saw
And whatever glows or seems
Into substance, into Law.

For Fancy’s gift
Can mountains lift;
The Muse can knit
What is past, what is done,
With the web that’s just begun;
Making free with time and size,
Dwindles here, there magnifies,
Swells a rain-drop to a tun;
So to repeat
No word or feat
Crowds in a day the sum of ages,
And blushing Love outwits the sages.

Try the might the Muse affords
And the balm of thoughtful words;
Bring music to the desolate;
Hang roses on the stony fate.

But over all his crowning grace,
Wherefor thanks God his daily praise,
Is the purging of his eye
To see the people of the sky:
From blue mount and headland dim
Friendly hands stretch forth to him,
Him they beckon, him advise
Of heavenlier prosperities
And a more excelling grace
And a truer bosom-glow
Than the wine-fed feasters know.
They turn his heart from lovely maids,
And make the darlings of the earth
Swainish, coarse and nothing worth:
Teach him gladly to postpone
Pleasures to another stage
Beyond the scope of human age,
Freely as task at eve undone
Waits unblamed to-morrow’s sun.

By thoughts I lead
Bards to say what nations need;
What imports, what irks and what behooves,
Framed afar as Fates and Loves.

And as the light divides the dark
  Through with living swords,
So shall thou pierce the distant age
  With adamantine words.

I framed his tongue to music,
  I armed his hand with skill,
I moulded his face to beauty
  And his heart the throne of Will.

For every God
Obeys the hymn, obeys the ode.

For art, for music over-thrilled,
The wine-cup shakes, the wine is spilled.

Hold of the Maker, not the Made;
Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

That book is good
Which puts me in a working mood.
  Unless to Thought is added Will,
  Apollo is an imbecile.
What parts, what gems, what colors shine, —
Ah, but I miss the grand design.

Like vaulters in a circus round
Who leap from horse to horse, but never touch the ground.

For Genius made his cabin wide,
And Love led Gods therein to bide.

The atom displaces all atoms beside,
And Genius unspheres all souls that abide.

To transmute crime to wisdom, so to stem
The vice of Japhet by the thought of Shem.

He could condense cerulean ether
Into the very best sole-leather.

Forbore the ant-hill, shunned to tread,
In mercy, on one little head.

I have no brothers and no peers,
And the dearest interferes:
When I would spend a lonely day,
Sun and moon are in my way.

The brook sings on, but sings in vain
Wanting the echo in my brain.

He planted where the deluge ploughed.
His hired hands were wind and cloud;
His eyes detect the Gods concealed
In the hummock of the field.

For what need I of book or priest,
Or sibyl from the mummied East,
When every star is Bethlehem star?
I count as many as there are
Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,
So many saints and saviors,
So many high behaviors
Salute the bard who is alive
And only sees what he doth give.

Coin the day-dawn into lines
In which its proper splendor shines;
Coin the moonlight into verse
Which all its marvel shall rehearse,
Chasing with words fast-flowing things; nor try
To plant thy shrivelled pedantry
On the shoulders of the sky.

Ah, not to me those dreams belong!
A better voice peals through my song.

The Muse’s hill by Fear is guarded,
A bolder foot is still rewarded.

His instant thought a poet spoke,
And filled the age his fame;
An inch of ground the lightning strook
But lit the sky with flame.

If bright the sun, he tarries,
  All day his song is heard;
And when he goes he carries
  No more baggage than a bird.

The Asmodean feat is mine,
To spin my sand-heap into twine.

Slighted Minerva’s learnèd tongue,
But leaped with joy when on the wind
    The shell of Clio rung.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE

NATURE

The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar,
Sleeps or feigns slumber,
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of time.
This poor tooting, creaking cricket,
Pan, half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;
‘T is his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps and Andes cold;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.

Come search the wood for flowers, —
Wild tea and wild pea,
Grapevine and succory,
Coreopsis
And liatris,
Flaunting in their bowers;
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern and agrimony;
Forest full of essences
Fit for fairy presences,
Peppermint and sassafras,
Sweet fern, mint and vernal grass,
Panax, black birch, sugar maple,
Sweet and scent for Dian’s table,
Elder-blow, sarsaparilla,
Wild rose, lily, dry vanilla, —
Spices in the plants that run
To bring their first fruits to the sun.
Earliest heats that follow frore
Nervèd leaf of hellebore,
Sweet willow, checkerberry red,
With its savory leaf for bread.
Silver birch and black
With the selfsame spice
Found in polygala root and rind,
Sassafras, fern, benzöine,
Mouse-ear, cowslip, wintergreen,
Which by aroma may compel
The frost to spare, what scents so well.

Where the fungus broad and red
Lifts its head,
Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread,
Where the aster grew
With the social goldenrod,
In a chapel, which the dew
Made beautiful for God: —
O what would Nature say?
She spared no speech to-day:
The fungus and the bulrush spoke,
Answered the pine-tree and the oak,
The wizard South blew down the glen,
Filled the straits and filled the wide,
Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.
All things shine in his smoky ray,
And all we see are pictures high;
Many a high hillside,
While oaks of pride
Climb to their tops,
And boys run out upon their leafy ropes.
The maple street
In the houseless wood,
Voices followed after,
Every shrub and grape leaf
Rang with fairy laughter.
I have heard them fall
Like the strain of all
King Oberon’s minstrelsy.
Would hear the everlasting
And know the only strong?
You must worship fasting,
You must listen long.
Words of the air
Which birds of the air
Carry aloft, below, around,
To the isles of the deep,
To the snow-capped steep,
To the thundercloud.

For Nature, true and like in every place,
Will hint her secret in a garden patch,
Or in lone corners of a doleful heath,
As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea,
Or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh;
And, when I would recall the scenes I dreamed
On Adirondac steeps, I know
Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre,
Assured to find the token once again
In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam
And peaceful woods beside my cottage door.

What all the books of ages paint, I have.
What prayers and dreams of youthful genius feign,
I daily dwell in, and am not so blind
But I can see the elastic tent of day
Belike has wider hospitality
Than my few needs exhaust, and bids me read
The quaint devices on its mornings gay.
Yet Nature will not be in full possessed,
And they who truliest love her, heralds are
And harbingers of a majestic race,
Who, having more absorbed, more largely yield,
And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.

But never yet the man was found
Who could the mystery expound,
Though Adam, born when oaks were young,
Endured, the Bible says, as long;
But when at last the patriarch died
The Gordian noose was still untied.
He left, though goodly centuries old,
Meek Nature’s secret still untold.

Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star.

When all their blooms the meadows flaunt
  To deck the morning of the year,
Why tinge thy lustres jubilant
  With forecast or with fear?

Teach me your mood, O patient stars!
  Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
  No trace of age, no fear to die.

The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin
To use my land to put his rainbows in.

For joy and beauty planted it,
  With faerie gardens cheered,
And boding Fancy haunted it
  With men and women weird.

What central flowing forces, say,
Make up thy splendor, matchless day?

Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more;
In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door,
A door to something grander, — loftier walls, and vaster floor.

She paints with white and red the moors
To draw the nations out of doors.

A score of airy miles will smooth
Rough Monadnoc to a gem.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE EARTH

Our eyeless bark sails free
  Though with boom and spar
Andes, Alp or Himmalee,
  Strikes never moon or star.

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THE HEAVENS

Wisp and meteor nightly falling,
But the Stars of God remain.

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TRANSITION

See yonder leafless trees against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And, ever subdividing, separate
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs.
As if they loved the element, and hasted
To dissipate their being into it.

Parks and ponds are good by day;
I do not delight
In black acres of the night,
Nor my unseasoned step disturbs
The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs.

In Walden wood the chickadee
Runs round the pine and maple tree
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden water.

The low December vault in June be lifted high,
And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

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THE GARDEN

Many things the garden shows,
And pleased I stray
From tree to tree
Watching the white pear-bloom,
Bee-infested quince or plum.
I could walk days, years, away
Till the slow ripening, secular tree
Had reached its fruiting-time,
Nor think it long.

Solar insect on the wing
In the garden murmuring,
Soothing with thy summer horn
Swains by winter pinched and worn.

Chronological List of Poems

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BIRDS

Darlings of children and of bard,
Perfect kinds by vice unmarred,
All of worth and beauty set
Gems in Nature’s cabinet;
These the fables she esteems
Reality most like to dreams.
Welcome back, you little nations,
Far-travelled in the south plantations;
Bring your music and rhythmic flight,
Your colors for our eyes’ delight:
Freely nestle in our roof,
Weave your chamber weatherproof;
And your enchanting manners bring
And your autumnal gathering.
Exchange in conclave general
Greetings kind to each and all,
Conscious each of duty done
And unstainèd as the sun.

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WATER

The water understands
Civilization well;
It wets my foot, but prettily
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

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NAHANT

All day the waves assailed the rock,
  I heard no church-bell chime,
The sea-beat scorns the minster clock
  And breaks the glass of Time.

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SUNRISE

Would you know what joy is hid
In our green Musketaquid,
And for travelled eyes what charms
Draw us to these meadow farms,
Come and I will show you all
Makes each day a festival.
Stand upon this pasture hill,
Face the eastern star until
The slow eye of heaven shall show
The world above, the world below.

Behold the miracle!
Thou saw’st but now the twilight sad
And stood beneath the firmament,
A watchman in a dark gray tent,
Waiting till God create the earth, —
Behold the new majestic birth!
The mottled clouds, like scraps of wool,
Steeped in the light are beautiful.
What majestic stillness broods
Over these colored solitudes.
Sleeps the vast East in pleasèd peace,
Up the far mountain walls the streams increase
Inundating the heaven
With spouting streams and waves of light
Which round the floating isles unite: —
See the world below
Baptized with the pure element,
A clear and glorious firmament
Touched with life by every beam.
I share the good with every flower,
I drink the nectar of the hour: —
This is not the ancient earth
Whereof old chronicles relate
The tragic tales of crime and fate;
But rather, like its beads of dew
And dew-bent violets, fresh and new,
An exhalation of the time.

* * *

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NIGHT IN JUNE

I left my dreary page and sallied forth,
Received the fair inscriptions of the night;
The moon was making amber of the world,
Glittered with silver every cottage pane,
The trees were rich, yet ominous with gloom.
            The meadows broad
From ferns and grapes and from the folded flowers
Sent a nocturnal fragrance; harlot flies
Flashed their small fires in air, or held their court
In fairy groves of herds-grass.

He lives not who can refuse me;
All my force saith, Come and use me:
A gleam of sun, a summer rain,
And all the zone is green again.

Seems, though the soft sheen all enchants,
Cheers the rough crag and mournful dell,
As if on such stern forms and haunts
A wintry storm more fitly fell.

Put in, drive home the sightless wedges
And split to flakes the crystal ledges.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

MAIA

Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each on other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By man who thirsts to be deceived.

Illusions like the tints of pearl,
Or changing colors of the sky,
Or ribbons of a dancing girl
That mend her beauty to the eye.

The cold gray down upon the quinces lieth
And the poor spinners weave their webs thereon
To share the sunshine that so spicy is.

Samson stark, at Dagon’s knee,
Gropes for columns strong as he;
When his ringlets grew and curled,
Groped for axle of the world.

But Nature whistled with all her winds,
Did as she pleased and went her way.

Chronological List of Poems

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LIFE

A train of gay and clouded days
Dappled with joy and grief and praise,
Beauty to fire us, saints to save,
Escort us to a little grave.

No fate, save by the victim’s fault, is low,
For God hath writ all dooms magnificent,
So guilt not traverses his tender will.

Around the man who seeks a noble end,
Not angels but divinities attend.

From high to higher forces
  The scale of power uprears,
The heroes on their horses,
  The gods upon their spheres.

This shining moment is an edifice
Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild.

Roomy Eternity
Casts her schemes rarely,
And an aeon allows
For each quality and part
Of the multitudinous
And many-chambered heart.

The beggar begs by God’s command,
And gifts awake when givers sleep,
Swords cannot cut the giving hand
Nor stab the love that orphans keep.

In the chamber, on the stairs,
  Lurking dumb,
  Go and come
Lemurs and Lars.

Such another peerless queen
Only could her mirror show.

Easy to match what others do,
Perform the feat as well as they;
Hard to out-do the brave, the true,
And find a loftier way:
The school decays, the learning spoils
Because of the sons of wine;
How snatch the stripling from their toils? —
Yet can one ray of truth divine
The blaze of revellers’ feasts outshine.

Of all wit’s uses the main one
Is to live well with who has none.

The tongue is prone to lose the way,
  Not so the pen, for in a letter
We have not better things to say,
  But surely say them better.

She walked in flowers around my field
As June herself around the sphere.

Friends to me are frozen wine;
I wait the sun on them should shine.

You shall not love me for what daily spends;
You shall not know me in the noisy street,
Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
Nor when I’m jaded, sick, anxious or mean.
But love me then and only, when you know
Me for the channel of the rivers of God
From deep ideal fontal heavens that flow.

To and fro the Genius flies,
  A light which plays and hovers
  Over the maiden’s head
And dips sometimes as low as to her eyes.
Of her faults I take no note,
  Fault and folly are not mine;
Comes the Genius, — all’s forgot,
Replunged again into that upper sphere
He scatters wide and wild its lustres here.

Love
Asks nought his brother cannot give;
Asks nothing, but does all receive.
Love calls not to his aid events;
He to his wants can well suffice:
Asks not of others soft consents,
Nor kind occasion without eyes;
Nor plots to ope or bolt a gate,
Nor heeds Condition’s iron walls, —
Where he goes, goes before him Fate;
Whom he uniteth, God installs;
Instant and perfect his access
To the dear object of his thought,
Though foes and land and seas between
Himself and his love intervene.

The brave Empedocles, defying fools,
Pronounced the word that mortals hate to hear —
“I am divine, I am not mortal made;
I am superior to my human weeds.”
Not Sense but Reason is the Judge of truth;
Reason’s twofold, part human, part divine;
That human part may be described and taught,
The other portion language cannot speak.

Tell men what they knew before;
Paint the prospect from their door.

Him strong Genius urged to roam,
Stronger Custom brought him home.

That each should in his house abide.
Therefore was the world so wide.

Thou shalt make thy house
The temple of a nation’s vows.
Spirits of a higher strain
Who sought thee once shall seek again.
I detected many a god
Forth already on the road,
Ancestors of beauty come
In thy breast to make a home.

The archangel Hope
Looks to the azure cope,
Waits through dark ages for the morn,
Defeated day by day, but unto victory born.

As the drop feeds its fated flower,
As finds its Alp the snowy shower,
Child of the omnific Need,
Hurled into life to do a deed,
Man drinks the water, drinks the light.

Ever the Rock of Ages melts
  Into the mineral air,
To be the quarry whence to build
  Thought and its mansions fair.

Go if thou wilt, ambrosial flower,
  Go match thee with thy seeming peers;
I will wait Heaven’s perfect hour
  Through the innumerable years.

Yes, sometimes to the sorrow-stricken
Shall his own sorrow seem impertinent,
A thing that takes no more root in the world
Than doth the traveller’s shadow on the rock.

But if thou do thy best,
Without remission, without rest,
And invite the sunbeam,
And abhor to feign or seem
Even to those who thee should love
And thy behavior approve;
If thou go in thine own likeness,
Be it health, or be it sickness;
If thou go as thy father’s son,
If thou wear no mask or lie,
Dealing purely and nakedly, —

* * *

Ascending thorough just degrees
To a consummate holiness,
As angel blind to trespass done,
And bleaching all souls like the sun.

From the stores of eldest matter,
The deep-eyed flame, obedient water,
Transparent air, all-feeding earth,
He took the flower of all their worth,
And, best with best in sweet consent,
Combined a new temperament.

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REX

The bard and mystic held me for their own,
I filled the dream of sad, poetic maids,
I took the friendly noble by the hand,
I was the trustee of the hand-cart man,
The brother of the fisher, porter, swain,
And these from the crowd’s edge well pleased beheld
The service done to me as done to them.

With the key of the secret he marches faster,
  From strength to strength, and for night brings day;
While classes or tribes, too weak to master
  The flowing conditions of life, give way.

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SUUM CUIQUE

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.

If curses be the wage of love,
Hide in thy skies, thou fruitless Jove,
    Not to be named:
    It is clear
  Why the gods will not appear;
    They are ashamed.

When wrath and terror changed Jove’s regal port,
And the rash-leaping thunderbolt fell short.

Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift,
  Sit still and Truth is near:
Suddenly it will uplift
  Your eyelids to the sphere:
Wait a little, you shall see
The portraiture of things to be.

The rules to men made evident
By Him who built the day,
The columns of the firmament
Not firmer based than they.

On bravely through the sunshine and the showers!
Time hath his work to do and we have ours.

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THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

In many forms we try
To utter God’s infinity,
But the boundless hath no form,
And the Universal Friend
Doth as far transcend
An angel as a worm.

The great Idea baffles wit,
Language falters under it,
It leaves the learned in the lurch;
Nor art, nor power, nor toil can find
The measure of the eternal Mind,
Nor hymn, nor prayer, nor church.

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GRACE

How much, preventing God, how much I owe
To the defences thou hast round me set;
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow, —
These scorned bondmen were my parapet.
I dare not peep over this parapet
To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.

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INSIGHT

Power that by obedience grows,
Knowledge which its source not knows,
Wave which severs whom it bears
From the things which he compares,
Adding wings through things to range,
To his own blood harsh and strange.

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PAN

O what are heroes, prophets, men,
But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow
A momentary music. Being’s tide
Swells hitherward, and myriads of forms
Live, robed with beauty, painted by the sun;
Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God,
Throbs with an overmastering energy
Knowing and doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie
White hollow shells upon the desert shore,
But not the less the eternal wave rolls on
To animate new millions, and exhale
Races and planets, its enchanted foam.

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MONADNOC FROM AFAR

Dark flower of Cheshire garden,
  Red evening duly dyes
Thy sombre head with rosy hues
  To fix far-gazing eyes.
Well the Planter knew how strongly
  Works thy form on human thought;
I muse what secret purpose had he
  To draw all fancies to this spot.

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SEPTEMBER

In the turbulent beauty
  Of a gusty Autumn day,
Poet on a sunny headland
  Sighed his soul away.

Farms the sunny landscape dappled,
  Swandown clouds dappled the farms,
Cattle lowed in mellow distance
  Where far oaks outstretched their arms.

Sudden gusts came full of meaning,
  All too much to him they said,
Oh, south winds have long memories,
  Of that be none afraid.

I cannot tell rude listeners
  Half the tell-tale South-wind said, —
‘T would bring the blushes of yon maples
  To a man and to a maid.

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EROS

They put their finger on their lip,
    The Powers above:
  The seas their islands clip,
  The moons in ocean dip,
They love, but name not love.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

OCTOBER

 October woods wherein
The boy’s dream comes to pass,
And Nature squanders on the boy her pomp,
And crowns him with a more than royal crown,
And unimagined splendor waits his steps.
The gazing urchin walks through tents of gold,
Through crimson chambers, porphyry and pearl,
Pavilion on pavilion, garlanded,
Incensed and starred with lights and airs and shapes,
Color and sound, music to eye and ear,
Beyond the best conceit of pomp or power.

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PETER’S FIELD

[Knows he who tills this lonely field
  To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
  At midnight and at morn?]

That field by spirits bad and good,
  By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
  I know is ground enchanted.

[In the long sunny afternoon
  The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up, I wandered down,
  Beset by pensive hosts.]

For in those lonely grounds the sun
  Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
  And nearer stoops the moon.

There in a moment I have seen
  The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
  Old gods forsook the skies.

I cannot publish in my rhyme
  What pranks the greenwood played;
It was the Carnival of time,
  And Ages went or stayed.

To me that spectral nook appeared
  The mustering Day of Doom,
And round me swarmed in shadowy troop
  Things past and things to come.

The darkness haunteth me elsewhere;
  There I am full of light;
In every whispering leaf I hear
  More sense than sages write.

Underwoods were full of pleasance,
  All to each in kindness bend,
And every flower made obeisance
  As a man unto his friend.

Far seen, the river glides below,
  Tossing one sparkle to the eyes:
I catch thy meaning, wizard wave;
  The River of my Life replies.

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MUSIC

Let me go where’er I will,
I hear a sky-born music still:
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young,
From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul,
Peals out a cheerful song.

It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.

‘T is not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings.

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THE WALK

A Queen rejoices in her peers,
And wary Nature knows her own
By court and city, dale and down,
And like a lover volunteers,
And to her son will treasures more
And more to purpose freely pour
In one wood walk, than learned men
Can find with glass in ten times ten.

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COSMOS

Who saw the hid beginnings
  When Chaos and Order strove,
Or who can date the morning.
  The purple flaming of love?

I saw the hid beginnings
  When Chaos and Order strove,
And I can date the morning prime
  And purple flame of love.

Song breathed from all the forest,
  The total air was fame;
It seemed the world was all torches
  That suddenly caught the flame.

* * *

Is there never a retroscope mirror
  In the realms and corners of space
That can give us a glimpse of the battle
  And the soldiers face to face?

Sit here on the basalt courses
  Where twisted hills betray
The seat of the world-old Forces
  Who wrestled here on a day.

* * *

When the purple flame shoots up,
  And Love ascends his throne,
I cannot hear your songs, O birds,
  For the witchery of my own.

And every human heart
  Still keeps that golden day
And rings the bells of jubilee
  On its own First of May.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE MIRACLE

I have trod this path a hundred times
With idle footsteps, crooning rhymes.
I know each nest and web-worm’s tent,
The fox-hole which the woodchucks rent,
Maple and oak, the old Divan
Self-planted twice, like the banian.
I know not why I came again
Unless to learn it ten times ten.
To read the sense the woods impart
You must bring the throbbing heart.
Love is aye the counterforce, —
Terror and Hope and wild Remorse,
Newest knowledge, fiery thought,
Or Duty to grand purpose wrought.
  Wandering yester morn the brake,
I reached this heath beside the lake,
And oh, the wonder of the power,
The deeper secret of the hour!
Nature, the supplement of man,
His hidden sense interpret can; —
What friend to friend cannot convey
Shall the dumb bird instructed say.
Passing yonder oak, I heard
Sharp accents of my woodland bird;
I watched the singer with delight, —
But mark what changed my joy to fright, —
When that bird sang, I gave the theme;
That wood-bird sang my last night’s dream,
A brown wren was the Daniel
That pierced my trance its drift to tell,
Knew my quarrel, how and why,
Published it to lake and sky,
Told every word and syllable
In his flippant chirping babble,
All my wrath and all my shames,
Nay, God is witness, gave the names.

Chronological List of Poems

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THE WATERFALL

A patch of meadow upland
  Reached by a mile of road,
Soothed by the voice of waters,
  With birds and flowers bestowed.

Hither I come for strength
  Which well it can supply,
For Love draws might from terrene force
  And potencies of sky.

The tremulous battery Earth
  Responds to the touch of man;
It thrills to the antipodes,
  From Boston to Japan.

The planets’ child the planet knows
  And to his joy replies;
To the lark’s trill unfolds the rose,
  Clouds flush their gayest dyes.

When Ali prayed and loved
  Where Syrian waters roll,
Upward the ninth heaven thrilled and moved;
  At the tread of the jubilant soul.

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WALDEN

In my garden three ways meet,
  Thrice the spot is blest;
Hermit-thrush comes there to build,
  Carrier-doves to nest.

There broad-armed oaks, the copses’ maze,
  The cold sea-wind detain;
Here sultry Summer overstays
  When Autumn chills the plain.

Self-sown my stately garden grows;
  The winds and wind-blown seed,
Cold April rain and colder snows
  My hedges plant and feed.

From mountains far and valleys near
  The harvests sown to-day
Thrive in all weathers without fear, —
  Wild planters, plant away!

In cities high the careful crowds
  Of woe-worn mortals darkling go,
But in these sunny solitudes
  My quiet roses blow.

Methought the sky looked scornful down
  On all was base in man,
And airy tongues did taunt the town,
  ‘Achieve our peace who can!’

What need I holier dew
  Than Walden’s haunted wave,
Distilled from heaven’s alembic blue,
  Steeped in each forest cave?

[If Thought unlock her mysteries,
  If Friendship on me smile,
I walk in marble galleries,
  I talk with kings the while.]

How drearily in College hall
  The Doctor stretched the hours,
But in each pause we heard the call
  Of robins out of doors.

The air is wise, the wind thinks well,
  And all through which it blows,
If plants or brain, if egg or shell,
  Or bird or biped knows;

And oft at home ‘mid tasks I heed,
  I heed how wears the day;
We must not halt while fiercely speed
  The spans of life away.

What boots it here of Thebes or Rome
  Or lands of Eastern day?
In forests I am still at home
  And there I cannot stray.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE ENCHANTER

In the deep heart of man a poet dwells
Who all the day of life his summer story tells;
Scatters on every eye dust of his spells,
Scent, form and color; to the flowers and shells
Wins the believing child with wondrous tales;
Touches a cheek with colors of romance,
And crowds a history into a glance;
Gives beauty to the lake and fountain,
Spies oversea the fires of the mountain;
When thrushes ope their throat, ‘t is he that sings,
And he that paints the oriole’s fiery wings.
The little Shakspeare in the maiden’s heart
Makes Romeo of a plough-boy on his cart;
Opens the eye to Virtue’s starlike meed
And gives persuasion to a gentle deed.

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WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

Six thankful weeks, — and let it be
A meter of prosperity, —
In my coat I bore this book,
And seldom therein could I look,
For I had too much to think,
Heaven and earth to eat and drink.
Is he hapless who can spare
In his plenty things so rare?

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RICHES

Have ye seen the caterpillar
  Foully warking in his nest?
‘T is the poor man getting siller,
  Without cleanness, without rest.

Have ye seen the butterfly
  In braw claithing drest?
‘T is the poor man gotten rich,
  In rings and painted vest.

The poor man crawls in web of rags
  And sore bested with woes.
But when he flees on riches’ wings,
  He laugheth at his foes.

Chronological List of Poems

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PHILOSOPHER

Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
In love, he cannot therefore cease his trade;
Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
He feels it, introverts his learned eye
To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.

His mother died, — the only friend he had, —
Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
Couched like a cat sat watching close behind
And throttled all his passion. Is’t not like
That devil-spider that devours her mate
Scarce freed from her embraces?

Chronological List of Poems

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INTELLECT

Gravely it broods apart on joy,
And, truth to tell, amused by pain.

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LIMITS

Who knows this or that?
Hark in the wall to the rat:
Since the world was, he has gnawed;
Of his wisdom, of his fraud
What dost thou know?
In the wretched little beast
Is life and heart,
Child and parent,
Not without relation
To fruitful field and sun and moon.
What art thou? His wicked eye
Is cruel to thy cruelty.

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Alphabetical List of Poems

INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR

Fall, stream, from Heaven to bless; return as well;
So did our sons; Heaven met them as they fell.

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THE EXILE (AFTER TALIESSIN)

The heavy blue chain
Of the boundless main
Didst thou, just man, endure.

I have an arrow that will find its mark,
A mastiff that will bite without a hark.

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Uncollected Poems

SILENCE

They put their finger on their lip, —
The Powers above;
The seas their islands clip,
The moons in Ocean dip, —
They love but name not love.

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FAME

Ah Fate! cannot a man
Be wise without a beard?
From East to West, from Beersheba to Dan,
Say, was it never heard,
That wisdom might in youth be gotten,
Or wit be ripe before’t was rotten?

He pays too high a price
For knowledge and for fame,
Who gives his sinews, to be wise,
His teeth and bones, to buy a name,
And crawls through life a paralytic,
To earn the praise of bard and critic.

Is it not better done,
To dine and sleep through forty years,
Be loved by few, be feared by none,
Laugh life away, have wine for tears,
And take the mortal leap undaunted,
Content that all we asked was granted?

But Fate will not permit
The seed of gods to die,
Nor suffer Sense to win from Wit
Its guerdon in the sky,
Nor let us hide, whate’er our pleasure,
The world’s light underneath a measure.

Go then, sad youth, and shine!
Go, sacrifice to fame;
Put love, joy, health, upon the shrine,
And life to fan the flame!
Thy hapless self for praises barter,
And die to Fame an honored martyr.

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I AM OWNER OF THE SPHERE

I am owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Cæsar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,
Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

Chronological List of Poems

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WILLIAM RUFUS AND THE JEW

“May it please my lord the king, — there’s a Jew at the door.”
— “Let him in,” said the king, “what’s he waiting there for?”
— “I wot, Sir, you come from Abraham’s loins,
Love not Christ, eat no pork, do no good with your coins.”
“My lord the king! I do as Moses bids;
Eschewing all evil, I shut my coffer lids;
From the law of my fathers, God forbid I should swerve;
The uncircumcised Nazarite, my race must not serve;
But Isaac my son to the Gentiles hath gone over,
And no means can I find my first-born to recover.
I would give fifty marks, and my gabardine to boot,
To the Rabbi that would bring him from the Christian faith about;
But phylacteried Rabbins live far over sea,
I cannot go to them, and they will not come to me.
Will it please my lord the king, from the house of Magog,
To bring my son back to his own synagogue.”
— “Why I ‘ll be the Rabbi, — where’s a fitter Pharisee?
Count me out the fifty marks, and go send your son to me.”
The king filled his mouth with arguments and jibes,
To win the boy back to the faith of the tribes,
But Isaac the Jew was so hard and stiff-necked,
That by no means could the king come to any effect;
So he paid the Jew back twenty marks of his gains;
Quoth he, “I think I ‘ll keep the thirty for the payment of my pains.”

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GRACE

How much, Preventing God! how much I owe
To the defences thou hast round me set:
Example, custom, fear, occasion slow, —
These scorned bondmen were my parapet.
I dare not peep over this parapet
To guage with glance the roaring gulf below.
The depths of sin to which I had descended,
Had not these me against myself defended.

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THE THREE DIMENSIONS

“Room for the spheres!” — then first they shined,
And dived into the ample sky;
“Room! room!” cried the new mankind,
And took the oath of liberty.
Room! room! willed the opening mind,
And found it in Variety.

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MOTTO TO “THE POET.”

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

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MOTTO TO “GIFTS.”

Gifts of one who loved me, —
‘T was high time they came;
When he ceased to love me,
Time they stopped for shame.

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MOTTOES TO “HISTORY.”

There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

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MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its laboring heart,
Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,
And hints the future which it owes.

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MOTTO TO “CIRCLES.”

Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

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MOTTO TO “NOMINALIST AND REALIST.”

In countless upward-striving waves
The moon-drawn tide-wave strives;
In thousand far-transplanted grafts
The parent fruit survives;
So, in the new-born millions,
The perfect Adam lives.
Not less are summer-mornings dear
To every child they wake,
And each with novel life his sphere
Fills for his proper sake.

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MY THOUGHTS

Many are the thoughts that come to me
In my lonely musing;
And they drift so strange and swift,
There’s no time for choosing
Which to follow, for to leave
Any, seems a losing.

When they come, they come in flocks,
As on glancing feather,
Startled birds rise one by one
In autumnal weather,
Waking one another up
From the sheltering heather.

Some so merry that I laugh,
Some are grave and serious,
Some so trite, their least approach
Is enough to weary us: —
Others flit like midnight ghosts,
Shrouded and mysterious.

There are thoughts that o’er me steal,
Like the day when dawning;
Great thoughts winged with melody
Common utterance scorning,
Moving in an inward tune,
And an inward morning.

Some have dark and drooping wings,
Children all of sorrow;
Some are as gay, as if today
Could see no cloudy morrow, —
And yet, like light and shade, they each
Must from the other borrow.

One by one they come to me
On their destined mission;
One by one I see them fade
With no hopeless vision;
For they’ve led me on a step
To their home Elysian.

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MOTTO TO “PRUDENCE.”

Theme no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young,
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.

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MOTTO TO “INTELLECT.”

Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals; —
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.

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MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

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MOTTO TO “CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.”

Hear what British Merlin sung,
Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
Usurp the seats for which all strive;
The forefathers this land who found
Failed to plant the vantage-ground;
Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
But wilt thou measure all thy road,
See thou lift the lightest load.
Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,
And thou, Cyndyllan’s son! beware
Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,
To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, —
Only the light-armed climb the hill.
The richest of all lords is Use,
And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
Drink the wild air’s salubrity:
Where the star Canope shines in May,
Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay.
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill, is cordial speech:
Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
Of all wit’s uses, the main one
Is to live well with who has none.
Cleave to thine acre; the round year
Will fetch all fruits and virtues here:
Fool and foe may harmless roam,
Loved and lovers bide at home.
A day for toil, an hour for sport,
But for a friend is life too short.

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MOTTO TO “NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.”

In the suburb, in the town,
On the railway, in the square,
Came a beam of goodness down
Doubling daylight everywhere:
Peace now each for malice takes,
Beauty for his sinful weeds,
For the angel Hope aye makes
Him an angel whom she leads.

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MOTTO TO “FATE.”

Delicate omens traced in air
To the lone bard true witness bare;
Birds with auguries on their wings
Chanted undeceiving things
Him to beckon, him to warn;
Well might then the poet scorn
To learn of scribe or courier
Hints writ in vaster character;
And on his mind, at dawn of day,
Soft shadows of the evening lay.
For the prevision is allied
Unto the thing so signified;
Or say, the foresight that awaits
Is the same Genius that creates.

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MOTTO TO “POWER.”

His tongue was framed to music,
And his hand was armed with skill,
His face was the mould of beauty,
And his heart the throne of will.

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MOTTO TO “ILLUSIONS.”

Flow, flow the waves hated,
Accursed, adored,
The waves of mutation:
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not;
Who seem to die live.
Flouse you were born in,
Friends of your spring-time,
Old man and young maid,
Day’s toil and its guerdon,
They are all vanishing,
Fleeing to fables,
Cannot be moored.
See the stars through them,
Through treacherous marbles.
Know, the stars yonder,
The stars everlasting,
Are fugitive also,
And emulate, vaulted,
The lambent heat-lightning,
And fire-fly’s flight.

When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation,
Beholding the shimmer,
The wild dissipation,
And, out of endeavor
To change and to flow,
The gas become solid,
And phantoms and nothings
Return to be things,
And endless imbroglio
Is law and the world, —
Then first shalt thou know,
That in the wild turmoil,
Horsed on the Proteus,
Thou ridest to power,
And to endurance.

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THE CUP OF LIFE IS NOT SO SHALLOW

The cup of life is not so shallow
That we have drained the best,
That all the wine at once we swallow,
And lees make all the rest.

Maids of as soft a bloom shall marry
As Hymen yet hath blessed,
And fairer forms are in the quarry
Than Angelo released.

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WHERE IS SKRYMIR? GIANT SKRYMIR?

Where is Skrymir? Giant Skrymir?
Come transplant the woods for me!
Scoop up yonder aged ash,
Centennial pine, mahogany beech,
Oaks that grew in the dark ages
Heedful, bring them, set them straight,
In sifted soil, before my porch;
Now turn the river on their roots,
So the new top shall not droop
His tall erected plume, nor a leaf wilt.

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SOUTH WIND

In the turbulent beauty
Of a gusty autumn day,
Poet in a wood-crowned headland
Sighed his soul away.
Farms the sunny landscape dappled,
Swan-down clouds dappled the farms,
Catde lowed in hazy distance
Where far oaks outstretched their arms.
Sudden gusts came full of meaning,
All too much to him they said; —
Southwinds have long memories,
Of that be none afraid.
I cannot tell rude listeners
Half the telltale South wind said,
T’would bring the blushes of yon maples
To a man and to a maid.

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THERE ARE BEGGARS IN IRAN AND ARABY

There are beggars in Iran and Araby,
Said was hungrier than all;
Men said he was a fly
That came to every festival,
Also he came to the mosque
In trail of camel and caravan,
Out from Mecca to Isphaban; —
Northward he went to the snowy hills, —
At court he sat in the grave divan.
His music was the south wind’s sigh,
His lamp the maiden’s downcast eye,
And ever the spell of beauty came
And turned the drowsy world to flame.
By lake and stream and gleaming hall,
And modest copse, and the forest tall,
Where’er he went the magic guide
Kept its place by the poet’s side.
Tell me the world is a talisman,
To read it must be the art of man;
Said melted the days in cups like pearl,
Served high and low, the lord and the churl;
Loved harebells nodding on a rock,
A cabin hung with curling smoke,
And huts and tents, nor loved he less
Stately lords in palaces,
Fenced by form and ceremony.

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QUOTH SAADI, WHEN I STOOD BEFORE

Quoth Saadi, when I stood before
Hassan the camel-driver’s door,
I scorned the fame of Timour brave, —
Timour to Hassan was a slave.
In every glance of Hassan’s eye
I read great years of victory;
And I, who cower mean and small
In the frequent interval
When Wisdom not with me resides,
Worship toil’s wisdom that abides;
I shunned his eye, — the faithful man’s,
I shunned the toiling Hassan’s glance.

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Translations

DANTE’S VITA NUOVA

THE NEW LIFE OF DANTE ALIGHIERI

I

In that part of the book of my memory before which little could be read, is found this title, The New Life begins. Under which rubric, I find written the words which it is my purpose to copy in this book, and if not all, at least their sense.

II

Nine times already after my birth was the heaven of light returned to the same point in its proper gyration, when to my eyes first appeared the gracious lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice by many who did not know her name. She had then been so long in this life that in her time the starry heaven had moved towards the East one of the twelve parts of a degree, so that she appeared to me as at the beginning of her ninth year, & I saw her about the end of mine and she appeared to me clothed in a very noble lowly colour and becoming red, girt & adorned in the mode which belonged to her tender youth. At that moment, I say verily the spirit of life which dwells in the secretest chamber of the heart did so quake that it appeared violently in my least pulses, and trembling said,

Ecce deus fortior me; veniens dominabitur mihi.
Behold a god stronger than I who cometh to rule me.

At that moment, the animal spirit which dwells in the chamber into which all the sensuous spirits carry their perceptions, began to marvel much, &, speaking specially to the spirits of sight, said,

Now hath appeared our Supreme Good.
Apparuit jam Beatitudo nostra.

At that moment, the natural spirit which dwells in that part where our nourishment is supplied, began to weep & weeping said,

Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps.
Wo is me I am henceforth to have my way no longer.

From that hour forth, I say, that, Love ruled my soul, which was so much disposed by him & he began to take over me so much lordship & governance, through the strength which my imagination gave to him, that it behoved me to do all his pleasure to the utmost, & he commanded me many times that I should seek to see this youngest angel; wherefore I in my boyhood many times went seeking her, & I saw her with such new & such praiseworthy manners that certainly those words of the Poet Homer might be spoken of her,

“She seemed not the daughter of a mortal, but of a god.”

And it was so that her image which continually abode with me, (was it the presumption of Love to subdue me) was always of so noble virtue that it never suffered Love to rule me without the faithful counsel of reason in matters wherein such counsel were good to hear. But since the controuling the passions & manners of so much youth may seem to some fabulous, I will quit these, & passing over many things which might be taken from the book where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under longer paragraphs.

III

When so many days were past that nine years were exactly completed after the forewritten appearance of this most gentle maid, — in the last of these days, it happened, that this wonderful lady appeared to me clothed in the purest white, in the middle between two gentlewomen who were of maturer age; & passing through a road turned her eyes towards that part where I was, very fearful, and by her ineffable courtesy which is today requited in the other world, saluted me virtuously, so that it appeared to me then that I saw all the limits of happiness. The hour when her sweetest salute arrived at me, was precisely the ninth of that day, and inasmuch as it was the first time that her words turned to arrive at my ears, I took so much sweetness, that, like one intoxicated, I departed from the company & withdrew to a solitary place of my chamber, & set myself to think on this most courteous one. And thinking of her, there came to me a sweet sleep in which appeared to me a marvellous vision, wherein I seemed to see in my chamber a cloud of the colour of fire, within which I discerned a figure of a signor of aspect fearful to the beholder.
And he appeared to have so much joy in himself, that it was wonderful, and he said many things, which I did not understand, except a few, among which I heard these words; I am thy lord.

In his arms appeared to me to sleep a person naked save that she was lightly infolded in a blood-red cloth, whom I beholding very attentively knew that she was the lady of peace, who had the day before deigned to salute me, & in one of his hands it appeared that he held something which burned wholly, & it seemed to me that he said to me these words;

Vide cor tuum.

And when he had remained some time it appeared to me that he waked her who slept, and so prevailed by his genius that he made her eat that thing which burned in her hand which she eat doubtfully. After a little while his joy turned into bitterest lamentation, and thus complaining he took again this lady in his arms, and with her he seemed to me to go towards heaven. Whence I suffered so great anguish that my weak sleep could not bear, so it broke, & I awaked. And immediately I began to reflect, & found that the hour in which this dream had appeared to me was the fourth of the night, so that it appeared plainly that it was the first hour of the nine last hours of the night. I thinking of this which had appeared to me proposed to make it known to many who were the famous poets (trovatori) in that time. And because I had already seen by myself the art of saying words in rhyme, I proposed to make a sonnet, in which I should salute all the faithful of love, & praying them that they would judge my vision, I should write them what I had seen in my dream, & I then begun this sonnet.

To each taken soul & gentle heart,
To whose sight comes the present word,
To the end that they may write again their thought
Greeting in the name of their lord, that is, Love.
Already was it the third hour
Of the time when every star is most bright,
When Love appeared to me suddenly
Whose substance seen made me tremble.
Glad seemed Love, holding
My heart in his hand, & in his arms had
My lady asleep rolled in a garment;
Then he waked her, and with that burning heart
Fed he her lowly trembling;
Then bewailing it, he seemed to go away.

This sonnet was answered by many & with different meanings; among which respondents was he whom I call first among my friends (Guido Cavalcanti). And he wrote this sonnet.

You have seen, in my judgment, every valour,
And every game, & every good which man feels,
As if you were in proof of a mighty lord
Who ruled the world of honour.
Then live in places where grief dies,
And hold reason in your pious mind
Yes go gently in dreams to the race
Who carry their heart without pain.
Seeing her carry the heart of you,
Death demands your lady,
Feeds on the living heart of her timid.
When it appeared to you that she went away grieving
It was the sweet dream which was completed
That its contrary came conquering it.

And this was the beginning of the friendship between me & him, when he knew that it was I that had sent this to him. The true meaning of the said sonnet was not seen then by any one, but now is manifest to the most simple.

IV

And after this vision my natural spirit began to be impeded in its operation because the soul was all given up to thinking of this most gentle one, whence I became in a little time after, of so frail & weak a condition, that many friends grieved at my face, and many full of envy persisted to know of me that which I wished to conceal altogether, from others, and I becoming sensible of the evil demand which they made me, through the will of love which commanded me according to the counsel of reason, answered them, that love was that which had governed me thus. I spoke of love because I carried in my face so many of his ensigns which could not be covered & when they asked on whose account this love had thus destroyed me I smiling looked at them & said nothing to them.

V

One day it happened that this most gentle one sat in a place where were heard words of the Queen of Glory, & I was in a place from whence I could see my chief joy, and in the midst between her & me in a right line sat a gentlewoman of very pleasant aspect who beheld many times with wonder my glances which appeared to terminate on her, whence many were informed of her looking. And so much was this regarded, that, on leaving that place I heard some one say near me, See how such a lady destroys the person of this man. And naming her, I heard that they spoke of her who was placed midway in the right line which begun from the most gentle Beatrice & terminated in my eyes. Then I comforted myself much, assuring myself that my secret was not communicated to others that day by my face, & immediately I thought of making of this gentlewoman a screen of the truth, and I carried this so well in a little time that my secret was believed to be known by many persons who spoke to me of it. Through this gentlewoman I concealed myself some years & months & to make it more credible to others, I made for her certain little pieces in rhyme, which it is not my purpose to write here, except insofar as they concern the most gentle Beatrice; and therefore I will leave them all, only I shall write one which appears to be in praise of her.

VI

I say that in the time when this gentlewoman was the screen of so much love, there arose on my part a wish to record the name of the most gentle, and to accompany it with many names of ladies, & specially with the name of this gentlewoman, and having taken the names of sixty the fairest women of the city, where my lady was placed by the most High Lord, I composed an epistle under the form of service, which I will not copy, & should not have mentioned except to say this, that composing it, it strangely happened that in no other number would the name of my lady stand, except in the ninth, among the names of these ladies.

VII

The gentlewoman through whom I had for some time concealed my inclination, happened to quit the abovementioned city & went into a distant country; I as it were frightened from my fine defence, greatly discomforted myself more than I should have believed beforehand, & thinking that if I should not speak somewhat dolorously of her departure, people would very soon become aware of my secret, I proposed to make a lament, in a sonnet which I will copy, because my lady was the immediate cause of certain words which are in the sonnet as appears to whoso understands it; and then I wrote this sonnet;

O ye who pass by the way of Love,
Attend & behold,
If any sorrow be great as mine.
And I pray only that you will hear me
And then imagine
If I am the lodging & the key of every grief.
Love, not truly by my small goodness
But by his own nobility
Placed me in a life so sweet & gentle
That I heard myself say secretly many times
Ah! by what worth
Does the heart so lightly possess this treasure?
Now have I lost all my presumption
Which arose out of the amorous treasure
Wherefore I remain poor
In a fashion, which to speak, breeds doubt.
So that wishing to do as those
Who through shame conceal their want,
I outwardly show a gladness
And within from the heart I pine & bewail.

VIII

After the departure of this gentlewoman, it was the pleasure of the Lord of the Angels to call to his glory a lady of very gentle countenance who was a great favourite in this city, whose body I saw lie without life in the midst of many ladies who lamented her. I also lamenting, proposed to myself to say some words of her death in guerdon of this, that I had once seen her with my lady; &, on that, I touched in the last part of the words which I wrote of her, as appears plainly to whoso understands it; and I said then these two sonnets; of which the first begins;

Lament lovers, since Love laments,
Seeing what cause he had to weep.
Love hears with pity ladies cry
Showing bitter grief in their eyes,
Because rough Death in gentle heart
Hath wrought his cruel work,
Spoiling that which the world praises
In a gentle dame, out of honour.
Hear how much horror Love felt,
Since I saw him lament in true form
Over the beautiful dead image;
And I looked toward the Heaven often
Where the gentle soul was already placed,
Who was a lady of so gay an aspect.
 and the second;
Rough Death, enemy of pity,
Ancient mother of grief,
Indisputable heavy judgment
Thou hast given matter of grief to the heart;
Wherefore I go sad.
The tongue wearies of blaming thee
And if thou wouldst make request for grace
It behoves that I tell
Your offence with every cruel injury;
Not because it is hidden from people
But to make angry at it
Whoso nourishes himself with Love henceforth.
From the world thou hast divided courtesy,
And that which in a lady is virtue to prize.
In gay youth
Thou hast destroyed amorous beauty
I will no more discover what dame she is
Except by her known virtues.
Whoso does not merit salvation
Let her never hope to have her company.

IX

Some days after the death of this lady, something occurred which required me to leave the city abovementioned, & to go towards those parts where was the gentlewoman who had been my defence. It chanced that my journey did not reach so far as to where she was, and although I was in the company of many according to the appearance, the going displeased me so that my sighs could not exhale the anguish which the heart felt, because I was departing from my felicity. And yet my sweetest lord who ruled me through the virtue of the most gentle lady, in my imagination appeared like a pilgrim lightly clad, & with coarse clothes, He seemed to me astonished & looked on the ground, except that sometimes his eyes turned to a beautiful running river, very clear, which ran along the road in which I walked. It seemed to me that Love called me, & said to me these words; “I come from that lady who has long been thy defence, & I know that her return will not be.

And therefore this heart which I made thee to have from her, I have with me & I carry it to a lady who shall be thy defence as this one was, (and he named her to me so that I knew her well) but notwithstanding if of these words I have spoken to thee, thou speakest anything, tell it in a fashion that by them may not be discerned the feigned love which thou hast shown to this one, & which it will behove thee to show to others.” And having said these words, this my imagination disappeared very suddenly through the large part which it appeared to me that Love had given me of himself. And, as if changed in countenance, I rode that day very thoughtful, &, attended by many sighs, on the next day I began thus this sonnet.

Riding the other day through a road
Sad at going where it displeased me
I found Love in the midst of the way
In the light dress of a pilgrim.
His semblance appeared mean
As if he had lost his lordship,
And sighing thoughtful came
So as not to see the people, his head down;
When he saw me, he called me by name,
And said, I come from the distant place
Where was your heart by my will,
And I bring it back to serve a new pleasure.
Then I took of him so great part
That he disappeared & I knew not how.

X

After my return I set myself to seek this lady whom my lord had named to me in the road of sighs &, that my story may be short, I say, that in a little time I made her my defence so much, that too many people spoke of her, beyond all the limits of courtesy, whereat I often was sorely grieved. And for this cause, that is, of this excessive fame, which appeared as if I had viciously defamed myself, that most gentle one who was the destroyer of all vices, & queen of the virtues, passing in some place, denied to me her sweetest salute, in which consisted all my peace. And digressing somewhat from the present argument, I wish to explain what her salutation operated virtuously in me.

XI

I say that when she appeared from any part, through the hope of her wonderful sweetness no enemy remained to me; also there was added to me a flame of charity, which made me pardon whoever had offended me. And if any one had demanded aught of me, my answer would have been only Love, with a face clothed in humility; and when she was at hand ready to salute, a spirit of Love destroying all the other sensuous spirits, advanced forth the weak spirits of sight and said to them, Go to honour your lady, & he remained in the place of them; and whoso had wished to know Love, could do so, beholding the tremor of my eyes. And when this gendest lady saluted me, not that Love was such a medium that he could shade from me the intolerable clearness, but he, as by excess of sweetness became such that my body, which now was all under his regiment, often moved itself as something heavily inanimate, so that it plainly appeared that in her salute dwelt my peace, which many times filled & overran my capacity.

XII

Now returning to the argument, I say, that when this joy was denied me, there came to me so much grief, that withdrawing from all company, I went into a lonely place to bathe the ground with bitterest tears. And, after some time, this weeping being stopped, I went into my chamber, where I could lament without being heard, and there calling pity from the Lady of all courtesy, & saying, O Love, aid thy faithful servant, — I slept like a beaten child worn out with crying. It happened in the midst of my sleep, that I seemed to see in my chamber beside me a youth clothed in whitest vestments & thinking much how much he looked at me there where I lay,
& when he had looked at me some time, it seemed to me, that, sighing he called me; & he said to me these words.

Fili mi, tempus est ut pretermictantur simulacra nostra.

Then it appeared to me that I knew him who called me thus, as many times in my sighs he had called me and considering him I thought that he wept piteously & he seemed to expect some word from me, whence taking courage began to speak thus with him. Lord of nobleness, why weepest thou? and he said to me these words; “I am, as it were, the centre of the circle, to whom all the parts of the circumference are alike. But not so, thou.”

Then thinking on his words, it seemed to me that he had spoken very obscurely, so that I forced myself to speak, & said these words to him, “What is that, my Lord, which you say with so much obscurity?” And he replied to me in the vulgar speech. “Do not ask more than is useful to you.” And yet I begun to speak with him of the salute which had been denied me. And asking the cause, it was answered in this manner. “This our Beatrice heard from certain persons that the lady whom I named to thee in the road of sighs received some displeasure from you. And therefore this most gentle one who is the contrary of all annoys, did not deign to salute your person, fearing lest it should be hurtful. Wherefore to the end that she may truly know something of the secret you have kept through so long a consuetude, I wish that you should say certain words, first, in which you comprise the power which I hold over you through her, & how you were hers, so early, from her infancy & of this call as witness him who knows it and pray him that he tell her it, & I who know this, willingly will converse with her of it, & by this she shall know your will, knowing which, she will understand the words of those deceived persons. Make these words as a means, so that thou shalt not speak to her immediately, which is not fit nor send them into any place without me where they can be heard by her, but adorn diem with sweet harmony in which I will be in all parts where it behoves;” and, having said these words, he disappeared, & my dream was broken.

Wherefore recollecting myself I found that this vision had appeared to me in the ninth hour of the day. And before I went out of the chamber, I proposed to make a ballad in which that was done which my lord had imposed on me, and
I made this Ballad;

Ballad, I wish that you should find Love
And with him go before my lady
So that my excuse which thou shalt sing
My lord may reason with her,
Thou ballad goest so courteously
That without company
Thou shouldest have courage in all parts;
But if thou wouldst go securely,
Find Love again first,
Who perhaps it is not good sense to leave
Because she who ought to hear thee
If she is, as I believe, in truth angry with me
If thou by him be not attended
Easily may do you a dishonour.
With sweet sound, when thou art with him,
Begin these words;
After thou hast sought pity,
Lady, he who sent me to you
If it please you
If there be excuse would that you should hear it of me
Love is here who through your beauty
Makes him, as he will, change face,
Then because he made him look at another
Think you not that his heart is changed.
Tell her; lady his heart is set
With such firm faith
That to serve you he has every thought ready;
Early was yours & he never swerved.
If she do not believe you
Tell her to ask Love whether it be true;
And at last make to her a humble prayer
(To pardon it if it were a trouble to her)
That she would command me by messenger that I should die.
And she shall see her good servant obey.
And say to her who is the key of all pity
Before I become free
That I shall know how to tell my good reason
Through the grace of my sweet notes;
Remain thou here with her
And tell of thy servant what you will.
And if she by thy prayer pardon him,
Cause that she announce to him a fair seeming peace.
My gentle ballad, when it pleases thee
Move in such form that you have honor.
Should any man confront me & say that he knew not to what purpose was this speaking in the second person, since the ballad is nothing else than these words which I speak, then I say, that this doubt I intend to solve & clear up in this little book, in part even more doubtful, and then he may here understand who doubts more than one who should confront me in the manner proposed.

XIII

After the abovementioned vision, having already spoken the words which Love had charged me to say, many & diverse thoughts began to combat & to try me, each, as it were, irresistible; among which thoughts, four hindered most the repose of life. One of them was this. Good is the lordship of Love since it draws the mind of the faithful from all vile matters. Another was this. The lordship of love is not good, since by how much faith the faithful yields, by so much the more sharp & grievous crises it requires him to pass. Another was this; The name of love is so sweet to hear, that it appears to me impossible that its proper operation should be in most things other than sweet, because names follow the things named, as it is written, Names are the consequences of things Nomina sunt consequentta rerurn. The fourth was this; The lady through whom Love binds thee thus, is not like other ladies, that she may lightly be removed from the heart. — And each assaulted me so long, that it made me stand like one who knows not by what way he shall take his road, who wishes to go & knows not his path. And if I thought of wishing to seek a common passage for them, that is, one in which they should all agree, this was very unpleasing to me, that is, to cry out & to throw myself into the arms of pity. And remaining in this state, there came to me a willingness to write rhymes and, I then said this sonnet;

All my thoughts speak of Love
And have in them so great variety,
That one makes me wish his power,
Another foolish talks of his valour,
Another hopeful brings me grief,
Another makes me complain often,
And they agree only in asking pity.
Trembling with fear which is in the heart.
Therefore I know not what theme to take.
And I would speak; and I know not what to say;
Thus I find myself in amorous errour
And if with all I would make agreement
It would need that I should call my enemy
My lady Pity who defends me

XIV

After the battle of these different thoughts it happened that this most gentle one was in a place where many gentle ladies were assembled, to which place I was conducted by a friendly person thinking to do me a great pleasure, inasmuch as he led me where so many ladies displayed their beauties, wherefore I, not knowing whither I was led, & confiding in the person who was one that had led his friend to the end of life, said to him, Why are we come to these ladies? Then he said, that he did thus that they should be worthily served. It is true that here they were gathered to the company of a gentlewoman who was that day married, and, therefore, according to the custom in that city, it behoved that they should give her their company in the first sitting down at table in the house of her bridegroom. So that I, believing that I did this friend a pleasure, made myself ready to stand at the sendee of these ladies in his company; and in the end of my making ready, it appeared to me that I felt a strange tremor begin on the left side of my breast, & extend itself suddenly through all parts of my body. Then I say that I turned my person feignedly to a picture which surrounded this house, & fearing lest others should be aware of my trembling, I lifted my eyes, & beholding the ladies, I saw among them the most gentle Beatrice.

Then were my spirits destroyed through the force with which Love took me, seeing himself in such nearness to the most gentle lady, that there did not remain in life any but the spirits of sight, & even these remained outside of their organs, because Love wished to stand in their most noble place to see the wonder of this lady. And as soon as I was other than at first, I was much grieved for these little spirits (spiritelli) who lamented aloud, & said, If this one had not dazzled us out of our places, we could have remained to see the marvel of this dame, as our peers also remain. I say that many of these ladies becoming aware of my transfiguration, began to wonder, &, discoursing, bantered concerning me and that most gentle one. Therefore the friend of good faith took me by the hand & leading me out of the sight of these ladies, asked me what ailed me? Then I answered somewhat, & rallied my dead-like spirits, & these fugitives being returned to their seats, I said to my friend these words,— “I have had my feet in that part of the life beyond, from which there is no more power in the understanding to return.” And having parted with him, I returned to my chamber of tears, where, weeping & ashamed, I said to myself, If this lady knew my condition, I do not believe that she would so mistake my person; rather would she surely have much pity on me. And remaining in this grief, I proposed to speak some words, in which, addressing her, I might signify to her the cause of my transfiguration; & I would say that I know well that she knows me not, & that if she knew me, I believe that pity of it would come to others, & I proposed to tell her them (the words or verses) desiring that they would come by chance into her audience, & then I said this sonnet;

With the other dames you deride my sight
And do not know the lady who moves me
That I assumed to you a strange face
When I beheld your beauty.
If you knew it, your compassion could not
Hold out longer against me the accustomed trial
That when Love found me so near to you
He took courage & so much security
That haughtily among my tremulous spirits,
Some he slew, & some he drove out,
So that he alone remained to see you.
Wherefore I change myself into the form of another
But not so that I do not well taste now
The woes of the tormented fugitives.

XV

After the new transfiguration, there came to me a strong thought, which rarely left me, nay which was always with me; since you came to so ridiculous appearance, when you were near this lady, why then do you seek to see her? If you were asked anything by her, what wouldst thou have to answer?

Granting that thou shouldest have each of thy powers liberated, in as much as thou shouldest answer her. And to this replied another humble thought, & said, I would tell her that so soon as I imagine her wonderful beauty, so soon have I the desire to behold her, which is of so much force that it kills & destroys in my memory all which can rise against it, & therefore these past sufferings do not restrain me from seeking the view of her. Therefore, I, moved by such thoughts, proposed to say certain words in which excusing myself to her with such passion, I described also how it was with me in her presence; & I said then this sonnet;

Whatever in the mind hinders dies
When I come to behold you, o beautiful joy,
And when I am near you, I hear Love
Who says, Fly, if you are loath to die.
The face shows the colour of the heart
Fainting where it leans;
And through the drunkenness of great fear
The stones seem to cry, Die, die;
It were a sin in whom should then see me
If he should not comfort the astonished soul
Only showing that he grieved for me
For pity which shall kill your contempt
Which cries in the sad expression
Of the eyes which desire their own death

XVI

After that which I had said in this sonnet I had an inclination to say also words in which I might say the four things also abovementioned concerning my state, which it did not seem to me I had yet made known. The first of which is, that, often I grieved when my memory moved the fancy to imagine what Love had made me become. The second is, that, Love often suddenly assailed me so strongly that there remained no other life in me except the thought which spoke of this lady.

The third; that, when this battle of love so assaulted me, I moved myself, as it were, all discoloured, to see this lady, believing that the sight of her would defend me from this array, forgetting all which had befallen me through approaching so much gentleness. The fourth is, how such a sight not only did not defend me, but finally discomfited the little life I had; and therefore I said this sonnet;

Often comes to mind
The dark quality Love gives me
And such pity rises, that often
I say, Ah! Happened it so to another?
For suddenly Love assaults me
So that life almost leaves me
A living spirit only remains
(And this remains, because he speaks of you)
Then I force myself to seek aid
And thus dead-like & without strength
I come to see you trusting to be healed
And if I lift my eyes to look at you
In the heart begins a quaking
Which drives the soul from the pulses.

XVII

After I had said these three sonnets in which I addressed this lady, because they were, as it were, reporters of all my condition, believing that I should be silent & say no more, since I seemed to me to have expressed myself sufficiently. Since then I refrained from speaking to her. It behoved me to take new & nobler argument than the past, &, because the occasion of my new subject is delightful to hear, I will relate it as briefly as I can.

XVIII

Whereas many persons by my countenance had become acquainted with my secret, certain ladies who were met for their mutual entertainment, knew well my heart, because each of them had been present at my many discomfitures, & I passing near them as led by my chance, was called by one of these gentlewomen and she who spoke to me was a lady of very graceful speech, so that when I joined them, & saw well that my most gentle lady was not there, recollecting myself, I saluted them, & inquired their pleasure. The ladies were many, among whom were some who laughed among themselves: others of them looked at me, awaiting what I should say: others of them spoke apart, of whom one turning her eyes towards me, & calling me by name, said these words; “To what end lovest thou this lady of thine, since thou canst not sustain her presence? Tell us what is the end of such a love, which should be a thing wholly new.” And when she had spoken these words, not only she but all the others began to listen for my reply. Then I said these words; Ladies, the end of my love was truly the salute (saluto) of this lady, of whom perhaps you have heard, and therein abides the happiness of the end of all my desires; but since it pleases her to deny it to me, my lord Love (I thank him for it) has placed all my firmness in that which cannot be taken away. Then these ladies began to speak among themselves, & if sometimes we see fall water mixed with beautiful snow, so seemed it to me to hear their words come forth mingled with sighs; and after they had spoken awhile apart, again said to me that lady who had first spoken, these words; “We pray thee that thou wouldest tell us where is thy felicity?” And I, answering her, said thus much; “In those words which praise my lady.” Then answered me this one who spoke before, “If thou toldest me truly, those words which thou saidest describing thy condition, thou wouldst have turned with another intention.”

Whereupon, I thinking on these words, as one ashamed, departed from them, & came away speaking to myself; ‘Since there is so much felicity in those words which praise my lady, why have I used others,’ and therefore I proposed to take for the argument of my speaking evermore this which should be the praise of this most gentle one, & thinking much on that point it seemed to me that I had undertaken too high argument for me. So that I dared not begin, & so waited several days, with desire to speak & with fear to commence.

XIX

It then chanced that passing through a road along which ran a very clear brook, I felt such willingness to speak that I began to think of the manner I used and I thought that to speak of her, was not fit; but that I ought to speak to ladies in the second person, and not to every lady, but only to those who are gentle, & who are not merely women. Then I say, that my tongue spoke as if moved by itself, & I said then “Ladies who apprehend love.” These words I laid up in my mind with great joy thinking to take them for my beginning; therefore being afterwards returned to the abovenamed City, & thinking for some days, I began the regular ode in the usual manner, as follows.

Ladies, who have heard of Love,
I wish to speak with you of my Lady,
Not because I think I can perfect her praise
But to discourse that I may relieve my mind;
I say, that thinking on her worth
Love so gently taught me to feel
That if I then did not lose my fire
I would put all men in love by my speech.
And I do not wish to speak so proudly
That I might become vile through fear,
But I will treat of her gentle estate
For her sake lightly,
Ladies & amorous maidens with you,
Since it is not fit to speak to others of her.
An Angel calls in the divine intellect,
And says, Sire, in the world is seen
A living wonder, which issues
From a soul which even up hither shines.
Heaven which has no other defect
Than wanting her, asks her of the Lord.
And each saint asks Mercy
Only pity pleads on our part.
That the Lord says who understands it of my lady;
Dear children now suffer me in peace;
Pleases me that your hope is so great,
There is one who expects to lose her
And who will say in Hell to the Ill-born,
I have seen the hope of the Blessed.
My Lady is desired in highest heaven.
Now I proceed to make you know her virtue:
I say, that whoso would seem a gentle lady,
Go with her; since when she goes in the road
Love casts in evil hearts a frost
So that every thought of theirs freezes,
And whatever can stand there to see,
Must become a noble thing, or die.
And when any one finds that he is worthy
To see her, he proves his virtue,
For that happens to him that imparts health
And so humbles him that he forgets all sin.
Yet has God, through greater grace, given,
That he cannot end ill, who has spoken to her.
Love said of her; A mortal thing —
How can it be so adorned, & so pure?
Then he beheld her & swore by himself
That God did not mean to make a new thing.
Color of pearl in her form, as
It befits a lady to have, not out of measure,
She has as much goodness as nature can;
By her pattern beauty is tried;
From her eyes, as she moves them,
Proceed spirits of love inflamed,
Which enkindle the eyes of whoso watches her,
And pass through, so that each finds the heart.
You see Love painted in the face
So that none can behold her steadily.
Canzone! I know that you will go speaking
To many dames, when I shall send you forth.
Now I warn you, since I have trained you up
For the daughter of Love, young & smooth,
That where you go, you say praying,
‘Direct me to go, since I am sent
To her for whose praise I am adorned’;
And if you will not go as a vain one,
Nor remain where are mean people,
Endeavour if you can to be made known
Alone to a lady, or to a courteous man,
Who shall swiftly deserve thee.
Thou wilt find Love; with him, her;
Commend me to him as you ought.

XX

After this sonnet had got abroad a little, because a friend had heard it, his desire moved him to pray me that I would tell him what is Love, having, perhaps, through the words he had heard, a hope of me beyond what was due. Then I thinking that after such a piece, it would be fine to discourse somewhat, of love, & thinking that my friend should be served, I proposed to speak words in which I should treat of love, & then I said this sonnet.

Love & the gentle heart are one thing;
As the Sage in his precept has it;
And you may dare be one without the other,
As well as a rational soul without reason.
Nature, when it is amorous, makes
Love the Sire, the heart for his abode
Within which sleeping he reposes
As little and as long as he will.
Beauty then appears in wise woman,
Which pleases the eyes, so that within the heart
Is born desire of the pleasant object,
And so abides in it,
That it causes the spirit of Love to awake.
And the like does a valiant man, in a woman.

XXI

After I had treated of Love in the rhyme aforesaid, there came to me the wish to speak words also in praise of this most gentle one, by which I might show how, through her, this love awoke, & how not only it awoke where it had slept, but where it is not in energy & there working wonderfully, made it appear; and then I said;

In her eyes my Lady carries Love,
Because she makes that noble which she looks upon.
Where she passes, every man turns to see her,
And whom she salutes, his heart quakes,
So that looking down, his whole countenance is changed,
And on every fault of his sighs.
Flees before her, all anger, & pride.
Aid me, Ladies, to do her honour,
Every sweetness, every lowly thought
Is born in the heart of him who hears her speak,
Therefore is he blessed who first sees her.
How she looks when she smiles a little,
Cannot be told, nor held in the mind,
So new & so gentle a miracle is it.

XXII

Not many days after this, it pleased that glorious Lord who refused not himself to die, that he who was the father of so great a marvel as this most noble Beatrice, departing out of this life should ascend to the eternal glory. Therefore, because such departure is woeful to those who remain, and were his friends, and there is no friendship so close as that of a good father with a good child, and this lady was at the summit of goodness, and her father, as many believed, and as was true, was good in a high degree, it is manifest that this lady was bitterly full of grief, & when, according to the custom of the city, ladies with ladies & men with men assembled there, where this Beatrice piteously lamented, — I seeing so many ladies return from her, heard them speak their words of this most gentle one, how she lamented, among which words I heard them say, “Indeed she wept so that whoever saw her might die with pity.” Then these ladies passed by, & I remained in so great sadness that some tears then bathed my face; which I concealed, covering my eyes often with my hands; and if I had not expected to hear again of her, since I was in place where most of those ladies passed who came from her, I should have concealed myself immediately when my tears came, & yet tarrying longer in the same place, ladies also passed near me conversing together in these words, “Which of us can ever be glad, who have heard this lady speak so piteously?” After these came others, saying, “This one weeps neither more nor less than if he had seen her as we saw her.” Others then said of me, “You shall see this one so changed that he does not appear to be himself.” And thus these ladies passing, I heard their words of her & of me (in this manner I have set down), thinking whereupon, I proposed to say such words as I might worthily find occasion, in which words I comprised all which I had heard from these ladies, and, since I should willingly have questioned them, if it had not been blameable, I took occasion to speak as if I had, & as if they had answered me, and I made two sonnets; and in the first I ask whatever I had to ask, & in the other I report their answer, taking that which I heard from them as they would have said to me in reply; & I began the first;

Ye who wear a lowly semblance
With downcast eyes showing grief,
Whence come you that your colour
Appears like that of stone?
Saw ye our gentle Lady,
Her face bathed in the pity of Love?
Tell me, ladies, what the heart says
Since I see you go with honest action,
And if ye come from so great piety,
Please you to stay here with me a little,
And hide nothing of her from me.
I see tears in your eyes,
And I see you come so disfigured
That my heart quakes to see you so.

The second;

Art thou he who has discoursed with us often
Of our lady, alone speaking to us?
Thy voice resembles him well
But thy sad form appears of quite another.
Ah! why weepest thou so cordially,
That you compel others to pity thee?
Hast thou seen her weep, that thou canst not
Conceal at all thy woful mind?
Leave us to weep, & to go disconsolate,
(And it were sin, if we should not,)
Who in her sorrow have heard her speak.
She has in her face sorrow so wise
That who would have beheld her
Would fall dead before her.

XXIII

After this, in a few days, it chanced that in (some) part of my body there fell on me a grievous infirmity, from which I suffered for many days the bitterest pain, which brought me to such debility, that I was forced to remain like those who cannot move themselves. In the ninth day, feeling my pain as it were intolerable, there came to me a thought of my lady. And when I had thought a little of her, & I returned to think of my debilitated life, and seeing how frail was its duration, even if I were well, I began to bewail myself of so much misery, and, deeply sighing, I said to myself, Of necessity, it must be that the most gentle Beatrice will some time die; and then
I felt such an amazement of fear that I closed my eyes, and began to work like a raving person, & to imagine in this manner. In the commencement of the wandering which my fancy made, appeared to me certain faces of ladies dishevelled, who said to me, “Thou too shalt die;” and after these ladies appeared certain different faces horrible to see, who said to me, “Thou art dead.” Thus my fancy beginning to wander, I came to that pass, that I knew not where I was, & I seemed to see ladies go dishevelled, weeping in a manner wonderfully sad, & it appeared to me that I saw the sun darkened, so that the stars showed themselves in such a colour that I thought they also wept, & very great earthquakes, & I, admiring in such a fancy, & greatly afraid, imagined that some friend came & said to me, “Now knowest thou not thy wonderful lady is departed from this world?” Then began I to weep very piteously, & not only wept in fancy, but I wept with my eyes, bathing them with real tears. I imagined that I looked towards the heaven & I seemed to see a multitude of angels who returned upward, & had before them a very white little cloud, & I thought these angels sang gloriously, and the words of their song I seemed to hear were these, Osanna in excelsis. And others heard I none. Then it seemed to me that the heart, where so much love was, said to me, True it is that our lady lies dead; and through this I seemed to go to see the body in which that most noble soul had been, & so strong was the erroneous fancy that it showed me this lady lying dead, & I thought that ladies dressed her, her head, namely, with a white veil; And I thought her face had such an aspect of humility, that it seemed to me that it said, “I am to see the beginning of peace.” In this imagination I felt such humility from beholding her, that I called Death, & said, “Sweetest Death, come to me, and be not rough with me, since thou oughtest to be gentle, seeing where thou hast been. Now come to me who desire thee much. Thou seest that I already wear thy complexion. And when I had seen fulfilled all the doleful mysteries which are used towards the bodies of the dead, I thought I returned to my chamber, & here I looked towards Heaven, & so strong was my fancy, that weeping I began to say with true voice, “Oh beautiful soul, how happy is he who sees thee!” And I saying these words with dolorous sobs, and calling death that he should come to me, a young & gentle lady who was by my bedside believing that my weeping & my words were only for the pain of my infirmity, began to lament with fear, and other ladies who were near the chamber, having compassion of me who wept, & of the lamentation which they saw this lady make, causing her to depart from me, (she who was my nearest blood-relation,) they came towards me to wake me, believing that I was dreaming, & they bade me sleep no more, & not to disorder myself, & on their thus speaking to me the strong fantasy ceased at the moment when I would say, “O Beatrice! blessed mayest thou be!”, and I had already said, “O Beatrice!” And recovering myself, I opened my eyes & saw that I was deceived, and as soon as I had called this name, my voice was so broken with the sob of grief, that these ladies could not understand me, (as I believe.) Add, that I waked, and was much ashamed, although through some admonition of love I turned myself from them, and when they saw me, they began to say, He appears as dead, & to say apart, Let us devise how to comfort him. Then they said many things to comfort me, & sometimes they inquired whereof I had had fear; Then I being somewhat reassured, and the imaginary disaster understood by me, I answered them, I will tell you what I have suffered.
Then I began from the beginning, & told them unto the end what I had seen, suppressing the name of this most gentle one. Then afterwards, being healed of this infirmity, I proposed to speak words of this which had befallen me, since it seemed to me an amorous thing to hear, & so I said it in this canzone.

A gentle dame & young
Well adorned with human gentleness
Who was there where I often invoked death
Seeing my eyes full of sorrow
And hearing my vain words
Was moved with fear to tears.
And other ladies who were apprised by me
For what she lamented with me
Made her depart
And approached to make me hear
One said Do not sleep
And one said Why do you grieve
Then I left my new fancy
Invoking the name of my lady
My voice was so mournful
So broken with anguish & tears
That I alone heard the name in my heart
And with looks of shame
That overspread my face
Love made me turn towards them
And such was my colour
As the speaking of the death of others brings.
Ah let us comfort this one
Said one to the other softly
And they said often
What seest thou that thou faintest
And when I was a little recovered
I said, Ladies I will tell it you.
While I thought on my frail life
And saw how short its term is,
Love pitied me in the heart where he dwells,
Because my soul was so sad
That sighing I said in my thought
It will befall that my lady will die.
Thence I took such dismay
That my eyes closed, being weighed down
And my spirits were so discouraged
That they went wandering each his way
Then given up to imagination
Out of knowledge, out of truth,
Faces of afflicted ladies appeared to me
Who said to me, Thou wilt die, thou wilt die,
Then I saw many vague forms
In the vain imagination in which I was
And I seemed to be I know not where
And to see ladies go dishevelled
Weeping & lamenting
Who shot up flames of sadness
Then methought gradually
The sun was darkened & the moon appeared
And they wept, he and she.
The birds fell flying thro the air
And the earth quaked
And a man appeared to me pale & faint
Saying What dost thou knowest thou not
Thy lady is dead who was so fair?
I lifted my eyes bathed in tears
And saw what seemed a shower of manna
Angels who returned up into heaven
And they bore a little cloud before them
After which they cried Hosanna
And if they had said more I would tell you
Then said Love I hide it from you no more
Come & see thy lady who lies dead.
The fallacious imagination
Led me to see my dead lady
And when I had seen her
Methought ladies covered her with a veil
And she bore in her looks true lowliness
Which seemed to say I am in peace.
I became in grief so humble
Seeing in her such finished humility
That I said Death I hold thee very gentle
Thou shouldst ever be a delicate thing
Since thou dwellest in my lady
And thou oughtest to have pity & not disdain.
See I come to thee with such desire
To be of thine that I resemble thee in faith
Come since the heart seeks thee
Then I departed every grief being fulfilled
And when I was alone
I said looking towards the other kingdom
Blessed, o beautiful soul, is whoever sees thee.
Ladies, you called me then, I thank you.

XXIV

After this vain imagination, it happened one day that I sitting thoughtful in some place, felt a quaking commence in my heart as if I had been in the presence of this lady, then I say that there came to me an imagination of Love, who appeared to come from that place where my lady stood, & I thought that he said in my heart, “See thou bless the day when I took thee, since thou oughtest to do it,” and certainly my heart seemed so glad that it did not appear to me to be my heart, through its new condition; and a little after, these words which my heart said to me with the tongue of love, I saw come towards me a gentle lady who was of famous beauty, and was long since the wife of my first friend (Guido Cavalcanti). The name of this lady was Giovanna, save that through her beauty, as some believe, the name of Primavera (The Spring) was bestowed on her, & so was she called.

And looking near her, I saw come the wonderful Beatrice. These ladies came near me, one after the other, and I thought that Love spoke in my heart & said, “This first one is named Primavera, only for this coming of today, since I moved the bestower of her name to call her also Primavera, because prima verra (she shall first see) the day when Beatrice shall show herself according to the imagination of her faithful servant; and if I also wish to consider her name to signify that she is what (the Spring) Primavera is.” And then I thought that I said other words to myself, that “whoever wishes to consider subtilly this Beatrice, would call her Love, through the strong resemblance which she has to me,” whereupon I afterwards musing, proposed to write in rhyme to my first friend, suppressing certain words which it seemed fit to omit, I thinking that also his heart would admire the beauty of that gentle primavera (spring), and I said this sonnet;

I felt awaken within my heart
An amorous spirit which slept,
Then saw! Love come from far
So cheerful that hardly I knew him
Saying, Bethink thee to do me honour;
And at each word, he smiled;
And my lord remaining with me a little while,
I looking in that quarter whence he came,
Saw Mona Vanna and Mona Bice
Come towards that place where I was,
The one marvel after the other;
It is as if my mind said to me again,
Love said to me, This is Primavera,
And this is called Love, who so resembles me.

XXV

Could any person capable of clearing up these things, here doubt of that which I say of Love, as if it were a thing by itself, & not only an intelligent substance, but as if it were a corporeal substance, which in reality is false, since Love is not by itself as a substance but is an accident in a substance, and as I may say of it, as if he were a body, nay, as if he were a man, appears from three things which I say of him. I say that I saw him come; and to come imports locomotion, and, according to the philosopher, body alone can be locomotive. If it appear that I rank Love as a body, I say also of it, that he laughs, & that he speaks, which things seem to be proper to man, especially laughter, & therefore it seems I make him a man. To clear this matter, as far as the present necessity requires, we must first understand, that anciently there were no speakers of Love in the vernacular tongue, on the contrary, the speakers of love were certain poets in the Latin tongue, (among us, I say) that happened which happened in other nations, and still happens, that as in Greece not vernacular but lettered poets handled these things, and not many years have passed since those vernacular poets appeared who speak rhyme in the vernacular; so much is to be said of verses in Latin (if with any adequateness & mark) that there is too little time; and if we wish to regard the Occitan dialect (Langue d’Oc) or the Northern French (Langue d’Oui) we do not find these things before the present time, for five hundred years.
And the reason why some conspicuous persons had the fame of knowledge & poetry is that they were the first (writers) in the Northern French (Langue d’Oui). And the first who began to speak as a vernacular poet, did so, because he wished to make his mistress understand his words, to whom latin verses were not intelligible. And this is against those who rhyme on other than amatory subjects, because that mode of speaking was first used to speak of Love. Therefore, since to poets may be conceded a greater license of speech than to prose speakers, and these speakers in rhyme are nothing else than vernacular poets, it is fit & reasonable that they should be indulged in a greater liberty of speech than other vernacular speakers. Therefore if any figure or rhetorical trope is conceded to poets, it is conceded to the rhymers. If then we find that the poets have addressed inanimate things as if they had sense or reason, & have made them speak together & not only things true, but things not true, that is, have spoken of things which cannot speak, & have said that many accidents speak, as if they were substances & men, it is fit that the speaker in rhyme should do the like, not indeed without reason, but with reason, which might be expressed in prose. That the poets have spoken in this manner appears by Virgil, who says that Juno, that is, a goddess unfriendly to the Trojans, spoke to Æolus, lord of the winds, as in the first of the Æneid; Æole namque tibi, &c and that this lord replied;

Tuus, o regina, quid optes
Explorare labor; mihi jussa capessere fas est

In the same poet, an inanimate thing speaks to animated things, in the Second of the Æneid;

Dardanidae duri In Lucan, an animated thing speaks to an inanimate;
Multum Roma tamen debes civilibus armis.

In Horace, a man speaks to his own knowledge as to another person, and not only are the words those of Horace, but he speaks them as out of the midst of Homer in his Ars Pôetica;

Dic mihi Musa virum.

In Ovid, Love speaks as if it were a human person, in the beginning of the book called The Remedy of Love;

Bella mihi video, bella parantur, ait.

And hence it is manifest to whosoever hesitates at any part of this my little book, & provided that some coarse person do not take a license from it, I say that neither the poets speak thus without reason, nor ought the rhymers to speak thus not having some reason in them of that which they say. Since great shame would accrue to him who should rhyme things under the guise of a trope or rhetorical figure, &, being interrogated, should not know how to strip his words of such a garment in a guise that they should have a true meaning. And this my first friend & I knew very well those persons who rhymed so absurdly.

XXVI

That most gentle lady of whom we have discoursed in the preceding words, came into so great grace of the people, that when she passed through the street persons ran to see her, whence a miserable joy came to me, and when she was near any one, so much honour came into that person’s heart, that he dared not lift up his eyes nor reply to her salute. And of this, many as witnesses could testify to what was incredible.

She, crowned & clothed in humility, went showing no glorying in that which she saw or heard. Many said, when she had passed, “This is not a woman, but is like one of the most beautiful angels of heaven.” Others said; “This is a wonder, & blessed be the Lord who knows how to work so wonderfully.” I say that she showed herself so gentle & so full of charms, that those who saw her felt in themselves an excellent beauty and so sweet that they did not know how to express nor was there any one who could look at her who at first without sighs. These & more wonderful things proceeded from her well & virtuously. Wherefore I thinking thus wishing to take up again the pen in her praise, proposed to speak words in which I should give to understand her wonderful & excellent works to the end that not only such as could see her with eyes, but also others might know of her what I could make known by words & then I said this sonnet.

So gentle & so gracious appears
My Lady when she salutes others,
That every tongue trembling becomes mute,
And the eyes dare not behold her.
She goes on hearing herself praised
Benignly clothed with humility
And it seems that she is something descended
From heaven to show a miracle in earth.
She shows herself pleasing to whoso beholds her
That she sends through his eyes a sweetness to the heart
Which none can apprehend who does not taste it;
And it seems that from her lips proceeds
A soft spirit, full of Love,
Which goes to the soul, saying, Sigh.

I say that this my lady came into such grace that not only was she honoured & praised, but through her were many honoured & praised. And I seeing that, & wishing to make it known to such as saw it not, proposed also to speak words in which this should be signified, & then I said this sonnet.

He sees perfectly all wellbeing
Who sees my lady among ladies
Those who go with her are holden
To render thanks to God for her beautiful grace.
And her beauty is of such virtue
That no envy proceeds from it to others
Rather it makes them go with her clothed
With the gentleness of love & of faith
The sight of her makes everything humble
And does not make her alone pleasing
But each through her receives honour
And in her acts she is so gentle
That no one can recall her to mind
Without sighing in the sweetness of Love.

XXVII

After this I begun to think one day on what I had said of my lady in the two preceding sonnets, & considering that I had not spoken of that which in the present dme wrought in me it seemed to me that I had spoken the truth defectively, & therefore I proposed to add words in which I should say how her virtue wrought in me & not thinking that this could be told in the shortness of a sonnet I begun this canzone.

So long has Love held me
And trained me to his lordship
That as it was strong in me at first
So now it remains sweet at my heart,
Therefore when his courage so seizes me,
That it seems the spirits flee away,
Then my frail soul feels
Such sweetness that my face grows pale.
Then Love in me takes so much virtue
That he makes my spirits go speaking
And they issue forth calling
My lady to give me more favor;
This happens wherever she sees me,
And so humble is she that you would not believe it.

XXVIII

How is the populous city become solitary and she is a widow who was queen of nations. I was still in the preparation of this canzone & had completed this stanza abovewritten when the Lord of justice called this most gentle one to glorify, under the sign of the Queen, the Blessed Mary, Himself, whose name was always in the utmost reverence in the words of this Beatrice. And although it might be grateful here to say somewhat of her departure from us, it is not my design to treat it here for three reasons; first, that such is not the present argument if we will respect the proem which precedes this book. Secondly that even if it were within our present design yet my tongue would not be sufficient to treat that as it ought to be treated; Thirdly, that supposing both the first & the second, it is not fit that I should treat of that which being treated would require that I should be a praiser of myself, which thing is entirely blameable in whatsoever person.

And therefore I leave such a discourse to another commentator. Nevertheless since several times the number nine has occurred in the foregoing words, whence it seems that it was not without reason & in her departure that number seems to have had much reason, it may behove us here to say something as far as belongs to the subject. Wherefore I will say first how it had place in her departure & then will assign some reason why this number was so friendly to her.

XXIX

I say that her soul departed, (according to the time-measure of Italy) in the first hour of the ninth day of the month: and according to the measure of Syria she departed in the ninth month of the year since the first month there is Tismin which with us is October, & according to our measure, she departed in that year of our era (that is, in that year of the Lord,) in which the perfect number was completed nine times in that century of the world in which she was placed, and she was of the thirteenth century of Christians. And this may be one reason of it. Since according to Ptolemy, & according to the Christian truth there be nine heavens which revolve, and according to the faith of Astrology these heavens are operative here below according to their united habitude, this number was friendly to her, to give to understand that in her nativity all the nine moveable heavens went perfectly together; this is one reason of that. But more subtilly thinking, according to the ineffable truth, this number was herself, I speak by similitude, & that I mean thus.

The number three is the root of nine since, without any number, multiplied by itself it makes nine as we see plainly that three times three make nine. Then if three by itself is the factor of nine, and the (factor or) maker of miracles is three, that is, Father, Son, & Holy Spirit which are three & one. This lady was accompanied by this number of nine, to give to understand, that she was a nine, that is a miracle, whose root that is of the miracle, is only that wonderful Trinity. Perhaps also by a more subtle person this would appear in more subtle reason; but this is what I see, & what pleases me more.

XXX

After this most gentle lady had departed from this world this city remained as it were a widow & despoiled of all dignity. Wherefor I also lamenting in this desolate city wrote to the princes of the land somewhat of her estate. And if any one should blame me that I do not here set down the words which follow what I here quote, I excuse myself because my design was not from the beginning to write otherwise than for the people. Therefore since the words which follow those which are quoted, are all latin, it would be out of my design, if I wrote them and the like intention I know that this my first friend had, to whom I write, this is, since I wrote to him only in the vernacular.

XXXI

After my eyes had for some time wept & were so wearied that I could not relieve my sadness I thought of relieving it by some sad words & then I proposed to make a canzone in which lamenting I conversed of her, my grief for whom was made the destroyer of my life, & I begun

Eyes grieving for pity at heart
Have suffered the pain of tears
So that they remain vanquished
Now if I wish to relieve the woe
Which little by little leads me to death
It behoves me to speak
And because I remember that I spoke
Of my lady whilst she lived
Gentle ladies willingly with you
I will not speak to others
Than to a gentle heart which is a lady
And I will then say of her weeping
That suddenly she has gone to heaven
And has left Love grieving with me.
Beatrice is gone into high heaven
Into realms where the angels have peace
And stands with them & you ladies has she left
Not there has the quality of cold rapt her
Nor that of heat, as it has rapt others,
But it was her great benignity
Which shining from her humility
Passed the heavens with so much virtue
That it made the Eternal Sire wonder
So that sweet desire
Came to him to summon so much health
And made her come to him from here below,
Because he saw that this troublesome life
Was not worthy of so gentle a being.
Parted from her beautiful person
Full of grace the gentle soul
And mounted glorious into worthy place.
Who weeps her not when he speaks of her
Has heart of stone, so wicked & base
That a benign spirit could not enter there.
There is not in a bad heart so high genius
That can imagine anything of her,
And therefore such will not weep for her.
But sadness & sobs of grief
And a death of sorrow
And a life despoiled of all solace
Comes to such as at any time saw in thought
What she was, and how she is taken.
My sighs give me deep anguish
When thought in the deep mind
Brings to me that which has cut my heart.
And often thinking on death
Comes to me a desire of it so sweet
That it changes the color of my face
When the thought of her becomes fixed
Pain attacks me from every side
That I recover myself through the pain I feel
And I become such
That shame drives me from the company.
Then weeping alone in my sorrow
I call Beatrice & I say Art thou too dead
And whilst I call her I am consoled
With weeping & with sighing
My heart pines away wherever I am,
So that it wearies whoever sees it
And what has been my life since
My lady went into the new world
No tongue can tell
And yet, o my Ladies, though I should desire it,
I should not know how to tell you what I am
Bitter life has so afflicted me
And it is so injured
That every man seems to say to me, I abandon you
Seeing my fainting
But be it as it may, my lady sees it,
And I hope yet a reward from her
My pious canzone now go lamenting
And find the dames & the damsels
Unto whom thy sisters
Were wont to carry joy
And thou who art a daughter of sorrow
Go disconsolate & stand with them
Sad that Beatrice more beautiful than all
Is gone to the feet of the Lord
And has left Love with me lamenting.

XXXII

After this canzone was said, one came to me who in the degrees of friendship is friendly to me, next to the first, and this one was so near in blood to that beautiful person that none was more near than he. And when he conversed with me he prayed me that I would say to him some thing for a lady who was dead and he feigned his words so that it appeared that he spoke of another who was certainly dead, therefore I becoming sensible that this one spoke only of that blessed soul, said that I would do that which he had entreated of me. Therefore then thinking I proposed to make a sonnet in which I bewailed myself & to give it to this friend so that it appeared that I had made it for him, and thus it was;

O gentle hearts, whom pity desires,
Come to hear my sighs,
Which disconsolate go their way;
And but for them I should die with grief,
Because my eyes would be worse than I could bear,
Weary of weeping so much for my lady,
That they would choak the heart by lamenting.
You shall hear them often call
My gentle lady who is gone away
To the world worthy of her virtue,
And despise now this life
In the person of the mourning soul
Abandoned by her welfare.

XXXIII

After I had spoken this sonnet thinking that this was for him who designed to ask it, as if it were made by him I saw that this service appeared to me poor & naked for a person so near to this beloved one. And therefore before I gave him the abovewritten sonnet, I said two stanzas of a canzone, the one indeed for him, & the other for me. And though to one who should not read attentively it might seem that both of them were spoken by one person, yet whoever looks at them attentively will see that different persons, that one does not call his lady and the other does as plainly appears. This canzone & the abovewritten sonnet I gave to him, saying to him that I had made it for him alone. The canzone begins

How often alas, I remember.

In the first stanza, this my friend and near kinsman of hers, laments himself. In the second, I lament; that is, in the other stanza, which begins,

There is heard in my sighs,

And thus it appears that in this canzone two persons deplore, one complaining as a brother the other as a lover.

How often alas I remember
That I may never more
Behold the Lady, therefore I go sorrowing thus;
My woeworn mind
Concentrates so much grief within the heart
That I say, My Soul, why dost thou not depart
Since the torments which thou shalt carry
In the world which is already so troublesome to you
Make me pensive with much fear
Wherefore, I call on Death
As gentle, & my sweet repose
And I say, Come to me, with such love,
That I am envious of such as die.

There is heard in my sighs
An undertone of pity
Which calls on Death continually
To it turn all my desires
Since my Lady
Was reached by his cruelty.
Because the pleasure of her beauty
Withdrawing itself from our view
Becomes spiritual beauty & grand
Which through the heaven expands,
The light of Love, which greets the Angels;
And makes their high & subtle intellect
Wonder, so gentle it is.

XXXIV

On that day on which the year was completed in which this lady was made one of the citizens of the Eternal Life I sat in a place, where, recollecting myself, I drew an angel on certain tablets, and while I was drawing, I turned my eyes and saw beside me men to whom it behoved that I should do reverence and they saw what I did and according to what was then told me, they had been there for some while, before I had been aware of them. When I saw them, I rose, & saluting them I said, “I was just now in another place, & I was thinking of that.” Then these departing and I returning to my work, that is, of drawing, whilst I wrought, the thought came to me of saying words in rhyme as for an Anniversary piece to her, and to write it to them who came to me; & I said then this sonnet which has two beginnings; one is;

Into my thought had come
The gentle Lady who for virtue
Was by the most high Lord
Placed in the heaven of humility, where is Mary,
&c &c

The second is;

Into my thought had come
That gentle lady whom Love mourns
To that degree that her virtue
Would draw you to see what I do.
Love who in the mind feels her,
Was waked in the dissolved heart,
And said to my sighs, Go forth
For each may go lamenting.
Forth issued they from my breast
With a voice which often leads
Sad tears to my sad eyes
But those which go not forth, with greater pain
Come saying, O noble mind!
Today the year is complete, since thou didst mount to heaven.

XXXV

Then for some time although I was in a place in which I remembered the time past, I remained very thoughtful, & with painful thoughts so that they made me appear abroad a spectacle of fright. Therefore I becoming sensible of my state, lifted my eyes to see if others saw me. Then I saw that a gentle lady from a window looked at me so piteously that all pity appeared collected in her. Therefore because when the wretched see in others pity for them so much the more they lament as having pity of themselves, I then perceived my eyes begin to wish to weep & yet fearing to exhibit my vile life I withdrew myself from the eyes of that gentle person & said to myself “It cannot be that with this pious lady there should not be very noble love” then I proposed to say a sonnet in which I should speak to her, & I comprised in it all which is narrated in this account, and I began.

My eyes beheld how much compassion
Appeared in your figure
When you saw the deeds & the form
Which from grief I many times showed
Then was I aware that you contemplated
The quality of my dark life
So that the fear entered my heart
Of showing my vileness in your eyes
And I took myself from before you, feeling
That the tears started from my heart
Which were moved by sight of you
Then I said in my sad soul
Blessed is in that lady the love
Which makes me weep thus.

XXXVI

It afterwards happened that whenever this lady saw me she made a piteous face & of a pale colour, as it were, like that of love. Therefore I often was reminded of my most noble lady who always showed a similar colour, & truly many times not being able to weep nor to relieve my sadness I went to see this compassionate lady, who seemed to have drawn tears out of my eyes by the sight of her, & then there came to me the will to say words also, speaking to her, & I said this sonnet.

Colour of Love and semblances of pity
Have never taken so wonderfully
The face of the lady

XXXVII

I came so far through the sight of this lady that my eyes begun to delight too much to see her, wherefore often I tormented myself in my heart & held myself for very vile, & many times I blasphemed the vanity of my eyes & said to them in my thought; Now I have accustomed you to cause to weep whosoever saw your sad condition, & now it appears that you wish to belie it for this lady who looked at you but who would not have looked at you, had not the thought so much weighed on her of the glorious lady whom you were wont to lament. But inasmuch as you can, cause that I remind you of her, O evil eyes! that never until after death your tears shall be restrained. And when I had thus spoken, myself to my eyes, & the largest sighs assailed me, and painfullest, — to the end that this battle which I had with myself should not remain only by the wretch who felt it I proposed to make a sonnet, & to comprise in it this horrible condition, & I said thus;

The bitter tears which ye shed
O mine eyes for so long time
Made others wonder
With pity as ye see
Now methinks ye would forget it
If I, on my part, were such a felon
That I did not disturb you with every reason
Reminding you of her whom ye lamented
Your vanity makes me think
And alarms me so that I vehemently fear
The sight of the lady who beholds you;
Ye should never until death
Forget our lady who is dead;
So says my heart, & then sigheth.

XXXVIII

I recovered then the sight of this lady in so new condition that many times I thought of her as of a person who pleased me too much & I thought of her thus; This is a gentle fair young & wise lady, who has appeared perhaps through the will of love in order that my life might repose & many times I thought more amorously, so that the heart consented in it that is, in its reasoning & when I had consented so, I reconsidered it as moved by reason, & I said to myself; Ah! what thought is this, that in so vile mode would console me, & not let me think otherwise? Then arose another thought & I said to myself — Now thou hast been in so much tribulation, why wilt thou not withdraw thyself from so much bitterness? Thou seest that this is one breathing which may bring the desires of love forward & is moved by so gentle a party as that of the eyes of this lady who has shown herself so pitying. Wherefore I having often thus contended with my self yet would not say any words, & because the battle of thoughts conquered those who spoke for her, methought it behoved me to speak to her & I said this sonnet, which begins;

Gentle thought which speaks of you
Comes often to stay with me
And talks of love so softly
That it makes the heart consent to him
The soul says to the Heart, Who is this
Who comes to console our mind?
And is its virtue so strong
That it will suffer no other thought to abide?
He answered her; O thoughtful soul
This is a new little-spirit of love
Which brings its desires forth to me
And its life & all its strength
Is moved by the eyes of this pitying one
Who so concerned herself in our sufferings.

And I call that gentle, inasmuch as it speaks of a gentle lady, which, on other grounds, was most vile. I make in this sonnet parties of myself, according as my thoughts were divided in two; the one party I call Heart, that is, appetite; the other I call Soul, that is, reason; and I speak as one speaks to the other. And that it is fit to call the appetite Heart, & the reason, Soul, is very manifest to those to whom I am pleased that this should appear. It is true that in the preceding sonnet I make the party of the Heart counter to that of the Eyes and this appears contrary to that which I say in the present and therefore I say that there also I design the Heart for the appetite since I had a greater desire to remember that most gentle
Lady of mine than to behold this one. Though I had some appetite for this yet it appeared to me slight. Thus it appears that one saying is not contrary to the other.

XXXIX

Against this adversary of the reason arose, one day, as it were in the ninth hour a strong imagination in me that I thought I saw this only Beatrice in those bloodred garments in which she first appeared to my eyes and she seemed youthfill, of the same age as when I first beheld her. Then I began to think of her & recollecting her in the order of the past time my heart began to repent itself bitterly of the desire to which it had been so basely abandoned for some days, contrary to the constancy of reason. And this mischievous desire being driven out my thoughts turned themselves all to their most gentle Beatrice & I say, that, from that hour forward I began to think so, with all my heart ashamed, that the spirits manifested this many times because as it were all said in their outgoing that which was thought in the heart, namely, the honour of this most gentle one & how she had parted from us. And it often happened that some thought had in it so much grief that I forgot it and there where I was by this rekindling of sighs my intermitted weeping was renewed in a manner that my eyes appeared to be two things which desired only to weep & it often happened that through the long continuing of the weeping a purple colour came out around them which was wont to appear for some witness to others, whence it seemed that they were fitly punished for their vanity. So that thenceforward they could not look at any person who looked at them in a manner to draw them to an understanding. Wherefore I willing that such wicked desire & vain temptation should appear destroyed, so that the rhymed words which I had before said could not breed any doubt proposed to make a sonnet, in which I should comprise the sense of this state of mind & I said

Alas, through the force of many sighs
Which proceed from the thoughts which are in the heart
The eyes are conquered & have no strength
To look at the person who looks at them.
And they are come to that, that they seem two desires
Of weeping & of showing grief.
And often they so lament, that Love
Encircles them with a crown of martyrs.
These thoughts & the sighs which I cast out
Become within the heart so bitter
That Love there faints and so suffers
Because they have in these dolorous (eyes)
Written the sweet name of My Lady,
And many words, of her death.
I said, Alas! so much was I ashamed that my eyes had been thus frivolous.

XL

After this tribulation it happened at that time that many people came to see that Blessed image which Jesus Christ left to us, for the example of his most beautiful figure, my Lady gloriously beholds, that some pilgrims passed by a road which is as it were the midst of the city where was born, lived, & died the most gentle Lady, and they went (as it appeared to me) very thoughtful. Then I, thinking on them, said to myself, These pilgrims appear to me to come from distant parts, & — I do not believe that they have even heard speak of this lady, & they know nothing of her; rather their thoughts are of other things, than of those here; they perhaps are thinking of their distant friends, whom we do not know. Then I said to myself I know that if they were of the neighboring country, they would appear in some sort disturbed passing through the midst of this painful city. Then I said to myself, If I could detain them a little I would make them weep before they go forth of this city, because I would speak words which should cause to weep whoever heard them. Then these having passed out of my sight, I proposed to make a sonnet in which I should signify that which I had said to myself & to the end that it should appear more piteous I proposed to speak as if I had addressed them, & I said this sonnet;

Ah Pilgrims who go thoughtful
On things perhaps which are not here present,
Come ye from so distant a tribe
As ye show in your aspect
That ye do not weep as ye pass
Through the midst of the mourning city,
As those persons who seem
To know nothing of its woe.
If you will stay & hear it
Verily my heart with sighs tells me
That ye shall go forth of it with tears
It has lost its Beatrice;
And the words which man can say of her
Have power to make others weep.

I said Pilgrims, in the large sense of the word as pilgrims may be understood in two senses in a liberal & a strict one, in the one, inasmuch as whosoever goes out of his country is a pilgrim; in the other, one is not a pilgrim unless he goes towards the house of St James, or returns. There are moreover three modes in which those people are properly distinguished who travel in the service of the Most High. They are called
Palmers who go beyond sea, whence they often fetch home palms. They are called Pilgrims as many as go to the house of Galizia because the sepulchre of St James was farther from his country than of any other apostle. They are called Romans (Romei) as many as go to Rome, thither, where these whom I call Pilgrims were going.

XLI

Then two gentle ladies sent to me praying me that I would send them some of these my rhymed words; and I considering their nobility, proposed to send them these, and to make something new which I might send them with these, so that I might more honorably fulfil their requests; and I then said a sonnet which tells of my state, & sent it to them in company with the preceding, & with another which begins, Come to hear See. The sonnet which I then made, is;

Beyond the hope which goes largest
Passes the sigh which comes from my heart,
New tidings, that Love weeping placed in it, then draws up again;
When he is come there where he would be,
He sees a lady who receives honour,
And shines so that by her splendour
The pilgrim soul beholds her;
Sees her such that when he tells me,
I understand him not; so subtilly he speaks
To the mourning heart that he makes it speak.
I know that he speaks of that gentle one,
Because often he mentions Beatrice,
So that I understand him well, o Ladies dear!

XLII

After this sonnet, appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things which made me determine to say no more of this Blessed one, until I could more worthily discourse of her; and to come at that, I study to the utmost, as she verily knows. So that, if it shall be the pleasure of Him to whom all things live, that my life should continue for some years, I hope to say of her that which was never said of any one; and then may it please him who is the Lord of courtesy, that my soul, if it be possible, may go to see the glory of Him who is blessed through all ages.

The End of Dante’s New Life.

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SONNET OF MICHEL ANGELO BUONAROTTI

Never did sculptor’s dream unfold
A form which marble doth not hold
In its white block; yet it therein shall find
Only the hand secure and bold
Which still obeys the mind.
So hide in thee, thou heavenly dame,
The ill I shun, the good I claim;
I alas! not well alive,
Miss the aim whereto I strive.
Not love, nor beauty’s pride,
Nor Fortune, nor thy coldness, can I chide,
If, whilst within thy heart abide
Both death and pity, my unequal skill
Fails of the life, but draws the death and ill.

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THE EXILE FROM THE PERSIAN OF KERMANI

In Farsistan the violet spreads
Its leaves to the rival sky;
I ask how far is the Tigris flood,
And the vine that grows thereby?

Except the amber morning wind,
Not one salutes me here;
There is no lover in all Bagdat
To offer the exile cheer.

I know that thou, O morning wind!
O’er Kernan’s meadow blowest,
And thou, heart-warming nightingale!
My father’s orchard knowest.

The merchant hath stuffs of price,
And gems from the sea-washed strand,
And princes offer me grace
To stay in the Syrian land;

But what is gold for, but for gifts?
And dark, without love, is the day;
And all that I see in Bagdat
Is the Tigris to float me away.

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FROM HAFIZ

I said to heaven that glowed above,
O hide yon sun-filled zone,
Hide all the stars you boast;
For, in the world of love
And estimation true,
The heaped-up harvest of the moon
Is worth one barley-corn at most,
The Pleiads’ sheaf but two.

If my darling should depart,
And search the skies for prouder friends,
God forbid my angry heart
In other love should seek amends.

When the blue horizon’s hoop
Me a little pinches here,
Instant to my grave I stoop,
And go find thee in the sphere.

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EPITAPH

Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest
Mad Destiny this tender stripling played;
For a warm breast of maiden to his breast,
She laid a slab of marble on his head.

They say, through patience, chalk
Becomes a ruby stone;
Ah, yes! but by the true heart’s blood
The chalk is crimson grown.

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FRIENDSHIP

Thou foolish Hafiz! Say, do churls
Know the worth of Oman’s pearls?
Give the gem which dims the moon
To the noblest, or to none.

Dearest, where thy shadow falls,
Beauty sits and Music calls;
Where thy form and favor come,
All good creatures have their home.

On prince or bride no diamond stone
Half so gracious ever shone,
As the light of enterprise
Beaming from a young man’s eyes.

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FROM OMAR KHAYYAM

Each spot where tulips prank their state
Has drunk the life-blood of the great;
The violets yon field which stain
Are moles of beauties Time hath slain.

Unbar the door, since thou the Opener art,
Show me the forward way, since thou art guide,
I put no faith in pilot or in chart,
Since they are transient, and thou dost abide.

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FROM ALI BEN ABU TALEB

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere.

On two days it steads not to run from thy grave,
The appointed, and the unappointed day;
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.

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FROM IBN JEMIN

Two things thou shalt not long for, if thou love a mind serene; —
A woman to thy wife, though she were a crowned queen;
And the second, borrowed money, — though the smiling lender say
That he will not demand the debt until the Judgment Day.

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THE FLUTE FROM HILALI

Hark, what, now loud, now low, the pining flute complains,
Without tongue, yellow-cheeked, full of winds that wail and sigh;
Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains, —
If I am I; thou, thou; or thou art I?

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TO THE SHAH FROM HAFIZ

Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,
Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear.

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TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

Not in their houses stand the stars,
But o’er the pinnacles of thine!

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TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

From thy worth and weight the stars gravitate,
And the equipoise of heaven is thy house’s equipoise.

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SONG OF SEYD NIMETOLLAH OF KUHISTAN

[Among the religious customs of the dervishes is an astronomical dance, in which the dervish imitates the movements of the heavenly bodies, by spinning on his own axis, whilst at the same time he revolves round the Sheikh in the centre, representing the sun; and, as he spins, he sings the Song of Seyd Nimetollah of Kuhistan.]

Spin the ball! I reel, I burn,
Nor head from foot can I discern,
Nor my heart from love of mine,
Nor the wine-cup from the wine.
All my doing, all my leaving,
Reaches not to my perceiving;
Lost in whirling spheres I rove,
And know only that I love.

 I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon;
From the shore of souls arrived,
In the sea of sense I dived;
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me who only jewels crave?
Love is the air-fed fire intense,
And my heart the frankincense;
As the rich aloes flames, I glow,
Yet the censer cannot know.
I’m all-knowing, yet unknowing;
Stand not, pause not, in my going.

 Ask not me, as Muftis can,
To recite the Alcoran;
Well I love the meaning sweet, —
I tread the book beneath my feet.

 Lo! the God’s love blazes higher,
Till all difference expire.
What are Moslems? what are Giaours?
All are Love’s, and all are ours.
I embrace the true believers,
But I reck not of deceivers.
Firm to Heaven my bosom clings,
Heedless of inferior things;
Down on earth there, underfoot,
What men chatter know I not.

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THE PRINCIPLE OF ALL THINGS; ENTRAILS MADE

The principle of all things; entrails made
Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone;
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted;
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:

Lucretius

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THE SECRET THAT SHOULD NOT BE BLOWN

The secret that should not be blown
Not one of thy nation must know;
You may padlock the gate of a town,
But never the mouth of a foe.

(Persian)

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ON EARTH’S WIDE THOROUGHFARES BELOW

On earth’s wide thoroughfares below
Two only men contented go:
Who knows what’s right and what’s forbid,
And he from whom is knowledge hid.

Omar Khayyam

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SUNSHINE WAS HE

Sunshine was he
In the winter day;
And in the midsummer
Coolness and shade.

(Arabian)

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GO BOLDLY FORTH, AND FEAST ON BEING’S BANQUET

Go boldly forth, and feast on being’s banquet;
Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with thee.

(Arabian)

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COLOR, TASTE, AND SMELL, SMARAGDUS, SUGAR, AND MUSK

Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk, —
Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare, —
If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair, —
If you leave it whole, the full harvest-moon is there.

Adsched of Meru

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LOOSE THE KNOTS OF THE HEART; NEVER THINK ON THY FATE

Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate:
No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl.

Hafiz

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THERE RESIDES IN THE GRIEVING

There resides in the grieving
A poison to kill;
Beware to go near them
’Tis pestilent still.

Hafiz

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I WILL BE DRUNK AND DOWN WITH WINE

I will be drunk and down with wine;
Treasures we find in a ruined house.

Hafiz

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TO BE WISE THE DULL BRAIN SO EARNESTLY THROBS

To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs,
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.

Hafiz

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THE BUILDER OF HEAVEN

The Builder of heaven
Hath sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth.

On turnpikes of wonder
Wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise, and upward,
West, southward, and north.

Stands the vault adamantine
Until the Doomsday;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o’er it away.

Hafiz

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I BATTER THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN

I batter the wheel of heaven
When it rolls not rightly by;
I am not one of the snivellers
Who fall thereon and die.

Hafiz

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TIS WRIT ON PARADISE’S GATE

’Tis writ on Paradise’s gate,
“Wo to the dupe that yields to Fate!”

Hafiz

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THE WORLD IS A BRIDE SUPERBLY DRESSED

The world is a bride superbly dressed; —
Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul.

Hafiz

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I AM: WHAT I AM

I am: what I am
My dust will be again.

Hafiz

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WHAT LOVELIER FORMS THINGS WEAR

What lovelier forms things wear,
Now that the Shah comes back!

Hafiz

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TAKE MY HEART IN THY HAND, O BEAUTIFUL BOY OF SCHIRAZ!

Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Schiraz!
I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and
Buchara!

Hafiz

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OUT OF THE EAST, AND OUT OF THE WEST, NO MAN UNDERSTANDS ME

Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me;
Oh, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!
This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded,
“Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!”

Hafiz

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FIT FOR THE PLEIADS’ AZURE CHORD

Fit for the Pleiads’ azure chord
The songs I sung, the pearls I bored.

Hafiz

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I HAVE NO HOARDED TREASURE

I have no hoarded treasure,
Yet have I rich content;
The first from Allah to the Shah,
The last to Hafiz went.

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HIGH HEART, O HAFIZ! THOUGH NOT THINE

High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine
Fine gold and silver ore;
More worth to thee the gift of song,
And the clear insight more.

Hafiz

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O HAFIZ! SPEAK NOT OF THY NEED

O Hafiz! speak not of thy need;
Are not these verses thine?
Then all the poets are agreed,
No man can less repine.

Hafiz

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OFT HAVE I SAID, I SAY IT ONCE MORE

Oft have I said, I say it once more,
I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself.
I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;
What the Eternal says, I stammering say again.
Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,
And according to my food I grow and I give.
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl,
And am only seeking one to receive it.

Hafiz

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THE PHOENIX

My phoenix long ago secured
His nest in the sky-vault’s cope;
In the body’s cage immured,
He is weary of life’s hope.

Round and round this heap of ashes
Now flies the bird amain,
But in that odorous niche of heaven
Nestles the bird again.

Once flies he upward, he will perch
On Tuba’s golden bough;
His home is on that fruited arch
Which cools the blest below.

If over this world of ours
His wings my phoenix spread,
How gracious falls on land and sea
The soul-refreshing shade!

Either world inhabits he,
Sees oft below him planets roll;
His body is all of air compact,
Of Allah’s love his soul.

Come! — the palace of heaven rests on aëry pillars, —
Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind.
I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul
Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces.
Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven
Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy?
O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch;
This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest.
Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven;
I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net.
I, too, have a counsel for thee; oh, mark it and keep it,
Since I received the same from the Master above:
Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls;
A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.
This jest of the world, which tickles me, leave to my vagabond self.
Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks;
Neither to me nor to thee was option imparted;
Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose.
The loving nightingale mourns; — cause enow for mourning; —
Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?
Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech.

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BY BREATH OF BEDS OF ROSES DRAWN

By breath of beds of roses drawn,
I found the grove in the morning pure,
In the concert of the nightingales
My drunken brain to cure.

With unrelated glance
I looked the rose in the eye;
The rose in the hour of gloaming
Flamed like a lamp hard-by.

She was of her beauty proud,
And prouder of her youth,
The while unto her flaming heart
The bulbul gave his truth.

The sweet narcissus closed
Its eye, with passion pressed;
The tulips out of envy burned
Moles in their scarlet breast.

The lilies white prolonged
Their sworded tongue to the smell;
The clustering anemones
Their pretty secrets tell.

Hafiz

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ALL DAY THE RAIN

All day the rain
Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain,
The flood may pour from morn till night
Nor wash the pretty Indians white.

Hafiz

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O’ER THE GARDEN WATER GOES THE WIND ALONE

O’er the garden water goes the wind alone
To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;
The fire is quenched on the dear hearth-stone,
But it burns again on the tulips brave.

Enweri

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WHILST I DISDAIN THE POPULACE

Whilst I disdain the populace,
I find no peer in higher place.
Friend is a word of royal tone,
Friend is a poem all alone.
Wisdom is like the elephant,
Lofty and rare inhabitant:
He dwells in deserts or in courts;
With hucksters he has no resorts.

Ibn Jemin

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A FRIEND IS HE, WHO, HUNTED AS A FOE

A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,
So much the kindlier shows him than before;
Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,
He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor.

Dschami

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THE CHEMIST OF LOVE

The chemist of love
Will this perishing mould,
Were it made out of mire,
Transmute into gold

Hafiz

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AND SINCE ROUND LINES ARE DRAWN

And since round lines are drawn
My darling’s lips about,
The very Moon looks puzzled on,
And hesitates in doubt
If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth
Be not her true way to the South.

Hafiz

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AH, COULD I HIDE ME IN MY SONG

Ah, could I hide me in my song,
To kiss thy lips from which it flows!

Hafiz

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FAIR FALL THY SOFT HEART

Fair fall thy soft heart!
A good work wilt thou do?
Oh, pray for the dead
Whom thine eyelashes slew!

Hafiz

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THEY STREW IN THE PATH OF KINGS AND CZARS

They strew in the path of kings and czars
Jewels and gems of price;
But for thy head I will pluck down stars,
And pave thy way with eyes.

I have sought for thee a costlier dome
Than Mahmoud’s palace high,
And thou, returning, find thy home
In the apple of Love’s eye.

Hafiz

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I KNOW THIS PERILOUS LOVE-LANE

I know this perilous love-lane
No whither the traveller leads,
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of
Thy tangled tresses feeds.

In the midnight of thy locks,
I renounce the day;
In the ring of thy rose-lips,
My heart forgets to pray.

Hafiz

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PLUNGE IN YON ANGRY’ WAVES

Plunge in yon angry’ waves,
Renouncing doubt and care;
The flowing of the seven broad seas
Shall never wet thy hair.

Is Allah’s face on thee
Bending with love benign,
And thou not less on Allah’s eye
O fairest! turnest thine.

Hafiz

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WHILE ROSES BLOOMED ALONG THE PLAIN

While roses bloomed along the plain,
The nightingale to the falcon said,
“Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?
With closed mouth thou utterest,
Though dying, no last word to man.
Yet sitt’st thou on the hand of princes,
And feedest on the grouse’s breast,
Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels
Squander in a single tone,
Lo! I feed myself with worms,
And my dwelling is the thorn.” —
The falcon answered, “Be all ear:
I, experienced in affairs,
See fifty things, say never one;
But thee the people prizes not,
Who, doing nothing, say’st a thousand.
To me, appointed to the chase,
The king’s hand gives the grouse’s breast;
Whilst a chatterer like thee
Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!”

Nisami

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BODY AND SOUL

A painter in China once painted a hall; —
Such a web never hung on an emperor’s wall; —
One half from his brush with rich colors did run,
The other he touched with a beam of the sun;
So that all which delighted the eye in one side,
The same, point for point, in the other replied.

In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;
Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground:
Is one half depicted with colors less bright?
Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!

Enweri

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I READ ON THE PORCH OF A PALACE BOLD

I read on the porch of a palace bold
In a purple tablet letters cast, —
“A house, though a million winters old,
A house of earth comes down at last;
Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All,
And build the dome that shall not fall.”

Ibn Jemin

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THE ETERNAL WATCHER, WHO DOTH WAKE

The eternal Watcher, who doth wake
All night in the body’s earthen chest,
Will of thine arms a pillow make,
And a bolster of thy breast.

Feisi

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POEM FROM “BIRD CONVERSATIONS.”

The bird-soul was ashamed;
Their body was quite annihilated;
They had cleaned themselves from the dust,
And were by the light ensouled.
What was, and was not, — the Past, —
Was wiped out from their breast.
The sun from near-by beamed
Clearest light into their soul;
The resplendence of the Simorg beamed
As one back from all three.
They knew not, amazed, if they
Were either this or that.
They saw themselves all as Simorg,
Themselves in the eternal Simorg.
When to the Simorg up they looked,
They beheld him among themselves;
And when they looked on each other,
They saw themselves in the Simorg.
A single look grouped the two parties,
The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,
This in that, and that in this,
As the world has never heard.
So remained they, sunk in wonder,
Thoughtless in deepest thinking,
And quite unconscious of themselves.
Speechless prayed they to the Highest
To open this secret,
And to unlock Thou and We.
There came an answer without tongue. —
“The Highest is a sun-mirror;
Who comes to Him sees himself therein,
Sees body and soul, and soul and body:
When you came to the Simorg,
Three therein appeared to you,
And, had fifty of you come,
So had you seen yourselves as many.
Him has none of us yet seen.
Ants see not the Pleiades.
Can the gnat grasp with his teeth
The body of the elephant?
What you see is He not;
What you hear is He not.
The valleys which you traverse,
The actions which you perform,
They lie under our treatment
And among our properties.
You as three birds are amazed,
Impatient, heartless, confused:
Far over you am I raised,
Since I am in act Simorg.
Ye blot out my highest being,
That ye may find yourselves on my throne;
Forever ye blot out yourselves,
As shadows in the sun. Farewell!”

Ferideddin Attar

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TIS HEAVY ODDS

’Tis heavy odds
Against the gods,
When they will match with myrmidons.
We spawning, spawning myrmidons,
Our turn to-day! we take command,
Jove gives the globe into the hand
Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

Pierre Jean de Béranger

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AT THE LAST DAY, MEN SHALL WEAR

At the last day, men shall wear
On their heads the dust,
As ensign and as ornament
Of their lowly trust.

Hafiz

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FOOLED THOU MUST BE, THOUGH WISEST OF THE WISE

Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.

(Persian)

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ALMS

The beggar begs by God’s command,
And gifts awake when givers sleep.
Swords cannot cut the giving hand,
Nor stab the love that orphans keep.

Hafiz

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NO. 13 HYMN WRITTEN IN CONCORD SEPT. 1814

Come heavenly Muse my voice inspire
Teach me to tune the poet’s lyre
In feeble notes that I may sing
And let Religion guide the string.
The works of God demand a song
From spirits and the angelic throng
O then let mortals also raise
In humbler strains their songs of praise
My soul O look around and see
How many things are made for thee
For thee the fields are cover’d o’er,
For thee the harvest yields its store,
Speech, reason, sight, and every sense
Is given thee by Providence
God’s praise is sung by every rill
O then let not my tongue be still
Let morn, and noon, and shady night
Hear praise to him who made the light
And to his Son who willing came
To save mankind from death and shame.

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ON THE DEATH OF MR. JOHN HASKINS

See the calm exit of the aged Saint,
Without a murmur, and without complaint,
Whil’st round him gathered his dear children stand
And some one holds his withered pallid hand.
He bids them trust in God, nor mourn nor weep;
He breathes Religion, and then falls asleep.
Then on angelic wings he flies to God,
Rejoiced to leave this earthly mortal clod.
His head is covered with a crown of gold.
A golden harp his hands immortal hold.

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LINES ON THE DEATH OF MISS. M. B. FARNHAM

Come heavenly Muse a suppliant asks thine aid,
No common theme his feeble pen pursues,
Where the blue grave-stone marks the silent dead,
There would he go and there in silence muse.

Here let unhallowed feet ne’er bend their way,
Here where decaying, youth & Beauty sleeps,
Here where cold Death holds his imperious sway,
And fond affection clad in mourning weeps.

Lowly beneath this green and nameless sod,
Rests the frail body of departed worth;
Her happy soul has mounted to her god,
And gone forever from this narrow Earth.

Her’s was the brightness of the noonday Sun
Her fancy brilliant as his golden rays,
Judgement & Reason, mounted on the throne,
And pure Religion shone in all her ways.

Long as the life blood flows within the veins,
Long as the throbbing heart persists to move,
So long shall thought of Mary lessen pains,
And bring to Memory all her cares, and love.

Her brilliant taste, and manners well refined,
Shone with bright splendor on this lower earth,
Her graceful form, and modesty combined,
Proclaimed her value, excellence, and worth.

Farewel thou dear departed! ah farewel,
Peace to thine ashes in their clay cold bed,
Till the last trump shalt burst thy narrow cell,
And bid thee leave the mansions of the dead.

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POEM ON ELOQUENCE BY R. W. EMERSON

When oer the world the son of genius rose
And woke mankind from indolent repose
When Science first diffused her genial rays
And Learning fair enlightened elder days
Then Eloquence descending from above
Left the high palace of Olympian Jove
To earth’s fair field she bent her airy way
Guided by Hermes from the realms of day
Thrice happy Greece her lighting footsteps bore
When first the Goddess on earthly shore
In thy fair realm Polymnia fix’d her throne
And raised her sacred fane, — nor there alone —
Where to bright knowledge Ignorance gave way
Where Superstition fled the dawn of day
There in the temple of the Muses shone
Polymnia star by radiant lustre known.
First mid the band that sought her courts for fame
Stood cloth’d in light the great Athenian name
Hail great Demosthenes! thine ardent soul
Could nature’s arts and nature’s self controul
Thy speech inspired with accents clear and loud
Flash’d like the lightning from the thunder cloud
As the fierce flame that rends the rumbling ground
With sudden blaze throws dire destruction round
From Etna’s top with mad resistless force
In liquid fire precipitates its course
Nor shepherd’s hut nor prince’s stately tower
Can save the tenant from the torrents power
Thus from thy lips the fire of Hermes flow’d
And from a mortal almost made a God
Gave thee the power the hearts of men to bind
The magic springs to know that actuate the mind
The strong in war thy strength resist in vain
The great and brave obey thy guiding vein
Twas with that power endued each sep’rate clause
Drew from the listening crowds the loud applause.
When Freedom from thy lips in thunder spoke
And all her spirit flash’d in every look.
When Phillip vainly tried each subtle art
To tempt with venal gold each patriot’s heart
Rous’d by their “last great man” they tried the field
But not those Greeks unknowing how to yield —
One mercy more oh! had the Gods bestow’d
Courage on him whose lips with ardour glow’d
Then had led their armies to the plain
And falling Greece had conquered once again
The dubious field of battle’s strife been won
And set majestic had their falling sun
But time forbids that more the muse should name
Of Grecian orators well known to fame
Farewell to Greece of liberal arts the nurse
Turn now Oh Muse to Rome direct thy course
See where with awful majesty arise
Her mighty leaders eloquent & wise
See great Hortentius to a greater yield
And stript of laurels quit the long-fought field

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ORIGINAL— “APROPOS.”

Night slowly stretches o’er the changing skies
And killing darkness shrouds the rolling Earth
Up to her well-known rock the night-owl hies
And wizard hags begin their cursed mirth.

A misty cloud bedims the rising moon
Few are the stars that cheer the evening sky
And dark and gloomy is the night; and soon
The light that issues from those stars will die.

This night, I deem, the moon is in her spell
And fiends have mutter’d incantations dire
This night in revelry, the hags of hell
Dance in deep cave, around th’infernal fire

Ah! bleakly blows the Ocean’s stormy blast
Grim Water-Sprites bestride the foaming wave,
Woe to the hapless bark, the towering mast
The careworn sailor finds tonight his Grave!

On Ballans lonely moor what sounds were heard!
When the chill night brought on the darkness drear
And in thy lofty towers lone Villagird!
What startling noise came sudden on the ear.

I passed at eve the foot of Ben-lide’s hill
I heard a voice as the sad breeze blew by
Starting I listened — all again was still
Nought through the mist could mortal sight descry.

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WILLIAM DOES THY FRIGID SOUL

William does thy frigid soul,
The charms of poetry deny,
And think thy heart beyond controul,
Of each Parnassian Deity?

This I suspect from that cold look,
Quenching like ice Apollo’s fire,
With which each vagrant verse you took,
When offer’d from my humble lyre.

Not that in truth I mean to say,
I ever had a lyre — not I —
Rhymers you know have got a way,
To Tell a bumper, alias lie. —

 — I love quotations — Dr Gibbs —
Or some one else perhaps — has said,
 — Poets have leave to publish fibs,
And t’is a portion of their trade —

But to return — ti’s wrong to say,
That I should not have leave to write,
My maxim is — write while it’s day, —
For soon, forsooth it will be night,

That is — poor Ralph must versify,
Through College like a thousand drums
But when well through then then oh my
The dark dull night of Business comes

While this my letter you peruse,
Frown no long-faced apostrophe,
Dare not to blame the wayward muse,
Nor scowl the scroflous brow at me —

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SONG: SHOUT FOR THOSE WHOSE COURSE IS DONE

Tune “Scots wha hue wi’ Wallace bled.”

Shout for those whose course is done, —
Bow you to their setting sun,
 — Souls of patriots who won
Noble Liberty.

Fell Brittania’s tyrant power
Quailed in combats fearful hour;
Lowly did the Lion cower
To their victory.

Stars of Freedom’s spangled banner!
Burst ye forth in loud hosanne,
While the morning breezes fan her
Passing cheerfully.

Celebrate with song today,
Feats of eras far away
Ruin to the British sway
O’er Columbia

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PERHAPS THY LOT IN LIFE IS HIGHER

Perhaps thy lot in life is higher
Than the fates assign to me
While they fulfil thy large desire
And bid my hopes as visions flee
But grant me still in joy or sorrow
In grief or hope to claim thy heart
And I will then defy the morrow
Whilst I fulfil a loyal part.

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VALEDICTORY POEM

Gambol and song and jubilee are done,
Life’s motley pilgrimage must be begun; —
Another scene is crowding on the last, —
Perhaps a darkened picture of the past;
And we, who leave Youth’s fairy vales behind,
Where Joy hath hailed us on the summer wind,
Would fain, with fond delay, prolong the hour,
Which sternly strikes at Friendship’s golden power.
Then chide us not, though idly we may strew
Some blooming chaplets in the way we view.
We cannot weep — while Hope is dancing nigh, —
We may not smile at Sorrow’s withering eye.
On Youth’s last threshold, while we doubtful stand,
What crowded scenes of various hues expand, —
A thousand fears the fields of Time deform,
Hope’s gilded rainbows resting on the storm.

Oh long ago, while Freedom yet was young,
Her wreaths ungathered, and her praise unsung,
While Europe languished in barbaric night,
And young Columbus kindled life and light, —
Fate’s finger pointed to the brooding cloud
Which wrapped a new world in its ponderous shroud.

On three full ages has the seal been set
Since, o’er this land, Fate’s awful Angels met; —
This land, — the scene of glory unrevealed,
Pregnant with powers her Genius woke to wield.
Here stood those Angels, on our mountain strand,
And looked through Time, and waved their charmed wand.
Hailed the full hour when God proclaims its birth,
A new and blissful paradise on earth.
Thrice oer the clime they flapped their dusky wings,
To lodge rich virtues in its secret springs,
And ere its gale and mortal banner furled,
Charm bound its shores, the asylum of the World.
Then bade the breezes waft Columbus on,
To crown the triumph which the hero won.
Columbus comes; — far land bedims the sky,
And rapture kindled in his eagle eye.
With awe struck soul, the trembling sailor feels
What man dishonoured, & what God reveals;
Found the first Eden’s pomp of hills and woods,
Lost in vast Ocean’s watery solitudes.
Like that rare bird the enamoured Ethiop praised
Whose peerless beauty all unworshipped blazed,
Gift of the Sun, his golden plumage shone,
In Afric’s boundless solitudes, — alone.

Back to the crowded multitudes of men,
Swelled with glad tidings, came the sail again;
Europe’s loud welcome bade the wanderers hail,
Delighted Wonder listened to their tale.
The eyes of men were fastened on the scene,
Whose distant beauty charmed with light serene.
Adventurous hosts, from Europe’s tower-crowned shore,
Claimed boundless realms unvisited before;
But ‘mid the shouts of rushing nations, — came,
And louder than the trumpet voice of fame,
Prophetic sounds, in solemn murmur heard,
The oracles of Fate breathed out the thrilling word.

— ‘When dying Europe mourns her lost renown,
‘Her wasted honour, and her broken crown;
‘When Vice and Ruin rend the earth with sin,
‘And pour the deluge of destruction in,
‘Corruption scorches with his tainted breath,
‘And hundred-handed Havoc rides on death; —
‘Be thou — fair land! their refuge, and their stay,
‘The pillared gate to Glory’s narrow way.
The sound had ceased, the unearthly host retired
Dark in the North, — and men, with awe, admired.

Time rolls away, but Nature stands the same;
Her starry host, her mountain wrapped in flame,
Earth, air, and heaven, which smiled benignant then
On those far travellers from the haunts of men,
With equal lustre now look calmly on
This youthful band, — this goal which they have won;
Perhaps bear with them, in their counsels high,
The near fulfilment of old prophecy;
And we, perchance, may claim with joy to be
The Ministers of Fate, the priests of Destiny.

Here, in the halls of Fate, we proudly stand,
Youth’s holy fires by Hope’s broad pinion fanned;
And while we wait what Destiny betides,
Gaze on the forms which fairy Fancy guides;
Bright apparitions floating on the air,
Which soft approaching claim a guardian care.
Shall I see FORTUNE wave her silken robe,
Or strong AMBITION comprehend the globe?
Shall warbling MUSES steal the soul away
To the rich stores of legendary lay?
Shall HONOUR trace the heraldry of Fame,
Or BEAUTY come, as Cleopatra came? —
 — Not to dull sense shall forms like these appear,
But conscious feeling finds them hovering near.
These are the living principles, which weave

Lifes treacherous web, to flatter and deceive;
Through every age, they lead the lot of life,
And grasp the Urn with human fortunes rife
The early minstrel, when his kindling eye
Marked the bright stars illuminate the sky,
Saw these wild phantoms, in those planets, roll
The tides of fortune to their fearful goal.
There, robed in light, the Genii of the stars
Launch, in refulgent space, their diamond cars;
Or, in pavilions of celestial pride,
Serene above all influence beside,
Vent the bold joy, which swells the glorious soul,
Rich with the rapture of secure controul.
They read the silent mysteries of fate,
The slow revealings of the future state;
Trace the colossal shades of coming time,
Pregnant with unknown prodigies of crime,
While passing on, to ill-omened birth,
Low in the hapless atmosphere of earth.
 — These were proud visions, and though part were feigned,
Enough of Truth’s sweet union remained.

We may not stoop dull folly’s round to creep,
And we must climb Ambitions rugged steep;
What though the toil should vex the soul with pain, —
Beyond its woes, there is a crown to gain.
We look for days of joy, and groves of peace,
Where all the turmoils of ambition cease;
We love that garland, which the scholar wears,
Who wreaths new blossoms with successive years,
Crouched in his cot, amid romantic bowers,
Domestic visions wing the happy hours,
When mellow eve shall paint the saffron sky,
And light the star of Hesperus on high,
Hush the wild warble of the lonely grove,
And charm the hamlet with the tales of love,
Then, the glad sire shall gather round his door,
His ruddy boys, to list his fairy lore;
By every soothing spell to Nature known
She courts him willing to her sylvan throne;

While, oer his sense, her bright enchantment steals,
Enamoured Memory all her stores reveals;
The star oft seen in youth’s rejoicing prime
Rolls back his soul along the tides of time;
Recalls the spring-time of his health and pride,
His gay companions bounding at his side;
The reckless shout which shook the college hall, —
The classic lesson potent to appal, —
The gorgeous dreams which ardent fancy wove
To gild the blushing morning of his love; —
All these shall rise for Memory’s brilliant theme,
And float in beauty, like an angel’s dream.
The old man’s fearless gaze salutes the sky,
Ere savage death hath shut his glazing eye.
When the grave closed oer Athens’ laurelled son,
The fair-haired Muses wept in Helicon;
Be our’s that tear, — fair Nature’s holiest gem,
That song, for aye, shall be our requiem.

But let not eager fancy roam so far,
Whose tale should now remind us what we are.
In this bright age, with seeds of glory sown,
The hand of fate hath placed us, — not our own.
When the old world is crumbling with decay,
And empires unregarded, pass away,
When the world’s days of infancy are told,
And Nature’s crowded destinies unfold,
Perhaps tis our’s — when strength and grandeur fail,
And pride and power confess that man is frail,
When vanquished Virtue’s reign is fully past,
And stern Corruption climbs the throne at last,
And men kneel down beneath that wasting sway, —
Perhaps tis our’s to rend the veil away;
To bid men see their honour, and their bliss,
The proud connection of that world and this;
To shew the triumphs of a loftier scene,
Than on this humble ball hath ever been,
Ourselves, heavens honoured instruments prepared,
Whose little band even savage Death has spared.

Let not the censure of presumption blot
The venial boldness of aspiring thought;
For proudest deeds, the lowliest means are made,
Where the dark schemes of Providence are laid,
So when, of old, to strike a lawless sway,
The arm of Nemesis was shrined in clay,
When the black host of earthborn giants strove
To rend Olympus from the might of Jove,
When Terror reddened on the Almighty’s cheek,
And even Jove’s thunders whispered they were weak,
Then was the might, which blessed high heaven with peace,
Found in the arm of youthful Hercules;
So heaven may bid this young unhonoured land
Lead the long changes which mankind demand.

I seek no pardon if my wayward lays
Flow too profusely with my country’s praise;
Shall a vain taunt proscribe my love of home,
Bid the heart sicken, sacred feeling roam?
Shall paltry ridicule assail the name,
Which twines its honours with Columbia’s fame?
The man whose soul, with patriot ardor thrills
To scorn the proud world from his native hills?

But what be these but idle dreams of hope
Which soon shall fade, and leave the blind to grope?
Ah! what be these, amid the night of life,
The certain, near, inevitable strife?
We stand on slippery paths; the Ocean’s roar
Is loud around us, — and the world, before; —
Thousands have crossed the gulf, — but few can tell
Of all that countless multitude — how well.
No glorious lustre gathers round their name,
Or gives their virtues to the trump of Fame.
As if men bless them with a brief renown,
Oh think how sadly purchased was that crown,
How malice blights the name it would destroy,
 — Think on Columbus chained, — canst thou be crowned with joy?

When mighty thoughts come crowding on the soul,
And Fancy’s dreams in sparkling lustre roll,
Let not the dreamer heed her baneful charms,
Perfidious smiles and Folly’s winning arms;
Fancy and Hope in chill Despair shall end,
He clasps a viper whom he thought a friend,
And when he finds the rapture of renown,
 — That crown of glory is a thorny crown.

We meet to part; then haste, no more delay
To bid farewell, and stretch our sail away;
And if a kindred sympathy shall rise
Here in the hearts, and friendships, which we prize,
Our heartfelt wish shall gratefully respond,
And God will sanction this fraternal bond.
And we shall cherish long this parting day,
When Beauty smiled to cheer us on our way.
Think not that heart, and feeling’s vital glow
Part from the little pageant which we show, —
No; brightly shrined in Memory’s hallowed cell,
All that we leave, and weep to leave, shall dwell.
One debt of gratitude remains unpaid
To those who led us through Minerva’s shade;
The thanks we offer, not by words expressed,
Let future years of grateful toil attest;
Be this our pride and boast to offer here
A freewill homage, grateful & sincere.

There is no joy to tear ourselves away
From scenes endeared by life’s young holiday.
When many days have dimmed the eye with tears,
And darkening round, the sky of life appears,
How will our hearts rejoice to look behind
On these old halls, and call the past to mind.
Spots, where while studies, friends, & pleasures bless,
We dreamed the dreams of youthful happiness;
Or learned to venerate the guardian care
Enthroned in Learning’s consecrated Chair;
Where ancient Science, with a frown severe,
Appalled the trifler, as he ventured near;

Here where we learned to wield the gun and quill,
Recite in sections, and in sections drill:
Here where we learned, still studious to excel
In arts and arms, to cheer, and to rebel;
Recall the pleasant faces which we knew,
Which oft put on a sombre colouring too;
The strange vicissitudes of life, which speak
In anxious paleness, on the sufferer’s cheek,
Who, while cold terror shakes his frame throughout,
Asks, with a ghastly smile, ‘Are the parts out?’

And many a one, whose sorrow, & whose fears,
Like Arethusa, melt himself to tears,
Short youth; disaster trembles in his eye,
An inch too short to join “the Company.”
In whom both art & nature joined to strive
To reach the lofty limit,— “five feet, five”;
Perchance, in Commons Hall too sparely fed,
His hopes, alas! proved higher than his head.

Enough; — Affection may not linger here,
Repeating fond farewells, and vows sincere;
Impatient Time doth knit his sullen brow,
Gird up your loins for fates dread mandate now!
May Glory wait you on your proudest ways,
The wise applaud you, while the world obeys,
May Joy attend the journey which we fear,
And may God speed our perilous career!

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FROM FRODMER’S DRAMA “THE FRIENDS.”

Malcolm, I love thee more than women love
And pure and warm and equal is the feeling
Which binds us and our destinies forever
But there are seasons in the change of times
When strong excitement kindles up the light
Of ancient memories

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DEDICATION

Quem fugis? Aut quis te nostris complexibus arcet?
Haec memorans, cinerem et sopitos suscitât ignes.
Virgilian lot.

This song to one whose unimproved talents and unattained friendship have interested the writer in his character & fate.
By the unacknowledged tie
Which binds us to each other
By the pride of feeling high
Which friendship’s name can smother

By the cold encountering eyes
Whose language deeply thrilling
Rebelled against the prompt surmise
Which told the heart was willing;

By all which you have felt and feel
My eager gaze returning
I offer to this silent zeal
On youthful altars burning,

All the classic hours which fill
This little urn of honour;
Minerva guide & pay the pen
Your hand conferred upon her.

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IDEALISM

Deep in the soul a strong delusion dwells,
A curious round of fairly fashioned dreams;
Yet quietly, the pleasant vision swells
Its gay proportions far around; the streams
Of the wide universe their wealth supply,
Their everlasting sources furnish forth
The fabled splendours, whose immortal dye
Colours the scene with hues which mock the summer sky
And oh how sweetly, in youth’s seraph soul,
That vision, like the light of heaven, doth rest
Its name is Life; its Hours their circle roll
Like angels in the robes of morning drest;
And every phantom of the train is blest
Who shakes his plumes upon the odorous air,
Or lights a star upon his azure crest
And while the lovely beam reposes there
Joy in the guileless heart his welcome will prepare

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I SPREAD MY GORGEOUS SAIL

I spread my gorgeous sail
Upon a starless sea
And oer the deep with a chilly gale
My painted bark sailed fast & free —

Old Ocean shook his waves
Beneath the roaring wind,
But the little keel of the mariner braves
The foaming abyss, & the midnight blind.

The firmament darkened overhead,
Below, the surges swelled, —
My bark ran low in the watery bed,
As the tempest breath its course compelled.

I took my silver lyre,
And waked its voice on high; —
The wild blasts were hushed to admire,
And the stars looked out from the charmed sky.

Bear me then, ye wild waters,
To Apollo’s Delphian isle,
My name is Music, in Castalie known,
Where bowers of joy the Nine beguile. —

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A SHOUT TO THE SHEPHERDS

Freshly, gaily, the rivulet flows
Beside its emerald bank
Each silver bubble in beauty goes
Adown the stream & briefly glows
Till it reach the broad flags & the alders dank.
Shepherds, who love the lay
Of untaught bards in oaken shades
Brighteyed Apollos of the forest glades
Hither, hither, turn your way.
Come to the grassy border of the brook
Here where the ragged hawthorn dips
His prickly buds of perfume in the wave
And thence again a costly fragrance sips
Drinking with each balmy floweret’s lips
Pure from the Naiad’s welling urn
While overhead the embowering elms
Bow their broad branches & keep out the day.
Hither, hither, turn your way.
Good bye.

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I WEAR NO BADGE; NO TINSEL STAR

I wear no badge; no tinsel star
Glitters upon my breast;
Nor jewelled crown nor victor’s car
Rob me of rest.

I am not poor, but I am proud
Of one inalienable right,
Above the envy of the crowd —
Thought’s holy light.

Better it is than gems or gold,
And oh! it cannot die,
But thought will glow when the Sun grows cold,
And mix with Deity.

I love thy music, mellow bell,
I love thine iron chime,
To life or death, to heaven or hell,
Which calls the Sons of Time.

Thy voice upon the deep
The homebound sea-boy hails,
It charms his cares to sleep,
It cheers him as he sails.

To house of God & heavenly joys
Thy summons called our sires,
And good men thought thy sacred voice
Disarmed the thunder’s fires.

And soon thy music, sad death-bell!
Shall lift its notes once more,
And mix my requiem with the wind
That sweeps my native shore.

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I RAKE NO COFFINED CLAY, NOR PUBLISH WIDE

I rake no coffined clay, nor publish wide
The resurrection of departed pride
Safe in their ancient crannies dark & deep
Let kings & conquerors saints & soldiers sleep.
Late in the world too late perchance for fame
Just late enough to reap abundant blame
I choose a novel theme, a bold abuse
Of critic charters, an unlaurelled muse.

Old mouldy men & books & names & lands
Disgust my reason & defile my hands
I had as lief respect an ancient shoe
As love Old things for age, & hate the new.
I spurn the Past, my mind disdains its nod
Nor kneels in homage to so mean a god.
I laugh at those who while they — & gaze
The bald antiquity of China praise.
Youth is (whatever Cynic tubs pretend)
The fault that boys & nations soonest mend.

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O WHAT HAVE I TO DO

O What have I to do
With merriment & jollities
Youths golden hair & sparkling eyes?
And deafening games that children prize

I am not made to tune a lute
Nor amble in a soft saloon
Nor mine the grace of kind salute
To mien of pride & heart of stone

My pulse is slow my blood is cold
My stammering tongue is rudely tuned

I care not who shall kiss the cup
That Fashion holds to Beauty up
Nor who shall slip thro’ the smiling throng
With honied lyes upon his tongue
The swift hours that go singing by
Tell not the triflers they must die

Man to his work the merry to their wine
Friend to his friend folly to festivals
All hopes & humors to their several ends
Sages to schools, young Passion to its love
Ambition to its task and me to mine.
I am not charged with dallying messages
That thus I mingle in this glittering crowd
Seeing with strange eyes their buffooneries

I am not tangled in the cobweb net
That wanton Beauty weaves for youth so knit
To some fair maid he follows with his eye
A sterner errand to the silken troop
Has quenched the uneasy blush that warmed my cheek
I am commissioned in my day of joy
To leave my woods & streams & the sweet sloth
Of prayer & song that were my dear delight
To leave the rudeness of my woodland life
Sweet twilight walks and midnight solitude
And kind acquaintance with the morning stars
& the smooth passage of my household hours
The innocent mirth which sweetens daily bread
Railing in love at those who rail again by mind’s industry sharpening the love of life
Books, Muses, study, fireside, friends, & love,
I loved ye with true love, so fare ye well.

I was a boy; boyhood slid gaily by
And the impatient years that trod on it
Taught me new lessons in the lore of life.

I’ve learned the burthen of that sad history
All woman born do know, that hoped for days
Days that come dancing on fraught with delights
Dash our blown hopes as they limp heavily by
But I — the banding of a country Muse
Abandon all those toys with speed to obey
The King whose meek ambassador I go.

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HAVE YE SEEN THE CATERPILLAR

Have ye seen the caterpillar
Foully warking in his nest?
Tis the poor man getting siller,
Without cleanness, without rest.
Have you seen the butterfly
In braw claithing drest?
Tis the poor man gotten rich,
In rings & painted vest.
The poor man crawls in web of rags,
And sore bested with woes,
But when he flees on riches’ wings,
He laugheth at his foes.

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THE PANOPLY OF PARADISE IS MINE

The panoply of Paradise is mine
No armourer wrought it on Eteian forge
No dear luxurious maiden brought the gift
By lying bards profanely deemed divine
I am clad in mail of celestial proof
I brandish Michael’s sword of flame
And I come to quell the pride of the world
But avaunt these toys of poesy Why wrap
The fiery truths in riddles dark
Truth treads on the pride of Plato
Truth treads on lovesick rhymes
The fashion of riddling priests
The trick of Delphos & Dodona
The cunning of Homer & Hesiod
Mischievous polytheists who deceived mankind
These delusions are overpast.
The altar of the Capitoline god is crushed
The spindle of ancient Fate is broken
The sisters do not spin the eternal thread
There is no fire glowing on Persic mountains
Where the sun was greeted with fragrant spikenard
The Nile breeds crocodiles in his slime
And the pyramids are by great Alcairo
But the swarthy votary will not adore the reptile
And the dead oppressor is not entombed in the piles
The immortal Gods are deceased
Go let your fabled muses chant their obituary.
Do you see how the world slides away
How its huge pomps dwindle to unsubstantial things
Tho’ they were dear to the heart & solid to the eye
There is a sentence on the lip of Tully
That Truth shall last tho’ the fabrics of imagination decay.
Many incidents up & down in the world shall verify
The simple oracle.
The proud hieroglyphic shall be the child’s bauble alphabet
The spectral tale that blanched the forefather’s cheek
Makes merriment for vermillion maids.
Fools judge by outside show, for while
The champion vanquishes in vain
And armed kings are met unprofitably
(Great things that have no harvest home)
The unconscious wit scratches his paper in a corner
And the words that are writ
Burn like pains in ten thousand memories
And are chanted in thunder to the four winds.
And the pillars of social fabrics are shaken at the sound like bulrushes.

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NO FATE, SAVE BY THE VICTIM’S FAULT, IS LOW

No fate, save by the victim’s fault, is low,
For God hath writ all dooms magnificent,
So guilt not traverses his tender will.

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WHEN SUCCESS EXALTS THY LOT

When success exalts thy lot
God for thy virtue lays a plot;
And all thy life is for thy own
Then for mankind’s instruction shewn;
And, tho’ thy knees were never bent,
To heaven thy hourly prayers are sent,
And whether formed for good or ill,
Are registered & answered still.

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THE SPIRITS OF THE WISE, SIT ON THE CLOUDS

The spirits of the wise, sit on the clouds
And mock the ambition of man
For his breath is vapour; his beauty the colour of a cloud
And his body & soul are parted by a sun, a storm
Or the feeble fork of a poor worm
And who shall tell his household
Whither the soul of the dead man is gone.
Is it gone to live in torture
Enduring a dread resurrection into pain
And perceive mortal plagues in an immortal body
Sighing to the heavy centuries, that bring
No light no hope in their immeasurable train?
Is it gone to farther regions of unequal lot
To a land where the colours of love & disgust
Are blended anew in the texture of the web
And the web is stained with black & bloody clouds.
Is it gone to harmonies of joy
To the ardour of virtue & the wealth of truth
Is it gone to blank oblivion
The mockery of hope & virtue & the death of God.
Alas! Alas! Alas!
Wo is me! for the sad survivor
Tho’ Fortune threw good not evil in his way
Showering the roses of pleasure & the laurel of Fame
Whilst his brother breasted the driving snows
Alas for the sad survivor.
He walks the long streets of his native City
But the peopled street is like the desolate sea.
Men study his face and its lofty lines
And love the graceful tones of pride & power
Rolled with rich thunder of eloquent words.
In the bosom of his own land.
They love him and they honour him
And they think his heart leaps at the voice of their praise.
But their thoughts are dark & their eyes are dim
And they cannot see that a noble nature
Must pine or be matched with noble things.
It is ill with the living, it is well with the dead.
It is better with the dead who live
Than it is with the living who die daily.
Oh Life, thou art a house wherein Fears inhabit
And when Man, poor pilgrim, enters the doors
They flock unto him with icy hands
They lead him in their shivering company
And if he come to a shining room
They tell him it leads to a dungeon tower.

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LET NOT CONCEITED SAGES LAUGH ALOUD

Let not conceited sages laugh aloud
Because another ventures from the crowd
And all unblushing in the sun assumes
The bard’s derided bays — ridiculous to grooms.
I know a rabble of misguided men
Have seized with untaught hand the poet’s pen
And alien born to morals & to mind
Usurped the laureate pomp & mocked mankind.
I know the Muses kept their shells unstrung
And hid their starcrowned heads while Dulness sung
Men of vain hearts but uninstructed souls
Talk out the madness of their midnight bowls

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MY DAYS ROLL BY ME LIKE A TRAIN OF DREAMS

My days roll by me like a train of dreams
A host of joyless undistinguished forms
Cloud after cloud my firmament deforms
While the sweet Eye of Heaven his purple gleams
Pour in rich rivers of Promethean beams
On all his ample family beside
On me on me the day forgets to dawn
Encountering darkness clasps me like a bride
Tombs rise around and from each cell forlorn
Starts with an ominous cry some ghastly child
Of death & darkness, summoning me to mourn
Companion of the clod brother of worms —
The future has no hope and memory mild
Gives not the blessed light that once my woes beguiled.

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ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER

One hand washes the other.
I’ll not pilfer a victory.
I’ll not be a moth of peace
I’ll turn my plumed helm into a skillet.

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WHOSO ALAS IS YOUNG

Whoso alas is young
And being young is wise
And deaf to saws of gray advice
Hath listened when the Muses sung
And heard with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung

In tender youth if he was proud
Nor would his gentle soul profane
And loathed the arts of gain
Assorted with the rabble crowd
But shared his soul with few, or sauntered lone & proud

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WHEN THY SOUL

When thy soul
Is filled with a just image fear not thou
Lest halting rhymes or unharmonious verse
Cripple the fair Conception Leave the heart
Alone to find its language. In all tongues
It hath a sovereign instinct that doth teach
An eloquence which rules can never give.
In the high hour when Destiny ordains
That thou bear testimony to its dooms
That hour a guiding spirit shall impart
The fervid utterance art could never find
Wait then, stern friend, wait in majestic peace.

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THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG

The blackbird’s song the blackbird’s song
Still still it warbles in my ear
Tho’ I have travelled many a mile
From the sweet woods where the bird is found.

The sound rings shrilly in my ear
It vibrates strong on every nerve
Impels the blood in a swifter tide
And riots thro’ all the house of life.

It hurries me back my sense my eye
My ear, my heart, to the dusky lake
Whose silent margin I trod alone
When the morn sent me on my way.

The sun was veiled in summer clouds
Nor spared one beam to welcome me
The wind in the chambers of the mount
Lay couched nor breathed his gay good morrow.

But where the chestnut & the oak
Fringed the smooth lake with leaves
And on the slender boughs of the birch
And amid the berries of the cedar tree

There tilting & shaking down the dew
Sang his good song the merry blackbird
Quoth he, I hope you like music young man —
For I’m determined to be heard.

And straightway as he sang, the sound
Woke every bird in the silent woods
On a thousand sprays, above around
They poured their notes to the sylvan gods.

Then the shy ducks that were swimming there
Skirred along the lake to a distant cove
And the pelican started from the reeds
And poised his broad wings on the morning air.

And I am here
On the green earth contemplating the moon
Much marvelling what may betide tomorrow
I love my life

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I AM AN EXILE FROM MY HOME; HEAVILY

I am an exile from my home; heavily
And all alone I walk the long sea shore
And find no joy. The trees the bushes talk to me
And the small fly that whispers in my ear.
Ah me I do not love the look
Of foreign men
And we is me that I forsook
My little home my lamp my book
To find across the foaming seas
This cheerless fen.

He must have
Droll fancies sometimes cross his quiet thoughts,
Who in my vagrant verse shall look to find
A holiday from study or from toil,
And consolation to his mortal care.
Such idler will not be a man of name,
But must be, & therein resembles me,
A little liable to ridicule,
Because he cares a particle too much
For the opinion of the fickle world;
And notes how Merit does not swim to place
In th’ tides of this world, — & feels the scandal oft
Of low salute to men of meaner mould;
And yet has felt, albeit with scorn the while,
A kind of justice in the Seneschal,
The uncivil fate, that made his fortunes vile.
I am frank, my friend, your eye has found
A gipsy muse that reads your lineaments
To tell the faithful fortunes of your life.
Go to, I’ll feed my humour to the full,
And still expand the pleasant commentary.
Who loves my verse is one whose roving eye
Detects more beauty than his tongue will own
In art & nature. Nay his traitor tongue
Sometimes consenting to the coxcomb’s jest,
Derides the beauty which delights his soul.
He is a man, who, though he told it not,
Mourned in the hour of manhood whilst he saw
The rich imagination which had tinged
Each earthly thing with hues from paradise
Forsake forever his instructed eye,
Bewailed its loss & felt how dearly bought
Is wisdom at the price of happiness.
Ah me, sometimes in
And sometimes when the dainty southwind blew
Its soft luxurious airs, & called the clouds
Mustering their hosts from all the sunny bays, —
Then when the piping wind & sounding sea
And tossing boughs combined their cadences,
The sweet & solemn melody they made
Enticed him oft in heady wantonness
To scoff at knowledge, mock the forms of life,
Cast off his years & be a boy again.
Then has he left his books, & vulgar cares,
And sallied forth across the freshened fields
With all the heart of highborn cavalier
In quest of forest glades hid from the sun,
And dim enchantments that therein abide.

I had rather follow him than talk to him;
Fast fast he leaves the villages behind,
As one who loathed them, yet he loathes them not,
And snuffs the scents which on the dallying gale
The woods send out as gentle harbingers
Bro’t from their inmost glens to lure the step
Of the pleased pilgrim to their alleys green.
I know the pleasures of this humour well
And, please you, reader, I’ll remember them.
First the glad sense of solitude, the sure
The absolute deliverance from the yoke
Of social forms, that are as tedious
Oft to a fretful & romantic man
As a musquito’s song at summer eve.
In the wood he is alone, & for the hollow chat
Of men that do not love, & will not think,
He has the unpretending company
Of birds & squirrels & the fine race of flowers.
He forms his friendships with the flowers
Whose habits or whose hue may please him best,
Goes by the red & yellow populace
That with their vulgar beauty spot the plain
To find the honoured orchis — seldom seen,
The low pyrola with a lilac’s smell,
Or the small cinque-foil, the wild strawberry’s friend.
He speculates with love on Natures forms
Admires a calyx much as Winkelmann
The architecture of a Doric Pile
Not more he doated on the [  ]Of frieze or triglyph or on architrave,
Than doth this dreamer, on the slender shaft
With awns & stipules graced, that lifts in air
The lily or the loosestrife, tapestried with leaves.
And close below
The faithful capsule to transmit its race
Like from its like to another year of flowers,
Once more to be the food of tuneful bird
Low stooping on swift wing, or busy bee,
Or the small nameless eaters that can find
A country in a leaf. —

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ST. AUGUSTINE

For fifteen winter days
I sailed upon the deep, & turned my back
Upon the Northern lights, & burning Bear,
On the twin Bears fast tethered to the Pole
And the cold orbs that hang by them in heaven,
Till star by star they sank into the sea.
Full swelled the sail before the driving wind,
Till the stout pilot turned his prow to land,
Where peered, mid orange groves & citron boughs,
The little city of Saint Augustine.

Slow slid the vessel to the fragrant shore,
Loitering along Matanzas’ sunny waves,
And under Anastasia’s verdant isle.
I saw Saint Mark’s grim bastions, piles of stone
Planting their deep foundations in the sea,
And speaking to the eye a thousand things
Of Spain, a thousand heavy histories.
Under these bleached walls of old renown
Our ship was moored.

 — An hour of busy noise,
And I was made a quiet citizen,
Pacing my chamber in a Spanish street.
An exile’s bread is salt, his heart is sad, —
Happy, he saith, the eye that never saw
The smoke ascending from a stranger’s fire!

Yet much is here
Than can beguile the months of banishment
To the pale travellers whom Disease hath sent
Hither for genial air from Northern homes.
Oh many a tragic story can be read, —
Dim vestiges of a romantic past,
Within the small peninsula of sand.
Here is the old land of America
And in this sea-girt nook, the infant steps
First foot-prints of that Genius giant-grown
That daunts the nations with his power today.

Inquisitive of such, I walk alone
Along the narrow streets, unpaved & old,
Among few dwellers, and the jealous doors
And windows barred upon the public way.

I explored
The castle & the ruined monastery
Unpeopled town, ruins of streets of stone,
Pillars upon the margin of the sea,
With worn inscriptions oft explored in vain,
Then with a keener scrutiny, I marked
The motley population. Hither come
The forest families, timid & tame
Not now as once with stained tomahawk
The restless red man left his council fire,
Or when, with Mexique art, he painted haughtily
On canvas woven in his boundless woods
His simple symbols for his foes to read.
Not such an one is yon poor vagabond
Who in unclean & sloven apathy
Brings venison from the forest, — silly trade.
Alas! red men are few, red men are feeble,
They are few & feeble, & must pass away. —
 — And here,
The dark Minorcan, sad & separate,
Wrapt in his cloak, strolls with unsocial eye:
By day, basks idle in the sun, then seeks his food
All night upon the waters, stilly plying
His hook & line in all the moonlit bays.
Here steals the sick man with uncertain gait
Looks with a feeble spirit at things around
As if he sighing said, “What is’t to me?
“I dwell afar; — far from this cheerless fen
“My wife, my children strain their eyes to me
“And oh! in vain. Wo, we is me! I feel
“In spite of hope, these wishful eyes no more
“Shall see New England’s wood-crowned hills again.”
X X X X X
(Here is a chasm very much to be regretted in the original manuscript.)
X X X X X X
There liest thou, little city of the deep,
And alway hearest the unceasing sound
By day & night in summer & in frost,
The roar of waters on thy coral shore.
But softening southward in thy gentle clime
Even the rude sea relents to clemency,
Feels the kind ray of that benignant sun
And pours warm billows up the beach of shells.
Farewell; & fair befall thee, gentle town!
The prayer of those who thank thee for their life,
The benison of those thy fragrant airs,
And simple hospitality hath blest,
Be to thee ever as the rich perfume
Of a good name, & pleasant memory!

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AWED I BEHOLD ONCE MORE

Awed I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came, —
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag roots in my father’s fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.

Look, here he is unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks & flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.

Here is the rock where yet a simple child
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing, — And these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky.
These are the same, but I am not the same
But wiser than I was, & wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho’ they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh call not Nature dumb;
These trees & stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. This wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road —
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of admonishment
And grave parental love.

They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds & boasts the immeasureable mind.

I feel as if I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country’s primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.

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AN ANCIENT LADY WHO DWELT IN ROME

An ancient lady who dwelt in Rome
Bro’t Tarquin the King her Album from home
Nine ponderous volumes conveyed in a cart
And mentioned that this was only a part
And requested the monarch to buy the nine tomes
At a price he thought might buy nine Romes.
The unmannerly king refused to buy
A lady’s Album appraised so high,
And she, to show her honest ire,
Threw the three first volumes into the fire,
And offered the king the rest of her lore
At the price she had fixed for the nine before.
The king was amazed at the lady’s story,
But the argument now was an a fortiori,
And he flatly refused to redeem the volumes,
Whatever might be or might not in their columns.
The lady departed, & straightway burned
Three more of the six, & then returned

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BE OF GOOD CHEER, BRAVE SPIRIT; STEADFASTLY

Be of good cheer, brave spirit; steadfastly
Serve that low whisper thou hast served; for know,
God hath a select family of Sons
Now scattered wide thro’ earth, & each alone,
Who are thy spiritual kindred, & each one
By constant service to that inward law,
Is rearing the sublime proportions
Of a true monarch’s soul. Beauty & Strength

The riches of a spotless memory,
The eloquence of truth, the wisdom got
By searching of a clear & loving eye
That seeth as God seeth These are their gifts
And Time who keeps God’s word brings on the day
To seal the marriage of these minds with thine
Thine everlasting lovers. Ye shall be
The salt of all the elements, world of the world

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THE WINDS ARE COLD, THE DAYS ARE DARK

The winds are cold, the days are dark,
In this unlovely land
The East wind rises with the tide
To chill the populous strand

Above me shines no Syrian moon
With warm luxurious glow,
Nor golden orange groves at noon
Perfume the world below.

Yet more I prize this frozen land,
This iron soil of ours,
Than fields by Indian breezes fanned
And crimsoned oer with flowers

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WRITTEN IN SICKNESS

I bear in youth the sad infirmities
That use to undo the limb & sense of age:
It hath pleased Heaven to break the dream of bliss
Which lit my onward way with bright presage,
And my unserviceable limbs forego
The sweet delight I found in fields & farms,
On windy hills, whose tops with morning glow,
And lakes, smooth mirrors of Aurora’s charms.
Yet I think on them in the silent night,
Still breaks that morn, though dim, to Memory’s eye
And the firm soul does the pale train defy
Of grim Disease, that would her peace affright.
Please God, I’ll wrap me in mine innocence
And bid each awful Muse drive the damned harpies hence.

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OIL & WINE

Oil & Wine,
Sparkling gems, & rich attire,
House & lands that men desire,
 — Ye may seek at Plutus’ shrine.

High renown,
Plaudits from desiring throngs,
Echoed far by poets songs
Are dowry to the Victors crown.

Royal state,
Diamond star, & cap of gold,
Bedizened throne, how hard to hold!
 — Are got by force, or fraud, or fate.

Man must learn — .
In haunts of care, in fields of strife,
Are bought the glittering goods of life,
These to ashes turn.

But go thou home,
Home to the mansion of the mind,
If solid good thy search would find,
In the bright bower of Joy, & Thought’s immortal dome.

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ALL THAT THY VIRGIN SOUL CAN ASK BE THINE

All that thy virgin soul can ask be thine
Beautiful Ellen Let this prayer be mine
The first devotion that my soul has paid
To mortal grace it pays to thee fair maid
I am enamoured of thy loveliness
Lovesick with thy sweet beauty which shall bless
With its glad light my path of life around
Which now is joyless where thou art not found
Now am I stricken with the sympathy
That binds the whole world in electric tie
I hail love’s birth within my hermit breast
And welcome the bright ordinance to be blest
I was a hermit whom the lone Muse cheers,
I sped apart my solitary years,
I found no joy in woman’s meaning eye
When Fashion’s merry mob were dancing by;
Yet had I read the law all laws above,
 — Great Nature hath ordained the heart to love —
Yet had I heard that in this mortal state
To every mind exists its natural mate,
That God at first did marry soul to soul
Tho’ lands divide & seas between them roll.
Then eagerly I searched each circle round
I panted for my mate, but no mate found
I saw bright eyes, fair forms, complexions fine,
But not a single soul that spoke to mine.
At last the star broke thro’ the hiding cloud,
At last I found thee in the silken crowd
I found thee, Ellen, born to love & shine,
And I who found am blessed to call thee mine.

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THAT WANDERING FIRE TO ME APPEARS

That wandering fire to me appears
Albeit a tiny spark
Older than the oldest spheres
That glow in the heavens dark

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THOUGH HER EYE SEEK OTHER FORMS

Though her eye seek other forms
And a glad delight below
Yet the love the world that warms
Bids for me her bosom glow

She must love me till she find
Another heart as large & true
Her soul like mine is unconfined
And the world has only two

If Nature hold another heart
That knows a purer flame than we
I too therein would challenge part
And learn of love a new degree

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DEAR ELLEN, MANY A GOLDEN YEAR

Dear Ellen, many a golden year
May ripe, then dim, thy beauty’s bloom
But never shall the hour appear
In sunny joy, in sorrow’s gloom,
When aught shall hinder me from telling
My ardent love, all loves excelling.

The spot is not in the rounded earth,
In cities vast, in islands lone,
Where I will not proclaim thy worth,
And glory that thou art mine own;
Will you, nill you, I’ll say I love thee,
Be the moon of June or of March above thee.

And when this porcelain clay of thine
Is laid beneath the cold earth’s flowers,
And close beside reposes mine,
Prey to the sun & air & showers,
I’ll find thy soul in the upper sphere,
And say I love thee in Paradise here.

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I CALL HER BEAUTIFUL; — SHE SAYS

I call her beautiful; — she says
Go to; your words are idle;
My lips began to speak her praise,
My lips she tried to bridle.
But, Ellen, I must tell you this,
Your prohibition wasted is,
Unless among your things you find
A little jail to hold the mind;
If you should dazzle out mine eyes,
As dimmer suns sometimes have done,
My sleepless ears, those judges wise,
Would say, Tis the voice of the Peerless one.
And if your witchery decree
That my five senses closed should be,
The little image in my soul
Is Ellen out of Ellen’s controul,
And whilst I live in the Universe
I will say tis my beauty, for better, for worse.

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I’VE FOUND THE DAINTY MALICE OUT

I’ve found the dainty malice out
Of Ellen’s hypocritic eye
She’s wound her gipsy nets about

I thought it was no harm to watch
The features of an artless maid

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AND DO I WASTE MY TIME

And do I waste my time
Scribbling of love to my beautiful queen
And is it idle to talk in prose & rhyme
Of one who at midnight & morning’s prime
In daylight is fancied, in visions seen?
And do I forget the burning crown
That Glory should weave of light for me

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AND THOUGH HE DEARLY PRIZED THE BARDS OF FAME

And though he dearly prized the bards of fame
His sweetest poem was one maiden’s name

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AND ELLEN, WHEN THE GREYBEARD YEARS

And Ellen, when the greybeard years
Have brought us to life’s Evening hour
And all the crowded Past appears
A tiny scene of sun & shower. —

Then, if I read the page aright
Where Hope the soothsayer reads our lot,
Thyself shalt own the page was bright
Well that we loved we had we not.

When Mirth is dumb & Flattery’s fled
And thy mute music’s dearest tone
When all but Love itself is dead,
And all but deathless Reason gone

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THE BRAVE EMPEDOCLES DEFYING FOOLS

The brave Empedocles defying fools
Pronounced the word that mortals hate to hear
“I am divine I am not mortal made
I am superior to my human weeds.”
Not sense but Reason is the Judge of truth
Reason’s twofold; part human part divine
That human part may be described & taught
The other portion language cannot speak

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DEAR BROTHER, WOULD YOU KNOW THE LIFE

Dear brother, would you know the life
Please God, that I would lead?
On the first wheels that quit this weary town
Over yon western bridges I would ride
And with a cheerful benison forsake
Each street & spire & roof incontinent.
Then would I seek where God might guide my steps,
Deep in a woodland tract, a sunny farm,
Amid the mountain counties, Hants Franklin Berks,
Where down the rock ravine a river roars,
Even from a brook, & where old woods
Not tamed & cleared, cumber the ample ground
With their centennial wrecks.
Find me a slope where I can feel the sun
And mark the rising of the early stars.
There will I bring my books, my household gods,
The reliquaires of my dead saint, & dwell
In the sweet odor of her memory.
There, in the uncouth solitude, unlock
My stock of art, plant dials, in the grass,
Hang in the air a bright thermometer,
And aim a telescope at the inviolate Sun.

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DOST THOU NOT HEAR ME ELLEN

Dost thou not hear me Ellen
Is thy ear deaf to me
Is thy radiant eye
Dark that it cannot see

In yonder ground thy limbs are laid
Under the snow
And earth has no spot so dear above
As that below

And there I know the heart is still
And the eye is shut & the ear is dull

But the spirit that dwelt in mine
The spirit wherein mine dwelt
The soul of Ellen the thought divine
From God, that came — for all that felt

Does it not know me now
Does it not share my thought
Is it prisoned from Waldo’s prayer
Is its glowing love forgot

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TEACH ME I AM FORGOTTEN BY THE DEAD

Teach me I am forgotten by the dead
And that the dead is by herself forgot
And I no longer would keep terms with me.
I would not murder, steal, or fornicate,
Nor with ambition break the peace of towns
But I would bury my ambition
The hope & action of my sovereign soul
In miserable ruin. Not a hope
Should ever make a holiday for me
I would not be the fool of accident
I would not have a project seek an end
That needed aught
Beyond the handful of my present means
The sun of Duty drop from his firmament
To be a rushlight for each petty end
I would not harm my fellow men
On this low argument, ’twould harm myself

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WHY SHOULD I LIVE

Why should I live
The future will repeat the past
Yet cannot give
Again the Vision beautiful too beautiful to last
And o perhaps the welcome stroke
That severs forever this fleshly yoke
Shall restore the vision to the soul
In the great Vision of the Whole.

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SHALL THE MUSE SING FOR THOUSANDS & NOT SING

Shall the Muse sing for thousands & not sing
For thee a Muse thyself of sweetest lay
I would forget my
What is life for & what is Memory
If it wants room for thee Is it a curse
Can it contain all painful circumstance
Each dull degrading fact & make life stale
With its street calendar its tavern roll
And can it not sanctify itself with thee
Yea fill the soul with odoriferous thought
By limning there thy lineaments in the serene
& Spiritual beauty God drest thee withal
And write the story of an angel’s life
And all thy ministry to thine & mine
And me

Shalt thou go to thy grave unsung
Shall no flower be plucked for thee
Shall no rites be paid no death bell rung
When the desire of all eyes is gone

’Tis well for we
Are on the outside of that world
Wherein thou enterest fair & free
And all the rites we pay
Are symbols bodily
Gropings in the dark
Around the door

Thou art gone in to God
Thou walkest in heaven’s day
Thou talkest with the seraphim
The select sons of truth
Thou addest a verse to their hymn
And curious speculation occupies
Thy radiant eyes
Every thought fresh wonders brings
On his planetary wings
And every thought is a chapel where
Thou perfumest heaven with prayer
And the eldest born of Godhead say
What star beams new on us today
And yet thou hast a bond on earth
Which thou wilt keep in heaven
The nearer to the throne thou goest
The more place it will have in thy holy breast.

For I know that the Universe cannot blot
From a holy soul its true record
And so on a cherub’s wings I fly
To the Holy of Holies of the Lord

If the heart is raised by heavenly choirs
That which here made heaven is not lost
And so I rise on her risen desires
Amid the pure martyrs’ host.

If there is joy when a sinner comes
There’s sympathy when
The dust lies on thy head
In the dark sepulchre
Thou hast gone alone to thy bed
Peace calm peace to her,
But oh what funeral is thine
My holy wife
Sad thoughts in every kindred breast
That knew thou hadst passed from life
And in the breast you loved

In the Soul that was dear to you
Dark hopeless visions roved
And a perpetual yew

And every day renews
The unrepaired regret

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WHAT FROM THIS BARREN BEING DO WE REAP

What from this barren being do we reap
And what shall hinder the wise
From lying down to sleep in the earth
The innocent child is dead
The blushing cheek of youth is cold
Genius hath untimely fled
Nor hath the world a face
To fill thy vacant place
O radiant daughter of light & love
Too rich in the graces that dwell above
To be lent long to the sinful earth
God had garnished with thy birth.
Thou wert pure as they are not
Who dwell upon this murky spot
And every thing that’s fair below.

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DUST UNTO DUST! AND SHALL NO MORE BE SAID

Dust unto dust! and shall no more be said
Ellen for thee, and shall a common fate
Blend thy last hour with the last hours of all?
Of thee my wife, my undefiled, my dear?
The muse thy living beauty could inspire
Shall spare one verse to strew thy urn
Or be forever silent. Ellen is dead
She who outshone all beauty yet knew not
That she was beautiful, she who was fair

After another mould than flesh & blood.
Her beauty was of God — The maker’s hand
Yet rested on his work,
And cast an atmosphere of sanctity
Around her steps that pleased old age & youth.
Yea that not won the eye, but did persuade
The soul by realizing human hopes,
Teaching that faith & love were not a dream,
Teaching that purity had yet a shrine,
And that the innocent & affectionate thoughts
That harbour in the bosom of a child
Might live embodied in a riper form,
And dwell with wisdom never bought by sin.
Blessed, sweet singer, were the ears that heard
To her, the eye that saw, bare witness.
The holy light of her eye did prophesy
The impatient heaven that called her hence.

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THE DAYS PASS OVER ME

The days pass over me,
And I am still the same;
The aroma of my life is gone
With the flower with which it came.

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WHY FEAR TO DIE

Why fear to die
And let thy body lie
Under the flowers of June
Thy body food
For the groundworm’s brood
And thy grave smiled on by the visiting moon

Amid great Nature’s halls,
Girt in by mountain walls,
And washed with waterfalls,

It would please me to die,
Where every wind that sweeps my tomb
Goes loaded with a free perfume,
Dealt out with a God’s charity.

I should like to lie in sweets,
A hill’s leaves for winding sheets,
And the searching sun to see
That I’m laid with decency
And the commissioned wind to sing
His mighty Psalm from fall to spring
And annual tunes commemorate
Of nature’s child the common fate.

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I AM ALONE. SAD IS MY SOLITUDE

I am alone. Sad is my solitude.
O thou sweet daughter of God, my angel wife,
Why dost thou leave me thus in the great stranger world
Without one sign or token, one remembrancer
Sent o’er the weary lands that sunder us
To say I greet thee with a beating heart.
Does thy heart beat with mine? does thy blue eye
Ever look northward with desire, O do thy prayers
Remember me when thou hallowest thy maker’s name,
Remember him
Who never failed to grace his orison
With thy dear name, believes it acceptable
And prays, that he may pray for thee —

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ON THEE HAS GOD CONFERRED

On thee has God conferred
A bodily presence mean as Paul’s
Yet made thee bearer of a word
That sleepy nations as with trumpet calls

O noble heart accept
With equal thanks the talent & disgrace
The splendid town unwept
Nourish thy power in a private place.

Think not that unattended
By heavenly Powers thou steal’st to solitude
Nor even on earth all unbefriended
Tho no sweet rabble shouts on thee intrude

Let Webster’s lofty face
Ever on thousands shine
A beacon set that Freedoms race
Might gather omens from that radiant sign.

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ALL THE GREAT & GOOD

All the great & good,
And all the fair,
As if in a disdainful mood,
Forsake the world, & to the grave repair.

Is there a sage
Needed to curb the unruly times; —
He hastes to quit the stage,
And blushing leaves his country to its crimes.

Is there an angel drest
In weeds of mortal beauty, whom high Heaven
With all sweet perfections doth invest; —
It hastes to take what it hath given.

And, as the delicate snow
Which latest fell, the thieving wind first takes
So thou, dear wife, must go,
As frail, as spotless, as those new fallen flakes.

Let me not fear to die,
But let me live so well,
As to win this mark of death from on high,
That I with God, & thee, dear heart, may dwell.

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SEEMED TO ME — NEVER MAID

Seemed to me — never maid
Wore the poor weeds of hapless womanhood
With such a brave sustained purity.
She felt no shame that she was mortal

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WHERE ART THOU

Where art thou
Thou beautiful dream
Whom every grace & every joy
Clothed in sunbeams dearest, best
Whom every fleeting hour in new graces drest
And every wondering eye that saw thee blest

Where art thou now
Sad I miss thy beaming brow
I miss thy radiant eye
The joyful noon of my life is past
My sun is set my moon is gone
Each star of hope sunk one by one
And in this cold, damp, silent eve of life
I walk alone oh Ellen, oh my wife.

One by one those graces come
Day by day to memory’s eye
Which thou worest as a robe
And I live over thy history
Thy thots were wove in beauty
Wisdom drest in dewbright flowers;
And sad & sportive hours
Had swelled alike the potent melody

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I LIVE AMONG IDEAL MEN

I live among ideal men
I know graces
I cannot find in human faces
And I would gladly know
Where I got my vision,
If the earth does not hold its archetype

With open eye & ear
I move thro all this world of men
And well their various gifts discern
What I cannot do, they do
If I do not covet their powers
Not less do I mark & prize them

Yet still from all its journeys wide
The eye comes back unsatisfied
No living man can yet pretend
To earn the sacred name of Friend.

And that wherein alike all fail
Is the easiest part of virtue
To wit, simplicity & truth
The native ornaments of human youth.

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WHAT AVAILS IT ME

What avails it me
That I have many friends
If when my walking ends
I come back to a lonely house

What boots it that I dwell
In a city free and rich and old
If the long streets never hold
The only form I love

What avails it I have bread
Raiment and books and leisure
Access to wisdom and to pleasure
If Ellen still is dead

In my chamber she is not
From my parlour joy is gone
Round the house I roam and groan
The glory of my house is fled

What avails it me
That I have many thoughts
That the nimble brain can run
Through all lands that see the sun
Hath a record of each race
That have had a dwelling place

If only I have right of seeing
In this wilderness of being
And from the vision glorious
Must come back to my lonely house.

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SHE NEVER COMES TO ME

She never comes to me
She promised me a thousand times
That she would dearly dearly love me
That in sickness & in health
Others present others absent
Whilst air was round & heaven above me
She would be present as my life
My holy gentle tender wife

She promised in my secret ear
When none but God & I could hear
That she would cleave to me forever

There was one will between us
There was one heart within us
And God upon his children smiled
As we the hours with love beguiled

And now I am alone
Unheard I moan
She never comes to me
Sits never by my side
I never hear her voice
She comes not even to my dreams
O Ellen

And comes she not
Ask thy heart, Waldo.
Doth she break her word
Doth not her love embrace thee yet
Even from the Spirits’ land?

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LEAVE ME, FEAR! THY THROBS ARE BASE

Leave me, Fear! thy throbs are base,
Trembling for the body’s sake.
Come, Love! who dost the spirit raise,
Because for others thou dost wake.
O it is beautiful in death
To hide the shame of human nature’s end
In sweet & wary serving of a friend.
Love is true Glory’s field, where the last breath
Expires in troops of honorable cares.
The wound of Fate the hero cannot feel
Smit with the heavenlier smart of social zeal.
It draws immortal day
In soot & ashes of our clay.
It is the virtue that enchants it.
It is the face of God that haunts it.

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IF THOU CANST BEAR

If thou canst bear
Strong meat of simple truth
If thou durst my words compare
With what thou thinkest in the soul’s free youth

Then take this fact unto thy soul —
God dwells in thee. —
It is no metaphor nor parable
It is unknown to thousands & to thee
Yet there is God.

He is in thy world
But thy world knows him not
He is the mighty Heart
From which life’s varied pulses part

Clouded & shrouded there doth sit
The Infinite
Embosomed in a man
And thou art stranger to thy guest
And know’st not what thou dost invest.
The clouds that veil his light within
Are thy thick woven webs of sin
Which his glory struggling through
Darkens to thine evil hue

Then bear thyself, o man!
Up to the scale & compass of thy guest
Soul of thy soul.
Be great as doth beseem
The ambassador who bears
The royal presence where he goes.
Give up to thy soul —
Let it have its way —
It is, I tell thee, God himself,
The selfsame One that rules the Whole
Tho’ he speaks thro’ thee with a stifled voice
And looks thro’ thee shorn of his beams

But if thou listen to his voice
If thou obey the royal thought
It will grow clearer to thine ear
More glorious to thine eye
The clouds will burst that veil him now
And thou shalt see the Lord.

Therefore be great
Not proud, too great to be proud
Let not thine eyes rove
Peep not in corners; let thine eyes
Look straight before thee as befits
The simplicity of Power.
And in thy closet carry state
Filled with light walk therein
And as a King
Would do no treason to his own empire
So do not thou to thine.

This is the reason why thou dost recognize
Things now first revealed
Because in thee resides
The Spirit that lives in all
And thou canst learn the laws of Nature
Because its author is latent in thy breast.
And in the Word
A wise man, Daniel, is the man
In whom the Spirit of the mighty gods abides
His goodness doth permit the deity within
To appear in his own light

Therefore o happy youth
Happy if thou dost know & love this truth
Thou art unto thyself a law
And since the Soul of things is in thee
Thou needest nothing out of thee.
The law, the gospel, & the Providence,
Heaven, Hell, the Judgment, & the stores
Immeasurable of Truth & Good
All these thou must find

Within thy single mind
Or never find.
Thou art the law.;
The gospel has no revelation
Of peace or hope until there is response
From the deep chambers of thy mind thereto
The rest is straw
It can reveal no truth unknown before.
The Providence
Thou art thyself that doth dispense
Wealth to thy work Want to thy sloth
Glory to goodness to Neglect the Moth
Thou sow’st the wind, the whirlwind reapest
Thou payest the wages
Of thy own work, through all ages.
The almighty energy within
Crowneth Virtue curseth Sin
Virtue sees by its own light
Stumbleth Sin in selfmade night.

Who approves thee doing right?
God in thee
Who condemns thee doing wrong?
God in thee
Who punishes thine evil deed?
God in thee
What is thine evil meed?
Thy worse mind, with error blind
And more prone to evil
That is, the greater hiding of the God within
The loss of peace
The terrible displeasure of this inmate
And next the consequence
More faintly as more distant wrought
Upon our outward fortunes
Which decay with vice
With virtue rise.

The selfsame God
By the same law

Makes the souls of angels glad
And the souls of devils sad

There is nothing else but God
Where e’er I look
All things hasten back to him
Light is but his shadow dim.

Shall I ask wealth or power of God who gave
An image of himself to be my Soul
As well might swilling Ocean ask a wave
Or the starred firmament a dying coal
For that which is in me lives in the whole

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A DULL UNCERTAIN BRAIN

A dull uncertain brain
But gifted yet to know
That God has Seraphim who go
Singing an immortal strain
Immortal here below
I know the mighty bards
I listen when they sing
And more I know
The Secret store
Which these explore
When they with torch of genius pierce
The tenfold clouds that cover
The riches of the Universe
From God’s adoring lover.
And if to me it is not given
To bring one ingot thence
Of that unfading gold of heaven
His merchants may dispense
Yet well I know the royal mine
And know the sparkle of its ore
Celestial truths from lies that shine
Explored they teach us to explore.

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THERE IS IN ALL THE SONS OF MEN

There is in all the sons of men
A love that in the spirit dwells
That panteth after things unseen
And tidings of the Future tells

And God hath built his altar here
To keep this fire of faith alive
And set his priests in holy fear
To speak the truth — for truth to survive.

And hither come the pensive train
Of rich & poor of young & old,
Of ardent youths untouched by pain
Of thoughtful maids & manhood bold

They seek a friend to speak the word
Already trembling on their tongue
To touch with prophet’s hand the Chord
Which God in human hearts hath strung

To speak the plain reproof of sin
That sounded in the soul before
And bid them let the angels in
That knock at humble Sorrow’s door.

They come to hear of faith & hope
That fill the exulting soul
They come to lift the curtain up
That hides the mortal goal

O thou sole source of hope assured
O give thy servant power
So shall he speak to us the word
Thyself dost give forevermore

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I WILL NOT LIVE OUT OF ME

I will not live out of me
I will not see with others’ eyes
My good is good, my evil ill
I would be free — I cannot be
While I take things as others please to rate them
I dare attempt to lay out my own road
That which myself delights in shall be Good
That which I do not want, — indifferent,
That which I hate is Bad. That’s flat
Henceforth, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be
Lighthearted as a bird & live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart
I hear continually his Voice therein
And books, & priests, & worlds, I less esteem
Who says the heart’s a blind guide? It is not.
My heart did never counsel me to sin
I wonder where it got its wisdom
For in the darkest maze amid the sweetest baits
Or amid horrid dangers never once
Did that gentle Angel fail of his oracle
The little needle always knows the north
The little bird remembereth his note
And this wise Seer never errs
I never taught it what it teaches me
I only follow when I act aright.
Whence then did this Omniscient Spirit come?
From God it came. It is the Deity.

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HARD IS IT TO PERSUADE THE PUBLIC MIND OF ITS PLAIN DUTY & TRUE INTEREST

Hard is it to persuade the public mind of its plain duty & true interest
And hard to find a straight road to renown
And hard for young men to get honest gold
And hard to find a perfect wife
And mid the armies of imperfect men
To find a friend hardest of all
All good is hard to come by
Yet all these are easilier done
Than to live well one day — to be a Man.
Who speaks the truth outspeaks our Everett
Who acts his thought takes place of Washington
And who prefers music of his Reason
Above the thunder of all men’s example
Embraces the beatitude of God.
Alas! that evermore the worldly hands
Hang back behind the charitable Will.

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ALWAYS DAY & NIGHT

Always day & night
Day before me
Night behind me

This I penned
Sitting on two stakes
Under the apple tree
Down in the swamp
To guard a friend

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HEARST THOU, SWEET SPIRIT, THOU HAST HEARD BEFORE

Hearst thou, sweet spirit, thou hast heard before —
In heaven perchance
The heavy tidings had a golden sound
Thy dear sister, sharer of thy thots
While yet, dear Ellen, thou didst linger here,
Meekly receives the death blows, one by one,
And as thou, blessed wife, didst wither once in February’s cold eye,
From month to month,
Passing from earth an angel into heaven
So, in her turn, she hastes upon thy steps,
And leaves two mourners following presently.

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NONE SPARES ANOTHER YET IT PLEASES ME

None spares another yet it pleases me
That none to any is indifferent
No heart in all this world is separate
But all are cisterns of one central sea
All are mouthpieces of the Eternal Word

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WRITTEN IN NAPLES, MARCH, 1833

We are what we are made; each following day
Is the Creator of our human mould
Not less than was the first; the all wise God
Gilds a few points in every several life
And as each flower upon the fresh hill-side,
And every coloured petal of each flower,
Is sketched and dyed each with a new design,
Its spot of purple, & its streak of brown,
So each man’s life shall have its proper lights,
And a few joys, a few peculiar charms,
For him round in the melancholy hours,
And reconcile him to the common days.
Not many men see beauty in the fogs
Of close low pine-woods in a river town:
Yet unto me not morn’s magnificence,
Nor the red rainbow of a summer eve,
Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls
Of rich men blazing hospitable light,
Nor wit, nor eloquence, no, nor even the song
Of any woman that is now alive,
Hath such a soul, such divine influence,
Such resurrection of the happy past,
As is to me when I behold the morn
Ope in such low moist road-side, & beneath
Peep the blue violets out of the black loam,
Pathetic silent poets that sing to me
Thine elegy, sweet singer, sainted wife!

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WHAT IS IT TO SAIL

What is it to sail
Upon the calm blue sea
To ride as a cloud
Over the purple floor
With golden mists for company?

And Day & Night are drest
Ever in their jocund vest,
And the water is warm to the hands,
And far below you see motes of light
By day, & streams of fire by night.

What is it to sail
Upon the stormy sea,
To drive with naked spars
Before the roaring gale,
Hemmed round with ragged clouds,
Foaming & hissing & thumping waves
The reeling cabin is cold & wet,
The masts are strained, & the sail is torn,
The gale blows fiercer as the night sets in
Scarce can the seaman aloft master his struggling reef,
Even the stout captain in his coat of storms
Sighs as he glances astern at the white, white combs

And the passenger sits unsocial
And puts his book aside
And leans upon his hand.
Yet is the difference less
Between this gray sea & that golden one
Than twixt the moods of the man that sails upon it
Today & yesterday.

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ALONE IN ROME! WHY ROME IS LONELY TOO

Alone in Rome! Why Rome is lonely too,
Virtue alone is sweet society.
It keeps the key to all heroic hearts,
And opens you a welcome when you dare.
You must be like them, if you challenge them,
Scorn trifles, & embrace a better aim
Than wine, or sleep, or praise,
Hunt knowledge, as the lover woos a maid,
And ever, in the strife of your own tho’ts,
Obey the nobler impulse. That is Rome.
That shall command a senate to your side
For there is no force in the universe
That can contend with love.
Wait then, sad friend, wait in majestic peace
The hour of Heaven

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AT SEA, SEPTEMBER 1833

Oft as I paced the deck,
My thought recurred on the uncertain sea
To what is faster than the solid land.
My Country! can the heart clasp realm so vast
As the broad oceans that wash thee inclose?
Is not the charity ambitious
That meets its arms about a continent?
And yet the sages praise the preference
Of my own cabin to a baron’s hall.
Chide it not then, but count it honesty
The insidious love & hate that curl the lip
Of the frank Yankee in the tenements
Of ducal & of royal rank abroad;
His supercilious ignorance
Of lordship, heraldry, & ceremony;
Nor less, his too tenacious memory,
Amid the particolored treasuries
That deck the Louvre & the Pitti House,
Of the brave steamboats puffing by New York,
Boston’s half-island, & the Hadley Farms
Washed by Connecticut’s psalm-loving stream.
Yea, if the ruddy Englishman speak true,
In Rome’s basilica, and underneath
The frescoed sky of its audacious dome,
Dauntless Kentucky chews, & counts the cost,
And builds the shrine with dollars in his head.
Arrived in Italy, his first demand, —
‘Has the star-bearing squadron left Leghorn?’

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I WILL NOT HESITATE TO SPEAK THE WORD

I will not hesitate to speak the word
Committed to me. It is not of men
It is not of myself — no vain discourse
Empty oration, tinkling soulless talk
My heart lies open to the Universe
I read only what there is writ I speak
The sincere word that’s whispered in my ear
I am an organ in the mouth of God
My prophecy the music of his lips.
Tho’ harsh in evil ears ’tis harmony
To patient wise & faithful hearts whose love
Cooperates with his
Concord of heaven & earth. Author divine
Of what I am & what I say, vouchsafe
To cleanse me that my folly may not hide
Thy truth nor my infirmity disguise
The Omnipotence that animates my clay.
Thou Lord dost clothe thy attributes with flesh
And named it man a morning spectacle
Unto the universe exhibiting
A manifold & mystic lesson

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THE SUN IS THE SOLE INCONSUMABLE FIRE

The Sun is the sole inconsumable fire
And God is the sole inexhaustible Giver.

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POEM, SPOKEN BEFORE THE SOCIETY, AUGUST, 1834

Is not this house a harp whose living chords,
Touched by a Poet with electric words,
Would vibrate with a harmony more true
Than Handel’s married thunders ever knew?
But I, — mere lover of the Bards’ sweet speech,
A simple seeker of the truth they teach,
Having no skill to play, must touch a string
That even to fumbling hands may music bring.
For who can love AMERICA, but seems
Clothed with some favor from its woods and streams?

His hand who hung in space this sun-burnt ball
Made Man the Heart in harmony with all
And each man to his native country tied
With the twin ligaments of love & pride.
And shall it be by antique men alone
In petty states can patriot zeal be shown
They vaunt their pastures at a kingdom’s worth
And we be dumb, whose lands balance the earth.

What purpose to man friendly hid so long
Columbia from the subtle & the strong,
Almost from pole to pole its green extent
Yet measured — only by the firmament.
Along the enormous tract in every belt
Of latitude, a several climate felt:
Under the arctic morn, red snow and moss,
Flora’s cold elements, the rocks emboss.
Southward, the rose, the apple, and the corn,
Thank the sweet influence of night and morn;
The palm-tree shakes its feathers on the Line,
And round the cane and plantain, curls the vine.

Thou shalt not covet; leave those lands alone,
Content to speculate within thine own.
As the stars shine in heaven, so genial shine
Thy stars, my country, to all lands a sign!
The little traveller from Britain’s isle
Lost in these far-spread states, may chirp and smile
At unbred men; because his dinner cools,
The country’s naught, — the countrymen are fools.
For him an ill-served soup hath disenchanted
The mighty hemisphere his fathers planted;
He sees not, by the famous pilgrims won,
A hundred Englands opening to the sun.

These northern fields, once the bear’s range and den
Bread, iron, oak, and coal, they yield to men.
Richer than purple hills of oil & wine,
Our barren mountains give their son, the Pine;
Borne on whose planks, the hardy fishers float
Round earth, wherever waves will bear a boat.

Angels might lean to see man going forth
With axe & plough to tame the savage earth;
The builder’s saw and hammer never rest;
A village climbs each hill with whitening crest;
Lowell, Bangor, & Rochester express
To pleased God the redeemed wilderness:
See the green line of culture westward run

Oer hill, swamp, prairie, to the setting sun:
Yon wagon, disappearing in the woods,
Transplants the Saxon germ to lovelier solitudes,
Bearing the wife, the babes, — basket & store —
To greet with English tongue Pacific’s shore.
What’s Italy? What’s England; Flanders France
That may compare with this inheritance
Prisons of cooped up millions born too late
Whose loss were gain to the oerburdened state
Here shall a man be rated at his worth
And nature’s freshest roses hail his birth.

Best name that Time can in his annals find
Columbia styled the Asylum of mankind
Blest office! to the exile to dispense
With open hand a God’s munificence
Say to him there is room for us and him
In the deep woods & by the Ocean’s brim;
Yes greet sad Europe’s exile to your shores
Let love unbar to him the mountain doors
Bid homeless Poland prove this side the main
The freedom she hath perilled all to gain
Give Erin’s starving outcast, wholesome meat;
And England’s haggard weaver slumber sweet.

Ah thou poor orphan! did the pitiless bed
Of feudal earth that bare thee grudge thee bread?
Was man so cheap in yon preserves of game
That thou must bend thy body as in shame
At being man; in Want, did life begin;
Thy only happiness the joys of sin;
Was it thine added crime some shame to feel,
To be for life the treadle of a wheel?
Come, clear thy brow; the hospitable Hours
Shall weave thy future web with healing flowers.
Welcome! in this continent thou shalt see
God’s blessing broad enough to cover thee.
Come, teach thy lip to smile; that hopeless brow
I’ll fits the firmament that shades thee now.
Go climb the Allegany’s strait defiles;

Speed up Missouri twice a thousand miles,
Traverse the unplanted forest floor, whereon
The allseeing sun for ages hath not shone;
Build where thou wilt thy home in Freedoms soil,
And bare thy strong arms to a freeman’s toil;
Plenty shall fill for thee her laughing horn,
And fields be jocund when thy son is born;
Go rear, — for truth the British gibe prevents, —
A race of captains, judges, presidents.

Small praise I deem it that this continent
Provides the beggar bread, clothing, content;
But greater praise no lands have claimed or can
Than this, — we make the vagabond a man.
Him for whom Thought & Freedom were but words
Whose substance was monopolized by lords
Open in him that inward eye whose view
Doth re-create the Universe anew
Is the rose fair? behold it glows for him;
For him the sea shells blush; the dolphins swim;
The perfumed morning sheds her diamond dews;
All sights and sounds in him their spirit infuse;
The keen October’s air, when trees are gay
With rainbow plumage, deepening day by day;
The midnights pomp when yonder horned moon
Rivals days golden with a silver moon;
But more than all, he was for Virtue born,
Though thrown neglected on his country’s scorn
And every gift benignant heaven let fall
On Man, the exile here is heir of all.

Yes, ope the hospitable forest wide
Unto poor men from all the realms of pride
So shall the New World pay the old its debt
For the great pair, — Columbus, — Lafayette;
From yon serene heaven leaning they shall see
The land which one would find, and one would free.

Alas for France! her truest heart is fled:
Her long-descended noble lieth dead
 — The best of heroes in the worst of times
His spotless life relieves his country’s crimes
Permit the vagrant muse to grace her verse
Borrowing a garland from his recent hearse

Ten years are flown since this great heir of fame
Stood here among us — to his children came
In his clear atmosphere of honor stood
And warmed us with the glory of the good
You know Who knows it not in any clime
The jubilee & triumph of that time
The nation followed him with eyes of love
As if he were some Genius from above
Uprose the farmer by his apple-tree
Tarried the sailor ere he put to sea.
The story of his life through all mouths ran
And swelling crowds hemmed in the heroic man
They pored insatiate on his seamed face
As if to search therein the spirit’s grace
In calm simplicity the old man stood
As one on sights of joy unused to brood
Seemed his great heart more easily would brave
A martyr for man’s liberty — the grave
He wore no badge — no mark the eye could see
Adorned only with his history.

So seemed to us; but envious Carlists prate
He was a good man but was never great;
His simple figure in the rich saloons
And halting foot displeased the court buffoons
He had a fixed smile, a farmers face,
Nor looked like marquis of the ancient race.
Ah! could these worshippers of ribbons read
In mortal features an immortal meed!
That smile has braved Bourbon’s & Orleans’ frown,
That farmer’s face outfaced Napoleon.
That patient worshipper of right was known
Where gayer lineaments might not be shown

In war’s red lines, & in the popular shock
When foaming thousands bellowed, ‘To the block!’
A tower immovable in Factions sea,
The patriarch, ‘mid the nations, of the free.
Smile did he? twas for Freedoms livelong hope
When all but he quailed at her horoscope;
Write on his tomb— ‘He never failed to smile
Gainst death, for freedom & for man the while.’
But when a man to noble place pretends
Take the old touchstone Judge him by his friends
There were two men in this our latter age
Might challenge greatness on a Roman page
One had a patriot’s, one a monarch’s heart, —
Both soldiers — Washington and Bonaparte.
On Lafayette in arms leaned Washington,
 — When saw the world such pair? — father and son.
Napoleon, when all Europe knelt around him,
Sought Lafayette, — fain with his love had bound him,
And he whom Europe served, proud of its chain,
Sued to the great republican in vain.

Rich is the living map the eagle sees
Sailing oer Auburn in the harvest breeze;
Bright streams, white towns, & man sustaining farms,
And Boston folded in the Ocean’s arms;
 — O’er town & suburb broods her public dome,
And speaks to coundess eyes of Law & Home. —
And farther than that wind-borne eagle flies
Beyond the Southern Horn, or northern ice,
The errands of the pleasant land are done,
As shod with winds oer seas her envoys run.
Fair heritage! only by Virtue strong,
Be thou the tower of right, abolisher of wrong.
What charms the man that views from hill or tower
These gathered symbols of a people’s power.
Is it that round him six score thousand men
Feed fat each day to sleep out night again.
If there to grudge, to rob, to mob, they dwell,
The wolf, the wild cat might be there as well.

If ancient Virtue’s fire is gone & spent,
Perish these piles of Art & ornament!
Burn church & schoolhouse, which our license mock,
And let the gallant vessel rot in the dock.
The world-encircling merchant sink his goods
And with his babes pick berries in the woods:
Nay let the rotten land suck in the seas,
And the whales pasture mid our college trees!

But if the children of New England feel
With their high lifted fate an even zeal
If to be native of this law-ruled earth
Shall be in the world synonimous with worth;
Who eats his bread by Massachusett’ streams
Shall steadfast aim to be the thing he seems
Shall love the country that him bore & bred
Revere the memory of her worthy dead
Feel his heart beat with throbs no sneer withstands
At Concord, Bunker’s height, and Plymouth sands
And, his debt owned to God & to good men,
Cannot lay down his dust in dust again
Till he, by studious thought, or deed of love,
Have sealed his kindred with the blest above;
 — Enamoured of such worthiness shall Fate
Concede the commonwealth a longer date.
And when remotest times together view
Acts of the elder England & the New
One self same genius shall shine through them all
From ancient Runnimede to Faneuil Hall.

That genius is the Saxon love of Law
And Freedom, whence our daily peace we draw.
For see how Heaven preserves us; when, of late,
Ill omened birds screamed shipwreck to the state,
Then, to redeem the law from the law’s foes,
An unexpected strength at once arose;
Thundered from lips long silent, voices wise,
And patriot anger flamed in quiet eyes.

Ill fits the abstemious muse a crown to weave
For living brows; — ill fits them to receive:
And yet, if Virtue abrogate the law,
One portrait, — fact or fancy — we may draw:
A form which nature cast in the heroic mould
Of them who rescued liberty of old;
He, when the rising storm of party roared,
Brought his great forehead to the council board:
There, when hot heads perplexed with fears the state,
Calm as the morn, the manly patriot sate;
Seemed, when at last his clarion accents broke,
As if the conscience of the country spoke.
Not on its base Monadnoc surer stood
Than he to common sense and common good
No mimic; — from his breast his counsel drew
Believed the eloquent was aye the true;
He bridged the gulf from the alway good & wise,
To that within the vision of small eyes.
Self centred; when he launched the genuine word
It shook or captivated all who heard;
Ran from his mouth to mountains & the sea,
And burned in noble hearts proverb & prophecy.
Not old but wise, — for justice born to strive, —
God keep New England’s WEBSTER long alive!

Yet even this day of hope may be o’ercast
And future months resemble months now past
O countrymen! though every cheek may burn
With crimson shame from time this lesson learn
The towers that generations did combine
To build & grace, a rat may undermine.

I speak unto the generous & the good
Unto New England’s choicest brotherhood
Trust not the guarding sea, the fertile land
Nor fleets, nor hosts, nor law’s unsure command;
Build in the soul your citadel apart, —
The true New England is the patriots heart.
The day of elder states may come to us
When public faith shall be ridiculous.

When times are changed, and the old cement gone,
Nor longer laws can yield protection;
Even then, when justice is put up to sale,
Shall one resource redress the unequal scale
For, the true man, as long as earth shall stand,
Is to himself a state, a law, a land;
In his own breast shall read the righteous laws,
His own heart argue injured Virtues cause,
With cheerful brow undauntedly shall face
Or frowning kings, or roaring populace;
And, spending in man’s cause his latest breath,
Shall greet with joy sublime the Angel Death.

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O WHAT IS HEAVEN BUT THE FELLOWSHIP

O what is Heaven but the fellowship
Of minds that each can stand against the world,
By its own meek but incorruptible will?

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AH STRANGE STRANGE STRANGE

Ah strange strange strange
The Dualism of man
That he can enlist
But half his being in his act

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SEE YONDER LEAFLESS TREES AGAINST THE SKY

See yonder leafless trees against the sky,
How they diffuse themselves into the air,
And ever subdividing separate,
Limbs into branches, branches into twigs,
As if they loved the element, & hasted
To dissipate their being into it.

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DO THAT WHICH YOU CAN DO

Do that which you can do
The world will feel its need of you.

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FEW ARE FREE

Few are free
All might be
Tis the height
Of the soul’s flight

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VAN BUREN

The towers that generations did combine
To build & grace, a rat may undermine.

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THE FUTURE

How many big events to shake the earth,
Lie packed in silence waiting for their birth.

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REX

The bard & mystic held me for their own
I filled the dream of sad poetic maids
I took the friendly noble by the hand
I was the trustee of the handcartman
The brother of the fisher, porter, swain, —
And these from the crowd’s edge well pleased beheld
The honor done to me as done to them.

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WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

Six thankful weeks, — & let it be
A metre of prosperity, —
In my coat I bore this book,
And seldom therein could I look,
Each morning brought too much to think,
Heaven & earth to eat & drink.
Is he hapless, who can spare
In his plenty things so rare?

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I LEFT MY DREAMY PAGE & SALLIED FORTH

I left my dreamy page & sallied forth
Received the fair inscriptions of the night
The moon was making amber of the world
Glittered with silver every cottage pane
The trees were rich yet ominous with gloom the meadows broad
From ferns & grasses & from folded flowers
Sent a nocturnal fragrance the harlot flies
Flashed their small fires in air or held their court
In fairy groves of herds grass

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S. R.

Demure apothecary
Whose early reverend genius my young eye
With wonder followed, & undoubting joy,
Believing in that cold & modest form

Brooded alway the everlasting mind.
And that thou faithful didst obey the soul,
So should the splendid favour of the God
From thine observed lips shower words of fire,
Pictures that cast before the common eye,

I know for mine, & all men know for theirs.
How is the fine gold dim! the lofty low!
And thou, reputed speaker for the soul,
Forgoest the matchless benefit, & now,
Sleek deacon of the New Jerusalem,

Thou hast defied the offering world to be
A blind man’s blind man.
Was it not worth ambition
To be the bard of nature to these times
With words like things,

An universal speech that did present
All natural creatures, and the eye beheld
A lake, a rose tree, when he named their names?

And better was it to cower before the phantoms
One self deceiving mystic drew in swarms
Wherever rolled his visionary eye,
The Swedish Pluto of a world of ghosts,
Eyes without light, men without character,
Nature a cave of theologions? —

And lo! the young men of the land
Decline the strife of virtue, fail to be
The bringers of glad thought, preferring Ease
Ease & irresolution & the wine
Of placid rich men, they consent to be
Danglers & dolls. With these, not thou, not thou,
O noblest youth, not thou wilt there remain!
Up! for thy life, & for thy people’s life!
And be the sun’s light & the rainbow’s glow,
And by the power of picture, to the eye
Show wherefore it was made. Unlock
The world of sound to the astonished ear,
And thus by thee shall man be twice a man.
Were it not better than to boast thyself
Father of fifty sons, flesh of thy flesh,
Rather to live earth’s better bachelor
Planting ethereal seed in souls,

Spreading abroad thy being in the being
Of men whom thou dost foster & inform,
Fill with new hopes, & shake with grand desire?

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PHILOSOPHERS ARE LINED WITH EYES WITHIN

Philosophers are lined with eyes within
And being so the sage unmakes the man
He is in love he cannot therefore cease his trade
Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek
He feels it, introverts his learned eye
To catch the unconscious heart in the very act
His mother died, the only friend he had
Some tears escaped but his philosophy
Couched like a cat sat watching close behind
And throttled all his passion. Is’t not like
That devil-spider that devours her mate
Scarce freed from her embraces

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THE SIMPLE PEOPLE EACH WITH BASKET OR TOOL

The simple people each with basket or tool
Had left the young & resolute to rule
But strange disorder in the councils crept
Whilst they in farm & orchard toiled & slept
The farmer & the merchant missed their mart
And no reward attends the craftsman’s art
Awaking from their lethargy they hear
Rude words which neither land nor sea will bear
A great concourse surrounds a single man
And waits obsequious
Watches his words, & predicates his will
Uprose the farmer by his apple tree
Tarried the sailor ere he put to sea
And who is he & who are ye he said
And what care I if ye are tail or head
Shall I who know not of the trade of state
Who know not, care not for the statesmans fate
Scarce hold the name of parties & of banks
Measures or leaders, officers or ranks
Shall I descend so low to ask or hear
What one man does or says with hope or fear
Follow the chance direction of his eye
Find his smile Fortune his frown poverty
God made these eyes: fear’s watch they cannot keep
God made this frame erect, it cannot creep.

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ON BRAVELY THROUGH THE SUNSHINE & THE SHOWERS

On bravely through the sunshine & the showers
Time hath his work to do & we have Ours.

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LET ME GO WHERE E’ER I WILL

Let me go where e’er I will
I hear a skyborn music still
It sounds from all things old
It sounds from all things young
From all that’s fair from all that’s foul
Peals out a cheerful song
It is not only in the Rose
It is not only in the bird
Not only where the Rainbow glows
Nor in the song of woman heard
But in the darkest meanest things
Theres alway alway something sings.

Tis not in the high stars alone
Nor in the cups of budding flowers
Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers
But in the mud & scum of things
Theres alway alway something sings.

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AND WHEN I AM ENTOMBED IN MY PLACE

And when I am entombed in my place,
Be it remembered of a single man,
He never, though he dearly loved his race,
For fear of human eyes, swerved from his plan.

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BARD OR DUNCE IS BLEST, BUT HARD

Bard or dunce is blest, but hard
Is it to be half a bard.

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IT TAKES PHILOSOPHER OR FOOL

It takes philosopher or fool
To build a fire or keep a school.

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TELL MEN WHAT THEY KNEW BEFORE

Tell men what they knew before
Paint the prospect from their door.

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I  USE THE KNIFE

I use the knife
To save the life.

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THERE IS NO EVIL BUT CAN SPEAK

There is no evil but can speak,
If the wheel want oil t’will creak.

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THE SEA REFLECTS THE ROSY SKY

The sea reflects the rosy sky,
The sky doth marry the blue main.

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IN THIS SOUR WORLD, O SUMMERWIND

In this sour world, o summerwind
Who taught thee sweet to blow
Who should not love me, summerwind,
If thou canst flatter so

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LOOK DANGER IN THE EYE IT VANISHES

Look danger in the eye it vanishes
Anatomize that roaring populace
Big dire & overwhelming as they seem
Piecemeal t’is nothing. Some of them scream
Fearing the others some are lookers on
One of them hectic day by day consumes
And one will die tomorrow of the flux
One of them has already changed his mind
And falls out with the ringleader and one
Has seen his creditor amidst the crowd
And flees. And there are heavy eyes
That miss their sleep & meditate retreat.
A few malignant heads keep up the din
The rest are idle boys.

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AS I WALKED IN THE WOOD

As I walked in the wood
The silence into music broke
Sang the thrush in the dark oak
I unwilling to intrude
Slink into nigh solitude
Till warned by a scout of a jay
That flying courier so gay
That he sees me if I see not him
His eyes are bright if mine are dim

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I SAT UPON THE GROUND

I sat upon the ground
I leaned against an ancient pine
The pleasant breeze
Shook the forest tops like waves of ocean
I felt of the trunk the gentle motion

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GOOD CHARLES THE SPRINGS ADORER

Good Charles the springs adorer
True worshipper of Flora
Knows’t thou the gay Rhodora
That blossoms in the May
It blooms in dark nooks
By the wood loving brooks
And makes their twilight gay

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AROUND THE MAN WHO SEEKS A NOBLE END

Around the man who seeks a noble end
Not angels but divinities attend.

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IN THE DEEP HEART OF MAN A POET DWELLS

In the deep heart of man a poet dwells
Who all the day of life his summer story tells
Scatters on every eye dust of his spells
Scent form & color to the flowers & shells
Wins the believing child with wondrous tales
Touches a cheek with colors of romance
And crowds a history into a glance
Gives beauty to the lake & fountain
Spies over sea the fires of the mountain
When thrushes ope their throat, tis he that sings
And he that paints the oriole’s fiery wings
The little Shakspeare in the maidens heart
Makes Romeo of a ploughboy on his cart
Opens the eye to Virtues starlike meed
And gives persuasion to a gentle deed.

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O WHAT ARE HEROES PROPHETS MEN

O what are heroes prophets men
But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow
A momentary music. Being’s tide
Swells hitherward & myriads of forms
Live, robed with beauty, painted by the Sun:
Their dust pervaded by the nerves of God
Throbs with an overmastering energy
Knowing & doing. Ebbs the tide, they lie
White hollow shells upon the desart shore.
But not the less the eternal wave rolls on
To animate new millions, & exhale
Races & planets its enchanted foam.

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YET SOMETIME TO THE SORROW STRICKEN

Yet sometime to the sorrow stricken
Shall his own sorrow seem impertinent
A thing that takes no more root in the world
Than doth the traveller’s shadow on the rock

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WHEN THOU SITTEST MOPING

When thou sittest moping
Nor seeing nor hoping
Thy thought is none
But being freed
By action & deed
Thy thoughts come in bands
Sisters hand in hand
Them thou canst not dispart
From the worlds that be
They reach to the stars
From the bed of the sea.

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WOODS

A Prose Sonnet

Wise are ye, O ancient woods! wiser than man. Whoso goeth in your paths or into your thickets where no paths are, read-eth the same cheerful lesson whether he be a young child or a hundred years old. Comes he in good fortune or bad, ye say the same things, & from age to age. Ever the needles of the pine grow & fall, the acorns on the oak, the maples redden in autumn, & at all times of the year the ground pine & the pyrola bud & root under foot. What is called fortune & what is called Time by men — ye know them not. Men have not language to describe one moment of your eternal life. This I would ask of you, o sacred Woods, when ye shall next give me somewhat to say, give me also the tune wherein to say it.
Give me a tune of your own like your winds or rains or brooks or birds; for the songs of men grow old when they have been often repeated, but yours, though a man have heard them for seventy years, are never the same, but always
new, like time itself, or like love.

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I HAVE SUPPED WITH THE GODS TONIGHT

I have supped with the gods tonight
Shall I come under wooden roofs?
As I walked on the hills
The great stars did not shine aloof
But they hurried down from their deep abodes
And hemmed me in their glittering troop

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ONCE THE PRIEST

Once the priest
Lived in an age
Of narrow & strait experience
Narrow & strait it cut his cowl
Narrow & strait it pinched his soul
The times are changed, the ball is known
The lands are found, the forest shown,
The woods are felled, the cities rise,
Swift fly the ships, the letter flies,
The train along the railroad skates
It leaves the land behind like ages past
The foreland flows to it in river fast
Missouri is the merchant’s mart
Iowa learns the Saxon Art
What should the old priest in a world like this
The new time will have a new priest I wis
He must know the house where he belongs
His ear must catch its many tongues
On the Bourse in Louvre walk
In Lloyd’s in Wall Street talk
His fine ear judge in the theater
In Caucus know the ballots go
And what the Barroom gossips so
What books the people write & read
What Reforms the restless breed
What the loghut thinks of the White House

He should know all things, all things see
And present at their secret be

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NATURES WEB STAR BROIDERED

Natures web star broidered
Of animated fibre woven

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FOR THAT A MAN IS A MARK

For that a man is a mark
Shows not that he has done
What he is charged withal;
But that some flaw
The censurer knows not what
Has cracked his crystal vase

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THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

In many forms we try
To utter God’s infinity
But the boundless hath no form
And the Universal Friend
Doth as far transcend
An angel as a worm.

The great Idea baffles wit
Language falters under it
It leaves the learned in the lurch
Nor art nor power nor toil can find
The measure of the eternal Mind
Nor hymn nor prayer nor church.

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KIND & HOLY WERE THE WORDS

Kind & holy were the words —
O how trustingly they fell!
Music wants such sweet accords —
Sister, this thy perfect spell.
All the woman now was dropt,
All the friend came forth to me,
The beauty I had pictured oft
Was vanished utterly
Before the dearer emanation
Of undefiled affection,
Of earnest, wistful, ancient love,
With clear & liquid eye,
Older than the gods above,
Fountain of their deity.
Yet thou showed me no love
For the sake of love,
That for meaner souls was made
To whom passion is their bread.
Thou didst wrap thy love in thought
It to me in wisdom taught
In the rapid utterance
Of thy noble aim & hope
In the clear deliverance
Of the will’s & wisdoms scope.
Now pleasant fall the blinding snows,
And gay to me the darkest night,
A merry catch the cold wind blows,
And Pain can yield its own delight,
Whilst thou to me & I to thee belong
By the high kin of thought, O Sister of my song!

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BLUEBEARD. LET THE GENTLE WIFE PREPARE

Bluebeard. Let the gentle wife prepare
With housewife’s pride her utmost feast
I know with granite glance
And one or two bitter words
How to spoil her relish for it.

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DIVINE INVITERS! I ACCEPT

Divine Inviters! I accept
The courtesy ye have shown & kept
From ancient ages for the bard,
To modulate
With finer fate
A fortune harsh & hard.
With aim like yours
I watch your course,
Who never break your lawful dance
By error or intemperance.
O birds of ether without wings!
O heavenly ships without a sail!
O fire of fire! o best of things!
O mariners who never fail!
Sail swiftly through your amber vault
An animated law, a presence to exalt

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GO IF THOU WILT AMBROSIAL FLOWER

Go if thou wilt ambrosial Flower
Go match thee with thy seeming peers
I will wait Heaven’s perfect hour
Through the innumerable years

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IN WALDEN WOOD THE CHICKADEE

In Walden wood the chickadee
Runs round the pine & maple tree,
Intent on insect slaughter:
O tufted entomologist!
Devour as many as you list,
Then drink in Walden Water.

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STAR SEER COPERNICUS

Star seer Copernicus
Only could earn a curse
A slip of a fellow to show men the stars
What a scandalous slip of a fellow was he
Presuming to show what men wished not to see
Misunderstood — Misunderstood
How dared the old graybeard be misunderstood

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AT LAST THE POET SPOKE

At last the poet spoke
The richest gifts are vain
As lightning in yon dark clouds grain
A poison in the worlds veins creeps
A devil in celestial deeps

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THE DISCONTENTED POET: A MASQUE

Lonely he sat, the men were strange
The women all forbidden
Too closely pent in narrow range
Between two sleeps a short day’s stealth
Mid many ails a brittle health
Counts his scant stock of native wealth
By conscience sorely chidden

His loves were sharp sharp pains
Outlets to his thoughts were none
A wandering fire within his veins
His soul was smouldered & undone
A cripple of God, half true, half formed,
And by great sparks Promethean warmed

Constrained by impotence to adjourn
To infinite time his eager turn,
His lot of action from the Urn.

He by false usage pinned about
No breath therein, no passage out,
Cast wishful glances at the stars
And wishful hailed the Ocean stream,
“Merge me in the brute Universe
Or lift to some diviner dream.”

Beside him sat enduring love:
Upon him noble eyes did rest,
Which for the genius that there strove
The follies bore that it invest:
They spoke not: for their earnest sense
Outran the craft of eloquence:

The holy lovers peaceful sate
Through extacy inanimate
As marble statues in a hall,
Yet was their silence musical;
The only plaints, the sole replies,
Were those long looks of liquid eyes.

Chorus Yon waterflags, yon sighing osier,
A drop can shake, a breath can fan
Maidens laugh & weep: Composure
Is the pudency of man.

Chorus Means, — dear brother, ask them not;
Soul’s desire is means enow;
Pure content is angels lot;
Thine own theatre art thou.

Poet I see your forms with deep content
I know that ye are excellent;
But will ye stay?
I hear the rustle of wings
Ye meditate what to say
When ye go to quit me forever & aye.

Chorus Brother, we are no phantom band,
Brother accept this fatal hand
Aches thy unbelieving heart
With the fear that we must part?
See all we are rooted here
By one thought to one same sphere;
From thyself thou canst not flee,
From thyself no more can we.

Poet Suns & stars their courses keep,
But not angels of the deep;
Day & night their turn observe,
But the day of day may swerve.
Is there warrant that the waves
Of thought from their mysterious caves
Will heap in me their highest tide
In me therewith beatified?
Unsure the ebb & flow of thought, —
The moon comes back, the spirit not.

Chorus Brother, sweeter is the Law
Than all the grace Love ever saw
We are its suppliants. By it we
Draw the breath of eternity:
Serve thou it not for daily bread
Serve it for pain & fear & dread.
Love it, though it hide its light;
By love behold the Sun at night;
If the Law should thee forget,
More enamoured serve it yet:
Though it hate thee, — suffer long, —
Put the Spirit in the wrong, —
That were a deed to sing in Eden,
By the waters of life to Seraphs heeding.

 —

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LOVE

Asks nought his brother cannot give
Asks nothing but does all receive
Love calls not to his aid events
He to his wants can well suffice
Asks not of others soft consents
Nor kind Occasion without eyes
Nor plots to ope or bolt a gate
Nor heeds Condition’s iron walls
Where he goes, goes before him Fate;
Whom he uniteth God instals;
Instant & perfect his access
To the dear object of his thought,
Though foes & lands & seas between
Himself & his love intervene.

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HOLD OF THE MAKER, NOT THE MADE

Hold of the Maker, not the made,
Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

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HE WALKED THE STREETS OF GREAT NEW YORK

He walked the streets of great New York
Full of men, the men were full of blood
Signs of power, signs of worth,
Yet all seemed trivial
As the ceaseless cry
Of the newsboys in the street
Now men do not listen after
The voice in the breast
Which makes the thunder mean
But the Great God hath departed
And they listen after Scott & Byron
I met no gods — I harboured none,
As I walked by noon & night alone
The crowded ways
And yet I found in the heart of the town
A few children of God nestling in his bosom
Not detached as all the crowd appeared
each one a sutlers boat
Cruising for private gain
But these seemed undetached united
Lovers of Love, of Truth,
And as among Indians they say
The One the One is known
So under the eaves of Wall Street
Brokers had met the Eternal
In the city of surfaces
Where I a swain became a surface
I found & worshipped Him.
Always thus neighbored well
The two contemporaries dwell
The World which by the world is known
And Wisdom seeking still its own
I walked with men
Who seemed as if they were chairs or stools
Tables or shopwindows or champagne baskets
For these they loved & were if truly seen
I walked with others of their wisdom gave me proof
Who brought the starry heaven
As near as the house roof

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THE ARCHANGEL HOPE

The Archangel Hope
Looks to the azure cope
Waits through dark ages for the morn
Defeated day by day but unto victory born

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ATOM FROM ATOM YAWNS AS FAR

Atom from atom yawns as far
As moon from earth, or star from star.

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I GRIEVE THAT BETTER SOULS THAN MINE

I grieve that better souls than mine
Docile read my measured line
High destined youths & holy maids
Hallow these my orchard shades
Environ me & me baptize
With light that streams from gracious eyes,
I dare not be beloved or known,
I ungrateful, I alone.

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NANTASKET

Lobster-car, boat, or fishbasket,
Peeps, noddies, oldsquaws, or quail,
To Musketaquid what from Nantasket,
What token of greeting & hail?

Can we tie up & send you our thunder, —
Pulse-beat of the sea on the shore?
Or our Rainbow, the daughter of Wonder,
Our rock Massasoit’s palace-door.

White pebbles from Nantasket beach,
Whereon to write the maiden’s name;
Shells, sea-eggs, sea flowers, could they teach
Thee the fair haunts from whence they came!

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WATER

The Water understands
Civilization well —
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted,
Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy;
Ill-used it will destroy
In perfect time and measure,
With a face of golden pleasure,
Elegantly destroy.

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WHERE THE FUNGUS BROAD & RED

Where the fungus broad & red
Lifts its head
Like poisoned loaf of elfin bread
Where the aster grew
With the social goldenrod
In a chapel which the dew
Made beautiful for God
The maple street
In the houseless wood
O what would nature say
She spared no speech today
The fungus & the bulrush spoke
Answered the pinetree & the oak
The wizard South blew down the glen
Filled the straits & filled the wide,
Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.
All things shine in his damp ray
And all we see are pictures high
Many a high hill side
Which oaks of pride
Climb to their tops
And boys run out upon their leafy ropes

In the houseless wood
Voices followed after
Every shrub & grapeleaf
Rang with fairy laughter
I have heard them fall
Like the strain of all
King Oberons minstrelsy
Would hear the everlasting
And know the only strong
You must worship fasting
You must listen long
Words of the air
Which birds of the air
Carry aloft below around
To the isles of the deep
To the snow capped steep
To the thundercloud
To the loud bazaar
To the haram of Caliph & Kremlin of Czar
Is the verse original
Let its numbers rise & fall
As the winds do when they call
One to another

Come search the wood for flowers
Wild tea & wild pea
Grape vine & succory
Coreopsis
And liatris
Flaunting in their bowers
Grass with greenflag halfmast high
Succory to match the sky
Columbine with horn of honey
Scented fern & agrimony
Forest full of essences

Fit for fairy presences,
Peppermint & sassafras
Sweet fern, mint, & vernal grass,
Panax, black birch, sugar maple,
Sweet & scent for Dian’s table,
Elder-blow, sarsaparilla,
Wild-rose, lily, dry vanilla.

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THE SKEPTIC

Madness, madness,
Madness from the gods!
To every brain a several vein
Of madness from the gods!
Their heads they toss each one aloft
They toss their heads with pride,
Though to break free they struggle oft
And shoulder each aside
What boots it, though their arms stretch out,
And wings behind their shoulders sprout,
If as at first, also at last,
Their planted feet like trees are fast,
Rooted in the slime of Fate,
Sepulchre predestinate:
As if their feet were flint, & soon
All the trunk will grow to stone.
Not one has surmounted
The Destiny yet:
Not one has accounted
To Conscience his debt.
Many in the dark have groped,
Many for the dawn have hoped,
And some more brave, or else more blind,
The freedom all desire, pretend to find.
Of all past men
Not one has snapped the chain
All enter life, each one the dupe
Of the arch-deceiver Hope:
Each hears the Siren whisper; ‘he,
Though first of men, shall yet be free;’
That one of their own stem,
Man of Ur, or Bethlehem,
Jove or Alcides,
Mahmoud or Moses,
From their eye shall pluck the beam
And their heart from death redeem.
But Destiny sat still,
And had her will.
Know thou surely
That there is yet no prophet’s ken,
No seer in the sons of men,
Those in whom thou dost confide,
Whom thy love has deified,
With a superabundant trust, —
Their words are wind, their forms are dust.
O thousand blossomed but barren tree!
Much-pretending, helped they thee?
Merchant & statesman
Poet & craftsman
Prophet & judge
Pirate & drudge
One fortune levels
Human angels human devils
For ever when a human brain
Its perfect purpose will attain
Then suddenly the pitiless
Performance-hating Nemesis
Withdraws the prize like a painted slide
And a new bauble is supplied
He that threatens is threatened
Who terrifieth is afraid

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WHEN JANE WAS ABSENT EDGAR’S EYE

When Jane was absent Edgar’s eye
Roved to the door incessantly
But when she came he went away
For the poor youth could nothing say
Yet hated to appear unwise
Before those beatific eyes

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I HAVE FOUND A NOBLER LOVE

I have found a nobler love
Than the sordid world doth know
Above its envy or belief
My flames of passion glow

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FINE PRESENTIMENTS CONTROLLED HIM

Fine presentiments controlled him,
As one who knew a day was great,
And freighted with a friendly fate,
Ere whispered news or couriers told him;
When first at morn he read the face
Of Nature from his resting place
He the coming day inspired
Was with its rare genius fired,
And, in his bearing & his gait,
Calm expectancy did wait

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WE SAUNTERED AMIDST MIRACLES

We sauntered amidst miracles
We were the fairies in the bells
The summer was our quaint bouquet
The winter eve our Milky Way
We played in turn with all the slides
In Natures lamp of suns & tides
We pierced all books with criticism
We plied with doubts the Catechism
The Christian Fold
The Bible Old

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THIS WORLD IS TEDIOUS

This world is tedious
Shingled with lies
Reform’s as bad as vice
Reformer as complier
And I as much a coward
As any he I blame

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WHAT ARE ALL THE FLOWERS

What are all the flowers
And all the rainbows of the skies
To the lights that rain from Eva’s eyes
She turned on me those azure orbs
And steeped me in their lavish light
All thot, all things, that joy absorbs.
Yet had no hint of vain delight
Yet the I spend my days in love
I never have known aught good thereof

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A PAIR OF CRYSTAL EYES WILL LEAD ME

A pair of crystal eyes will lead me
All about the rounded globe
Averted oft, if once they heed me
I will follow follow follow
To kiss the hem of her robe

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KNOWS HE WHO TILLS THIS LONELY FIELD

Knows he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight & at morn

That field by spirits bad & good
By Hell & Heaven is haunted
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted

In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts
I wandered up I wandered down
Beset by pensive hosts

For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town
In nearer arcs his journeys run
And nearer stoops the moon

There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise
The fields of Thessaly grew green
Old gods forsook the skies

I cannot publish in my rhyme
What pranks the greenwood played
It was the Carnival of time
And Ages went or stayed

To me that spectral nook appeared
The mustering Day of doom
And round me swarmed in shadowy troop
Things past & things to come

The darkness haunteth me elsewhere
There I am full of light
In every whispering leaf I hear
More sense than sages write

There is no mystery
But tis figured in the flowers
There is no history
But tis calendared in the bowers

Underwoods were full of pleasance
All to each in kindness bend
And every flower made obeisance
As a man unto his friend.

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FAR SEEN THE RIVER GLIDES BELOW

Far seen the river glides below
Tossing one sparkle to the eyes
I catch thy meaning wizard wave
The River of my Life replies

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FROM THE STORES OF ELDEST MATTER

From the stores of eldest Matter
The deepeyed flame obedient water
Transparent air allfeeding earth
He took the flower of all their worth
And best with best in sweet consent
Combined a new temperament

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AND THE BEST GIFT OF GOD

And the best gift of God
Is the love of superior souls

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STOUT SPARTA SHRINED THE GOD OF LAUGHTER

Stout Sparta shrined the god of Laughter
In a niche below the rafter,
Visible from every seat
Where the young men carve their meat.

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BROTHER, NO DECREPITUDE

Brother, no decrepitude
Cramps the limbs of Time;
As fleet his feet, his hands as good,
His vision as sublime.
As when at first Jehovah hurled
The Sun & each revolving world.

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WHO KNOWS THIS OR THAT

Who knows this or that
Hark in the wall to the rat
Since the world was, he has gnawed;
Of his wisdom of his fraud
What dost thou know
In the wretched little beast
Is life & heart
Child & parent
Not without relation
To fruitful field & sun & moon
What art thou? his wicked eye
Is cruel to thy cruelty

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SAADI LOVED THE NEW & OLD

Saadi loved the new & old
The near & far the town & wold
Him when Genius urged to roam
Stronger Custom brot him home

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BUT IF THOU DO THY BEST

But if thou do thy best
Without remission without rest
And invite the sunbeam
And abhor to feign or seem
Even to those who thee shd love
And thy behavior approve
If thou go in thine own likeness
Be it health or be it sickness
If thou go as thy fathers son
If thou wear no mask or lie
Dealing purely & nakedly

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AN ANCIENT DROP OF FEUDAL BLOOD

An ancient drop of feudal blood
From the high line of Bulkeley-Mere
Mixed with the democratic flood
Of sires to Yankee freedom dear.

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THESE TREES LIKE THO’TS THAT TO VISIONS CONGEAL

These trees like tho’ts that to visions congeal
Gleamed out on my sight like the gleaming of steel
These woodlands how grand & how sacred they seem
And the air of my house but a pestilent steam
My eyes were bewitched O Nature but thou
Hast with woodland perfumes disenchanted them now

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VAIN AGAINST HIM WERE HOSTILE BLOWS

Vain against him were hostile blows
He did their weapons decompose
Aimed at him the blushing blade
Healed as fast the wounds it made
On whomsoever fell his gaze
Power it had to blind & craze

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LIKE VAULTERS IN THE CIRCUS ROUND

Like vaulters in the circus round
Who step from horse to horse but never touch the ground

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IF HE GO APART

If he go apart
And tear the foible from his heart
And with himself content
Live in the deed & not the event
He shall thus himself erect
Into a tower of intellect
Farseen farseeing circumspect
Star specular high & clear
And to thyself more justly dear
Than if thy heart with soft alarms
Did palpitate within his arms

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NATURE WILL NOT LOSE

Nature will not lose
In any ends she doth propose
But if thou thy debt decline
Will mulct thee with a fine
If thou refuse to bring forth men

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THE CROWNING HOUR WHEN BODIES VIE WITH SOULS

The crowning hour when bodies vie with souls
And bifold essence rushes to its poles

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AND AS THE LIGHT DIVIDED THE DARK

And as the light divided the dark
Thorough with living swords
So shalt thou pierce the distant age
With adamantine words.

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WHEN DEVILS BITE

When devils bite
A damned parasite
Strikes at their throat & stings them home

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COMFORT WITH A PURRING CAT

Comfort with a purring cat
Prosperity in a white hat

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I CANNOT FIND A PLACE SO LONELY

I cannot find a place so lonely
To harbour thee & me only
I cannot find a nook so deep
So sheltered may suffice to keep
The ever glowing festival
When thou & I to each are all

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HE WHOM GOD HAD THUS PREFERRED

He whom God had thus preferred
To whom sweet angels ministered
Wrapped him in love as in a cloud
Their gifts bestowed, their love avowed,
Saluted him each morn as Brother to each other

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BENDED TO FOPS WHO BENT TO HIM

Bended to fops who bent to him
Surface with surfaces did swim
And in the fashionable crowd
None more obsequious heartless bowed
“Sorrow! Sorrow!” the Angels cried
“Is this dear nature’s manly pride!
Call hither thy mortal enemy
Make him glad thy fall to see.”

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ON THAT NIGHT THE POET WENT

On that night the poet went
From the lighted halls
Beneath the darkling firmament
To the sea shore to the old sea walls
Dark was night upon the seas
Darker was the poet’s mind
For his shallow suppleness
Black abyss of penitence
The wind blew keen, the poet threw
His cloak apart to feel the cold
The wind he said is free & true
But I am mean and sold.
Out shone a star between the clouds
The constellation glittered soon,
“You have no lapse! so have ye glowed
But once in your dominion.
And I to whom your light has spoke
I pining to be one of you
I fall, my faith is broken
Ye scorn me from your deeps of Blue
And yet dear stars I know ye shine
Only by needs & loves of mine
Light loving light asking Life in me
Feeds those eternal lamps I see

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YE HAVE GRACE

Ye have Grace
With swiftness to abolish space
Alike your tiny arrows work
On Schiraz Cairo & New York

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THE DERVISH WHINED TO SAID

The Dervish whined to Said,
“Thou didst not tarry while I prayed.”
Beware the fires which Eblis burned.
But Saadi coldly thus returned,
“Once, with manlike love & fear,
I gave thee for an hour my ear,
I kept the sun & stars at bay,
And love, for words thy tongue could say;
I cannot sell my heaven again
For all that rattles in thy brain.

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LIFE IS GREAT

Life is great
Men are small
Were it not for the Power
To which each testifies
We could not suppress a titter.
The Soul is in eternity.
As a man stands in the landscape
He is very small,
But he is apprised that the other is large
And being so apprized
Partakes of its scope.
When once he has believed
And become doubly alive
Threescore & ten orbits of the sun
To him short term appears
And he finds it not unworthy
To live long only for a few lessons
Assured he shall pass through a million forms
And in each acquire the appropriate facts
So that one day he will emerge
Armed at all points a god,
A demigod, a chrystal soul
Sphered & concentred to the whole.

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THE HUSBAND HAS THE NEAREST ACRES

The husband has the nearest acres
The poet has the far

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FROM A FAR MOUNTAIN CREEPING DOWN

From a far mountain creeping down
Music floats up from the town
As we nearer come
We hear only noise & hum

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IN DREAMY WOODS, WHAT FORMS ABOUND

In dreamy woods, what forms abound
That elsewhere never poet found!
Here voices ring, & pictures burn,
And grace on grace, wheree’er I turn.

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BUT O TO SEE HIS SOLAR EYES

But O to see his solar eyes
Like meteors which chose their way
And rived the dark like a new day
Not lazy gazing on all they saw
Each chimney pot & cottage door
Farmgear & every picket fence
But feeding on magnificence
They bounded to the horizon’s edge
And searched with the sun’s privilege
Landward they reached the mountains old
Where pastoral tribes the flocks infold
Saw rivers run seaward from forest high
And the seas wash the low hung sky
Saw the endless rack of the firmament
And the sailing moon where the cloud was rent
And thro’ man & woman & sea & star
Saw the dance of nature go
Thro’ worlds & races & terms & times
Saw musical order & pairing rhymes.

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WHO SAW THE HID BEGINNINGS

Who saw the hid beginnings
When Chaos & Order strove?
Or who can date the morning prime
And purple flame of love?

I saw the hid beginnings
When Chaos & Order strove,
And I can date the morning prime
And purple flame of Love.

Song breather from all the forest,
The total air was fame;
It seemed the world was all torches
That suddenly caught the flame.

Is there never a retroscope mirror
In the realms & corners of space,
That can give us a glimpse of the battle
And the soldiers face to face?

Sit here on the basalt ranges,
Where twisted hills betray
The feet of the world-old Forces
Who wrestled here on a day.

When the purple flame shoots up,
And Love ascends his throne,
I cannot hear your songs, o birds,
For the witchery of my own.

And every human heart
Still keeps that golden day,
And rings the bells of jubilee
On its own First of May.

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WHAT NEVER WAS NOT, & STILL WILL BE

What never was not, & still will be,
Weighs in sand, grows in tree
Burns in fire primaeval Force
Lodged they say in Chaos once
Shooting thence it runs its course
Filling Space with moons & suns
Now it binds, & now it rives,
Feigns to perish yet revives
To bud & breed, to cling & hold,
Never wanes by waxing old,
The decaying of the fruit
Feeding fat the younger root
Nor less in souls
The subtle potentate controls
Pours thro mans tyrannic will
Fatal streams of empire still

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ENOUGH IS DONE HIGHMINDED FRIEND GO SLEEP

Enough is done highminded friend go sleep
And leave me here to weep
With joy & envy at thy vestibule
And kneel to be admitted of thy school
Go sleep serene, for now thy deeds will wake
And other slumberers will rudely shake
Sleep, for thy deed will answer for thee loud
And crown thee absent to the wishful crowd
Actions are sons & daughters. O who need
In action sweat who’s father to a deed?
Who longer pines or hoards, that once hath won
Engine or art a frigate or a town?
Thy genius which still drave thee as a ghost
Comes forth in actions that are uppermost
And that which rent thee with unkindly throes
Born is more sweet than apple or the rose
Henceforth our easy faith will grant thee all
Undone as done will thee the Master call
In thee the arts revive; the spritely seer
That looked thro Phidias has found a peer
We shall not fear the loss of arts again
Forgive us bards of Judah & of Greece
If we seem heedless of your memories
He has reinstated man on his own heart
And we shall rightly read the hint you gave
And henceforth leave your graveclothes in the grave

Cheered us with plenty
For now we see the niggard cowardice
Ended so quick the inventory of arts
And six or seven branches could comprize
All the fine arts all the humanities

On a few plants & stones our commerce waits
Corn cotton cane vine iron opium wheat
Hemp flax as these grow or fade
The wealth of states is stablished or unmade
There’s not a weed waves in the wind
But is the girdle that will empires bind
As many arts & circles radiant
Of handmaid crafts & callings adjutant
With all their pensioners & appanage
As are the stuffs our chemistry engage

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THOU SHALT MAKE THY HOUSE

Thou shalt make thy house
The temple of a nation’s vows
Spirits of a higher strain
Who sought thee once shall seek again
I detected many a god
Forth already on the road
Ancestors of beauty come
In thy breast to make a home

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THE GODS WALK IN THE BREATH OF THE WOODS

The gods walk in the breath of the woods
They walk by the sounding pine,
And fill the long reach of the old seashore
With colloquy divine
And the poet who overhears
Each random word they say
Is the prophet without peers
Whom kings & lords obey.

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WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT JOY IS HID

Would you know what joy is hid
In our green Musketaquid
And for travelled eyes what charms
Draw us to these meadow farms
Come & I will show you all
Makes each day a festival
Stand upon this pasture hill
Face the eastern star until
The slow eye of heaven shall show
The world above the world below
The mottled clouds like scraps of wool
Steeped in the light are beautiful
And what majestic stillness broods
Over those colored solitudes
Sleeps the vast East in pleased peace
Whilst up behind yon mountain walls
The silent river flows

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TELL ME MAIDEN DOST THOU USE

Tell me maiden dost thou use
Thyself thro nature to diffuse
All the angles of the coast
Were tenanted by thy sweet ghost
Bore thy colours every flower
Thine each leaf & berry bore
All wore thy badges & thy favours
In their scent or in their savours
Every moth with painted wing
Every bird in caroling
The woodboughs with thy manners waved
The rocks uphold thy name engraved
The sod throbbed friendly to my feet
And the sweet air with thee was sweet
The saffron cloud that floated warm
Studied thy motion, took thy form,
And in his airy road benign
Recalled thy skill in bold design
Or seemed to use his privilege
To gaze over the horizon’s edge
To search where now thy beauty glowed
Or made what other purlieus proud?

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I HAVE NO BROTHERS & NO PEERS

I have no brothers & no peers
And the dearest interferes
When I would spend a lonely day
Sun & moon are in my way

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SOLAR INSECT ON THE WING

Solar insect on the wing
In the garden murmuring
Soothing with thy summer horn
Swains by winter pinched & worn

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AND MAN OF WIT & MARK

And man of wit & mark
Repair to men of wit
It cannot be society
In one saloon to sit.

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I KNOW THE APPOINTED HOUR

I know the appointed hour,
I greet my office well,
Never faster, never slower
Revolves the fatal wheel.

I am neither faint nor weary, —
Fill thy will, O faultless Heart!
Here from youth to age I tarry,
Count it flight of bird or dart.

My heart at the heart of things
Heeds no longer lapse of time,
Ages vainly fan their wings,
Me shall keep thy love sublime.

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YOU SHALL NOT LOVE ME FOR WHAT DAILY SPENDS

You shall not love me for what daily spends,
You shall not know me in the noisy street
Where I as others follow petty ends,

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NOR WHEN IN FAIR SALOONS WE CHANCE TO MEET

Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet,
Nor when I’m jaded, sick, perplexed, or mean:
But love me then & only when you know
Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow,
Making the shores, making their beauty broad,
Which birds & cattle drink, drink too the roots of the grove,
And animating all it feeds with love.

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ELIZABETH HOAR

Almost I am tempted to essay
For sympathetic eyes the portraiture
Of the good angels that environ me.
My sister is a Greek in mind & face
And well embodies to these latest years
The truth of those high sculptors old who drew
In marble or in bronze, on vase or frieze
The perfect forms of Pallas or the Muse;
Forms in simplicity complete
And beauty of the soul disdaining art.
So bright, so positive, so much itself,
Yet so adapted to the work it wrought
It drew true love, but was complete alone.
She seemed to commune with herself, & say,
I cannot stoop to custom & the crowd,
For either I will marry with a star,
Or I will pick threads in a factory.
So perfect in her action, one would say,
She condescended if she added speech.
Her look was sympathy, & though she spoke
Better than all the rest, she did not speak
Worthy of her. She read in many books,
And loved the Greek as t’were her mother tongue
She knew the value of the passing day
Thought it no mark of virtue to be scornful
Or cry for better company, but held

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EACH DAY A SOLID GOOD; NEVER MISTOOK

Each day a solid good; never mistook
The fashionable judgment for her own.
So keen perception that no judge or scribe
Could vie with her unerring estimate.
When through much silence & delay she spoke,
It was the Mind’s own oracle, through joy
And love of truth or beauty so perceived:
Never a poor return on self.

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PROTEUS

Poet bred in Saadi’s school
Can wind the world off any spool,
Knows the lore of more & less.
Brahma stooped from the sky
& made the sun of the slime.
He made, of a toad, an archangel,
Of bats & bugs, a god as well,
If he should wash your eyes with rue,
You would remember
How hated were the forms you clasp,
And that once you adored the mummies,
Trust nothing that you see
It changes while you look
Do not think him a dunce
Who wore bells & foolscap once
He is the teacher of ages
For there is no wise man
Men are vascular only,
Constructive men only,
Pipes or channels, clay or crystal
Thro’ them rolls the stream today
To roll tomorrow otherwheres
And leave these dry & mean
As high as thy perception goes,
Thou canst not overpraise the great
Yet grander heroes shine beyond.
We tread the ladder’s lowest round
And before the Deity
Thy gods are pismires

Flow flow the waves hated
Accursed adored!
The waves of mutation;
No anchorage is.
Sleep is not, death is not,
Who seem to die, live.
House you were born in
Friends of your youth
Old man & young maid
Early toil & its gains
They are all vanishing
Fleeing to fables
Cannot be moored
See the stars through them,
The treacherous marbles
Know, the stars yonder
The stars everlasting
Are fugitive also
And emulate, vaulted,
The passing heat-lightning
or fireflys flight

When thou dost return
On the wave’s circulation
Beholding the shimmer
The wild dissipation,
And out of endeavor
To change & to flow,
The gas become solid
And phantasms & nothings
Return to be things
And endless imbroglio
Is law & the world,
Then first shalt thou know
That in the wild turmoil
Horsed on the Proteus
Only canst thou ride to power.
And to Endurance.

Much thou must suffer
Be shocked & derided
Lose faith to gain faith,
Ah worse! must I say it?
Lose thy virtue, lose thy soul,
To gain the incorruptible.
The scale in this world
Of greatness & height
Is reversed in the other.
Crown of power, is fashioned
Of dust of abasement.

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TO EVERY CREATURE

To every creature
Adam gave its name
Let each to all unmask its feature
And cognizance
Moth or bug or worm or snail
Mite or fly or atomy
Nor each nor any fail
Its lineage to proclaim
Not a plant obscure
But some bright morn its flowers unfold
And tell the Universe
Its family & fame.
No fly or aphis bites the leaf
But comes a chance
When egg or fretted path betray
The petty thief,
And his small malfaisance.
Many things the garden shows
And pleased I stray
From tree to tree
Watching the white pear bloom
Bee infested quince or plum.
I could walk days, years, away
Till the slow ripening secular tree
Had reached its fruiting time
Nor think it long

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CLOUD UPON CLOUD

Cloud upon cloud
The world is a seeming,
Feigns dying, but dies not,
Corpses rise ruddy,
Follow their funerals.
Seest thou not brother
Drops hate detachment,
And atoms disorder,
How they run into plants,
And grow into beauties.
The darkness will glow,
The solitude sing

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SINCE THE DEVIL HOPPING ON

Since the devil hopping on
From bush to vine from man to dame
Marshals temptations
A million deep
And ever new beauties rise
And with what faults soever
The stock of illusion
Is inexhaustible
I meantime depreciate
Every hour in the market
But the wares I would buy
Are enhanced every hour
I see no other way
Than to run violently from the market

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SAMSON STARK AT DAGON’S KNEE

Samson stark at Dagon’s knee
Gropes for column strong as he
When his ringlets grew & curled
Groped for axle of the world

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POUR THE WINE! POUR THE WINE!

Pour the wine! pour the wine!
As it changes to foam,
So flashes the day-god
Rushing abroad,
Ever new & unlooked for,
In furthest & smallest
Comes royally home.
In spider wise
Will again geometrize,
Will in bee & gnat keep time
With the annual solar chime;
Aphides like emperors
Sprawl & play their pair of hours

For Fancys gift
Can mountains lift;
The Muse can knit
What is past & what is done
With the web that’s just begun,
Making free with time & size,
Dwindles here, there magnifies
Swells a rain-drop to a tun;
So to repeat
No word or feat,
Crowds in a day the sum of ages,
And blushing Love outwits the sages.

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HEARTILY HEARTILY

Heartily heartily
Nothing be false
Men ocular jocular
Work with the fingertips
Speak no deeper than the lips
Blow, good northwind, I grow nervous
Good wind, blow away all trace
Of the spectral populace.

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POETS ARE COLORPOTS

Poets are colorpots
Dovesnecks & opaline
Exquisite daintiness
Vapors of wine
Delicate gloom
Barrel of opium
Blowing simoom
Cloud-collecting, dissipating
Brain relaxing enervating
Put your body on your word
Man & sonnet at accord
Set your foot upon the scales
My foot weighs just a pound
Said the cruel Yankee captain
Trucking for his precious bales
Of ermine skin & silver fur
With the painted islander.

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THANKS TO THOSE WHO GO & COME

Thanks to those who go & come
Bringing Hellas, Thebes, & Rome,
As near to me as is my home:
Careful husbands of the mind
Who keep decaying history good,
And do not suffer Tyre or Troy
To know decrepitude.

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IS JOVE IMMORTAL

Is Jove immortal
So is Cerberus at his portal
Nothing but lying is mean
Never let thy banner down
Rat & worm & wolverine
Have the old dazzle of God’s crown
And in the Zodiack are seen
Health & Power become the wise
Fill the gaps with charities
Scatter this vetch everywhere
It will take root in the air
But he the dreaded Fates will please
Who has no eye or time for pease
God having shaped him like a wedge
And driven him to his forepledge
Forth as from a gun.

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HEARTILY HEARTILY SING

Heartily heartily sing
Ever be true in town or grove
Bears & men must have their swing
Of berries, & honey, & love.
There’s no ideot like the wise
And most virtue’s cowardice
What each is born to let him do
Let the devil himself be true
And he has an open track
And all planets at his back
Bare good meaning is an ass
Virtue brings its will to pass
He is wise who marries his end
Makes heaven & earth & hell his friend
Rushes to his deed
Will crack nature or succeed
Values in the issue had
Tis all one
What feat is done
Alike to build an iron way
From Montreal to Boston Bay
Or make a shanty glad.

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THANK THE GODS THY GOVERNORS

Thank the gods thy governors
Many painful ancestors
Wore away successive lives
To sun & mellow a stock
Which neither Rome nor Antioch
China nor Egypt could forestal
Ripe in thee now last of all.

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IF THY BODY PINE

If thy body pine,
Tis the Genius’s retreat
To the chambers from the street,
Magnifying the coming vaunt
Of his flowering aloe plant
Starves the florets due today

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SCHOLAR IS A BALL THATS SPENT

Scholar is a ball thats spent,
Or the barrel that it sent,
Twas fired ere he came into hall,
Here is neither charge nor ball.

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ASK NOT TREASURES FROM HIS STORE

Ask not treasures from his store, —
For he lies in wait for more;
Nor what dawneth in his brain, —
That to whisper were profane.

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KING. IF FARMERS MAKE MY LAND SECURE

King. If farmers make my land secure,
If pedlers use their craft for me,
How can I other than endure
Once in a year their company

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INTELLECT

Rule which by obeying grows
Knowledge not its fountain knows
Wave removing whom it bears
From the shores which he compares
Adding wings thro things to range
Makes him to his own blood strange

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CHLADNI STREWED ON GLASS THE SAND

Chladni strewed on glass the sand
Then struck the glass its music sweet
The sand flew into symmetry
Then with altered hand
drew discords, & the sand scattered formless,
We cannot find a foreign land
Into new laws we never come
Tho we run along the diameter
Of sidereal space.
Sing, & the rock will crystallize
Sing, & the plant will grow.

Obey one law above, below,
light, heat, & sound, each a liquid wave
And Beauty for the guide I gave
To lead where you should go.

The motes of the stream shall prate
Of the current that floats them on.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

I MUST NOT BORROW LIGHT

I must not borrow light
From history trite
But from friends whom God gave
And the destiny I have

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GO INTO THE GARDEN

Go into the garden,
Feed thine eyes & ears,
And every sense;
But do not touch a weed,
nor cut off a twig
Be not tempted.
If thou wilt not be a garden tool

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BUT AS THIS FUGITIVE SUNLIGHT

But as this fugitive sunlight
Arrested & fixed
And with the primal atoms mixed
Is plant & man & rock
So a fleeing thought
Taken up in act & wrought
Makes the air & the sun
And hurls new systems out to run

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COMRADE OF THE SNOW & WIND

Comrade of the snow & wind
He left each civil scale behind
Him woodgods fed with honey wild
And of his memory beguiled
In caves & hollow trees he crept
And near the wolf & panther slept
He came to the green ocean’s rim
And saw the sea birds skim
Summer & winter oer the wave
Like creatures made of skiey mould
Impassible to heat or cold.
He stood beside the main
Beautiful but insane
He felt himself as if the sky walked
Or the son of the wind
There was no man near
To mete himself withal

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GOD ONLY KNEW HOW SAADI DINED

God only knew how Saadi dined
Roses he ate, & drank the wind

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FRIENDS TO ME ARE FROZEN WINE

Friends to me are frozen wine
I wait the sun shall on them shine

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THAT EACH SHOULD IN HIS HOUSE ABIDE

That each should in his house abide,
Therefore was the world so wide

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NEW ENGLAND CAPITALIST

What are his machines
Of steel, brass, leather, oak, & ivory,
But manikins & miniatures,
Dwarfs of one faculty, measured from him,
As nimbly he applies his bending self
Unto the changing world, thus making that
Another weapon of his conquering will?
He built the mills, & by his polities, made
The arms of millions turn them.

Stalwart New Hampshire, mother of men,
Sea-dented Maine, reluctant Carolina,
Must drag his coach, & by arts of peace
He, in the plenitude of love & honor,
Eats up the poor, — poor citizen poor state.
Much has he done,
Has made his telegraph,
Propeller, car, postoffice, phototype,
His coast survey, vote by majority,
His life assurance, & star registry,
Preludes & hints of what he meditates; —
Now let him make a harp!

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ON A RAISIN STONE

On a raisin stone
The wheels of nature turn,
Out of it the fury comes
Wherewith the spondyls burn.
And, because the seed of the vine
Is creation’s heart,
Wash with wine those eyes of thine
To know the hidden part.
Wine is translated wit,
Wine is the day of day,
Wine from the veiled secret
Tears the veil away.

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GO OUT INTO NATURE AND PLANT TREES

Go out into Nature and plant trees
That when the southwind blows
You shall not be warm in your own limbs
but in ten thousand limbs & ten million leaves
Of your blossoming trees of orchard & forest

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BUT GOD WILL KEEP HIS PROMISE YET

But God will keep his promise yet
Trees & clouds are prophets sure
And new & finer forms of life
Day by day approach the pure.

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POET OF POETS

Poet of poets
Is Time, the distiller,
Chemist, refiner:
Time hath a vitriol
Which can dissolve
Towns into melody,
Rubbish to gold.
Burn up the libraries!
Down with the colleges!
Raze the foundations!
Drive out the doctors!
Rout the philosophers!
Exile the critics!
Men of particulars,
Narrowing niggardly
Something to nothing.
All their ten thousand ways
End in the Néant.

All through the countryside
Rush locomotives:
Prosperous grocers
Poring on newspapers
Over their shop fires
Settle the State.
But, for the Poet, —
Seldom in centuries
Comes the well-tempered
Musical man.
He is the waited-for,
He is the complement,
One man of all men.
The random wayfarer
Counts him of his kin.
This is he that should come
The tongue of the secret,
The key of the casket,
Of Past & of Future.
Sudden the lustre
That hovered round cities,
Round bureaus of Power,
Or Chambers of Commerce,
Round banks, or round beauties,
Or state-rending factions,
Has quit them, & perches
Well pleased on his form.
True bard never cared
To flatter the princes
Costs time to live with them.
Ill genius affords it,
Preengaged to the skies.
Foremost of all men
The Poet inherits
Badge of nobility,
Charter of Earth;
Free of the city,
Free of the meadows,
Knight of each order,
Sworn of each guild,
Fellow of monarchs,
And, what is better,
Mate of all men.

Pan’s paths are wonderful.
Subtile his counsel.
Wisdom needs circumstance,
Many concomitants,

Goes not in purple,
Steals along secretly,
Shunning the eye;
Has the dominion
Of men & the planet,
On this sole condition, —
She shall not assume it.
When the crown first incloses
The brows of her son,
The Muse him deposes
From kingdom & throne.

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SEE THE SPHERES RUSHING

See the spheres rushing, —
Poet that tracks them
With emulous eye,
What lovest thou?
Planet, or orbit?
Whether the pipe,
Or the lay, it discourses?
In heaven, up yonder,
All the astronomy,
Sun-dance & star blaze,
Is Emblem of love.

Nought is of worth
In earth or in sky
But Love & Thought only.
Fast perish the mankind,
Firm bideth the thought,
Clothes it with Adam-kind,
Puts on a new suit
Of earth & of stars.
He will come one day
Who can articulate
That which unspoken
Vaults itself over us,
Globes itself under us,
Looks out of lovers’ eyes,
Dies, & is born again; —
He who can speak well;
Men hearing delighted
Shall say, ‘that is ours
Trees hearing shall blossom,
Rocks hearing shall tremble,
And range themselves dreamlike
In new compositions,
Architecture of thought.
Then will appear
What the old centuries,
Aeons were groping for,
Times of discomfiture,
Bankrupt millenniums.

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THE PATIENT PAN

The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar
Sleeps or feigns slumber
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of Time.
This poor tooting creaking cricket,
Pan half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never:
Tis his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain-chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps & Andes cold.
Haply else we could not live
Life would be too wild an ode
Sun & planet would explode
Ah! the poor Adamkind
Fault of supplies
From the fire fountains
We busybodies
Ever experiment
See what will come of it
Prove the quaint substances
Prove our bodies, prove our essence
Fortunes, genius, elements,
Try a foot, try a hand,
Then plunge the body in
Then our wits characters
And our gods if we can
Analysing analysing
As the chemist his new stone
Puts to azote, puts to chlorine,
Puts to vegetable blues.
Ah my poor apothecaries,
Can ye never wiselier sit,
Meddle less & more accept,
With dignity not overstepped
Skies have their etiquette

We are faithful to time
Time measured in moments
Only so many
Share of Methusalem
Share of the babe
Hundredhanded, hundredeyed,
Fussy & anxious
We would so gladly
Serve an apprenticeship
Day by day faithfully
Learn the use of Adam’s tools
Fire & water, azote, carbon,
Gravity levity
Hatred attraction
Animals chemistry
Botany land
Have a right to our flesh
Know the honest earth by heart

Do the feat of Archimedes
If the earth reject her sons
Till theyve learned her alphabeta
None but Hooke & Newton dare
Cross the threshold when it thunders.
Life is all too short for farming
All too short for architecture
All too short to learn the tongues
And for philosophy
Life’s done ere weve begun to think.
Solid farming haw & geeing
Drive uphill the loaded team
Bud the pear & dig potatoes
What time Lyra’s in the Zenith
That is wholesome as it makes
Man as massive as the glebe
Pricks dropsical pretension
Tames the infinite romance
Underpins the falcon turrets
High as fly falcons, fancy builds

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TO TRANSMUTE CRIME TO WISDOM, & TO STEM

To transmute crime to wisdom, & to stem
The vice of Japhet by the thought of Shem.

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PALE GENIUS ROVES ALONE

Pale Genius roves alone,
No scout can track his way,
None credits him till he have shown
His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster’s wine,
Nor land, nor gold, nor power,
By want & pain God screeneth him
Till his elected hour.

Go, speed the stars of Thought
On to their shining goals; —
The sower scatters broad his seed,
The wheat thou strew’st be souls.

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BURN YOUR LITERARY VERSES

Burn your literary verses
Give us rather the glib curses
Of the truckmen in the street
Songs of the forecastle
To the caboose

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INTELLECT

Intellect
Gravely broods apart on joy,
And truth to tell, amused by pain

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WHAT ALL THE BOOKS OF AGES PAINT, I HAVE

What all the books of ages paint, I have.
What prayers & dreams of youthful genius feign,
I daily dwell in, & am not so blind
But I can see the elastic tent of day
Belike has wider hospitality
Than my few needs exhaust, & bids me read
The quaint devices on its mornings gay.
Yet nature will not be in full possessed,
And they who trueliest love her, heralds are
And harbingers of a majestic race,
Who, having more absorbed, more largely yield,
And walk on earth as the sun walks in the sphere.

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THE CIVIL WORLD WILL MUCH FORGIVE

The civil world will much forgive
To bards who from its maxims live
But if, grown bold, the poet dare
Bend his practice to his prayer,
And, following his mighty heart
Shame the time, & live apart,
Vae solis!
I found this, —
That of goods I could not miss
If I fell within the line,
Once a member, all was mine,
Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains,
Fortune’s delectable mountains;
But if I would walk alone,
Was neither cloak nor crumb my own

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MASK THY WISDOM WITH DELIGHT

Mask thy wisdom with delight,
Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
The lesson which the Muses say
Was sweet to hear & to obey.
He loved to round a verse, & play,
Without remoter hope, or fear,
Or purpose, than to please his ear.
And all the golden summer-time
Rung out the hours with happy rhyme.
Meantime every cunning word
Tribes & ages overheard:
Those idle catches told the laws
Holding nature to her Cause.

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ROOMY ETERNITY

Roomy Eternity
Casts her schemes rarely,
And an aeon allows
For each quality and part
In the multitudinous
And many-chambered heart.

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DARK FLOWER OF CHESHIRE GARDEN

Dark Flower of Cheshire garden
Red Evening duly dyes
Thy sombre head with rosy hues
To fix fargazing eyes.
Well the planter knew how strongly
Works thy form on human thought:
I muse what secret purpose had he
To draw all fancies to this spot.

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TERMINUS

For thought & not praise;
Thought is the wages
For which I sell days,
Will gladly sell ages,
And willing grow old,
Deaf, & dumb, & blind, & cold,
Melting matter into dreams,
Panoramas which I saw
And whatever glows or seems
Into substance into Law

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I TO MY GARDEN WENT

I to my garden went
To the unplanted woods

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MORE SWEET THAN MY REFRAIN

More sweet than my refrain
Was the first drop of April rain

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WISP & METEOR NIGHTLY FALLING

Wisp & meteor nightly falling
But the stars of God remain.

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GOD THE LORD SAVE MASSACHUSETTS

God The Lord save Massachusetts
Without chivalry or slave
We are ignorant of stealing
Quite too stupid to be knave
And to perjure and to poison
Not our way our souls to save

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A POET IS AT HOME

A poet is at home
He does not follow the old & dead
Ruins & mummies
But cities & heroes come to him
One [ ] will serve
As well as another
For he fills them
From his own winepress
In the village he can find.

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O BOSTON CITY LECTURE-HEARING

O Boston city lecture-hearing,
O Unitarian God-fearing,
But more, I fear, bad men-revering;
Too civil by half, thine evil guest
Makes thee his byword & his jest,
And scorns the men that honeyed the pest,
Piso & Atticus, with the rest.
Thy fault is much civility,
Thy bane, respectability.
And thou hadst been as wise, & wiser,
Lacking the Daily Advertiser.
Ah, gentlemen, — for you are gentle, —
And mental maids, not sentimental.

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A PATCH OF MEADOW & UPLAND

A patch of meadow & upland
Reached by a mile of road,
Soothed by the voice of waters,
With birds & flowers bestowed.

This is my book of Chronicles,
Code, Psalter, lexicon,
My Genesis & calendar
I read it as I run.

It is my consolation
In mild or poignant grief,
My park & my gymnasium,
My out-of-door relief.

I come to it for strength,
Which it can well supply,
For Love draws might from terrene force
And potences of sky.

The tremulous battery, earth,
Responds to touch of man,
It thrills to the antipodes,
From Boston to Japan.

The planets’ child the planet knows
And to his joy replies;
To the lark’s trill unfolds the rose,
Clouds flush their gayest dyes.

When Ali prayed & loved
Where Syrian waters roll,
Upward the ninth heaven thrilled & moved
At the tread of the jubilant soul.

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AND HE LIKE ME IS NOT TOO PROUD

And he like me is not too proud
To be the poet of the crowd

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PARKS & PONDS ARE GOOD BY DAY

Parks & ponds are good by day,
But where’s the husband doth delight
In black acres of the night?
Not my unseasoned step disturbs
The sleeps of trees or dreams of herbs

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CLOUD UPON CLOUD

Cloud upon cloud.
Clouds after rain
Value standeth in success,
But the same value
Hideth in failure,
In poverty, mourning,
In solitude, crime;
The value adhesive
Sticks to them all
Refuses to sunder
From man, from man.
Differ servitude & rank
As chains that clank not, chains that clank

The last shall be first
The first be postponed
The latest promoted
At the end of the day
It first will appear
Who never surrendered
Who combated stoutly,
Where God was the while
We strutted we coxcombs
So condescendingly
Bowing & giving
Affecting to give
Virtue is a cockney grown

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FOR LYRA YET SHALL BE THE POLE

For Lyra yet shall be the pole
And grass grow in the Capitol

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A SCORE OF AIRY MILES WILL SMOOTH

A score of airy miles will smooth
Rough Monadnock to a gem.

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ALL THINGS REHEARSE

All things rehearse
The meaning of the universe

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WEBSTER

Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail?
He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale.

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THE ATOM DISPLACES ALL ATOMS BESIDE

The atom displaces all atoms beside
And Genius unspheres all souls that abide

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I HAVE AN ARROW THAT CAN FIND ITS MARK

I have an arrow that can find its mark,
A mastiff that will bite without a bark.

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FROM HIGH TO HIGHER FORCES

From high to higher forces
The scale of power uprears,
The heroes on their horses,
The gods upon the spheres.

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ALL DAY THE WAVES ASSAILED THE ROCK

All day the waves assailed the rock,
I heard no church-bell chime;
The sea-beat scorns the minster clock,
And breaks the glass of Time.

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HONOR BRIGHT O MUSE

Honor bright o muse
Muses keep your faith with me
Give me some audacious hours
Draw to a just close
The poem ye begun

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SUCH ANOTHER PEERLESS QUEEN

Such another peerless queen
Only could her mirror show

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SEE HOW ROMANCE ADHERES

See how Romance adheres
To the deer, the lion,
and every bird,
Because they are free
And have no master but Law
On the wild ice in depths of sea
On Alp or Andes side
In the vast abyss of air
The bird, the flying cloud,
The fire the wind the element
These have not manners coarse or cowed
And no borrowed will
But graceful as cloud & flame
All eyes with pleasure fill

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WITH THE KEY OF THE SECRET HE MARCHES FASTER

With the key of the secret he marches faster
From strength to strength, and for night brings day,
While classes or tribes too weak to master
The flowing conditions of life give way.

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FOR WHAT NEED I OF BOOK OR PRIEST

For what need I of book or priest
Or Sibyls from the mummied East
When every star is Bethlehem’s star
I count as many as there are
Cinquefoils or violets in the grass;
So many saints & saviors,
So many high behaviors,
Salute the boy of years thrice five
Who only sees what he doth give

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AND RIVAL COXCOMBS WITH ENAMORED STARE

And rival Coxcombs with enamored stare
Perused the mysteries of her coiled hair

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FOR JOY & BEAUTY PLANTED IT

For joy & beauty planted it
With faerie lustres cheered,
And boding Fancy haunted it,
With men & women weird.

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PAPAS BLONDINE

Papas Blondine
Grew tall & wise
Eschewing vanities
And loved the truth
Can Truth suffice?
The years shall show:
Truth is put upon its trial
Her judgment will not brook denial
In her large memory
Is never fact forgotten
And she will know
If Truth’s as true as she
In action & in word
If the false world can afford
That any sterling be

And if it prove that things are rotten
She will frankly call them so
She who is real,
She who cannot aught conceal,
She that hypocrisy disdains,
Never palters, never feigns,
But well believes
That she may dare
Confess her faith in any air
That honest meaning will not fail
Over falsehood to prevail
She will launch her thought nor fear it
Speak the truth to who will hear it.
But still as now
With pure good will

And Bounty sculptured on thy brow
Give the downhearted world
Hints of Eternal cheer.

Brave maid obey thy heart
Accept what rule it shall impart
Nor heed one word of all the voices gay
Which in their manifolded quire
Stoop to Fashion & stoop to please
Flatter worthless ease

In every house a welcome guest
For her good heart & searching eye
Though she bring this sunlike test
In lieu of a polished lie.
She can weave & embroider
Can write & draw
And like a mirror report
Orderly beautiful all she sees
But when she signs her name
With plain verity content
Never prefixed a compliment
And in whatever circle came
Never stooped to utter one
Who if polite society
Did not exist, would it invent,
By her practice show its laws,
Grace without compliment.
Grace that grows from pure intent
Grace that fascinates & draws
Advance life as now
Bearer of good news
Or if disaster come
Evil news were not allowed
To dim her eye, her aspect cloud
Or choke her cheerful voice
Tell ill news as thou tellest good
Nor mar thy quiet in the broil
Adorn thy self with hardihood
With ice bath fortify the blood,
arctic winds blew round her bed
Hard fare & charitable toil

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THE ASMODAEAN FEAT BE MINE

The Asmodaean feat be mine
To spin my sand heaps into twine.

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A PUFF OF AIR OR DRY OR DAMP

A puff of air or dry or damp
Shall burn the town or quench the lamp
As the babe to the mothers breast
We are tied to the element
By hands no Will can circumvent
Through the world east & west
Pupils & children of the wind
Since our forefather Adam sinned
And as sinks or mounts the song
We are impotent or strong
A whiff of air will make the odds
Between the victim & the gods
As blows from divers points the gale
The man shall prosper or shall fail

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COIN THE DAYDAWN INTO LINES

Coin the daydawn into lines
In which its proper splendor shines;
Coin the moonlight into verse
Which all its marvels shall rehearse

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HE LOVED TO WATCH & WAKE

He loved to watch & wake
When the wing of the southwind whipt the lake
And the glassy surface in ripples brake
And fled in pretty darkness away
Like the flitting boreal lights
Rippling roses in northern nights
Or like the thrill of Aeolian strings
On which the sudden wind-god rings

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SHE WALKED IN FLOWERS AROUND MY FIELD

She walked in flowers around my field
As June herself around the sphere

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THE BIRD WAS GONE THE GHASTLY TREES

The bird was gone the ghastly trees
Heard the wind sing with in the breeze
Was this her funeral that I see
Did that asking eye ask me?

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PEDANTS ALL

Pedants all
They would be original
The mute pebble shames their wit
The echo is ironical
And wiser silence swallows speech

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IF BRIGHT THE SUN, HE TARRIES

If bright the sun, he tarries;
All day his song is heard;
And when he goes, he carries
No more baggage than a bird.

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TEACH ME YOUR MOOD, O PATIENT STARS!

Teach me your mood, O patient stars!
Who climb each night the ancient sky,
Leaving on space no shade, no scars,
No trace of age, no fear to die.

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O SUN! TAKE OFF THY HOOD OF CLOUDS

O sun! take off thy hood of clouds,
O land! take off thy chain,
And fill the world with happy mood
And love from main to main.

Ye shall not on this charter day
Disloyally withhold
Their household rights from captive men
By pirates bought & sold.

Ah little knew the innocent
In throes of birth forlorn,
That wolves & foxes waited for
Their victim to be born.

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AS THE DROP FEEDS ITS FATED FLOWER

As the drop feeds its fated flower,
As finds its Alp the snowy shower,
Child of the omnific Need
Hurled into life to do a deed,
Man drinks the water, drinks the light

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I LEAVE THE BOOK, I LEAVE THE WINE

I leave the book, I leave the wine,
I breathe freer by the pine:
In houses, I am low & mean,
Mountain waters wash me clean,
And by the seawaves I am strong,
I hear their medicinal song,
No balsam but the breeze I crave,
And no physician but the wave.

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GENTLE SPRING HAS CHARMED THE EARTH

Gentle Spring has charmed the earth
Where an April sunbeam fell,
Let no glacier from the north
Floating by undo the spell.

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THE CORAL WORM BENEATH THE SEA

The coral worm beneath the sea
Mason planter spreads
Its rock vegetable threads
Foundation of the isles to be
His colossal flowers
Home of imperial powers
And nobler life

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EASY TO MATCH WHAT OTHERS DO

Easy to match what others do,
Perform the feat as well as they;
Hard to outdo the wise, the true,
And find a loftier way.
The school decays, the learning spoils,
Because of the sons of wine: —
How snatch the stripling from their toils?
Yet can one ray of truth divine
The banquet’s blaze outshine.

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IF WISHES WOULD CARRY ME OVER THE LAND

If wishes would carry me over the land,
I would ride with free bridle today,
I would greet every tree with a grasp of my hand,
I would drink of each river, & swim in each bay.

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MAIA

Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each on other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By Man who thirsts to be deceived.

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SEYD PLANTED WHERE THE DELUGE PLOUGHED

Seyd planted where the deluge ploughed,
His hired hands were wind & cloud
His eyes could spy the gods concealed
In each hummock of the field

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FOR EVERY GOD

For every god
Obeys the hymn, obeys the ode,
Obeys the holy ode.

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FOR GENIUS MADE HIS CABIN WIDE

For Genius made his cabin wide
And Love brought gods therein to bide
Better he thought no god could bring
And basked in friendship all the days of Spring.
And though he found his friendships meet
His quarrels too had somewhat sweet.

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HE LIVES NOT WHO CAN REFUSE ME

He lives not who can refuse me,
All my force saith, ‘Come & use me.’
A little sun, a little rain,
And all the zone is green again

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FORBORE THE ANT HILL, SHUNNED TO TREAD

Forbore the ant hill, shunned to tread,
In mercy, on one little head

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BY ART, BY MUSIC, OVERTHRILLED

By art, by music, overthrilled
The wine cup shakes, the wine is spilled

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BORROW URANIA’S SUBTILE WINGS

Borrow Urania’s subtile wings
Chasing with words fast-flowing things:
Cling to the sacred fact, nor try
To plant thy shrivelled pedantry
On the shoulders of the sky.

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THE COMRADE OR THE BOOK IS GOOD

The comrade or the book is good
That puts me in a working mood:
Unless to thought be added will,
Apollo is an imbecile.
What parts, what truth, what fancies shine!
 — Ah! but I miss the just design.

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IS THE PACE OF NATURE SLOW?

Is the pace of nature slow?
Why not from strength to strength
From miracle to miracle
And not as now with retardation
As with sprained foot

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WHY HONOR THE NEW MEN

Why honor the new men
Who never understood the old

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I  NEVER KNEW BUT ONE

I never knew but one
Could do what thou hast done
Give me back the song of birds
Into plainest English words
Or articulate
The sough of the wind as I sate

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THINK NOT THE GODS RECEIVE THY PRAYER

Think not the gods receive thy prayer
In ear & heart, but find it there.

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TURTLE IN SWAMP

Turtle in swamp
wader on beaches
camel in sand
goat on mountain
fish in sea
eyes in light
Every Zone its flora & fauna
animals hybernate, or wake when dinner is ready
food, parasite, enemy, census,
Same fitness between a man & his time & event
Man comes when world is ready for him.
And things ripen, new men
Hercules comes first, & St John afterwards.
& Shakspeare at last.

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INSPIRED WE MUST FORGET OUR BOOKS

Inspired we must forget our books,
To see the landscape’s royal looks.

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SHE HAD WEALTH OF MORNINGS IN HER YEAR

She had wealth of mornings in her year
And planets in her sky,
She chose the best thy heart to cheer
Thy beauty to supply. —
Now younger lovers find the stream
The willow & the vine
But aye to me the happiest seem
To draw the dregs of wine

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WHEN WRATH & TERROR CHANGED JOVE’S REGAL PORT

When wrath & terror changed Jove’s regal port,
And the rashleaping thunderbolt fell short.

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SOFTENS THE AIR SO COLD & RUDE

Softens the air so cold & rude
What can the heart do less?
If Earth puts off her savage mood,
We should learn gentleness.

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SPICES IN THE PLANTS THAT RUN

Spices in the plants that run
To bring their firstfruits to the sun
Earliest heats that follow frore
Nerved leaf of hellebore
Sweet willow, checkerberry red,
With its savory leaf for bread
Silver birch & black
With the selfsame spice
Found in polygala root & rind
Sassafras & fern
Benzoin
Mouse ear cowslip wintergreen
Which by aroma may compel
The frost to spare what scents so well

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SHE PAINTS WITH WHITE & RED THE MOORS

She paints with white & red the moors
To draw the nations out of doors

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THE EARTH

Our eyeless bark sails free
Tho’ rough with boom & spar
 — Andes, Alp or Himmalee, —
Strikes never moon or star

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THE SUN ATHWART THE CLOUD THOUGHT IT NO SIN

The sun athwart the cloud thought it no sin
To use my land to put his rainbow in.

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OCTOBER WOODS, WHEREIN

October woods, wherein
The boy’s dream comes to pass,
And nature squanders on the boy her pomp
And crowns him with a more than royal crown
And unimagined splendor waits his steps
The urchin walks thro tents of gold
Thro crimson chambers porphyry & pearl
Pavilion on pavilion garlanded
Incensed & starred with lights & airs & shapes
And sounds, music
Beyond the best conceit of pomp or power

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HOW DREARILY IN COLLEGE HALL

How drearily in College hall
The Doctor stretched the hours!
But in each pause we heard the call
Of robins out of doors.

The air is wise, the wind thinks well,
And all through which it blows,
If plant or brain, if egg or cell,
To joyful beauty grows.

And oft at home ‘mid tasks I heed
I heed how wears the day —
We must not halt while fiercely speed
The spans of life away.

Who asketh here of Thebes or Rome
Or lands of eastern day?
In forests joy is still at home,
And there I cannot stray.

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IF CURSES BE THE WAGE OF LOVE

If curses be the wage of love
Hide in thy skies thou fruitless Jove
Not to be named
It is clear
Why the gods will not appear
They are ashamed

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THE LAND WAS ALL ELECTRIC

The land was all electric
There was no need of trumpets
As they float by coast & crag
There was no need of banners
Every zephyr was a bugle
Every maple was a flag
Each steeple was a rallying sign
The tocsin was its bell
Sharp steel was the lieutenant
And powder was his men.

The mountain echoes roar,
Every crutch became a pike,
The woods & meadows murmured war,
And the valleys shouted, Strike!

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FOR NATURE TRUE & LIKE IN EVERY PLACE

For Nature true & like in every place
Will hint her secret in a garden patch,
or in lone corners of a doleful heath,
As in the Andes watched by fleets at sea
or the sky-piercing horns of Himmaleh
or Europe’s pilgrims at Niagara
And when I would recall the scenes I dreamed
On Adirondac steeps I know
Small need have I of Turner or Daguerre,
Assured to find the token once again
In silver lakes that unexhausted gleam,
And peaceful woods beside my cottage door.

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HISTORY & PROPHECY ARE ALIKE

History & prophecy are alike
It matters little if thou read
Backward or forth a frivolous creed
Alike unworthy thou hast learned
The world was drowned & shall be burned
As if man’s Spirit were some cat
Loved its old barn to end with that

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THE COIL OF SPACE THE CONES OF LIGHT

The coil of space the cones of light
Starry orbits
Where they end, begin & enlarge
And the worlds of God
Are a dot on its marge

Ah waste & ocean, fold on fold,
And doubled ever more by Thought
Which nothing bounds which all can hold

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THE HEAVY BLUE CHAIN

The heavy blue chain
Of the boundless main
Lock up their prison door,
And the cannon’s wrath
Forbid their path
On Ocean’s azure floor.

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THIS SHINING HOUR IS AN EDIFICE

This shining hour is an edifice
Which the Omnipotent cannot rebuild

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HE COULD CONDENSE CERULEAN ETHER

He could condense cerulean ether
Into the very best sole leather

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THE SPARROW IS RICH IN HER NEST

The sparrow is rich in her nest
The bee has her desire
The lover in his love is blest
The poet in his brain of fire

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JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

As I left my door,
The muse came by,
Said, “Whither away?”
I, well-pleased to praise myself,
And in such presence raise myself,
Replied, ‘To keep thy bards birthday’
— “O happy morn! o happy eve!” —
The muse rejoined, “And dost thou weave
For noble night a noble rhyme,
And up to song through friendship climb?
For every guest
Ere he can rest
Plucks for my son or flower or fruit
In sign of Nature’s glad salute.”

— ‘Alas! thou know’st,
Dearest muse, I cannot boast
Of any grace from thee:
To thy spare bounty, queen, thou ow’st,
No verse will flow from me.
Beside, the bard himself, profuse
In thy accomplishment,
Does Comedy & Lyric use,
And to thy sisters all too dear,
Too gifted, than that he can chuse
To raise an eyebrow’s hint severe
On the toiling good intention
Of ill-equipped incomprehension.’

“The bard is loyal,”
Said the queen
With haughtier mien,
“And hear thou this, my mandate royal:
Instant to the Sibyl’s chair,
To the Delphic maid repair,
He has reached the middle date
Stars tonight that culminate
Shed beams fair & fortunate:
Go inquire his horoscope,
Half of memory, half of hope.”

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FROM PAQUES TO NOEL

From Paques to Noel,
Prophets & Bards,
Merlin, Llewellyn,
Highborn Hoel,
Wellborn Lowell,
What said the Sibyl?
What was the fortune
She sung for him? —
“Strength for the hour.”

Man of marrow, man of mark,
Virtue lodged in sinew stark,
Rich supplies & never stinted,
More behind at need is hinted,
Never cumbered with the morrow,
Never knew corroding sorrow,
Too well gifted to have found
Yet his opulence’s bound,

Most at home in mounting fun,
Broadest joke, & luckiest pun,
Masking in the mantling tones
Of his rich laugh-loving voice,
In speeding troops of social joys,
And in volleys of wild mirth,
Purer metal, rarest worth,
Logic, passion, cordial zeal,
Such as bard & hero feel.

Strength for the hour, —
For the day sufficient power,
Well advised, too easily great
His large fleece to antedate.

But, if another temper come,
If on the sun shall creep a gloom,
A time & tide too exigent,
When the old mounds are torn & rent,
More proud, more strong competitiors
Marshal the lists for Emperors,
 — Then, the pleasant bard will know
To put this frolic masque behind him,
Like an old summer cloak,
And in sky-born mail to bind him,
And single-handed cope with Time,
And parry & deal the thunderstroke.

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EVER THE ROCK OF AGES MELTS

Ever the Rock of Ages melts
Into the mineral air,
To be the quarry whence is built
Thought & its mansion fair.

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BUT NEVER YET THE MAN WAS FOUND

But never yet the man was found
Who could the mystery expound
Tho’ Adam born when oaks were young
Endured, the Bible says, as long,
But when at last the patriarch died
The Gordian noose was not untied.
He left, though goodly centuries old,
Meek natures secret still untold.

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FROM NATURE’S BEGINNING

From Nature’s beginning
Sin blunders & brags,
True making, true winning
Go hidden in rags.

Wit has the creation
Of worlds & their fame
On one stipulation,
 — Renouncing the same.

What wilt thou? the Forces?
Or skies which they breed?
The strain it discourses
Or Pan? or his reed?

If the crown once incloses
The brows of her son,
The Muse him deposes
From kingdom & throne

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A QUEEN REJOICES IN HER PEERS

A queen rejoices in her peers,
And wary Nature knows her own,
By court & city, dale & down,
And like a lover volunteers,
And to her son will treasures more
And more to purpose freely pour
In one woodwalk than learned men
Will find with glass in ten times ten.

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BY KINDS I KEEP MY KINDS IN CHECK

By kinds I keep my kinds in check,
I plant the oak, the rose I deck.

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BUT NATURE WHISTLED WITH ALL HER WINDS

But Nature whistled with all her winds,
Did as she pleased, & went her way.

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DEAR ARE THE PLEASANT MEMORIES

Dear are the pleasant memories
Of unreturning years,
And griefs recalled delight not less, —
Youth’s terrors & its tears

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THE GENIAL SPARK THE POET FELT

The genial spark the poet felt
Flamed till every barrier melt,
He poured his heart out like a bird,
And as he spoke, so was he heard.

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ONE NIGHT HE DREAMED OF A PALACE FAIR

One night he dreamed of a palace fair, —
Next year, it stood in marble strong,
Sheltered a nation’s proudest throne,
There sate the fathers of the state,
There echoed freedom’s shrill debate
A thousand years it will stand the same
Enacting laws & breathing Fame.

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THE LOW DECEMBER VAULT IN JUNE BE UP-LIFTED HIGH

The low December vault in June be up-lifted high
And largest clouds be flakes of down in that enormous sky.

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AT PLYMOUTH IN THE FRIENDLY CROWD

At Plymouth in the friendly crowd
Mamma was not a little proud
To see her beaming candlesticks
Almost outshine their lighted wicks
Why not? since shafts of solid silver
Might tempt the Plymouth saints to pilfer
But Time, a more relentless thief
Betrayed Mamma & these to grief
He stole the silver grain by grain
Nothing but copper would remain
But when Aladdin came to town
Hiding his famed lamp in his gown
Touched the old sticks with fingers new
As if with starshine riddled through
And now they beam like her own feats
Of mercy in the Concord streets.

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OLD AGE

The brook sings on the selfsame strain
But finds no echo in my brain

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TO THE CLOCK

Hail requiem of departed time
Never was richman’s funeral
Followed behind the pall
By the heir’s eager feet,
With resignation more complete
Yet not his hope is mine

Thou diggst the grave of each day
Not mine, Dig it thou shalt;
I defy thee to forbear it

O Time thou loiterer
Thou whose might
Laid low Enceladus & crushed the moth
Rest on thy hoary throne forgetting
Alike thy agitations & thy graves

Arachnean webs decoying & destroying
Webs whereat the Gorgons ply
But lo! thy web’s motheaten
The shuttles quiver as the loom’s beams are shaken

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NATURE SAYS

Nature says,
These craggy hills that front the dawn
Man-bearing granite of the North
Shall fiercer forms & races spawn
Charged with my genius forth

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SHUN PASSION, FOLD THE HANDS OF THRIFT

Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift,
Sit still, and Truth is near;
Suddenly it will uplift
Your eye-lids to the sphere,
Wait a little, you shall see
The portraiture of things to be.

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TO THE MIZEN, THE MAIN, & THE FORE

To the mizen, the main, & the fore,
Up with it once more,
The old tricolor,
The ribbon of power,
The white, blue, & red, which the nations adore.

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THE RULES TO MEN MADE EVIDENT

The rules to men made evident
By Him who built the day,
The columns of the firmament
Not firmer based than they.

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TOO LATE THE ANXIOUS FIRE CAME

Too late the anxious fire came
The Express had mounted his pot of flame
No gift tho’ urged by Ediths voice
No bugler can the rider bring
Only this paper scrap can make amends
Tomorrow rides with equal fire
And brings the haughty horseman home
He well can wait
This horse forever bounds
This horn to fancy ever sounds
The warcloud hints what bursts behind

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HIS INSTANT THOUGHT THE POET SPOKE

His instant thought the Poet spoke
And filled the age his fame;
An inch of earth the wild bolt strook
But lit the sky with flame.

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TRY THE MIGHT THE MUSE AFFORDS

Try the might the Muse affords,
And the balm of thoughtful words.
Bring music to the desolate
Hang roses on the stony fate

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SAADI HELD THE MUSE IN AWE

Saadi held the Muse in awe
She was his mistress & his law
A twelvemonth he could silence hold
Nor ran to speak till she him told
He felt the flame, the fanning wings,
Nor offered words till they were things.
Glad when the solid mountain swims
In Music & uplifting hymns

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NO SONG SO TUNEFUL, QUOTH THE FOX

No song so tuneful, quoth the fox,
As the rich crowing of the cocks.

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LIFE

A train of gay and clouded days
Dappled with joy and grief & praise,
Beauty to fire us, saints to save,
Escort us to a little grave.

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SONG OF TALIESIN

Vain Bards! I can discover all,
What befel or shall befal.
I come seeking what is lost,
And my aim shall not be crossed.
Strong am I who this demand,
More strong my tongue than Arthur’s hand
Three hundred potent songs & more
Are hidden in the strain I pour:
No foemen in these mountains dwell
On whom I cannot cast a spell;
Nor stone nor brass, nor iron ring
Can fetter Elphin when I sing;
All that I seek this hand can find,
All Gates unbar, all bonds unbind.

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SEEMED, THO’ THE SOFT SHEEN ALL ENCHANTS

Seemed, tho’ the soft sheen all enchants,
Cheers the rough crag & mournful dell,
As if on such stern forms & haunts,
A wintry storm more fitly fell.

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NATURE SAITH

Nature saith,
I am not infinite,
But imprisoned & bound,
Tool of mind,
Tool of the being I feed & adorn.

Twas I did soothe
Thy thorny youth;
I found thee placed
In my most leafless waste;
I comforted thy little feet

On the forlorn errand bound;
I fed thee, with my mallows fed,
On the first day of failing bread.

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ILLUSIONS LIKE THE TINTS OF PEARL

Illusions like the tints of pearl,
Or changing colors of the sky,
Or ribbons of a dancing girl
That mend her beauty to the eye.

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INSCRIPTION ON A WELL IN MEMORY

of the Martyrs of the War
Fall stream from Heaven to bless: return as well;
So did our sons; Heaven met them as they fell.

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LETTERS

My tongue is prone to lose the way,
Not so my pen, for in a letter
We have not better things to say,
But surely put them better.

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MAY

When all their blooms the meadows flaunt
To deck the morning of the year,
Why tinge thy lustres jubilant
With forecast or with fear?

Softens the air so sharp and rude,
What can the heart do less?
If Earth put off her savage mood,
Let us learn gentleness.

The purple flame all bosoms girds,
And Love ascends his throne;
I cannot hear your songs, O birds!
For the witchery of my own.

Each human heart this tide makes free
To keep the golden day,
And ring the bells of jubilee
On its own First of May.

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THE MIRACLE

I have trod this path a hundred times
With idle footsteps, crooning rhymes,
I know each nest & web-worms tent;
The fox-hole which the woodchucks rent
Maple & oak, the old “divan,”
Self-planted twice like the banian;
I know not why I came again
Unless to learn it ten times ten.
To read the sense the woods impart,
You must bring the throbbing heart;
Love is aye the counterforce,
Terror, & Hope, & wild Remorse.
Newest knowledge, fiery thought,
Or Duty to grand purpose wrought.

Wandering yester-morn the brake,
I reached the margin of the lake,
And oh! the wonder of the power,
The deeper secret of the hour! —
Nature, the supplement of Man,
His hidden sense interpret can, —
What friend to friend cannot convey
Shall the dumb bird instructed say.
Passing yonder oak, I heard
Sharp accents of my woodland bird, —
I watched the singer with delight, —
But mark what changed my joy to fright,
When that bird sang, I gave the theme, —
That wood-bird sang my last night’s dream,
A brown wren was the Daniel
That pierced my trance its drift to tell;
It knew my quarrel, how and why,
Published it to lake and sky, —
Told every word and syllable
In his flippant chirping babble,
All my wrath, & all my shames,
Nay, Heaven be witness, — gave the names.

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A DANGEROUS GIFT & GRACE IS MINE

A dangerous gift & grace is mine
Closely dame your ear incline
A word my merits shall unlock
Behold me here a whispering clock
I both time & silence keep
Will not wake you when you sleep
Yet count as true the balmy hours
As truly as
The thunderer from the steeple towers

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AND HUNGRY DEBT BESEIGED MY DOOR

And hungry Debt beseiged my door
And still held out his hundred hands

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USE WILL IN MAN NEW GRACE REVEAL

Use will in man new grace reveal
The gleam which Labor adds to steel.

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PUT IN, DRIVE HOME THE SIGHTLESS WEDGES

Put in, drive home the sightless wedges,
Exploding burst the crystal ledges.

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WHAT FLOWING CENTRAL FORCES, SAY

What flowing central forces, say,
Make up thy splendor, matchless day!

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THE BEST OF LIFE IS PRESENCE OF A MUSE

The best of life is presence of a muse
Who does not wish to wander, comes by stealth,
Divulging to the heart she sets a flame
No popular tale, no bauble for the mart.
When the wings grow that draw the gazing crowd,
Ofttimes poor Genius fluttering near the earth
Is wrecked upon the turrets of the town:
But, lifted till he meets the steadfast gales
Calm blowing from the Everlasting West

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THE PILGRIMS

Behold I make partition
In this new world I have built,
For slavery differs from freedom
As honor is wide from guilt.

Lo now to Freedom I assign
And make partition fair,
All space above the waterline
All ground below the air.

And what’s beside may slavery claim
Her residue & share,
Within the earth to hide her shame,
Or climb above the air.

Firm to the pole he knots the cord,
And to the tropics drew,
About the round globe’s quarter broad,
Along the welkin blue.

Hills clapped their hands, the rivers shined,
The seas applauding roar,
The elements were of one mind,
As they had been of yore.

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I CARE NOT WHITHER I MAY GO

I care not whither I may go,
Or if my task be high or low,
Work to hide or proudly show,
Or if my mates shall be my peers
Or only rare-met travellers,
Whether I pace the shop-lined street
And scan the city at my feet
With secret pride to rule the town
And shire on which the dome looks down.

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I AM NOT BLACK IN MY MIND

I am not black in my mind
But born to make black fair:
On the battlefield my master find, —
His white corpse taints the air.
Eve roved in Paradise, I’ve heard,
With no more baggage than a bird;
Exiled, she soon found necessary
More garments than she liked to carry;
Adam devised valise & sack,
And trunk & tray her weeds to pack,
But when the hatbox he invented,
Dear Eve declared herself contented;
Eden was well — Angels prefer it —
She thought the outworld had its merit;
And now transmits to Ellen dear
This sable cube of comfort here.

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TRIMOUNTAIN

Sicut cum patribus sit Deus nobis

The land that has no song
Shall have a song today,
The granite ledge is dumb too long,
The vales have much to say.
Its men can teach the lightning speech,
And round the globe their voices reach.

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THE ROCKY NOOK WITH HILLTOPS THREE

The rocky Nook with hilltops three
Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice a day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms:
The men of yore were stout & poor,
And sailed for bread to every shore.

The waves that rocked them on the deep
To them their secret told,
Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep,
“Like us be free & bold.
The honest waves refuse to slaves
The empire of the Ocean caves.”

And where they went, on trade intent,
They did what freemen can;
Their dauntless ways did all men praise,
The merchant was a man.
The world was made for honest trade,
To plant & eat be none afraid.

Old Europe groans with palaces
Has lords enough & more
We plant & build by foaming seas
A city of the poor.
For what avail the plough & sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?

The noble craftsman we promote,
Disown the knave & fool;
Each honest man shall have his vote,
Each child shall have his school.

We grant no dukedoms to the few,
We hold like rights & shall,
Equal on Sunday in the pew,
On Monday in the mall.

Fair rose the planted hills behind
The good town on the Bay,
And where the western slopes declined
The prairie stretched away.

Out from the many-fountained earth
The rivers gushed & foamed,
Sweet airs from every forest forth
Around the mountains roamed.

What rival towers majestic soar
Along the stormy coast, —
Penn’s town, New York, & Baltimore,
If Boston knew the most!

They laughed to know the world so wide,
The mountains said, “Good-day!
We greet you well, you Saxon men,
Up with your towns, & stay.”

“For you,” they said, “no barriers be,
For you no sluggard’s rest;
Each street leads downward to the Sea,
Or land-ward to the West.”

The townsmen braved the English King,
Found friendship in the French,
And Honor joined the patriot ring
Low on their wooden bench.

O bounteous seas that never fail!
O day remembered yet!
O happy port that spied the sail
Which wafted Lafayette!
Abdiel bright, in Europe’s night,
That never faltered from the right.

O pity that I pause, —
The song disdaining shuns
To name the noble sires, because
Of the unworthy sons:
For what avail the plough & sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?

But there was chaff within the flour,
And one was false in ten;
And reckless clerks in lust of power
Forgot the rights of men;
Cruel & blind did file their mind,
And sell the blood of human kind.

Your town is full of gentle names
By patriots once were watchwords made;
Those war-cry names are muffled shames
On recreant sons mislaid.
What slave shall dare a name to wear
Once Freedom’s passport everywhere?

O welaway! if this be so,
And man cannot afford the right,
And if the wage of love is woe,
And honest dealing yield despite.
For what avail the plough & sail,
Or land, or life, if freedom fail?

Hie to the woods, sleek citizen!
Back to the sea, go landsmen down!
Climb the White Hills, sleek aldermen,
And vacant leave the town:
Ere these echoes be choked with snows,
Or over the roofs blue Ocean flows.

The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart,
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart.
For what avail the plough & sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?

Let the blood of her hundred thousands
Throb in each manly vein
And the wit of all her wisest
Make sunshine in his brain.
A union then of honest men,
Or Union nevermore again.

And each shall care for other,
And each to each shall bend,
To the poor a noble brother,
To the good an equal friend.

A blessing through the ages thus
Shield all thy roofs & towers!
God with the fathers, So with us!
Thou darling town of ours!

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Alphabetical List of Poems

FOR LUCIFER, THAT OLD ATHLETE

For Lucifer, that old athlete,
Tho’ flung from Heaven falls on his feet

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TRAITORS THO’ PLUMED & STEEL EQUIPPED

Traitors tho’ plumed & steel equipped
Are born to be betrayed & whipped
Born to be caught & to be whipped

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THE MUSE

The Muse
Can at pleasure use
Every syllable men have heard
And can move with every word
Need not mimic, plot or veer
But speak right onward without fear
She need not turn aside
Or half convey & half suppress
New meaning in a worn-out phrase
She will not walk in crooked ways
But bend the language to her
Make the language bend to her
Not unable not afraid
To say what never yet was said
She need not stray from her path
To find the words of love or wrath
The world is as rich in nouns & verbs
As in sea sand or in herbs

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IN MY GARDEN THREE WAYS MEET

In my garden three ways meet,
Thrice the spot is blest;
Hermit thrush comes there to build
Carrier doves to rest.

The broad armed oaks, the copse’s maze
The cold sea-wind detain;
And sultry summer overstays
When autumn chills the plain.

Self-sown my stately garden grows,
The winds and wind-blown seed,
Cold April rain, and colder snows
My hedges plant and feed.

From mountains far and valleys near,
The harvests sown to-day,
Thrive in all weathers without fear, —
Wild planters plant away!

In cities high the careful crowd
Of woe-worn mortals darkling go,
But in these sunny solitudes
My quiet roses blow.

Methought the sky looked scornful down
On all was base in man,
And airy tongues did taunt the town,
Achieve our peace who can!

What need I holier dew
Than Walden’s haunted wave,
Distilled from heaven’s alembic blue,
Steeped in each forest cave.

If Thought unlock her mysteries,
If Friendship on me smile,
I walk in marble galleries,
I talk with kings the while.

And chiefest thou, whom Genius loved,
Daughter of sounding seas,
Whom Nature pampered in these groves,
And lavished all to please.

What wealth of mornings in her year,
What planets in her sky!
She chose her best thy heart to cheer,
Thy beauty to supply.

Now younger pilgrims find the stream,
The willows and the vine,
But aye to me the happiest seem
To draw the dregs of wine.

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THERMOMETER

Mine to watch the sun at work
Or if he hide in clouds & shirk
I test the force of wood & bark,
And keep the pitcoal to the mark
On my white enamelled scale
The warning numbers never fail
From sixty up to seventy one
The grades of household comfort run
If they climb a hairsbreadth higher
Fling wide the door, put out the fire,
Each year will have its holidays
Which I report nor blame nor praise
Twice I dive twenty below zero
Twice climb to heat would blacken Nero
But health & heart will prosper more
At the mean point of 54

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NATURE

Day by day for her darlings to her much she added more,
In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber was a door,
A door to something grander, — loftier walls, & vaster floor.

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SEASHORE

Here chimes no clock, no pedant calendar,
My waves abolish time, dwarf days to hours,
And give my guest eternal afternoon.

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THINGS OFT MISCALLING, AS THE HEN

Things oft miscalling, as the hen-
Fever raged not in fowls but men.

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ON THE CHAMBER, ON THE STAIRS

On the chamber, on the stairs,
Lurking dumb,
Go and come
The Lemurs and the Lars.

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AH! NOT TO ME THESE DREAMS BELONG

Ah! not to me these dreams belong,
A better voice sings through my song.

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FOR DEATHLESS POWERS TO VERSE BELONG

“For deathless powers to verse belong
And they like demigods are strong
On whom the Muses smile.”

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UPON A ROCK YET UNCREATE

Upon a rock yet uncreate
Amid a Chaos inchoate
An uncreated being sate
Beneath him rock
Above him cloud
And the cloud was rock
And the rock was cloud
The rock then growing soft & warm
The cloud began to take a form
A form chaotic vast & vague
Which issued in the cosmic egg
Then the being uncreate
Upon the egg did incubate
And thus became an incubator
And of the egg did allegate
And thus became an alligator
And the incubate was potentate
But the alligator was potentator

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ALAS, ALAS, THAT I AM BETRAYED

Alas, Alas, that I am betrayed
By my flying days, it is then the looking glass,
Not the mind, if self love do not tarnish it
Alas that he who foolish frets in desire
Not heeding the flying time
Finds himself, like me, at one instant, old.
Nor know I how to repent, nor do I make myself ready,
Nor advise myself with death at the door.
Enemy of myself
Vainly I pour out plaints & sighs
Since there is no harm equal to lost time

Michelangelo

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WO IS ME WOE’S ME WHEN I THINK

Wo is me woe’s me when I think
Of my spent years I find not one
Among so many days; not one was mine.
Hopes which betrayed me, vain longing,
Tears, love, fiery glow, & sigh,
For not one mortal affection is longer new to me
Held me fast, & now, I know it, & learn it,
And from goodness & truth ever severed,
Go I forth, from day to day, further;
Ever the shadows grow longer; ever deeper
Sinks for me the sun;
And I am ready to fall infirm & outworn.

Michelangelo

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SWEET, SWEET, IS SLEEP, — AH! SWEETER, TO BE STONE

Sweet, sweet, is sleep, — Ah! sweeter, to be stone,
Whilst wrong & shame exist & grow;
Not to see, not to feel, is a boon;
Then, not to wake me, pray speak low!

Michelangelo

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THE POWER OF A BEAUTIFUL FACE LIFTS ME TO HEAVEN

The power of a beautiful face lifts me to heaven
Since else in earth is none that delights me
And I mount living among the elect souls,
A grace which seldom falls to a mortal.

So well with its Maker the work consents,
That I rise to him through divine conceptions
And here I shape all thoughts & words,
Burning, loving, through this gentle form:

Whence, if ever from two beautiful eyes
I know not how to turn my look, I know in them
The light which shows me the way which guides me to God.

And if, kindled at their light, I burn,
In my noble flame sweedy shines
The eternal joy which smiles in heaven.

Michelangelo

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BOY BRING THE BOWL FULL OF WINE

Boy bring the bowl full of wine
Bring me two bowls of the purest wine
I take wine to be the love-potion
This stuff for old & young, bring
Sun & moon are the wine & the glass
In the midst of the moon bring me the sun
How the understanding strives so earnestly
Bring bands made of wine for the stupid head
Fan this dissolving glow,
That is, instead of water bring wine
Goes the rose by, say gladly:
Nectar of pearls & blood of the rose, bring.
Sounds not the nightingale it is right
Sound of glass & sound of wine, bring.
Mourn for nothing, since past is past
Harp & lute tones therefore bring
Only in dreams enjoy I my love
Then bring wine for wine brings sleep
Am I drunken What is to do
That I may be well drunken bring one glass more
One two cups bring to Hafiz
Be it now well or ill done, bring.

Hafiz

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WHO ROYALLY BEDDED

Who royally bedded
On ermine lies
Knows not the stone pillow
Of the pilgrims thorn bed

Hafiz

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DESIRE NO BREAD, FORSAKE THE GUEST HALL OF THE EARTH

Desire no bread, forsake the guest hall of the earth,
The earth is a host who murders his guests

Hafiz

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THE RED ROSE BLOOMS

The red rose blooms
The nightingale is drunken
Now leave free course to drinking
Ye reverencers of wine

The building of Sorrow it seemed so firm
Piled of granite gray
O see how the crystal glass
Has already shattered it & broke

Bring wine; before the Throne
Which hears our wishes
Drunkard & sage are one
And prince & groom

Since I must one day leave
This two-ported guest house
It is all one whether my lifes course
Be high or humble

It is not possible without sorrow
And without grief to live
Since on the day of Destiny was
Sorrow assigned to us

For being & not-being cumber thee not
Be ever of glad heart
The end of every excellence
Is the Chaos & the Night

Pomp, Asaph, the East-wind-horse,
The knowledge of the bird language,
Is all gone to the winds
And profits not the king

Mount not from the straight way
In to the air with wings
The arrow flies into the air & falls
Again to earth

How can the tongue of thy quill
Thank Hafiz therefor
That thy words steadily from mouth
to mouth fly.

Hafiz

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MANY OUR NEEDS, YET WE SPARE PRAYERS

Many our needs, yet we spare prayers
Since thro’ thy nature have we no need of praying
The Nature of my beloved is the world-showing mirror
Ah it has taught me that thy need is no need
Long time I endured the torments of the ship
Since the pearls are mine, what do I want of the sea
Beggar! the soul-squandering life of the beloved
Knows thy petition. She has no need of explanation
Prince of beauty, by God! I am burned up by love.
Ask me finally still, Have the beggars really need?
Thou importunate flee I have nothing to do with thee
My friends are there Is there need of enemies
Thy word conquers Hafiz, of itself appears virtue
Envy & empty strife with the adversary are not needful

Hafiz

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EARLY AFTER THE NIGHT LONG REVEL

Early after the night long revel
Took I lyre plectrum & bowl
Bridled the horse of Reason
Drove it with spurrs to the town of revellers

See the host flatters me
That I fear not the blinding of Destiny
Thou the aim of the arrow of speech
Said the host with bows of brows

Little profits it thee
Tho thou embrace me like a belt
Spread the net for others
Over the net the Auka soars

Host & trusted are one
Every difference is only a pretence
Reach us the boats of Sohra
That we save us out of these waters

Ah how enjoyed the Shah
Who in himself is constantly enamoured
All is riddle Hafiz
To explain it to us is mere talk.

Hafiz

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THOU WHO WITH THY LONG HAIR

Thou who with thy long hair
As with thy chains art come
Thine be opportunity
Since to capture slaves thou comest

O show thyself benign
And change thy mood
Since they to resign
Thou to ask & claim comest

Be it in peace be it in war
To yield to thee it is my doom
Since in every event thou art
With entrancing kisses come

Fire & water mingled are
In thy swelling ruby lip
Evil eyes be far!
As a juggler thou art come

Honor to thy soft heart
And a good work wouldst thou do
Pray for all the dead
Whom thine eyelashes slew

Say what boots my virtue
Since thou intent to steal the heart’s treasures
All drunken & confused
To my still chamber art come

See Hafis said he to me
Thy coat with spots soiled
Wert thou safe from this company
Once home again?

Hafiz

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ART THOU WISE, FOUR THINGS RESIGN

Art thou wise, four things resign, —
Love, & loneness, sloth, and wine.

Hafiz

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KNOWST THOU THE LUCK THE FRIENDS FACE TO SEE

Knowst thou the luck the friends face to see
Rather to beg near him than a prince to bee
Tis easy out of the soul to banish lust
Not easy the friend from the soul to thrust
With my own heart go I like a flower
There tear I the garment of good name
Now kiss I secretly with the roses, as the East wind,
Now hearken I the secrets of the nightingale
Kiss the friends lips when thou canst
Otherwise wilt thou in the lips bite full of sorrow
Seize the chance of talking with thy friend
Who knows if we meet again on the way.

Hafiz

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UNTRUTH IS BECOME THE MODE

Untruth is become the mode
And no man knows of friendship & truth
The worthy nears now the worthless
And stretch out their hands for a gift
Whoso in the world is virtuous & wise
Is no moment free from care & sorrow
On the other side the dunce lives in plenty
With gold & honour overlaid
And if a poet fluent as water
Full of heart speaking to mind & to soul
So yields him avarice no shilling
Tho his songs were worthy of Abusina
Yesterday said Reason to the Understanding
Go forth suffer & complain not
In satisfaction seek thy kingdom
And drink wine instead of other potions
Hafiz follow thou this good counsel
Then the thy foot fall thy head shall rise

Hafiz

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NOVICE, HEAR ME WHAT I SAY

Novice, hear me what I say
So shalt thou be purified
Whilst thou dost not tread the way,
Thou canst not be a guide.

Pride of the gazing school,
Lord of thy companions,
Mark, hear boy thou too shalt be
One day the sire of sons

Sleeping, eating, drinking,
The spark of love withstood,
Eat not, sleep not, love in thinking
Will come rushing like a flood.

A beam of the love of Allah
Once fall thy soul upon,
By God I know thou then wilt be
More brilliant than the sun.

As learned magians do,
Thy hand from brass withhold,
That thou in life true alchemist
May turn all stones to gold.

From thy footsole to thy head
A beam of God thou burnest,
So [ ]thout foot or head
To the hest of God thou turnest

Go leap into the waves,
And have no doubt or care,
And the flowing of the seven broad seas
Shall never wet thy hair.

If Allah’s face on thee
Look down with love benign,
Who disbelieves that thou also
To his face turnest thine?

And though thy form & fortune
Were broken waste & void
Dream not of thy eternal root
A fibre is destroyed

Hafiz

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LAMENT NOT, O HAFIZ, THE DISTRIBUTION

Lament not, o Hafiz, the distribution
Thy nature & thy verse, which flow like water, let them
content you.

Hafiz

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HAFIZ THOU ART FROM ETERNITY

Hafiz thou art from Eternity
By God created for a man
Who abhors hypocrisy

Hafiz

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HAFIZ SINCE ON THE WORLD

Hafiz since on the world
Sorrows & joys pass away
So it is better that thou ever
Of glad spirit art

Hafiz

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I SAID TO THE EAST WIND

I said to the East wind
On the tulip-enriched plain,
Of what martyrs are these the bloody corpse-cloths?
He said, Dear Hafiz, to you & me
Has no one told this.
Tell thou of wine-ruby, of silver-chin,
Seize the skirt of thy friend,
Care not for the enemy,
Be God’s man & fear not the Devil.

Hafiz

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WE WISH LIKE THE GLASS

We wish like the glass
All clean to be; who wishes it not
The East wind breathes out in scents
Spices & perfumes
Why changes not the inner mind
Violet earth into musk?

Hafiz

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WHEN IN ETERNITY THE LIGHT

When in eternity the light
Of thy beauty glistened, Love was,
Which set the worlds on fire
Beams trickled from thy cheeks,
Angels saw them & remained cold
Indignant turned they then to men
See, the Understanding prayed
for a spark his light to kindle.
Jealousy was the dazzling spark

Hafiz

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SECRETLY TO LOVE & TO DRINK, WHAT IS IT? TIS A DISSOLUTE

Secretly to love & to drink, what is it? tis a dissolute
day’s work.
I side with the open drunkards, be it as it may.
Loose the knots of the heart & cumber thee no farther
for the lot
No geometer has yet disentangled this confusion.
At the trade & changes of Time wonder not;
The like enchantments keeps Destiny ready.
Hold the glass discreetly, it was put together
Of the skulls of Jamschid, Keikobad, & Behmen,
Who teaches us where Kai was & Nimrod are gone
How the throne of Jamschid fell in pieces at last
See Ferhad, how he longs for the lips of Schirin
Out of the flood of tears sprang tulips before him.
Come I will be riotous & wasted by wine
Who knows but I shall find treasures in a desolate
house

Hafiz

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THIS EFFERVESCING GENTLEMAN WHO DESPISES A SECRET

This effervescing gentleman who despises a secret
Scorns me since I am riotous & enamoured,
Look at the virtues of lovers not at their faults
Since who is not virtuous himself, sees faults.

People of heart have the key to the treasure of the heart
Let none henceforth doubt of this refined truth
Shepherd in the vale of Rest thy wish will then be first
fulfilled.
When thou several years hast served the Jethro of the heart
Blood trickles from the eye of Hafiz as if he were enchanted
When he as old man remembers the days of youth

Hafiz

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STAND UP, THAT WE MAY SACRIFICE THE SOUL

Stand up, that we may sacrifice the soul
Before the pencil of the Master
Who the picture of this world
So masterly has painted

Hafiz

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O FRIEND BLAME NOT HAFIZ

O friend blame not Hafiz,
While his glances so follow you,
I have in him all the time
Only your friend seen.

Hafiz

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THE WAY OF LOVE IS UNLIMITED

The way of love is unlimited
The soul is there sacrificed
There is no other way.

Scare me not with reason
Bring wine. Since Reason as watchman
Has nothing here to do

When thou givest thy heart to love
Tis good time tis a good thing
Use no counsel first

Who smote me? Ask thine eye,
O sweet child, let this not lie
As guilt against my Destiny

As the new moon needs a sharp eye
So thou an intelligent one; not every one
Sees the young crescent

Use drinking with wisdom
The way to it as to a treasure is not
Open to every man

Hafiz

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HIS LEARNING TRULY LIFTED HAFIZ TO HEAVEN

His learning truly lifted Hafiz to Heaven
But his love of thee has brot him to the dust

Hafiz

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THOUSAND DANGERS OF RUIN HAS THE STREET OF LOVE

Thousand dangers of ruin has the street of love
Believe not that death frees thee from all

Hafiz

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BRING WINE RELEASE ME

Bring wine release me
From care
Only with wine they drive
Sorrow away

There are no other lamps
In society
Than wine & the face
Of the handsome cupbearer

Be not proud of the Enchantment
Of thy eyelashes
Since pride profits not
Oft have I proved.

Master thou oft well advisest me
Not to love
But this lesson is
No law for me

Love befouls only the heart
Of great men
Since thou hast no love
Thou art excused

To a wink sacrificed I
My virtue
Ah therein is all my store
Of good works

The luck of enjoyment is there
Bating separation
And the land of the heart is now
Again arable

Hafiz

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BLAME ME NOT THOU HOARSE PREACHER

Blame me not thou hoarse preacher
Did not the Creator know
Who set me on fire with this flame
Whom I ought to love?

Hafiz

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I NEVER WENT OUT OF MY COUNTRY

I never went out of my country
In all my life

Hafiz

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FOR HIS CONSTANT DWELLING PLACE HAS HAFIZ

For his constant dwelling place has Hafiz
Once for all chosen the wine-house
So chooses the lion the wood for his abode
And the bird the plain

Hafiz

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OUR SHAH’S COUNSEL IS THE EFFLUX

Our Shah’s counsel is the efflux
Of higher light
See thou have, if thou draw nigh him,
Clear vision.
Take the wish for his greatness
Into thy prayer
Since the ear of his heart
Converses with angels

Hafiz

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IF THY DARLING FAVOR THEE

If thy darling favor thee
Both worlds thou mayest defy
Let fortune stand thy friend
Armies encamp against thee in vain

Hafiz

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NO PHYSICIAN HAS A BALSAM FOR MY WO

No physician has a balsam for my wo
I am only sound or sick thro my friend

Hafiz

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SPARE THOU NEITHER TIME NOR BLOOD FOR THY FRIEND

Spare thou neither time nor blood for thy friend
Sacrifice also a hundred souls for one drink

Hafiz

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IT IS CERTAIN THAT WHO HIS MIND

It is certain that who his mind
In his friend concentered has
Has good luck to his handmaid
Higher than the Understanding
Is the cabinet of love,
Who has his soul in his own sleeve
Kisses only the door.
The mouth of the friend perchance
Is the seal of Solomons hand
Which under the power of a ruby
Has the world at command
My friend has a musk down
And lips like fireglow
I will flatter the beauty finely
Who has this & that.
As long as thou art in the earth
Use occasion, work & climb
Since the Grave has a plenty
of unprofitable time.
Happy who sees the poor
Without contempt
While the first place of honour
Has many poor sitters
It screens from harms body & soul
The hearts prayer of the poor;
Whilst he who is ashamed of the poor
Has no good end.

Hafiz

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WHO DEDICATES HIMSELF TO THE GLASS

Who dedicates himself to the glass
Wherein the world mirrors itself
Lifts securely the veil
Which separates the worlds

Hafiz

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WINE RESEMBLES THE LORD JESUS

Wine resembles the Lord Jesus
It wakes the dead to life

Hafiz

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DRINK TILL THE TURBANS ARE ALL UNBOUND

Drink till the turbans are all unbound
Drink till the house like the world turns round

Hafiz?

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SO LONG AS THERE’S A TRACE

So long as there’s a trace
Of wine & banquet house
My head will lie in the dust
Of the threshold of the winehouse
Ask thou for grace hereafter
At my gravestone
That will be the pilgrim city
Of all the drinkers of wine
The ring of mine host hangs
Forever in my ear.
I am; what I was
My dust will be again.
Go, blind hermit, go,
Since to thee & me alike
The secret is hidden,
And always will be.
My well beloved went
Abroad today to hunt
Whomsoever the lot had doomed
To bleed at the heart.
A place on which the sole
Of thy foot falls
Will be the resort
Of all reasonable men.
From the day when by love
I am laid as in the grave
Until the Judgment, my eye
Will be by thine
So long the luck of Hafiz
Will be no better
The hair of his love
Will be in the hands of another.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TO WHOM A GLASS FULL OF RED WINE

To whom a glass full of red wine
Was given in the morning
To him was a place in heaven
By the Lord given.
Be no saint; look not
Too closely after drunkards
To them was on the day of lots
The love-bias given.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

IN BOUNDING YOUTH THE NIGHT & RAIN

In bounding youth the night & rain
Shut toys out vex the brain
But later, dark & rainy skies
Give not the cheer the sun supplies

Hafiz?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE NINEFOLD TABLE OF HEAVEN

The ninefold table of Heaven
Its gold & silver bread
Compared with the table of thy grace
Are but a morsel

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SHOULD I SHED MY TEARS

Should I shed my tears
Into the Sinderud,
Irak would in a moment
Be watered through & through

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

PRINCE THE BALL OF HEAVEN SHOULD

Prince the ball of heaven should
Under thy bat be
And the field of time of space
Should be thy playground

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SINCE YOU SET NO WORTH ON THE HEART

Since you set no worth on the heart
Will I on the way instead of small coin
Strew eyes.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

NOW TELLS THE FLOWER

Now tells the flower
Histories of May
Who fetters himself with gold
He is not wise.

Cheer thy heart with wine:
The Earth is only
A house to which our bones
Give the mortar.

Seek not in thy friend, truth;
Truth is dead;
Holy fire comes not
Out of Church lamps.

Blacken thou not my name
For my riot;
Who knows what the lot
Inscribed on the brow?

Turn not thy steps
From the grave of Hafiz,
Since though in sins sunken
He expects Heaven

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

GOOD IS WHAT GOES ON THE ROAD OF NATURE

Good is what goes on the road of Nature
On the straight way never yet erred man

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

REACH ME WINE NO COUNSEL WEAKENS THE CONCLUSION OF

the lot
Reach me wine No counsel weakens the conclusion of
the lot,
None alters what Destiny determines for him.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HAS THINE ENEMY SLANDERED THY HOUSE

Has thine enemy slandered thy house
He shall find his sin in his childs child

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

YET ALL COMES OUT OF THIS, THAT ONE DOOR

Yet all comes out of this, that one door
Opens, when another shuts.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HEAR WHAT THE GLASS WILL TELL THEE

Hear what the glass will tell thee
This again-married world
Has had many husbands mighty & glorious
Jam & Keikobad

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FREE THYSELF FROM WO

Free thyself from wo
Thou drinkest blood when thou enviest others their luck

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

AND HAD HAFIZ

And had Hafiz
Ten tongues like the lily,
He would be silent
Like the rosebud,
While thro love his mouth is sealed.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THY SONGS O HAFIZ

Thy songs O Hafiz
Are erst in Paradise
On the leaves of the jasmin
And the rose bush written

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WHO COMPARES A POEM

Who compares a poem
Of others to mine
Compares gold
With rush-plaits

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THY POEMS HAFIZ SHAME THE ROSE LEAVES

Thy poems Hafiz shame the rose leaves
Since they breathe the praise of the rosier cheeks of thy love

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

IN THE KINGDOM OF POESY HAFIZ WAVES LIKE A BANNER

In the kingdom of Poesy Hafiz waves like a banner
Thro’ the Shah’s defending favor

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WHERE O WHERE IS THE MESSAGE WHICH TODAY

Where o where is the message which today
brought us tidings of joy
That instead of silver & gold I on the earth
Might strew souls.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

COME LET US STREW ROSES

Come let us strew roses
And pour wine in the cup
Break up the roof of heaven
And throw it into new forms

So soon the army of cares
Shed the blood of the true
So will I with the cupbearer
Shatter the building of woe

We will rosewater
In winecups pour
And sugar in the censer
Full of musksmell throw

Thy harping is lovely
O play sweet airs
That we may sing songs
And shake our heads

Bring Eastwind the dust of the body
To that great lord
That we also may cast our eyes
On his beauty

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WHO GAVE THY CHEEK THE MIXED TINT

Who gave thy cheek the mixed tint
Of tulip & rose
Is also in state to give
Patience & rest to me poor
Who taught cruelty
To thy dark hair
Is also in state to give
The right against myself
I gave up hope of Ferhad
Once for all on the day
When I learned he had given
His heart to Schirin
Surely I have no treasure
Yet am I richly satisfied
God has given that to the Shah
And this to the beggar
The bride of the world is truly
Outwardly richly dressed
Who enjoys her must give
His soul for a dowry.
At the cedar’s foot by the brook
Lift I freer my hands
When now the blowing of the East
Gives tidings of May

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

DRINK, HEAR MY COUNSEL, MY SON, THAT THE WORLD FRET THEE

not
Drink, hear my counsel, my son, that the world fret thee
not.
Tho’ the heart bleed, let thy lips laugh, like the wine cup:
Is thy soul hurt, yet dance with the viol-strings:
Thou learnest no secret, untl thou knowest friendship,
Since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge comes in.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

RULER AFTER WORD & THOUGHT

Ruler after word & thought
Which no eye yet saw
Which no ear yet heard
Remain, until thy young destiny
From the old greybeard of the sky
His blue coat takes.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

O FOLLOW THE SONNET’S FLIGHT

O follow the sonnet’s flight
Thou seest a fleet career
A child begot in a night
That travels a thousand year

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

O HAFIZ, GIVE ME THOUGHT

O Hafiz, give me thought
In fiery figures cast;
For all beside is naught, —
All else is din & blast.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

IN THY HOLIDAY OF LIFE

In thy holiday of life,
Use occasion, work & climb,
The sepulchre has overmuch
Unprofitable time.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE ROGUISH WIND AND I

The roguish wind and I
Are truly an amorous pair;
Me burns the sparkle of thine eye,
He fans thy scented hair.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE TREACHEROUS WIND PIPES A LEWD SONG

The treacherous wind pipes a lewd song,
Makes saints perverse, & angels bad;
Shall we sit & see such wrong,
And not cry out like mad!
Fie! what flute pants in the North?
What viol in the west?
Steals Virtue not from men of worth?
Corrupts he not the best?
Shall this pass in silence by?
Shall we not make hue & cry?

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WE WOULD DO NOUGHT BUT GOOD

We would do nought but good,
Else shall dishonor come
On the day when the flying soul
Hies backward to its home.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

LO! WHERE FROM HEAVEN’S HIGH ROOF

Lo! where from Heaven’s high roof
Misfortune staggers down;
We, just from harm to stand aloof,
Will to the wineshop run.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

DRINK WINE, AND THE HEAVEN

Drink wine, and the heaven
New lustre diffuses,
And doubt not that sinning
Has also its uses.

The builder of Heaven
Has sundered the earth,
So that no footway
Leads out of it forth:

On turnpikes of wonder
Wine leads the mind forth,
Straight, sidewise & upward
Southward and north.

Stands the vault adamantine
Until the last day;
The wine-cup shall ferry
Thee o’er it away.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

A STATELY BRIDE IS THE SHINING WORLD

A stately bride is the shining world,
Yet none can woo that maid to wife.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WHO EVER SUFFERED AS I FROM SEPARATION?

Who ever suffered as I from separation?
Oh!  will punish separation by separation.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

I SHALL GO FROM MY SICKBED TO HEAVEN

I shall go from my sickbed to heaven
If, on my last march, thou holdest a torch for me
The wind-borne dust is heavy from thy attraction
Think on me, I am an older servant.
Not every poet sings inspired songs
My sly falcon grasps firmly the partridge of song.
Believest me not? Go ask the pictures of Sina
Whether Mani did not wish a stroke from my ink?
The nightingale says, Up cupbearer, good morning,
Still rings in my head the lute-tone of yesterday,
Ask not Hafiz, ask me, of revelry & love,
Since flask & cups are to me the moon & pleiads.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SEE & HEAR THE FRAUD, THE MALICE OF THE CHANGE OF FORTUNE

See & hear the fraud, the malice of the change of fortune,
Every eye is blind, every ear is deaf.
Many whom the sun & the moon had served for a bolster
Lay down their head at last in ashes & dust.
Will thy thumb-ring span the bow of Fate?
Will a shield ward off the strokes of Destiny?
Though thou screen thyself with iron walls, & brazen gates,
Ever the hand of your Fate crashes in.
Never mind the trembling light in the lamp of life,
Night follows on light, sugar only conceals poison.

Hafiz

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WHO LOVES HIS FRIEND WITH HIS HEART OF HEARTS

Who loves his friend with his heart of hearts
Bends not his head though the sky rain darts,
O, our lifetime wastes to no lofty end
Till the hero is matched with an equal friend.
Poison from the hand of my love were food,
The sweet & the bane do the heart good.
Knowst thou shy Saadi sits ever alone?
Because he cannot part from the darling one.

Saadi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

HAD I THE WORLD FOR MY ENEMY

Had I the world for my enemy
Yet kept the treasure of a true friend,
Never should I ask whether things were
Or were not, in this world.
A ship on the high seas
Doth the state of a lover resemble.
Overboard cast they the cargo
If so they can save their lives.

Saadi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SALVE SENESCENTEM

Saadi’s poem on Old Age

Now is the time when weakness comes, — & strength goes
The magic of sweet words — I lose
The harvest wind cuts keen: the tender sheen and shade
And pink & purple light upon thy garland fade
To my foot fails the power — of manly stride in streets;
Happy he who soonest to his orchard hut — retreats.
Saadi’s whole power lies — in sweet words
Keep this all the rest may go to beast & birds

Saadi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE PAIN OF LOVE’S A BETTER FATE

The pain of love’s a better fate
Than the body’s best estate.

Saadi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

IN SENAHAR, MY FIRST BORN SLEEPS

In Senahar, my first born sleeps;
Stunned with the blow, poor Saadi weeps;
Tho’ youth more fresh than Jussuf blooms,
The charnelworm his cheek consumes.
Where is the palm, star-topped, earth-footed,
Which the brute storm has not uprooted?
I muttered,— “Perish God on high,
Since pure youth dies as greybeards die!”
I staggered to my darling’s tomb,
And tore the sealed stone therefrom,
Then frantic, tottering, void of wit,
Groped down into that marble pit.
When grief was spent, & reason came,
Methought I heard my son exclaim
‘If my dark house thy heart affright
‘Saadi strive upwards to the light
‘Wilt thou give graves the blaze of noon
‘High hearts can work that wonder soon
The crowd believe that harvests grow
Where never man did barley sow.
But Saadi saw the fruit enchanted
By bending sower truly planted.

Saadi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

UNBAR THE DOOR, SINCE THOU THE OPENER ART

Unbar the door, since thou the Opener art,
Show me the forward way, since thou art guide,
I put no faith in pilot or in chart,
Since they are transient, & thou dost abide.

Omar Khayyam

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FOR TWO REWARDS, & NOUGHT BESIDE

For two rewards, & nought beside,
A prudent man the world would ride;
His friend with benefits to crown,
And put his adversary down.

Ibn Jemin

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

SHAH SANDSCHAR, WHOSE LOWEST SLAVE

Shah Sandschar, whose lowest slave
Is on this earth a king;
The mole of his despotic command
Adorns men & daemons.
When his wrath burns on earth,
Nothing in heaven is secure.
Looks he on the world with power,
Life mounts in it.
Where his name is named,
Is the love of gold unknown.
Death, out of fear of him, clatters his dry bones.
The deep-hid secret is discovered by thy wit;
Unrest is stilled by thee, unrest which know no limits.
When thy wrath glowed
The wolves become tame in the wood,
The world would not stand, if thy foot held it not firm,
In the desart, his breath restores the equipoise of the air.
The Lion of the Zodiack is a picture of the lions of his
banner.
Hope leads his light bridle,
His heavy stirrup leads death.
Ambush of destiny lies
For all, behind his arrow.
When his bow moves,
It is already the Last Day.
Whom his onset marks out,
To him is life not appointed:
And the ghost of the Holy Ghost

Were not sure of its time.
None holds himself once firm in the stirrup, save Victory.
A hundred conquerors heaven strikes dead
Before thee, as thy right.
O Lord, take him into thy pay. It is his only wish.
Is he not of thy circle? Stands he yet at thy door?
Buy him, ere thou yet knowest him,
Or instantly his price will rise.
Once every ten years let him kiss thy hand,
Only one day let him stand in thy Forecourts.

Suffer in thy lands, o Shah! a poet, tho’ rough & rude,
But in thy praise is he finer than a hair.
Steadily so long as the tongue speaks, sounds thy name in
prayer.
As long as there is gold, will thy name be coined on it.
Of thee, Time stands in need, as Space stands in need of
Time;
So long as men give & take, Thou shalt give & take
lordship.
Rule thou forever, so will rule subsist.

Enweri

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

WILT THOU LIFE’S BEST ELIXIR DRAIN?

Wilt thou life’s best elixir drain?
Be lowliest of the lowly found;
The sweetest drop of the sugar-cane
Grows nearest to the ground.

Feisi

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

THE SOUL

I am the falcon of the spirit world,
Escaped out of highest heaven
Who out of desire of the hunt,
Am fallen into earthly form
Of the Mount Kaf am I the Simorg,
Whom the net of Being holds imprisoned
Of Paradise am I the Peacock,
Who has escaped from his nest.

(Persian)

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

TEACH YOUR CHILD TO EARN HIS MEAL

Teach your child to earn his meal,
Or you bring him up to steal.

Jean Chardin

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ONLY THREE THINGS LENGTHEN LIFE

Only three things lengthen life, —
Fine clothes, fine house, & comely wife.

Jean Chardin

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FOR PEARLS, PLUNGE IN THE SEA

For pearls, plunge in the sea
For greatness, wake all night

Jean Chardin

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

ARABIAN BALLAD

1 — Under the rock on the trail
He lies slain
Into whose blood
No dew falls

2 A great load laid he on me
And died;
God knows, this load
Will I lift.

2 — Heir of my revenge
Is my sister’s son,
The warlike,
The irreconcileable.

4 Mute sweats he poison,
As the otter sweats;
As the snake breathes venom
Against which no enchantment avails

3 — The stern message came to us
Of the heavy woe;
The stoutest had they
Overpowered.

6 Me had Destiny plundered
Striking down my friend,
Whose dearest friend
Was left unhurt.

4 — Sunshine was he
On the cold day,
And when the dogstar burned
He was shade & coolness.

5 — Dry were his hips
Not slow;
Moist his hand,
Bold & strong.

9 With firm mind
Followed he his aim
Until he rested,
Then rested also the firm mind.

10 The rain cloud was he
Imparting gifts;
And, when he attacked,
The terrible lion.

11 Stately before men,
Black haired, long-robed,
When rushing on the foe
A lean wolf.

6 — Two cups offered he,
Honey and wormwood;
Fare of such kind
Tasted each.

7 — Terrible rode he alone;
No man accompanied him;
Like the sword of Yemen,
With teeth adorned.

8 — At noon we young men set forth
On the war trail
Rode all night
Like sweeping clouds without rest

9 — Every one was a sword
Girt with a sword;
Out of the sheath drawn
A glancing lightning

10 — They sipped the spirit of sleep,
But, when they nodded their heads,
We smote them,
And they were away

11 — Our vengeance was complete.
There escaped of two tribes
Quite little,
The least.

12 — And when the Hudselite
Had broken his lance to kill his man
The man with his lance
Slew the Hudselite.

19 On a rough resting place
They laid him, —
On a sharp rock, where the very camels
Broke their paws.

13 — When the morning greeted him there,
The murdered, on the grim place,
Was he robbed,
The booty carried away.

14 — But now are murdered by me
The Hudseleites with deep wounds;
Pity makes me not unhappy
Itself is murdered.

15 — The spear’s thirst was assuaged
With the first drink;
To it was not denied
Repeated drinks.

23 Now is wine again permitted
Which first was forbidden:
With much toil
I won this permission.

16 — To sword & spear,
And to horse, gave I
This favor,
Which is now the good of all.

25 Reach then the bowl,
O Sawab Ben Amre!
Since my body, at the command of my uncle
Is now one great wound.

17 — And the cup of death
Reached we to the Hudseleites
Whose working is wo,
Blindness, & ruin.

18 — Then laughed the hyenas
At the death of the Hudseleites;
And thou sawest the wolves
Whose faces shone.

19 — The noblest vultures flew thither
They stepped from corpse to corpse
And from the richly prepared feast
They could not rise into the air.

Goethe

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

FORTUNE AND HOPE! I’VE MADE MY PORT

Fortune and Hope! I’ve made my port,
Farewell ye twin deceivers!
You’ve trained me many a weary chase,
Go cozen new believers.

Prudentius

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

The Poems

The Boston Latin School, founded on April 23, 1635, in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended by Emerson in 1812.

Inside the school, 1844

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Poems of Youth and Early Manhood

THE BELL

THOUGHT

PRAYER

CAMBRIDGE, 1827.

TO-DAY

FAME

THE SUMMONS

THE RIVER

GOOD HOPE

LINES TO ELLEN

SECURITY

A MOUNTAIN GRAVE

A LETTER

CHARDON ST., BOSTON, 1831.

HYMN

SELF-RELIANCE

WRITTEN IN NAPLES

WRITTEN AT ROME

WEBSTER

FROM THE PHI BETA KAPPA POEM

Poems, 1847

GOOD-BYE

EACH AND ALL

THE PROBLEM

TO RHEA

THE VISIT

URIEL

THE WORLD-SOUL

THE SPHINX

ALPHONSO OF CASTILE

MITHRIDATES

TO J.W.

DESTINY

GUY

HAMATREYA

EARTH-SONG

THE RHODORA: ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?

THE HUMBLE-BEE

BERRYING

THE SNOW-STORM

WOODNOTES I

WOODNOTES II

MONADNOC

FABLE

ODE INSCRIBED TO W.H. CHANNING

ASTRAEA

ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE

COMPENSATION

FORBEARANCE

THE PARK

FORERUNNERS

SURSUM CORDA

ODE TO BEAUTY

GIVE ALL TO LOVE

TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH

TO ELLEN

TO EVA

LINES WRITTEN BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER SHORTLY BEFORE HER MARRIAGE TO MR. EMERSON

THE VIOLET

THE AMULET

THINE EYES STILL SHINED

EROS

HERMIONE

INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE

THE APOLOGY

MERLIN I

MERLIN II

BACCHUS

MEROPS

THE HOUSE

SAADI

HOLIDAYS

XENOPHANES

THE DAY’S RATION

BLIGHT

MUSKETAQUID

DIRGE

THRENODY

CONCORD HYMN

May-Day and Other Pieces

MAY-DAY

THE ADIRONDACS

BRAHMA

NEMESIS

FATE

FREEDOM

ODE SUNG IN THE TOWN HALL, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857

BOSTON HYMN READ IN MUSIC HALL, JANUARY 1, 1863

VOLUNTARIES

LOVE AND THOUGHT

UNA

BOSTON

LETTERS

RUBIES

MERLIN’S SONG

THE TEST

SOLUTION

HYMN SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS

NATURE I

NATURE II

THE ROMANY GIRL

DAYS

MY GARDEN

THE CHARTIST’S COMPLAINT

THE TITMOUSE

THE HARP

SEASHORE

SONG OF NATURE

TWO RIVERS

WALDEINSAMKEIT

TERMINUS

THE NUN’S ASPIRATION

APRIL

MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP

CUPIDO

THE PAST

THE LAST FAREWELL

IN MEMORIAM E. B. E.

Elements and Mottoes

EXPERIENCE

COMPENSATION

POLITICS

HEROISM

CHARACTER

CULTURE

FRIENDSHIP

SPIRITUAL LAWS

BEAUTY

MANNERS

ART

UNITY

WORSHIP

PRUDENCE

NATURE

THE INFORMING SPIRIT

CIRCLES

INTELLECT

GIFTS

PROMISE

CARITAS

POWER

WEALTH

ILLUSIONS

Quatrains

A.H.

HUSH!

ORATOR

ARTIST

POET

POET

BOTANIST

GARDENER

FORESTER

NORTHMAN

FROM ALCUIN

EXCELSIOR

S.H.

BORROWING FROM THE FRENCH

NATURE

FATE

HOROSCOPE

POWER

CLIMACTERIC

HERI, CRAS, HODIE

MEMORY

LOVE

SACRIFICE

PERICLES

CASELLA

SHAKSPEARE

HAFIZ

NATURE IN LEASTS

Fragments

THE POET

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE

NATURE

THE EARTH

THE HEAVENS

TRANSITION

THE GARDEN

BIRDS

WATER

NAHANT

SUNRISE

NIGHT IN JUNE

MAIA

LIFE

REX

SUUM CUIQUE

THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

GRACE

INSIGHT

PAN

MONADNOC FROM AFAR

SEPTEMBER

EROS

OCTOBER

PETER’S FIELD

MUSIC

THE WALK

COSMOS

THE MIRACLE

THE WATERFALL

WALDEN

THE ENCHANTER

WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

RICHES

PHILOSOPHER

INTELLECT

LIMITS

INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR

THE EXILE (AFTER TALIESSIN)

Uncollected Poems

SILENCE

FAME

I AM OWNER OF THE SPHERE

WILLIAM RUFUS AND THE JEW

GRACE

THE THREE DIMENSIONS

MOTTO TO “THE POET.”

MOTTO TO “GIFTS.”

MOTTOES TO “HISTORY.”

MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

MOTTO TO “CIRCLES.”

MOTTO TO “NOMINALIST AND REALIST.”

MY THOUGHTS

MOTTO TO “PRUDENCE.”

MOTTO TO “INTELLECT.”

MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

MOTTO TO “CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.”

MOTTO TO “NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.”

MOTTO TO “FATE.”

MOTTO TO “POWER.”

MOTTO TO “ILLUSIONS.”

THE CUP OF LIFE IS NOT SO SHALLOW

WHERE IS SKRYMIR? GIANT SKRYMIR?

SOUTH WIND

THERE ARE BEGGARS IN IRAN AND ARABY

QUOTH SAADI, WHEN I STOOD BEFORE

Translations

DANTE’S VITA NUOVA

SONNET OF MICHEL ANGELO BUONAROTTI

THE EXILE FROM THE PERSIAN OF KERMANI

FROM HAFIZ

EPITAPH

FRIENDSHIP

FROM OMAR KHAYYAM

FROM ALI BEN ABU TALEB

FROM IBN JEMIN

THE FLUTE FROM HILALI

TO THE SHAH FROM HAFIZ

TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

SONG OF SEYD NIMETOLLAH OF KUHISTAN

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALL THINGS; ENTRAILS MADE

THE SECRET THAT SHOULD NOT BE BLOWN

ON EARTH’S WIDE THOROUGHFARES BELOW

SUNSHINE WAS HE

GO BOLDLY FORTH, AND FEAST ON BEING’S BANQUET

COLOR, TASTE, AND SMELL, SMARAGDUS, SUGAR, AND MUSK

LOOSE THE KNOTS OF THE HEART; NEVER THINK ON THY FATE

THERE RESIDES IN THE GRIEVING

I WILL BE DRUNK AND DOWN WITH WINE

TO BE WISE THE DULL BRAIN SO EARNESTLY THROBS

THE BUILDER OF HEAVEN

I BATTER THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN

TIS WRIT ON PARADISE’S GATE

THE WORLD IS A BRIDE SUPERBLY DRESSED

I AM: WHAT I AM

WHAT LOVELIER FORMS THINGS WEAR

TAKE MY HEART IN THY HAND, O BEAUTIFUL BOY OF SCHIRAZ!

OUT OF THE EAST, AND OUT OF THE WEST, NO MAN UNDERSTANDS ME

FIT FOR THE PLEIADS’ AZURE CHORD

I HAVE NO HOARDED TREASURE

HIGH HEART, O HAFIZ! THOUGH NOT THINE

O HAFIZ! SPEAK NOT OF THY NEED

OFT HAVE I SAID, I SAY IT ONCE MORE

THE PHOENIX

BY BREATH OF BEDS OF ROSES DRAWN

ALL DAY THE RAIN

O’ER THE GARDEN WATER GOES THE WIND ALONE

WHILST I DISDAIN THE POPULACE

A FRIEND IS HE, WHO, HUNTED AS A FOE

THE CHEMIST OF LOVE

AND SINCE ROUND LINES ARE DRAWN

AH, COULD I HIDE ME IN MY SONG

FAIR FALL THY SOFT HEART

THEY STREW IN THE PATH OF KINGS AND CZARS

I KNOW THIS PERILOUS LOVE-LANE

PLUNGE IN YON ANGRY’ WAVES

WHILE ROSES BLOOMED ALONG THE PLAIN

BODY AND SOUL

I READ ON THE PORCH OF A PALACE BOLD

THE ETERNAL WATCHER, WHO DOTH WAKE

POEM FROM “BIRD CONVERSATIONS.”

TIS HEAVY ODDS

AT THE LAST DAY, MEN SHALL WEAR

FOOLED THOU MUST BE, THOUGH WISEST OF THE WISE

ALMS

NO. 13 HYMN WRITTEN IN CONCORD SEPT. 1814

ON THE DEATH OF MR. JOHN HASKINS

LINES ON THE DEATH OF MISS. M. B. FARNHAM

POEM ON ELOQUENCE BY R. W. EMERSON

ORIGINAL— “APROPOS.”

WILLIAM DOES THY FRIGID SOUL

SONG: SHOUT FOR THOSE WHOSE COURSE IS DONE

PERHAPS THY LOT IN LIFE IS HIGHER

VALEDICTORY POEM

FROM FRODMER’S DRAMA “THE FRIENDS.”

DEDICATION

IDEALISM

I SPREAD MY GORGEOUS SAIL

A SHOUT TO THE SHEPHERDS

I WEAR NO BADGE; NO TINSEL STAR

I RAKE NO COFFINED CLAY, NOR PUBLISH WIDE

O WHAT HAVE I TO DO

HAVE YE SEEN THE CATERPILLAR

THE PANOPLY OF PARADISE IS MINE

NO FATE, SAVE BY THE VICTIM’S FAULT, IS LOW

WHEN SUCCESS EXALTS THY LOT

THE SPIRITS OF THE WISE, SIT ON THE CLOUDS

LET NOT CONCEITED SAGES LAUGH ALOUD

MY DAYS ROLL BY ME LIKE A TRAIN OF DREAMS

ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER

WHOSO ALAS IS YOUNG

WHEN THY SOUL

THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG

I AM AN EXILE FROM MY HOME; HEAVILY

ST. AUGUSTINE

AWED I BEHOLD ONCE MORE

AN ANCIENT LADY WHO DWELT IN ROME

BE OF GOOD CHEER, BRAVE SPIRIT; STEADFASTLY

THE WINDS ARE COLD, THE DAYS ARE DARK

WRITTEN IN SICKNESS

OIL & WINE

ALL THAT THY VIRGIN SOUL CAN ASK BE THINE

THAT WANDERING FIRE TO ME APPEARS

THOUGH HER EYE SEEK OTHER FORMS

DEAR ELLEN, MANY A GOLDEN YEAR

I CALL HER BEAUTIFUL; — SHE SAYS

I’VE FOUND THE DAINTY MALICE OUT

AND DO I WASTE MY TIME

AND THOUGH HE DEARLY PRIZED THE BARDS OF FAME

AND ELLEN, WHEN THE GREYBEARD YEARS

THE BRAVE EMPEDOCLES DEFYING FOOLS

DEAR BROTHER, WOULD YOU KNOW THE LIFE

DOST THOU NOT HEAR ME ELLEN

TEACH ME I AM FORGOTTEN BY THE DEAD

WHY SHOULD I LIVE

SHALL THE MUSE SING FOR THOUSANDS & NOT SING

WHAT FROM THIS BARREN BEING DO WE REAP

DUST UNTO DUST! AND SHALL NO MORE BE SAID

THE DAYS PASS OVER ME

WHY FEAR TO DIE

I AM ALONE. SAD IS MY SOLITUDE

ON THEE HAS GOD CONFERRED

ALL THE GREAT & GOOD

SEEMED TO ME — NEVER MAID

WHERE ART THOU

I LIVE AMONG IDEAL MEN

WHAT AVAILS IT ME

SHE NEVER COMES TO ME

LEAVE ME, FEAR! THY THROBS ARE BASE

IF THOU CANST BEAR

A DULL UNCERTAIN BRAIN

THERE IS IN ALL THE SONS OF MEN

I WILL NOT LIVE OUT OF ME

HARD IS IT TO PERSUADE THE PUBLIC MIND OF ITS PLAIN DUTY & TRUE INTEREST

ALWAYS DAY & NIGHT

HEARST THOU, SWEET SPIRIT, THOU HAST HEARD BEFORE

NONE SPARES ANOTHER YET IT PLEASES ME

WRITTEN IN NAPLES, MARCH, 1833

WHAT IS IT TO SAIL

ALONE IN ROME! WHY ROME IS LONELY TOO

AT SEA, SEPTEMBER 1833

I WILL NOT HESITATE TO SPEAK THE WORD

THE SUN IS THE SOLE INCONSUMABLE FIRE

POEM, SPOKEN BEFORE THE SOCIETY, AUGUST, 1834

O WHAT IS HEAVEN BUT THE FELLOWSHIP

AH STRANGE STRANGE STRANGE

SEE YONDER LEAFLESS TREES AGAINST THE SKY

DO THAT WHICH YOU CAN DO

FEW ARE FREE

VAN BUREN

THE FUTURE

REX

WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

I LEFT MY DREAMY PAGE & SALLIED FORTH

S. R.

PHILOSOPHERS ARE LINED WITH EYES WITHIN

THE SIMPLE PEOPLE EACH WITH BASKET OR TOOL

ON BRAVELY THROUGH THE SUNSHINE & THE SHOWERS

LET ME GO WHERE E’ER I WILL

AND WHEN I AM ENTOMBED IN MY PLACE

BARD OR DUNCE IS BLEST, BUT HARD

IT TAKES PHILOSOPHER OR FOOL

TELL MEN WHAT THEY KNEW BEFORE

I  USE THE KNIFE

THERE IS NO EVIL BUT CAN SPEAK

THE SEA REFLECTS THE ROSY SKY

IN THIS SOUR WORLD, O SUMMERWIND

LOOK DANGER IN THE EYE IT VANISHES

AS I WALKED IN THE WOOD

I SAT UPON THE GROUND

GOOD CHARLES THE SPRINGS ADORER

AROUND THE MAN WHO SEEKS A NOBLE END

IN THE DEEP HEART OF MAN A POET DWELLS

O WHAT ARE HEROES PROPHETS MEN

YET SOMETIME TO THE SORROW STRICKEN

WHEN THOU SITTEST MOPING

WOODS

I HAVE SUPPED WITH THE GODS TONIGHT

ONCE THE PRIEST

NATURES WEB STAR BROIDERED

FOR THAT A MAN IS A MARK

THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

KIND & HOLY WERE THE WORDS

BLUEBEARD. LET THE GENTLE WIFE PREPARE

DIVINE INVITERS! I ACCEPT

GO IF THOU WILT AMBROSIAL FLOWER

IN WALDEN WOOD THE CHICKADEE

STAR SEER COPERNICUS

AT LAST THE POET SPOKE

THE DISCONTENTED POET: A MASQUE

LOVE

HOLD OF THE MAKER, NOT THE MADE

HE WALKED THE STREETS OF GREAT NEW YORK

THE ARCHANGEL HOPE

ATOM FROM ATOM YAWNS AS FAR

I GRIEVE THAT BETTER SOULS THAN MINE

NANTASKET

WATER

WHERE THE FUNGUS BROAD & RED

THE SKEPTIC

WHEN JANE WAS ABSENT EDGAR’S EYE

I HAVE FOUND A NOBLER LOVE

FINE PRESENTIMENTS CONTROLLED HIM

WE SAUNTERED AMIDST MIRACLES

THIS WORLD IS TEDIOUS

WHAT ARE ALL THE FLOWERS

A PAIR OF CRYSTAL EYES WILL LEAD ME

KNOWS HE WHO TILLS THIS LONELY FIELD

FAR SEEN THE RIVER GLIDES BELOW

FROM THE STORES OF ELDEST MATTER

AND THE BEST GIFT OF GOD

STOUT SPARTA SHRINED THE GOD OF LAUGHTER

BROTHER, NO DECREPITUDE

WHO KNOWS THIS OR THAT

SAADI LOVED THE NEW & OLD

BUT IF THOU DO THY BEST

AN ANCIENT DROP OF FEUDAL BLOOD

THESE TREES LIKE THO’TS THAT TO VISIONS CONGEAL

VAIN AGAINST HIM WERE HOSTILE BLOWS

LIKE VAULTERS IN THE CIRCUS ROUND

IF HE GO APART

NATURE WILL NOT LOSE

THE CROWNING HOUR WHEN BODIES VIE WITH SOULS

AND AS THE LIGHT DIVIDED THE DARK

WHEN DEVILS BITE

COMFORT WITH A PURRING CAT

I CANNOT FIND A PLACE SO LONELY

HE WHOM GOD HAD THUS PREFERRED

BENDED TO FOPS WHO BENT TO HIM

ON THAT NIGHT THE POET WENT

YE HAVE GRACE

THE DERVISH WHINED TO SAID

LIFE IS GREAT

THE HUSBAND HAS THE NEAREST ACRES

FROM A FAR MOUNTAIN CREEPING DOWN

IN DREAMY WOODS, WHAT FORMS ABOUND

BUT O TO SEE HIS SOLAR EYES

WHO SAW THE HID BEGINNINGS

WHAT NEVER WAS NOT, & STILL WILL BE

ENOUGH IS DONE HIGHMINDED FRIEND GO SLEEP

THOU SHALT MAKE THY HOUSE

THE GODS WALK IN THE BREATH OF THE WOODS

WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT JOY IS HID

TELL ME MAIDEN DOST THOU USE

I HAVE NO BROTHERS & NO PEERS

SOLAR INSECT ON THE WING

AND MAN OF WIT & MARK

I KNOW THE APPOINTED HOUR

YOU SHALL NOT LOVE ME FOR WHAT DAILY SPENDS

NOR WHEN IN FAIR SALOONS WE CHANCE TO MEET

ELIZABETH HOAR

EACH DAY A SOLID GOOD; NEVER MISTOOK

PROTEUS

TO EVERY CREATURE

CLOUD UPON CLOUD

SINCE THE DEVIL HOPPING ON

SAMSON STARK AT DAGON’S KNEE

POUR THE WINE! POUR THE WINE!

HEARTILY HEARTILY

POETS ARE COLORPOTS

THANKS TO THOSE WHO GO & COME

IS JOVE IMMORTAL

HEARTILY HEARTILY SING

THANK THE GODS THY GOVERNORS

IF THY BODY PINE

SCHOLAR IS A BALL THATS SPENT

ASK NOT TREASURES FROM HIS STORE

KING. IF FARMERS MAKE MY LAND SECURE

INTELLECT

CHLADNI STREWED ON GLASS THE SAND

I MUST NOT BORROW LIGHT

GO INTO THE GARDEN

BUT AS THIS FUGITIVE SUNLIGHT

COMRADE OF THE SNOW & WIND

GOD ONLY KNEW HOW SAADI DINED

FRIENDS TO ME ARE FROZEN WINE

THAT EACH SHOULD IN HIS HOUSE ABIDE

NEW ENGLAND CAPITALIST

ON A RAISIN STONE

GO OUT INTO NATURE AND PLANT TREES

BUT GOD WILL KEEP HIS PROMISE YET

POET OF POETS

SEE THE SPHERES RUSHING

THE PATIENT PAN

TO TRANSMUTE CRIME TO WISDOM, & TO STEM

PALE GENIUS ROVES ALONE

BURN YOUR LITERARY VERSES

INTELLECT

WHAT ALL THE BOOKS OF AGES PAINT, I HAVE

THE CIVIL WORLD WILL MUCH FORGIVE

MASK THY WISDOM WITH DELIGHT

ROOMY ETERNITY

DARK FLOWER OF CHESHIRE GARDEN

TERMINUS

I TO MY GARDEN WENT

MORE SWEET THAN MY REFRAIN

WISP & METEOR NIGHTLY FALLING

GOD THE LORD SAVE MASSACHUSETTS

A POET IS AT HOME

O BOSTON CITY LECTURE-HEARING

A PATCH OF MEADOW & UPLAND

AND HE LIKE ME IS NOT TOO PROUD

PARKS & PONDS ARE GOOD BY DAY

CLOUD UPON CLOUD

FOR LYRA YET SHALL BE THE POLE

A SCORE OF AIRY MILES WILL SMOOTH

ALL THINGS REHEARSE

WEBSTER

THE ATOM DISPLACES ALL ATOMS BESIDE

I HAVE AN ARROW THAT CAN FIND ITS MARK

FROM HIGH TO HIGHER FORCES

ALL DAY THE WAVES ASSAILED THE ROCK

HONOR BRIGHT O MUSE

SUCH ANOTHER PEERLESS QUEEN

SEE HOW ROMANCE ADHERES

WITH THE KEY OF THE SECRET HE MARCHES FASTER

FOR WHAT NEED I OF BOOK OR PRIEST

AND RIVAL COXCOMBS WITH ENAMORED STARE

FOR JOY & BEAUTY PLANTED IT

PAPAS BLONDINE

THE ASMODAEAN FEAT BE MINE

A PUFF OF AIR OR DRY OR DAMP

COIN THE DAYDAWN INTO LINES

HE LOVED TO WATCH & WAKE

SHE WALKED IN FLOWERS AROUND MY FIELD

THE BIRD WAS GONE THE GHASTLY TREES

PEDANTS ALL

IF BRIGHT THE SUN, HE TARRIES

TEACH ME YOUR MOOD, O PATIENT STARS!

O SUN! TAKE OFF THY HOOD OF CLOUDS

AS THE DROP FEEDS ITS FATED FLOWER

I LEAVE THE BOOK, I LEAVE THE WINE

GENTLE SPRING HAS CHARMED THE EARTH

THE CORAL WORM BENEATH THE SEA

EASY TO MATCH WHAT OTHERS DO

IF WISHES WOULD CARRY ME OVER THE LAND

MAIA

SEYD PLANTED WHERE THE DELUGE PLOUGHED

FOR EVERY GOD

FOR GENIUS MADE HIS CABIN WIDE

HE LIVES NOT WHO CAN REFUSE ME

FORBORE THE ANT HILL, SHUNNED TO TREAD

BY ART, BY MUSIC, OVERTHRILLED

BORROW URANIA’S SUBTILE WINGS

THE COMRADE OR THE BOOK IS GOOD

IS THE PACE OF NATURE SLOW?

WHY HONOR THE NEW MEN

I  NEVER KNEW BUT ONE

THINK NOT THE GODS RECEIVE THY PRAYER

TURTLE IN SWAMP

INSPIRED WE MUST FORGET OUR BOOKS

SHE HAD WEALTH OF MORNINGS IN HER YEAR

WHEN WRATH & TERROR CHANGED JOVE’S REGAL PORT

SOFTENS THE AIR SO COLD & RUDE

SPICES IN THE PLANTS THAT RUN

SHE PAINTS WITH WHITE & RED THE MOORS

THE EARTH

THE SUN ATHWART THE CLOUD THOUGHT IT NO SIN

OCTOBER WOODS, WHEREIN

HOW DREARILY IN COLLEGE HALL

IF CURSES BE THE WAGE OF LOVE

THE LAND WAS ALL ELECTRIC

FOR NATURE TRUE & LIKE IN EVERY PLACE

HISTORY & PROPHECY ARE ALIKE

THE COIL OF SPACE THE CONES OF LIGHT

THE HEAVY BLUE CHAIN

THIS SHINING HOUR IS AN EDIFICE

HE COULD CONDENSE CERULEAN ETHER

THE SPARROW IS RICH IN HER NEST

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

FROM PAQUES TO NOEL

EVER THE ROCK OF AGES MELTS

BUT NEVER YET THE MAN WAS FOUND

FROM NATURE’S BEGINNING

A QUEEN REJOICES IN HER PEERS

BY KINDS I KEEP MY KINDS IN CHECK

BUT NATURE WHISTLED WITH ALL HER WINDS

DEAR ARE THE PLEASANT MEMORIES

THE GENIAL SPARK THE POET FELT

ONE NIGHT HE DREAMED OF A PALACE FAIR

THE LOW DECEMBER VAULT IN JUNE BE UP-LIFTED HIGH

AT PLYMOUTH IN THE FRIENDLY CROWD

OLD AGE

TO THE CLOCK

NATURE SAYS

SHUN PASSION, FOLD THE HANDS OF THRIFT

TO THE MIZEN, THE MAIN, & THE FORE

THE RULES TO MEN MADE EVIDENT

TOO LATE THE ANXIOUS FIRE CAME

HIS INSTANT THOUGHT THE POET SPOKE

TRY THE MIGHT THE MUSE AFFORDS

SAADI HELD THE MUSE IN AWE

NO SONG SO TUNEFUL, QUOTH THE FOX

LIFE

SONG OF TALIESIN

SEEMED, THO’ THE SOFT SHEEN ALL ENCHANTS

NATURE SAITH

ILLUSIONS LIKE THE TINTS OF PEARL

INSCRIPTION ON A WELL IN MEMORY

LETTERS

MAY

THE MIRACLE

A DANGEROUS GIFT & GRACE IS MINE

AND HUNGRY DEBT BESEIGED MY DOOR

USE WILL IN MAN NEW GRACE REVEAL

PUT IN, DRIVE HOME THE SIGHTLESS WEDGES

WHAT FLOWING CENTRAL FORCES, SAY

THE BEST OF LIFE IS PRESENCE OF A MUSE

THE PILGRIMS

I CARE NOT WHITHER I MAY GO

I AM NOT BLACK IN MY MIND

TRIMOUNTAIN

THE ROCKY NOOK WITH HILLTOPS THREE

FOR LUCIFER, THAT OLD ATHLETE

TRAITORS THO’ PLUMED & STEEL EQUIPPED

THE MUSE

IN MY GARDEN THREE WAYS MEET

THERMOMETER

NATURE

SEASHORE

THINGS OFT MISCALLING, AS THE HEN

ON THE CHAMBER, ON THE STAIRS

AH! NOT TO ME THESE DREAMS BELONG

FOR DEATHLESS POWERS TO VERSE BELONG

UPON A ROCK YET UNCREATE

ALAS, ALAS, THAT I AM BETRAYED

WO IS ME WOE’S ME WHEN I THINK

SWEET, SWEET, IS SLEEP, — AH! SWEETER, TO BE STONE

THE POWER OF A BEAUTIFUL FACE LIFTS ME TO HEAVEN

BOY BRING THE BOWL FULL OF WINE

WHO ROYALLY BEDDED

DESIRE NO BREAD, FORSAKE THE GUEST HALL OF THE EARTH

THE RED ROSE BLOOMS

MANY OUR NEEDS, YET WE SPARE PRAYERS

EARLY AFTER THE NIGHT LONG REVEL

THOU WHO WITH THY LONG HAIR

ART THOU WISE, FOUR THINGS RESIGN

KNOWST THOU THE LUCK THE FRIENDS FACE TO SEE

UNTRUTH IS BECOME THE MODE

NOVICE, HEAR ME WHAT I SAY

LAMENT NOT, O HAFIZ, THE DISTRIBUTION

HAFIZ THOU ART FROM ETERNITY

HAFIZ SINCE ON THE WORLD

I SAID TO THE EAST WIND

WE WISH LIKE THE GLASS

WHEN IN ETERNITY THE LIGHT

SECRETLY TO LOVE & TO DRINK, WHAT IS IT? TIS A DISSOLUTE

THIS EFFERVESCING GENTLEMAN WHO DESPISES A SECRET

STAND UP, THAT WE MAY SACRIFICE THE SOUL

O FRIEND BLAME NOT HAFIZ

THE WAY OF LOVE IS UNLIMITED

HIS LEARNING TRULY LIFTED HAFIZ TO HEAVEN

THOUSAND DANGERS OF RUIN HAS THE STREET OF LOVE

BRING WINE RELEASE ME

BLAME ME NOT THOU HOARSE PREACHER

I NEVER WENT OUT OF MY COUNTRY

FOR HIS CONSTANT DWELLING PLACE HAS HAFIZ

OUR SHAH’S COUNSEL IS THE EFFLUX

IF THY DARLING FAVOR THEE

NO PHYSICIAN HAS A BALSAM FOR MY WO

SPARE THOU NEITHER TIME NOR BLOOD FOR THY FRIEND

IT IS CERTAIN THAT WHO HIS MIND

WHO DEDICATES HIMSELF TO THE GLASS

WINE RESEMBLES THE LORD JESUS

DRINK TILL THE TURBANS ARE ALL UNBOUND

SO LONG AS THERE’S A TRACE

TO WHOM A GLASS FULL OF RED WINE

IN BOUNDING YOUTH THE NIGHT & RAIN

THE NINEFOLD TABLE OF HEAVEN

SHOULD I SHED MY TEARS

PRINCE THE BALL OF HEAVEN SHOULD

SINCE YOU SET NO WORTH ON THE HEART

NOW TELLS THE FLOWER

GOOD IS WHAT GOES ON THE ROAD OF NATURE

REACH ME WINE NO COUNSEL WEAKENS THE CONCLUSION OF

HAS THINE ENEMY SLANDERED THY HOUSE

YET ALL COMES OUT OF THIS, THAT ONE DOOR

HEAR WHAT THE GLASS WILL TELL THEE

FREE THYSELF FROM WO

AND HAD HAFIZ

THY SONGS O HAFIZ

WHO COMPARES A POEM

THY POEMS HAFIZ SHAME THE ROSE LEAVES

IN THE KINGDOM OF POESY HAFIZ WAVES LIKE A BANNER

WHERE O WHERE IS THE MESSAGE WHICH TODAY

COME LET US STREW ROSES

WHO GAVE THY CHEEK THE MIXED TINT

DRINK, HEAR MY COUNSEL, MY SON, THAT THE WORLD FRET THEE

RULER AFTER WORD & THOUGHT

O FOLLOW THE SONNET’S FLIGHT

O HAFIZ, GIVE ME THOUGHT

IN THY HOLIDAY OF LIFE

THE ROGUISH WIND AND I

THE TREACHEROUS WIND PIPES A LEWD SONG

WE WOULD DO NOUGHT BUT GOOD

LO! WHERE FROM HEAVEN’S HIGH ROOF

DRINK WINE, AND THE HEAVEN

A STATELY BRIDE IS THE SHINING WORLD

WHO EVER SUFFERED AS I FROM SEPARATION?

I SHALL GO FROM MY SICKBED TO HEAVEN

SEE & HEAR THE FRAUD, THE MALICE OF THE CHANGE OF FORTUNE

WHO LOVES HIS FRIEND WITH HIS HEART OF HEARTS

HAD I THE WORLD FOR MY ENEMY

SALVE SENESCENTEM

THE PAIN OF LOVE’S A BETTER FATE

IN SENAHAR, MY FIRST BORN SLEEPS

UNBAR THE DOOR, SINCE THOU THE OPENER ART

FOR TWO REWARDS, & NOUGHT BESIDE

SHAH SANDSCHAR, WHOSE LOWEST SLAVE

WILT THOU LIFE’S BEST ELIXIR DRAIN?

THE SOUL

TEACH YOUR CHILD TO EARN HIS MEAL

ONLY THREE THINGS LENGTHEN LIFE

FOR PEARLS, PLUNGE IN THE SEA

ARABIAN BALLAD

FORTUNE AND HOPE! I’VE MADE MY PORT

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A-D   E-H   I-L   M-O   P-S   T-V   W-Z

A DANGEROUS GIFT & GRACE IS MINE

A DULL UNCERTAIN BRAIN

A FRIEND IS HE, WHO, HUNTED AS A FOE

A LETTER

A MOUNTAIN GRAVE

A PAIR OF CRYSTAL EYES WILL LEAD ME

A PATCH OF MEADOW & UPLAND

A POET IS AT HOME

A PUFF OF AIR OR DRY OR DAMP

A QUEEN REJOICES IN HER PEERS

A SCORE OF AIRY MILES WILL SMOOTH

A SHOUT TO THE SHEPHERDS

A STATELY BRIDE IS THE SHINING WORLD

A.H.

AH STRANGE STRANGE STRANGE

AH! NOT TO ME THESE DREAMS BELONG

AH, COULD I HIDE ME IN MY SONG

ALAS, ALAS, THAT I AM BETRAYED

ALL DAY THE RAIN

ALL DAY THE WAVES ASSAILED THE ROCK

ALL THAT THY VIRGIN SOUL CAN ASK BE THINE

ALL THE GREAT & GOOD

ALL THINGS REHEARSE

ALMS

ALONE IN ROME! WHY ROME IS LONELY TOO

ALPHONSO OF CASTILE

ALWAYS DAY & NIGHT

AN ANCIENT DROP OF FEUDAL BLOOD

AN ANCIENT LADY WHO DWELT IN ROME

AND AS THE LIGHT DIVIDED THE DARK

AND DO I WASTE MY TIME

AND ELLEN, WHEN THE GREYBEARD YEARS

AND HAD HAFIZ

AND HE LIKE ME IS NOT TOO PROUD

AND HUNGRY DEBT BESEIGED MY DOOR

AND MAN OF WIT & MARK

AND RIVAL COXCOMBS WITH ENAMORED STARE

AND SINCE ROUND LINES ARE DRAWN

AND THE BEST GIFT OF GOD

AND THOUGH HE DEARLY PRIZED THE BARDS OF FAME

AND WHEN I AM ENTOMBED IN MY PLACE

APRIL

ARABIAN BALLAD

AROUND THE MAN WHO SEEKS A NOBLE END

ART

ART THOU WISE, FOUR THINGS RESIGN

ARTIST

AS I WALKED IN THE WOOD

AS THE DROP FEEDS ITS FATED FLOWER

ASK NOT TREASURES FROM HIS STORE

ASTRAEA

AT LAST THE POET SPOKE

AT PLYMOUTH IN THE FRIENDLY CROWD

AT SEA, SEPTEMBER 1833

AT THE LAST DAY, MEN SHALL WEAR

ATOM FROM ATOM YAWNS AS FAR

AWED I BEHOLD ONCE MORE

BACCHUS

BARD OR DUNCE IS BLEST, BUT HARD

BE OF GOOD CHEER, BRAVE SPIRIT; STEADFASTLY

BEAUTY

BENDED TO FOPS WHO BENT TO HIM

BERRYING

BIRDS

BLAME ME NOT THOU HOARSE PREACHER

BLIGHT

BLUEBEARD. LET THE GENTLE WIFE PREPARE

BODY AND SOUL

BORROW URANIA’S SUBTILE WINGS

BORROWING FROM THE FRENCH

BOSTON

BOSTON HYMN READ IN MUSIC HALL, JANUARY 1, 1863

BOTANIST

BOY BRING THE BOWL FULL OF WINE

BRAHMA

BRING WINE RELEASE ME

BROTHER, NO DECREPITUDE

BURN YOUR LITERARY VERSES

BUT AS THIS FUGITIVE SUNLIGHT

BUT GOD WILL KEEP HIS PROMISE YET

BUT IF THOU DO THY BEST

BUT NATURE WHISTLED WITH ALL HER WINDS

BUT NEVER YET THE MAN WAS FOUND

BUT O TO SEE HIS SOLAR EYES

BY ART, BY MUSIC, OVERTHRILLED

BY BREATH OF BEDS OF ROSES DRAWN

BY KINDS I KEEP MY KINDS IN CHECK

CAMBRIDGE, 1827.

CARITAS

CASELLA

CHARACTER

CHARDON ST., BOSTON, 1831.

CHLADNI STREWED ON GLASS THE SAND

CIRCLES

CLIMACTERIC

CLOUD UPON CLOUD

CLOUD UPON CLOUD

COIN THE DAYDAWN INTO LINES

COLOR, TASTE, AND SMELL, SMARAGDUS, SUGAR, AND MUSK

COME LET US STREW ROSES

COMFORT WITH A PURRING CAT

COMPENSATION

COMPENSATION

COMRADE OF THE SNOW & WIND

CONCORD HYMN

COSMOS

CULTURE

CUPIDO

DANTE’S VITA NUOVA

DARK FLOWER OF CHESHIRE GARDEN

DAYS

DEAR ARE THE PLEASANT MEMORIES

DEAR BROTHER, WOULD YOU KNOW THE LIFE

DEAR ELLEN, MANY A GOLDEN YEAR

DEDICATION

DESIRE NO BREAD, FORSAKE THE GUEST HALL OF THE EARTH

DESTINY

DIRGE

DIVINE INVITERS! I ACCEPT

DO THAT WHICH YOU CAN DO

DOST THOU NOT HEAR ME ELLEN

DRINK TILL THE TURBANS ARE ALL UNBOUND

DRINK WINE, AND THE HEAVEN

DRINK, HEAR MY COUNSEL, MY SON, THAT THE WORLD FRET THEE

DUST UNTO DUST! AND SHALL NO MORE BE SAID

EACH AND ALL

EACH DAY A SOLID GOOD; NEVER MISTOOK

EARLY AFTER THE NIGHT LONG REVEL

EARTH-SONG

EASY TO MATCH WHAT OTHERS DO

ELIZABETH HOAR

ENOUGH IS DONE HIGHMINDED FRIEND GO SLEEP

EPITAPH

EROS

EROS

ÉTIENNE DE LA BOÉCE

EVER THE ROCK OF AGES MELTS

EXCELSIOR

EXPERIENCE

FABLE

FAIR FALL THY SOFT HEART

FAME

FAME

FAR SEEN THE RIVER GLIDES BELOW

FATE

FATE

FEW ARE FREE

FINE PRESENTIMENTS CONTROLLED HIM

FIT FOR THE PLEIADS’ AZURE CHORD

FOOLED THOU MUST BE, THOUGH WISEST OF THE WISE

FOR DEATHLESS POWERS TO VERSE BELONG

FOR EVERY GOD

FOR GENIUS MADE HIS CABIN WIDE

FOR HIS CONSTANT DWELLING PLACE HAS HAFIZ

FOR JOY & BEAUTY PLANTED IT

FOR LUCIFER, THAT OLD ATHLETE

FOR LYRA YET SHALL BE THE POLE

FOR NATURE TRUE & LIKE IN EVERY PLACE

FOR PEARLS, PLUNGE IN THE SEA

FOR THAT A MAN IS A MARK

FOR TWO REWARDS, & NOUGHT BESIDE

FOR WHAT NEED I OF BOOK OR PRIEST

FORBEARANCE

FORBORE THE ANT HILL, SHUNNED TO TREAD

FORERUNNERS

FORESTER

FORTUNE AND HOPE! I’VE MADE MY PORT

FRAGMENTS ON NATURE AND LIFE

FRAGMENTS ON THE POET AND THE POETIC GIFT

FREE THYSELF FROM WO

FREEDOM

FRIENDS TO ME ARE FROZEN WINE

FRIENDSHIP

FRIENDSHIP

FROM A FAR MOUNTAIN CREEPING DOWN

FROM ALCUIN

FROM ALI BEN ABU TALEB

FROM FRODMER’S DRAMA “THE FRIENDS.”

FROM HAFIZ

FROM HIGH TO HIGHER FORCES

FROM IBN JEMIN

FROM NATURE’S BEGINNING

FROM OMAR KHAYYAM

FROM PAQUES TO NOEL

FROM THE PHI BETA KAPPA POEM

FROM THE STORES OF ELDEST MATTER

GARDENER

GENTLE SPRING HAS CHARMED THE EARTH

GIFTS

GIVE ALL TO LOVE

GO BOLDLY FORTH, AND FEAST ON BEING’S BANQUET

GO IF THOU WILT AMBROSIAL FLOWER

GO INTO THE GARDEN

GO OUT INTO NATURE AND PLANT TREES

GOD ONLY KNEW HOW SAADI DINED

GOD THE LORD SAVE MASSACHUSETTS

GOOD CHARLES THE SPRINGS ADORER

GOOD HOPE

GOOD IS WHAT GOES ON THE ROAD OF NATURE

GOOD-BYE

GRACE

GRACE

GUY

HAD I THE WORLD FOR MY ENEMY

HAFIZ

HAFIZ SINCE ON THE WORLD

HAFIZ THOU ART FROM ETERNITY

HAMATREYA

HARD IS IT TO PERSUADE THE PUBLIC MIND OF ITS PLAIN DUTY & TRUE INTEREST

HAS THINE ENEMY SLANDERED THY HOUSE

HAVE YE SEEN THE CATERPILLAR

HE COULD CONDENSE CERULEAN ETHER

HE LIVES NOT WHO CAN REFUSE ME

HE LOVED TO WATCH & WAKE

HE WALKED THE STREETS OF GREAT NEW YORK

HE WHOM GOD HAD THUS PREFERRED

HEAR WHAT THE GLASS WILL TELL THEE

HEARST THOU, SWEET SPIRIT, THOU HAST HEARD BEFORE

HEARTILY HEARTILY

HEARTILY HEARTILY SING

HERI, CRAS, HODIE

HERMIONE

HEROISM

HIGH HEART, O HAFIZ! THOUGH NOT THINE

HIS INSTANT THOUGHT THE POET SPOKE

HIS LEARNING TRULY LIFTED HAFIZ TO HEAVEN

HISTORY & PROPHECY ARE ALIKE

HOLD OF THE MAKER, NOT THE MADE

HOLIDAYS

HONOR BRIGHT O MUSE

HOROSCOPE

HOW DREARILY IN COLLEGE HALL

HUSH!

HYMN

HYMN SUNG AT THE SECOND CHURCH, AT THE ORDINATION OF REV. CHANDLER ROBBINS

I  NEVER KNEW BUT ONE

I  USE THE KNIFE

I AM ALONE. SAD IS MY SOLITUDE

I AM AN EXILE FROM MY HOME; HEAVILY

I AM NOT BLACK IN MY MIND

I AM OWNER OF THE SPHERE

I AM: WHAT I AM

I BATTER THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN

I CALL HER BEAUTIFUL; — SHE SAYS

I CANNOT FIND A PLACE SO LONELY

I CARE NOT WHITHER I MAY GO

I GRIEVE THAT BETTER SOULS THAN MINE

I HAVE AN ARROW THAT CAN FIND ITS MARK

I HAVE FOUND A NOBLER LOVE

I HAVE NO BROTHERS & NO PEERS

I HAVE NO HOARDED TREASURE

I HAVE SUPPED WITH THE GODS TONIGHT

I KNOW THE APPOINTED HOUR

I KNOW THIS PERILOUS LOVE-LANE

I LEAVE THE BOOK, I LEAVE THE WINE

I LEFT MY DREAMY PAGE & SALLIED FORTH

I LIVE AMONG IDEAL MEN

I MUST NOT BORROW LIGHT

I NEVER WENT OUT OF MY COUNTRY

I RAKE NO COFFINED CLAY, NOR PUBLISH WIDE

I READ ON THE PORCH OF A PALACE BOLD

I SAID TO THE EAST WIND

I SAT UPON THE GROUND

I SHALL GO FROM MY SICKBED TO HEAVEN

I SPREAD MY GORGEOUS SAIL

I TO MY GARDEN WENT

I WEAR NO BADGE; NO TINSEL STAR

I WILL BE DRUNK AND DOWN WITH WINE

I WILL NOT HESITATE TO SPEAK THE WORD

I WILL NOT LIVE OUT OF ME

I’VE FOUND THE DAINTY MALICE OUT

IDEALISM

IF BRIGHT THE SUN, HE TARRIES

IF CURSES BE THE WAGE OF LOVE

IF HE GO APART

IF THOU CANST BEAR

IF THY BODY PINE

IF THY DARLING FAVOR THEE

IF WISHES WOULD CARRY ME OVER THE LAND

ILLUSIONS

ILLUSIONS LIKE THE TINTS OF PEARL

IN BOUNDING YOUTH THE NIGHT & RAIN

IN DREAMY WOODS, WHAT FORMS ABOUND

IN MEMORIAM E. B. E.

IN MY GARDEN THREE WAYS MEET

IN SENAHAR, MY FIRST BORN SLEEPS

IN THE DEEP HEART OF MAN A POET DWELLS

IN THE KINGDOM OF POESY HAFIZ WAVES LIKE A BANNER

IN THIS SOUR WORLD, O SUMMERWIND

IN THY HOLIDAY OF LIFE

IN WALDEN WOOD THE CHICKADEE

INITIAL, DAEMONIC AND CELESTIAL LOVE

INSCRIPTION FOR A WELL IN MEMORY OF THE MARTYRS OF THE WAR

INSCRIPTION ON A WELL IN MEMORY

INSIGHT

INSPIRED WE MUST FORGET OUR BOOKS

INTELLECT

INTELLECT

INTELLECT

INTELLECT

IS JOVE IMMORTAL

IS THE PACE OF NATURE SLOW?

IT IS CERTAIN THAT WHO HIS MIND

IT TAKES PHILOSOPHER OR FOOL

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

KIND & HOLY WERE THE WORDS

KING. IF FARMERS MAKE MY LAND SECURE

KNOWS HE WHO TILLS THIS LONELY FIELD

KNOWST THOU THE LUCK THE FRIENDS FACE TO SEE

LAMENT NOT, O HAFIZ, THE DISTRIBUTION

LEAVE ME, FEAR! THY THROBS ARE BASE

LET ME GO WHERE E’ER I WILL

LET NOT CONCEITED SAGES LAUGH ALOUD

LETTERS

LETTERS

LIFE

LIFE

LIFE IS GREAT

LIKE VAULTERS IN THE CIRCUS ROUND

LIMITS

LINES ON THE DEATH OF MISS. M. B. FARNHAM

LINES TO ELLEN

LINES WRITTEN BY ELLEN LOUISA TUCKER SHORTLY BEFORE HER MARRIAGE TO MR. EMERSON

LO! WHERE FROM HEAVEN’S HIGH ROOF

LOOK DANGER IN THE EYE IT VANISHES

LOOSE THE KNOTS OF THE HEART; NEVER THINK ON THY FATE

LOVE

LOVE

LOVE AND THOUGHT

MAIA

MAIA

MAIDEN SPEECH OF THE AEOLIAN HARP

MANNERS

MANY OUR NEEDS, YET WE SPARE PRAYERS

MASK THY WISDOM WITH DELIGHT

MAY

MAY-DAY

MEMORY

MERLIN I

MERLIN II

MERLIN’S SONG

MEROPS

MITHRIDATES

MONADNOC

MONADNOC FROM AFAR

MORE SWEET THAN MY REFRAIN

MOTTO TO “CIRCLES.”

MOTTO TO “CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.”

MOTTO TO “FATE.”

MOTTO TO “GIFTS.”

MOTTO TO “ILLUSIONS.”

MOTTO TO “INTELLECT.”

MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

MOTTO TO “NATURE.”

MOTTO TO “NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.”

MOTTO TO “NOMINALIST AND REALIST.”

MOTTO TO “POWER.”

MOTTO TO “PRUDENCE.”

MOTTO TO “THE POET.”

MOTTOES TO “HISTORY.”

MUSIC

MUSKETAQUID

MY DAYS ROLL BY ME LIKE A TRAIN OF DREAMS

MY GARDEN

MY THOUGHTS

NAHANT

NANTASKET

NATURE

NATURE

NATURE

NATURE

NATURE I

NATURE II

NATURE IN LEASTS

NATURE SAITH

NATURE SAYS

NATURE WILL NOT LOSE

NATURES WEB STAR BROIDERED

NEMESIS

NEW ENGLAND CAPITALIST

NIGHT IN JUNE

NO FATE, SAVE BY THE VICTIM’S FAULT, IS LOW

NO PHYSICIAN HAS A BALSAM FOR MY WO

NO SONG SO TUNEFUL, QUOTH THE FOX

NO. 13 HYMN WRITTEN IN CONCORD SEPT. 1814

NONE SPARES ANOTHER YET IT PLEASES ME

NOR WHEN IN FAIR SALOONS WE CHANCE TO MEET

NORTHMAN

NOVICE, HEAR ME WHAT I SAY

NOW TELLS THE FLOWER

O BOSTON CITY LECTURE-HEARING

O FOLLOW THE SONNET’S FLIGHT

O FRIEND BLAME NOT HAFIZ

O HAFIZ! SPEAK NOT OF THY NEED

O HAFIZ, GIVE ME THOUGHT

O SUN! TAKE OFF THY HOOD OF CLOUDS

O WHAT ARE HEROES PROPHETS MEN

O WHAT HAVE I TO DO

O WHAT IS HEAVEN BUT THE FELLOWSHIP

O’ER THE GARDEN WATER GOES THE WIND ALONE

OCTOBER

OCTOBER WOODS, WHEREIN

ODE INSCRIBED TO W.H. CHANNING

ODE SUNG IN THE TOWN HALL, CONCORD, JULY 4, 1857

ODE TO BEAUTY

OFT HAVE I SAID, I SAY IT ONCE MORE

OIL & WINE

OLD AGE

ON A RAISIN STONE

ON BRAVELY THROUGH THE SUNSHINE & THE SHOWERS

ON EARTH’S WIDE THOROUGHFARES BELOW

ON THAT NIGHT THE POET WENT

ON THE CHAMBER, ON THE STAIRS

ON THE DEATH OF MR. JOHN HASKINS

ON THEE HAS GOD CONFERRED

ONCE THE PRIEST

ONE HAND WASHES THE OTHER

ONE NIGHT HE DREAMED OF A PALACE FAIR

ONLY THREE THINGS LENGTHEN LIFE

ORATOR

ORIGINAL— “APROPOS.”

OUR SHAH’S COUNSEL IS THE EFFLUX

OUT OF THE EAST, AND OUT OF THE WEST, NO MAN UNDERSTANDS ME

PALE GENIUS ROVES ALONE

PAN

PAPAS BLONDINE

PARKS & PONDS ARE GOOD BY DAY

PEDANTS ALL

PERHAPS THY LOT IN LIFE IS HIGHER

PERICLES

PETER’S FIELD

PHILOSOPHER

PHILOSOPHERS ARE LINED WITH EYES WITHIN

PLUNGE IN YON ANGRY’ WAVES

POEM FROM “BIRD CONVERSATIONS.”

POEM ON ELOQUENCE BY R. W. EMERSON

POEM, SPOKEN BEFORE THE SOCIETY, AUGUST, 1834

POET

POET

POET OF POETS

POETS ARE COLORPOTS

POLITICS

POUR THE WINE! POUR THE WINE!

POWER

POWER

PRAYER

PRINCE THE BALL OF HEAVEN SHOULD

PROMISE

PROTEUS

PRUDENCE

PUT IN, DRIVE HOME THE SIGHTLESS WEDGES

QUOTH SAADI, WHEN I STOOD BEFORE

REACH ME WINE NO COUNSEL WEAKENS THE CONCLUSION OF

REX

REX

RICHES

ROOMY ETERNITY

RUBIES

RULER AFTER WORD & THOUGHT

S. R.

S.H.

SAADI

SAADI HELD THE MUSE IN AWE

SAADI LOVED THE NEW & OLD

SACRIFICE

SALVE SENESCENTEM

SAMSON STARK AT DAGON’S KNEE

SCHOLAR IS A BALL THATS SPENT

SEASHORE

SEASHORE

SECRETLY TO LOVE & TO DRINK, WHAT IS IT? TIS A DISSOLUTE

SECURITY

SEE & HEAR THE FRAUD, THE MALICE OF THE CHANGE OF FORTUNE

SEE HOW ROMANCE ADHERES

SEE THE SPHERES RUSHING

SEE YONDER LEAFLESS TREES AGAINST THE SKY

SEEMED TO ME — NEVER MAID

SEEMED, THO’ THE SOFT SHEEN ALL ENCHANTS

SELF-RELIANCE

SEPTEMBER

SEYD PLANTED WHERE THE DELUGE PLOUGHED

SHAH SANDSCHAR, WHOSE LOWEST SLAVE

SHAKSPEARE

SHALL THE MUSE SING FOR THOUSANDS & NOT SING

SHE HAD WEALTH OF MORNINGS IN HER YEAR

SHE NEVER COMES TO ME

SHE PAINTS WITH WHITE & RED THE MOORS

SHE WALKED IN FLOWERS AROUND MY FIELD

SHOULD I SHED MY TEARS

SHUN PASSION, FOLD THE HANDS OF THRIFT

SILENCE

SINCE THE DEVIL HOPPING ON

SINCE YOU SET NO WORTH ON THE HEART

SO LONG AS THERE’S A TRACE

SOFTENS THE AIR SO COLD & RUDE

SOLAR INSECT ON THE WING

SOLUTION

SONG OF NATURE

SONG OF SEYD NIMETOLLAH OF KUHISTAN

SONG OF TALIESIN

SONG: SHOUT FOR THOSE WHOSE COURSE IS DONE

SONNET OF MICHEL ANGELO BUONAROTTI

SOUTH WIND

SPARE THOU NEITHER TIME NOR BLOOD FOR THY FRIEND

SPICES IN THE PLANTS THAT RUN

SPIRITUAL LAWS

ST. AUGUSTINE

STAND UP, THAT WE MAY SACRIFICE THE SOUL

STAR SEER COPERNICUS

STOUT SPARTA SHRINED THE GOD OF LAUGHTER

SUCH ANOTHER PEERLESS QUEEN

SUNRISE

SUNSHINE WAS HE

SURSUM CORDA

SUUM CUIQUE

SWEET, SWEET, IS SLEEP, — AH! SWEETER, TO BE STONE

TAKE MY HEART IN THY HAND, O BEAUTIFUL BOY OF SCHIRAZ!

TEACH ME I AM FORGOTTEN BY THE DEAD

TEACH ME YOUR MOOD, O PATIENT STARS!

TEACH YOUR CHILD TO EARN HIS MEAL

TELL ME MAIDEN DOST THOU USE

TELL MEN WHAT THEY KNEW BEFORE

TERMINUS

TERMINUS

THANK THE GODS THY GOVERNORS

THANKS TO THOSE WHO GO & COME

THAT EACH SHOULD IN HIS HOUSE ABIDE

THAT WANDERING FIRE TO ME APPEARS

THE ADIRONDACS

THE AMULET

THE APOLOGY

THE ARCHANGEL HOPE

THE ASMODAEAN FEAT BE MINE

THE ATOM DISPLACES ALL ATOMS BESIDE

THE BELL

THE BEST OF LIFE IS PRESENCE OF A MUSE

THE BIRD WAS GONE THE GHASTLY TREES

THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG

THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

THE BOHEMIAN HYMN

THE BRAVE EMPEDOCLES DEFYING FOOLS

THE BUILDER OF HEAVEN

THE CHARTIST’S COMPLAINT

THE CHEMIST OF LOVE

THE CIVIL WORLD WILL MUCH FORGIVE

THE COIL OF SPACE THE CONES OF LIGHT

THE COMRADE OR THE BOOK IS GOOD

THE CORAL WORM BENEATH THE SEA

THE CROWNING HOUR WHEN BODIES VIE WITH SOULS

THE CUP OF LIFE IS NOT SO SHALLOW

THE DAY’S RATION

THE DAYS PASS OVER ME

THE DERVISH WHINED TO SAID

THE DISCONTENTED POET: A MASQUE

THE EARTH

THE EARTH

THE ENCHANTER

THE ETERNAL WATCHER, WHO DOTH WAKE

THE EXILE (AFTER TALIESSIN)

THE EXILE FROM THE PERSIAN OF KERMANI

THE FLUTE FROM HILALI

THE FUTURE

THE GARDEN

THE GENIAL SPARK THE POET FELT

THE GODS WALK IN THE BREATH OF THE WOODS

THE HARP

THE HEAVENS

THE HEAVY BLUE CHAIN

THE HOUSE

THE HUMBLE-BEE

THE HUSBAND HAS THE NEAREST ACRES

THE INFORMING SPIRIT

THE LAND WAS ALL ELECTRIC

THE LAST FAREWELL

THE LOW DECEMBER VAULT IN JUNE BE UP-LIFTED HIGH

THE MIRACLE

THE MIRACLE

THE MUSE

THE NINEFOLD TABLE OF HEAVEN

THE NUN’S ASPIRATION

THE PAIN OF LOVE’S A BETTER FATE

THE PANOPLY OF PARADISE IS MINE

THE PARK

THE PAST

THE PATIENT PAN

THE PHOENIX

THE PILGRIMS

THE POET

THE POWER OF A BEAUTIFUL FACE LIFTS ME TO HEAVEN

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALL THINGS; ENTRAILS MADE

THE PROBLEM

THE RED ROSE BLOOMS

THE RHODORA: ON BEING ASKED, WHENCE IS THE FLOWER?

THE RIVER

THE ROCKY NOOK WITH HILLTOPS THREE

THE ROGUISH WIND AND I

THE ROMANY GIRL

THE RULES TO MEN MADE EVIDENT

THE SEA REFLECTS THE ROSY SKY

THE SECRET THAT SHOULD NOT BE BLOWN

THE SIMPLE PEOPLE EACH WITH BASKET OR TOOL

THE SKEPTIC

THE SNOW-STORM

THE SOUL

THE SPARROW IS RICH IN HER NEST

THE SPHINX

THE SPIRITS OF THE WISE, SIT ON THE CLOUDS

THE SUMMONS

THE SUN ATHWART THE CLOUD THOUGHT IT NO SIN

THE SUN IS THE SOLE INCONSUMABLE FIRE

THE TEST

THE THREE DIMENSIONS

THE TITMOUSE

THE TREACHEROUS WIND PIPES A LEWD SONG

THE VIOLET

THE VISIT

THE WALK

THE WATERFALL

THE WAY OF LOVE IS UNLIMITED

THE WINDS ARE COLD, THE DAYS ARE DARK

THE WORLD IS A BRIDE SUPERBLY DRESSED

THE WORLD-SOUL

THERE ARE BEGGARS IN IRAN AND ARABY

THERE IS IN ALL THE SONS OF MEN

THERE IS NO EVIL BUT CAN SPEAK

THERE RESIDES IN THE GRIEVING

THERMOMETER

THESE TREES LIKE THO’TS THAT TO VISIONS CONGEAL

THEY STREW IN THE PATH OF KINGS AND CZARS

THINE EYES STILL SHINED

THINGS OFT MISCALLING, AS THE HEN

THINK NOT THE GODS RECEIVE THY PRAYER

THIS EFFERVESCING GENTLEMAN WHO DESPISES A SECRET

THIS SHINING HOUR IS AN EDIFICE

THIS WORLD IS TEDIOUS

THOU SHALT MAKE THY HOUSE

THOU WHO WITH THY LONG HAIR

THOUGH HER EYE SEEK OTHER FORMS

THOUGHT

THOUSAND DANGERS OF RUIN HAS THE STREET OF LOVE

THRENODY

THY POEMS HAFIZ SHAME THE ROSE LEAVES

THY SONGS O HAFIZ

TIS HEAVY ODDS

TIS WRIT ON PARADISE’S GATE

TO BE WISE THE DULL BRAIN SO EARNESTLY THROBS

TO ELLEN

TO ELLEN AT THE SOUTH

TO EVA

TO EVERY CREATURE

TO J.W.

TO RHEA

TO THE CLOCK

TO THE MIZEN, THE MAIN, & THE FORE

TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

TO THE SHAH FROM ENWERI

TO THE SHAH FROM HAFIZ

TO TRANSMUTE CRIME TO WISDOM, & TO STEM

TO WHOM A GLASS FULL OF RED WINE

TO-DAY

TOO LATE THE ANXIOUS FIRE CAME

TRAITORS THO’ PLUMED & STEEL EQUIPPED

TRANSITION

TRIMOUNTAIN

TRY THE MIGHT THE MUSE AFFORDS

TURTLE IN SWAMP

TWO RIVERS

UNA

UNBAR THE DOOR, SINCE THOU THE OPENER ART

UNITY

UNTRUTH IS BECOME THE MODE

UPON A ROCK YET UNCREATE

URIEL

USE WILL IN MAN NEW GRACE REVEAL

VAIN AGAINST HIM WERE HOSTILE BLOWS

VALEDICTORY POEM

VAN BUREN

VOLUNTARIES

WALDEINSAMKEIT

WALDEN

WATER

WATER

WE SAUNTERED AMIDST MIRACLES

WE WISH LIKE THE GLASS

WE WOULD DO NOUGHT BUT GOOD

WEALTH

WEBSTER

WEBSTER

WHAT ALL THE BOOKS OF AGES PAINT, I HAVE

WHAT ARE ALL THE FLOWERS

WHAT AVAILS IT ME

WHAT FLOWING CENTRAL FORCES, SAY

WHAT FROM THIS BARREN BEING DO WE REAP

WHAT IS IT TO SAIL

WHAT LOVELIER FORMS THINGS WEAR

WHAT NEVER WAS NOT, & STILL WILL BE

WHEN DEVILS BITE

WHEN IN ETERNITY THE LIGHT

WHEN JANE WAS ABSENT EDGAR’S EYE

WHEN SUCCESS EXALTS THY LOT

WHEN THOU SITTEST MOPING

WHEN THY SOUL

WHEN WRATH & TERROR CHANGED JOVE’S REGAL PORT

WHERE ART THOU

WHERE IS SKRYMIR? GIANT SKRYMIR?

WHERE O WHERE IS THE MESSAGE WHICH TODAY

WHERE THE FUNGUS BROAD & RED

WHILE ROSES BLOOMED ALONG THE PLAIN

WHILST I DISDAIN THE POPULACE

WHO COMPARES A POEM

WHO DEDICATES HIMSELF TO THE GLASS

WHO EVER SUFFERED AS I FROM SEPARATION?

WHO GAVE THY CHEEK THE MIXED TINT

WHO KNOWS THIS OR THAT

WHO LOVES HIS FRIEND WITH HIS HEART OF HEARTS

WHO ROYALLY BEDDED

WHO SAW THE HID BEGINNINGS

WHOSO ALAS IS YOUNG

WHY FEAR TO DIE

WHY HONOR THE NEW MEN

WHY SHOULD I LIVE

WILLIAM DOES THY FRIGID SOUL

WILLIAM RUFUS AND THE JEW

WILT THOU LIFE’S BEST ELIXIR DRAIN?

WINE RESEMBLES THE LORD JESUS

WISP & METEOR NIGHTLY FALLING

WITH THE KEY OF THE SECRET HE MARCHES FASTER

WO IS ME WOE’S ME WHEN I THINK

WOODNOTES I

WOODNOTES II

WOODS

WORSHIP

WOULD YOU KNOW WHAT JOY IS HID

WRITTEN AT ROME

WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

WRITTEN IN A VOLUME OF GOETHE

WRITTEN IN NAPLES

WRITTEN IN NAPLES, MARCH, 1833

WRITTEN IN SICKNESS

XENOPHANES

YE HAVE GRACE

YET ALL COMES OUT OF THIS, THAT ONE DOOR

YET SOMETIME TO THE SORROW STRICKEN

YOU SHALL NOT LOVE ME FOR WHAT DAILY SPENDS

The Books

In October 1817, aged 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president.

Harvard College today

NATURE: ADDRESSES AND LECTURES

Published anonymously in 1836, the seminal essay Nature is widely regarded as the foundation work of Transcendentalism, in which Emerson delineates his own belief system of a non-traditional appreciation of nature. Transcendentalism suggests that divinity suffuses all nature, proposing that we can only understand reality through the study of nature. Following a visit to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Emerson was inspired to give a set of lectures on nature, which were delivered in Boston, leading on to the publication of Nature.

Within the essay, Emerson divides nature into four usages; Commodity, Beauty, Language and Discipline, and with these distinctions he defines the ways by which humans use nature for their basic needs, their desire for delight, their communication with one another and their understanding of the world.

According to Emerson, humans must take themselves away from society’s flaws and distractions in order to experience a “wholeness” with nature for which we are naturally suited. He believes that solitude is the only way humans can fully adhere to what nature has to offer. Reflecting upon this idea of solitude and humans’ search for this ideal, Emerson states, “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.” Clearly, a person must allow nature to “take him away,” society can destroy humans’ wholeness. Nature and humans must create a reciprocal relationship, “Nature, in its ministry to man, is only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man,” as Jefferson says, nature and humans need each other to be beneficial. This relationship that Emerson depicts is somewhat spiritual; humans must recognize the spirit of nature, and accept it as the Universal Being. “Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient.” Emerson explains that nature is not “fixed or fluid;” to a pure spirit, but that nature is everything.

The groundbreaking essay has influenced leading writers and thinkers across the world since its first publication in 1836. When Henry David Thoreau read the essay as a senior at Harvard College, it had a profound effect on his outlook. Nature eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau’s later writings, including his seminal book Walden. In fact, Thoreau wrote Walden while living in a self-built cabin on land that Emerson owned, having befriended the author and sought his advice and guidance before beginning his famous experiment.

The first edition

CONTENTS

NATURE

CHAPTER I. NATURE.

CHAPTER II. COMMODITY.

CHAPTER III. BEAUTY.

CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE.

CHAPTER V. DISCIPLINE.

CHAPTER VI. IDEALISM.

CHAPTER VII. SPIRIT.

CHAPTER VIII. PROSPECTS.

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

AN ADDRESS

LITERARY ETHICS

THE METHOD OF NATURE

MAN THE REFORMER

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES

THE CONSERVATIVE

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

ADDRESS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES (1844)

Emerson, 1847

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who was destined to become a leading author, poet, philosopher, historian and Transcendentalist, was deeply inspired by Emerson’s landmark essay ‘Nature’.

NATURE

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

CHAPTER I. NATURE.

TO go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet. The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

CHAPTER II. COMMODITY.

WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.

Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course, is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, and is the only use of nature which all men apprehend. The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, and his bed.

   “More servants wait on man
     Than he’ll take notice of.” —

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus’s bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

But there is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader’s reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work.

CHAPTER III. BEAUTY.

A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world κοσμος, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion’s claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner.

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms is a delight. The influence of the forms and actions in nature, is so needful to man, that, in its lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of commodity and beauty. To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street, and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself. The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not reform for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their back-ground, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the country landscape is pleasant only half the year. I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery, and believe that we are as much touched by it as by the genial influences of summer. To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression of the earth from week to week. The succession of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by which time tells the summer hours, will make even the divisions of the day sensible to a keen observer. The tribes of birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their time, follow each other, and the year has room for all. By water-courses, the variety is greater. In July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in continual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of purple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ‘t is mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and it is gone: ‘t is only a mirage as you look from the windows of diligence.

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element is essential to its perfection. The high and divine beauty which can be loved without effeminacy, is that which is found in combination with the human will. Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine. We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it. Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution. In proportion to the energy of his thought and will, he takes up the world into himself. “All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;” said Sallust. “The winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the sun and moon and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, — perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each and look at them once in the steep defile of Thermopylae; when Arnold Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Columbus nears the shore of America; — before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the New World clothe his form with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, “You never sate on so glorious a seat.” Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. “But,” his biographer says, “the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.” In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretcheth out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathize with Jesus. And in common life, whosoever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how easily he took all things along with him, — the persons, the opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary to a man.

3. There is still another aspect under which the beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the relation of things to virtue, they have a relation to thought. The intellect searches out the absolute order of things as they stand in the mind of God, and without the colors of affection. The intellectual and the active powers seem to succeed each other, and the exclusive activity of the one, generates the exclusive activity of the other. There is something unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like the alternate periods of feeding and working in animals; each prepares and will be followed by the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in relation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, and comes because it is unsought, remain for the apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. The beauty of nature reforms itself in the mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new creation.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms, — the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty “il piu nell’ uno.” Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. God is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and beauty, are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.

CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE.

LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves to man. Nature is the vehicle, and threefold degree.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit.

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import, — so conspicuous a fact in the history of language, — is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine. This universal soul, he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but we are its; we are its property and men. And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER.

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. These are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man. All the facts in natural history taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life. Whole Floras, all Linnaeus’ and Buffon’s volumes, are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or work, or noise of an insect, applied to the illustration of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or, in any way associated to human nature, affects us in the most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a plant, — to what affecting analogies in the nature of man, is that little fruit made use of, in all discourse, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the human corpse a seed,— “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man’s life and the seasons? And do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant’s; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and human thoughts, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages. It has moreover been observed, that the idioms of all languages approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the first language, so is it the last. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or back-woodsman, which all men relish.

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God. The moment our discourse rises above the ground line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, cotemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It is the working of the Original Cause through the instruments he has already made.

These facts may suggest the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know more from nature than we can at will communicate. Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we forget its presence. The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolution, — these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands.

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such noble races of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able. We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass. “The visible world and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of the invisible.” The axioms of physics translate the laws of ethics. Thus, “the whole is greater than its part;” “reaction is equal to action;” “the smallest weight may be made to lift the greatest, the difference of weight being compensated by time;” and many the like propositions, which have an ethical as well as physical sense. These propositions have a much more extensive and universal sense when applied to human life, than when confined to technical use.

In like manner, the memorable words of history, and the proverbs of nations, consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; ‘T is hard to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of wine; The last ounce broke the camel’s back; Long-lived trees make roots first; — and the like. In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but we repeat them for the value of their analogical import. What is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf;

     — “Can these things be,
     And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,
     Without our special wonder?”

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. “Material objects,” said a French philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.”

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the images of “garment,” “scoriae,” “mirror,” &c., may stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. “Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,” — is the fundamental law of criticism. A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful extent and multitude of objects; since “every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an object, a part of the domain of knowledge, — a new weapon in the magazine of power.

CHAPTER V. DISCIPLINE.

IN view of the significance of nature, we arrive at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. This use of the world includes the preceding uses, as parts of itself.

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, — its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent from particular to general; of combination to one end of manifold forces. Proportioned to the importance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care with which its tuition is provided, — a care pretermitted in no single case. What tedious training, day after day, year after year, never ending, to form the common sense; what continual reproduction of annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas; what rejoicing over us of little men; what disputing of prices, what reckonings of interest, — and all to form the Hand of the mind; — to instruct us that “good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!”

The same good office is performed by Property and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate; — debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow,— “if it fall level to-day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,” — is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws.

The whole character and fortune of the individual are affected by the least inequalities in the culture of the understanding; for example, in the perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and therefore Time, that man may know that things are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and individual. A bell and a plough have each their use, and neither can do the office of the other. Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear; but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separation, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no range in their scale, but suppose every man is as every other man. What is not good they call the worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best.

In like manner, what good heed, nature forms in us! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoölogy, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature’s dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.

How calmly and genially the mind apprehends one after another the laws of physics! What noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowledge the privilege to BE! His insight refines him. The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. Man is greater that he can see this, and the universe less, because Time and Space relations vanish as laws are known.

Here again we are impressed and even daunted by the immense Universe to be explored. “What we know, is a point to what we do not know.” Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of nature, we must not omit to specify two.

The exercise of the Will or the lesson of power is taught in every event. From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he saith, “Thy will be done!” he is learning the secret, that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up. He forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of persuasion and command. One after another, his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes, at last, only a realized will, — the double of the man.

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have drawn deeply from this source. This ethical character so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, as to seem the end for which it was made. Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function, and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior service. In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the production of an end, is essential to any being. The first and gross manifestation of this truth, is our inevitable and hated training in values and wants, in corn and meat.

It has already been illustrated, that every natural process is a version of a moral sentence. The moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance, every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal, preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun, — it is a sacred emblem from the first furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their several resorts, have each an experience precisely parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: because all organizations are radically alike. Nor can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impregnates the waters of the world, is caught by man and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman? how much tranquillity has been reflected to man from the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching preacher of self-command is the varying phenomenon of Health!

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of Nature, — the unity in variety, — which meets us everywhere. All the endless variety of things make an identical impression. Xenophanes complained in his old age, that, look where he would, all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects wherein there is great superficial unlikeness. Thus architecture is called “frozen music,” by De Stael and Goethe. Vitruvius thought an architect should be a musician. “A Gothic church,” said Coleridge, “is a petrified religion.” Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential. In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat, from the river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtile currents; the light resembles the heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth which we express in words, implies or supposes every other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all possible circles; which, however, may be drawn, and comprise it, in like manner. Every such truth is the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has innumerable sides.

The central Unity is still more conspicuous in actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature. “The wise man, in doing one thing, does all; or, in the one thing he does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is done rightly.”

Words and actions are not the attributes of brute nature. They introduce us to the human form, of which all other organizations appear to be degradations. When this appears among so many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all others. It says, ‘From such as this, have I drawn joy and knowledge; in such as this, have I found and beheld myself; I will speak to it; it can speak again; it can yield me thought already formed and alive.’ In fact, the eye, — the mind, — is always accompanied by these forms, male and female; and these are incomparably the richest informations of the power and order that lie at the heart of things. Unfortunately, every one of them bears the marks as of some injury; is marred and superficially defective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf and dumb nature around them, these all rest like fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, are the entrances.

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail their ministry to our education, but where would it stop? We are associated in adolescent and adult life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, are coextensive with our idea; who, answering each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at such focal distance from us, that we can mend or even analyze them. We cannot choose but love them. When much intercourse with a friend has supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has increased our respect for the resources of God who thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when he has, moreover, become an object of thought, and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet wisdom, — it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.

CHAPTER VI. IDEALISM.

THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end, — deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute space, — or, whether, without relations of time and space, the same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the accuracy of my senses.

The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws, the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an accident and an effect.

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view, man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression. These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women, — talking, running, bartering, fighting, — the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, — between man and nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament;

   The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
     A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air.

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state.

   No, it was builded far from accident;
     It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
     Under the brow of thralling discontent;
     It fears not policy, that heretic,
     That works on leases of short numbered hours,
     But all alone stands hugely politic.

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning.

        Take those lips away
     Which so sweetly were forsworn;
     And those eyes, — the break of day,
     Lights that do mislead the morn.

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet, — this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to magnify the small, — might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few lines.

   ARIEL. The strong based promontory
     Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
     The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his companions;

   A solemn air, and the best comforter
     To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
     Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

Again;

        The charm dissolves apace,
     And, as the morning steals upon the night,
     Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
     Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
     Their clearer reason.
          Their understanding
     Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
     Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
     That now lie foul and muddy.

The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought. “The problem of philosophy,” according to Plato, “is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.” It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions, strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his law of arches, “This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is true;” had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter like an outcast corpse.

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, “He that has never doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries.” It fastens the attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. “These are they who were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel.”

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have no affinity.

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called, — the practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life, — have an analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein; that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, “The things that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal.” It puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,— “Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion.” The devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, “it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into time.”

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man’s connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.

The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.

CHAPTER VII. SPIRIT.

IT is essential to a true theory of nature and of man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and wherein all his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of being summed in one, which yields the activity of man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual, and strives to lead back the individual to it.

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views already presented do not include the whole circumference of man. We must add some related thoughts.

Three problems are put by nature to the mind; What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? The first of these questions only, the ideal theory answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our own being, and the evidence of the world’s being. The one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it.

Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprize us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world.

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, and we learn that man has access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. This view, which admonishes me where the sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to virtue as to

        “The golden key
     Which opes the palace of eternity,”

carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animates me to create my own world through the purification of my soul.

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. But it differs from the body in one important respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we may measure our departure. As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature, as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, a face of him? Yet this may show us what discord is between man and nature, for you cannot freely admire a noble landscape, if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men.

CHAPTER VIII. PROSPECTS.

IN inquiries respecting the laws of the world and the frame of things, the highest reason is always the truest. That which seems faintly possible — it is so refined, is often faint and dim because it is deepest seated in the mind among the eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and, by the very knowledge of functions and processes, to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world, and that it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments.

For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor minuteness in details, so long as there is no hint to explain the relation between things and thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, architecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, — faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of his little poem on Man.

        “Man is all symmetry,
     Full of proportions, one limb to another,
          And to all the world besides.
          Each part may call the farthest, brother;
     For head with foot hath private amity,
          And both with moons and tides.

        “Nothing hath got so far
     But man hath caught and kept it as his prey;
          His eyes dismount the highest star;
          He is in little all the sphere.
     Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
          Find their acquaintance there.

        “For us, the winds do blow,
     The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow;
          Nothing we see, but means our good,
          As our delight, or as our treasure;
     The whole is either our cupboard of food,
          Or cabinet of pleasure.

        “The stars have us to bed:
     Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws.
          Music and light attend our head.
          All things unto our flesh are kind,
     In their descent and being; to our mind,
          In their ascent and cause.

        “More servants wait on man
     Than he’ll take notice of. In every path,
          He treads down that which doth befriend him
          When sickness makes him pale and wan.
     Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath
          Another to attend him.”

The perception of this class of truths makes the attraction which draws men to science, but the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence of Plato, that, “poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.” Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit.

I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.

‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.

‘We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct.’ Thus my Orphic poet sang.

At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding; as by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king should buy his territories inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional examples of the action of man upon nature with his entire force, — with reason as well as understanding. Such examples are; the traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, as in religious and political revolutions, and in the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio.

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

It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is woman? What is a child? What is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide the baldness of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind.

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

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

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

Mr. President and Gentlemen,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AN ADDRESS

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

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

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

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

 The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every virtuous act and thought, — in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous.

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

 See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie — for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance — will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

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

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

 This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. Through it the soul first knows itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, by showing the fountain of all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps of Reason. When he says, “I ought;” when love warns him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and the great deed, — then deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

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

 Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely, it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become false and hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief nor in the aspiration of society; but, when suggested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes nearsighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.

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

 Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what was in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion:— “I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.” But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age:— “This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man.” The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word “miracle,” as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is “monster.” It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

 He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now is, to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.

 1. In this point of view we become very sensible of the first defect of historical Christianity. Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. As it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus. The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by this Eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which indolence and fear have built, the friend of man is made the injurer of man. The manner in which his name is surrounded with expressions, which were once sallies of admiration and love, but are now petrified into official titles, kills all generous sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel that the language that describes Christ to Europe and America is not the style of friendship and enthusiasm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated and formal, — paints a demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. Accept the injurious impositions of our early catechetical instruction, and even honesty and self denial were but splendid sins if they did not wear the Christian name. One would rather be

“A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,”

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

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

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

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

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

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

 The man enamored of this excellency becomes its priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he only can create, who is. The man on whom the soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone can teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; and every man can open his door to these angels, and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But the man who aims to speak as books enable, as synods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest commands, babbles. Let him hush.

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

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

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

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

 Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any oversight of the claims of good men. I know and honor the purity and strict conscience of numbers of the clergy. What life the public worship retains, it owes to the scattered company of pious men who minister here and there in the churches, and who, sometimes accepting with too great tenderness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted from others, but from their own heart, the genuine impulses of virtue, and so still command our love and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the truer inspirations of all, — nay, in the sincere moments of every man. But with whatever exception, it is still true that tradition characterizes the preaching of this country; that it comes out of the memory and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is usual and not at what is necessary and eternal; that thus historical Christianity destroys the power of preaching, by withdrawing it from the exploration of the moral nature of man, where the sublime is, where are the resources of astonishment and power. What a cruel injustice it is to that Law, the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make thought dear and rich; that Law whose fatal sureness the astronomical orbits poorly emulate, that it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it articulated. The pulpit in losing sight of this Law loses its reason, and gropes after it knows not what. And for want of this culture the soul of the community is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian discipline, to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does any man dare to be wise and good, and so draw after him the tears and blessings of his kind.

 Certainly there have been periods when, from the inactivity of the intellect on certain truths, a greater faith was possible in names and persons. The Puritans in England and America found in the Christ of the Catholic Church, and in the dogmas inherited from Rome, scope for their austere piety and their longings for civil freedom. But their creed is passing away, and none arises in its room. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship has on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, half parishes are signing off, — to use the local term. It is already beginning to indicate character and religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. I have heard a devout person who prized the Sabbath say in bitterness of heart: “On Sundays it seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive that holds the best there, is now only a hope and a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, that the best and the worst men in the parish, the poor and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, young and old, should meet one day as fellows in one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, — has come to be a paramount motive for going thither.

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

 And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then, let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man, — indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity — a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of man — is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet, avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. See how nations and races flit by on the sea of time, and leave no ripple to tell where they floated or sunk, and one good soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster reverend forever. None essayeth the stern ambition to be the Self of the nation and of Nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. Once leave your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, or Swedenborg’s, and you get wide from God with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries, — the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is in them anything divine.

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

 Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection, — when you meet one of these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought or virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be followed with their love as by an angel.

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

 In such high communion let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a bold benevolence, an independence of friends so that not the unjust wishes of those who love us will impair our freedom, but we shall resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in advance; and — what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful element — a certain solidity of merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is so essentially and manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted that the right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs not praise their courage, — they are the heart and soul of nature. Oh my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes the majority — demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice — comes graceful and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unwearable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, and the angel is shown. But these are heights that we can scarce remember and look up to, without contrition and shame. Let us thank God that such things exist.

 And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The evils of the Church that now is are manifest. The question returns, what shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms seem to me in vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — today, pasteboard and filigree, and ending tomorrow in madness, and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, Soul, and second, Soul, and evermore, Soul. A whole popedom of forms one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify.

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

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

LITERARY ETHICS

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

GENTLEMEN,

The invitation to address you this day, with which you have honored me, was so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons to celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me, as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to bring you any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into the holy ground where other men’s aspirations only point. His successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advantages. And because the scholar, by every thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few scholars in each country, whose genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies; and, when events occur of great import, I count over these representatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as if I were counting nations. And, even if his results were incommunicable; if they abode in his own spirit; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessions, that the fact of his existence and pursuits would be a happy omen.

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

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

Yet, in every sane hour, the service of thought appears reasonable, the despotism of the senses insane. The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar.

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

I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect. The resources of the scholar are co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind. He cannot know them until he has beheld with awe the infinitude and impersonality of the intellectual power. When he has seen, that it is not his, nor any man’s, but that it is the soul which made the world, and that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, as its minister, may rightfully hold all things subordinate and answerable to it. A divine pilgrim in nature, all things attend his steps. Over him stream the flying constellations; over him streams Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and years. He inhales the year as a vapor: its fragrant midsummer breath, its sparkling January heaven. And so pass into his mind, in bright transfiguration, the grand events of history, to take a new order and scale from him. He is the world; and the epochs and heroes of chronology are pictorial images, in which his thoughts are told. There is no event but sprung somewhere from the soul of man; and therefore there is none but the soul of man can interpret. Every presentiment of the mind is executed somewhere in a gigantic fact. What else is Greece, Rome, England, France, St. Helena? What else are churches, literatures, and empires? The new man must feel that he is new, and has not come into the world mortgaged to the opinions and usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt. The sense of spiritual independence is like the lovely varnish of the dew, whereby the old, hard, peaked earth, and its old self-same productions, are made new every morning, and shining with the last touch of the artist’s hand. A false humility, a complaisance to reigning schools, or to the wisdom of antiquity, must not defraud me of supreme possession of this hour. If any person have less love of liberty, and less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you and me? Say to such doctors, We are thankful to you, as we are to history, to the pyramids, and the authors; but now our day is come; we have been born out of the eternal silence; and now will we live, — live for ourselves, — and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, but as the upholders and creators of our age; and neither Greece nor Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the College of the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review, is to command any longer. Now that we are here, we will put our own interpretation on things, and our own things for interpretation. Please himself with complaisance who will, — for me, things must take my scale, not I theirs. I will say with the warlike king, “God gave me this crown, and the whole world shall not take it away.”

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

Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our hope. If you would know the power of character, see how much you would impoverish the world, if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato, — these three, and cause them not to be. See you not, how much less the power of man would be? I console myself in the poverty of my thoughts; in the paucity of great men, in the malignity and dulness of the nations, by falling back on these sublime recollections, and seeing what the prolific soul could beget on actual nature; — seeing that Plato was, and Shakspeare, and Milton, — three irrefragable facts. Then I dare; I also will essay to be. The humblest, the most hopeless, in view of these radiant facts, may now theorize and hope. In spite of all the rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in the street, in spite of slumber and guilt, in spite of the army, the bar-room, and the jail, have been these glorious manifestations of the mind; and I will thank my great brothers so truly for the admonition of their being, as to endeavor also to be just and brave, to aspire and to speak. Plotinus too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of philosophy, — that which they have written out with patient courage, makes me bold. No more will I dismiss, with haste, the visions which flash and sparkle across my sky; but observe them, approach them, domesticate them, brood on them, and draw out of the past, genuine life for the present hour.

To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions of hope and provocation, you must come to know, that each admirable genius is but a successful diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your own. The impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of the individual, and not on the universal attributes of man. The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires. In solitude, in a remote village, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, until his fancy has brought home to the surrounding woods, the faint roar of cannonades in the Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curious concerning that man’s day. What filled it? the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the foreign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul answers — Behold his day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens, you meet, — in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea, and the puny execution; — behold Charles the Fifth’s day; another, yet the same; behold Chatham’s, Hampden’s, Bayard’s, Alfred’s, Scipio’s, Pericles’s day, — day of all that are born of women. The difference of circumstance is merely costume. I am tasting the self-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, what it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of that day, called Byron, or Burke; — but ask it of the enveloping Now; the more quaintly you inspect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details, its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, — so much the more you master the biography of this hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.

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

In order to a knowledge of the resources of the scholar, we must not rest in the use of slender accomplishments, — of faculties to do this and that other feat with words; but we must pay our vows to the highest power, and pass, if it be possible, by assiduous love and watching, into the visions of absolute truth. The growth of the intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals. It is larger reception. Able men, in general, have good dispositions, and a respect for justice; because an able man is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite. All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of universal being. The hero is great by means of the predominance of the universal nature; he has only to open his mouth, and it speaks; he has only to be forced to act, and it acts. All men catch the word, or embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of an excess of organization cheats them of equal issues. Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of genius comes by renouncing the too officious activity of the understanding, and giving leave and amplest privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. Out of this must all that is alive and genial in thought go. Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid. Observe the phenomenon of extempore debate. A man of cultivated mind, but reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the miracle of free, impassioned, picturesque speech, in the man addressing an assembly; — a state of being and power, how unlike his own! Presently his own emotion rises to his lips, and overflows in speech. He must also rise and say somewhat. Once embarked, once having overcome the novelty of the situation, he finds it just as easy and natural to speak, — to speak with thoughts, with pictures, with rhythmical balance of sentences, — as it was to sit silent; for, it needs not to do, but to suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free spirit which gladly utters itself through him; and motion is as easy as rest.

II. I pass now to consider the task offered to the intellect of this country. The view I have taken of the resources of the scholar, presupposes a subject as broad. We do not seem to have imagined its riches. We have not heeded the invitation it holds out. To be as good a scholar as Englishmen are; to have as much learning as our contemporaries; to have written a book that is read; satisfies us. We assume, that all thought is already long ago adequately set down in books, — all imaginations in poems; and what we say, we only throw in as confirmatory of this supposed complete body of literature. A very shallow assumption. Say rather, all literature is yet to be written. Poetry has scarce chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of nature to us, is, ‘The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day.’

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

The noonday darkness of the American forest, the deep, echoing, aboriginal woods, where the living columns of the oak and fir tower up from the ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where, from year to year, the eagle and the crow see no intruder; the pines, bearded with savage moss, yet touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the broad, cold lowland, which forms its coat of vapor with the stillness of subterranean crystallization; and where the traveller, amid the repulsive plants that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing terror of the distant town; this beauty, — haggard and desert beauty, which the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, repaint and vary, has never been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any passenger. All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes. What mean these journeys to Niagara; these pilgrims to the White Hills? Men believe in the adaptations of utility, always: in the mountains, they may believe in the adaptations of the eye. Undoubtedly, the changes of geology have a relation to the prosperous sprouting of the corn and peas in my kitchen garden; but not less is there a relation of beauty between my soul and the dim crags of Agiocochook up there in the clouds. Every man, when this is told, hearkens with joy, and yet his own conversation with nature is still unsung.

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

This starting, this warping of the best literary works from the adamant of nature, is especially observable in philosophy. Let it take what tone of pretension it will, to this complexion must it come, at last. Take, for example, the French Eclecticism, which Cousin esteems so conclusive; there is an optical illusion in it. It avows great pretensions. It looks as if they had all truth, in taking all the systems, and had nothing to do, but to sift and wash and strain, and the gold and diamonds would remain in the last colander. But, Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light. Shut the shutters never so quick, to keep all the light in, it is all in vain; it is gone before you can cry, Hold. And so it happens with our philosophy. Translate, collate, distil all the systems, it steads you nothing; for truth will not be compelled, in any mechanical manner. But the first observation you make, in the sincere act of your nature, though on the veriest trifle, may open a new view of nature and of man, that, like a menstruum, shall dissolve all theories in it; shall take up Greece, Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, and what not, as mere data and food for analysis, and dispose of your world-containing system, as a very little unit. A profound thought, anywhere, classifies all things: a profound thought will lift Olympus. The book of philosophy is only a fact, and no more inspiring fact than another, and no less; but a wise man will never esteem it anything final and transcending. Go and talk with a man of genius, and the first word he utters, sets all your so-called knowledge afloat and at large. Then Plato, Bacon, Kant, and the Eclectic Cousin, condescend instantly to be men and mere facts.

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

Thus is justice done to each generation and individual, — wisdom teaching man that he shall not hate, or fear, or mimic his ancestors; that he shall not bewail himself, as if the world was old, and thought was spent, and he was born into the dotage of things; for, by virtue of the Deity, thought renews itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is a new subject with countless relations.

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

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

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

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

Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the lust of display, the seeming that unmakes our being. A mistake of the main end to which they labor, is incident to literary men, who, dealing with the organ of language, — the subtlest, strongest, and longest-lived of man’s creations, and only fitly used as the weapon of thought and of justice, — learn to enjoy the pride of playing with this splendid engine, but rob it of its almightiness by failing to work with it. Extricating themselves from the tasks of the world, the world revenges itself by exposing, at every turn, the folly of these incomplete, pedantic, useless, ghostly creatures. The scholar will feel, that the richest romance, — the noblest fiction that was ever woven, — the heart and soul of beauty, — lies enclosed in human life. Itself of surpassing value, it is also the richest material for his creations. How shall he know its secrets of tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate? How can he catch and keep the strain of upper music that peals from it? Its laws are concealed under the details of daily action. All action is an experiment upon them. He must bear his share of the common load. He must work with men in houses, and not with their names in books. His needs, appetites, talents, affections, accomplishments, are keys that open to him the beautiful museum of human life. Why should he read it as an Arabian tale, and not know, in his own beating bosom, its sweet and smart? Out of love and hatred, out of earnings, and borrowings, and lendings, and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of travelling, and voting, and watching, and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws. Let him not slur his lesson; let him learn it by heart. Let him endeavor exactly, bravely, and cheerfully, to solve the problem of that life which is set before him. And this, by punctual action, and not by promises or dreams. Believing, as in God, in the presence and favor of the grandest influences, let him deserve that favor, and learn how to receive and use it, by fidelity also to the lower observances.

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

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

Let the scholar appreciate this combination of gifts, which, applied to better purpose, make true wisdom. He is a revealer of things. Let him first learn the things. Let him not, too eager to grasp some badge of reward, omit the work to be done. Let him know, that, though the success of the market is in the reward, true success is the doing; that, in the private obedience to his mind; in the sedulous inquiry, day after day, year after year, to know how the thing stands; in the use of all means, and most in the reverence of the humble commerce and humble needs of life, — to hearken what they say, and so, by mutual reaction of thought and life, to make thought solid, and life wise; and in a contempt for the gabble of to-day’s opinions, the secret of the world is to be learned, and the skill truly to unfold it is acquired. Or, rather, is it not, that, by this discipline, the usurpation of the senses is overcome, and the lower faculties of man are subdued to docility; through which, as an unobstructed channel, the soul now easily and gladly flows?

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

The student, as we all along insist, is great only by being passive to the superincumbent spirit. Let this faith, then, dictate all his action. Snares and bribes abound to mislead him; let him be true nevertheless. His success has its perils too. There is somewhat inconvenient and injurious in his position. They whom his thoughts have entertained or inflamed, seek him before yet they have learned the hard conditions of thought. They seek him, that he may turn his lamp on the dark riddles whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls of their being. They find that he is a poor, ignorant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat, like themselves, no wise emitting a continuous stream of light, but now and then a jet of luminous thought, followed by total darkness; moreover, that he cannot make of his infrequent illumination a portable taper to carry whither he would, and explain now this dark riddle, now that. Sorrow ensues. The scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous boys; and the youth has lost a star out of his new flaming firmament. Hence the temptation to the scholar to mystify; to hear the question; to sit upon it; to make an answer of words, in lack of the oracle of things. Not the less let him be cold and true, and wait in patience, knowing that truth can make even silence eloquent and memorable. Truth shall be policy enough for him. Let him open his breast to all honest inquiry, and be an artist superior to tricks of art. Show frankly as a saint would do, your experience, methods, tools, and means. Welcome all comers to the freest use of the same. And out of this superior frankness and charity, you shall learn higher secrets of your nature, which gods will bend and aid you to communicate.

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

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

You will not fear, that I am enjoining too stern an asceticism. Ask not, Of what use is a scholarship that systematically retreats? or, Who is the better for the philosopher who conceals his accomplishments, and hides his thoughts from the waiting world? Hides his thoughts! Hide the sun and moon. Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners, and your face. It will bring you friendships. It will impledge you to truth by the love and expectation of generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Nature, which is one and perfect, it shall yield every sincere good that is in the soul, to the scholar beloved of earth and heaven.

THE METHOD OF NATURE

An Oration delivered before the Society of the Adelphi Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841

GENTLEMEN,

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

I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the industrious manufacturing village, or the mart of commerce. I love the music of the water-wheel; I value the railway; I feel the pride which the sight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every mechanical craft as education also. But let me discriminate what is precious herein. There is in each of these works an act of invention, an intellectual step, or short series of steps taken; that act or step is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition of the same a thousand times. And I will not be deceived into admiring the routine of handicrafts and mechanics, how splendid soever the result, any more than I admire the routine of the scholars or clerical class. That splendid results ensue from the labors of stupid men, is the fruit of higher laws than their will, and the routine is not to be praised for it. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the result, — I would not have the laborer sacrificed to my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of his superiority to his work, and his knowledge that the product or the skill is of no value, except so far as it embodies his spiritual prerogatives. If I see nothing to admire in the unit, shall I admire a million units? Men stand in awe of the city, but do not honor any individual citizen; and are continually yielding to this dazzling result of numbers, that which they would never yield to the solitary example of any one.

Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself. I sometimes believe that our literary anniversaries will presently assume a greater importance, as the eyes of men open to their capabilities. Here, a new set of distinctions, a new order of ideas, prevail. Here, we set a bound to the respectability of wealth, and a bound to the pretensions of the law and the church. The bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day. Into our charmed circle, power cannot enter; and the sturdiest defender of existing institutions feels the terrific inflammability of this air which condenses heat in every corner that may restore to the elements the fabrics of ages. Nothing solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not safe; he too is searched and revised. Is his learning dead? Is he living in his memory? The power of mind is not mortification, but life. But come forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all-hoping poet! hither, thou tender, doubting heart, who hast not yet found any place in the world’s market fit for thee; any wares which thou couldst buy or sell, — so large is thy love and ambition, — thine and not theirs is the hour. Smooth thy brow, and hope and love on, for the kind heaven justifies thee, and the whole world feels that thou art in the right.

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

The festival of the intellect, and the return to its source, cast a strong light on the always interesting topics of Man and Nature. We are forcibly reminded of the old want. There is no man; there hath never been. The Intellect still asks that a man may be born. The flame of life flickers feebly in human breasts. We demand of men a richness and universality we do not find. Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous. There is somewhat indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly tied to one thought. If they are prophets, they are egotists; if polite and various, they are shallow. How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what progress our reformer has made, — not an inch has he pierced, — you still find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust. The new book says, `I will give you the key to nature,’ and we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a very little while, for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few months. It is so with every book and person: and yet — and yet — we do not take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of expectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter is the sure prediction of his advent.

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

It seems to me, therefore, that it were some suitable paean, if we should piously celebrate this hour by exploring the method of nature. Let us see that, as nearly as we can, and try how far it is transferable to the literary life. Every earnest glance we give to the realities around us, with intent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and is really songs of praise. What difference can it make whether it take the shape of exhortation, or of passionate exclamation, or of scientific statement? These are forms merely. Through them we express, at last, the fact, that God has done thus or thus.

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

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we admire in the order of the world, is the result of infinite distribution. Its smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an emanation, and that from which it emanates is an emanation also, and from every emanation is a new emanation. If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature. Not the cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends always from above. It is unbroken obedience. The beauty of these fair objects is imported into them from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ, but makes the organ.

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

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

That no single end may be selected, and nature judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded. Read alternately in natural and in civil history, a treatise of astronomy, for example, with a volume of French Memoires pour servir. When we have spent our wonder in computing this wasteful hospitality with which boon nature turns off new firmaments without end into her wide common, as fast as the madrepores make coral, — suns and planets hospitable to souls, — and then shorten the sight to look into this court of Louis Quatorze, and see the game that is played there, — duke and marshal, abbe and madame, — a gambling table where each is laying traps for the other, where the end is ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your rival and ruin him with this solemn fop in wig and stars, — the king; one can hardly help asking if this planet is a fair specimen of the so generous astronomy, and if so, whether the experiment have not failed, and whether it be quite worth while to make more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an article.

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

To questions of this sort, nature replies, `I grow.’ All is nascent, infant. When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the savant toiling to compute the length of her line, the return of her curve, we are steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing; that all seems just begun; remote aims are in active accomplishment. We can point nowhere to anything final; but tendency appears on all hands: planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars. Why should not then these messieurs of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season, without prejudice to their faculty to run on better errands by and by?

But nature seems further to reply, `I have ventured so great a stake as my success, in no single creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed, — and by no means the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the expense of all the other functions.’

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

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

The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last victory of intelligence. The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship. Who would value any number of miles of Atlantic brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? Confine it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore where wise men dwell, and it is filled with expression; and the point of greatest interest is where the land and water meet. So must we admire in man, the form of the formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory. See the play of thoughts! what nimble gigantic creatures are these! what saurians, what palaiotheria shall be named with these agile movers? The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars, — was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order. Each individual soul is such, in virtue of its being a power to translate the world into some particular language of its own; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance, — why, then, into a trade, an art, a science, a mode of living, a conversation, a character, an influence. You admire pictures, but it is as impossible for you to paint a right picture, as for grass to bear apples. But when the genius comes, it makes fingers: it is pliancy, and the power of transferring the affair in the street into oils and colors. Raphael must be born, and Salvator must be born.

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

But what strikes us in the fine genius is that which belongs of right to every one. A man should know himself for a necessary actor. A link was wanting between two craving parts of nature, and he was hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two else unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each of one of the wants, and the union of foreign constitutions in him enables him to do gladly and gracefully what the assembled human race could not have sufficed to do. He knows his materials; he applies himself to his work; he cannot read, or think, or look, but he unites the hitherto separated strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts he delights to utter are the reason of his incarnation. Is it for him to account himself cheap and superfluous, or to linger by the wayside for opportunities? Did he not come into being because something must be done which he and no other is and does? If only he sees, the world will be visible enough. He need not study where to stand, nor to put things in favorable lights; in him is the light, from him all things are illuminated, to their centre. What patron shall he ask for employment and reward? Hereto was he born, to deliver the thought of his heart from the universe to the universe, to do an office which nature could not forego, nor he be discharged from rendering, and then immerge again into the holy silence and eternity out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and many more men than one he harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the beauty of all. Is not this the theory of every man’s genius or faculty? Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?

Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine. I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker. In all the millions who have heard the voice, none ever saw the face. As children in their play run behind each other, and seize one by the ears and make him walk before them, so is the spirit our unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all languages, governs all men, and none ever caught a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any longer separate it from himself in his thought, he shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is taught him, the sound swells to a ravishing music, he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes careless of his food and of his house, he is the fool of ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is set on the things to be done, and not on the truth that is still taught, and for the sake of which the things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, and at last is but a humming in his ears. His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when, by forbearing to be artists, we might be vessels filled with the divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to receive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as from us, this desire to be loved, the wish to be recognized as individuals, — is finite, comes of a lower strain.

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

This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole and not to the parts; to the cause and not to the ends; to the tendency, and not to the act. It respects genius and not talent; hope, and not possession: the anticipation of all things by the intellect, and not the history itself; art, and not works of art; poetry, and not experiment; virtue, and not duties.

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

Therefore man must be on his guard against this cup of enchantments, and must look at nature with a supernatural eye. By piety alone, by conversing with the cause of nature, is he safe and commands it. And because all knowledge is assimilation to the object of knowledge, as the power or genius of nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the description of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist: his inspiration a sort of bright casualty: his will in it only the surrender of will to the Universal Power, which will not be seen face to face, but must be received and sympathetically known. It is remarkable that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in the oracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, a statement of this fact, which every lover and seeker of truth will recognize. “It is not proper,” said Zoroaster, “to understand the Intelligible with vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you will apprehend it: not too earnestly, but bringing a pure and inquiring eye. You will not understand it as when understanding some particular thing, but with the flower of the mind. Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand sensual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the summit.”

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

Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is vitiated by too much will. He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end. To every reform, in proportion to its energy, early disgusts are incident, so that the disciple is surprised at the very hour of his first triumphs, with chagrins, and sickness, and a general distrust: so that he shuns his associates, hates the enterprise which lately seemed so fair, and meditates to cast himself into the arms of that society and manner of life which he had newly abandoned with so much pride and hope. Is it that he attached the value of virtue to some particular practices, as, the denial of certain appetites in certain specified indulgences, and, afterward, found himself still as wicked and as far from happiness in that abstinence, as he had been in the abuse? But the soul can be appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she feels her wings. You shall love rectitude and not the disuse of money or the avoidance of trade: an unimpeded mind, and not a monkish diet; sympathy and usefulness, and not hoeing or coopering. Tell me not how great your project is, the civil liberation of the world, its conversion into a Christian church, the establishment of public education, cleaner diet, a new division of labor and of land, laws of love for laws of property; — I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses: then will it be a god always approached, — never touched; always giving health. A man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an aim adorns an action. What is strong but goodness, and what is energetic but the presence of a brave man? The doctrine in vegetable physiology of the presence, or the general influence of any substance over and above its chemical influence, as of an alkali or a living plant, is more predicable of man. You need not speak to me, I need not go where you are, that you should exert magnetism on me. Be you only whole and sufficient, and I shall feel you in every part of my life and fortune, and I can as easily dodge the gravitation of the globe as escape your influence.

But there are other examples of this total and supreme influence, besides Nature and the conscience. “From the poisonous tree, the world,” say the Brahmins, “two species of fruit are produced, sweet as the waters of life, Love or the society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the immortal juice of Vishnu.” What is Love, and why is it the chief good, but because it is an overpowering enthusiasm? Never self-possessed or prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain admirable wisdom, preferable to all other advantages, and whereof all others are only secondaries and indemnities, because this is that in which the individual is no longer his own foolish master, but inhales an odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round with awe of the object, blending for the time that object with the real and only good, and consults every omen in nature with tremulous interest. When we speak truly, — is not he only unhappy who is not in love? his fancied freedom and self-rule — is it not so much death? He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself a living and expanding soul, he presently exhausts it. But the love remains in his mind, and the wisdom it brought him; and it craves a new and higher object. And the reason why all men honor love, is because it looks up and not down; aspires and not despairs.

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

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the incomputable energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? Has any thing grand and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea. What brought the pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty; another, the desire of founding a church; and a third, discovers that the motive force was plantation and trade. But if the Puritans could rise from the dust, they could not answer. It is to be seen in what they were, and not in what they designed; it was the growth and expansion of the human race, and resembled herein the sequent Revolution, which was not begun in Concord, or Lexington, or Virginia, but was the overflowing of the sense of natural right in every clear and active spirit of the period. Is a man boastful and knowing, and his own master? — we turn from him without hope: but let him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast and the Divine, which uses him glad to be used, and our eye is riveted to the chain of events. What a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath morning in the country of New England, teaching privation, self-denial and sorrow! A man was born not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, like the noble rock-maple which all around our villages bleeds for the service of man. Not praise, not men’s acceptance of our doing, but the spirit’s holy errand through us absorbed the thought. How dignified was this! How all that is called talents and success, in our noisy capitals, becomes buzz and din before this man-worthiness! How our friendships and the complaisances we use, shame us now! Shall we not quit our companions, as if they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake ourselves to some desert cliff of mount Katahdin, some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to communicate again with these sharers of a more sacred idea?

And what is to replace for us the piety of that race? We cannot have theirs: it glides away from us day by day, but we also can bask in the great morning which rises forever out of the eastern sea, and be ourselves the children of the light. I stand here to say, Let us worship the mighty and transcendent Soul. It is the office, I doubt not, of this age to annul that adulterous divorce which the superstition of many ages has effected between the intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness have been one class, the students of wisdom another, as if either could exist in any purity without the other. Truth is always holy, holiness always wise. I will that we keep terms with sin, and a sinful literature and society, no longer, but live a life of discovery and performance. Accept the intellect, and it will accept us. Be the lowly ministers of that pure omniscience, and deny it not before men. It will burn up all profane literature, all base current opinions, all the false powers of the world, as in a moment of time. I draw from nature the lesson of an intimate divinity. Our health and reason as men needs our respect to this fact, against the heedlessness and against the contradiction of society. The sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force. His nobility needs the assurance of this inexhaustible reserved power. How great soever have been its bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence they flow. If you say, `the acceptance of the vision is also the act of God:’ — I shall not seek to penetrate the mystery, I admit the force of what you say. If you ask, `How can any rules be given for the attainment of gifts so sublime?’ I shall only remark that the solicitations of this spirit, as long as there is life, are never forborne. Tenderly, tenderly, they woo and court us from every object in nature, from every fact in life, from every thought in the mind. The one condition coupled with the gift of truth is its use. That man shall be learned who reduceth his learning to practice. Emanuel Swedenborg affirmed that it was opened to him, “that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge.” “If knowledge,” said Ali the Caliph, “calleth unto practice, well; if not, it goeth away.” The only way into nature is to enact our best insight. Instantly we are higher poets, and can speak a deeper law. Do what you know, and perception is converted into character, as islands and continents were built by invisible infusories, or, as these forest leaves absorb light, electricity, and volatile gases, and the gnarled oak to live a thousand years is the arrest and fixation of the most volatile and ethereal currents. The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a cry of joy and exultation. Who shall dare think he has come late into nature, or has missed anything excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable stars of possibility, and the yet untouched continent of hope glittering with all its mountains in the vast West? I praise with wonder this great reality, which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its light. What man seeing this, can lose it from his thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject? The entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of man. We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mortal frame, shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the ocean and land, space and time, form and essence, and hold the key to universal nature. I draw from this faith courage and hope. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm, and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn: they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power.

MAN THE REFORMER

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

Mr. President, and Gentlemen,

I wish to offer to your consideration some thoughts on the particular and general relations of man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim of each young man in this association is the very highest that belongs to a rational mind. Let it be granted, that our life, as we lead it, is common and mean; that some of those offices and functions for which we were mainly created are grown so rare in society, that the memory of them is only kept alive in old books and in dim traditions; that prophets and poets, that beautiful and perfect men, we are not now, no, nor have even seen such; that some sources of human instruction are almost unnamed and unknown among us; that the community in which we live will hardly bear to be told that every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine illumination, and his daily walk elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world. Grant all this, as we must, yet I suppose none of my auditors will deny that we ought to seek to establish ourselves in such disciplines and courses as will deserve that guidance and clearer communication with the spiritual nature. And further, I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit.

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

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

It will afford no security from the new ideas, that the old nations, the laws of centuries, the property and institutions of a hundred cities, are built on other foundations. The demon of reform has a secret door into the heart of every lawmaker, of every inhabitant of every city. The fact, that a new thought and hope have dawned in your breast, should apprize you that in the same hour a new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts. That secret which you would fain keep, — as soon as you go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the doorstep, to tell you the same. There is not the most bronzed and sharpened money-catcher, who does not, to your consternation, almost, quail and shake the moment he hears a question prompted by the new ideas. We thought he had some semblance of ground to stand upon, that such as he at least would die hard; but he trembles and flees. Then the scholar says, `Cities and coaches shall never impose on me again; for, behold every solitary dream of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That fancy I had, and hesitated to utter because you would laugh, — the broker, the attorney, the market-man are saying the same thing. Had I waited a day longer to speak, I had been too late. Behold, State Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, and begins to prophesy!’

It cannot be wondered at, that this general inquest into abuses should arise in the bosom of society, when one considers the practical impediments that stand in the way of virtuous young men. The young man, on entering life, finds the way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond the borders) of fraud. The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less genial to his faculties, but these are now in their general course so vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which all connive, that it requires more vigor and resources than can be expected of every young man, to right himself in them; he is lost in them; he cannot move hand or foot in them. Has he genius and virtue? the less does he find them fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in them, he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of boyhood and youth as dreams; he must forget the prayers of his childhood; and must take on him the harness of routine and obsequiousness. If not so minded, nothing is left him but to begin the world anew, as he does who puts the spade into the ground for food. We are all implicated, of course, in this charge; it is only necessary to ask a few questions as to the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. How many articles of daily consumption are furnished us from the West Indies; yet it is said, that, in the Spanish islands, the venality of the officers of the government has passed into usage, and that no article passes into our ships which has not been fraudulently cheapened. In the Spanish islands, every agent or factor of the Americans, unless he be a consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic, or has caused a priest to make that declaration for him. The abolitionist has shown us our dreadful debt to the southern negro. In the island of Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of slavery, it appears, only men are bought for the plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I leave for those who have the knowledge the part of sifting the oaths of our custom-houses; I will not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. I content myself with the fact, that the general system of our trade, (apart from the blacker traits, which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and unshared by all reputable men,) is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage. It is not that which a man delights to unlock to a noble friend; which he meditates on with joy and self-approval in his hour of love and aspiration; but rather what he then puts out of sight, only showing the brilliant result, and atoning for the manner of acquiring, by the manner of expending it. I do not charge the merchant or the manufacturer. The sins of our trade belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes, every body confesses, — with cap and knee volunteers his confession, yet none feels himself accountable. He did not create the abuse; he cannot alter it. What is he? an obscure private person who must get his bread. That is the vice, — that no one feels himself called to act for man, but only as a fraction of man. It happens therefore that all such ingenuous souls as feel within themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them, and they come forth from it. Such cases are becoming more numerous every year.

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

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

But it is said, `What! will you give up the immense advantages reaped from the division of labor, and set every man to make his own shoes, bureau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would be to put men back into barbarism by their own act.’ I see no instant prospect of a virtuous revolution; yet I confess, I should not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out of the belief, that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that calling. Who could regret to see a high conscience and a purer taste exercising a sensible effect on young men in their choice of occupation, and thinning the ranks of competition in the labors of commerce, of law, and of state? It is easy to see that the inconvenience would last but a short time. This would be great action, which always opens the eyes of men. When many persons shall have done this, when the majority shall admit the necessity of reform in all these institutions, their abuses will be redressed, and the way will be open again to the advantages which arise from the division of labor, and a man may select the fittest employment for his peculiar talent again, without compromise.

But quite apart from the emphasis which the times give to the doctrine, that the manual labor of society ought to be shared among all the members, there are reasons proper to every individual, why he should not be deprived of it. The use of manual labor is one which never grows obsolete, and which is inapplicable to no person. A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands. We must have an antagonism in the tough world for all the variety of our spiritual faculties, or they will not be born. Manual labor is the study of the external world. The advantage of riches remains with him who procured them, not with the heir. When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health, that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands. But not only health, but education is in the work. Is it possible that I who get indefinite quantities of sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, crockery ware, and letter paper, by simply signing my name once in three months to a cheque in favor of John Smith and Co. traders, get the fair share of exercise to my faculties by that act, which nature intended for me in making all these far-fetched matters important to my comfort? It is Smith himself, and his carriers, and dealers, and manufacturers, it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the butcher, the negro, the hunter, and the planter, who have intercepted the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton of the cotton. They have got the education, I only the commodity. This were all very well if I were necessarily absent, being detained by work of my own, like theirs, work of the same faculties; then should I be sure of my hands and feet, but now I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without my aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend on them, and have not earned by use a right to my arms and feet.

Consider further the difference between the first and second owner of property. Every species of property is preyed on by its own enemies, as iron by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provisions by mould, putridity, or vermin; money by thieves; an orchard by insects; a planted field by weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle by hunger; a road by rain and frost; a bridge by freshets. And whoever takes any of these things into his possession, takes the charge of defending them from this troop of enemies, or of keeping them in repair. A man who supplies his own want, who builds a raft or a boat to go a fishing, finds it easy to caulk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the rudder. What he gets only as fast as he wants for his own ends, does not embarrass him, or take away his sleep with looking after. But when he comes to give all the goods he has year after year collected, in one estate to his son, house, orchard, ploughed land, cattle, bridges, hardware, wooden-ware, carpets, cloths, provisions, books, money, and cannot give him the skill and experience which made or collected these, and the method and place they have in his own life, the son finds his hands full, — not to use these things, — but to look after them and defend them from their natural enemies. To him they are not means, but masters. Their enemies will not remit; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexation, and he is converted from the owner into a watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old and new chattels. What a change! Instead of the masterly good humor, and sense of power, and fertility of resource in himself; instead of those strong and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing heart, which the father had, whom nature loved and feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast and fish seemed all to know and to serve, we have now a puny, protected person, guarded by walls and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches, and men-servants and women-servants from the earth and the sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, is made anxious by all that endangers those possessions, and is forced to spend so much time in guarding them, that he has quite lost sight of their original use, namely, to help him to his ends, — to the prosecution of his love; to the helping of his friend, to the worship of his God, to the enlargement of his knowledge, to the serving of his country, to the indulgence of his sentiment, and he is now what is called a rich man, — the menial and runner of his riches.

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

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, or insist that every man should be a farmer, any more than that every man should be a lexicographer. In general, one may say, that the husbandman’s is the oldest, and most universal profession, and that where a man does not yet discover in himself any fitness for one work more than another, this may be preferred. But the doctrine of the Farm is merely this, that every man ought to stand in primary relations with the work of the world, ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the accident of his having a purse in his pocket, or his having been bred to some dishonorable and injurious craft, to sever him from those duties; and for this reason, that labor is God’s education; that he only is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, who learns the secrets of labor, and who by real cunning extorts from nature its sceptre.

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the learned professions, of the poet, the priest, the lawgiver, and men of study generally; namely, that in the experience of all men of that class, the amount of manual labor which is necessary to the maintenance of a family, indisposes and disqualifies for intellectual exertion. I know, it often, perhaps usually, happens, that where there is a fine organization apt for poetry and philosophy, that individual finds himself compelled to wait on his thoughts, to waste several days that he may enhance and glorify one; and is better taught by a moderate and dainty exercise, such as rambling in the fields, rowing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudgery of the farmer and the smith. I would not quite forget the venerable counsel of the Egyptian mysteries, which declared that “there were two pairs of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be closed, when the pair that are above them perceive, and that when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath should be opened.” Yet I will suggest that no separation from labor can be without some loss of power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I doubt not, the faults and vices of our literature and philosophy, their too great fineness, effeminacy, and melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and sickly habits of the literary class. Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the bookmaker abler and better, and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written.

But granting that for ends so sacred and dear, some relaxation must be had, I think, that if a man find in himself any strong bias to poetry, to art, to the contemplative life, drawing him to these things with a devotion incompatible with good husbandry, that man ought to reckon early with himself, and, respecting the compensations of the Universe, ought to ransom himself from the duties of economy, by a certain rigor and privation in his habits. For privileges so rare and grand, let him not stint to pay a great tax. Let him be a caenobite, a pauper, and if need be, celibate also. Let him learn to eat his meals standing, and to relish the taste of fair water and black bread. He may leave to others the costly conveniences of housekeeping, and large hospitality, and the possession of works of art. Let him feel that genius is a hospitality, and that he who can create works of art needs not collect them. He must live in a chamber, and postpone his self-indulgence, forewarned and forearmed against that frequent misfortune of men of genius, — the taste for luxury. This is the tragedy of genius, — attempting to drive along the ecliptic with one horse of the heavens and one horse of the earth, there is only discord and ruin and downfall to chariot and charioteer.

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

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

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

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

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

The power, which is at once spring and regulator in all efforts of reform, is the conviction that there is an infinite worthiness in man which will appear at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms are the removing of some impediment. Is it not the highest duty that man should be honored in us? I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I cannot be bought, — neither by comfort, neither by pride, — and though I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me. And if, at the same time, a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, or a juster way of thinking than mine, I ought to confess it by my respect and obedience, though it go to alter my whole way of life.

The Americans have many virtues, but they have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah and Amen. And yet they have the broadest meaning, and the most cogent application to Boston in 1841. The Americans have no faith. They rely on the power of a dollar; they are deaf to a sentiment. They think you may talk the north wind down as easily as raise society; and no class more faithless than the scholars or intellectual men. Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my friend, with a poet, with a conscientious youth who is still under the dominion of his own wild thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of society to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I see at once how paltry is all this generation of unbelievers, and what a house of cards their institutions are, and I see what one brave man, what one great thought executed might effect. I see that the reason of the distrust of the practical man in all theory, is his inability to perceive the means whereby we work. Look, he says, at the tools with which this world of yours is to be built. As we cannot make a planet, with atmosphere, rivers, and forests, by means of the best carpenters’ or engineers’ tools, with chemist’s laboratory and smith’s forge to boot, — so neither can we ever construct that heavenly society you prate of, out of foolish, sick, selfish men and women, such as we know them to be. But the believer not only beholds his heaven to be possible, but already to begin to exist, — not by the men or materials the statesman uses, but by men transfigured and raised above themselves by the power of principles. To principles something else is possible that transcends all the power of expedients.

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

But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on our modes of living, a nobler morning than that Arabian faith, in the sentiment of love. This is the one remedy for all ills, the panacea of nature. We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible. Our age and history, for these thousand years, has not been the history of kindness, but of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, and burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail we keep him so. An acceptance of the sentiment of love throughout Christendom for a season, would bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, with the devotion of his faculties to our service. See this wide society of laboring men and women. We allow ourselves to be served by them, we live apart from them, and meet them without a salute in the streets. We do not greet their talents, nor rejoice in their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, nor in the assembly of the people vote for what is dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the selfish noble and king from the foundation of the world. See, this tree always bears one fruit. In every household, the peace of a pair is poisoned by the malice, slyness, indolence, and alienation of domestics. Let any two matrons meet, and observe how soon their conversation turns on the troubles from their “help,” as our phrase is. In every knot of laborers, the rich man does not feel himself among his friends, — and at the polls he finds them arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition to him. We complain that the politics of masses of the people are controlled by designing men, and led in opposition to manifest justice and the common weal, and to their own interest. But the people do not wish to be represented or ruled by the ignorant and base. They only vote for these, because they were asked with the voice and semblance of kindness. They will not vote for them long. They inevitably prefer wit and probity. To use an Egyptian metaphor, it is not their will for any long time “to raise the nails of wild beasts, and to depress the heads of the sacred birds.” Let our affection flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a day the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work on institutions by the sun than by the wind. The state must consider the poor man, and all voices must speak for him. Every child that is born must have a just chance for his bread. Let the amelioration in our laws of property proceed from the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that no one should take more than his share, let him be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be a lover. I am to see to it that the world is the better for me, and to find my reward in the act. Love would put a new face on this weary old world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be superseded by this unarmed child. Love will creep where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imperceptible methods, — being its own lever, fulcrum, and power, — which force could never achieve. Have you not seen in the woods, in a late autumn morning, a poor fungus or mushroom, — a plant without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but a soft mush or jelly, — by its constant, total, and inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its way up through the frosty ground, and actually to lift a hard crust on its head? It is the symbol of the power of kindness. The virtue of this principle in human society in application to great interests is obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in history it has been tried in illustrious instances, with signal success. This great, overgrown, dead Christendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine.

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

“Sunshine was he
In the winter day;
And in the midsummer
Coolness and shade.”

He who would help himself and others, should not be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses of virtue, but a continent, persisting, immovable person, — such as we have seen a few scattered up and down in time for the blessing of the world; men who have in the gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which distributes the motion equably over all the wheels, and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks. It is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength, than that it should be concentrated into ecstasies, full of danger and followed by reactions. There is a sublime prudence, which is the very highest that we know of man, which, believing in a vast future, — sure of more to come than is yet seen, — postpones always the present hour to the whole life; postpones talent to genius, and special results to character. As the merchant gladly takes money from his income to add to his capital, so is the great man very willing to lose particular powers and talents, so that he gain in the elevation of his life. The opening of the spiritual senses disposes men ever to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal talents, their best means and skill of procuring a present success, their power and their fame, — to cast all things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine communications. A purer fame, a greater power rewards the sacrifice. It is the conversion of our harvest into seed. As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we now possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES

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

The times, as we say — or the present aspects of our social state, theral Science, Agriculture, Art, Trade, Letters, have their root in an invisible spiritual reality. To appear in these aspects, they must first exist, or have some necessary foundation. Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence. The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of to-day is building up the Future. The Times — the nations, manners, institutions, opinions, votes, are to be studied as omens, as sacred leaves, whereon a weighty sense is inscribed, if we have the wit and the love to search it out. Nature itself seems to propound to us this topic, and to invite us to explore the meaning of the conspicuous facts of the day. Everything that is popular, it has been said, deserves the attention of the philosopher: and this for the obvious reason, that although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet it characterizes the people.

Here is very good matter to be handled, if we are skilful; an abundance of important practical questions which it behooves us to understand. Let us examine the pretensions of the attacking and defending parties. Here is this great fact of Conservatism, entrenched in its immense redoubts, with Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas for its flank, and Andes for its rear, and the Atlantic and Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches, which has planted its crosses, and crescents, and stars and stripes, and various signs and badges of possession, over every rood of the planet, and says, `I will hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and whom I will, will I exclude and starve:’ so says Conservatism; and all the children of men attack the colossus in their youth, and all, or all but a few, bow before it when they are old. A necessity not yet commanded, a negative imposed on the will of man by his condition a deficiency in his force, is the foundation on which it rests. Let this side be fairly stated. Meantime, on the other part, arises Reform, and offers the sentiment of Love as an overmatch to this material might. I wish to consider well this affirmative side, which has a loftier port and reason than heretofore, which encroaches on the other every day, puts it out of countenance, out of reason, and out of temper, and leaves it nothing but silence and possession.

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

But the subject of the Times is not an abstract question. We talk of the world, but we mean a few men and women. If you speak of the age, you mean your own platoon of people, as Milton and Dante painted in colossal their platoons, and called them Heaven and Hell. In our idea of progress, we do not go out of this personal picture. We do not think the sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, or our climate more temperate, but only that our relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier. What is the reason to be given for this extreme attraction which persons have for us, but that they are the Age? they are the results of the Past; they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate, — these witty, suffering, blushing, intimidating figures of the only race in which there are individuals or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what it drives at. As trees make scenery, and constitute the hospitality of the landscape, so persons are the world to persons. A cunning mystery by which the Great Desart of thoughts and of planets takes this engaging form, to bring, as it would seem, its meanings nearer to the mind. Thoughts walk and speak, and look with eyes at me, and transport me into new and magnificent scenes. These are the pungent instructors who thrill the heart of each of us, and make all other teaching formal and cold. How I follow them with aching heart, with pining desire! I count myself nothing before them. I would die for them with joy. They can do what they will with me. How they lash us with those tongues! How they make the tears start, make us blush and turn pale, and lap us in Elysium to soothing dreams, and castles in the air! By tones of triumph; of dear love; by threats; by pride that freezes; these have the skill to make the world look bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tenderness and joy. I do not wonder at the miracles which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, when I remember what I have experienced from the varied notes of the human voice. They are an incalculable energy which countervails all other forces in nature, because they are the channel of supernatural powers. There is no interest or institution so poor and withered, but if a new strong man could be born into it, he would immediately redeem and replace it. A personal ascendency, — that is the only fact much worth considering. I remember, some years ago, somebody shocked a circle of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed that our people were identified with their religious denominations, by declaring that an eloquent man, — let him be of what sect soever, — would be ordained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. To be sure he would; and not only in ours, but in any church, mosque, or temple, on the planet; but he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method and classification, by the superior beauty of his own. Every fact we have was brought here by some person; and there is none that will not change and pass away before a person, whose nature is broader than the person which the fact in question represents. And so I find the Age walking about in happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes, and pleasant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer so, than in the statute-book, or in the investments of capital, which rather celebrate with mournful music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a fanatic; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called by city boys very ignorant, because they do not know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the hair-splitting conscientiousness of some eccentric person, who has found some new scruple to embarrass himself and his neighbors withal; is to be found that which shall constitute the times to come, more than in the now organized and accredited oracles. For, whatever is affirmative and now advancing, contains it. I think that only is real, which men love and rejoice in; not what they tolerate, but what they choose; what they embrace and avow, and not the things which chill, benumb, and terrify them.

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

Certainly, I think, if this were done, there would be much to admire as well as to condemn; souls of as lofty a port, as any in Greek or Roman fame, might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, and of persuasive speech; subtle thinkers, and men of wide sympathy, and an apprehension which looks over all history, and everywhere recognises its own. To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of men, more than enough: bloated promises, which end in nothing or little. And then truly great men, but with some defect in their composition, which neutralizes their whole force. Here is a Damascus blade, such as you may search through nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in some village to rust and ruin. And how many seem not quite available for that idea which they represent! Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I should rather say, a more surrendered soul, more informed and led by God, which is much in advance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but predicts what shall soon be the general fulness; as when we stand by the seashore, whilst the tide is coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a long while none comes up to that mark; but after some time the whole sea is there and beyond it.

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

The two omnipresent parties of History, the party of the Past and the party of the Future, divide society to-day as of old. Here is the innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the church from the last generation, and stand on no argument but possession. They have reason also, and, as I think, better reason than is commonly stated. No Burke, no Metternich has yet done full justice to the side of conservatism. But this class, however large, relying not on the intellect but on instinct, blends itself with the brute forces of nature, is respectable only as nature is, but the individuals have no attraction for us. It is the dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting this ancient domain to embark on seas of adventure, who engages our interest. Omitting then for the present all notice of the stationary class, we shall find that the movement party divides itself into two classes, the actors, and the students.

The actors constitute that great army of martyrs who, at least in America, by their conscience and philanthropy, occupy the ground which Calvinism occupied in the last age, and compose the visible church of the existing generation. The present age will be marked by its harvest of projects for the reform of domestic, civil, literary, and ecclesiastical institutions. The leaders of the crusades against War, Negro slavery, Intemperance, Government based on force, Usages of trade, Court and Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on the system of Education and the laws of Property, are the right successors of Luther, Knox, Robinson, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They have the same virtues and vices; the same noble impulse, and the same bigotry. These movements are on all accounts important; they not only check the special abuses, but they educate the conscience and the intellect of the people. How can such a question as the Slave trade be agitated for forty years by all the Christian nations, without throwing great light on ethics into the general mind? The fury, with which the slave-trader defends every inch of his bloody deck, and his howling auction-platform, is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, to wake the dull, and drive all neutrals to take sides, and to listen to the argument and the verdict. The Temperance-question, which rides the conversation often thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled at every public and at every private table, drawing with it all the curious ethics of the Pledge, of the Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture and the trade, is a gymnastic training to the casuistry and conscience of the time. Antimasonry had a deep right and wrong, which gradually emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy. The political questions touching the Banks; the Tariff; the limits of the executive power; the right of the constituent to instruct the representative; the treatment of the Indians; the Boundary wars; the Congress of nations; are all pregnant with ethical conclusions; and it is well if government and our social order can extricate themselves from these alembics, and find themselves still government and social order. The student of history will hereafter compute the singular value of our endless discussion of questions, to the mind of the period.

Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates, until it excludes the others from sight, and repels discreet persons by the unfairness of the plea, the movements are in reality all parts of one movement. There is a perfect chain, — see it, or see it not, — of reforms emerging from the surrounding darkness, each cherishing some part of the general idea, and all must be seen, in order to do justice to any one. Seen in this their natural connection, they are sublime. The conscience of the Age demonstrates itself in this effort to raise the life of man by putting it in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and the Just. The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments. They appear to us unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend on them. In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves apologizing for our employments; we speak of them with shame. Nature, literature, science, childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own daily work, not the ripe fruit and considered labors of man. This beauty which the fancy finds in everything else, certainly accuses that manner of life we lead. Why should it be hateful? Why should it contrast thus withall natural beauty? Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise us? Is there a necessity that the works of man should be sordid? Perhaps not. — Out of this fair Idea in the mind springs the effort at the Perfect. It is the interior testimony to a fairer possibility of life and manners, which agitates society every day with the offer of some new amendment. If we would make more strict inquiry concerning its origin, we find ourselves rapidly approaching the inner boundaries of thought, that term where speech becomes silence, and science conscience. For the origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst the natural, ever contains the supernatural for men. That is new and creative. That is alive. That alone can make a man other than he is. Here or nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded power.

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

“A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going upon that trade. What should he do? Fain he would have the name to be religious; fain he would bear up with his neighbors in that. What does he, therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, and to find himself out some factor, to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs; some divine of note and estimation that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks and keys, into his custody; and indeed makes the very person of that man his religion; esteems his associating with him a sufficient evidence and commendatory of his own piety. So that a man may say, his religion is now no more within himself, but is become a dividual moveable, and goes and comes near him, according as that good man frequents the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, feasts him, lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously laid to sleep, rises, is saluted, and after the malmsey, or some well spiced beverage, and better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion.”

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

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

These reforms are our contemporaries; they are ourselves; our own light, and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify. They are the simplest statements of man in these matters; the plain right and wrong. I cannot choose but allow and honor them. The impulse is good, and the theory; the practice is less beautiful. The Reformers affirm the inward life, but they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar means. They do not rely on precisely that strength which wins me to their cause; not on love, not on a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on circumstances, on money, on party; that is, on fear, on wrath, and pride. The love which lifted men to the sight of these better ends, was the true and best distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a principle more than a material force. I think that the soul of reform; the conviction, that not sensualism, not slavery, not war, not imprisonment, not even government, are needed, — but in lieu of them all, reliance on the sentiment of man, which will work best the more it is trusted; not reliance on numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust of numbers, and the feeling that then are we strongest, when most private and alone. The young men, who have been vexing society for these last years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this mistake; they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the Reform of Reforms must be accomplished without means.

The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind, than the evil tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those, who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better. It is done in the same way, it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics, and clamor. It is a buzz in the ear. I cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which display to me such partiality of character. We do not want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of water, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers actions, countless, endless actions. You have on some occasion played a bold part. You have set your heart and face against society, when you thought it wrong, and returned it frown for frown. Excellent: now can you afford to forget it, reckoning all your action no more than the passing of your hand through the air, or a little breath of your mouth? The world leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea. To the youth diffident of his ability, and full of compunctionat his unprofitable existence, the temptation is always great to lend himself to public movements, and as one of a party accomplish what he cannot hope to effect alone. But he must resist the degradation of a man to a measure. I must act with truth, though I should never come to act, as you call it, with effect. I must consent to inaction. A patience which is grand; a brave and cold neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it be done in a deep, upper piety; a consent to solitude and inaction, which proceeds out of an unwillingness to violate character, is the century which makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to express the respect and joy I feel before this sublime connection of reforms, now in their infancy around us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties of self-reliance. I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, the church, yea the friends of the heart are phantasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be respected.

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

But the man of ideas, accounting the circumstance nothing, judges of the commonwealth from the state of his own mind. `If,’ he says, `I am selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to establish it, wherever I go. But if I am just, then is there no slavery, let the laws say what they will. For if I treat all men as gods, how to me can there be such a thing as a slave?’ But how frivolous is your war against circumstances. This denouncing philanthropist is himself a slave holder in every word and look. Does he free me? Does he cheer me? He is the state of Georgia, or Alabama, with their sanguinary slave-laws walking here on our north-eastern shores. We are all thankful he has no more political power, as we are fond of liberty ourselves. I am afraid our virtue is a little geographical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and swears, and I can see to the end of it; but, I own, our virtue makes me ashamed; so sour and narrow, so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, how trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, whilst he aims merely at the circumstance of the slave. Give the slave the least elevation of religious sentiment, and he is no slave: you are the slave: he not only in his humility feels his superiority, feels that much deplored condition of his to be a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is the master. The exaggeration, which our young people make of his wrongs, characterizes themselves. What are no trifles to them, they naturally think are no trifles to Pompey.

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

A new disease has fallen on the life of man. Every Age, like every human body, has its own distemper. Other times have had war, or famine, or a barbarism domestic or bordering, as their antagonism. Our forefathers walked in the world and went to their graves, tormented with the fear of Sin, and the terror of the Day of Judgment. These terrors have lost their force, and our torment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which we all at last believe in) is fair and beneficent. Our Religion assumes the negative form of rejection. Out of love of the true, we repudiate the false: and the Religion is an abolishing criticism. A great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow of all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the best spirits, which distinguishes the period. We do not find the same trait in the Arabian, in the Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English periods; no, but in other men a natural firmness. The men did not see beyond the need of the hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted nothing. We mistrust every step we take. We find it the worst thing about time, that we know not what to do with it. We are so sharp-sighted that we can neither work nor think, neither read Plato nor not read him.

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

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

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

But have a little patience with this melancholy humor. Their unbelief arises out of a greater Belief; their inaction out of a scorn of inadequate action. By the side of these men, the hot agitators have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they even look smaller than the others. Of the two, I own, I like the speculators best. They have some piety which looks with faith to a fair Future, unprofaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize it. And truly we shall find much to console us, when we consider the cause of their uneasiness. It is the love of greatness, it is the need of harmony, the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exorbitant Idea. No man can compare the ideas and aspirations of the innovators of the present day, with those of former periods, without feeling how great and high this criticism is. The revolutions that impend over society are not now from ambition and rapacity, from impatience of one or another form of government, but from new modes of thinking, which shall recompose society after a new order, which shall animate labor by love and science, which shall destroy the value of many kinds of property, and replace all property within the dominion of reason and equity. There was never so great a thought laboring in the breasts of men, as now. It almost seems as if what was aforetime spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now spoken plainly, the doctrine, namely, of the indwelling of the Creator in man. The spiritualist wishes this only, that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual, that is, anything positive, dogmatic, or personal. The excellence of this class consists in this, that they have believed; that, affirming the need of new and higher modes of living and action, they have abstained from the recommendation of low methods. Their fault is that they have stopped at the intellectual perception; that their will is not yet inspired from the Fountain of Love. But whose fault is this? and what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! We have come to that which is the spring of all power, of beauty and virtue, of art and poetry; and who shall tell us according to what law its inspirations and its informations are given or withholden?

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

But turn it how we will, as we ponder this meaning of the times, every new thought drives us to the deep fact, that the Time is the child of the Eternity. The main interest which any aspects of the Times can have for us, is the great spirit which gazes through them, the light which they can shed on the wonderful questions, What we are? and Whither we tend? We do not wish to be deceived. Here we drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea; — but from what port did we sail? Who knows? Or to what port are we bound? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far. But what know they more than we? They also found themselves on this wondrous sea. No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their speaking-trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, Not in us; not in Time. Where then but in Ourselves, where but in that Thought through which we communicate with absolute nature, and are made aware that, whilst we shed the dust of which we are built, grain by grain, till it is all gone, the law which clothes us with humanity remains new? where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from within, shall we learn the Truth? Faithless, faithless, we fancy that with the dust we depart and are not; and do not know that the law and the perception of the law are at last one; that only as much as the law enters us, becomes us, we are living men, — immortal with the immortality of this law. Underneath all these appearances, lies that which is, that which lives, that which causes. This ever renewing generation of appearances rests on a reality, and a reality that is alive.

To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of nature, the departments of life, and the passages of his experience, is simply the information they yield him of this supreme nature which lurks within all. That reality, that causing force is moral. The Moral Sentiment is but its other name. It makes by its presence or absence right and wrong, beauty and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the granite comes to the surface, and towers into the highest mountains, and, if we dig down, we find it below the superficial strata, so in all the details of our domestic or civil life, is hidden the elemental reality, which ever and anon comes to the surface, and forms the grand men, who are the leaders and examples, rather than the companions of the race. The granite is curiously concealed under a thousand formations and surfaces, under fertile soils, and grasses, and flowers, under well-manured, arable fields, and large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation of these, and is always indicating its presence by slight but sure signs. So is it with the Life of our life; so close does that also hide. I read it in glad and in weeping eyes: I read it in the pride and in the humility of people: it is recognized in every bargain and in every complaisance, in every criticism, and in all praise: it is voted for at elections; it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy eloquence of the senate, sole victor; histories are written of it, holidays decreed to it; statues, tombs, churches, built to its honor; yet men seem to fear and to shun it, when it comes barely to view in our immediate neighborhood.

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

THE CONSERVATIVE

A Lecture delivered at the Masonic Temple, Boston, December 9, 1841

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

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

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

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

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

‘O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, ‘thou canst not hold thine own, but by making more. Thy oysters are barnacles and cockles, and with the next flowing of the tide, they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’

‘I see,’ rejoins Saturn, ‘thou art in league with Night, thou art become an evil eye; thou spakest from love; now thy words smite me with hatred. I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’  ‘I appeal to Fate also,’ said Uranus, ‘must there not be motion?’  But Saturn was silent, and went on making oysters for a thousand years.

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

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

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see a better fact. The castle, which conservatism is set to defend, is the actual state of things, good and bad. The project of innovation is the best possible state of things. Of course, conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate; it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. Conservatism is more candid to behold another’s worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and to your thought, whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men’s temper governs them; that for me, it avails not to trust in principles; they will fail me; I must bend a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application,  law for all that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction.

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

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

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.

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

That which is best about conservatism, that which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, inspires reverence in all, is the Inevitable. There is the question not only, what the conservative says for himself? but, why must he say it? What insurmountable fact binds him to that side? Here is the fact which men call Fate, and fate in dread degrees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the consideration that the Conscience commands this or that, but necessitating the question, whether the faculties of man will play him true in resisting the facts of universal experience? For although the commands of the Conscience are essentially absolute, they are historically limitary. Wisdom does not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is, a conditioned one, such a one as the faculties of man and the constitution of things will warrant. The reformer, the partisan loses himself in driving to the utmost some specialty of right conduct, until his own nature and all nature resist him; but Wisdom attempts nothing enormous and disproportioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot perform or nearly perform. We have all a certain intellection or presentiment of reform existing in the mind, which does not yet descend into the character, and those who throw themselves blindly on this lose themselves. Whatever they attempt in that direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor himself. This is the penalty of having transcended nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with impossibilities; but here is sacred fact. This also was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or it could not have existed; it has life in it, or it could not continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or may not be, but this has the endorsement of nature and a long friendship and cohabitation with the powers of nature. This will stand until a better cast of the dice is made. The contest between the Future and the Past is one between Divinity entering, and Divinity departing. You are welcome to try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace the actual order by that ideal republic you announce, for nothing but God will expel God. But plainly the burden of proof must lie with the projector. We hold to this, until you can demonstrate something better.

The system of property and law goes back for its origin to barbarous and sacred times; it is the fruit of the same mysterious cause as the mineral or animal world. There is a natural sentiment and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of barbarous and aboriginal usages, which is a homage to the element of necessity and divinity which is in them. The respect for the old names of places, of mountains, and streams, is universal. The Indian and barbarous name can never be supplanted without loss. The ancients tell us that the gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs; and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin could not be explored, passed among the junior tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations.

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the existing social system, that it leaves no one out of it. We may be partial, but Fate is not. All men have their root in it. You who quarrel with the arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil all, and risk the indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in this, and your deeds contradict your words every day. For as you cannot jump from the ground without using the resistance of the ground, nor put out the boat to sea, without shoving from the shore, nor attain liberty without rejecting obligation, so you are under the necessity of using the Actual order of things, in order to disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to take away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and in the strength of its bread you would break up the oven. But you are betrayed by your own nature. You also are conservatives. However men please to style themselves, I see no other than a conservative party. You are not only identical with us in your needs, but also in your methods and aims. You quarrel with my conservatism, but it is to build up one of your own; it will have a new beginning, but the same course and end, the same trials, the same passions; among the lovers of the new I observe that there is a jealousy of the newest, and that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable as the pope himself. On these and the like grounds of general statement, conservatism plants itself without danger of being displaced. Especially before this personal appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, must confess that no man is to be found good enough to be entitled to stand champion for the principle. But when this great tendency comes to practical encounters, and is challenged by young men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of hunger, distress, and exclusion from opportunities, it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beggar, with all the reason of things, one would say, on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, clothe, and warm himself, he is met by warnings on every hand, that this thing and that thing have owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says; If I am born into the earth, where is my part? have the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where to build my cabin.

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

And what is that peril?

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

And by what authority, kind gentlemen?

By our law.

And your law,  is it just?

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

I repeat the question, Is your law just?

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

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

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies to this plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, a man of many virtues:

Your opposition is feather-brained and overfine. Young man, I have no skill to talk with you, but look at me; I have risen early and sat late, and toiled honestly, and painfully for very many years. I never dreamed about methods; I laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I possess; it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by work, and you must show me a warrant like these stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor, before I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as your own.

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

On the other hand, precisely the defence which was set up for the British Constitution, namely, that with all its admitted defects, rotten boroughs and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial justice was somehow done; the wisdom and the worth did get into parliament, and every interest did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented; the same defence is set up for the existing institutions. They are not the best; they are not just; and in respect to you, personally, O brave young man! they cannot be justified. They have, it is most true, left you no acre for your own, and no law but our law, to the ordaining of which, you were no party. But they do answer the end, they are really friendly to the good; unfriendly to the bad; they second the industrious, and the kind; they foster genius. They really have so much flexibility as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, the same chance of demonstration and success which they might have, if there was no law and no property.

It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that nothing is given you, no outfit, no exhibition; for in this institution of credit, which is as universal as honesty and promise in the human countenance, always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and land and tools and stock to the young adventurer. And if in any one respect they have come short, see what ample retribution of good they have made. They have lost no time and spared no expense to collect libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages have not been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich niggardly. Have we not atoned for this small offence (which we could not help) of leaving you no right in the soil, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral and national wealth? Would you have been born like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your freedom on a heath, and the range of a planet which had no shed or boscage to cover you from sun and wind,  to this towered and citied world? to this world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New York? For thee Naples, Florence, and Venice, for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adriatic; for thee both Indies smile; for thee the hospitable North opens its heated palaces under the polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every direction across the land, and fleets of floating palaces with every security for strength, and provision for luxury, swim by sail and by steam through all the waters of this world. Every island for thee has a town; every town a hotel. Though thou wast born landless, yet to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established usage, scores of servants are swarming in every strange place with cap and knee to thy command, scores, nay hundreds and thousands, for thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and every whim is anticipated and served by the best ability of the whole population of each country. The king on the throne governs for thee, and the judge judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, the joiner hammers, the postman rides. Is it not exaggerating a trifle to insist on a formal acknowledgment of your claims, when these substantial advantages have been secured to you? Now can your children be educated, your labor turned to their advantage, and its fruits secured to them after your death. It is frivolous to say, you have no acre, because you have not a mathematically measured piece of land. Providence takes care that you shall have a place, that you are waited for, and come accredited; and, as soon as you put your gift to use, you shall have acre or acre’s worth according to your exhibition of desert, acre, if you need land; acre’s worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or make shoes, or wheels, to the tilling of the soil.

Besides, it might temper your indignation at the supposed wrong which society has done you, to keep the question before you, how society got into this predicament? Who put things on this false basis? No single man, but all men. No man voluntarily and knowingly; but it is the result of that degree of culture there is in the planet. The order of things is as good as the character of the population permits. Consider it as the work of a great and beneficent and progressive necessity, which, from the first pulsation of the first animal life, up to the present high culture of the best nations, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude fostermother though she has taught you a better wisdom than her own, and has set hopes in your heart which shall be history in the next ages. You are yourself the result of this manner of living, this foul compromise, this vituperated Sodom. It nourished you with care and love on its breast, as it had nourished many a lover of the right, and many a poet, and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so irremediably bad? Then again, if the mitigations are considered, do not all the mischiefs virtually vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how every personal character reacts on the form, and makes it new? A strong person makes the law and custom null before his own will. Then the principle of love and truth reappears in the strictest courts of fashion and property. Under the richest robes, in the darlings of the selectest circles of European or American aristocracy, the strong heart will beat with love of mankind, with impatience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to achieve its own fate, and make every ornament it wears authentic and real.

Moreover, as we have already shown that there is no pure reformer, so it is to be considered that there is no pure conservative, no man who from the beginning to the end of his life maintains the defective institutions; but he who sets his face like a flint against every novelty, when approached in the confidence of conversation, in the presence of friendly and generous persons, has also his gracious and relenting motions, and espouses for the time the cause of man; and even if this be a shortlived emotion, yet the remembrance of it in private hours mitigates his selfishness and compliance with custom.

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising one morning before day from his bed of moss and dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to reform the corruption of mankind. On his way he encountered many travellers who greeted him courteously; and the cabins of the peasants and the castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will easily introduced him to many families of the rich, and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told him how much love they bore their children, and how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest they should fail in their duty to them. ‘What!’ he said, ‘and this on rich embroidered carpets, on marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about you?’  ‘Look at our pictures and books,’ they said, ‘and we will tell you, good Father, how we spent the last evening. These are stories of godly children and holy families and romantic sacrifices made in old or in recent times by great and not mean persons; and last evening, our family was collected, and our husbands and brothers discoursed sadly on what we could save and give in the hard times.’ Then came in the men, and they said, ‘What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want gifts?’ Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘This way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers; what can I do?’

The reformer concedes that these mitigations exist, and that, if he proposed comfort, he should take sides with the establishment. Your words are excellent, but they do not tell the whole. Conservatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but am less; I have more clothes, but am not so warm; more armor, but less courage; more books, but less wit. What you say of your planted, builded and decorated world, is true enough, and I gladly avail myself of its convenience; yet I have remarked that what holds in particular, holds in general, that the plant Man does not require for his most glorious flowering this pomp of preparation and convenience, but the thoughts of some beggarly Homer who strolled, God knows when, in the infancy and barbarism of the old world; the gravity and sense of some slave Moses who leads away his fellow slaves from their masters; the contemplation of some Scythian Anacharsis; the erect, formidable valor of some Dorian townsmen in the town of Sparta; the vigor of Clovis the Frank, and Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Mahomet, Ali, and Omar the Arabians, Saladin the Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed to build what you call society, on the spot and in the instant when the sound mind in a sound body appeared. Rich and fine is your dress, O conservatism! your horses are of the best blood; your roads are well cut and well paved; your pantry is full of meats and your cellar of wines, and a very good state and condition are you for gentlemen and ladies to live under; but every one of these goods steals away a drop of my blood. I want the necessity of supplying my own wants. All this costly culture of yours is not necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder peasant, who sits neglected there in a corner, carries a whole revolution of man and nature in his head, which shall be a sacred history to some future ages. For man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.

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

The conservative party in the universe concedes that the radical would talk sufficiently to the purpose, if we were still in the garden of Eden; he legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and this omission makes his whole doctrine false. The idealist retorts, that the conservative falls into a far more noxious error in the other extreme. The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious system of trade has existed so long, it has stereotyped itself in the human generation, and misers are born. And now that sickness has got such a foot-hold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean; society has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, and all its laws are quarantine. If any man resist, and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as good against the general despair, society frowns on him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her granaries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will serve him a sexton’s turn. Conservatism takes as low a view of every part of human action and passion. Its religion is just as bad; a lozenge for the sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper; mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; always mitigations, never remedies; pardons for sin, funeral honors, never self-help, renovation, and virtue. Its social and political action has no better aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the day and year about, and make the world last our day; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new and more excellent creation; a timid cobbler and patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause of education is urged in this country with the utmost earnestness, on what ground? why on this, that the people have the power, and if they are not instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, reading, trading, and governing class, inspired with a taste for the same competitions and prizes, they will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and perhaps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is taught in the same spirit. The contractors who were building a road out of Baltimore, some years ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and refractory, to a degree that embarrassed the agents, and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. The corporation were advised to call off the police, and build a Catholic chapel; which they did; the priest presently restored order, and the work went on prosperously. Such hints, be sure, are too valuable to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath, or other religious institutions, give yourself no concern about maintaining them. They have already acquired a market value as conservators of property; and if priest and church-member should fail, the chambers of commerce and the presidents of the Banks, the very innholders and landlords of the county would muster with fury to their support.

Of course, religion in such hands loses its essence. Instead of that reliance, which the soul suggests on the eternity of truth and duty, men are misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the moment they cease to be the instantaneous creations of the devout sentiment, are worthless. Religion among the low becomes low. As it loses its truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They detect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not weaken the state, do not take off the strait jacket from dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep up the hoax the best he can; must patronize providence and piety, and wherever he sees anything that will keep men amused, schools or churches or poetry, or picture-galleries or music, or what not, he must cry “Hist-a-boy,” and urge the game on. What a compliment we pay to the good SPIRIT with our superserviceable zeal!

But not to balance reasons for and against the establishment any longer, and if it still be asked in this necessity of partial organization, which party on the whole has the highest claims on our sympathy? I bring it home to the private heart, where all such questions must have their final arbitrement. How will every strong and generous mind choose its ground,  with the defenders of the old? or with the seekers of the new? Which is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, and beneficent man; to throw him on his resources, and tax the strength of his character? On which part will each of us find himself in the hour of health and of aspiration?

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

But in peace and a commercial state we depend, not as we ought, on our knowledge and all men’s knowledge that we are honest men, but we cowardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is always at last the virtue of some men in the society, which keeps the law in any reverence and power. Is there not something shameful that I should owe my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not to the knowledge of my countrymen that I am useful, but to their respect for sundry other reputable persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtues still keep the law in good odor?

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

But if I allow myself in derelictions, and become idle and dissolute, I quickly come to love the protection of a strong law, because I feel no title in myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and covetous person no love flows; to him mankind would pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once relaxed; nay, if they could give their verdict, they would say, that his self-indulgence and his oppression deserved punishment from society, and not that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The law acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and makes him worse the longer it protects him.

In conclusion, to return from this alternation of partial views, to the high platform of universal and necessary history, it is a happiness for mankind that innovation has got on so far, and has so free a field before it. The boldness of the hope men entertain transcends all former experience. It calms and cheers them with the picture of a simple and equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flowered on what tree? It was not imported from the stock of some celestial plant, but grew here on the wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this old and vituperated system of things has borne so fair a child. It predicts that amidst a planet peopled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be born.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

A Lecture read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842

The first thing we have to say respecting what are called new views here in New England, at the present time, is, that they are not new, but the very oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new times. The light is always identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner, thought only appears in the objects it classifies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances, and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, facts which are of the same nature as the faculty which reports them, and not liable to doubt; facts which in their first appearance to us assume a native superiority to material facts, degrading these into a language by which the first are to be spoken; facts which it only needs a retirement from the senses to discern. Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.

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

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is to show him, that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundations of his banking-house or Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to the angles of his structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot, perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole state and faculty. One thing, at least, he says is certain, and does not give me the headache, that figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, moreover, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it again to-morrow; — but for these thoughts, I know not whence they are. They change and pass away. But ask him why he believes that an uniform experience will continue uniform, or on what grounds he founds his faith in his figures, and he will perceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as strange and quaking foundations as his proud edifice of stone.

In the order of thought, the materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Although in his action overpowered by the laws of action, and so, warmly cooperating with men, even preferring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientifically, or after the order of thought, he is constrained to degrade persons into representatives of truths. He does not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely, property, otherwise than as a manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidelity of details the laws of being; he does not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind; nor the church; nor charities; nor arts, for themselves; but hears, as at a vast distance, what they say, as if his consciousness would speak to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, — that is the Universe. His experience inclines him to behold the procession of facts you call the world, as flowing perpetually outward from an invisible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective or relative existence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre of him.

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

The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possible applications to the state of man, without the admission of anything unspiritual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. Thus, the spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought, and never, who said it? And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules and measures on the spirit than its own.

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

“You heard her say herself it was not I.”
Emilia replies,
“The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do, is done only because they are overpowered by the humanities that speak on all sides; and they consent to such labor as is open to them, though to their lofty dream the writing of Iliads or Hamlets, or the building of cities or empires seems drudgery.

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

They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, — they are not stockish or brute, — but joyous; susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. Like the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten times a day, “But are you sure you love me?” Nay, if they tell you their whole thought, they will own that love seems to them the last and highest gift of nature; that there are persons whom in their hearts they daily thank for existing, — persons whose faces are perhaps unknown to them, but whose fame and spirit have penetrated their solitude, — and for whose sake they wish to exist. To behold the beauty of another character, which inspires a new interest in our own; to behold the beauty lodged in a human being, with such vivacity of apprehension, that I am instantly forced home to inquire if I am not deformity itself: to behold in another the expression of a love so high that it assures itself, — assures itself also to me against every possible casualty except my unworthiness; — these are degrees on the scale of human happiness, to which they have ascended; and it is a fidelity to this sentiment which has made common association distasteful to them. They wish a just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you, and they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity which you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish to be spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If you do not need to hear my thought, because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you would not understand what I say. I will not molest myself for you. I do not wish to be profaned.

And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not this love, would prevail in their circumstances, because of the extravagant demand they make on human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new feature in their portrait, that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics. Their quarrel with every man they meet, is not with his kind, but with his degree. There is not enough of him, — that is the only fault. They prolong their privilege of childhood in this wise, of doing nothing, — but making immense demands on all the gladiators in the lists of action and fame. They make us feel the strange disappointment which overcasts every human youth. So many promising youths, and never a finished man! The profound nature will have a savage rudeness; the delicate one will be shallow, or the victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished will have some capital absurdity; and so every piece has a crack. ‘T is strange, but this masterpiece is a result of such an extreme delicacy, that the most unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize the most aspiring genius, and spoil the work. Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his profession, and he will ask you, “Where are the old sailors? do you not see that all are young men?” And we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the old idealists? where are they who represented to the last generation that extravagant hope, which a few happy aspirants suggest to ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, one asks, Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly world, to these? Are they dead, — taken in early ripeness to the gods, — as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or did the high idea die out of them, and leave their unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet, announcing to all that the celestial inhabitant, who once gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be better with the new generation? We easily predict a fair future to each new candidate who enters the lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this hope. Then these youths bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their unconcealed dissatisfaction, they expose our poverty, and the insignificance of man to man. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. He ought to be a shower of benefits — a great influence, which should never let his brother go, but should refresh old merits continually with new ones; so that, though absent, he should never be out of my mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the earth should open at my side, or my last hour were come, his name should be the prayer I should utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man is cheap, and friendship wants its deep sense. We affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes not, they let us go. These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.

With this passion for what is great and extraordinary, it cannot be wondered at, that they are repelled by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad company. And it is really a wish to be met, — the wish to find society for their hope and religion, — which prompts them to shun what is called society. They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when they have quitted mankind, and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy creation of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.

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

On the part of these children, it is replied, that life and their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be squandered on such trifles as you propose to them. What you call your fundamental institutions, your great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Each `Cause,’ as it is called, — say Abolition, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Unitarianism, — becomes speedily a little shop, where the article, let it have been at first never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. You make very free use of these words `great’ and `holy,’ but few things appear to them such. Few persons have any magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and the philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery. As to the general course of living, and the daily employments of men, they cannot see much virtue in these, since they are parts of this vicious circle; and, as no great ends are answered by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by which they are maintained. Nay, they have made the experiment, and found that, from the liberal professions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the courtesies of the academy and the college to the conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and seeming, which intimates a frightful skepticism, a life without love, and an activity without an aim.

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

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

`Then,’ says the world, `show me your own.’
`We have none.’
`What will you do, then?’ cries the world.
`We will wait.’
`How long?’
`Until the Universe rises up and calls us to work.’
`But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’

`Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish, (as you call it,) but I will not move until I have the highest command. If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not cheer me. I know that which shall come will cheer me. If I cannot work, at least I need not lie. All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie. In other places, other men have encountered sharp trials, and have behaved themselves well. The martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat-hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite Counsels?’

But, to come a little closer to the secret of these persons, we must say, that to them it seems a very easy matter to answer the objections of the man of the world, but not so easy to dispose of the doubts and objections that occur to themselves. They are exercised in their own spirit with queries, which acquaint them with all adversity, and with the trials of the bravest heroes. When I asked them concerning their private experience, they answered somewhat in this wise: It is not to be denied that there must be some wide difference between my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain brief experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market, in some place, at some time, — whether in the body or out of the body, God knoweth, — and made me aware that I had played the fool with fools all this time, but that law existed for me and for all; that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience, and the worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more. Well, in the space of an hour, probably, I was let down from this height; I was at my old tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society. My life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world; I ask, When shall I die, and be relieved of the responsibility of seeing an Universe which I do not use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a benign climate.

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

But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit to add that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the same taste is observable in all the moral movements of the time, in the religious and benevolent enterprises. They have a liberal, even an aesthetic spirit. A reference to Beauty in action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted restitution, it was prudence which granted it. But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and the pauper, and the drunkard is for Beauty, — is for a necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say, this is the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips, does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are austere; they preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we are tempted to smile, and we flee from the working to the speculative reformer, to escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for these days of derision and criticism! We call the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the true. — They are lovers of nature also, and find an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world for the violated order and grace of man.

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to be spoken or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves open to criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be told of them as of any. There will be cant and pretension; there will be subtilty and moonshine. These persons are of unequal strength, and do not all prosper. They complain that everything around them must be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors insist on their respect to this institution, and that usage; to an obsolete history; to some vocation, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or morning or evening call, which they resist, as what does not concern them. But it costs such sleepless nights, alienations and misgivings, — they have so many moods about it; — these old guardians never change their minds; they have but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony is very perverse, — that it is quite as much as Antony can do, to assert his rights, abstain from what he thinks foolish, and keep his temper. He cannot help the reaction of this injustice in his own mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all freedom and flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolic nature are quite out of the question; it is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide. This is no time for gaiety and grace. His strength and spirits are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics; they surrender themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf, — church and old book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding, preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of greater momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.

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

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

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a political party, or the division of an estate, — will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes: — all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1844

GENTLEMEN:

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

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

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these improvements in creating an American sentiment. An unlooked for consequence of the railroad, is the increased acquaintance it has given the American people with the boundless resources of their own soil. If this invention has reduced England to a third of its size, by bringing people so much nearer, in this country it has given a new celerity to time, or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts of land, the choice of water privileges, the working of mines, and other natural advantages. Railroad iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.

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

“Our garden is the immeasurable earth,
The heaven’s blue pillars are Medea’s house.”

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

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

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

Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific disposition of the people, every thing invites to the arts of agriculture, of gardening, and domestic architecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plantations in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to us. There is no feature of the old countries that strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens at Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine: works easily imitated here, and which might well make the land dear to the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture, painting, and religious and civil architecture have become effete, and have passed into second childhood. We have twenty degrees of latitude wherein to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling enlarge the opportunity of selection, by making it easy to cultivate very distant tracts, and yet remain in strict intercourse with the centres of trade and population. And the whole force of all the arts goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwellings. A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the landscape is pleasing, the garden shows it, — if tame, it excludes it. A little grove, which any farmer can find, or cause to grow near his house, will, in a few years, make cataracts and chains of mountains quite unnecessary to his scenery; and he is so contented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards, and river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White Hills, and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And yet the selection of a fit houselot has the same advantage over an indifferent one, as the selection to a given employment of a man who has a genius for that work. In the last case, the culture of years will never make the most painstaking apprentice his equal: no more will gardening give the advantage of a happy site to a house in a hole or on a pinnacle. In America, we have hitherto little to boast in this kind. The cities drain the country of the best part of its population: the flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much inferior class. The land, — travel a whole day together, — looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half the year on their estates, and to fill them with every convenience and ornament. Of course, these make model farms, and model architecture, and are a constant education to the eye of the surrounding population. Whatever events in progress shall go to disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

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

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

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, in connexion with its youth, without a presentiment that here shall laws and institutions exist on some scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the gravity of nature will infuse itself into the code. A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships from all corners of the world to the great gates of North America, namely, Boston, New York, and New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the prairie and the mountains, and quickly contributing their private thought to the public opinion, their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the election, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other. It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the Future. From Washington, proverbially `the city of magnificent distances,’ through all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Destiny by which the human race is guided, — the race never dying, the individual never spared, — to results affecting masses and ages. Men are narrow and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in their calculated and voluntary activity, but in what befalls, with or without their design. Only what is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love and good are inevitable, and in the course of things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small balance in brute facts always favorable to the side of reason. All the facts in any part of nature shall be tabulated, and the results shall indicate the same security and benefit; so slight as to be hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere is flattened at the poles, and swelled at the equator; a form flowing necessarily from the fluid state, yet the form, the mathematician assures us, required to prevent the protuberances of the continent, or even of lesser mountains cast up at any time by earthquakes, from continually deranging the axis of the earth. The census of the population is found to keep an invariable equality in the sexes, with a trifling predominance in favor of the male, as if to counterbalance the necessarily increased exposure of male life in war, navigation, and other accidents. Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at somewhat better than the actual creatures: amelioration in nature, which alone permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God. This Genius, or Destiny, is of the sternest administration, though rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be styled a cruel kindness, serving the whole even to the ruin of the member; a terrible communist, reserving all profits to the community, without dividend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to yourself. For Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into to-morrow’s creation; — not a superfluous grain of sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense and public works. It is because Nature thus saves and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor particulars are so crushed and straitened, and find it so hard to live. She flung us out in her plenty, but we cannot shed a hair, or a paring of a nail, but instantly she snatches at the shred, and appropriates it to the general stock. Our condition is like that of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound himself, or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incontinently.

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

It is easy to see that the existing generation are conspiring with a beneficence, which, in its working for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one, which infatuates the most selfish men to act against their private interest for the public welfare. We build railroads, we know not for what or for whom; but one thing is certain, that we who build will receive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit will accrue; they are essential to the country, but that will be felt not until we are no longer countrymen. We do the like in all matters: —

“Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set
By secret and inviolable springs.”

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

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

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family management gets to be rather troublesome to all but the papa; the sceptre comes to be a crowbar. And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes, and finally destroys. The king is compelled to call in the aid of his brothers and cousins, and remote relations, to help him keep his overgrown house in order; and this club of noblemen always come at last to have a will of their own; they combine to brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of the people. Each chief attaches as many followers as he can, by kindness, maintenance, and gifts; and as long as war lasts, the nobles, who must be soldiers, rule very well. But when peace comes, the nobles prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters; their frolics turn out to be insulting and degrading to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a bandit and brigand.

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

By this means, however, it has done its work. It has its faults, and will come to an end, as the others do. The philosopher and lover of man have much harm to say of trade; but the historian will see that trade was the principle of Liberty; that trade planted America and destroyed Feudalism; that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery. We complain of its oppression of the poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But the aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of that friendly Power which works for us in our own despite. We design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise and far better. This beneficent tendency, omnipotent without violence, exists and works. Every line of history inspires a confidence that we shall not go far wrong; that things mend. That is the moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, the prolific mother of reforms. Our part is plainly not to throw ourselves across the track, to block improvement, and sit till we are stone, but to watch the uprise of successive mornings, and to conspire with the new works of new days. Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that the office of statute law should be to express, and not to impede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, new things. Trade was one instrument, but Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and better, whose signs are already dawning in the sky.

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

In consequence of the revolution in the state of society wrought by trade, Government in our times is beginning to wear a clumsy and cumbrous appearance. We have already seen our way to shorter methods. The time is full of good signs. Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All this beneficent socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling cry of voices for the education of the people, indicates that Government has other offices than those of banker and executioner. Witness the new movements in the civilized world, the Communism of France, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades’ Unions; the English League against the Corn Laws; and the whole Industrial Statistics, so called. In Paris, the blouse, the badge of the operative, has begun to make its appearance in the saloons. Witness, too, the spectacle of three Communities which have within a very short time sprung up within this Commonwealth, besides several others undertaken by citizens of Massachusetts within the territory of other States. These proceeded from a variety of motives, from an impatience of many usages in common life, from a wish for greater freedom than the manners and opinions of society permitted, but in great part from a feeling that the true offices of the State, the State had let fall to the ground; that in the scramble of parties for the public purse, the main duties of government were omitted, — the duty to instruct the ignorant, to supply the poor with work and with good guidance. These communists preferred the agricultural life as the most favorable condition for human culture; but they thought that the farm, as we manage it, did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer’s flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool. It seemed a great deal worse, because the farmer is living in the same town with men who pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one side, is agricultural chemistry, coolly exposing the nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture and ruinous expense of manures, and offering, by means of a teaspoonful of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank into corn; and, on the other, the farmer, not only eager for the information, but with bad crops and in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are Etzlers and mechanical projectors, who, with the Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the smallest union would make every man rich; — and, on the other side, a multitude of poor men and women seeking work, and who cannot find enough to pay their board. The science is confident, and surely the poverty is real. If any means could be found to bring these two together!

This was one design of the projectors of the Associations which are now making their first feeble experiments. They were founded in love, and in labor. They proposed, as you know, that all men should take a part in the manual toil, and proposed to amend the condition of men, by substituting harmonious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his system, to distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were disagreeable, and likely to be omitted, were to be assumed.

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

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

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

This is the value of the Communities; not what they have done, but the revolution which they indicate as on the way. Yes, Government must educate the poor man. Look across the country from any hill-side around us, and the landscape seems to crave Government. The actual differences of men must be acknowledged, and met with love and wisdom. These rising grounds which command the champaign below, seem to ask for lords, true lords, land-lords, who understand the land and its uses, and the applicabilities of men, and whose government would be what it should, namely, mediation between want and supply. How gladly would each citizen pay a commission for the support and continuation of good guidance. None should be a governor who has not a talent for governing. Now many people have a native skill for carving out business for many hands; a genius for the disposition of affairs; and are never happier than when difficult practical questions, which embarrass other men, are to be solved. All lies in light before them; they are in their element. Could any means be contrived to appoint only these! There really seems a progress towards such a state of things, in which this work shall be done by these natural workmen; and this, not certainly through any increased discretion shown by the citizens at elections, but by the gradual contempt into which official government falls, and the increasing disposition of private adventurers to assume its fallen functions. Thus the costly Post Office is likely to go into disuse before the private transportation-shop of Harnden and his competitors. The currency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. Justice is continually administered more and more by private reference, and not by litigation. We have feudal governments in a commercial age. It would be but an easy extension of our commercial system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for administering difficult affairs, for counselling poor farmers how to turn their estates to good husbandry, for combining a hundred private enterprises to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or in Court-street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king.

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

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

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land. In every age of the world, there has been a leading nation, one of a more generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens were willing to stand for the interests of general justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantastic. Which should be that nation but these States? Which should lead that movement, if not New England? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young American? The people, and the world, is now suffering from the want of religion and honor in its public mind. In America, out of doors all seems a market; in doors, an air-tight stove of conventionalism. Every body who comes into our houses savors of these habits; the men, of the market; the women, of the custom. I find no expression in our state papers or legislative debate, in our lyceums or churches, specially in our newspapers, of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels that rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs which can be presumed to speak a popular sense. They recommend conventional virtues, whatever will earn and preserve property; always the capitalist; the college, the church, the hospital, the theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the capitalist, — whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these, is good; what jeopardizes any of these, is damnable. The `opposition’ papers, so called, are on the same side. They attack the great capitalist, but with the aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. The opposition is against those who have money, from those who wish to have money. But who announces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the street, the secret of heroism,

“Man alone
Can perform the impossible?”

I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects and vices which require this Order of Censors in the state. I might not set down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. It is not often the worst trait that occasions the loudest outcry. Men complain of their suffering, and not of the crime. I fear little from the bad effect of Repudiation; I do not fear that it will spread. Stealing is a suicidal business; you cannot repudiate but once. But the bold face and tardy repentance permitted to this local mischief, reveal a public mind so preoccupied with the love of gain, that the common sentiment of indignation at fraud does not act with its natural force. The more need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right, by the brave. The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion. Good-nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel, to fight down the proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor, is the office of the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of hope, on the liberal, on the expansive side, never on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the lock and bolt system. More than our good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own genius, which chains us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment and the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and opinion are swift to do. It is for us to confide in the beneficent Supreme Power, and not to rely on our money, and on the state because it is the guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old people and of vicious people, is lest the Union of these States be destroyed: as if the Union had any other real basis than the good pleasure of a majority of the citizens to be united. But the wise and just man will always feel that he stands on his own feet; that he imparts strength to the state, not receives security from it; and that if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution. Every great and memorable community has consisted of formidable individuals, who, like the Roman or the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the state and made it great. Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.

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

It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. We are full of vanity, of which the most signal proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and especially English censure. One cause of this is our immense reading, and that reading chiefly confined to the productions of the English press. It is also true, that, to imaginative persons in this country, there is somewhat bare and bald in our short history, and unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would live in a new country, that can live in an old? and it is not strange that our youths and maidens should burn to see the picturesque extremes of an antiquated country. But it is one thing to visit the pyramids, and another to wish to live there. Would they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths to the government, and horse-guards, and licensed press, and grief when a child is born, and threatening, starved weavers, and a pauperism now constituting one-thirteenth of the population? Instead of the open future expanding here before the eye of every boy to vastness, would they like the closing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and that fast contracting to be no future? One thing, for instance, the beauties of aristocracy, we commend to the study of the travelling American. The English, the most conservative people this side of India, are not sensible of the restraint, but an American would seriously resent it. The aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for the unprivileged classes. It is a questionable compensation to the embittered feeling of a proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who, by the magic of title, paralyzes his arm, and plucks from him half the graces and rights of a man, is himself also an aspirant excluded with the same ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no end to the wheels within wheels of this spiral heaven. Something may be pardoned to the spirit of loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something to the imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. Philip II. of Spain rated his ambassador for neglecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst he debated some point of honor with the French ambassador; “You have left a business of importance for a ceremony.” The ambassador replied, “Your majesty’s self is but a ceremony.” In the East, where the religious sentiment comes in to the support of the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also, there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny; but in England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what is commonly affirmed, that such is the transcendent honor accorded to wealth and birth, that no man of letters, be his eminence what it may, is received into the best society, except as a lion and a show. The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history of the world; but they need all, and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to avoid it. That there are mitigations and practical alleviations to this rigor, is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding worth, and personal power, must sit crowned in all companies, nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or affronted in any company of civilized men. But the system is an invasion of the sentiment of justice and the native rights of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the value of English citizenship. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only say, let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall daily mend. This land, too, is as old as the Flood, and wants no ornament or privilege which nature could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills, here animals, here men abound, and the vast tendencies concur of a new order. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of other’s censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.

ADDRESS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES (1844)

Friends and Fellow Citizens,

We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts: a day, which gave the immense fortification of a fact, — of gross history, — to ethical abstractions. It was the settlement, as far as a great Empire was concerned, of a question on which almost every leading citizen in it had taken care to record his vote; one which for many years absorbed the attention of the best and most eminent of mankind. I might well hesitate, coming from other studies, and without the smallest claim to be a special laborer in this work of humanity, to undertake to set this matter before you; which ought rather to be done by a strict cooperation of many well-advised persons; but I shall not apologize for my weakness. In this cause, no man’s weakness is any prejudice; it has a thousand sons; if one man cannot speak, ten others can; and whether by the wisdom of its friends, or by the folly of the adversaries; by speech and by silence; by doing and by omitting to do, it goes forward. Therefore I will speak, — or, not I, but the might of liberty in my weakness. The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

It has been in all men’s experience a marked effect of the enterprise in behalf of the African, to generate an over-bearing and defying spirit. The institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts. Under such an impulse, I was about to say, If any cannot speak, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence, — I had almost said, Creep into your grave, the universe has no need of you! But I have thought better: let him not go. When we consider what remains to be done for this interest, in this country, the dictates of humanity make us tender of such as are not yet persuaded. The hardest selfishness is to be borne with. Let us withhold every reproachful, and, if we can, every indignant remark. In this cause, we must renounce our temper, and the risings of pride. If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of his own comfort, — who would not so much as part with his ice-cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think, I must not hesitate to satisfy that man, that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper, by placing the negro nation on a fair footing, than by robbing them. If the Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxury of his vassalage, on the heavy Ethiopian manners of his house-servants, their silent obedience, their hue of bronze, their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for the more intelligent but precarious hired-service of whites, I shall not refuse to show him, that when their free-papers are made out, it will still be their interest to remain on his estate, and that the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced, that it is cheaper to pay wages, than to own the slave.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records, between the material and the moral nature. From the earliest monuments, it appears, that one race was victim, and served the other races. In the oldest temples of Egypt, negro captives are painted on the tombs of kings, in such attitudes as to show that they are on the point of being executed; and Herodotus, our oldest historian, relates that the Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse-chariots. From the earliest time, the negro has been an article of luxury to the commercial nations. So has it been, down to the day that has just dawned on the world. Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world, — there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of the sun, — I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers. The prizes of society, the trumpet of fame, the privileges of learning, of culture, of religion, the decencies and joys of marriage, honor, obedience, personal authority, and a perpetual melioration into a finer civility, these were for all, but not for them. For the negro, was the slave-ship to begin with, in whose filthy hold he sat in irons, unable to lie down; bad food, and insufficiency of that; disfranchisement; no property in the rags that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished him in her bosom, — no right to the children of his body; no security from the humors, none from the crimes, none from the appetites of his master: toil, famine, insult, and flogging; and, when he sunk in the furrow, no wind of good fame blew over him, no priest of salvation visited him with glad tidings: but he went down to death, with dusky dreams of African shadow-catchers and Obeahs hunting him. Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the beginning, offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man was greedy, and chose the largest. “The buckra box was full up with pen, paper, and whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro to this day.”

But the crude element of good in human affairs must work and ripen, spite of whips, and plantation-laws, and West Indian interest. Conscience rolled on its pillow, and could not sleep. We sympathize very tenderly here with the poor aggrieved planter, of whom so many unpleasant things are said; but if we saw the whip applied to old men, to tender women; and, undeniably, though I shrink to say so, — pregnant women set in the treadmill for refusing to work, when, not they, but the eternal law of animal nature refused to work; — if we saw men’s backs flayed with cowhides, and “hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine or pickle, rubbed in with a cornhusk, in the scorching heat of the sun;” — if we saw the runaways hunted with blood-hounds into swamps and hills; and, in cases of passion, a planter throwing his negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice, — if we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince. They are not pleasant sights. The blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery. Well, so it happened; a good man or woman, a country-boy or girl, it would so fall out, once in a while saw these injuries, and had the indiscretion to tell of them. The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over the world. They who heard it, asked their rich and great friends, if it was true, or only missionary lies. The richest and greatest, the prime minister of England, the king’s privy council were obliged to say, that it was too true. It became plain to all men, the more this business was looked into, that the crimes and cruelties of the slave-traders and slave-owners could not be overstated. The more it was searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up, — things not to be spoken. Humane persons who were informed of the reports, insisted on proving them. Granville Sharpe was accidentally made acquainted with the sufferings of a slave, whom a West Indian planter had brought with him to London, and had beaten with a pistol on his head so badly, that his whole body became diseased, and the man, useless to his master, who left him to go whither he pleased. The man applied to Mr. William Sharpe, a charitable surgeon, who attended the diseases of the poor. In process of time, he was healed. Granville Sharpe found him at his brother’s, and procured a place for him in an apothecary’s shop. The master accidentally met his recovered slave, and instantly endeavored to get possession of him again. Sharpe protected the slave. In consulting with the lawyers, they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal. But the decisions are against you, and Lord Mansfield, now chief justice of England, leans to the decisions.’ Sharpe instantly sat down and gave himself to the study of English law for more than two years, until he had proved that the opinions relied on of Talbot and Yorke, were incompatible with the former English decisions, and with the whole spirit of English law. He published his book in 1769, and he so filled the heads and hearts of his advocates, that when he brought the case of George Somerset, another slave, before Lord Mansfield, the slavish decisions were set aside, and equity affirmed. There is a sparkle of God’s righteousness in Lord Mansfield’s judgment, which does the heart good. Very unwilling had that great lawyer been to reverse the late decisions; he suggested twice from the bench, in the course of the trial, how the question might be got rid of: but the hint was not taken; the case was adjourned again and again, and judgment delayed. At last judgment was demanded, and on the 22d June, 1772, Lord Mansfield is reported to have decided in these words;

“Immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law, long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority, and time of its introduction, are lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly; (tracing the subject to natural principles, the claim of slavery never can be supported.) The power claimed by this return never was in use here. We cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom; and therefore the man must be discharged.”

This decision established the principle that the “air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe,” but the wrongs in the islands were not thereby touched. Public attention, however, was drawn that way, and the methods of the stealing and the transportation from Africa, became noised abroad. The Quakers got the story. In their plain meeting-houses, and prim dwellings, this dismal agitation got entrance. They were rich: they owned for debt, or by inheritance, island property; they were religious, tender-hearted men and women; and they had to hear the news, and digest it as they could. Six Quakers met in London on the 6th July, 1783; William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoar, George Harrison, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, “to consider what step they should take for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.” They made friends and raised money for the slave; they interested their Yearly Meeting; and all English and all American Quakers. John Woolman of New Jersey, whilst yet an apprentice, was uneasy in his mind when he was set to write a bill of sale of a negro, for his master. He gave his testimony against the traffic, in Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Clarkson was a youth at Cambridge, England, when the subject given out for a Latin prize dissertation, was, “Is it right to make slaves of others against their will?” He wrote an essay, and won the prize; but he wrote too well for his own peace; he began to ask himself, if these things could be true; and if they were, he could no longer rest. He left Cambridge; he fell in with the six Quakers. They engaged him to act for them. He himself interested Mr. Wilberforce in the matter. The shipmasters in that trade were the greatest miscreants, and guilty of every barbarity to their own crews. Clarkson went to Bristol, made himself acquainted with the interior of the slaveships, and the details of the trade. The facts confirmed his sentiment, “that Providence had never made that to be wise, which was immoral, and that the slave-trade — was as impolitic as it was unjust;” that it was found peculiarly fatal to those employed in it. More seamen died in that trade, in one year, than in the whole remaining trade of the country in two. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox were drawn into the generous enterprise. In 1788, the House of Commons voted Parliamentary inquiry. In 1791, a bill to abolish the trade was brought in by Wilberforce, and supported by him, and by Fox, and Burke, and Pitt, with the utmost ability and faithfulness; resisted by the planters, and the whole West Indian interest, and lost. During the next sixteen years, ten times, year after year, the attempt was renewed by Mr. Wilberforce, and ten times defeated by the planters. The king, and all the royal family but one, were against it. These debates are instructive, as they show on what grounds the trade was assailed and defended. Every thing generous, wise, and sprightly is sure to come to the attack. On the other part, are found cold prudence, barefaced selfishness, and silent votes. But the nation was aroused to enthusiasm. Every horrid fact became known. In 1791, three hundred thousand persons in Britain pledged themselves to abstain from all articles of island produce. The planters were obliged to give way; and in 1807, on the 25th March, the bill passed, and the slave-trade was abolished.

The assailants of slavery had early agreed to limit their political action on this subject to the abolition of the trade, but Granville Sharpe, as a matter of conscience; whilst he acted as chairman of the London Committee, felt constrained to record his protest against the limitation, declaring that slavery was as much a crime against the Divine law, as the slave-trade. The trade, under false flags, went on as before. In 1821, according to official documents presented to the American government by the Colonization Society, 200,000 slaves were deported from Africa. Nearly 30,000 were landed in the port of Havana alone. In consequence of the dangers of the trade growing out of the act of abolition, ships were built sharp for swiftness, and with a frightful disregard of the comfort of the victims they were destined to transport. They carried five, six, even seven hundred stowed in a ship built so narrow as to be unsafe, being made just broad enough on the beam to keep the sea. In attempting to make its escape from the pursuit of a man-of-war, one ship flung five hundred slaves alive into the sea. These facts went into Parliament. In the islands, was an ominous state of cruel and licentious society; every house had a dungeon attached to it; every slave was worked by the whip. There is no end to the tragic anecdotes in the municipal records of the colonies. The boy was set to strip and to flog his own mother to blood, for a small offence. Looking in the face of his master by the negro was held to be violence by the island courts. He was worked sixteen hours, and his ration by law, in some islands, was a pint of flour and one salt herring a day. He suffered insult, stripes, mutilation, at the humor of the master: iron collars were riveted on their necks with iron prongs ten inches long; capsicum pepper was rubbed in the eyes of the females; and they were done to death with the most shocking levity between the master and manager, without fine or inquiry. And when, at last, some Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan and Baptist missionaries, following in the steps of Carey and Ward in the East Indies, had been moved to come and cheer the poor victim with the hope of some reparation, in a future world, of the wrongs he suffered in this, these missionaries were persecuted by the planters, their lives threatened, their chapels burned, and the negroes furiously forbidden to go near them. These outrages rekindled the flame of British indignation. Petitions poured into Parliament: a million persons signed their names to these; and in 1833, on the 14th May, Lord Stanley, minister of the colonies, introduced into the House of Commons his bill for the Emancipation.

The scheme of the minister, with such modification as it received in the legislature, proposed gradual emancipation; that on 1st August, 1834, all persons now slaves should be entitled to be registered as apprenticed laborers, and to acquire thereby all the rights and privileges of freemen, subject to the restriction of laboring under certain conditions. These conditions were, that the praedials should owe three fourths of the profits of their labor to their masters for six years, and the nonpraedials for four years. The other fourth of the apprentice’s time was to be his own, which he might sell to his master, or to other persons; and at the end of the term of years fixed, he should be free.

With these provisions and conditions, the bill proceeds, in the twelfth section, in the following terms. “Be it enacted, that all and every person who, on the 1st August, 1834, shall be holden in slavery within any such British colony as aforesaid, shall upon and from and after the said 1st August, become and be to all intents and purposes free, and discharged of and from all manner of slavery, and shall be absolutely and forever manumitted; and that the children thereafter born to any such persons, and the offspring of such children, shall, in like manner, be free from their birth; and that from and after the 1st August, 1834, slavery shall be and is hereby utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British colonies, plantations, and possessions abroad.”

The ministers, having estimated the slave products of the colonies in annual exports of sugar, rum, and coffee, at $1,500,000 per annum, estimated the total value of the slave-property at 30,000,000 pounds sterling, and proposed to give the planters, as a compensation for so much of the slaves’ time as the act took from them, 20,000,000 pounds sterling, to be divided into nineteen shares for the nineteen colonies, and to be distributed to tile owners of slaves by commissioners, whose appointment and duties were regulated by the Act. After much debate, the bill passed by large majorities. The apprenticeship system is understood to have proceeded from Lord Brougham, and was by him urged on his colleagues, who, it is said, were inclined to the policy of immediate emancipation.

The colonial legislatures received the act of Parliament with various degrees of displeasure, and, of course, every provision of the bill was criticised with severity. The new relation between the master and the apprentice, it was feared, would be mischievous; for the bill required the appointment of magistrates, who should hear every complaint of the apprentice, and see that justice was done him. It was feared that the interest of the master and servant would now produce perpetual discord between them. In the island of Antigua, containing 37,000 people, 30,000 being negroes, these objections had such weight, that the legislature rejected the apprenticeship system, and adopted absolute emancipation. In the other islands the system of the ministry was accepted.

The reception of it by the negro population was equal in nobleness to the deed. The negroes were called together by the missionaries and by the planters, and the news explained to them. On the night of the 31st July, they met everywhere at their churches and chapels, and at midnight, when the clock struck twelve, on their knees, the silent, weeping assembly became men; they rose and embraced each other; they cried, they sung, they prayed, they were wild with joy, but there was no riot, no feasting. I have never read anything in history more touching than the moderation of the negroes. Some American captains left the shore and put to sea, anticipating insurrection and general murder. With far different thoughts, the negroes spent the hour in their huts and chapels. I will not repeat to you the well-known paragraph, in which Messrs. Thome and Kimball, the commissioners sent out in the year 1837 by the American Anti-slavery Society, describe the occurrences of that night in the island of Antigua. It has been quoted in every newspaper, and Dr. Channing has given it additional fame. But I must be indulged in quoting a few sentences from the pages that follow it, narrating the behavior of the emancipated people on the next day.

“The first of August came on Friday, and a release was proclaimed from all work until the neat Monday. The day was chiefly spent by the great mass of the negroes in the churches and chapels. The clergy and missionaries throughout the island were actively engaged, seizing the opportunity to enlighten the people on all the duties and responsibilities of their new relation, and urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh his children free. In every quarter, we were assured, the day was like a sabbath. Work had ceased. The hum of business was still: tranquillity pervaded the towns and country. The planters informed us, that they went to the chapels where their own people were assembled, greeted them, shook hands with them, and exchanged the most hearty good wishes. At Grace Hill, there were at least a thousand persons around the Moravian Chapel who could not get in. For once the house of God suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. At Grace Bay, the people, all dressed in white, formed a procession, and walked arm in arm into the chapel. We were told that the dress of the negroes on that occasion was uncommonly simple and modest. There was not the least disposition to gaiety. Throughout the island, there was not a single dance known of, either day or night, nor so much as a fiddle played.” [Note from bottom of p. 13: “Emancipation in the West Indies: a Six Months Tour in Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica, in the year 1837. By J. A. Thome and J. H. Kimball. New York, 1838.” — pp. 146, 147.”]

On the next Monday morning, with very few exceptions, every negro on every plantation was in the field at his work. In some places, they waited to see their master, to know what bargain he would make; but, for the most part, throughout the islands, nothing painful occurred. In June, 1835, the ministers, Lord Aberdeen and Sir George Grey, declared to the Parliament, that the system worked well; that now for ten months, from 1st August, 1834, no injury or violence had been offered to any white, and only one black had been hurt in 800,000 negroes: and, contrary to many sinister predictions, that the new crop of island produce would not fall short of that of the last year.

But the habit of oppression was not destroyed by a law and a day of jubilee. It soon appeared in all the islands, that the planters were disposed to use their old privileges, and overwork the apprentices; to take from them, under various pretences, their fourth part of their time; and to exert the same licentious despotism as before. The negroes complained to the magistrates, and to the governor. In the island of Jamaica, this ill blood continually grew worse. The governors, Lord Belmore, the Earl of Sligo, and afterwards Sir Lionel Smith, (a governor of their own class, who had been sent out to gratify the planters,) threw themselves on the side of the oppressed, and are at constant quarrel with the angry and bilious island legislature. Nothing can exceed the ill humor and sulkiness of the addresses of this assembly.

I may here express a general remark, which the history of slavery seems to justify, that it is not founded solely on the avarice of the planter. We sometimes say, the planter does not want slaves, he only wants the immunities and the luxuries which the slaves yield him; give him money, give him a machine that will yield him as much money as the slaves, and he will thankfully let them go. He has no love of slavery, he wants luxury, and he will pay even this price of crime and danger for it. But I think experience does not warrant this favorable distinction, but shows the existence, beside the covetousness, of a bitterer element, the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control. We sometimes observe, that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem to measure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented, provided you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations. The planter is the spoiled child of his unnatural habits, and has contracted in his indolent and luxurious climate the need of excitement by irritating and tormenting his slave.

Sir Lionel Smith defended the poor negro girls, prey to the licentiousness of the planters; they shall not be whipped with tamarind rods, if they do not comply with their master’s will; he defended the negro women; they should not be wade to dig the cane-holes, (which is the very hardest of the field-work;) he defended the Baptist preachers and the stipendiary magistrates, who are the negroes’ friends, from the power of the planter. The power of the planters, however, to oppress, was greater than the power of the apprentice and of his guardians to withstand. Lord Brougham and Mr. Buxton declared that the planter had not fulfilled his part in the contract, whilst the apprentices had fulfilled theirs; and demanded that the emancipation should be hastened, and the apprenticeship abolished. Parliament was compelled to pass additional laws for the defence and security of the negro, and in ill humor at these acts, the great island of Jamaica, with a population of half a million, and 300,000 negroes, early in 1838, resolved to throw up the two remaining years of apprenticeship, and to emancipate absolutely on the 1st August, 1838. In British Guiana, in Dominica, the same resolution had been earlier taken with more good will; and the other islands fell into the measure; so that on the 1st August, 1838, the shackles dropped from every British slave. The accounts which we have from all parties, both from the planters, and those too who were originally most opposed to the measure, and from the new freemen, are of the most satisfactory kind. The manner in which the new festival was celebrated, brings tears to the eyes. The First of August, 1838, was observed in Jamaica as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. Sir Lionel Smith, the governor, writes to the British Ministry, “It is impossible for me to do justice to the good order, decorum, and gratitude, which the whole laboring population manifested on that happy occasion. Though joy beamed on every countenance, it was throughout tempered with solemn thankfulness to God, and the churches and chapels were everywhere filled with these happy people in humble offering of praise.”

The Queen, in her speech to the Lords and Commons, praised the conduct of the emancipated population: and, in 1840, Sir Charles Metcalfe, the new governor of Jamaica, in his address to the Assembly, expressed himself to that late exasperated body in these terms. “All those who are acquainted with the state of the island, know that our emancipated population are as free, as independent in their conduct, as well-conditioned, as much in the enjoyment of abundance, and as strongly sensible of the blessings of liberty, as any that we know of in any country. All disqualifications and distinctions of color have ceased; men of all colors have equal rights in law, and an equal footing in society, and every man’s position is settled by the same circumstances which regulate that point in other free countries, where no difference of color exists. It may be asserted, without fear of denial, that the former slaves of Jamaica are now as secure in all social rights, as freeborn Britons.” He further describes the erection of numerous churches, chapels, and schools, which the new population required, and adds that more are still demanded. The legislature, in their reply, echo the governor’s statement, and say, “The peaceful demeanor of the emancipated population redounds to their own credit, and affords a proof of their continued comfort and prosperity.”

I said, this event is signal in the history of civilization. There are many styles of civilization, and not one only. Ours is full of barbarities. There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period, and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age; and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason. Our culture is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well-glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors, and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year. Such as one house, such are all. The owner of a New York manor imitates the mansion and equipage of the London nobleman; the Boston merchant rivals his brother of New York; and the villages copy Boston. There have been nations elevated by great sentiments. Such was the civility of Sparta and the Dorian race, whilst it was defective in some of the chief elements of ours. That of Athens, again, lay in an intellect dedicated to beauty. That of Asia Minor in poetry, music, and arts; that of Palestine in piety; that of Rome in military arts and virtues, exalted by a prodigious magnanimity; that of China and Japan in the last exaggeration of decorum and etiquette. Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession. And we are shopkeepers, and have acquired the vices and virtues that belong to trade. We peddle, we truck, we sail, we row, we ride in cars, we creep in teams, we go in canals — to market, and for the sale of goods. The national aim and employment streams into our ways of thinking, our laws, our habits, and our manners. The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict. It was or it seemed the dictate of trade, to keep the negro down. We had found a race who were less warlike, and less energetic shopkeepers than we; who had very little skill in trade. We found it very convenient to keep them at work, since, by the aid of a little whipping, we could get their work for nothing but their board and the cost of whips. What if it cost a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa? That was a great way off; and the scenes could be endured by some sturdy, unscrupulous fellows, who could go for high wages and bring us the men, and need not trouble our ears with the disagreeable particulars. If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal, and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. The coffee was fragrant; the tobacco was incense; the brandy made nations happy; the cotton clothed the world. What! all raised by these men, and no wages? Excellent! What a convenience! They seemed created by providence to bear the heat and the whipping, and make these fine articles.

But unhappily, most unhappily, gentlemen, man is born with intellect, as well as with a love of sugar, and with a sense of justice, as well as a taste for strong drink. These ripened, as well as those. You could not educate him, you could not get any poetry, any wisdom, any beauty in woman, any strong and commanding character in man, but these absurdities would still come flashing out, — these absurdities of a demand for justice, a generosity for the weak and oppressed. Unhappily too, for the planter, the laws of nature are in harmony with each other: that which the head and the heart demand, is found to be, in the long run, for what the grossest calculator calls his advantage. The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done. It was shown to the planters that they, as well as the negroes, were slaves; that though they paid no wages, they got very poor work; that their estates were ruining them, under the finest climate; and that they needed the severest monopoly laws at home to keep them from bankruptcy. The oppression of the slave recoiled on them. They were full of vices; their children were lumps of pride, sloth, sensuality and rottenness. The position of woman was nearly as bad as it could be, and, like other robbers, they could not sleep in security. Many planters have said, since the emancipation, that, before that day, they were the greatest slaves on the estates. Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book, or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay. For these reasons, the islands proved bad customers to England. It was very easy for manufacturers less shrewd than those of Birmingham and Manchester to see, that if the state of things in the islands was altered, if the slaves had wages, the slaves would be clothed, would build houses, would fill them with tools, with pottery, with crockery, with hardware; and negro women love fine clothes as well as white women. In every naked negro of those thousands, they saw a future customer. Meantime, they saw further, that the slave-trade, by keeping in barbarism the whole coast of eastern Africa, deprives them of countries and nations of customers, if once freedom and civility, and European manners could get a foothold there. But the trade could not be abolished, whilst this hungry West Indian market, with an appetite like the grave, cried, [“]More, more, bring me a hundred a day;” they could not expect any mitigation in the madness of the poor African war-chiefs. These considerations opened the eyes of the dullest in Britain. More than this, the West Indian estate was owned or mortgaged in England, and the owner and the mortgagee had very plain intimations that the feeling of English liberty was gaining every hour new mass and velocity, and the hostility to such as resisted it, would be fatal. The House of Commons would destroy the protection of island produce, and interfere on English politics in the island legislation: so they hastened to make the best of their position, and accepted the bill.

These considerations, I doubt not, had their weight, the interest of trade, the interest of the revenue, and, moreover, the good fame of the action. It was inevitable that men should feel these motives. But they do not appear to have had an excessive or unreasonable weight. On reviewing this history, I think the whole transaction reflects infinite honor on the people and parliament of England. It was a stately spectacle, to see the cause of human rights argued with so much patience and generosity, and with such a mass of evidence before that powerful people. It is a creditable incident in the history, that when, in 1789, the first privy-council report of evidence on the trade, a bulky folio, (embodying all the facts which the London Committee had been engaged for years in collecting, and all the examinations before the council,) was presented to the House of Commons, a late day being named for the discussion, in order to give members time, — Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Pitt, the prime minister, and other gentlemen, took advantage of the postponement, to retire into the country, to read the report. For months and years the bill was debated, with some consciousness of the extent of its relations by the first citizens of England, the foremost men of the earth; every argument was weighed, every particle of evidence was sifted, and laid in the scale; and, at last, the right triumphed, the poor man was vindicated, and the oppressor was flung out. I know that England has the advantage of trying the question at a wide distance from the spot where the nuisance exists: the planters are not, excepting in rare examples, members of the legislature. The extent of the empire, and the magnitude and number of other questions crowding into court, keep this one in balance, and prevent it from obtaining that ascendency, and being urged with that intemperance, which a question of property tends to acquire. There are causes in the composition of the British legislature, and the relation of its leaders to the country and to Europe, which exclude much that is pitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies. From these reasons, the question was discussed with a rare independence and magnanimity. It was not narrowed down to a paltry electioneering trap, and, I must say, a delight in justice, an honest tenderness for the poor negro, for man suffering these wrongs, combined with the national pride, which refused to give the support of English soil, or the protection of the English flag, to these disgusting violations of nature.

Forgive me, fellow citizens, if I own to you, that in the last few days that my attention has been occupied with this history, I have not been able to read a page of it, without the most painful comparisons. Whilst I have read of England, I have thought of New England. Whilst I have meditated in my solitary walks on the magnanimity of the English Bench and Senate, reaching out the benefit of the law to the most helpless citizen in her world-wide realm, I have found myself oppressed by other thoughts. As I have walked in the pastures and along the edge of woods, I could not keep my imagination on those agreeable figures, for other images that intruded on me. I could not see the great vision of the patriots and senators who have adopted the slave’s cause: — they turned their backs on me. No: I see other pictures — of mean men: I see very poor, very ill-clothed, very ignorant men, not surrounded by happy friends, — to be plain, — poor black men of obscure employment as mariners, cooks, or stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Commonwealth of Massachusetts, — freeborn as we, — whom the slave-laws of the States of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana, have arrested in the vessels in which they visited those ports, and shut up in jails so long as the vessel remained in port, with the stringent addition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the costs of this official arrest, and the board in jail, these citizens are to be sold for slaves, to pay that expense. This man, these men, I see, and no law to save them. Fellow citizens, this crime will not be hushed up any longer. I have learned that a citizen of Nantucket, walking in New Orleans, found a freeborn citizen of Nantucket, a man, too, of great personal worth, and, as it happened, very dear to him, as having saved his own life, working chained in the streets of that city, kidnapped by such a process as this. In the sleep of the laws, the private interference of two excellent citizens of Boston has, I have ascertained, rescued several natives of this State from these southern prisons. Gentlemen, I thought the deck of a Massachusetts ship was as much the territory of Massachusetts, as the floor on which we stand. It should be as sacred as the temple of God. The poorest fishing-smack, that floats under the shadow of an iceberg in the northern seas, or hunts the whale in the southern ocean, should be encompassed by her laws with comfort and protection, as much as within the arms of Cape Ann and Cape Cod. And this kidnapping is suffered within our own land and federation, whilst the fourth article of the Constitution of the United States ordains in terms, that, “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.” If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler: the State-house in Boston is a play-house: the General Court is a dishonored body: if they make laws which they cannot execute. The great-hearted Puritans have left no posterity. The rich men may walk in State-street, but they walk without honor; and the farmers may brag their democracy in the country, but they are disgraced men. If the State has no power to defend its own people in its own shipping, because it has delegated that power to the Federal Government, has it no representation in the Federal Government? Are those men dumb? I am no lawyer, and cannot indicate the forms applicable to the case, but here is something which transcends all forms. Let the senators and representatives of the State, containing a population of a million freemen, go in a body before the Congress, and say, that they have a demand to make on them so imperative, that all functions of government must stop, until it is satisfied. If ordinary legislation cannot reach it, then extraordinary must be applied. The Congress should instruct the President to send to those ports of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, such orders and such force, as should release, forthwith, all such citizens of Massachusetts as were holden in prison without the allegation of any crime, and should set on foot the strictest inquisition to discover where such persons, brought into slavery by these local laws, at any time heretofore, may now be. That first; — and then, let order be taken to indemnify all such as have been incarcerated. As for dangers to the Union, from such demands! — the Union is already at an end, when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged. Is it an union and covenant in which the State of Massachusetts agrees to be imprisoned, and the State of Carolina to imprison? Gentlemen, I am loath to say harsh things, and perhaps I know too little of politics for the smallest weight to attach to any censure of mine, — but I am at a loss how to characterize the tameness and silence of the two senators and the ten representatives of the State at Washington. To what purpose, have we clothed each of those representatives with the power of seventy thousand persons, and each senator with near half a million, if they are to sit dumb at their desks, and see their constituents captured and sold; — perhaps to gentlemen sitting by them in the hall? There is a scandalous rumor that has been swelling louder of late years, — perhaps it is wholly false, — that members are bullied into silence by southern gentlemen. It is so cosy to omit to speak, or even to be absent when delicate things are to be handled. I may as well say what all then feel, that whilst our very amiable and very innocent representatives and senators at Washington, are accomplished lawyers and merchants, and very eloquent at dinners and at caucuses, there is a disastrous want of men from New England. I would gladly make exceptions, and you will not suffer me to forget one eloquent old man, in whose veins the blood of Massachusetts rolls, and who singly has defended the freedom of speech, and the rights of the free, against the usurpation of the slave-holder. But the reader of Congressional debates, in New England, is perplexed to see with what admirable sweetness and patience the majority of the free States, are schooled and ridden by the minority of slave-holders. What if we should send thither representatives who were a particle less amiable and less innocent? I entreat you, sirs, let not this stain attach, let not this misery accumulate any longer. If the managers of our political parties are too prudent and too cold; — if, most unhappily, the ambitious class of young men and political men have found out, that these neglected victims are poor and without weight; that they have no graceful hospitalities to offer; no valuable business to throw into any man’s hands, no strong vote to cast at the elections; and therefore may with impunity be left in their chains or to the chance of chains, then let the citizens in their primary capacity take up their cause on this very ground, and say to the government of the State, and of the Union, that government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves. And as an omen and assurance of success, I point you to the bright example which England set you, on this day, ten years ago.

There are other comparisons and other imperative duties which come sadly to mind, — but I do not wish to darken the hours of this day by crimination; I turn gladly to the rightful theme, to the bright aspects of the occasion.

This event was a moral revolution. The history of it is before you. Here was no prodigy, no fabulous hero, no Trojan horse, no bloody war, but all was achieved by plain means of plain men, working not under a leader, but under a sentiment. Other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant. It was the masters revolting from their mastery. The slave-holder said, I will not hold slaves. The end was noble, and the means were pure. Hence, the elevation and pathos of this chapter of history. The lives of the advocates are pages of greatness, and the connexion of the eminent senators with this question, constitutes the immortalizing moments of those men’s lives. The bare enunciation of the theses, at which the lawyers and legislators arrived, gives a blow to the heart of the reader. Lord Chancellor Northington is the author of the famous sentence, ““As soon as any man puts his foot on English ground, he becomes free.” “I was a slave,” said the counsel of Somerset, speaking for his client, “for I was in America: I am now in a country, where the common rights of man-kind are known and regarded.” Granville Sharpe filled the ear of the judges with the sound principles, that had from time to time been affirmed by the legal authorities. “Derived power cannot be superior to the power from which it is derived.” “The reasonableness of the law is the soul of the law.” “It is better to suffer every evil, than to consent to any.” Out it would come, the God’s truth, out it came, like a bolt from a cloud, for all the mumbling of the lawyers. One feels very sensibly in all this history that a great heart and soul are behind there, superior to any man, and making use of each, in turn, and infinitely attractive to every person according to the degree of reason in his own mind, so that this cause has had the power to draw to it every particle of talent and of worth in England, from the beginning. All the great geniuses of the British senate, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Grenville, Sheridan, Grey, Canning, ranged themselves on its side; the poet Cowper wrote for it: Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, in this country, all recorded their votes. All men remember the subtlety and the fire of indignation, which the Edinburgh Review contributed to the cause; and every liberal mind, poet, preacher, moralist, statesman, has had the fortune to appear somewhere for this cause. On the other part, appeared the reign of pounds and shillings, and all manner of rage and stupidity; a resistance which drew from Mr. Huddlestone in Parliament the observation, “That a curse attended this trade even in the mode of defending it. By a certain fatality, none but the vilest arguments were brought forward, which corrupted the very persons who used them. Every one of these was built on the narrow ground of interest, of pecuniary profit, of sordid gain, in opposition to every motive that had reference to humanity, justice, and religion, or to that great principle which comprehended them all.” — This moral force perpetually reinforces and dignifies the friends of this cause. It gave that tenacity to their point which has insured ultimate triumph; and it gave that superiority in reason, in imagery, in eloquence, which makes in all countries anti-slavery meetings so attractive to the people. and has made it a proverb in Massachusetts, that, “eloquence is dog-cheap at the anti-slavery chapel?”

I will say further, that we are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics, and a reference of every question to the absolute standard. It is notorious, that the political, religious, and social schemes, with which the minds of men are now most occupied, have been matured, or at least broached, in the free and daring discussions of these assemblies. Men have become aware through the emancipation, and kindred events, of the presence of powers, which, in their days of darkness, they had overlooked. Virtuous men will not again rely on political agents. They have found out the deleterious effect of political association. Up to this day, we have allowed to statesmen a paramount social standing, and we bow low to them as to the great. We cannot extend this deference to them any longer. The secret cannot be kept, that the seats of power are filled by underlings, ignorant, timid, and selfish, to a degree to destroy all claim, excepting that on compassion, to the society of the just and generous. What happened notoriously to an American ambassador in England, that he found himself compelled to palter, and to disguise the fact that he was a slave-breeder, happens to men of state. Their vocation is a presumption against them, among well-meaning people. The superstition respecting power and office, is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end. There are now other energies than force, other than political, which no man in future can allow himself to disregard. There is direct conversation and influence. A man is to make himself felt, by his proper force. The tendency of things runs steadily to this point, namely, to put every man on his merits, and to give him so much power as he naturally exerts — no more, no less. Of course, the timid and base persons, all who are conscious of no worth in themselves, and who owe all their place to the opportunities which the old order of things allowed them to deceive and defraud men, shudder at the change, and would fain silence every honest voice, and lock up every house where liberty and innovation can be pleaded for. They would raise mobs, for fear is very cruel. But the strong and healthy yeomen and husbands of the land, the self-sustaining class of inventive and industrious men, fear no competition or superiority. Come what will, their faculty cannot be spared.

The First of August marks the entrance of a new element into modern politics, namely, the civilization of the negro. A man is added to the human family. Not the least affecting part of this history of abolition, is, the annihilation of the old indecent nonsense about the nature of the negro. In the case of the ship Zong, in 1781, whose master had thrown one hundred and thirty-two slaves alive into the sea, to cheat the underwriters, the first jury gave a verdict in favor of the master and owners: they had a right to do what they had done. Lord Mansfield is reported to have said on the bench, “The matter left to the jury is, — Was it from necessity? For they had no doubt, — though it shocks one very much, — that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. It is a very shocking case.” But a more enlightened and humane opinion began to prevail. Mr. Clarkson, early in his career, made a collection of African productions and manufactures, as specimens of the arts and culture of the negro; comprising cloths and loom, weapons, polished stones and woods, leather, glass, dyes, ornaments, soap, pipe-bowls, and trinkets. These he showed to Mr. Pitt, who saw and handled them with extreme interest. “On sight of these,” says Clarkson, “many sublime thoughts seemed to rush at once into his mind, some of which he expressed;” and hence appeared to arise a project which was always dear to him, of the civilization of Africa, — a dream which forever elevates his fame. In 1791, Mr. Wilberforce announced to the House of Commons, “We have already gained one victory: we have obtained for these poor creatures the recognition of their human nature, which, for a time, was most shamefully denied them.” It was the sarcasm of Montesquieu, “it would not do to suppose that negroes were men, lest it should turn out that whites were not;” for, the white has, for ages, done what he could to keep the negro in that hoggish state. His laws have been furies. It now appears, that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have brought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears. If, before, he was taxed with such stupidity, or such defective vision, that he could not set a table square to the walls of an apartment, he is now the principal, if not the only mechanic, in the West Indies; and is, besides, an architect, a physician, a lawyer, a magistrate, an editor, and a valued and increasing political power. The recent testimonies of Sturge, of Thome and Kimball, of Gurney, of Philippo, are very explicit on this point, the capacity and the success of the colored and the black population in employments of skill, of profit, and of trust; and, best of all, is the testimony to their moderation. They receive hints and advances from the whites, that they will be gladly received as subscribers to the Exchange, as members of this or that committee of trust. They hold back, and say to each other, that “social position is not to be gained by pushing.”

I have said that this event interests us because it came mainly from the concession of the whites; I add, that in part it is the earning of the blacks. They won the pity and respect which they have received, by their powers and native endowments. I think this a circumstance of the highest import. Their whole future is in it. Our planet, before the age of written history, had its races of savages, like the generations of sour paste, or the animalcules that wriggle and bite in a drop of putrid water. Who cares for these or for their wars? We do not wish a world of bugs or of birds; neither afterward of Scythians, Caraibs, or Feejees. The grand style of nature, her great periods, is all we observe in them. Who cares for oppressing white, or oppressed blacks, twenty centuries ago, more than for bad dreams? Eaters and food are in the harmony of nature; and there too is the germ forever protected, unfolding gigantic leaf after leaf, a newer flower, a richer fruit, in every period, yet its next product is never to be guessed. It will only save what is worth saving; and it saves not by compassion, but by power. It appoints no police to guard the lion, but his teeth and claws; no fort or city for the bird, but his wings; no rescue for flies and mites, but their spawning numbers, which no ravages can overcome. It deals with men after the same manner. If they are rude and foolish, down they must go. When at last in a race, a new principle appears, an idea, — that conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble, and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization, for the sake of that element, no wrong, nor strength, nor circumstance, can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity. The anti-slavery of the whole world, is dust in the balance before this, — is a poor squeamishness and nervousness: the might and the right are here: here is the anti-slave: here is man: and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. The intellect, — that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams. But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful or lovely, is degrading and futile. All the songs, and newspapers, and money-subscriptions, and vituperation of such as do not think with us, will avail nothing against a fact. I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman; other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery, that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect, and take a master’s part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch, that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself. For this, they have been preserved in sandy deserts, in rice-swamps, in kitchens and shoe-shops, so long: now let them emerge, clothed and in their own form.

There remains the very elevated consideration which the subject opens, but which belongs to more abstract views than we are now taking, this namely, that the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest, and of the newest philosophy, that, man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members. America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.

These considerations seem to leave no choice for the action of the intellect and the conscience of the country. There have been moments in this, as well as in every piece of moral history, when there seemed room for the infusions of a skeptical philosophy; when it seemed doubtful, whether brute force would not triumph in the eternal struggle. I doubt not, that sometimes a despairing negro, when jumping over the ship’s sides to escape from the white devils who surrounded him, has believed there was no vindication of right; it is horrible to think of, but it seemed so. I doubt not, that sometimes the negro’s friend, in the face of scornful and brutal hundreds of traders and drivers, has felt his heart sink. Especially, it seems to me, some degree of despondency is pardonable, when he observes the men of conscience and of intellect, his own natural allies and champions, — those whose attention should be nailed to the grand objects of this cause, so hotly offended by whatever incidental petulances or infirmities of indiscreet defenders of the negro, as to permit themselves to be ranged with the enemies of the human race; and names which should be the alarums of liberty and the watchwords of truth, are mixed up with all the rotten rabble of selfishness and tyranny. I assure myself that this coldness and blindness will pass away. A single noble wind of sentiment will scatter them forever. I am sure that the good and wise elders, the ardent and generous youth will not permit what is incidental and exceptional to withdraw their devotion from the essential and permanent characters of the question. There have been moments, I said, when men might be forgiven, who doubted. Those moments are past. Seen in masses, it cannot be disputed, there is progress in human society. There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly. The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with slavery. The Intellect, with blazing eye, looking through history from the beginning onward, gazes on this blot, and it disappears. The sentiment of Right, once very low and indistinct, but ever more articulate, because it is the voice of the universe, pronounces Freedom. The Power that built this fabric of things affirms it in the heart; and in the history of the First of August, has made a sign to the ages, of his will.

ESSAYS. FIRST SERIES

CONTENTS

HISTORY.

SELF-RELIANCE.

COMPENSATION.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

LOVE.

FRIENDSHIP.

PRUDENCE.

HEROISM.

THE OVER-SOUL.

CIRCLES.

INTELLECT.

ART.

HISTORY.

   There is no great and no small

   To the Soul that maketh all:

   And where it cometh, all things are

   And it cometh everywhere.

   I am owner of the sphere,

   Of the seven stars and the solar year,

   Of Caesar’s hand, and Plato’s brain,

   Of Lord Christ’s heart, and Shakspeare’s strain.

HISTORY.

THERE is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

This human mind wrote history, and this must read it. The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia is as much an illustration of the mind’s powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand before each of its tablets and say, ‘Under this mask did my Proteus nature hide itself.’ This remedies the defect of our too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our actions into perspective; and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and the waterpot lose their meanness when hung as signs in the zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline.

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things. Human life, as containing this, is mysterious and inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All laws derive hence their ultimate reason; all express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence. Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws and wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims; the plea for education, for justice, for charity; the foundation of friendship and love and of the heroism and grandeur which belong to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures, — in the sacerdotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will or of genius, — anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, that this is for better men; but rather is it true that in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakspeare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize in the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great prosperities of men; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.

We have the same interest in condition and character. We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic or Oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. The silent and the eloquent praise him and accost him, and he is stimulated wherever he moves, as by personal allusions. A true aspirant therefore never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but, more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character, yea further in every fact and circumstance, — in the running river and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love flows, from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of the firmament.

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the government of the world; he must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London, to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way. “What is history,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon?” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, — must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know. What the former age has epitomized into a formula or rule for manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, sometime, it will demand and find compensation for that loss, by doing the work itself. Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike affected, and should achieve the like; and we aim to master intellectually the steps and reach the same height or the same degradation that our fellow, our proxy has done.

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis, — is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us and not done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. We put ourselves into the place and state of the builder. We remember the forest-dwellers, the first temples, the adherence to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the nation increased; the value which is given to wood by carving led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathedral. When we have gone through this process, and added thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, its Saints’ days and image-worship, we have as it were been the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could and must be. We have the sufficient reason.

The difference between men is in their principle of association. Some men classify objects by color and size and other accidents of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance.

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, why should we be such hard pedants, and magnify a few forms? Why should we make account of time, or of magnitude, or of figure? The soul knows them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. Genius studies the causal thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals the fixed species; through many species the genus; through all genera the steadfast type; through all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity. Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same. She casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and toughness of matter, a subtle spirit bends all things to its own will. The adamant streams into soft but precise form before it, and whilst I look at it its outline and texture are changed again. Nothing is so fleeting as form; yet never does it quite deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races; yet in him they enhance his nobleness and grace; as Io, in Aeschylus, transformed to a cow, offends the imagination; but how changed when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris-Jove, a beautiful woman with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as the splendid ornament of her brows!

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally obvious. There is, at the surface, infinite variety of things; at the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their architecture, a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the straight line and the square, — a builded geometry. Then we have it once again in sculpture, the “tongue on the balance of expression,” a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of action and never transgressing the ideal serenity; like votaries performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the figure and decorum of their dance. Thus of the genius of one remarkable people we have a fourfold representation: and to the senses what more unlike than an ode of Pindar, a marble centaur, the peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of Phocion?

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, without any resembling feature, make a like impression on the beholder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the same sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all ages. What is Guido’s Rospigliosi Aurora but a morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning cloud? If any one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely, — but, by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him at will in every attitude. So Roos “entered into the inmost nature of a sheep.” I knew a draughtsman employed in a public survey who found that he could not sketch the rocks until their geological structure was first explained to him. In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. By a deeper apprehension, and not primarily by a painful acquisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of awakening other souls to a given activity.

It has been said that “common souls pay with what they do, nobler souls with that which they are.” And why? Because a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by its very looks and manners, the same power and beauty that a gallery of sculpture or of pictures addresses.

Civil and natural history, the history of art and of literature, must be explained from individual history, or must remain words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us, — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, — the roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the Dome of St. Peter’s are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Cathedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Steinbach. The true poem is the poet’s mind; the true ship is the ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should see the reason for the last flourish and tendril of his work; as every spine and tint in the sea-shell preexists in the secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chivalry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could ever add.

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some old prediction to us and converting into things the words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet. The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world. I remember one summer day in the fields my companion pointed out to me a broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted over churches, — a round block in the centre, which it was easy to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the archetype of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain of summer lightning which at once showed to me that the Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common architectural scroll to abut a tower.

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. “The custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock,” says Heeren in his Researches on the Ethiopians, “determined very naturally the principal character of the Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assistance of nature it could not move on a small scale without degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?”

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of the forest trees, with all their boughs, to a festal or solemn arcade; as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, his saw and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty.

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in summer and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of a market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism. And in these late and civil countries of England and America these propensities still fight out the old battle, in the nation and in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to wander, by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season and to drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America and Europe the nomadism is of trade and curiosity; a progress, certainly, from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo and Italo-mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs, tending to invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers; and the cumulative values of long residence are the restraints on the itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the love of adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. A man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid domestication, lives in his wagon and roams through all latitudes as easily as a Calmuc. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates as happily as beside his own chimneys. Or perhaps his facility is deeper seated, in the increased range of his faculties of observation, which yield him points of interest wherever fresh objects meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to desperation; and this intellectual nomadism, in its excess, bankrupts the mind through the dissipation of power on a miscellany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is that continence or content which finds all the elements of life in its own soil; and which has its own perils of monotony and deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions.

Every thing the individual sees without him corresponds to his states of mind, and every thing is in turn intelligible to him, as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that fact or series belongs.

The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as the Germans say, — I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities; courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. “After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, began to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like.” Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any and sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the old literature, is that the persons speak simply, — speak as persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses should, — that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists; but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had it seems the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnavigation by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the sacred history of the world he has the same key. When the voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition and the caricature of institutions.

Rare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God have from time to time walked among men and made their commission felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence evidently the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the divine afflatus.

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves. As they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, their own piety explains every fact, every word.

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind. I cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much as theirs.

I have seen the first monks and anchorets, without crossing seas or centuries. More than once some individual has appeared to me with such negligence of labor and such commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary begging in the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins.

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual’s private life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young child, in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the understanding, and that without producing indignation, but only fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny, — is a familiar fact, explained to the child when he becomes a man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself a child tyrannized over by those names and words and forms of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped and how the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and himself has laid the courses.

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds, like them, new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigor is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licentiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many times in the history of the world has the Luther of the day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household! “Doctor,” said his wife to Martin Luther, one day, “how is it that whilst subject to papacy we prayed so often and with such fervor, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and very seldom?”

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature, — in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born. One after another he comes up in his private adventures with every fable of Aesop, of Homer, of Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with his own head and hands.

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of the imagination and not of the fancy, are universal verities. What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has the story of Prometheus! Beside its primary value as the first chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts and the migration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion, with some closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of the old mythology. He is the friend of man; stands between the unjust “justice” of the Eternal Father and the race of mortals, and readily suffers all things on their account. But where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity and exhibits him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence of man against this untruth, namely a discontent with the believed fact that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverence is onerous. It would steal if it could the fire of the Creator, and live apart from him and independent of him. The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness both his body and his mind are invigorated by habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry, to unfix and as it were clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus. The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran? And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. The transmigration of souls is no fable. I would it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. Ah! brother, stop the ebb of thy soul, — ebbing downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old fable of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles to every passenger. If the man could not answer, she swallowed him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. What is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events? In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts encumber them, tyrannize over them, and make the men of routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a higher race; remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places; they know their master, and the meanest of them glorifies him.

See in Goethe’s Helena the same desire that every word should be a thing. These figures, he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, Phorkyas, Helen and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a specific influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal entities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving them he writes out freely his humor, and gives them body to his own imagination. And although that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images, — awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shocks of surprise.

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” All the fictions of the Middle Age explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit “to bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas; and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals, — that the fairies do not like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted; that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like, — I find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily forward, — that of the external world, — in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also the correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to play for, and he would beat the air, and appear stupid. Transport him to large countries, dense population, complex interests and antagonist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, bounded that is by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual Napoleon. This is but Talbot’s shadow; —

   “His substance is not here.

   For what you see is but the smallest part

   And least proportion of humanity;

   But were the whole frame here,

   It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch,

   Your roof were not sufficient to contain it.”

 — Henry VI.

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Newton and Laplace need myriads of age and thick-strewn celestial areas. One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of Newton’s mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring the affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo predict the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic sound? Do not the constructive fingers of Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temperable texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the refinements and decorations of civil society? Here also we are reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder its thought for ages and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm? No man can antedate his experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first time.

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce its treasures for each pupil. He too shall pass through the whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and experiences; — his own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge, the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the building of the Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences and new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old as the Caucasian man, — perhaps older, — these creatures have kept their counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals, — from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, — if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.

   SELF-RELIANCE.

   “Ne te quaesiveris extra.”

   “Man is his own star; and the soul that can

   Render an honest and a perfect man,

   Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

   Nothing to him falls early or too late.

   Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,

   Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

   Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune.

   Cast the bantling on the rocks,

   Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

   Wintered with the hawk and fox.

   Power and speed be hands and feet.

SELF-RELIANCE.

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

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

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

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

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

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, “What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within?” my friend suggested,— “But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’ Rough and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached, as the counteraction of the doctrine of love, when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; — though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you is that it scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-buff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression. There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history; I mean “the foolish face of praise,” the forced smile which we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved but moved by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of the face with the most disagreeable sensation.

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. The by-standers look askance on him in the public street or in the friend’s parlor. If this aversation had its origin in contempt and resistance like his own he might well go home with a sad countenance; but the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs. Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid, as being very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being, as the inequalities of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of the sphere. Nor does it matter how you gauge and try him. A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; — read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this pleasing contrite wood-life which God allows me, let me record day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also. We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemera. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome”; and all history Resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book have an alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to say like that, ‘Who are you, Sir?’ Yet they all are his, suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day’s work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred and Scanderbeg and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen.

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suffered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and things and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but with honor, and represent the law in his person, was the hieroglyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of their own right and comeliness, the right of every man.

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee? What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom and which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions are but roving; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish between perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition. That thought by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name; — the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul.

Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I have all men’s. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door and say,— ‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you: if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last.’ — But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog; whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day.

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlor soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations; that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window, we pity him no more but thank and revere him; — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor and make his name dear to all history.

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.

1. In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Caratach, in Fletcher’s Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the mind of the god Audate, replies, —

“His hidden meaning lies in our endeavors;

Our valors are our best gods.”

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”

As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, ‘Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we will obey.’ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentham, a Fourier, it imposes its classification on other men, and lo! a new system. In proportion to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind acting on the elemental thought of duty, and man’s relation to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Swedenborgism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance that he goes, the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign and not like an interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

3. But the rage of travelling is a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our faculties, lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the government, he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul, all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

4. As our Religion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever were. A singular equality may be observed between the great men of the first and of the last ages; nor can all the science, art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to educate greater men than Plutarch’s heroes, three or four and twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume and do not invigorate men. The harm of the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats as to astonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the resources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, discovered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of means and machinery which were introduced with loud laudation a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered Europe by the bivouac, which consisted of falling back on naked valor and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Cases, “without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake his bread himself.”

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have come to esteem the religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental, — came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes. “Thy lot or portion of life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” Our dependence on these foreign goods leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties meet in numerous conventions; the greater the concourse and with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from Essex! The Democrats from New Hampshire! The Whigs of Maine! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers summon conventions and vote and resolve in multitude. Not so, O friends! will the God deign to enter and inhabit you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a man puts off all foreign support and stands alone that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and, in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.

COMPENSATION.

   The wings of Time are black and white,

   Pied with morning and with night.

   Mountain tall and ocean deep

   Trembling balance duly keep.

   In changing moon, in tidal wave,

   Glows the feud of Want and Have.

   Gauge of more and less through space

   Electric star and pencil plays.

   The lonely Earth amid the balls

   That hurry through the eternal halls,

   A makeweight flying to the void,

   Supplemental asteroid,

   Or compensatory spark,

   Shoots across the neutral Dark.

   Man’s the elm, and Wealth the vine,

   Stanch and strong the tendrils twine:

   Though the frail ringlets thee deceive,

   None from its stock that vine can reave.

   Fear not, then, thou child infirm,

   There’s no god dare wrong a worm.

   Laurel crowns cleave to deserts

   And power to him who power exerts;

   Hast not thy share? On winged feet,

   Lo! it rushes thee to meet;

   And all that Nature made thy own,

   Floating in air or pent in stone,

   Will rive the hills and swim the sea

   And, like thy shadow, follow thee.

COMPENSATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   1 St. Augustine, Confessions, B. I.

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

   “Of all the gods, I only know the keys

    That ope the solid doors within whose vaults

    His thunders sleep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

               “Winds blow and waters roll

       Strength to the brave, and power and deity,

       Yet in themselves are nothing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   SPIRITUAL LAWS.

   The living Heaven thy prayers respect,

   House at once and architect,

   Quarrying man’s rejected hours,

   Builds therewith eternal towers;

   Sole and self-commanded works,

   Fears not undermining days,

   Grows by decays,

   And, by the famous might that lurks

   In reaction and recoil,

   Makes flame to freeze, and ice to boil;

   Forging, through swart arms of Offence,

   The silver seat of Innocence.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. In these hours the mind seems so great that nothing can be taken from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful if man will live the life of nature and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man, — never darkened across any man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give account of his faith and expound to another the theory of his self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity in that which he is. “A few strong instincts and a few plain rules” suffice us.

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now take. The regular course of studies, the years of academical and professional education have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School. What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it.

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation. But there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there or he is not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him. Timoleon’s victories are the best victories, which ran and flowed like Homer’s verses, Plutarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say ‘Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.’

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life. There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid far-sighted plans to Caesar and Napoleon; but the best of their power was in nature, not in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, ‘Not unto us, not unto us.’ According to the faith of their times they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to the eye their deed. Did the wires generate the galvanism? It is even true that there was less in them on which they could reflect than in another; as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which externally seemed will and immovableness was willingness and self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shakspeare? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius convey to others any insight into his methods? If he could communicate that secret it would instantly lose its exaggerated value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy the power to stand and to go.

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature; for whenever we get this vantage-ground of the past, or of a wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are begirt with laws which execute themselves.

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition-convention, or the Temperance-meeting, or the Transcendental club into the fields and woods, she says to us, ‘So hot? my little Sir.’

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools and churches and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all virtue work in one and the same way? Why should all give dollars? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars; merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn; poets will sing; women will sew; laborers will lend a hand; the children will bring flowers. And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.

If we look wider, things are all alike; laws and letters and creeds and modes of living seem a travesty of truth. Our society is encumbered by ponderous machinery, which resembles the endless aqueducts which the Romans built over hill and dale and which are superseded by the discovery of the law that water rises to the level of its source. It is a Chinese wall which any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing army, not so good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly appointed empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to answer just as well.

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling forward. All our manual labor and works of strength, as prying, splitting, digging, rowing and so forth, are done by dint of continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, fall for ever and ever.

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out and thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of nature is not that which may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made. We judge of a man’s wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth. The wild fertility of nature is felt in comparing our rigid names and reputations with our fluid consciousness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. One sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that he is that middle point whereof every thing may be affirmed and denied with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you say of the seraphim, and of the tin-peddler. There is no permanent wise man except in the figment of the Stoics. We side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and the robber; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, and shall be again, — not in the low circumstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs possible to the soul.

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine. Belief and love, — a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when we struggle to wound its creatures our hands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why need you choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a possible right for you that precludes the need of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose and the air and the sun.

I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. But that which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution; and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the state or circumstance desirable to my constitution; and the action which I in all my years tend to do, is the work for my faculties. We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade? Has he not a calling in his character?

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines to do something which is easy to him and good when it is done, but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any other call. The pretence that he has another call, a summons by name and personal election and outward “signs that mark him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men,” is fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein.

By doing his work he makes the need felt which he can supply, and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own work he unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force and meaning is in him. The common experience is that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves; the man is lost. Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. He must find in that an outlet for his character, so that he may justify his work to their eyes. If the labor is mean, let him by his thinking and character make it liberal. Whatever he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth doing, that let him communicate, or men will never know and honor him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.

We like only such actions as have already long had the praise of men, and do not perceive that any thing man can do may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organized in some places or duties, in certain offices or occasions, and do not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and Eulenstein from a jews-harp, and a nimble-fingered lad out of shreds of paper with his scissors, and Landseer out of swine, and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in which he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or vulgar society is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and renowned as any. In our estimates let us take a lesson from kings. The parts of hospitality, the connection of families, the impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things, royalty makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. To make habitually a new estimate, — that is elevation.

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope or fear? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as solid but that which is in his nature and which must grow out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may come and go like summer leaves; let him scatter them on every wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness.

He may have his own. A man’s genius, the quality that differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes only his own out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the loadstone amongst splinters of steel. Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory without his being able to say why, remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. They are symbols of value to him as they can interpret parts of his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks at my door, whilst a thousand persons as worthy go by it, to whom I give no regard. It is enough that these particulars speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, manners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out of all proportion to their apparent significance if you measure them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your heart thinks great is great. The soul’s emphasis is always right.

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius the man has the highest right. Everywhere he may take what belongs to his spiritual estate, nor can he take any thing else though all doors were open, nor can all the force of men hinder him from taking so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a secret from one who has a right to know it. It will tell itself. That mood into which a friend can bring us is his dominion over us. To the thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All the secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is a law which statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the French Republic, which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Vienna M. de Narbonne, one of the old noblesse, with the morals, manners and name of that interest, saying that it was indispensable to send to the old aristocracy of Europe men of the same connection, which, in fact, constitutes a sort of free-masonry. M. de Narbonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. Yet a man may come to find that the strongest of defences and of ties, — that he has been understood; and he who has received an opinion may come to find it the most inconvenient of bonds.

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any which he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel twisted into coils and angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into this or that; — it will find its level in all. Men feel and act the consequences of your doctrine without being able to show how they follow. Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathematician will find out the whole figure. We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot bury his meanings so deep in his book but time and like-minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, “They are published and not published.”

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.

Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. “Earth fills her lap with splendors” not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the trees; as it is not observed that the keepers of Roman galleries or the valets of painters have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are wiser men than others. There are graces in the demeanor of a polished and noble person which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These are like the stars whose light has not yet reached us.

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps the traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his hand is terrific. “My children,” said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, “my children, you will never see any thing worse than yourselves.” As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts five, — east, west, north, or south; or an initial, medial, and terminal acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person and avoids another, according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking himself in his associates and moreover in his trade and habits and gestures and meats and drinks, and comes at last to be faithfully represented by every view you take of his circumstances.

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire but what we are? You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands and read your eyes out, you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews’ tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen, it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body is in the room.

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which adjust the relation of all persons to each other by the mathematical measure of their havings and beings? Gertrude is enamored of Guy; how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners! to live with him were life indeed, and no purchase is too great; and heaven and earth are moved to that end. Well, Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails how high, how aristocratic, how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are in the senate, in the theatre and in the billiard-room, and she has no aims, no conversation that can enchant her graceful lord?

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but nature. The most wonderful talents, the most meritorious exertions really avail very little with us; but nearness or likeness of nature, — how beautiful is the ease of its victory! Persons approach us, famous for their beauty, for their accomplishments, worthy of all wonder for their charms and gifts; they dedicate their whole skill to the hour and the company, — with very imperfect result. To be sure it would be ungrateful in us not to praise them loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead of another having come; we are utterly relieved and refreshed; it is a sort of joyful solitude. We foolishly think in our days of sin that we must court friends by compliance to the customs of society, to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. The scholar forgets himself and apes the customs and costumes of the man of the world to deserve the smile of beauty, and follows some giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion to know the noble woman with all that is serene, oracular and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and love shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others’ eyes.

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all acceptation that a man may have that allowance he takes. Take the place and attitude which belong to you, and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every man, with profound unconcern, to set his own rate. Hero or driveller, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept your own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak about and deny your own name, or whether you see your work produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the revolution of the stars.

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you and you are he; then is a teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of one ear as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and Mr. Hand before the Mechanics’ Association, and we do not go thither, because we know that these gentlemen will not communicate their own character and experience to the company. If we had reason to expect such a confidence we should go through all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried in litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man.

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath can give it evidence. The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathematically measurable by its depth of thought. How much water does it draw? If it awaken you to think, if it lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; if the pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in the hour. The way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion is to speak and write sincerely. The argument which has not power to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach yours. But take Sidney’s maxim:— “Look in thy heart, and write.” He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity. The writer who takes his subject from his ear and not from his heart, should know that he has lost as much as he seems to have gained, and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half the people say, ‘What poetry! what genius!’ it still needs fuel to make fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life alone can impart life; and though we should burst we can only be valued as we make ourselves valuable. There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears, but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum and morocco, and presentation-copies to all the libraries will not preserve a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must go with all Walpole’s Noble and Royal Authors to its fate. Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok may endure for a night, but Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato, — never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand. “No book,” said Bentley, “was ever written down by any but itself.” The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort, friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man. “Do not trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue,” said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor; “the light of the public square will test its value.”

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must; it was the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the circumstances of the moment. But now, every thing he did, even to the lifting of his finger or the eating of bread, looks large, all-related, and is called an institution.

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius of nature; they show the direction of the stream. But the stream is blood; every drop is alive. Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs, — not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud. You have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that you cannot help them; for oracles speak. Doth not Wisdom cry and Understanding put forth her voice?

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimulation. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the body. Faces never lie, it is said. No man need be deceived who will study the changes of expression. When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint.

I have heard an experienced counsellor say that he never feared the effect upon a jury of a lawyer who does not believe in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict. If he does not believe it his unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all his protestations, and will become their unbelief. This is that law whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it. That which we do not believe we cannot adequately say, though we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction which Swedenborg expressed when he described a group of persons in the spiritual world endeavoring in vain to articulate a proposition which they did not believe; but they could not, though they twisted and folded their lips even to indignation.

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any thing, — that he can do it better than any one else, — he has a pledge of the acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop and run in each yard and square, a new-comer is as well and accurately weighed in the course of a few days and stamped with his right number, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength, speed and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with better dress, with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and pretensions; an older boy says to himself, ‘It’s of no use; we shall find him out to-morrow.’ ‘What has he done?’ is the divine question which searches men and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.

As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. The high, the generous, the self-devoted sect will always instruct and command mankind. Never was a sincere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the ground, but there is some heart to greet and accept it unexpectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes, in our smiles, in salutations, and the grasp of hands. His sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men know not why they do not trust him, but they do not trust him. His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his cheek, pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of the head, and writes O fool! fool! on the forehead of a king.

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge, — all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,— “How can a man be concealed? How can a man be concealed?”

On the other hand, the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to sweetness of peace and to nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It consists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for not having visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act? Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest love has come to see him, in thee its lowest organ. Or why need you torment yourself and friend by secret self-reproaches that you have not assisted him or complimented him with gifts and salutations heretofore? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real light and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common men are apologies for men; they bow the head, excuse themselves with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances because the substance is not.

We are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is not a president, a merchant, or a porter. We adore an institution, and do not see that it is founded on a thought which we have. But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life and says,— ‘Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.’ And all our after years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and according to their ability execute its will. This revisal or correction is a constant force, which, as a tendency, reaches through our lifetime. The object of the man, the aim of these moments, is to make daylight shine through him, to suffer the law to traverse his whole being without obstruction, so that on what point soever of his doing your eye falls it shall report truly of his character, whether it be his diet, his house, his religious forms, his society, his mirth, his vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and the ray does not traverse; there are no thorough lights, but the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many unlike tendencies and a life not yet at one.

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to disparage that man we are and that form of being assigned to us? A good man is contented. I love and honor Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just to love the world of this hour than the world of his hour. Nor can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, ‘He acted and thou sittest still.’ I see action to be good, when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminondas, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should we be busybodies and superserviceable? Action and inaction are alike to the true. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. Shall I not assume the post? Shall I skulk and dodge and duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty and imagine my being here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there? and that the soul did not know its own needs? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, I have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me and unlocks new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I will not meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have heard that it has come to others in another shape.

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action? ’Tis a trick of the senses, — no more. We know that the ancestor of every action is a thought. The poor mind does not seem to itself to be any thing unless it have an outside badge, — some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayer-meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great donation, or a high office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action to testify that it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature. To think is to act.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. Let us seek one peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy of Greek and Italian history before I have justified myself to my benefactors? How dare I read Washington’s campaigns when I have not answered the letters of my own correspondents? Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbors. It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting, —

   “He knew not what to say, and so he swore.”

I may say it of our preposterous use of books, — He knew not what to do, and so he read. I can think of nothing to fill my time with, and I find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant compliment to pay to Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to General Washington. My time should be as good as their time, — my facts, my net of relations, as good as theirs, or either of theirs. Rather let me do my work so well that other idlers if they choose may compare my texture with the texture of these and find it identical with the best.

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, this under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact of an identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good astronomer, the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius; the painter uses the conventional story of the Virgin Mary, of Paul, of Peter. He does not therefore defer to the nature of these accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet write a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Caesar; then the selfsame strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of its love and hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid and precious in the world, — palaces, gardens, money, navies, kingdoms, — marking its own incomparable worth by the slight it casts on these gauds of men; — these all are his, and by the power of these he rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.

We are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil that measure the accumulations of the subtle element. We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises.

   LOVE.

   “I was as a gem concealed;

   Me my burning ray revealed.”

                          Koran.

LOVE.

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by patience and the Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the school-house door; — but to-day he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life’s book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, “enamelled in fire,” and make the study of midnight: —

   “Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,

    Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy

      loving heart.”

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said of love, —

   “All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men: —

        “Fountain-heads and pathless groves,

         Places which pale passion loves,

         Moonlight walks, when all the fowls

         Are safely housed, save bats and owls,

         A midnight bell, a passing groan, —

         These are the sounds we feed upon.”

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence.”

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” We say so because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled: —

        “Her pure and eloquent blood

         Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

         That one might almost say her body thought.”

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature — for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element — is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman: —

        “The person love does to us fit,

         Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other’s designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them together, — those once sacred features, that magical play of charms, — was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

   FRIENDSHIP.

   A RUDDY drop of manly blood

   The surging sea outweighs;

   The world uncertain comes and goes,

   The lover rooted stays.

   I fancied he was fled,

   And, after many a year,

   Glowed unexhausted kindliness

   Like daily sunrise there.

   My careful heart was free again, —

   O friend, my bosom said,

   Through thee alone the sky is arched,

   Through thee the rose is red,

   All things through thee take nobler form

   And look beyond the earth,

   The mill-round of our fate appears

   A sun-path in thy worth.

   Me too thy nobleness has taught

   To master my despair;

   The fountains of my hidden life

   Are through thy friendship fair.

FRIENDSHIP.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain cordial exhilaration. In poetry and in common speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love to the lowest degree of good-will, they make the sweetness of life.

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and forthwith troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the dress and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart and the communications of the soul, no more.

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish, — all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand years.

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a possession for all time. Nor is Nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first Bard, — poetry without stop, — hymn, ode and epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these too separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost dangerous to me to “crush the sweet poison of misused wine” of the affections. A new person is to me a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine, and a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books and instruments, — fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its pied and painted immensity, — thee also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love: —

DEAR FRIEND,

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise; my moods are quite attainable, and I respect thy genius; it is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how many friends I have and what content I can find in conversing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other friends my asylum: —

        “The valiant warrior famoused for fight,

         After a hundred victories, once foiled,

         Is from the book of honor razed quite,

         And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.”

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother’s soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either should be first named. One is truth. A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank; that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting — as indeed he could not help doing — for some time in this course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some civility, — requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge and trifle, — but we can scarce believe that so much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed and we so pure that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,— “I offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted.” I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet on the other hand we cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine and does not substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is fit for serene days and graceful gifts and country rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs and offices of man’s life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and unity. It should never fall into something usual and settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to what was drudgery.

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike men and women variously related to each other and between whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation, — no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these disparities, unites them.

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made good.

Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own before we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb; — you can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inquinat, aequat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their dialogue each stands for the whole world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late, — very late, — we perceive that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire, — but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul.

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, — those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows merely.

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe, an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other’s because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced; he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend.

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have but what they are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though we parted not.

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god, that it may deify both.

   PRUDENCE.

   THEME no poet gladly sung,

   Fair to old and foul to young;

   Scorn not thou the love of parts,

   And the articles of arts.

   Grandeur of the perfect sphere

   Thanks the atoms that cohere.

PRUDENCE.

What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have Little, and that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate lubricity and people without perception. Then I have the same title to write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not possess. The poet admires the man of energy and tactics; the merchant breeds his son for the church or the bar; and where a man is not vain and egotistic you shall find what he has not by his praise. Moreover it would be hardly honest in me not to balance these fine lyric words of Love and Friendship with words of coarser sound, and whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant, not to own it in passing.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is God taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws of matter. It is content to seek health of body by complying with physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the intellect.

The world of the senses is a world of shows; it does not exist for itself, but has a symbolic character; and a true prudence or law of shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws and knows that its own office is subaltern; knows that it is surface and not centre where it works. Prudence is false when detached. It is legitimate when it is the Natural History of the soul incarnate, when it unfolds the beauty of laws within the narrow scope of the senses.

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three. One class live to the utility of the symbol, esteeming health and wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the beauty of the symbol, as the poet and artist and the naturalist and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified; these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man traverses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly, then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and lastly, whilst he pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not offer to build houses and barns thereon, — reverencing the splendor of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and cranny.

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we possessed no other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, the eye and ear; a prudence which adores the Rule of Three, which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, and asks but one question of any project, — Will it bake bread? This is a disease like a thickening of the skin until the vital organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the high origin of the apparent world and aiming at the perfection of the man as the end, degrades every thing else, as health and bodily life, into means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants. Cultivated men always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value as proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated man.

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature’s joke, and therefore literature’s. The true prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world. This recognition once made, the order of the world and the distribution of affairs and times, being studied with the co-perception of their subordinate place, will reward any degree of attention. For our existence, thus apparently attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the periods which they mark, — so susceptible to climate and to country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of splendor and so tender to hunger and cold and debt, — reads all its primary lessons out of these books.

Prudence does not go behind nature and ask whence it is. It takes the laws of the world whereby man’s being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, sleep, the law of polarity, growth and death. There revolve, to give bound and period to his being on all sides, the sun and moon, the great formalists in the sky: here lies stubborn matter, and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws and fenced and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties which impose new restraints on the young inhabitant.

We eat of the bread which grows in the field. We live by the air which blows around us and we are poisoned by the air that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which shows so vacant, indivisible and divine in its coming, is slit and peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock to be repaired. I want wood or oil, or meal or salt; the house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax, and an affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains, and the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word, — these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have its flies; if we walk in the woods we must feed mosquitos; if we go a-fishing we must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a great impediment to idle persons; we often resolve to give up the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the rain.

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the hours and years. The hard soil and four months of snow make the inhabitant of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. The islander may ramble all day at will. At night he may sleep on a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild date-tree grows, nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for his morning meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must brew, bake, salt and preserve his food, and pile wood and coal. But as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to without some new acquaintance with nature, and as nature is inexhaustibly significant, the inhabitants of these climates have always excelled the southerner in force. Such is the value of these matters that a man who knows other things can never know too much of these. Let him have accurate perceptions. Let him, if he have hands, handle; if eyes, measure and discriminate; let him accept and hive every fact of chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is he willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occasions that disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of every natural and innocent action. The domestic man, who loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and the airs which the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces which others never dream of. The application of means to ends insures victory and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband finds method as efficient in the packing of fire-wood in a shed or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular campaigns or the files of the Department of State. In the rainy day he builds a work-bench, or gets his tool-box set in the corner of the barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, pincers, screwdriver and chisel. Herein he tastes an old joy of youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses and corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping. His garden or his poultry-yard tells him many pleasant anecdotes. One might find argument for optimism in the abundant flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every suburb and extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the law, — any law, — and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. If you think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes to deal with men of loose and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson is reported to have said,— “If the child says he looked out of this window, when he looked out of that, — whip him.” Our American character is marked by a more than average delight in accurate perception, which is shown by the currency of the byword, “No mistake.” But the discomfort of unpunctuality, of confusion of thought about facts, of inattention to the wants of to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey it will yield us bees. Our words and actions to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June, yet what is more lonesome and sad than the sound of a whetstone or mower’s rifle when it is too late in the season to make hay? Scatter-brained and “afternoon” men spoil much more than their own affair in spoiling the temper of those who deal with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which I am reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who are not true to their senses. The last Grand Duke of Weimar, a man of superior understanding, said,— “I have sometimes remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now especially in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes to the effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an irresistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures we draw, the right centre of gravity. I mean the placing the figures firm upon their feet, making the hands grasp, and fastening the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even lifeless figures, as vessels and stools — let them be drawn ever so correctly — lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the perpendicularity of all the figures.” This perpendicularity we demand of all the figures in this picture of life. Let them stand on their feet, and not float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them discriminate between what they remember and what they dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their own senses with trust.

But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence? Who is prudent? The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. There is a certain fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, distorting our modes of living and making every law our enemy, which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in the world to ponder the question of Reform. We must call the highest prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and genius should now be the exception rather than the rule of human nature? We do not know the properties of plants and animals and the laws of nature, through our sympathy with the same; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and prudence should be coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted. We have violated law upon law until we stand amidst ruins, and when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason and the phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is rare. Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius should be the child of genius and every child should be inspired; but now it is not to be predicted of any child, and nowhere is it pure. We call partial half-lights, by courtesy, genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it.

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for every deduction from his holiness, and less for every defect of common sense. On him who scorned the world as he said, the scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small things will perish by little and little. Goethe’s Tasso is very likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses and slays a score of innocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this world and consistent and true to them, the other fired with all divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a knot we cannot untie. Tasso’s is no infrequent case in modern biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reckless of physical laws, self-indulgent, becomes presently unfortunate, querulous, a “discomfortable cousin,” a thorn to himself and to others.

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something higher than prudence is active, he is admirable; when common sense is wanted, he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was not so great; to-day, the felon at the gallows’ foot is not more miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an ideal world in which he lives, the first of men; and now oppressed by wants and by sickness, for which he must thank himself. He resembles the pitiful drivellers whom travellers describe as frequenting the bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow, emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel and become tranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the tragedy of imprudent genius struggling for years with paltry pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted and fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins?

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending him, as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and self-denial? Health, bread, climate, social position, have their importance, and he will give them their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, and her perfections the exact measure of our deviations. Let him make the night night, and the day day. Let him control the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as much wisdom may be drawn from it. The laws of the world are written out for him on every piece of money in his hand. There is nothing he will not be the better for knowing, were it only the wisdom of Poor Richard, or the State-Street prudence of buying by the acre to sell by the foot; or the thrift of the agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it will grow whilst he sleeps; or the prudence which consists in husbanding little strokes of the tool, little portions of time, particles of stock and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. Iron, if kept at the ironmonger’s, will rust; beer, if not brewed in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour; timber of ships will rot at sea, or if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp and dry-rot; money, if kept by us, yields no rent and is liable to loss; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white; keep the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be very much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank-notes, good, bad, clean, ragged, and saves itself by the speed with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every thing in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law and not by luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the minor virtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting! let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How many words and promises are promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float round the globe in a pine ship and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming population, let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his being across all these distracting forces, and keep a slender human word among the storms, distances and accidents that drive us hither and thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man reappear to redeem its pledge after months and years in the most distant climates.

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking at that only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is symmetrical. The prudence which secures an outward well-being is not to be studied by one set of men, whilst heroism and holiness are studied by another, but they are reconcilable. Prudence concerns the present time, persons, property and existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots in the soul, and if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or would become some other thing, — the proper administration of outward things will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause and origin; that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the single-hearted the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. On the most profitable lie the course of events presently lays a destructive tax; whilst frankness invites frankness, puts the parties on a convenient footing and makes their business a friendship. Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great, though they make an exception in your favor to all their rules of trade.

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence does not consist in evasion or in flight, but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, “In battles the eye is first overcome.” Entire self-possession may make a battle very little more dangerous to life than a match at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers of men who have seen the cannon pointed and the fire given to it, and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlor and the cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet as under the sun of June.

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbors, fear comes readily to heart and magnifies the consequence of the other party; but it is a bad counsellor. Every man is actually weak and apparently strong. To himself he seems weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid of Grim; but Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the good-will of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But the sturdiest offender of your peace and of the neighborhood, if you rip up his claims, is as thin and timid as any, and the peace of society is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid, and the other dares not. Far off, men swell, bully and threaten; bring them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk.

It is a proverb that ‘courtesy costs nothing’; but calculation might come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled to be blind, but kindness is necessary to perception; love is not a hood, but an eye-water. If you meet a sectary or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines, but meet on what common ground remains, — if only that the sun shines and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it, the boundary mountains on which the eye had fastened have melted into air. If they set out to contend, Saint Paul will lie and Saint John will hate. What low, poor, paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion will make of the pure and chosen souls! They will shuffle and crow, crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that they may brag and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either party, and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither should you put yourself in a false position with your contemporaries by indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely that which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliverance. The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute. The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does not show itself proportioned and in its true bearings, but bears extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent and it shall presently be granted, since really and underneath their external diversities, all men are of one heart and mind.

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy and intimacy to come. But whence and when? To-morrow will be like to-day. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our friends and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely can we say we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are too old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are easy to the feet. Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper names prouder, and that tickle the fancy more. Every man’s imagination hath its friends; and life would be dearer with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in garden-beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility and all the virtues range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a present well-being. I do not know if all matter will be found to be made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

   HEROISM.

   “Paradise is under the shadow of swords.”

                                 Mahomet.

   RUBY wine is drunk by knaves,

   Sugar spends to fatten slaves,

   Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons;

   Thunderclouds are Jove’s festoons,

   Drooping oft in wreaths of dread

   Lightning-knotted round his head;

   The hero is not fed on sweets,

   Daily his own heart he eats;

   Chambers of the great are jails,

   And head-winds right for royal sails.

HEROISM.

In the elder English dramatists, and mainly in the plays Of Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society of their age as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo, Pedro or Valerio enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, ‘This is a gentleman, — and proffers civilities without end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal advantages there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of character and dialogue, — as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the Double Marriage, — wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry. Among many texts take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered Athens, — all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although assured that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds: —

   Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.

   Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,

   Yonder, above, ‘bout Ariadne’s crown,

   My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

   Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight;

   Let not soft nature so transformed be,

   And lose her gentler sexed humanity,

   To make me see my lord bleed. So, ’tis well;

   Never one object underneath the sun

   Will I behold before my Sophocles:

   Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.

   Mar. Dost know what ‘t is to die?

   Soph. Thou dost not, Martius,

   And, therefore, not what ’tis to live; to die

   Is to begin to live. It is to end

   An old, stale, weary work, and to commence

   A newer and a better. ’Tis to leave

   Deceitful knaves for the society

   Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part

   At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,

   And prove thy fortitude what then ‘t will do.

   Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?

   Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent

   To them I ever loved best? Now I’ll kneel,

   But with my back toward thee; ’tis the last duty

   This trunk can do the gods.

   Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius,

   Or Martius’ heart will leap out at his mouth.

   This is a man, a woman. Kiss thy lord,

   And live with all the freedom you were wont.

   O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me

   With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,

   My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,

   Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

   Val. What ails my brother?

   Soph. Martius, O Martius,

   Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

   Dor. O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak

   Fit words to follow such a deed as this?

   Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius,

   With his disdain of fortune and of death,

   Captived himself, has captivated me,

   And though my arm hath ta’en his body here,

   His soul hath subjugated Martius’ soul.

   By Romulus, he is all soul, I think;

   He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;

   Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,

   And Martius walks now in captivity.

I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” and the ode of “Dion,” and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies there is an account of the battle of Lutzen which deserves to be read. And Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of individual valor, with admiration all the more evident on the part of the narrator that he seems to think that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence. But if we explore the literature of Heroism we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his “Lives” is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue more than books of political science or of private economy. Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. The violations of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contemporaries are punished in us also. The disease and deformity around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such compound misery. A lock-jaw that bends a man’s head back to his heels; hydrophobia that makes him bark at his wife and babes; insanity that makes him eat grass; war, plague, cholera, famine, indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhappily no man exists who has not in his own person become to some amount a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself liable to a share in the expiation.

Our culture therefore must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the rectitude of his behavior.

Towards all this external evil the man within the breast assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single-handed with the infinite army of enemies. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly and as it were merrily he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless we must profoundly revere it. There is somewhat in great actions which does not allow us to go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right; and although a different breeding, different religion and greater intellectual activity would have modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a quality in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little farther on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little time be past: then they see it to be in unison with their acts. All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sensual prosperity; for every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What shall it say then to the sugar-plums and cats’-cradles, to the toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards and custard, which rack the wit of all society? What joys has kind nature provided for us dear creatures! There seems to be no interval between greatness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense. “Indeed, these humble considerations make me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to take note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, these and those that were the peach-colored ones; or to bear the inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other for use!”

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display; the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice and the fire he will provide. Ibn Hankal, the Arabian geographer, describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, in Bukharia. “When I was in Sogd I saw a great building, like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed back to the wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told that the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years. Strangers may present themselves at any hour and in whatever number; the master has amply provided for the reception of the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any other country.” The magnanimous know very well that they who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger, — so it be done for love and not for ostentation, — do, as it were, put God under obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose is redeemed and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves. These men fan the flame of human love and raise the standard of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for service and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision his living is natural and poetic. John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine,— “It is a noble, generous liquor and we should be humbly thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it.” Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,— “O Virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade.” I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

But that which takes my fancy most in the heroic class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life at so cheap a rate that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of his accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates’s condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More’s playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Sea Voyage,” Juletta tells the stout captain and his company, —

   Jul. Why, slaves, ’tis in our power to hang ye.

   Master. Very likely,

   ’Tis in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye.

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing seriously; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches and nations which have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and customs of this world behind them, and play their own game in innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, like little children frolicking together, though to the eyes of mankind at large they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences.

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our purpose. All these great and transcendent properties are ours. If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let us find room for this great guest in our small houses. The first step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious associations with places and times, with number and size. Why should these words, Athenian, Roman, Asia and England, so tingle in the ear? Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River and Boston Bay you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest. Epaminondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground enough for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet of Milton. A great man makes his climate genial in the imagination of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate spirits. That country is the fairest which is inhabited by the noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is; that we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days.

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire their superiority; they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. What then? The lesson they gave in their first aspirations is yet true; and a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had genius and cultivation do not satisfy the imagination and the serene Themis, none can, — certainly not she? Why not? She has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with erect soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each new experience, search in turn all the objects that solicit her eye, that she may learn the power and the charm of her new-born being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of space. The fair girl who repels interference by a decided and proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own nobleness. The silent heart encourages her; O friend, never strike sail to a fear! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined by the vision.

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose excellence is that they outrun sympathy and appeal to a tardy justice. If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person,— “Always do what you are afraid to do.” A simple manly character need never make an apology, but should regard its past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his dissuasion from the battle.

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find consolation in the thought — this is a part of my constitution, part of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has nature covenanted with me that I should never appear to disadvantage, never make a ridiculous figure? Let us be generous of our dignity as well as of our money. Greatness once and for ever has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not because we wish to be praised for them, not because we think they have great merit, but for our justification. It is a capital blunder; as you discover when another man recites his charities.

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering men. And not only need we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, — but it behooves the wise man to look with a bold eye into those rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of violent death.

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day never shines in which this element may not work. The circumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at this hour than perhaps ever before. More freedom exists for culture. It will not now run against an axe at the first step out of the beaten track of opinion. But whoso is heroic will always find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live.

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much association, let him go home much, and stablish himself in those courses he approves. The unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor, if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic, if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire, tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to pronounce his opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us: —

        “Let them rave:

   Thou art quiet in thy grave.”

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.

   THE OVER-SOUL.

   “BUT souls that of his own good life partake,

   He loves as his own self; dear as his eye

   They are to Him: He’ll never them forsake:

   When they shall die, then God himself shall die:

   They live, they live in blest eternity.”

                                      Henry More.

   Space is ample, east and west,

   But two cannot go abreast,

   Cannot travel in it two:

   Yonder masterful cuckoo

   Crowds every egg out of the nest,

   Quick or dead, except its own;

   A spell is laid on sod and stone,

   Night and Day ‘ve been tampered with,

   Every quality and pith

   Surcharged and sultry with a power

   That works its will on age and hour.

THE OVER-SOUL.

THERE is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For this reason the argument which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know what it saith. Every man’s words who speaks from that life must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend. When it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins when it would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something of himself. All reform aims in some one particular to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, “God comes to see us without bell;” that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time, —

        “Can crowd eternity into an hour,

         Or stretch an hour to eternity.”

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the conditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed; or produce a volume of Plato or Shakspeare, or remind us of their names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See how the deep divine thought reduces centuries and millenniums and makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought has nothing to do with time. And so always the soul’s scale is one, the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space and Nature shrink away. In common speech we refer all things to time, as we habitually refer the immensely sundered stars to one concave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we mean that in the nature of things one of the facts we contemplate is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its progress to be computed. The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain total character, that does not advance the elect individual first over John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of discovered inferiority, — but by every throe of growth the man expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian than with persons in the house.

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which contains them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is not it; requires justice, but justice is not that; requires beneficence, but is somewhat better; so that there is a kind of descent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well-born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform that commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action and grace. For whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment we have come from our remote station on the circumference instantaneously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a slow effect.

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society, with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or express a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I live. I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature; and these other souls, these separated selves, draw me as nothing else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion; of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity; thence come conversation, competition, persuasion, cities and war. Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them. But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between two persons tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God. And so in groups where debate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple, this unity of thought in which every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and do not label or stamp it with any man’s name, for it is theirs long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting in vain. The action of the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid than in that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We know better than we do. We do not yet possess ourselves, and we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neighbors, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by-play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us.

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to the world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, they resemble those Arabian sheiks who dwell in mean houses and affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, and reserve all their display of wealth for their interior and guarded retirements.

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. It is adult already in the infant man. In my dealing with my child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money stead me nothing; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of strength. But if I renounce my will and act for the soul, setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes looks the same soul; he reveres and loves with me.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, ‘How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?’ We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indicate the greatness of that man’s perception,— “It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false, — this is the mark and character of intelligence.” In the book I read, the good thought returns to me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a discerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the particular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things.

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages of the individual’s experience, it also reveals truth. And here we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the soul’s communication of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these communications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, — to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with excess of light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own questions. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after.

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion of a revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands shall do and who shall be their company, adding names and dates and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation of the idea of duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary “decree of God,” but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the children of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one.

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the character of the several individuals in his circle of friends? No man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs had yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who had an interest in his own character. We know each other very well, — which of us has been just to himself and whether that which we teach or behold is only an aspiration or is our honest effort also.

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, its trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, is one wide, judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in small committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not read them by learning or craft. No; the wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge them; he lets them judge themselves and merely reads and records their own verdict.

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together can hinder him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all his opinions will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, — between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, — between philosophers like Spinoza, Kant and Coleridge, and philosophers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh and Stewart, — between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying half insane under the infinitude of his thought, — is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance of such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly confess it.

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing presence; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspiration; they have a light and know not whence it comes and call it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In these instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of virtue, but almost of vice; and we feel that a man’s talents stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is not anomalous, but more like and not less like other men. There is in all great poets a wisdom of humanity which is superior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the partisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shakspeare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring of inferior but popular writers. For they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes beholds again and blesses the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions. His best communication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done. Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day for ever. Why then should I make account of Hamlet and Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables from the tongue?

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and proud; it comes as insight; it comes as serenity and grandeur. When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an eye to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by quoting my lord and the prince and the countess, who thus said or did to him. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons and brooches and rings, and preserve their cards and compliments. The more cultivated, in their account of their own experience, cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance, — the visit to Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant friend They know; still further on perhaps the gorgeous landscape, the mountain lights, the mountain thoughts they enjoyed yesterday, — and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true; has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures; does not want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience of the common day, — by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become porous to thought and bibulous of the sea of light.

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap and so things of course, that in the infinite riches of the soul it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing can pass there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, plain confession, and omniscient affirmation.

Souls such as these treat you as gods would, walk as gods in the earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your bounty, your virtue even, — say rather your act of duty, for your virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and over-royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery with which authors solace each other and wound themselves! These flatter not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell and Christina and Charles the Second and James the First and the Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows of kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for they confront them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, and give a high nature the refreshment and satisfaction of resistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship and of new ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. Deal so plainly with man and woman as to constrain the utmost sincerity and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the highest compliment you can pay. Their “highest praising,” said Milton, “is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind of praising.”

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul. The simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our mistakes and disappointments! When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure revelation of time the solution of his private riddles. He is sure that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence of law to his mind he is overflowed with a reliance so universal that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find him? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you that you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be prevented from going? O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

Let man then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sentiment of duty is there. But if he would know what the great God speaketh, he must ‘go into his closet and shut the door,’ as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men’s devotion. Even their prayers are hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made, — no matter how indirectly, — to numbers, proclamation is then and there made that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him never counts his company. When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in? When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say?

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower; it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the immense possibilities of man all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, that we have none; that we have no history, no record of any character or mode of living that entirely contents us. The saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original and pure, to the Lonely, Original and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public and human in my regards and actions. So come I to live in thoughts and act with energies which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that “its beauty is immense,” man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.

   CIRCLES.

   NATURE centres into balls,

   And her proud ephemerals,

   Fast to surface and outside,

   Scan the profile of the sphere;

   Knew they what that signified,

   A new genesis were here.

CIRCLES.

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into another idea: they will disappear. The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice; here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July. For the genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are already passing under the same sentence and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet; the new races fed out of the decomposition of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics; fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; sails, by steam; steam by electricity.

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate appears to women a firm and lasting fact; to a merchant, one easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An orchard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture, like a gold mine, or a river, to a citizen; but to a large farmer, not much more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest; and when once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable? Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance, — as for instance an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite, — to heap itself on that ridge and to solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong it bursts over that boundary on all sides and expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses, it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, — how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the literatures of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder: the steps are actions; the new prospect is power. Every several result is threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems to be contradicted by the new; it is only limited by the new. The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revelation of the new hour.

Fear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much.

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of thoughts and can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow! I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.

The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The sweet of nature is love; yet, if I have a friend I am tormented by my imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him, and rise by my affection to new heights. A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he loses for truth, he gains a better. I thought as I walked in the woods and mused on my friends, why should I play with them this game of idolatry? I know and see too well, when not voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and worthy. Rich, noble and great they are by the liberality of our speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for these, they are not thou! Every personal consideration that we allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for a short and turbulent pleasure.

How often must we learn this lesson? Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him. Has he talents? has he enterprise? has he knowledge? It boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you never see it again.

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes. By going one step farther back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of mankind are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it.

Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and his alert acceptance of it from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world, may at any time be superseded and decease.

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him. The idealism of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, and that again is a crude statement of the fact that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one time directly dependent on the intellectual classification then existing in the minds of men. The things which are dear to men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present order of things, as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs, are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, — knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, — property, climate, breeding, personal beauty and the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see the swift circumspection! Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be suffered.

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle through which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill ourselves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier see French, English and American houses and modes of living. In like manner we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find the parallax of any star.

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more of choosing a straight path in theory and practice.

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of the world. We can never see Christianity from the catechism: — from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the songs of wood-birds we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography. Christianity is rightly dear to the best of mankind; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding had fallen into the Christian church by whom that brave text of Paul’s was not specially prized:— “Then shall also the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” Let the claims and virtues of persons be never so great and welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of the book itself.

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concentric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislocations which apprise us that this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious qualities, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and methods only, — are words of God, and as fugitive as other words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely that like draws to like, and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to you and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence is a higher fact. Not through subtle subterranean channels need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur. But it behooves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

One man’s justice is another’s injustice; one man’s beauty another’s ugliness; one man’s wisdom another’s folly; as one beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord’s or a banker’s?

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices: —

        “Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too,

         Those smaller faults, half converts to the right.”

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitableness day by day; but when these waves of God flow into me I no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the year; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omnipotence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done, without time.

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that if we are true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we shall construct the temple of the true God!

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and hole that selfishness has left open, yea into selfishness and sin itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought, and contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and thought as Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which is made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew, germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then, become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are building up our being. Of lower states, of acts of routine and sense, we can tell somewhat; but the masterpieces of God, the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he hideth; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine and helpful; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new position of the advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. Now, for the first time seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words, — we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire.

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better goals. Character makes an overpowering present; a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies all the company by making them see that much is possible and excellent that was not thought of. Character dulls the impression of particular events. When we see the conqueror we do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression. People say sometimes, ‘See what I have overcome; see how cheerful I am; see how completely I have triumphed over these black events.’ Not if they still remind me of the black event. True conquest is the causing the calamity to fade and disappear as an early cloud of insignificant result in a history so large and advancing.

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. “A man,” said Oliver Cromwell, “never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.” Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.

   INTELLECT.

   GO, speed the stars of Thought

   On to their shining goals; —

   The sower scatters broad his seed,

   The wheat thou strew’st be souls.

INTELLECT.

Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood and iron and salt; air dissolves water; electric fire dissolves air, but the intellect dissolves fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations of nature in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple power anterior to all action or construction. Gladly would I unfold in calm degrees a natural history of the intellect, but what man has yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries of that transparent essence? The first questions are always to be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitiveness of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, knowledge into act? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the things known.

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds. Intellect separates the fact considered, from you, from all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense and colored mists. In the fog of good and evil affections it is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is void of affection and sees an object as it stands in the light of science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what concerns person or place cannot see the problem of existence. This the intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things and reduces all things into a few principles.

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that mass of mental and moral phenomena which we do not make objects of voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune; they constitute the circumstance of daily life; they are subject to change, to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies open to the mercy of coming events. But a truth, separated by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We behold it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for science. What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us but makes us intellectual beings.

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual. Long prior to the age of reflection is the thinking of the mind. Out of darkness it came insensibly into the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy it accepted and disposed of all impressions from the surrounding creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith is after a law; and this native law remains over it after it has come to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter’s life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot with your best deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from your bed, or walk abroad in the morning after meditating the matter before sleep on the previous night. Our thinking is a pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as much by too violent direction given by our will, as by too great negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We only open our senses, clear away as we can all obstruction from the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch us up for moments into their heaven and so fully engage us that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what we have seen, and repeat as truly as we can what we have beheld. As far as we can recall these ecstasies we carry away in the ineffaceable memory the result, and all men and all the ages confirm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to report and attempt to correct and contrive, it is not truth.

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us, we shall perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive principle over the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the second, but virtual and latent. We want in every man a long logic; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must not be spoken. Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of the intuition; but its virtue is as silent method; the moment it would appear as propositions and have a separate value it is worthless.

In every man’s mind, some images, words and facts remain, without effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, and afterwards these illustrate to him important laws. All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth and you shall know why you believe.

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires after college rules. What you have aggregated in a natural manner surprises and delights when it is produced. For we cannot oversee each other’s secret. And hence the differences between men in natural endowment are insignificant in comparison with their common wealth. Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you? Every body knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture, finds his curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking of other men, and especially of those classes whose minds have not been subdued by the drill of school education.

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but becomes richer and more frequent in its informations through all states of culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we not only observe, but take pains to observe; when we of set purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth; when we keep the mind’s eye open whilst we converse, whilst we read, whilst we act, intent to learn the secret law of some class of facts.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis of civil government. Let him intend his mind without respite, without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time avails him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say I will walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. We go forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only the stillness and composed attitude of the library to seize the thought. But we come in, and are as far from it as at first. Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A certain wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the principle, we wanted. But the oracle comes because we had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood, — the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity and see what the great Soul showeth.

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is mainly prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect what delights you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, Where did he get this? and think there was something divine in his life. But no; they have myriads of facts just as good, would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal.

We are all wise. The difference between persons is not in wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person who always deferred to me; who, seeing my whim for writing, fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior; whilst I saw that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me and I would make the same use of them. He held the old; he holds the new; I had the habit of tacking together the old and the new which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in the great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no, but of a great equality, — only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which we lacked. For notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit and immense knowledge of life and liquid eloquence find in us all.

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe corn, and then retire within doors and shut your eyes and press them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the bright light with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, or the corn-flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it not. So lies the whole series of natural images with which your life has made you acquainted, in your memory, though you know it not; and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as the word of its momentary thought.

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until by and by we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought now for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems, for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to the unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by which it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through space and only when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spiritual energy is directed on something outward, then it is a thought. The relation between it and you first makes you, the value of you, apparent to me. The rich inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be inexhaustible poets if once we could break through the silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, between two men and between two moments of the same man, in respect to this faculty. In common hours we have the same facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judgment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imaginative vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not flow from experience only or mainly, but from a richer source. Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grand strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing to the fountain-head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first drawing-master? Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the human form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a picture; if the attitude be natural or grand or mean; though he has never received any instruction in drawing or heard any conversation on the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness a single feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject, and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head. We may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill; for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are! We entertain ourselves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of gardens, of woods and of monsters, and the mystic pencil wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, no meagreness or poverty; it can design well and group well; its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on and the whole canvas which it paints is lifelike and apt to touch us with terror, with tenderness, with desire and with grief. Neither are the artist’s copies from experience ever mere copies, but always touched and softened by tints from this ideal domain.

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear to be so often combined but that a good sentence or verse remains fresh and memorable for a long time. Yet when we write with ease and come out into the free air of thought, we seem to be assured that nothing is easier than to continue this communication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom of thought has no inclosures, but the Muse makes us free of her city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would think then that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years. It is true that the discerning intellect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so that there are many competent judges of the best book, and few writers of the best books. But some of the conditions of intellectual construction are of rare occurrence. The intellect is a whole and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted equally by a man’s devotion to a single thought and by his ambition to combine too many.

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself but falsehood; herein resembling the air, which is our natural element, and the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the same be directed on the body for a time, it causes cold, fever, and even death. How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon.

Is it any better if the student, to avoid this offence, and to liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, or science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his vision? The world refuses to be analyzed by addition and subtraction. When we are young we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that in the course of a few years we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Neither by detachment neither by aggregation is the integrity of the intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which brings the intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every moment. It must have the same wholeness which nature has. Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a model by the best accumulation or disposition of details, yet does the world reappear in miniature in every event, so that all the laws of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The intellect must have the like perfection in its apprehension and in its works. For this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual proficiency is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird are not theirs, have nothing of them; the world is only their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses are to be spheral and complete, is one whom Nature cannot deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness she may put on. He feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness than variety in all her changes. We are stung by the desire for new thought; but when we receive a new thought it is only the old thought with a new face, and though we make it our own we instantly crave another; we are not really enriched. For the truth was in us before it was reflected to us from natural objects; and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures into every product of his wit.

But if the constructive powers are rare and it is given to few men to be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending holy ghost, and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly parallel is the whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral duty. A self-denial no less austere than the saint’s is demanded of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things for that, and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in thought is thereby augmented.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please, — you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, — most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes to find the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth I am bathed by a beautiful element and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I confine and am less. When Socrates speaks, Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not speak. They also are good. He likewise defers to them, loves them, whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seems something the less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful with the more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and universal. Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, and follow me. Who leaves all, receives more. This is as true intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach seems to require an abdication of all our past and present possessions. A new doctrine seems at first a subversion of all our opinions, tastes, and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter Cousin seemed to many young men in this country. Take thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and after a short season the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven and blending its light with all your day.

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which draws him, because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to that which draws him not, whatsoever fame and authority may attend it, because it is not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs to the intellect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. It must treat things and books and sovereign genius as itself also a sovereign. If Aeschylus be that man he is taken for, he has not yet done his office when he has educated the learned of Europe for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail him nothing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Aeschyluses to my intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant. Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I shall not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;— “The cherubim know most; the seraphim love most.” The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these great spiritual lords who have walked in the world, — these of the old religion, — dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of Christianity look parvenues and popular; for “persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect.” This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible and the most natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, without a moment’s heed of the universal astonishment of the human race below, who do not comprehend their plainest argument; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a popular or explaining sentence, nor testify the least displeasure or petulance at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.

   ART.

   GIVE to barrows trays and pans

   Grace and glimmer of romance,

   Bring the moonlight into noon

   Hid in gleaming piles of stone;

   On the city’s paved street

   Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet,

   Let spouting fountains cool the air,

   Singing in the sun-baked square.

   Let statue, picture, park and hall,

   Ballad, flag and festival,

   The past restore, the day adorn

   And make each morrow a new morn

   So shall the drudge in dusty frock

   Spy behind the city clock

   Retinues of airy kings,

   Skirts of angels, starry wings,

   His fathers shining in bright fables,

   His children fed at heavenly tables.

   ’Tis the privilege of Art

   Thus to play its cheerful part,

   Man in Earth to acclimate

   And bend the exile to his fate,

   And, moulded of one element

   With the days and firmament,

   Teach him on these as stairs to climb

   And live on even terms with Time;

   Whilst upper life the slender rill

   Of human sense doth overfill.

ART.

Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim. In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the landscape has beauty for his eye because it expresses a thought which is to him good; and this because the same power which sees through his eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will come to value the expression of nature and not nature itself, and so exalt in his copy the features that please him. He will give the gloom of gloom and the sunshine of sunshine. In a portrait he must inscribe the character and not the features, and must esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imperfect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within.

What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? for it is the inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger sense by simpler symbols. What is a man but nature’s finer success in self-explication? What is a man but a finer and compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — nature’s eclecticism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of nature, but a still finer success, — all the weary miles and tons of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it contracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the pencil?

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work and gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist and finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this element of Necessity from his labor. No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages and arts of his times shall have no share. Though he were never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above his will and out of his sight he is necessitated by the air he breathes and the idea on which he and his contemporaries live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inasmuch as the artist’s pen or chisel seems to have been held and guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese and Mexican idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height of the human soul in that hour, and were not fantastic, but sprung from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its highest value, as history; as a stroke drawn in the portrait of that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations all beings advance to their beatitude?

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing trance, but his individual character and his practical power depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and dealing with one at a time. Love and all the passions concentrate all existence around a single form. It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the object, the thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, — so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. The power depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour And concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is the only thing worth naming to do that, — be it a sonnet, an opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass to some other object, which rounds itself into a whole as did the first; for example a well-laid garden; and nothing seems worth doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire the best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and water, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatsoever, to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel leaping from bough to bough and making the Wood but one wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, — is beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter of pigs, satisfies and is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects we learn at last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature, which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also learn that what astonished and fascinated me in the first work astonished me in the second work also; that excellence of all things is one.

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing “landscape with figures” amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can draw every thing, why draw any thing? and then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, — capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. As picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. When I have seen fine statues and afterwards enter a public assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, “When I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants.” I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself improvising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes him, now another, and with each moment he alters the whole air, attitude and expression of his clay. Away with your nonsense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels; except to open your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are hypocritical rubbish.

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains the traits common to all works of the highest art, — that they are universally intelligible; that they restore to us the simplest states of mind, and are religious. Since what skill is therein shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of pure light, it should produce a similar impression to that made by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, — the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian masters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. The traveller who visits the Vatican, and passes from chamber to chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi and candelabra, through all forms of beauty cut in the richest materials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the technical rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that these works were not always thus constellated; that they are the contributions of many ages and many countries; that each came out of the solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, created his work without other model save life, household life, and the sweet and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting eyes; of poverty and necessity and hope and fear. These were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home to your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist will find in his work an outlet for his proper character. He must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, but through his necessity of imparting himself the adamant will be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication of himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not cumber himself with a conventional nature and culture, nor ask what is the mode in Rome or in Paris, but that house and weather and manner of living which poverty and the fate of birth have made at once so odious and so dear, in the gray unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the symbol of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all.

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms, — unto which I lived; that it was the plain you and me I knew so well, — had left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said to myself— ‘Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee there at home?’ That fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when I came to Rome and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. “What, old mole! workest thou in the earth so fast?” It had travelled by my side; that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the Vatican, and again at Milan and at Paris, and made all travelling ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of this peculiar merit. A calm benignant beauty shines over all this picture, and goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to call you by name. The sweet and sublime face of Jesus is beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid expectations! This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if one should meet a friend. The knowledge of picture-dealers has its value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you; for such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and lofty emotions.

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we must end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know them, are but initial. Our best praise is given to what they aimed and promised, not to the actual result. He has conceived meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age of production is past. The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency; tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art has not yet come to its maturity if it do not put itself abreast with the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it do not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses them with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art than the arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end. A man should find in it an outlet for his whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.

Already History is old enough to witness the old age and disappearance of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago perished to any real effect. It was originally a useful art, a mode of writing, a savage’s record of gratitude or devotion, and among a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form this childish carving was refined to the utmost splendor of effect. But it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the manly labor of a wise and spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I stand in a thoroughfare; but in the works of our plastic arts and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of paltriness, as of toys and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in “stone dolls.” Sculpture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the secret of form, how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into that eloquent dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before that new activity which needs to roll through all things, and is impatient of counterfeits and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill or industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures into nature, — namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which vented itself in these fine extravagances, — no longer dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute any thing higher than the character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and inconvertible, and console themselves with color-bags and blocks of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a death which they call poetic. They despatch the day’s weary chores, and fly to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses; it stands in the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin higher up, — to serve the ideal before they eat and drink; to serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, and in the functions of life? Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reiterate its miracles in the old arts; it is its instinct to find beauty and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it will raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint-stock company; our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist’s retort; in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great mechanical works, to mills, railways, and machinery, the effect of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.

ESSAYS, SECOND SERIES

CONTENTS

THE POET.

EXPERIENCE.

CHARACTER.

MANNERS.

GIFTS.

NATURE.

POLITICS.

NONIMALIST AND REALIST.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

THE POET.

    A moody child and wildly wise

    Pursued the game with joyful eyes,

    Which chose, like meteors, their way,

    And rived the dark with private ray:

    They overleapt the horizon’s edge,

    Searched with Apollo’s privilege;

    Through man, and woman, and sea, and star

    Saw the dance of nature forward far;

    Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times

    Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.

    Olympian bards who sung

      Divine ideas below,

    Which always find us young,

      And always keep us so.

THE POET.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “So every spirit, as it is most pure,

     And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

     So it the fairer body doth procure

     To habit in, and it more fairly dight,

     With cheerful grace and amiable sight.

     For, of the soul, the body form doth take,

     For soul is form, and doth the body make.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “So in our tree of man, whose nervie root

     Springs in his top;” —

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

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

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

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence possessing this virtue will take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told, — All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric, — universal signs, instead of these village symbols, — and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

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

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

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

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

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

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion of our fireplace; not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing.

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine: thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own; and thou shalt possess that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord! sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, — there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.

     EXPERIENCE.

     THE lords of life, the lords of life, —

     I saw them pass,

     In their own guise,

     Like and unlike,

     Portly and grim,

     Use and Surprise,

     Surface and Dream,

     Succession swift, and spectral Wrong,

     Temperament without a tongue,

     And the inventor of the game

     Omnipresent without name; —

     Some to see, some to be guessed,

     They marched from east to west:

     Little man, least of all,

     Among the legs of his guardians tall,

     Walked about with puzzled look: —

     Him by the hand dear Nature took;

     Dearest Nature, strong and kind,

     Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!

     Tomorrow they will wear another face,

     The founder thou! these are thy race!’

EXPERIENCE.

WHERE do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again. Did our birth fall in some fit of indigence and frugality in nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no superfluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. Ah that our Genius were a little more of a genius! We are like millers on the lower levels of a stream, when the factories above them have exhausted the water. We too fancy that the upper people must have raised their dams.

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know to-day whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that ’tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born. It is said all martyrdoms looked mean when they were suffered. Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon. Our life looks trivial, and we shun to record it. Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference. ‘Yonder uplands are rich pasturage, and my neighbor has fertile meadow, but my field,’ says the querulous farmer, ‘only holds the world together.’ I quote another man’s saying; unluckily that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me. ’Tis the trick of nature thus to degrade to-day; a good deal of buzz, and somewhere a result slipped magically in. Every roof is agreeable to the eye until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women and hard-eyed husbands and deluges of lethe, and the men ask, ‘What’s the news?’ as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature — take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel, — is a sum of very few ideas and of very few original tales; all the rest being variation of these. So in this great society wide lying around us, a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense. There are even few opinions, and these seem organic in the speakers, and do not disturb the universal necessity.

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

    “Over men’s heads walking aloft,

     With tender feet treading so soft.”

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

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

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

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

I thus express the law as it is read from the platform of ordinary life, but must not leave it without noticing the capital exception. For temperament is a power which no man willingly hears any one praise but himself. On the platform of physics we cannot resist the contracting influences of so-called science. Temperament puts all divinity to rout. I know the mental proclivity of physicians. I hear the chuckle of the phrenologists. Theoretic kidnappers and slave-drivers, they esteem each man the victim of another, who winds him round his finger by knowing the law of his being; and by such cheap signboards as the color of his beard or the slope of his occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they are: — Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! — But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I had fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual, what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden among vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the doctors shall buy me for a cent.— ‘But, sir, medical history; the report to the Institute; the proven facts!’ — I distrust the facts and the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level, or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo, such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.

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

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

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

But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism. Our young people have thought and written much on labor and reform, and for all that they have written, neither the world nor themselves have got on a step. Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately enough, with planted trees on either side to tempt the traveller, but soon became narrow and narrower and ended in a squirrel-track and ran up a tree. So does culture with us; it ends in headache. Unspeakably sad and barren does life look to those who a few months ago were dazzled with the splendor of the promise of the times. “There is now no longer any right course of action nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis.” Objections and criticism we have had our fill of. There are objections to every course of life and action, and the practical wisdom infers an indifferency, from the omnipresence of objection. The whole frame of things preaches indifferency. Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find, without question. Nature hates peeping, and our mothers speak her very sense when they say, “Children, eat your victuals, and say no more of it.” To fill the hour, — that is happiness; to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. Under the oldest mouldiest conventions a man of native force prospers just as well as in the newest world, and that by skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of mathematicians if you will, to say that the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a duration we were sprawling in want or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know is a respect to the present hour. Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. If these are mean and malignant, their contentment, which is the last victory of justice, is a more satisfying echo to the heart than the voice of poets and the casual sympathy of admirable persons. I think that however a thoughtful man may suffer from the defects and absurdities of his company, he cannot without affectation deny to any set of men and women a sensibility to extraordinary merit. The coarse and frivolous have an instinct of superiority, if they have not a sympathy, and honor it in their blind capricious way with sincere homage.

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

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos, and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law; do not come out of the Sunday School, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle; — and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copyright is to be discussed, and in the interim we will sell our books for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, — but thou, God’s darling! heed thy private dream; thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism; there are enough of them; stay there in thy closet and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.

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

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

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

    “Since neither now nor yesterday began

     These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can

     A man be found who their first entrance knew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness, — these are threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life. I dare not assume to give their order, but I name them as I find them in my way. I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code. I gossip for my hour concerning the eternal politics. I have seen many fair pictures not in vain. A wonderful time I have lived in. I am not the novice I was fourteen, nor yet seven years ago. Let who will ask Where is the fruit? I find a private fruit sufficient. This is a fruit, — that I should not ask for a rash effect from meditations, counsels and the hiving of truths. I should feel it pitiful to demand a result on this town and county, an overt effect on the instant month and year. The effect is deep and secular as the cause. It works on periods in which mortal lifetime is lost. All I know is reception; I am and I have: but I do not get, and when I have fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not. I worship with wonder the great Fortune. My reception has been so large, that I am not annoyed by receiving this or that superabundantly. I say to the Genius, if he will pardon the proverb, In for a mill, in for a million. When I receive a new gift, I do not macerate my body to make the account square, for if I should die I could not make the account square. The benefit overran the merit the first day, and has overrun the merit ever since. The merit itself, so-called, I reckon part of the receiving.

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

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

    CHARACTER.

    The sun set; but set not his hope:

    Stars rose; his faith was earlier up:

    Fixed on the enormous galaxy,

    Deeper and older seemed his eye:

    And matched his sufferance sublime

    The taciturnity of time.

    He spoke, and words more soft than rain

    Brought the Age of Gold again:

    His action won such reverence sweet,

    As hid all measure of the feat.

    Work of his hand

    He nor commends nor grieves

    Pleads for itself the fact;

    As unrepenting Nature leaves

    Her every act.

CHARACTER.

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

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

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

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

This is a natural power, like light and heat, and all nature cooperates with it. The reason why we feel one man’s presence and do not feel another’s is as simple as gravity. Truth is the summit of being; justice is the application of it to affairs. All individual natures stand in a scale, according to the purity of this element in them. The will of the pure runs down from them into other natures as water runs down from a higher into a lower vessel. This natural force is no more to be withstood than any other natural force. We can drive a stone upward for a moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever fall; and whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to make itself believed. Character is this moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. An individual is an encloser. Time and space, liberty and necessity, truth and thought, are left at large no longer. Now, the universe is a close or pound. All things exist in the man tinged with the manners of his soul. With what quality is in him he infuses all nature that he can reach; nor does he tend to lose himself in vastness, but, at how long a curve soever, all his regards return into his own good at last. He animates all he can, and he sees only what he animates. He encloses the world, as the patriot does his country, as a material basis for his character, and a theatre for action. A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole; so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level. Thus, men of character are the conscience of the society to which they belong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “The Gods are to each other not unknown.”

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

    When each the other shall avoid,

    Shall each by each be most enjoyed.

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

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

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

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

    MANNERS.

    “HOW near to good is what is fair!

    Which we no sooner see,

    But with the lines and outward air

    Our senses taken be.

    Again yourselves compose,

    And now put all the aptness on

    Of Figure, that Proportion

    Or Color can disclose;

    That if those silent arts were lost,

    Design and Picture, they might boast

    From you a newer ground,

    Instructed by the heightening sense

    Of dignity and reverence

    In their true motions found.”

                       BEN JONSON

MANNERS.

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

What fact more conspicuous in modern history than the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty is that, and, in English literature, half the drama, and all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Walter Scott, paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which unites all the most forcible persons of every country; makes them intelligible and agreeable to each other, and is somewhat so precise that it is at once felt if an individual lack the masonic sign, — cannot be any casual product, but must be an average result of the character and faculties universally found in men. It seems a certain permanent average; as the atmosphere is a permanent composition, whilst so many gases are combined only to be decompounded. Comme il faut, is the Frenchman’s description of good Society: as we must be. It is a spontaneous fruit of talents and feelings of precisely that class who have most vigor, who take the lead in the world of this hour, and though far from pure, far from constituting the gladdest and highest tone of human feeling, is as good as the whole society permits it to be. It is made of the spirit, more than of the talent of men, and is a compound result into which every great force enters as an ingredient, namely virtue, wit, beauty, wealth, and power.

There is something equivocal in all the words in use to express the excellence of manners and social cultivation, because the quantities are fluxional, and the last effect is assumed by the senses as the cause. The word gentleman has not any correlative abstract to express the quality. Gentility is mean, and gentilesse is obsolete. But we must keep alive in the vernacular the distinction between fashion, a word of narrow and often sinister meaning, and the heroic character which the gentleman imports. The usual words, however, must be respected; they will be found to contain the root of the matter. The point of distinction in all this class of names, as courtesy, chivalry, fashion, and the like, is that the flower and fruit, not the grain of the tree, are contemplated. It is beauty which is the aim this time, and not worth. The result is now in question, although our words intimate well enough the popular feeling that the appearance supposes a substance. The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness. The popular notion certainly adds a condition of ease and fortune; but that is a natural result of personal force and love, that they should possess and dispense the goods of the world. In times of violence, every eminent person must fall in with many opportunities to approve his stoutness and worth; therefore every man’s name that emerged at all from the mass in the feudal ages, rattles in our ear like a flourish of trumpets. But personal force never goes out of fashion. That is still paramount to-day, and in the moving crowd of good society the men of valor and reality are known and rise to their natural place. The competition is transferred from war to politics and trade, but the personal force appears readily enough in these new arenas.

Power first, or no leading class. In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks. God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door; but whenever used in strictness and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. It describes a man standing in his own right and working after untaught methods. In a good lord there must first be a good animal, at least to the extent of yielding the incomparable advantage of animal spirits. The ruling class must have more, but they must have these, giving in every company the sense of power, which makes things easy to be done which daunt the wise. The society of the energetic class, in their friendly and festive meetings, is full of courage and of attempts which intimidate the pale scholar. The courage which girls exhibit is like a battle of Lundy’s Lane, or a sea-fight. The intellect relies on memory to make some supplies to face these extemporaneous squadrons. But memory is a base mendicant with basket and badge, in the presence of these sudden masters. The rulers of society must be up to the work of the world, and equal to their versatile office: men of the right Caesarian pattern, who have great range of affinity. I am far from believing the timid maxim of Lord Falkland (“that for ceremony there must go two to it; since a bold fellow will go through the cunningest forms”), and am of opinion that the gentleman is the bold fellow whose forms are not to be broken through; and only that plenteous nature is rightful master which is the complement of whatever person it converses with. My gentleman gives the law where he is; he will outpray saints in chapel, outgeneral veterans in the field, and outshine all courtesy in the hall. He is good company for pirates and good with academicians; so that it is useless to fortify yourself against him; he has the private entrance to all minds, and I could as easily exclude myself, as him. The famous gentlemen of Asia and Europe have been of this strong type; Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves, to value any condition at a high rate.

A plentiful fortune is reckoned necessary, in the popular judgment, to the completion of this man of the world; and it is a material deputy which walks through the dance which the first has led. Money is not essential, but this wide affinity is, which transcends the habits of clique and caste and makes itself felt by men of all classes. If the aristocrat is only valid in fashionable circles and not with truckmen, he will never be a leader in fashion; and if the man of the people cannot speak on equal terms with the gentleman, so that the gentleman shall perceive that he is already really of his own order, he is not to be feared. Diogenes, Socrates, and Epaminondas, are gentlemen of the best blood who have chosen the condition of poverty when that of wealth was equally open to them. I use these old names, but the men I speak of are my contemporaries. Fortune will not supply to every generation one of these well-appointed knights, but every collection of men furnishes some example of the class; and the politics of this country, and the trade of every town, are controlled by these hardy and irresponsible doers, who have invention to take the lead, and a broad sympathy which puts them in fellowship with crowds, and makes their action popular.

The manners of this class are observed and caught with devotion by men of taste. The association of these masters with each other and with men intelligent of their merits, is mutually agreeable and stimulating. The good forms, the happiest expressions of each, are repeated and adopted. By swift consent everything superfluous is dropped, everything graceful is renewed. Fine manners show themselves formidable to the uncultivated man. They are a subtler science of defence to parry and intimidate; but once matched by the skill of the other party, they drop the point of the sword, — points and fences disappear, and the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game, and not a misunderstanding rises between the players. Manners aim to facilitate life, to get rid of impediments and bring the man pure to energize. They aid our dealing and conversation as a railway aids travelling, by getting rid of all avoidable obstructions of the road and leaving nothing to be conquered but pure space. These forms very soon become fixed, and a fine sense of propriety is cultivated with the more heed that it becomes a badge of social and civil distinctions. Thus grows up Fashion, an equivocal semblance, the most puissant, the most fantastic and frivolous, the most feared and followed, and which morals and violence assault in vain.

There exists a strict relation between the class of power and the exclusive and polished circles. The last are always filled or filling from the first. The strong men usually give some allowance even to the petulances of fashion, for that affinity they find in it. Napoleon, child of the revolution, destroyer of the old noblesse, never ceased to court the Faubourg St. Germain; doubtless with the feeling that fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past. It usually sets its face against the great of this hour. Great men are not commonly in its halls; they are absent in the field: they are working, not triumphing. Fashion is made up of their children; of those who through the value and virtue of somebody, have acquired lustre to their name, marks of distinction, means of cultivation and generosity, and, in their physical organization a certain health and excellence which secures to them, if not the highest power to work, yet high power to enjoy. The class of power, the working heroes, the Cortez, the Nelson, the Napoleon, see that this is the festivity and permanent celebration of such as they; that fashion is funded talent; is Mexico, Marengo, and Trafalgar beaten out thin; that the brilliant names of fashion run back to just such busy names as their own, fifty or sixty years ago. They are the sowers, their sons shall be the reapers, and their sons, in the ordinary course of things, must yield the possession of the harvest to new competitors with keener eyes and stronger frames. The city is recruited from the country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday that is city and court today.

Aristocracy and fashion are certain inevitable results. These mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, as certainly as cream rises in a bowl of milk: and if the people should destroy class after class, until two men only were left, one of these would be the leader and would be involuntarily served and copied by the other. You may keep this minority out of sight and out of mind, but it is tenacious of life, and is one of the estates of the realm. I am the more struck with this tenacity, when I see its work. It respects the administration of such unimportant matters, that we should not look for any durability in its rule. We sometimes meet men under some strong moral influence, as a patriotic, a literary, a religious movement, and feel that the moral sentiment rules man and nature. We think all other distinctions and ties will be slight and fugitive, this of caste or fashion for example; yet come from year to year and see how permanent that is, in this Boston or New York life of man, where too it has not the least countenance from the law of the land. Not in Egypt or in India a firmer or more impassable line. Here are associations whose ties go over and under and through it, a meeting of merchants, a military corps, a college class, a fire-club, a professional association, a political, a religious convention; — the persons seem to draw inseparably near; yet, that assembly once dispersed, its members will not in the year meet again. Each returns to his degree in the scale of good society, porcelain remains porcelain, and earthen earthen. The objects of fashion may be frivolous, or fashion may be objectless, but the nature of this union and selection can be neither frivolous nor accidental. Each man’s rank in that perfect graduation depends on some symmetry in his structure or some agreement in his structure to the symmetry of society. Its doors unbar instantaneously to a natural claim of their own kind. A natural gentleman finds his way in, and will keep the oldest patrician out who has lost his intrinsic rank. Fashion understands itself; good-breeding and personal superiority of whatever country readily fraternize with those of every other. The chiefs of savage tribes have distinguished themselves in London and Paris, by the purity of their tournure.

To say what good of fashion we can, it rests on reality, and hates nothing so much as pretenders; to exclude and mystify pretenders and send them into everlasting ‘Coventry,’ is its delight. We contemn in turn every other gift of men of the world; but the habit even in little and the least matters of not appealing to any but our own sense of propriety, constitutes the foundation of all chivalry. There is almost no kind of self-reliance, so it be sane and proportioned, which fashion does not occasionally adopt and give it the freedom of its saloons. A sainted soul is always elegant, and, if it will, passes unchallenged into the most guarded ring. But so will Jock the teamster pass, in some crisis that brings him thither, and find favor, as long as his head is not giddy with the new circumstance, and the iron shoes do not wish to dance in waltzes and cotillons. For there is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual. The maiden at her first ball, the country-man at a city dinner, believes that there is a ritual according to which every act and compliment must be performed, or the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way; and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectly well-bred would be a company of sensible persons in which every man’s native manners and character appeared. If the fashionist have not this quality, he is nothing. We are such lovers of self-reliance that we excuse in a man many sins if he will show us a complete satisfaction in his position, which asks no leave to be, of mine, or any man’s good opinion. But any deference to some eminent man or woman of the world, forfeits all privilege of nobility. He is an underling: I have nothing to do with him; I will speak with his master. A man should not go where he cannot carry his whole sphere or society with him, — not bodily, the whole circle of his friends, but atmospherically. He should preserve in a new company the same attitude of mind and reality of relation which his daily associates draw him to, else he is shorn of his best beams, and will be an orphan in the merriest club. “If you could see Vich Ian Vohr with his tail on!— “ But Vich Ian Vohr must always carry his belongings in some fashion, if not added as honor, then severed as disgrace.

There will always be in society certain persons who are mercuries of its approbation, and whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods. Accept their coldness as an omen of grace with the loftier deities, and allow them all their privilege. They are clear in their office, nor could they be thus formidable without their own merits. But do not measure the importance of this class by their pretension, or imagine that a fop can be the dispenser of honor and shame. They pass also at their just rate; for how can they otherwise, in circles which exist as a sort of herald’s office for the sifting of character?

As the first thing man requires of man is reality, so that appears in all the forms of society. We pointedly, and by name, introduce the parties to each other. Know you before all heaven and earth, that this is Andrew, and this is Gregory, — they look each other in the eye; they grasp each other’s hand, to identify and signalize each other. It is a great satisfaction. A gentleman never dodges; his eyes look straight forward, and he assures the other party, first of all, that he has been met. For what is it that we seek, in so many visits and hospitalities? Is it your draperies, pictures, and decorations? Or do we not insatiably ask, Was a man in the house? I may easily go into a great household where there is much substance, excellent provision for comfort, luxury, and taste, and yet not encounter there any Amphitryon who shall subordinate these appendages. I may go into a cottage, and find a farmer who feels that he is the man I have come to see, and fronts me accordingly. It was therefore a very natural point of old feudal etiquette that a gentleman who received a visit, though it were of his sovereign, should not leave his roof, but should wait his arrival at the door of his house. No house, though it were the Tuileries or the Escurial, is good for anything without a master. And yet we are not often gratified by this hospitality. Every body we know surrounds himself with a fine house, fine books, conservatory, gardens, equipage and all manner of toys, as screens to interpose between himself and his guest. Does it not seem as if man was of a very sly, elusive nature, and dreaded nothing so much as a full rencontre front to front with his fellow? It were unmerciful, I know, quite to abolish the use of these screens, which are of eminent convenience, whether the guest is too great or too little. We call together many friends who keep each other in play, or by luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope’s legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off: and yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve; and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of good manners. No rentroll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation; and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.

I have just been reading, in Mr. Hazlitt’s translation, Montaigne’s account of his journey into Italy, and am struck with nothing more agreeably than the self-respecting fashions of the time. His arrival in each place, the arrival of a gentleman of France, is an event of some consequence. Wherever he goes he pays a visit to whatever prince or gentleman of note resides upon his road, as a duty to himself and to civilization. When he leaves any house in which he has lodged for a few weeks, he causes his arms to be painted and hung up as a perpetual sign to the house, as was the custom of gentlemen.

The complement of this graceful self-respect, and that of all the points of good breeding I most require and insist upon, is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne, and hold a king. I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship. Let the incommunicable objects of nature and the metaphysical isolation of man teach us independence. Let us not be too much acquainted. I would have a man enter his house through a hall filled with heroic and sacred sculptures, that he might not want the hint of tranquillity and self-poise. We should meet each morning as from foreign countries, and, spending the day together, should depart at night, as into foreign countries. In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. Let us sit apart as the gods, talking from peak to peak all round Olympus. No degree of affection need invade this religion. This is myrrh and rosemary to keep the other sweet. Lovers Should guard their strangeness. If they forgive too much, all slides into confusion and meanness. It is easy to push this deference to a Chinese etiquette; but coolness and absence of heat and haste indicate fine qualities. A gentleman makes no noise; a lady is serene. Proportionate is our disgust at those invaders who fill a studious house with blast and running, to secure some paltry convenience. Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor’s needs. Must we have a good understanding with one another’s palates? as foolish people who have lived long together know when each wants salt or sugar. I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, and not to hold out his plate as if I knew already. Every natural function can be dignified by deliberation and privacy. Let us leave hurry to slaves. The compliments and ceremonies of our breeding should signify, however remotely, the recollection of the grandeur of our destiny.

The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling, but if we dare to open another leaf and explore what parts go to its conformation, we shall find also an intellectual quality. To the leaders of men, the brain as well as the flesh and the heart must furnish a proportion. Defect in manners is usually the defect of fine perceptions. Men are too coarsely made for the delicacy of beautiful carriage and customs. It is not quite sufficient to good-breeding, a union of kindness and independence. We imperatively require a perception of, and a homage to beauty in our companions. Other virtues are in request in the field and workyard, but a certain degree of taste is not to be spared in those we sit with. I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic. The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life. The average spirit of the energetic class is good sense, acting under certain limitations and to certain ends. It entertains every natural gift. Social in its nature, it respects everything which tends to unite men. It delights in measure. The love of beauty is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. If you wish to be loved, love measure. You must have genius or a prodigious usefulness if you will hide the want of measure. This perception comes in to polish and perfect the parts of the social instrument. Society will pardon much to genius and special gifts, but, being in its nature a convention, it loves what is conventional, or what belongs to coming together. That makes the good and bad of manners, namely what helps or hinders fellowship. For fashion is not good sense absolute, but relative; not good sense private, but good sense entertaining company. It hates corners and sharp points of character, hates quarrelsome, egotistical, solitary, and gloomy people; hates whatever can interfere with total blending of parties; whilst it values all peculiarities as in the highest degree refreshing, which can consist with good fellowship. And besides the general infusion of wit to heighten civility, the direct splendor of intellectual power is ever welcome in fine society as the costliest addition to its rule and its credit.

The dry light must shine in to adorn our festival, but it must be tempered and shaded, or that will also offend. Accuracy is essential to beauty, and quick perceptions to politeness, but not too quick perceptions. One may be too punctual and too precise. He must leave the omniscience of business at the door, when he comes into the palace of beauty. Society loves creole natures, and sleepy languishing manners, so that they cover sense, grace and good-will: the air of drowsy strength, which disarms criticism; perhaps because such a person seems to reserve himself for the best of the game, and not spend himself on surfaces; an ignoring eye, which does not see the annoyances, shifts, and inconveniences that cloud the brow and smother the voice of the sensitive.

Therefore besides personal force and so much perception as constitutes unerring taste, society demands in its patrician class another element already intimated, which it significantly terms good-nature, — expressing all degrees of generosity, from the lowest willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. A man who is happy there, finds in every turn of the conversation equally lucky occasions for the introduction of that which he has to say. The favorites of society, and what it calls whole souls, are able men and of more spirit than wit, who have no uncomfortable egotism, but who exactly fill the hour and the company; contented and contenting, at a marriage or a funeral, a ball or a jury, a water-party or a shooting-match. England, which is rich in gentlemen, furnished, in the beginning of the present century, a good model of that genius which the world loves, in Mr. Fox, who added to his great abilities the most social disposition and real love of men. Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons; when Fox urged on his old friend the claims of old friendship with such tenderness that the house was moved to tears. Another anecdote is so close to my matter, that I must hazard the story. A tradesman who had long dunned him for a note of three hundred guineas, found him one day counting gold, and demanded payment:— “No,” said Fox, “I owe this money to Sheridan; it is a debt of honor; if an accident should happen to me, he has nothing to show.” “Then,” said the creditor, “I change my debt into a debt of honor,” and tore the note in pieces. Fox thanked the man for his confidence and paid him, saying, “his debt was of older standing, and Sheridan must wait.” Lover of liberty, friend of the Hindoo, friend of the African slave, he possessed a great personal popularity; and Napoleon said of him on the occasion of his visit to Paris, in 1805, “Mr. Fox will always hold the first place in an assembly at the Tuileries.”

We may easily seem ridiculous in our eulogy of courtesy, whenever we insist on benevolence as its foundation. The painted phantasm Fashion rises to cast a species of derision on what we say. But I will neither be driven from some allowance to Fashion as a symbolic institution, nor from the belief that love is the basis of courtesy. We must obtain that, if we can; but by all means we must affirm this. Life owes much of its spirit to these sharp contrasts. Fashion, which affects to be honor, is often, in all men’s experience, only a ballroom-code. Yet so long as it is the highest circle in the imagination of the best heads on the planet, there is something necessary and excellent in it; for it is not to be supposed that men have agreed to be the dupes of anything preposterous; and the respect which these mysteries inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners. I know that a comic disparity would be felt, if we should enter the acknowledged ‘first circles’ and apply these terrific standards of justice, beauty, and benefit to the individuals actually found there. Monarchs and heroes, sages and lovers, these gallants are not. Fashion has many classes and many rules of probation and admission, and not the best alone. There is not only the right of conquest, which genius pretends, — the individual demonstrating his natural aristocracy best of the best; — but less claims will pass for the time; for Fashion loves lions, and points like Circe to her horned company. This gentleman is this afternoon arrived from Denmark; and that is my Lord Ride, who came yesterday from Bagdat; here is Captain Friese, from Cape Turnagain; and Captain Symmes, from the interior of the earth; and Monsieur Jovaire, who came down this morning in a balloon; Mr. Hobnail, the reformer; and Reverend Jul Bat, who has converted the whole torrid zone in his Sunday school; and Signor Torre del Greco, who extinguished Vesuvius by pouring into it the Bay of Naples; Spahi, the Persian ambassador; and Tul Wil Shan, the exiled nabob of Nepaul, whose saddle is the new moon. — But these are monsters of one day, and to-morrow will be dismissed to their holes and dens; for in these rooms every chair is waited for. The artist, the scholar, and, in general, the clerisy, wins their way up into these places and get represented here, somewhat on this footing of conquest. Another mode is to pass through all the degrees, spending a year and a day in St. Michael’s Square, being steeped in Cologne water, and perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the biography and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs.

Yet these fineries may have grace and wit. Let there be grotesque sculpture about the gates and offices of temples. Let the creed and commandments even have the saucy homage of parody. The forms of politeness universally express benevolence in superlative degrees. What if they are in the mouths of selfish men, and used as means of selfishness? What if the false gentleman almost bows the true out Of the world? What if the false gentleman contrives so to address his companion as civilly to exclude all others from his discourse, and also to make them feel excluded? Real service will not lose its nobleness. All generosity is not merely French and sentimental; nor is it to be concealed that living blood and a passion of kindness does at last distinguish God’s gentleman from Fashion’s. The epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout is not wholly unintelligible to the present age: “Here lies Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy: what his mouth ate, his hand paid for: what his servants robbed, he restored: if a woman gave him pleasure, he supported her in pain: he never forgot his children; and whoso touched his finger, drew after it his whole body.” Even the line of heroes is not utterly extinct. There is still ever some admirable person in plain clothes, standing on the wharf, who jumps in to rescue a drowning man; there is still some absurd inventor of charities; some guide and comforter of runaway slaves; some friend of Poland; some Philhellene; some fanatic who plants shade-trees for the second and third generation, and orchards when he is grown old; some well-concealed piety; some just man happy in an ill fame; some youth ashamed of the favors of fortune and impatiently casting them on other shoulders. And these are the centres of society, on which it returns for fresh impulses. These are the creators of Fashion, which is an attempt to organize beauty of behavior. The beautiful and the generous are, in the theory, the doctors and apostles of this church: Scipio, and the Cid, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Washington, and every pure and valiant heart who worshipped Beauty by word and by deed. The persons who constitute the natural aristocracy are not found in the actual aristocracy, or only on its edge; as the chemical energy of the spectrum is found to be greatest just outside of the spectrum. Yet that is the infirmity of the seneschals, who do not know their sovereign when he appears. The theory of society supposes the existence and sovereignty of these. It divines afar off their coming. It says with the elder gods, —

    “As Heaven and Earth are fairer far

     Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;

     And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth,

     In form and shape compact and beautiful;

     So, on our heels a fresh perfection treads;

     A power, more strong in beauty, born of us,

     And fated to excel us, as we pass

     In glory that old Darkness:

   ——  —— for, ’tis the eternal law,

     That first in beauty shall be first in might.”

Therefore, within the ethnical circle of good society there is a narrower and higher circle, concentration of its light, and flower of courtesy, to which there is always a tacit appeal of pride and reference, as to its inner and imperial court; the parliament of love and chivalry. And this is constituted of those persons in whom heroic dispositions are native; with the love of beauty, the delight in society, and the power to embellish the passing day. If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review, in such manner as that we could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman and no lady; for although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars we should detect offence. Because elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth. There must be romance of character, or the most fastidious exclusion of impertinencies will not avail. It must be genius which takes that direction: it must be not courteous, but courtesy. High behavior is as rare in fiction as it is in fact. Scott is praised for the fidelity with which he painted the demeanor and conversation of the superior classes. Certainly, kings and queens, nobles and great ladies, had some right to complain of the absurdity that had been put in their mouths before the days of Waverley; but neither does Scott’s dialogue bear criticism. His lords brave each other in smart epigramatic speeches, but the dialogue is in costume, and does not please on the second reading: it is not warm with life. In Shakspeare alone the speakers do not strut and bridle, the dialogue is easily great, and he adds to so many titles that of being the best-bred man in England and in Christendom. Once or twice in a lifetime we are permitted to enjoy the charm of noble manners, in the presence of a man or woman who have no bar in their nature, but whose character emanates freely in their word and gesture. A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form: it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts. A man is but a little thing in the midst of the objects of nature, yet, by the moral quality radiating from his countenance he may abolish all considerations of magnitude, and in his manners equal the majesty of the world. I have seen an individual whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his eye; who exhilarated the fancy by flinging wide the doors of new modes of existence; who shook off the captivity of etiquette, with happy, spirited bearing, good-natured and free as Robin Hood; yet with the port of an emperor, if need be, — calm, serious, and fit to stand the gaze of millions.

The open air and the fields, the street and public chambers are the places where Man executes his will; let him yield or divide the sceptre at the door of the house. Woman, with her instinct of behavior, instantly detects in man a love of trifles, any coldness or imbecility, or, in short, any want of that large, flowing, and magnanimous deportment which is indispensable as an exterior in the hall. Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women. A certain awkward consciousness of inferiority in the men may give rise to the new chivalry in behalf of Woman’s Rights. Certainly let her be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformer can ask, but I confide so entirely in her inspiring and musical nature, that I believe only herself can show us how she shall be served. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments raises her at times into heroical and godlike regions, and verifies the pictures of Minerva, Juno, or Polymnia; and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, she convinces the coarsest calculators that another road exists than that which their feet know. But besides those who make good in our imagination the place of muses and of Delphic Sibyls, are there not women who fill our vase with wine and roses to the brim, so that the wine runs over and fills the house with perfume; who inspire us with courtesy; who unloose our tongues and we speak; who anoint our eyes and we see? We say things we never thought to have said; for once, our walls of habitual reserve vanished and left us at large; we were children playing with children in a wide field of flowers. Steep us, we cried, in these influences, for days, for weeks, and we shall be sunny poets and will write out in many-colored words the romance that you are. Was it Hafiz or Firdousi that said of his Persian Lilla, She was an elemental force, and astonished me by her amount of life, when I saw her day after day radiating, every instant, redundant joy and grace on all around her. She was a solvent powerful to reconcile all heterogeneous persons into one society: like air or water, an element of such a great range of affinities that it combines readily with a thousand substances. Where she is present all others will be more than they are wont. She was a unit and whole, so that whatsoever she did, became her. She had too much sympathy and desire to please, than that you could say her manners were marked with dignity, yet no princess could surpass her clear and erect demeanor on each occasion. She did not study the Persian grammar, nor the books of the seven poets, but all the poems of the seven seemed to be written upon her. For though the bias of her nature was not to thought, but to sympathy, yet was she so perfect in her own nature as to meet intellectual persons by the fulness of her heart, warming them by her sentiments; believing, as she did, that by dealing nobly with all, all would show themselves noble.

I know that this Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution of our society makes it a giant’s castle to the ambitious youth who have not found their names enrolled in its Golden Book, and whom it has excluded from its coveted honors and privileges. They have yet to learn that its seeming grandeur is shadowy and relative: it is great by their allowance; its proudest gates will fly open at the approach of their courage and virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For the advantages which fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets namely. Out of this precinct they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, in friendship, in the heaven of thought or virtue.

But we have lingered long enough in these painted courts. The worth of the thing signified must vindicate our taste for the emblem. Everything that is called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the cause and fountain of honor, creator of titles and dignities, namely the heart of love. This is the royal blood, this the fire, which, in all countries and contingencies, will work after its kind and conquer and expand all that approaches it. This gives new meanings to every fact. This impoverishes the rich, suffering no grandeur but its own. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody? to succor the unfashionable and the eccentric? rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the itinerant with his consul’s paper which commends him “To the charitable,” the swarthy Italian with his few broken words of English, the lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or besotted wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice which made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim on acute and conclusive reasons? What is gentle, but to allow it, and give their heart and yours one holiday from the national caution? Without the rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar. The king of Schiraz could not afford to be so bountiful as the poor Osman who dwelt at his gate. Osman had a humanity so broad and deep that although his speech was so bold and free with the Koran as to disgust all the dervishes, yet was there never a poor outcast, eccentric, or insane man, some fool who had cut off his beard, or who had been mutilated under a vow, or had a pet madness in his brain, but fled at once to him; that great heart lay there so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country, that it seemed as if the instinct of all sufferers drew them to his side. And the madness which he harbored he did not share. Is not this to be rich? this only to be rightly rich?

But I shall hear without pain that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand. It is easy to see, that what is called by distinction society and fashion has good laws as well as bad, has much that is necessary, and much that is absurd. Too good for banning, and too bad for blessing, it reminds us of a tradition of the pagan mythology, in any attempt to settle its character. ‘I overheard Jove, one day,’ said Silenus, ‘talking of destroying the earth; he said it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect, seen far or seen near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; if you called them good, they would appear so; and there was no one person or action among them, which would not puzzle her owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or good.’

    GIFTS.

    Gifts of one who loved me, —

    ‘T was high time they came;

    When he ceased to love me,

    Time they stopped for shame.

GIFTS.

IT is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy; that the world owes the world more than the world can pay, and ought to go into chancery and be sold. I do not think this general insolvency, which involves in some sort all the population, to be the reason of the difficulty experienced at Christmas and New Year and other times, in bestowing gifts; since it is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts. But the impediment lies in the choosing. If at any time it comes into my head that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone. Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed? Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them. If a man should send to me to come a hundred miles to visit him and should set before me a basket of fine summer-fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the labor and the reward.

For common gifts, necessity makes pertinences and beauty every day, and one is glad when an imperative leaves him no option; since if the man at the door have no shoes, you have not to consider whether you could procure him a paint-box. And as it is always pleasing to see a man eat bread, or drink water, in the house or out of doors, so it is always a great satisfaction to supply these first wants. Necessity does everything well. In our condition of universal dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him. I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies. Next to things of necessity, the rule for a gift, which one of my friends prescribed, is that we might convey to some person that which properly belonged to his character, and was easily associated with him in thought. But our tokens of compliment and love are for the most part barbarous. Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing. This is right and pleasing, for it restores society in so far to its primary basis, when a man’s biography is conveyed in his gift, and every man’s wealth is an index of his merit. But it is a cold lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s. This is fit for kings, and rich men who represent kings, and a false state of property, to make presents of gold and silver stuffs, as a kind of symbolical sin-offering, or payment of black-mail.

The law of benefits is a difficult channel, which requires careful sailing, or rude boats. It is not the office of a man to receive gifts. How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten. We can receive anything from love, for that is a way of receiving it from ourselves; but not from any one who assumes to bestow. We sometimes hate the meat which we eat, because there seems something of degrading dependence in living by it: —

    “Brother, if Jove to thee a present make,

     Take heed that from his hands thou nothing take.”

We ask the whole. Nothing less will content us. We arraign society if it do not give us, besides earth and fire and water, opportunity, love, reverence, and objects of veneration.

He is a good man who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming. Some violence I think is done, some degradation borne, when I rejoice or grieve at a gift. I am sorry when my independence is invaded, or when a gift comes from such as do not know my spirit, and so the act is not supported; and if the gift pleases me overmuch, then I should be ashamed that the donor should read my heart, and see that I love his commodity, and not him. The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him. When the waters are at level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine, all mine his. I say to him, How can you give me this pot of oil or this flagon of wine when all your oil and wine is mine, which belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence the fitness of beautiful, not useful things, for gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful, as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at all considering the value of the gift but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, — I rather sympathize with the beneficiary than with the anger of my lord Timon. For the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who never thanks, and who says, “Do not flatter your benefactors.”

The reason of these discords I conceive to be that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit which is directly received. But rectitude scatters favors on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.

I fear to breathe any treason against the majesty of love, which is the genius and god of gifts, and to whom we must not affect to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or flower-leaves indifferently. There are persons from whom we always expect fairy-tokens; let us not cease to expect them. This is prerogative, and not to be limited by our municipal rules. For the rest, I like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. I find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick, — no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you and delight in you all the time.

    NATURE.

    The rounded world is fair to see,

    Nine times folded in mystery:

    Though baffled seers cannot impart

    The secret of its laboring heart,

    Throb thine with Nature’s throbbing breast,

    And all is clear from east to west.

    Spirit that lurks each form within

    Beckons to spirit of its kin;

    Self-kindled every atom glows,

    And hints the future which it owes.

NATURE.

THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies and the earth, make a harmony, as if nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours, seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature.

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety, — and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane in which we have given heed to some natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to windharps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames, or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sittingroom, — these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion. My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village. But I go with my friend to the shore of our little river, and with one stroke of the paddle I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element; our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance, but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most; he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, — is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the State with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove, his wine and his company, but the provocation and point of the invitation came out of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances I see what men strove to realize in some Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. Indeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon and the blue sky for the background which save all our works of art, which were otherwise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor with servility and obsequiousness, they should consider the effect of men reputed to be the possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy riches! A boy hears a military band play on the field at night, and he has kings and queens and famous chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for example, which converts the mountains into an Aeolian harp, — and this supernatural tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are rich for the sake of his imagination; how poor his fancy would be, if they were not rich! That they have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited, and go in coaches, keeping only the society of the elegant, to watering-places and to distant cities, — these make the groundwork from which he has delineated estates of romance, compared with which their actual possessions are shanties and paddocks. The muse herself betrays her son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and well-born beauty by a radiation out of the air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the road, — a certain haughty favor, as if from patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aristocracy in nature, a prince of the power of the air.

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colors of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders. There is nothing so wonderful in any particular landscape as the necessity of being beautiful under which every landscape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.

But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy of readers on this topic, which schoolmen called natura naturata, or nature passive. One can hardly speak directly of it without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed companies what is called “the subject of religion.” A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and Indians should furnish facts for, would take place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms of all the “Wreaths” and “Flora’s chaplets” of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as men begin to write on nature, they fall into euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute to Pan, who ought to be represented in the mythology as the most continent of gods. I would not be frivolous before the admirable reserve and prudence of time, yet I cannot renounce the right of returning often to this old topic. The multitude of false churches accredits the true religion. Literature, poetry, science are the homage of man to this unfathomed secret, concerning which no sane man can affect an indifference or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although, or rather because there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it: it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society. Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness and selfishness we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us. We see the foaming brook with compunction: if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook. The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.

But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause before which all forms flee as the driven snows; itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd,) and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets of nature: — Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the end of the universe she has but one stuff, — but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much we are nature’s, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of silk.

This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal, are concrete geometry and numbers. Common sense knows its own, and recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Franklin, Dalton, Davy and Black, is the same common sense which made the arrangements which now it discovers.

If the identity expresses organized rest, the counter action runs also into organization. The astronomers said, ‘Give us matter and a little motion and we will construct the universe. It is not enough that we should have matter, we must also have a single impulse, one shove to launch the mass and generate the harmony of the centrifugal and centripetal forces. Once heave the ball from the hand, and we can show how all this mighty order grew.’— ‘A very unreasonable postulate,’ said the metaphysicians, ‘and a plain begging of the question. Could you not prevail to know the genesis of projection, as well as the continuation of it?’ Nature, meanwhile, had not waited for the discussion, but, right or wrong, bestowed the impulse, and the balls rolled. It was no great affair, a mere push, but the astronomers were right in making much of it, for there is no end to the consequences of the act. That famous aboriginal push propagates itself through all the balls of the system, and through every atom of every ball; through all the races of creatures, and through the history and performances of every individual. Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance a slight generosity, a drop too much. Without electricity the air would rot, and without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency. We aim above the mark to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. And when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play, but blabs the secret; — how then? Is the bird flown? O no, the wary Nature sends a new troop of fairer forms, of lordlier youths, with a little more excess of direction to hold them fast to their several aim; makes them a little wrongheaded in that direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty, and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions, — an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end; and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the perpetuity of the race.

But the craft with which the world is made, runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart. Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say. The poet, the prophet, has a higher value for what he utters than any hearer, and therefore it gets spoken. The strong, self-complacent Luther declares with an emphasis not to be mistaken, that “God himself cannot do without wise men.” Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts, and James Naylor once suffered himself to be worshipped as the Christ. Each prophet comes presently to identify himself with his thought, and to esteem his hat and shoes sacred. However this may discredit such persons with the judicious, it helps them with the people, as it gives heat, pungency, and publicity to their words. A similar experience is not infrequent in private life. Each young and ardent person writes a diary, in which, when the hours of prayer and penitence arrive, he inscribes his soul. The pages thus written are to him burning and fragrant; he reads them on his knees by midnight and by the morning star; he wets them with his tears; they are sacred; too good for the world, and hardly yet to be shown to the dearest friend. This is the man-child that is born to the soul, and her life still circulates in the babe. The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. After some time has elapsed, he begins to wish to admit his friend to this hallowed experience, and with hesitation, yet with firmness, exposes the pages to his eye. Will they not burn his eyes? The friend coldly turns them over, and passes from the writing to conversation, with easy transition, which strikes the other party with astonishment and vexation. He cannot suspect the writing itself. Days and nights of fervid life, of communion with angels of darkness and of light have engraved their shadowy characters on that tear-stained book. He suspects the intelligence or the heart of his friend. Is there then no friend? He cannot yet credit that one may have impressive experience and yet may not know how to put his private fact into literature; and perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world; or do anything well who does not esteem his work to be of importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.

In like manner, there is throughout nature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us. All promise outruns the performance. We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final success nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated. Hunger and thirst lead us on to eat and to drink; but bread and wine, mix and cook them how you will, leave us hungry and thirsty, after the stomach is full. It is the same with all our arts and performances. Our music, our poetry, our language itself are not satisfactions, but suggestions. The hunger for wealth, which reduces the planet to a garden, fools the eager pursuer. What is the end sought? Plainly to secure the ends of good sense and beauty, from the intrusion of deformity or vulgarity of any kind. But what an operose method! What a train of means to secure a little conversation! This palace of brick and stone, these servants, this kitchen, these stables, horses and equipage, this bank-stock and file of mortgages; trade to all the world, country-house and cottage by the waterside, all for a little conversation, high, clear, and spiritual! Could it not be had as well by beggars on the highway? No, all these things came from successive efforts of these beggars to remove friction from the wheels of life, and give opportunity. Conversation, character, were the avowed ends; wealth was good as it appeased the animal cravings, cured the smoky chimney, silenced the creaking door, brought friends together in a warm and quiet room, and kept the children and the dinner-table in a different apartment. Thought, virtue, beauty, were the ends; but it was known that men of thought and virtue sometimes had the headache, or wet feet, or could lose good time whilst the room was getting warm in winter days. Unluckily, in the exertions necessary to remove these inconveniences, the main attention has been diverted to this object; the old aims have been lost sight of, and to remove friction has come to be the end. That is the ridicule of rich men, and Boston, London, Vienna, and now the governments generally of the world are cities and governments of the rich; and the masses are not men, but poor men, that is, men who would be rich; this is the ridicule of the class, that they arrive with pains and sweat and fury nowhere; when all is done, it is for nothing. They are like one who has interrupted the conversation of a company to make his speech, and now has forgotten what he went to say. The appearance strikes the eye everywhere of an aimless society, of aimless nations. Were the ends of nature so great and cogent as to exact this immense sacrifice of men?

Quite analogous to the deceits in life, there is, as might be expected, a similar effect on the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd jealousy, but the poet finds himself not near enough to his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by and is now at its glancing splendor and heyday, perchance in the neighboring fields, or, if you stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The present object shall give you this sense of stillness that follows a pageant which has just gone by. What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever and ever. It is the same among the men and women as among the silent trees; always a referred existence, an absence, never a presence and satisfaction. Is it that beauty can never be grasped? in persons and in landscape is equally inaccessible? The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star: she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.

What shall we say of this omnipresent appearance of that first projectile impulse, of this flattery and balking of so many well-meaning creatures? Must we not suppose somewhere in the universe a slight treachery and derision? Are we not engaged to a serious resentment of this use that is made of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel’s wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report of the return of the curve. But it also appears that our actions are seconded and disposed to greater conclusions than we designed. We are escorted on every hand through life by spiritual agents, and a beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with Nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest form.

The uneasiness which the thought of our helplessness in the chain of causes occasions us, results from looking too much at one condition of nature, namely, Motion. But the drag is never taken from the wheel. Wherever the impulse exceeds, the Rest or Identity insinuates its compensation. All over the wide fields of earth grows the prunella or self-heal. After every foolish day we sleep off the fumes and furies of its hours; and though we are always engaged with particulars, and often enslaved to them, we bring with us to every experiment the innate universal laws. These, while they exist in the mind as ideas, stand around us in nature forever embodied, a present sanity to expose and cure the insanity of men. Our servitude to particulars betrays into a hundred foolish expectations. We anticipate a new era from the invention of a locomotive, or a balloon; the new engine brings with it the old checks. They say that by electro-magnetism your salad shall be grown from the seed whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner; it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of objects; — but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man’s life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these checks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood; it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess its essence until after a long time.

    POLITICS.

    Gold and iron are good

    To buy iron and gold;

    All earth’s fleece and food

    For their like are sold.

    Boded Merlin wise,

    Proved Napoleon great, —

    Nor kind nor coinage buys

    Aught above its rate.

    Fear, Craft, and Avarice

    Cannot rear a State.

    Out of dust to build

    What is more than dust, —

    Walls Amphion piled

    Phoebus stablish must.

    When the Muses nine

    With the Virtues meet,

    Find to their design

    An Atlantic seat,

    By green orchard boughs

    Fended from the heat,

    Where the statesman ploughs

    Furrow for the wheat;

    When the Church is social worth,

    When the state-house is the hearth,

    Then the perfect State is come,

    The republican at home.

POLITICS.

In dealing with the State we ought to remember that its institution are not aboriginal, though they existed before we were born; that they are not superior to the citizen; that every one of them was once the act of a single man; every law and usage was a man’s expedient to meet a particular case; that they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good, we may make better. Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men and institutions rooted like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres, but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement and compel the system to gyrate round it; as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato or Paul, does forever. But politics rest on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity. Republics abound in young civilians, who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education, and religion, may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for eternity; and that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum. We are superstitious, and esteem the statute somewhat: so much life as it has in the character of living men is its force. The statute stands there to say, Yesterday we agreed so and so, but how feel ye this article to-day? Our statute is a currency which we stamp with our own portrait: it soon becomes unrecognizable, and in process of time will return to the mint. Nature is not democratic, nor limited-monarchical, but despotic, and will not be fooled or abated of any jot of her authority by the pertest of her sons; and as fast as the public mind is opened to more intelligence, the code is seen to be brute and stammering. It speaks not articulately, and must be made to. Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies; then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place in turn to new prayers and pictures. The history of the State sketches in coarse outline the progress of thought, and follows at a distance the delicacy of culture and of aspiration.

The theory of politics which has possessed the mind of men, and which they have expressed the best they could in their laws and in their revolutions, considers persons and property as the two objects for whose protection government exists. Of persons, all have equal rights, in virtue of being identical in nature. This interest of course with its whole power demands a democracy. Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a county. This accident, depending primarily on the skill and virtue of the parties, of which there is every degree, and secondarily on patrimony, falls unequally, and its rights of course are unequal. Personal rights, universally the same, demand a government framed on the ratio of the census; property demands a government framed on the ratio of owners and of owning. Laban, who has flocks and herds, wishes them looked after by an officer on the frontiers, lest the Midianites shall drive them off; and pays a tax to that end. Jacob has no flocks or herds and no fear of the Midianites, and pays no tax to the officer. It seemed fit that Laban and Jacob should have equal rights to elect the officer who is to defend their persons, but that Laban and not Jacob should elect the officer who is to guard the sheep and cattle. And if question arise whether additional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who, because he is a youth and a traveller, eats their bread and not his own?

In the earliest society the proprietors made their own wealth, and so long as it comes to the owners in the direct way, no other opinion would arise in any equitable community than that property should make the law for property, and persons the law for persons.

But property passes through donation or inheritance to those who do not create it. Gift, in one case, makes it as really the new owner’s, as labor made it the first owner’s: in the other case, of patrimony, the law makes an ownership which will be valid in each man’s view according to the estimate which he sets on the public tranquillity.

It was not however found easy to embody the readily admitted principle that property should make law for property, and persons for persons; since persons and property mixed themselves in every transaction. At last it seemed settled that the rightful distinction was that the proprietors should have more elective franchise than non-proprietors, on the Spartan principle of “calling that which is just, equal; not that which is equal, just.”

That principle no longer looks so self-evident as it appeared in former times, partly, because doubts have arisen whether too much weight had not been allowed in the laws to property, and such a structure given to our usages as allowed the rich to encroach on the poor, and to keep them poor; but mainly because there is an instinctive sense, however obscure and yet inarticulate, that the whole constitution of property, on its present tenures, is injurious, and its influence on persons deteriorating and degrading; that truly the only interest for the consideration of the State is persons; that property will always follow persons; that the highest end of government is the culture of men; and if men can be educated, the institutions will share their improvement and the moral sentiment will write the law of the land.

If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question, the peril is less when we take note of our natural defences. We are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect. Society always consists in greatest part of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of courts and statesmen, die and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age. With such an ignorant and deceivable majority, States would soon run to ruin, but that there are limitations beyond which the folly and ambition of governors cannot go. Things have their laws, as well as men; and things refuse to be trifled with. Property will be protected. Corn will not grow unless it is planted and manured; but the farmer will not plant or hoe it unless the chances are a hundred to one that he will cut and harvest it. Under any forms, persons and property must and will have their just sway. They exert their power, as steadily as matter its attraction. Cover up a pound of earth never so cunningly, divide and subdivide it; melt it to liquid, convert it to gas; it will always weigh a pound; it will always attract and resist other matter by the full virtue of one pound weight: — and the attributes of a person, his wit and his moral energy, will exercise, under any law or extinguishing tyranny, their proper force, — if not overtly, then covertly; if not for the law, then against it; if not wholesomely, then poisonously; with right, or by might.

The boundaries of personal influence it is impossible to fix, as persons are organs of moral or supernatural force. Under the dominion of an idea which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the powers of persons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

In like manner to every particle of property belongs its own attraction. A cent is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. Its value is in the necessities of the animal man. It is so much warmth, so much bread, so much water, so much land. The law may do what it will with the owner of property; its just power will still attach to the cent. The law may in a mad freak say that all shall have power except the owners of property; they shall have no vote. Nevertheless, by a higher law, the property will, year after year, write every statute that respects property. The non-proprietor will be the scribe of the proprietor. What the owners wish to do, the whole power of property will do, either through the law or else in defiance of it. Of course I speak of all the property, not merely of the great estates. When the rich are outvoted, as frequently happens, it is the joint treasury of the poor which exceeds their accumulations. Every man owns something, if it is only a cow, or a wheel-barrow, or his arms, and so has that property to dispose of.

The same necessity which secures the rights of person and property against the malignity or folly of the magistrate, determines the form and methods of governing, which are proper to each nation and to its habit of thought, and nowise transferable to other states of society. In this country we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history. They are not better, but only fitter for us. We may be wise in asserting the advantage in modern times of the democratic form, but to other states of society, in which religion consecrated the monarchical, that and not this was expedient. Democracy is better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it. Born democrats, we are nowise qualified to judge of monarchy, which, to our fathers living in the monarchical idea, was also relatively right. But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. What satire on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages has signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?

The same benign necessity and the same practical abuse appear in the parties, into which each State divides itself, of opponents and defenders of the administration of the government. Parties are also founded on instincts, and have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders. They have nothing perverse in their origin, but rudely mark some real and lasting relation. We might as wisely reprove the east wind or the frost, as a political party, whose members, for the most part, could give no account of their position, but stand for the defence of those interests in which they find themselves. Our quarrel with them begins when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader, and obeying personal considerations, throw themselves into the maintenance and defence of points nowise belonging to their system. A party is perpetually corrupted by personality. Whilst we absolve the association from dishonesty, we cannot extend the same charity to their leaders. They reap the rewards of the docility and zeal of the masses which they direct. Ordinarily our parties are parties of circumstance, and not of principle; as the planting interest in conflict with the commercial; the party of capitalists and that of operatives; parties which are identical in their moral character, and which can easily change ground with each other in the support of many of their measures. Parties of principle, as, religious sects, or the party of free-trade, of universal suffrage, of abolition of slavery, of abolition of capital punishment, — degenerate into personalities, or would inspire enthusiasm. The vice of our leading parties in this country (which may be cited as a fair specimen of these societies of opinion) is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth. Of the two great parties which at this hour almost share the nation between them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man will of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free-trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these liberalities. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless: it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy; it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.

I do not for these defects despair of our republic. We are not at the mercy of any waves of chance. In the strife of ferocious parties, human nature always finds itself cherished; as the children of the convicts at Botany Bay are found to have as healthy a moral sentiment as other children. Citizens of feudal states are alarmed at our democratic institutions lapsing into anarchy, and the older and more cautious among ourselves are learning from Europeans to look with some terror at our turbulent freedom. It is said that in our license of construing the Constitution, and in the despotism of public opinion, we have no anchor; and one foreign observer thinks he has found the safeguard in the sanctity of Marriage among us; and another thinks he has found it in our Calvinism. Fisher Ames expressed the popular security more wisely, when he compared a monarchy and a republic, saying that a monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft, which would never sink, but then your feet are always in water. No forms can have any dangerous importance whilst we are befriended by the laws of things. It makes no difference how many tons weight of atmosphere presses on our heads, so long as the same pressure resists it within the lungs. Augment the mass a thousand fold, it cannot begin to crush us, as long as reaction is equal to action. The fact of two poles, of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each force by its own activity develops the other. Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. ‘Lynch-law’ prevails only where there is greater hardihood and self-subsistency in the leaders. A mob cannot be a permanency; everybody’s interest requires that it should not exist, and only justice satisfies all.

We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads; and an abstract of the codes of nations would be a transcript of the common conscience. Governments have their origin in the moral identity of men. Reason for one is seen to be reason for another, and for every other. There is a middle measure which satisfies all parties, be they never so many or so resolute for their own. Every man finds a sanction for his simplest claims and deeds in decisions of his own mind, which he calls Truth and Holiness. In these decisions all the citizens find a perfect agreement, and only in these; not in what is good to eat, good to wear, good use of time, or what amount of land or of public aid, each is entitled to claim. This truth and justice men presently endeavor to make application of to the measuring of land, the apportionment of service, the protection of life and property. Their first endeavors, no doubt, are very awkward. Yet absolute right is the first governor; or, every government is an impure theocracy. The idea after which each community is aiming to make and mend its law, is the will of the wise man. The wise man it cannot find in nature, and it makes awkward but earnest efforts to secure his government by contrivance; as by causing the entire people to give their voices on every measure; or by a double choice to get the representation of the whole; or, by a selection of the best citizens; or to secure the advantages of efficiency and internal peace by confiding the government to one, who may himself select his agents. All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.

Every man’s nature is a sufficient advertisement to him of the character of his fellows. My right and my wrong is their right and their wrong. Whilst I do what is fit for me, and abstain from what is unfit, my neighbor and I shall often agree in our means, and work together for a time to one end. But whenever I find my dominion over myself not sufficient for me, and undertake the direction of him also, I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him. I may have so much more skill or strength than he that he cannot express adequately his sense of wrong, but it is a lie, and hurts like a lie both him and me. Love and nature cannot maintain the assumption; it must be executed by a practical lie, namely by force. This undertaking for another is the blunder which stands in colossal ugliness in the governments of the world. It is the same thing in numbers, as in a pair, only not quite so intelligible. I can see well enough a great difference between my setting myself down to a self-control, and my going to make somebody else act after my views; but when a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disturbed by the circumstances to see so clearly the absurdity of their command. Therefore all public ends look vague and quixotic beside private ones. For any laws but those which men make for themselves, are laughable. If I put myself in the place of my child, and we stand in one thought and see that things are thus or thus, that perception is law for him and me. We are both there, both act. But if, without carrying him into the thought, I look over into his plot, and, guessing how it is with him, ordain this or that, he will never obey me. This is the history of governments, — one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me ordains that a part of my labor shall go to this or that whimsical end, — not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money’s worth, except for these.

Hence the less government we have the better, — the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government is the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man; of whom the existing government is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe; which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of Nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the appearance of the wise man the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, — he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favorable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him needs not husband and educate a few to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is in its infancy. As a political power, as the rightful lord who is to tumble all rulers from their chairs, its presence is hardly yet suspected. Malthus and Ricardo quite omit it; the Annual Register is silent; in the Conversations’ Lexicon it is not set down; the President’s Message, the Queen’s Speech, have not mentioned it; and yet it is never nothing. Every thought which genius and piety throw into the world, alters the world. The gladiators in the lists of power feel, through all their frocks of force and simulation, the presence of worth. I think the very strife of trade and ambition are confession of this divinity; and successes in those fields are the poor amends, the fig-leaf with which the shamed soul attempts to hide its nakedness. I find the like unwilling homage in all quarters. It is because we know how much is due from us that we are impatient to show some petty talent as a substitute for worth. We are haunted by a conscience of this right to grandeur of character, and are false to it. But each of us has some talent, can do somewhat useful, or graceful, or formidable, or amusing, or lucrative. That we do, as an apology to others and to ourselves for not reaching the mark of a good and equal life. But it does not satisfy us, whilst we thrust it on the notice of our companions. It may throw dust in their eyes, but does not smooth our own brow, or give us the tranquillity of the strong when we walk abroad. We do penance as we go. Our talent is a sort of expiation, and we are constrained to reflect on our splendid moment with a certain humiliation, as somewhat too fine, and not as one act of many acts, a fair expression of our permanent energy. Most persons of ability meet in society with a kind of tacit appeal. Each seems to say, ‘I am not all here.’ Senators and presidents have climbed so high with pain enough, not because they think the place specially agreeable, but as an apology for real worth, and to vindicate their manhood in our eyes. This conspicuous chair is their compensation to themselves for being of a poor, cold, hard nature. They must do what they can. Like one class of forest animals, they have nothing but a prehensile tail; climb they must, or crawl. If a man found himself so rich-natured that he could enter into strict relations with the best persons and make life serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior, could he afford to circumvent the favor of the caucus and the press, and covet relations so hollow and pompous as those of a politician? Surely nobody would be a charlatan who could afford to be sincere.

The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints. The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history. Much has been blind and discreditable, but the nature of the revolution is not affected by the vices of the revolters; for this is a purely moral force. It was never adopted by any party in history, neither can be. It separates the individual from all party, and unites him at the same time to the race. It promises a recognition of higher rights than those of personal freedom, or the security of property. A man has a right to be employed, to be trusted, to be loved, to be revered. The power of love, as the basis of a State, has never been tried. We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end. Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends even devise better ways? On the other hand, let not the most conservative and timid fear anything from a premature surrender of the bayonet and the system of force. For, according to the order of nature, which is quite superior to our will, it stands thus; there will always be a government of force where men are selfish; and when they are pure enough to abjure the code of force they will be wise enough to see how these public ends of the post-office, of the highway, of commerce and the exchange of property, of museums and libraries, of institutions of art and science can be answered.

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation. What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love. All those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State. I do not call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature. Such designs, full of genius and full of fate as they are, are not entertained except avowedly as air-pictures. If the individual who exhibits them dare to think them practicable, he disgusts scholars and churchmen; and men of talent and women of superior sentiments cannot hide their contempt. Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm, and there are now men, — if indeed I can speak in the plural number, — more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.

    NOMINALIST AND REALIST.

    In countless upward-striving waves

    The moon-drawn tide-wave strives:

    In thousand far-transplanted grafts

    The parent fruit survives;

    So, in the new-born millions,

    The perfect Adam lives.

    Not less are summer-mornings dear

    To every child they wake,

    And each with novel life his sphere

    Fills for his proper sake.

NONIMALIST AND REALIST.

I CANNOT often enough say that a man is only a relative and representative nature. Each is a hint of the truth, but far enough from being that truth which yet he quite newly and inevitably suggests to us. If I seek it in him I shall not find it. Could any man conduct into me the pure stream of that which he pretends to be! Long afterwards I find that quality elsewhere which he promised me. The genius of the Platonists is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books. The man momentarily stands for the thought, but will not bear examination; and a society of men will cursorily represent well enough a certain quality and culture, for example, chivalry or beauty of manners; but separate them and there is no gentleman and no lady in the group. The least hint sets us on the pursuit of a character which no man realizes. We have such exorbitant eyes that on seeing the smallest arc we complete the curve, and when the curtain is lifted from the diagram which it seemed to veil, we are vexed to find that no more was drawn than just that fragment of an arc which we first beheld. We are greatly too liberal in our construction of each other’s faculty and promise. Exactly what the parties have already done they shall do again; but that which we inferred from their nature and inception, they will not do. That is in nature, but not in them. That happens in the world, which we often witness in a public debate. Each of the speakers expresses himself imperfectly; no one of them hears much that another says, such is the preoccupation of mind of each; and the audience, who have only to hear and not to speak, judge very wisely and superiorly how wrongheaded and unskilful is each of the debaters to his own affair. Great men or men of great gifts you shall easily find, but symmetrical men never. When I meet a pure intellectual force or a generosity of affection, I believe here then is man; and am presently mortified by the discovery that this individual is no more available to his own or to the general ends than his companions; because the power which drew my respect is not supported by the total symphony of his talents. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false, for the rest of his body is small or deformed. I observe a person who makes a good public appearance, and conclude thence the perfection of his private character, on which this is based; but he has no private character. He is a graceful cloak or lay-figure for holidays. All our poets, heroes, and saints, fail utterly in some one or in many parts to satisfy our idea, fail to draw our spontaneous interest, and so leave us without any hope of realization but in our own future. Our exaggeration of all fine characters arises from the fact that we identify each in turn with the soul. But there are no such men as we fable; no Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Caesar, nor Angelo, nor Washington, such as we have made. We consecrate a great deal of nonsense because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible. I verily believe if an angel should come to chant the chorus of the moral law, he would eat too much gingerbread, or take liberties with private letters, or do some precious atrocity. It is bad enough that our geniuses cannot do anything useful, but it is worse that no man is fit for society who has fine traits. He is admired at a distance, but he cannot come near without appearing a cripple. The men of fine parts protect themselves by solitude, or by courtesy, or by satire, or by an acid worldly manner, each concealing as he best can his incapacity for useful association, but they want either love or self-reliance.

Our native love of reality joins with this experience to teach us a little reserve, and to dissuade a too sudden surrender to the brilliant qualities of persons. Young people admire talents or particular excellences; as we grow older we value total powers and effects, as the impression, the quality, the spirit of men and things. The genius is all. The man, — it is his system: we do not try a solitary word or act, but his habit. The acts which you praise, I praise not, since they are departures from his faith, and are mere compliances. The magnetism which arranges tribes and races in one polarity is alone to be respected; the men are steel-filings. Yet we unjustly select a particle, and say, ‘O steel-filing number one! what heart-drawings I feel to thee! what prodigious virtues are these of thine! how constitutional to thee, and incommunicable.’ Whilst we speak the loadstone is withdrawn; down falls our filing in a heap with the rest, and we continue our mummery to the wretched shaving. Let us go for universals; for the magnetism, not for the needles. Human life and its persons are poor empirical pretensions. A personal influence is an ignis fatuus. If they say it is great, it is great; if they say it is small, it is small; you see it, and you see it not, by turns; it borrows all its size from the momentary estimation of the speakers: the Will-of-the-wisp vanishes if you go too near, vanishes if you go too far, and only blazes at one angle. Who can tell if Washington be a great man or no? Who can tell if Franklin be? Yes, or any but the twelve, or six, or three great gods of fame? And they too loom and fade before the eternal.

We are amphibious creatures, weaponed for two elements, having two sets of faculties, the particular and the catholic. We adjust our instrument for general observation, and sweep the heavens as easily as we pick out a single figure in the terrestrial landscape. We are practically skilful in detecting elements for which we have no place in our theory, and no name. Thus we are very sensible of an atmospheric influence in men and in bodies of men, not accounted for in an arithmetical addition of all their measurable properties. There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society. England, strong, punctual, practical, well-spoken England I should not find if I should go to the island to seek it. In the parliament, in the play-house, at dinner-tables, I might see a great number of rich, ignorant, book-read, conventional, proud men, — many old women, — and not anywhere the Englishman who made the good speeches, combined the accurate engines, and did the bold and nervous deeds. It is even worse in America, where, from the intellectual quickness of the race, the genius of the country is more splendid in its promise and more slight in its performance. Webster cannot do the work of Webster. We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type. We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words, and grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual.

In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most partial and sordid way of living. Our proclivity to details cannot quite degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind. Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses. Property keeps the accounts of the world, and is always moral. The property will be found where the labor, the wisdom, and the virtue have been in nations, in classes, and (the whole life-time considered, with the compensations) in the individual also. How wise the world appears, when the laws and usages of nations are largely detailed, and the completeness of the municipal system is considered! Nothing is left out. If you go into the markets and the custom-houses, the insurers’ and notaries’ offices, the offices of sealers of weights and measures, of inspection of provisions, — it will appear as if one man had made it all. Wherever you go, a wit like your own has been before you, and has realized its thought. The Eleusinian mysteries, the Egyptian architecture, the Indian astronomy, the Greek sculpture, show that there always were seeing and knowing men in the planet. The world is full of masonic ties, of guilds, of secret and public legions of honor; that of scholars, for example; and that of gentlemen, fraternizing with the upper class of every country and every culture.

I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. I looked into Pope’s Odyssey yesterday: it is as correct and elegant after our canon of to-day as if it were newly written. The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done I feel as if I did; what is ill done I reck not of. Shakspeare’s passages of passion (for example, in Lear and Hamlet) are in the very dialect of the present year. I am faithful again to the whole over the members in my use of books. I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, and sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy and the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its rich colors. ’Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature and fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself. A higher pleasure of the same kind I found lately at a concert, where I went to hear Handel’s Messiah. As the master overpowered the littleness and incapableness of the performers and made them conductors of his electricity, so it was easy to observe what efforts nature was making, through so many hoarse, wooden, and imperfect persons, to produce beautiful voices, fluid and soul-guided men and women. The genius of nature was paramount at the oratorio.

This preference of the genius to the parts is the secret of that deification of art, which is found in all superior minds. Art, in the artist, is proportion, or a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here and there and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought. Beautiful details we must have, or no artist; but they must be means and never other. The eye must not lose sight for a moment of the purpose. Lively boys write to their ear and eye, and the cool reader finds nothing but sweet jingles in it. When they grow older, they respect the argument.

We obey the same intellectual integrity when we study in exceptions the law of the world. Anomalous facts, as the never quite obsolete rumors of magic and demonology, and the new allegations of phrenologists and neurologists, are of ideal use. They are good indications. Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time. So with Mesmerism, Swedenborgism, Fourierism, and the Millennial Church; they are poor pretensions enough, but good criticism on the science, philosophy, and preaching of the day. For these abnormal insights of the adepts ought to be normal, and things of course.

All things show us that on every side we are very near to the best. It seems not worth while to execute with too much pains some one intellectual, or aesthetical, or civil feat, when presently the dream will scatter, and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.

Thus we settle it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them; he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars. It is all idle talking: as much as a man is a whole, so is he also a part; and it were partial not to see it. What you say in your pompous distribution only distributes you into your class and section. You have not got rid of parts by denying them, but are the more partial. You are one thing, but Nature is one thing and the other thing, in the same moment. She will not remain orbed in a thought, but rushes into persons; and when each person, inflamed to a fury of personality, would conquer all things to his poor crotchet, she raises up against him another person, and by many persons incarnates again a sort of whole. She will have all. Nick Bottom cannot play all the parts, work it how he may; there will be somebody else, and the world will be round. Everything must have its flower or effort at the beautiful, coarser or finer according to its stuff. They relieve and recommend each other, and the sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. She punishes abstractionists, and will only forgive an induction which is rare and casual. We like to come to a height of land and see the landscape, just as we value a general remark in conversation. But it is not the intention of Nature that we should live by general views. We fetch fire and water, run about all day among the shops and markets, and get our clothes and shoes made and mended, and are the victims of these details; and once in a fortnight we arrive perhaps at a rational moment. If we were not thus infatuated, if we saw the real from hour to hour, we should not be here to write and to read, but should have been burned or frozen long ago. She would never get anything done, if she suffered admirable Crichtons and universal geniuses. She loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels, and a groom who is part of his horse; for she is full of work, and these are her hands. As the frugal farmer takes care that his cattle shall eat down the rowen, and swine shall eat the waste of his house, and poultry shall pick the crumbs, — so our economical mother dispatches a new genius and habit of mind into every district and condition of existence, plants an eye wherever a new ray of light can fall, and gathering up into some man every property in the universe, establishes thousandfold occult mutual attractions among her offspring, that all this wash and waste of power may be imparted and exchanged.

Great dangers undoubtedly accrue from this incarnation and distribution of the godhead, and hence Nature has her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castille fancied he could have given useful advice. But she does not go unprovided; she has hellebore at the bottom of the cup. Solitude would ripen a plentiful crop of despots. The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less. But when he comes into a public assembly he sees that men have very different manners from his own, and in their way admirable. In his childhood and youth he has had many checks and censures, and thinks modestly enough of his own endowment. When afterwards he comes to unfold it in propitious circumstance, it seems the only talent; he is delighted with his success, and accounts himself already the fellow of the great. But he goes into a mob, into a banking house, into a mechanic’s shop, into a mill, into a laboratory, into a ship, into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot; other talents take place, and rule the hour. The rotation which whirls every leaf and pebble to the meridian, reaches to every gift of man, and we all take turns at the top.

For Nature, who abhors mannerism, has set her heart on breaking up all styles and tricks, and it is so much easier to do what one has done before than to do a new thing, that there is a perpetual tendency to a set mode. In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, which may be soon learned by an acute person and then that particular style continued indefinitely. Each man too is a tyrant in tendency, because he would impose his idea on others; and their trick is their natural defence. Jesus would absorb the race; but Tom Paine or the coarsest blasphemer helps humanity by resisting this exuberance of power. Hence the immense benefit of party in politics, as it reveals faults of character in a chief, which the intellectual force of the persons, with ordinary opportunity and not hurled into aphelion by hatred, could not have seen. Since we are all so stupid, what benefit that there should be two stupidities! It is like that brute advantage so essential to astronomy, of having the diameter of the earth’s orbit for a base of its triangles. Democracy is morose, and runs to anarchy, but in the State and in the schools it is indispensable to resist the consolidation of all men into a few men. If John was perfect, why are you and I alive? As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own. A new poet has appeared; a new character approached us; why should we refuse to eat bread until we have found his regiment and section in our old army-files? Why not a new man? Here is a new enterprise of Brook Farm, of Skeneateles, of Northampton: why so impatient to baptize them Essenes, or Port-Royalists, or Shakers, or by any known and effete name? Let it be a new way of living. Why have only two or three ways of life, and not thousands? Every man is wanted, and no man is wanted much. We came this time for condiments, not for corn. We want the great genius only for joy; for one star more in our constellation, for one tree more in our grove. But he thinks we wish to belong to him, as he wishes to occupy us. He greatly mistakes us. I think I have done well if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though it were only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use: —

    “Into paint will I grind thee, my bride!”

To embroil the confusion, and make it impossible to arrive at any general statement, — when we have insisted on the imperfection of individuals, our affections and our experience urge that every individual is entitled to honor, and a very generous treatment is sure to be repaid. A recluse sees only two or three persons, and allows them all their room; they spread themselves at large. The statesman looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less. Yet are they not entitled to this generosity of reception? and is not munificence the means of insight? For though gamesters say that the cards beat all the players, though they were never so skilful, yet in the contest we are now considering, the players are also the game, and share the power of the cards. If you criticise a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and instead of the poet, are censuring your own caricature of him. For there is somewhat spheral and infinite in every man, especially in every genius, which, if you can come very near him, sports with all your limitations. For rightly every man is a channel through which heaven floweth, and whilst I fancied I was criticising him, I was censuring or rather terminating my own soul. After taxing Goethe as a courtier, artificial, unbelieving, worldly, — I took up this book of Helena, and found him an Indian of the wilderness, a piece of pure nature like an apple or an oak, large as morning or night, and virtuous as a brier-rose.

But care is taken that the whole tune shall be played. If we were not kept among surfaces, every thing would be large and universal; now the excluded attributes burst in on us with the more brightness that they have been excluded. “Your turn now, my turn next,” is the rule of the game. The universality being hindered in its primary form, comes in the secondary form of all sides; the points come in succession to the meridian, and by the speed of rotation a new whole is formed. Nature keeps herself whole and her representation complete in the experience of each mind. She suffers no seat to be vacant in her college. It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Whatever does not concern us is concealed from us. As soon as a person is no longer related to our present well-being, he is concealed, or dies, as we say. Really, all things and persons are related to us, but according to our nature they act on us not at once but in succession, and we are made aware of their presence one at a time. All persons, all things which we have known, are here present, and many more than we see; the world is full. As the ancient said, the world is a plenum or solid; and if we saw all things that really surround us we should be imprisoned and unable to move. For though nothing is impassable to the soul, but all things are pervious to it and like highways, yet this is only whilst the soul does not see them. As soon as the soul sees any object, it stops before that object. Therefore, the divine Providence which keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul, conceals all the furniture and all the persons that do not concern a particular soul, from the senses of that individual. Through solidest eternal things the man finds his road as if they did not subsist, and does not once suspect their being. As soon as he needs a new object, suddenly he beholds it, and no longer attempts to pass through it, but takes another way. When he has exhausted for the time the nourishment to be drawn from any one person or thing, that object is withdrawn from his observation, and though still in his immediate neighborhood, he does not suspect its presence. Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.

If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is commonly said by farmers that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.

The end and the means, the gamester and the game, — life is made up of the intermixture and reaction of these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears beforehand monstrous, as each denies and tends to abolish the other. We must reconcile the contradictions as we can, but their discord and their concord introduce wild absurdities into our thinking and speech. No sentence will hold the whole truth, and the only way in which we can be just, is by giving ourselves the lie; Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech; — All things are in contact; every atom has a sphere of repulsion; — Things are, and are not, at the same time; — and the like. All the universe over, there is but one thing, this old Two-Face, creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong, of which any proposition may be affirmed or denied. Very fitly therefore I assert that every man is a partialist, that nature secures him as an instrument by self-conceit, preventing the tendencies to religion and science; and now further assert, that, each man’s genius being nearly and affectionately explored, he is justified in his individuality, as his nature is found to be immense; and now I add that every man is a universalist also, and, as our earth, whilst it spins on its own axis, spins all the time around the sun through the celestial spaces, so the least of its rational children, the most dedicated to his private affair, works out, though as it were under a disguise, the universal problem. We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history. The rabid democrat, as soon as he is senator and rich man, has ripened beyond possibility of sincere radicalism, and unless he can resist the sun, he must be conservative the remainder of his days. Lord Eldon said in his old age that “if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as agitator.”

We hide this universality if we can, but it appears at all points. We are as ungrateful as children. There is nothing we cherish and strive to draw to us but in some hour we turn and rend it. We keep a running fire of sarcasm at ignorance and the life of the senses; then goes by, perchance, a fair girl, a piece of life, gay and happy, and making the commonest offices beautiful by the energy and heart with which she does them; and seeing this we admire and love her and them, and say, ‘Lo! a genuine creature of the fair earth, not dissipated or too early ripened by books, philosophy, religion, society, or care!’ insinuating a treachery and contempt for all we had so long loved and wrought in ourselves and others.

If we could have any security against moods! If the profoundest prophet could be holden to his words, and the hearer who is ready to sell all and join the crusade could have any certificate that tomorrow his prophet shall not unsay his testimony! But the Truth sits veiled there on the Bench, and never interposes an adamantine syllable; and the most sincere and revolutionary doctrine, put as if the ark of God were carried forward some furlongs, and planted there for the succor of the world, shall in a few weeks be coldly set aside by the same speaker, as morbid; “I thought I was right, but I was not,” — and the same immeasurable credulity demanded for new audacities. If we were not of all opinions! if we did not in any moment shift the platform on which we stand, and look and speak from another! if there could be any regulation, any ‘one-hour-rule,’ that a man should never leave his point of view without sound of trumpet. I am always insincere, as always knowing there are other moods.

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but doated on the superficies; that I loved man, if men seemed to me mice and rats; that I revered saints, but woke up glad that the old pagan world stood its ground and died hard; that I was glad of men of every gift and nobility, but would not live in their arms. Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they existed, and heartily wished them God-speed, yet, out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in Oregon, for any claim I felt on them, — it would be a great satisfaction.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

    In the suburb, in the town,

    On the railway, in the square,

    Came a beam of goodness down

    Doubling daylight everywhere:

    Peace now each for malice takes,

    Beauty for his sinful weeks,

    For the angel Hope aye makes

    Him an angel whom she leads.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY IN AMORY HALL, ON SUNDAY, MARCH 3, 1844.

WHOEVER has had opportunity of acquaintance with society in New England during the last twenty-five years, with those middle and with those leading sections that may constitute any just representation of the character and aim of the community, will have been struck with the great activity of thought and experimenting. His attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church, or religious party, is falling from the Church nominal, and is appearing in temperance and non-resistance societies; in movements of abolitionists and of socialists; and in very significant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible Conventions; composed of ultraists, of seekers, of all the soul of the soldiery of dissent, and meeting to call in question the authority of the Sabbath, of the priesthood, and of the Church. In these movements nothing was more remarkable than the discontent they begot in the movers. The spirit of protest and of detachment drove the members of these Conventions to bear testimony against the Church, and immediately afterward, to declare their discontent with these Conventions, their independence of their colleagues, and their impatience of the methods whereby they were working. They defied each other, like a congress of kings, each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming, and another that no man should buy or sell, that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No; they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these incessant advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming, and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk, wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitos was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles! Others assailed particular vocations, as that of the lawyer, that of the merchant, of the manufacturer, of the clergyman, of the scholar. Others attacked the institution of marriage as the fountain of social evils. Others devoted themselves to the worrying of churches and meetings for public worship; and the fertile forms of antinomianism among the elder puritans seemed to have their match in the plenty of the new harvest of reform.

With this din of opinion and debate there was a keener scrutiny of institutions and domestic life than any we had known; there was sincere protesting against existing evils, and there were changes of employment dictated by conscience. No doubt there was plentiful vaporing, and cases of backsliding might occur. But in each of these movements emerged a good result, a tendency to the adoption of simpler methods, and an assertion of the sufficiency of the private man. Thus it was directly in the spirit and genius of the age, what happened in one instance when a church censured and threatened to excommunicate one of its members on account of the somewhat hostile part to the church which his conscience led him to take in the anti-slavery business; the threatened individual immediately excommunicated the church in a public and formal process. This has been several times repeated: it was excellent when it was done the first time, but of course loses all value when it is copied. Every project in the history of reform, no matter how violent and surprising, is good when it is the dictate of a man’s genius and constitution, but very dull and suspicious when adopted from another. It is right and beautiful in any man to say, ‘I will take this coat, or this book, or this measure of corn of yours,’ — in whom we see the act to be original, and to flow from the whole spirit and faith of him; for then that taking will have a giving as free and divine; but we are very easily disposed to resist the same generosity of speech when we miss originality and truth to character in it.

There was in all the practical activities of New England for the last quarter of a century, a gradual withdrawal of tender consciences from the social organizations. There is observable throughout, the contest between mechanical and spiritual methods, but with a steady tendency of the thoughtful and virtuous to a deeper belief and reliance on spiritual facts.

In politics for example it is easy to see the progress of dissent. The country is full of rebellion; the country is full of kings. Hands off! let there be no control and no interference in the administration of the affairs of this kingdom of me. Hence the growth of the doctrine and of the party of Free Trade, and the willingness to try that experiment, in the face of what appear incontestable facts. I confess, the motto of the Globe newspaper is so attractive to me that I can seldom find much appetite to read what is below it in its columns: “The world is governed too much.” So the country is frequently affording solitary examples of resistance to the government, solitary nullifiers, who throw themselves on their reserved rights; nay, who have reserved all their rights; who reply to the assessor and to the clerk of court that they do not know the State, and embarrass the courts of law by non-juring and the commander-in-chief of the militia by non-resistance.

The same disposition to scrutiny and dissent appeared in civil, festive, neighborly, and domestic society. A restless, prying, conscientious criticism broke out in unexpected quarters. Who gave me the money with which I bought my coat? Why should professional labor and that of the counting-house be paid so disproportionately to the labor of the porter and woodsawyer? This whole business of Trade gives me to pause and think, as it constitutes false relations between men; inasmuch as I am prone to count myself relieved of any responsibility to behave well and nobly to that person whom I pay with money; whereas if I had not that commodity, I should be put on my good behavior in all companies, and man would be a benefactor to man, as being himself his only certificate that he had a right to those aids and services which each asked of the other. Am I not too protected a person? is there not a wide disparity between the lot of me and the lot of thee, my poor brother, my poor sister? Am I not defrauded of my best culture in the loss of those gymnastics which manual labor and the emergencies of poverty constitute? I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society; I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

The same insatiable criticism may be traced in the efforts for the reform of Education. The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. It was complained that an education to things was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow, of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, ‘All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.’ And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of the planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will draw, certain likeminded men, — Greek men, and Roman men, — in all countries, to their study; but by a wonderful drowsiness of usage they had exacted the study of all men. Once (say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things became stereotyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and was now creating and feeding other matters at other ends of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges this warfare against common sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelligent persons said or thought, ‘Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight to affairs.’ So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all the puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arrive at short methods; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often injured than helped by the means he uses.

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual, to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is feeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hour to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit. It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that the man be in his senses.

The criticism and attack on institutions, which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration. Do not be so vain of your one objection. Do you think there is only one? Alas! my good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike. Do you complain of our Marriage? Our marriage is no worse than our education, our diet, our trade, our social customs. Do you complain of the laws of Property? It is a pedantry to give such importance to them. Can we not play the game of life with these counters, as well as with those? in the institution of property, as well as out of it? Let into it the new and renewing principle of love, and property will be universality. No one gives the impression of superiority to the institution, which he must give who will reform it. It makes no difference what you say, you must make me feel that you are aloof from it; by your natural and supernatural advantages do easily see to the end of it, — do see how man can do without it. Now all men are on one side. No man deserves to be heard against property. Only Love, only an Idea, is against property as we hold it.

I cannot afford to be irritable and captious, nor to waste all my time in attacks. If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? the street is as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie. When we see an eager assailant of one of these wrongs, a special reformer, we feel like asking him, What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel amidst the rags of a beggar.

In another way the right will be vindicated. In the midst of abuses, in the heart of cities, in the aisles of false churches, alike in one place and in another, — wherever, namely, a just and heroic soul finds itself, there it will do what is next at hand, and by the new quality of character it shall put forth it shall abrogate that old condition, law or school in which it stands, before the law of its own mind.

If partiality was one fault of the movement party, the other defect was their reliance on Association. Doubts such as those I have intimated drove many good persons to agitate the questions of social reform. But the revolt against the spirit of commerce, the spirit of aristocracy, and the inveterate abuses of cities, did not appear possible to individuals; and to do battle against numbers they armed themselves with numbers, and against concert they relied on new concert.

Following or advancing beyond the ideas of St. Simon, of Fourier, and of Owen, three communities have already been formed in Massachusetts on kindred plans, and many more in the country at large. They aim to give every member a share in the manual labor, to give an equal reward to labor and to talent, and to unite a liberal culture with an education to labor. The scheme offers, by the economies of associated labor and expense, to make every member rich, on the same amount of property, that, in separate families, would leave every member poor. These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether those who have energy will not prefer their chance of superiority and power in the world, to the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed, rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter it, without some compromise. Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object; yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.

But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly a college, or an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the first time possible; because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two, where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual, but is dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another; when his faith is traversed by his habits; when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows and with the other backs water, what concert can be?

I do not wonder at the interest these projects inspire. The world is awaking to the idea of union, and these experiments show what it is thinking of. It is and will be magic. Men will live and communicate, and plough, and reap, and govern, as by added ethereal power, when once they are united; as in a celebrated experiment, by expiration and respiration exactly together, four persons lift a heavy man from the ground by the little finger only, and without sense of weight. But this union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods they use. The union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated. It is the union of friends who live in different streets or towns. Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul; he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. Government will be adamantine without any governor. The union must be ideal in actual individualism.

I pass to the indication in some particulars of that faith in man, which the heart is preaching to us in these days, and which engages the more regard, from the consideration that the speculations of one generation are the history of the next following.

In alluding just now to our system of education, I spoke of the deadness of its details. But it is open to graver criticism than the palsy of its members: it is a system of despair. The disease with which the human mind now labors is want of faith. Men do not believe in a power of education. We do not think we can speak to divine sentiments in man, and we do not try. We renounce all high aims. We believe that the defects of so many perverse and so many frivolous people who make up society, are organic, and society is a hospital of incurables. A man of good sense but of little faith, whose compassion seemed to lead him to church as often as he went there, said to me that “he liked to have concerts, and fairs, and churches, and other public amusements go on.” I am afraid the remark is too honest, and comes from the same origin as the maxim of the tyrant, “If you would rule the world quietly, you must keep it amused.” I notice too that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear; ‘This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.’ We do not believe that any education, any system of philosophy, any influence of genius, will ever give depth of insight to a superficial mind. Having settled ourselves into this infidelity, our skill is expended to procure alleviations, diversion, opiates. We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue with languages, his body with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gayety and games?

But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some doubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happiness and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in those disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too the doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods. In their experience the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man, as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed but was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on action, never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the power of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did not bring him to peace or to beneficence.

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who importuned King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused: the woman exclaimed, “I appeal:” the king, astonished, asked to whom she appealed: the woman replied, “From Philip drunk to Philip sober.” The text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according to the good-hearted word of Plato, “Unwillingly the soul is deprived of truth.” Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but by a supposed necessity which he tolerates by shortness or torpidity of sight. The soul lets no man go without some visitations and holydays of a diviner presence. It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man’s biography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every kind but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he should do; — that he puts himself on the side of his enemies, listening gladly to what they say of him, and accusing himself of the same things.

What is it men love in Genius, but its infinite hope, which degrades all it has done? Genius counts all its miracles poor and short. Its own idea it never executed. The Iliad, the Hamlet, the Doric column, the Roman arch, the Gothic minster, the German anthem, when they are ended, the master casts behind him. How sinks the song in the waves of melody which the universe pours over his soul! Before that gracious Infinite out of which he drew these few strokes, how mean they look, though the praises of the world attend them. From the triumphs of his art he turns with desire to this greater defeat. Let those admire who will. With silent joy he sees himself to be capable of a beauty that eclipses all which his hands have done; all which human hands have ever done.

Well, we are all the children of genius, the children of virtue, — and feel their inspirations in our happier hours. Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged: in the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals. In the circle of the rankest tories that could be collected in England, Old or New, let a powerful and stimulating intellect, a man of great heart and mind, act on them, and very quickly these frozen conservators will yield to the friendly influence, these hopeless will begin to hope, these haters will begin to love, these immovable statues will begin to spin and revolve. I cannot help recalling the fine anecdote which Warton relates of Bishop Berkeley, when he was preparing to leave England with his plan of planting the gospel among the American savages. “Lord Bathurst told me that the members of the Scriblerus club being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm, that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose up all together with earnestness, exclaiming, ‘Let us set out with him immediately.’” Men in all ways are better than they seem. They like flattery for the moment, but they know the truth for their own. It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them and speaking to them rude truth. They resent your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for it always. What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms. We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world, which is itself so slight and unreal. We crave a sense of reality, though it come in strokes of pain. I explain so, — by this manlike love of truth, — those excesses and errors into which souls of great vigor, but not equal insight, often fall. They feel the poverty at the bottom of all the seeming affluence of the world. They know the speed with which they come straight through the thin masquerade, and conceive a disgust at the indigence of nature: Rousseau, Mirabeau, Charles Fox, Napoleon, Byron, — and I could easily add names nearer home, of raging riders, who drive their steeds so hard, in the violence of living to forget its illusion: they would know the worst, and tread the floors of hell. The heroes of ancient and modern fame, Cimon, Themistocles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Caesar, have treated life and fortune as a game to be well and skilfully played, but the stake not to be so valued but that any time it could be held as a trifle light as air, and thrown up. Caesar, just before the battle of Pharsalia, discourses with the Egyptian priest concerning the fountains of the Nile, and offers to quit the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, if he will show him those mysterious sources.

The same magnanimity shows itself in our social relations, in the preference, namely, which each man gives to the society of superiors over that of his equals. All that a man has will he give for right relations with his mates. All that he has will he give for an erect demeanor in every company and on each occasion. He aims at such things as his neighbors prize, and gives his days and nights, his talents and his heart, to strike a good stroke, to acquit himself in all men’s sight as a man. The consideration of an eminent citizen, of a noted merchant, of a man of mark in his profession; a naval and military honor, a general’s commission, a marshal’s baton, a ducal coronet, the laurel of poets, and, anyhow procured, the acknowledgment of eminent merit, — have this lustre for each candidate that they enable him to walk erect and unashamed in the presence of some persons before whom he felt himself inferior. Having raised himself to this rank, having established his equality with class after class of those with whom he would live well, he still finds certain others before whom he cannot possess himself, because they have somewhat fairer, somewhat grander, somewhat purer, which extorts homage of him. Is his ambition pure? then will his laurels and his possessions seem worthless: instead of avoiding these men who make his fine gold dim, he will cast all behind him and seek their society only, woo and embrace this his humiliation and mortification, until he shall know why his eye sinks, his voice is husky, and his brilliant talents are paralyzed in this presence. He is sure that the soul which gives the lie to all things will tell none. His constitution will not mislead him. If it cannot carry itself as it ought, high and unmatchable in the presence of any man; if the secret oracles whose whisper makes the sweetness and dignity of his life do here withdraw and accompany him no longer, — it is time to undervalue what he has valued, to dispossess himself of what he has acquired, and with Caesar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, “All these will I relinquish, if you will show me the fountains of the Nile.” Dear to us are those who love us; the swift moments we spend with them are a compensation for a great deal of misery; they enlarge our life; — but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life: they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

As every man at heart wishes the best and not inferior society, wishes to be convicted of his error and to come to himself, — so he wishes that the same healing should not stop in his thought, but should penetrate his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform, that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments of ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely the greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved by you that I should say, ‘Take me and all mine, and use me and mine freely to your ends’! for I could not say it otherwise than because a great enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that our being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great; we desire to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race, understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison, or to worse extremity.

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man’s innocence and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I remember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people, remarked, “I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right.” I suppose considerate observers, looking at the masses of men in their blameless and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

If it were worth while to run into details this general doctrine of the latent but ever soliciting Spirit, it would be easy to adduce illustration in particulars of a man’s equality to the Church, of his equality to the State, and of his equality to every other man. It is yet in all men’s memory that, a few years ago, the liberal churches complained that the Calvinistic church denied to them the name of Christian. I think the complaint was confession: a religious church would not complain. A religious man like Behmen, Fox, or Swedenborg is not irritated by wanting the sanction of the Church, but the Church feels the accusation of his presence and belief.

It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation. The man whose part is taken and who does not wait for society in anything, has a power which society cannot choose but feel. The familiar experiment called the hydrostatic paradox, in which a capillary column of water balances the ocean, is a symbol of the relation of one man to the whole family of men. The wise Dandamis, on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes read, “judged them to be great men every way, excepting, that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which to second and authorize, true virtue must abate very much of its original vigor.”

And as a man is equal to the Church and equal to the State, so he is equal to every other man. The disparities of power in men are superficial; and all frank and searching conversation, in which a man lays himself open to his brother, apprises each of their radical unity. When two persons sit and converse in a thoroughly good understanding, the remark is sure to be made, See how we have disputed about words! Let a clear, apprehensive mind, such as every man knows among his friends, converse with the most commanding poetic genius, I think it would appear that there was no inequality such as men fancy, between them; that a perfect understanding, a like receiving, a like perceiving, abolished differences; and the poet would confess that his creative imagination gave him no deep advantage, but only the superficial one that he could express himself and the other could not; that his advantage was a knack, which might impose on indolent men but could not impose on lovers of truth; for they know the tax of talent, or what a price of greatness the power of expression too often pays. I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions has added to his fitness for his own work. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hindrance operates as a concentration of his force.

These and the like experiences intimate that man stands in strict connection with a higher fact never yet manifested. There is power over and behind us, and we are the channels of its communications. We seek to say thus and so, and over our head some spirit sits which contradicts what we say. We would persuade our fellow to this or that; another self within our eyes dissuades him. That which we keep back, this reveals. In vain we compose our faces and our words; it holds uncontrollable communication with the enemy, and he answers civilly to us, but believes the spirit. We exclaim, ‘There’s a traitor in the house!’ but at last it appears that he is the true man, and I am the traitor. This open channel to the highest life is the first and last reality, so subtle, so quiet, yet so tenacious, that although I have never expressed the truth, and although I have never heard the expression of it from any other, I know that the whole truth is here for me. What if I cannot answer your questions? I am not pained that I cannot frame a reply to the question, What is the operation we call Providence? There lies the unspoken thing, present, omnipresent. Every time we converse we seek to translate it into speech, but whether we hit or whether we miss, we have the fact. Every discourse is an approximate answer: but it is of small consequence that we do not get it into verbs and nouns, whilst it abides for contemplation forever.

If the auguries of the prophesying heart shall make themselves good in time, the man who shall be born, whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the man within man; shall destroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it avails itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we contravene it. Men are all secret believers in it, else the word justice would have no meaning: they believe that the best is the true; that right is done at last; or chaos would come. It rewards actions after their nature, and not after the design of the agent. ‘Work,’ it saith to man, ‘in every hour, paid or unpaid, see only that thou work, and thou canst not escape the reward: whether thy work be fine or coarse, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought: no matter how often defeated, you are born to victory. The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.’

As soon as a man is wonted to look beyond surfaces, and to see how this high will prevails without an exception or an interval, he settles himself into serenity. He can already rely on the laws of gravity, that every stone will fall where it is due; the good globe is faithful, and carries us securely through the celestial spaces, anxious or resigned, we need not interfere to help it on: and he will learn one day the mild lesson they teach, that our own orbit is all our task, and we need not assist the administration of the universe. Do not be so impatient to set the town right concerning the unfounded pretensions and the false reputation of certain men of standing. They are laboring harder to set the town right concerning themselves, and will certainly succeed. Suppress for a few days your criticism on the insufficiency of this or that teacher or experimenter, and he will have demonstrated his insufficiency to all men’s eyes. In like manner, let a man fall into the divine circuits, and he is enlarged. Obedience to his genius is the only liberating influence. We wish to escape from subjection and a sense of inferiority, and we make self-denying ordinances, we drink water, we eat grass, we refuse the laws, we go to jail: it is all in vain; only by obedience to his genius, only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise before a man and lead him by the hand out of all the wards of the prison.

That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conducted will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction. All around us what powers are wrapped up under the coarse mattings of custom, and all wonder prevented. It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise: the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual. Shall not the heart which has received so much, trust the Power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?

REPRESENTATIVE MEN

This book is a collection of seven essays, published initially in 1850. The first essay discusses the role played by “great men” in society, and the remaining six essays explore the various virtues of six men deemed by Emerson to be great: Plato (“the Philosopher”), Emanuel Swedenborg (“the Mystic”), Michel de Montaigne (“the Skeptic”), William Shakespeare (“the Poet”), Napoleon (“the Man of the World”), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (“the Writer”).

CONTENTS

USES OF GREAT MEN.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

USES OF GREAT MEN.

It is natural to believe in great men. If the companions of our childhood should turn out to be heroes, and their condition regal, it would not surprise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth, and found it deliciously sweet.

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society; and actually, or ideally, we manage to live with superiors. We call our children and our lands by their names. Their names are wrought into the verbs of language, their works and effigies are in our houses, and every circumstance of the day recalls an anecdote of them.

The search after the great is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works, — if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the Germans are hospitable; in Valencia, the climate is delicious; and in the hills of Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich, and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all, and buy it, and put myself on the road to-day.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge, that in the city is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants, or of fleas — the more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or distributed.

If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of service we derive from others, let us be warned of the danger of modern studies, and begin low enough. We must not contend against love, or deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have social strengths. Our affection toward others creates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality pure. A little genius let us leave alone. A main difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their own affair or not. Man is that noble endogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within, outward. His own affair, though impossible to others, he can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy to sugar to be sweet, and to nitre to be salt. We take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap that which of itself will fall into our hands. I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light, and in large relations; whilst they must make painful corrections, and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest— “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet.” He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.

But he must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of explanation. I cannot tell what I would know; but I have observed there are persons, who, in their character and actions, answer questions which I have not skill to put. One man answers some questions which none of his contemporaries put, and is isolated. The past and passing religions and philosophies answer some other question. Certain men affect us as rich possibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their times, — the sport, perhaps, of some instinct that rules in the air; — they do not speak to our want. But the great are near: we know them at sight. They satisfy expectation, and fall into place. What is good is effective, generative; makes for itself room, food, and allies. A sound apple produces seed, — a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating armies with his purpose, which is thus executed. The river makes its own shores, and each legitimate idea makes its own channels and welcome, — harvest for food, institutions for expression, weapons to fight with, and disciples to explain it. The true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his own shoes.

Our common discourse respects two kinds of use of service from superior men. Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy. The boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains. Right ethics are central, and go from the soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the universe. Serving others is serving us. I must absolve me to myself. “Mind thy affair,” says the spirit:— “coxcomb, would you meddle with the skies, or with other people?” Indirect service is left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Swedenborg saw that things were representative. Men are also representative; first, of things, and secondly, of ideas.

As plants convert the minerals into food for animals, so each man converts some raw material in nature to human use. The inventors of fire, electricity, magnetism, iron; lead, glass, linen, silk, cotton; the makers of tools; the inventor of decimal notation; the geometer; the engineer; musician, — severally make an easy way for all, through unknown and impossible confusions. Each man is, by secret liking, connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions.

A man is a center for nature, running out threads of relation through everything, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls; every clod and stone comes to the meridian; so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes. Each plant has its parasite, and each created thing its lover and poet. Justice has already been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to loadstone, to iodine, to corn, and cotton; but how few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant. It would seem as if each waited, like the enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted, and walk forth to the day in human shape. In the history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems to have fashioned a brain for itself. A magnet must be made man, in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, or Oersted, before the general mind can come to entertain its powers.

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages; — a sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes up as the charm of nature, — the glitter of the spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid, and gas, circle us round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The eye repeats every day the finest eulogy on things— “He saw that they were good.” We know where to find them; and these performers are relished all the more, after a little experience of the pretending races. We are entitled, also, to higher advantages. Something is wanting to science, until it has been humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, and its vital play, in botany, music, optics, and architecture, another. There are advancements to numbers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little suspected at first, when, by union with intellect and will, they ascend into the life, and re-appear in conversation, character and politics.

But this comes later. We speak now only of our acquaintance with them in their own sphere, and the way in which they seem to fascinate and draw to them some genius who occupies himself with one thing, all his life long. The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other. And to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at the man, and thinks. But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can only be known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of that thing. Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes this career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys?

Thus, we sit by the fire, and take hold on the poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In one of those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring a new planet.

We are too passive in the reception of these material or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step, — we are better served through our sympathy. Activity is contagious. Looking where others look, and conversing with the same things, we catch the charm which lured them. Napoleon said, “you must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” Talk much with any man of vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit of looking at things in the same light, and, on each occurrence, we anticipate his thought.

Men are helpful through the intellect and the affections. Other help, I find a false appearance. If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but all mental and moral force is a positive good. It goes out from you whether you will or not, and profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution. We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil’s saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, “I know that he can toil terribly,” is an electric touch. So are Clarendon’s portraits, — of Hampden; “who was of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp, and of a personal courage equal to his best parts” — of Falkland; “who was so severe an adorer of truth, that he could as easily have given himself leave to steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read Plutarch, without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “As age is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering, determined.”

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard for departed men to touch the quick like our own companions, whose names may not last as long. What is he whom I never think of? whilst in every solitude are those who succor our genius, and stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a power in love to divine another’s destiny better than that other can, and by heroic encouragements, hold him to his task. What has friendship so signaled as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is in us? We will never more think cheaply of ourselves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will not again shame us.

Under this head, too, falls that homage, very pure, as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus, down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! What eyes! Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed, runs, also, much higher, and is the secret of the reader’s joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shakspeare’s principal merit may be conveyed, in saying that he, of all men, best understands the English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate constitution. Shakspeare’s name suggests other and purely intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords, and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts out of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented, if now and then, in a century, the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws on their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power and beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure, and a higher benefit, from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as, feats of memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imagination, even versatility, and concentration, as these acts expose the invisible organs and members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the parts of the body. For, we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, “to choose those who can, without aid from the eyes, or any other sense, proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among these activities, are the summersaults, spells, and resurrections, wrought by the imagination. When this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size, and inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this benefit is real, because we are entitled to these enlargements, and, once having passed the bounds, shall never again be quite the miserable pedants we were.

The high functions of the intellect are so allied, that some imaginative power usually appears in all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the first class, but especially in meditative men of an intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so that they have the perception of identity and the perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either of these laws. The perception of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little, through failure to see them.

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our delight in reason degenerates into idolatry of the herald. Especially when a mind of powerful method has instructed men, we find the examples of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Bacon, of Locke, — in religion the history of hierarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power. It is the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to bind the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man should appear in our village, he would create, in those who conversed with him, a new consciousness of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved advantages; he would establish a sense of immovable equality, calm us with assurances that we could not be cheated; as every one would discern the checks and guaranties of condition. The rich would see their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes and their resources.

But nature brings all this about in due time. Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of masters, and eager for change. Housekeepers say of a domestic who has been valuable, “She has lived with me long enough.” We are tendencies, or rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Rotation is the law of nature. When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear; not Jefferson, nor Franklin, but now a great salesman; then a road-contractor; then a student of fishes; then a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage western general. Thus we make a stand against our rougher masters; but against the best there is a finer remedy. The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which, also, Plato was debtor.

I must not forget that we have a special debt to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. Between rank and rank of our great men are wide intervals. Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few persons, who, either by the quality of that idea they embodied, or by the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the constitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In lucid intervals we say, “Let there be an entrance opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool’s cap too long.” We will know the meaning of our economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and, if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, let us read off the strains. We have been cheated of our reason; yet there have been sane men, who enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they know, they know for us. With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed, until the last great man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place. Witness the multitude of statues, pictures, and memorials which recall their genius in every city, village, house, and ship: —

 ”Ever their phantoms arise before us.
  Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
  At bed and table they lord it o’er us,
  With looks of beauty, and words of good.”

How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, the service rendered by those who introduce moral truths into the general mind? — I am plagued, in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. If I work in my garden, and prune an apple-tree, I am well enough entertained, and could continue indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes to mind that a day is gone, and I have got this precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New York, and run up and down on my affairs: they are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling advantage. I remember the peau d’ane, on which whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a convention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I cannot keep my eyes off the clock. But if there should appear in the company some gentle soul who knows little of persons or parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me; I forget the clock.

I pass out of the sore relation to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition of rich and poor. We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more, every other must have so much less. I seem to have no good, without breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors. But in these new fields there is room: here are no self-esteems, no exclusions.

I admire great men of all classes, those who stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like rough and smooth “Scourges of God,” and “Darlings of the human race.” I like the first Caesar; and Charles V., of Spain; and Charles XII., of Sweden; Richard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I applaud a sufficient man, an officer, equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater, when he can abolish himself, and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons; this subtilizer, and irresistible upward force, into our thought, destroying individualism; the power so great, that the potentate is nothing. Then he is a monarch, who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff, who preaches the equality of souls, and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor, who can spare his empire.

But I intended to specify, with a little minuteness, two or three points of service. Nature never spares the opium or nepenthe; but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, and the sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the ruin, and incapable of seeing it, though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest, invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness of their contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed? Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each, is the pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright thought that made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure goes by, which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that should marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid. Without Plato, we should almost lose our faith in the possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, so rapid is the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their contemporaries, even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years, that they grow alike; and, if they should live long enough, we should not be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances, which threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any high point, the city of New York, yonder city of London, the western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep each other in countenance, and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience, is the universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again; it is very easy to be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries, what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the skin. We catch it by sympathy, or, as a wife arrives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where they stop. Very hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as hold of nature, and transcend fashions, by their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from these federal errors, and defend us from our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all grows alike. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much conversation with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help: — other great men, new qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, even, “I pray you, let me never hear that man’s name again.” They cry up the virtues of George Washington,— “Damn George Washington!” is the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation. But it is human nature’s indispensable defense. The centripetence augments the centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of the state depends on the see-saw.

There is, however, a speedy limit to the use of heroes. Every genius is defended from approach by quantities of availableness. They are very attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we are hindered on all sides from approach. The more we are drawn, the more we are repelled. There is something not solid in the good that is done for us. The best discovery the discoverer makes for himself. It has something unreal for his companion, until he too has substantiated it. It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not communicable to other men, and, sending it to perform one more turn through the circle of beings, wrote “Not transferable,” and “Good for this trip only,” on these garments of the soul. There is somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. The boundaries are invisible, but they are never crossed. There is such good will to impart, and such good will to receive, that each threatens to become the other; but the law of individuality collects its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, and so we remain.

For Nature wishes every thing to remain itself; and, whilst every individual strives to grow and exclude, and to exclude and grow, to the extremities of the universe, and to impose the law of its being on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to protect each against every other. Each is self-defended. Nothing is more marked than the power by which individuals are guarded from individuals, in a world where every benefactor becomes so easily a malefactor, only by continuation of his activity into places where it is not due; where children seem so much at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all men are too social and interfering. We rightly speak of the guardian angels of children. How superior in their security from infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought! They shed their own abundant beauty on the objects they behold. Therefore, they are not at the mercy of such poor educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them, they soon come not to mind it, and get a self-reliance; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn the limitation elsewhere.

We need not fear excessive influence. A more generous trust is permitted. Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism: the devotion may easily be greater than the wretched pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be another: not thyself, but a Platonist; not a soul, but a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian; not a poet, but a Shakspearian. In vain, the wheels of tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of inertia, fear, or love itself, hold thee there. On, and forever onward! The microscope observes a monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circulating in water. Presently, a dot appears on the animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought, and in society. Children think they cannot live without their parents. But, long before they are aware of it, the black dot has appeared, and the detachment taken place. Any accident will now reveal to them their independence.

But great men: — the word is injurious. Is there caste? is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature. “Generous and handsome,” he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred; — but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be low, as that we should be low; for we must have society.

Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say, society is a Pestalozzian school; all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by receiving and by imparting. Men who know the same things, are not long the best company for each other. But bring to each an intelligent person of another experience, and it is as if you let off water from a lake, by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechanical advantage, and great benefit it is to each speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to himself. We pass very fast, in our personal moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses, and common men; — there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.

The heroes of the hour are relatively great: of a faster growth; or they are such, in whom, at the moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then in request. Other days will demand other qualities. Some rays escape the common observer, and want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the less great, but the more, that society cannot see them. Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul.

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, — that there is true ascension in our love. The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals. We must infer much, and supply many chasms in the record. The history of the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemonical. No man, in all the procession of famous men, is reason or illumination, or that essence we were looking for; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, of new possibilities. Could we one day complete the immense figure which these flagrant points compose! The study of many individuals leads us to an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought and feeling, that break out there, cannot be impounded by any fence of personality. This is the key to the power of the greatest men, — their spirit diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by night and by day, in concentric circles from its origin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the union of all minds appears intimate: what gets admission to one, cannot be kept out of any other: the smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any quarter, is so much good to the commonwealth of souls. If the disparities of talent and position vanish, when the individuals are seen in the duration which is necessary to complete the career of each; even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears, when we ascend to the central identity of all the individuals, and know that they are made of the same substance which ordaineth and doeth.

The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. No experience is more familiar. Once you saw phoenixes: they are gone; the world is not therefore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery; but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you may still read them transferred to the walls of the world. For a time, our teachers serve us personally, as metres or milestones of progress. Once they were angels of knowledge, and their figures touched the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, culture, and limits; and they yielded their places to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain so high, that we have not been able to read them nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed them of a ray. But, at last, we shall cease to look in men for completeness, and shall content ourselves with their social and delegated quality. All that respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits, into a catholic existence. We have never come at the true and best benefit of any genius, so long as we believe him an original force. In the moment when he ceases to help us as a cause, he begins to help us move as an effect. Then he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind and will. The opaque self becomes transparent with the light of the First Cause.

Yet, within the limits of human education and agency, we may say, great men exist that there may be greater men. The destiny of organized nature is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song, that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be multiplied.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.

Among books, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, “Burn the libraries; for, their value is in this book.” These sentences contain the culture of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation. Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We have reached the mountain from which all these drift bowlders were detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man, who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation, — Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Coleridge, — is some reader of Plato, translating into the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors, and must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, — at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men, — Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and says, “how English!” a German— “how Teutonic!” an Italian— “how Roman and how Greek!” As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader in New England, an American genius. His broad humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question concerning his reputed works, — what are genuine, what spurious. It is singular that wherever we find a man higher, by a whole head, than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt, what are his real works. Thus, Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these men magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do for them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does thus live in several bodies; and write, or paint, or act, by many hands; and after some time, it is not easy to say what is the authentic work of the master, and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is a great man, but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he can dispose of everything. What is not good for virtue is good for knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times, — Philolaus, Timaeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis, — beyond all example then or since, — he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, “Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but its different parts generally spring up in different persons.” Every man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of lyric expression) mainly is not a poet, because he chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them. Plato, especially, has no external biography. If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his intellectual performances.

He was born 430 A. C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in his times and city; and is said to have had an early inclination for war; but in his twentieth year, meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit, and remained for ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to Megara; accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius, to the court of Sicily; and went thither three times, though very capriciously treated. He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a long time; some say three, — some say thirteen years. It is said, he went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, he gave lessons, in the Academy, to those whom his fame drew thither; and died, as we have received it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years.

But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the supreme elevation of this man, in the intellectual history of our race, — how it happens that, in proportion to the culture of men, they become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have pre-occupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every church, every poet, — making it impossible to think, on certain levels, except through him. He stands between the truth and every man’s mind, and has almost impressed language, and the primary forms of thought, with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms; here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato, — and in none before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness is the measure of merit, in every work of art; since the author of it was not misled by anything shortlived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve.

This could not have happened, without a sound, sincere, and catholic man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their want, and the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and quarrel; their manners are full of desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no longer in lumps and masses, but accurately distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence, and explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women. “Ah! you don’t understand me; I have never met with any one who comprehends me:” and they sigh and weep, write verses, and walk alone, — fault of power to express their precise meaning. In a month or two, through the favor of their good genius, they meet some one so related as to assist their volcanic estate; and, good communication being once established, they are thenceforward good citizens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accuracy, to skill, to truth, from blind force.

There is a moment, in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness, and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale; and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses, by his eyes and brain, with solar and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and such in philosophy. Its early records, almost perished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing with them the dreams of barbarians; a confusion of crude notions of morals, and of natural philosophy, gradually subsiding, through the partial insight of single teachers.

Before Pericles, came the Seven Wise Masters; and we have the beginnings of geometry, metaphysics, and ethics: then the partialists, — deducing the origin of things from flux or water, or from air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with these causes mythologic pictures. At last, comes Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric paint, or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. “He shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide and define.”

This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world. Two cardinal facts lie forever at the base: the one, and the two. — 1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2, Variety. We unite all things, by perceiving the law which pervades them; by perceiving the superficial differences, and the profound resemblances. But every mental act, — this very perception of identity or oneness, recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and otherness. It is impossible to speak, or to think, without embracing both.

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the cause of that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound; self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one, — a one that shall be all. “In the midst of the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the imperishable being, “say the Vedas. All philosophy, of east and west, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the one, to that which is not one, but other or many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the other. These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought to separate, and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other, that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds, when we contemplate the one, the true, the good, — as in the surfaces and extremities of matter. In all nations, there are minds which incline to dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, and chiefly, in the Indian Scriptures, in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana. Those writings contain little else than this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it.

The Same, the Same! friend and foe are of one stuff; the ploughman, the plough, and the furrow, are of one stuff; and the stuff is such, and so much, that the variations of forms are unimportant. “You are fit” (says the supreme Krishna to a sage) “to apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, with its gods, and heroes, and mankind. Men contemplate distinctions, because they are stupefied with ignorance.” “The words I and mine constitute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you shall now learn from me. It is soul, — one in all bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent over nature, exempt from birth, growth, and decay, omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, independent, unconnected with unrealities, with name, species, and the rest, in time past, present, and to come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is essentially one, is in one’s own, and in all other bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity of things. As one diffusive air, passing through the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit is single, though its forms be manifold, arising from the consequences of acts. When the difference of the investing form, as that of god, or the rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction.” “The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise, as not differing from, but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.” As if he had said, “All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient painting; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.” That which the soul seeks is resolution into being, above form, out of Tartarus, and out of heaven, — liberation from nature.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly backwards to diversity. The first is the course of gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many. One is being; the other, intellect; one is necessity; the other, freedom; one, rest; the other, motion; one, power; the other, distribution; one, strength; the other, pleasure; one, consciousness; the other, definition; one, genius; the other, talent, one, earnestness; the other, knowledge; one, possession; the other, trade; one, caste; the other, culture; one king; the other, democracy; and, if we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, and name the last tendency of both, we might say, that the end of the one is escape from organization, — pure science; and the end of the other is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or executive deity.

Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation.

To this partiality the history of nations corresponded. The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this fate in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative; it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the East loved infinity, the West delighted in boundaries.

European civility is the triumph of talent, the extension of system, the sharpened understanding, adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifestation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, Greece, had been working in this element with the joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of the detriment of an excess. They saw before them no sinister political economy; no ominous Malthus; no Paris or London; no pitiless subdivision of classes, — the doom of the pinmakers, the doom of the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to throw it off. The understanding was in its health and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper and cheap press.

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt, and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia, and the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic soul, and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe, — Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substructs the religion of Asia, as the base.

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to be small. The reason why we do not at once believe in admirable souls, is because they are not in our experience. In actual life, they are so rare, as to be incredible; but, primarily, there is not only no presumption against them, but the strongest presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother or his father dreamed that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not; a man who could see two sides of a thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its real and its ideal power, — was now, also, transferred entire to the consciousness of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good, which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained by orators, and polite conversers; from mares and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His arguments and his sentences are self-poised and spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands. The seashore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this command of two elements must explain the power and charm of Plato. Art expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the reverse of the medal of Jove.

To take an example: — The physical philosophers have sketched each his theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare inventories and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,— “Let us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world, will be in the truth.” “All things are for the sake of the good, and it is the cause of everything beautiful.” This dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy. The synthesis which makes the character of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great compass of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, “If Jove should descend to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.”

With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim of several of his works, and running through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which mounts, in the Republic, and in the Phaedo, to piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest his manly interference before the people in his master’s behalf, since even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indignation towards popular government, in many of his pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry, prophecy, and the high insight, arc from a wisdom of which man is not master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania, these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal metempsychosis; the Fates, with the rock and shears; and hears the intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say, he had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,— “Be bold;” and on the second gate,— “Be bold, be bold and evermore be bold;” and then again he paused well at the third gate,— “Be not too bold.” His strength is like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve, — so excellent is his Greek love of boundary, and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms, one is not more secure, than in following Plato in his flights. Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking, before he brings it to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers, than the poor, — but has that one dress, or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use, — epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of obstetric art is good philosophy; and his finding that word “cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.

What moderation, and understatement, and checking his thunder in mid volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all that can be said against the schools. “For philosophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could well afford to be generous, — he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was his speech: he plays with the doubt, and makes the most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. “I, therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can and, when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the utmost of my power; and you, too, I in turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here.”

He is a great average man one who, to the best thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they are. A great common sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has, also, what they have not, — this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never writes in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rapture.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on the earth, and cover his eyes, whilst he adorned that which cannot be numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which everything can be affirmed and denied: that “which is entity and nonentity.” He called it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so, — that this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having paid his homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, “And yet things are knowable!” — that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily honored, — the ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and he cries, Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science of quantities called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences, — I call it Dialectic, — which is the intellect discriminating the false and the true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for, to judge, is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The sciences, even the best, — mathematics, and astronomy, are like sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to make any use of them. Dialectic must teach the use of them. “This is of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on any study for its own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole science which embraces all.”

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend the whole; or that which in the diversity of sensations, can be comprised under a rational unity.” “The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” I announce to men the intellect. I announce the good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the law-giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men: that truth is altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be balked of the sight of essence, and to be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is the essence of justice, — to attend every one his own; nay, the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at, except through direct contemplation of the divine essence. Courage, then, for “the persuasion that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver, and more industrious, than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it.” He secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, “Culture.” He saw the institutions of Sparta, and recognized more genially, one would say, than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance; above all, in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement. “The whole of life, O Socrates,” said Glauco, “is, with the wise the measure of hearing such discourses as these.” What a price he sets on the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Parmenides! What price, above price on the talents themselves! He called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What value he gives to the art of gymnastics in education; what to geometry; what to music, what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In the Timseus, he indicates the highest employment of the eyes. “By us it is asserted, that God invented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose, — that, on surveying the circles of intelligence in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our own minds, which, though disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are still allied to their circulations; and that, having thus learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might, by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own wanderings and blunders.” And in the Republic,— “By each of these disciplines, a certain organ of the soul is both purified and reanimated, which is blinded and buried by studies of another kind; an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is perceived by this alone.”

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably the first place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic character and disposition is the origin of caste. “Such as were fit to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold: into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and artificers.” The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this point of caste. “Men have their metal, as of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace it.” Plato was not less firm. “Of the five orders of things, only four can be taught in the generality of men.” In the Republic, he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as the first of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature, is in the dialogue with the young Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates declares that, if some have grown wise by associating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him, they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way of it. “It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating with me, whom the Daemons oppose, so that it is not possible for me to live with these. With many, however, he does not prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with me. Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the God, you will make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen.” As if he had said, “I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You will be what you must. If there is love between us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your time is lost, and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you or me, is this secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my business.”

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, “There is also the divine.” There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself, and good itself, and attempted, as if on the part of the human intellect, once for all, to do it adequate homage, — homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He said, then, “Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings.”

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated the relation between the absolute good and true, and the forms of the intelligible world, he says:— “Let there be a line cut in two, unequal parts. Cut again each of these two parts, — one representing the visible, the other the intelligible world, — and these two new sections, representing the bright part and the dark part of these worlds, you will have, for one of the sections of the visible world, — images, that is, both shadows and reflections; for the other section, the objects of these images,-that is, plants, animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and hypotheses, and the other section, of truths.” To these four sections, the four operations of the soul correspond, — conjecture, faith, understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun, so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that “beauty is the most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity, and shedding desire and confidence through the universe, wherever it enters; and it enters, in some degree, into all things; but that there is another, which is as much more beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than chaos; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality.” He has the same regard to it as the source of excellence in works of art. “When an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work; it must follow, that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful.”

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry, and to all the sermons of the world, that the love of the sexes is initial; and symbolizes, at a distance, the passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the limitation of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom; — God only. In the same mind, he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods are produced to us through mania, and are assigned to us by a divine gift.

This leads me to that central figure, which he has established in his Academy, as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored, that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato’s mind. Socrates and Plato are the double star, which the most powerful instruments will not entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato’s extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough; of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable, as to be a cause of wit in others, — the rather that his broad good nature and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his humor a perfect temper, and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in any debate, — and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their feasts, whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head in Athens; and, after leaving the whole party under the table, goes away, as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought everything in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnameable offices, — especially if he talked with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, — an immense talker, — the rumor ran, that, on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troop; and there was some story that, under cover of folly, he had, in the city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, on bread and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He wore no undergarment; his upper garment was the same for summer and winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that, to procure the pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his shop, and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretense of knowing nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted, if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others, asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men, of such a magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist!-Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to him; but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and bon-hommie, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane, or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment; and, refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government, was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison, and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison, whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not go out by treachery. “Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes me deaf to everything you say.” The fame of this prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr, the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasurers he had to communicate. It was a rare fortune, that this Aesod of the mob, and this robed scholar, should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato. Moreover, by this means, he was able, in the direct way, and without envy, to avail himself of the wit and weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and these derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in power is only that which results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and, therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, driving into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul, — he is literary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit of Plato, that his writings have not, — what is, no doubt, incident to this regnancy of intellect in his work, — the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism, but that we have come to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt, with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this, and another, that: he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato, — nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism. But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues on this side, and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.

These things we are forced to say, if we must consider the effort of Plato, or of any philosopher, to dispose of Nature, — which will not be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him, is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine collection of fables; or, when we praise the style; or the common sense; or arithmetic; we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our impatience of miles when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

The publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “Serial Library,” of the excellent translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or, to add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals, by tracing growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope. The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish. It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented with the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. With this artist time and space are cheap, and she is insensible of what you say of tedious preparation. She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the fortune, in the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of the Socratic, or on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent of the universe, but is as poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason. These expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and, by this second sight, discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses. His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life, and life out of death, — that law by which, in nature, decomposition is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage, justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates — fables which have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine, “what comes from God to us, returns from us to God,” and in Socrates’ belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and virtue; but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer injustice, than to do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary homicide; that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions; and that no man sins willingly; that the order of proceeding of nature was from the mind to the body; and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune, is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing to give them everything which they need. This second sight explains the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was not more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are constant of oxygen, azote, and lime; there is just so much water, and slate, and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing the real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection, continuity, and representation, everywhere; hating insulation; and appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new and vacant, when Plato could write thus:— “Of all whose arguments are left to the men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as respects the repute, honors, and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as respects either of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings, — how, namely, that the one is the greatest of all the evils that the soul has within it, and justice the greatest good.”

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of things. Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most probable particular explication. Call that fanciful, — it matters not; the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the scale of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended into detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would say, that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm, or a district, or an island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He domesticates the soul in nature; man is the microcosm. All the circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in the action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names, significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his own ideal, when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things from disorder into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the center, that we see the sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of latitude, every arc and node; a theory so averaged, so modulated, that you would say, the winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize. Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a Platonist, when he writes, “Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean,” or,

  ”He that can endure
   To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
   Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
   And earns a place in the story.”

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ’tis the magnitude only of Shakspeare’s proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of “Conjugal Love,” is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular success is the moral aim, which endeared him to mankind. “Intellect,” he said, “is king of heaven and of earth;” but, in Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For their arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets; and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus. As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of charlatan.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to make emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by demerit have put themselves below protection, — outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature and desert are out of the reach of your rewards; let such be free of the city, and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michel Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities, permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and love of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world of corn and money, and console them for the shortcomings of the day, and the meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer, by engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in new faculties. Others may build cities; he is to understand them, and keep them in awe. But there is a class who lead us into another region, — the world of morals, or of will. What is singular about this region of thought, is, its claim. Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of everything else. For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently teach, that the problem of essence must take precedence of all others, — the questions of Whence? What? and Whither? and the solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason, the doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of the Koran, “God said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is between them, think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not return to us?” It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the universe into a person: —

 ”The realms of being to no other bow,
  Not only all are thine, but all are Thou.”

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this kind:

 ”Go boldly forth, and feast on being’s banquet;
  Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with thee.”

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure of nature, by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the Philosopher, conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, “All that he sees, I know;” and the mystic said, “All that he knows, I see.” If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, “traveling the path of existence through thousands of births,” having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly she knew. “For, all things in nature being linked and related, and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage, and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all.” How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and godlike soul! For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix: and he is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence, — a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints, — a beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad; “the flight,” Plotinus called it, “of the alone to the alone.” The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. “It o’erinforms the tenement of clay,” and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of religious illumination, somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it? —

                               ”Indeed it takes
  From our achievements, when performed at height,
  The pith and marrow of our attribute.”

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and so much fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, and will not add a pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore, the men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain, they are potter’s earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times, no such remarkable example of this introverted mind has occurred, as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688. This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and Brunswicks, of that day, have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several persons, — like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale, and possesses the advantage of size. As it is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by some crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics, and astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of the Board of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years, and visited the universities of England, Holland, France, and Germany. He performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of Fredericshall, by hauling two galleys, five boats, and a sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Europe, to examine mines and smelting works. He published, in 1716, his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and, from this time, for the next thirty years, was employed in the composition and publication of his scientific works. With the like force, he threw himself into theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called his illumination began. All his metallurgy, and transportation of ships overland, was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors, and devoted himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden, Liepsic, London, or Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life. His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles XII., by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In Sweden, he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters, and people about the ports through which he was wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the importation and publication of his religious works; but he seems to have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived on bread, milk, and vegetables; and he lived in a house situated in a large garden; he went several times to England, where he does not seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London, as a man of quiet, clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children. He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever he walked out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far more subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time; venture into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion in the world, — began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals are held in the highest esteem by those who understand these matters. It seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century; anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet, — but, unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern astronomy in regard to the generation of earth by the sun; in magnetism, some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of Schlichting, Monro, and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by them, and requires a long local distance to be seen; suggest, as Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning, or quasi omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible. His superb speculations, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes his own picture, in the “Principia,” of the original integrity of man. Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books, will most admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an university. Our books are false by being fragmentary; their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature, — being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite a surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means. But Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. ’Tis hard to say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends, skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert’s magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was born, published the “Principia,” and established the universal gravity. Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts,— “tota in minimis existit natura.” Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that “Nature is always like herself;” and, lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument. What was left for a genius of the largest calibre, but to go over their ground, and verify and unite? It is easy to see, in these minds, the original of Swedenborg’s studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He had a capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes of thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, one or other of whom had introduced all his leading ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of proving originality, the first birth and annunciation of one of the laws of nature.

He named his favorite views, the doctrine of Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the doctrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. His statement of these doctrines deserves to be studied in his books. Not every man can read them, but they will reward him who can. His theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. His writings would be a sufficient library to a lonely and athletic student; and the “Economy of the Animal Kingdom” is one of those books which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an honor to the human race. He had studied spars and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid knowledge makes his style lustrous with points and shooting spicula of thought, and resembling one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles with crystals. The grandeur of the topics makes the grandeur of the style. He was apt for cosmology, because of that native perception of identity which made mere size of no account to him. In the atom of magnetic iron, he saw the quality which would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet.

The thoughts in which he lived were, the universality of each law in nature; the Platonic doctrine of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion of each into other, and so the correspondence of all the parts; the fine secret that little explains large, and large, little; the centrality of man in nature, and the connection that subsists throughout all things: he saw that the human body was strictly universal, or an instrument through which the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter: so that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics, that, “the wiser a man is, the more will he be a worshipper of the Deity.” In short, he was a believer in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he experimented with and established through years of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle.

This theory dates from the oldest philosophers, and derives perhaps its best illustration from the newest. It is this: that nature iterates her means perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture, and food, determining the form it shall assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form, — spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and, between the lines of this mystical quadrant, all animate beings find their place; and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the type of prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine, nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. At the top of the column, she puts out another spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extremities again; the hands being now the upper jaw, the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this time by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a new man on the shoulders of the last. It can almost shed its trunk, and manage to live alone, according to the Platonic idea in the Timaeus. Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digesting, absorbing, excluding, and generating, in a new and ethereal element. Here, in the brain, is all the process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, comparing, digesting, and assimilating of experience. Here again is the mystery of generation repeated. In the brain are male and female faculties; here is marriage, here is fruit. And there is no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series. Everything, at the end of one use, is taken up into the next, each series punctually repeating every organ and process of the last. We are adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end; but everything, at the end of one use, is lifted into a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs into daemonic and celestial natures. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is good, but grandeur, when we find chemistry only an extension of the law of masses into particles, and that the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort of gravitation, operative also in the mental phenomena; and the terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical rations. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother. What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is one fork of a mightier stream, for which we have yet no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must come up into life to have its full value, and not remain there in globes and spaces. The globule of blood gyrates around its own axis in the human veins, as the planet in the sky; and the circles of intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. These grand rhymes or returns in nature, — the dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, under a mask so unexpected that we think it the face of a stranger, and, carrying up the semblance into divine forms, — delighted the prophetic eye of Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, has given to an aimless accumulation of experiments, guidance and form, and a beating heart.

I own, with some regret, that his printed works amount to about fifty stout octaves, his scientific works being about half of the whole number; and it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The scientific works have just now been translated into English, in an excellent edition.

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained from that time neglected; and now, after their century is complete, he has at last found a pupil in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, with a co-equal vigor of understanding and imagination comparable only to Lord Bacon’s, who has produced his master’s buried books to the day, and transferred them, with every advantage, from their forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world in our commercial and conquering tongue. This startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hundred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable fact in his history. Aided, it is said, by the munificence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary skill, this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson has enriched these volumes, throw all the contemporary philosophy of England into shade, and leave me nothing to say on their proper grounds.

The “Animal Kingdom” is a book of wonderful merits. It was written with the highest end, — to put science and the soul, long estranged from each other, at one again. It was an anatomist’s account of the human body, in the highest style of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brilliant treatment of a subject usually so dry and repulsive. He saw nature “wreathing through an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, on axles that never creak,” and sometimes sought “to uncover those secret recess is where nature is sitting at the fires in the depths of her laboratory;” whilst the picture comes recommended by the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius decides, peremptorily for the analytic, against the synthetic method; and, in a book whose genius is a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself to a rigid experience.

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature and how wise was that old answer of Amasis to him who bade him drink up the sea,— “Yes, willingly, if you will stop the rivers that flow in.” Few knew as much about nature and her subtle manners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He thought as large a demand is made on our faith by nature, as by miracles. “He noted that in her proceeding from first principles through her several subordinations, there was no state through which she did not pass, as if her path lay through all things.” “For as often as she betakes herself upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, withdraws herself inward, she instantly, as it were, disappears, while no one knows what has become of her, or whither she is gone; so that it is necessary to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps.”

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an end or final cause, gives wonderful animation, a sort of personality to the whole writing. This book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient doctrines of Hippocrates, that the brain is a gland; and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius, —

 Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis
  Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis
  Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari
  Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis;
  Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse
  Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis;
  Ignibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse.
                                          Lib. I. 835.

 ”The principle of all things entrails made
  Of smallest entrails; bone, of smallest bone,
  Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one;
  Gold, of small grains; earth, of small sands compacted
  Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted:”

and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim, that “nature exists entirely in leasts,” — is a favorite thought of Swedenborg. “It is a constant law of the organic body, that large, compound, or visible forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpler, and ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more universally, and the least forms so perfectly and universally, as to involve an idea representative of their entire universe.” The unities of each organ are so many little organs, homogeneous with their compound; the unities of the tongue are little tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs; those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful idea furnishes a key to every secret. What was too small for the eye to detect was read by the aggregates; what was too large, by the units. There is no end to his application of the thought. “Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hungers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over the body.” It is the key to his theology, also. “Man is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to the world of spirits and to heaven. Every particular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every smallest spark of his affection, is an image and effigy of him. A spirit may be known from only a single thought. God is the grand man.” The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of nature required a theory of forms, also. “Forms ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and corporeal. The second and next higher form is the circular, which is also called the perpetual-angular, because the circumference of a circle is a perpetual angle. The form above this is the spiral, parent and measure of circular forms; its diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, and have a spherical surface for center; therefore it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral; next, the perpetual-vortical, or celestial; last, the perpetual-celestial, or spiritual.”

Was it strange that a genius so bold should take the last step, also, — conceive that he might attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the meaning of the world? In the first volume of the “Animal Kingdom,” he broaches the subject, in a remarkable note. —

“In our doctrine of Representations and Correspondences, we shall treat of both these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of the astonishing things which occur, I will not say, in the living body only, but throughout nature, and which correspond so entirely to supreme and spiritual things, that one would swear that the physical world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world; insomuch, that if we choose to express any natural truth in physical and definite vocalterms, and to convert these terms only into the corresponding and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a spiritual truth, or theological dogma, in place of the physical truth or precept; although no mortal would have predicted that anything of the kind could possibly arise by bare literal transposition; inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately from the other, appears to have absolutely no relation to it. I intend, hereafter, to communicate a number of examples of such correspondences, together with a vocabulary containing the terms of spiritual things, as well as of the physical things for which they are to be substituted. This symbolism pervades the living body.”

The fact, thus explicitly stated, is implied in all poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems, and in the structure of language. Plato knew of it, as is evident from his twice bisected line, in the sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had found that truth and nature differed only as seal and print; and he instanced some physical proportions, with their translation into a moral and political sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this law in their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to them only, as the magnet was known for ages, as a toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached and scientific statement, because it was habitually present to him, and never not seen. It was involved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of identity and iteration, because the mental series exactly tallies with the material series. It required an insight that could rank things in order and series; or, rather, it required such rightness of position, that the poles of the eye should coincide with the axis of the world. The earth has fed its mankind through five or six millenniums, and they had sciences, religions, philosophies; and yet had failed to see the correspondence of meaning between every part and every other part. And, down to this hour, literature has no book in which the symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One would say, that, as soon as men had the first hint that every sensible object, — animal, rock, river, air, — nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor finally to a material end, but as a picture-language, to tell another story of beings and duties, other science would be put by, and a science of such grand presage would absorb all faculties; that each man would ask of all objects, what they mean: Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief, in this center? Why hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one never quite expressed fact in endless picture-language? Yet, whether it be that these things will not be intellectually learned, or, that many centuries must elaborate and compose so rare and opulent a soul, — there is no comet, rock-stratum, fossil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for itself, does not interest more scholars and classifiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of things.

But Swedenborg was not content with the culinary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth year, these thoughts held him fast, and his profound mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent in religious history, that he was an abnormal person, to whom was granted the privilege of conversing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy connected itself with just this office of explaining the moral import of the sensible world. To a right perception, at once broad and minute, of the order of nature, he added the comprehension of the moral laws in their widest social aspects; but whatever he saw, through some excessive determination to form, in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed it in events. When he attempted to announce the law most sanely, he was forced to couch it in parable.

Modern psychology offers no similar example of a deranged balance. The principal powers continued to maintain a healthy action; and, to a reader who can make due allowance in the report for the reporter’s peculiarities, the results are still instructive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime laws he announced, than any that balanced dulness could afford. He attempts to give some account of the modus of the new state, affirming that “his presence in the spiritual world is attended with a certain separation, but only as to the intellectual part of his mind, not as to the will part;” and he affirms that “he sees, with the internal sight, the things that are in another life, more clearly than he sees the things which are here in the world.”

Having adopted the belief that certain books of the Old and New Testaments were exact allegories, or written in the angelic and ecstatic mode, he employed his remaining years in extricating from the literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of “a most ancient people, men better than we, and dwelling nigher to the gods;” and Swedenborg added, that they used the earth symbolically; that these, when they saw terrestrial objects, did not think at all about them, but only about those which they signified. The correspondence between thoughts and things henceforward occupied him. “The very organic form resembles the end inscribed on it.” A man is in general, and in particular, an organizd justice or injustice, selfishness or gratitude. And the cause of this harmony he assigned in the Arcana: “The reason why all and single things, in the heavens and on earth, are representative, is because they exist from an influx of the Lord, through heaven.” This design of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if adequately executed, would be the poem of the world, in which all history and science would play an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by the exclusively theologic direction which his inquiries took. His perception of nature is not human and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. He fastens each natural object to a theologic notion: — a horse signifies carnal understanding; a tree, perception; the moon, faith; a cat means this; an ostrich, that; an artichoke, this other; and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ecclesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter circulates in turn through every system. The central identity enables any one symbol to express successively all the qualities and shades of the real being. In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Everything must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly.

His theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of symbols is yet to be written. But the interpreter, whom mankind must still expect, will find no predecessor who has approached so near to the true problem.

Swedenborg styles himself, in the title-page of his books, “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ;” and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have a successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical wisdom should give him influence as a teacher. To the withered traditional church yielding dry catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worshiper, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is surprised to find himself a party to the whole of his religion. His religion thinks for him, and is of universal application. He turns it on every side; it fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies every circumstance. Instead of a religion which visited him diplomatically three or four times, — when he was born, when he married, when he fell sick, and when he died, and for the rest never interfered with him, — here was a teaching which accompanied him all day, accompanied him even into sleep and dreams; into his thinking, and showed him through what a long ancestry his thoughts descend; into society, and showed by what affinities he was girt to his equals and his counterparts; into natural objects, and showed their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and what are hurtful; and opened the future world, by indicating the continuity of the same laws. His disciples allege that their intellect is invigorated by the study of his books.

There is no such problem for criticism as his theological writings, their merits are so commanding; yet such grave deductions must be made. Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the prairie, or the desert, and their incongruities are like the last deliration. He is superfluously explanatory, and his feelings of the ignorance of men, strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions; he is a rich discoverer, and of things which most import us to know. His thought dwells in essential resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to the man who built it. He saw things in their law, in likeness of function, not of structure. There is an invariable method and order in his delivery of his truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weightiness, — his eye never roving, without one swell of vanity, or one look to self, in any common form of literary pride! a theoretic or speculative man, but whom no practical man in the universe could affect to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, though of purple, and almost skywoven, is an academic robe, and hinders action with its voluminous folds. But this mystic is awful to Caesar. Lycurgus himself would bow.

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction of popular errors, the announcement of ethical laws, take him out of comparison with any other modern writer, and entitle him to a place, vacant for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. That slow but commanding influence which he has acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must be excessive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount. Of course, what is real and universal cannot be confined to the circle of those who sympathize strictly with his genius, but will pass forth into the common stock of wise and just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, by which it attracts what is excellent in its children, and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of the grandest mind.

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid, and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien will, — in Swedenborg’s mind, has a more philosophic character. It is subjective, or depends entirely upon the thought of the person. All things in the universe arrange themselves to each person anew, according to his ruling love. Man is such as his affection and thought are. Man is man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of knowing and understanding. As he is, so he sees. The marriages of the world are broken up. Interiors associate all in the spiritual world. Whatever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a heap of carrion. Nothing can resist states; everything gravitates; like will to like; what we call poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have come into a world which is a living poem. Every thing is as I am. Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present. Every one makes his own house and state. The ghosts are tormented with the fear of death, and cannot remember that they have died. They who are in evil and falsehood are afraid of all others. Such as have deprived themselves of charity, wander and flee; the societies which they approach discover their quality, and drive them away. The covetous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells where their money is deposited, and these to be infested with mice. They who place merit in good works seem to themselves to cut wood. “I asked such, if they were not wearied? They replied, that they have not yet done work enough to merit heaven.”

He delivers golden sayings, which express with singular beauty the ethical laws; as when he uttered that famed sentence, that, “in heaven the angels are advancing continually to the springtime of their youth, so that the oldest angel appears the youngest:” “The more angels, the more room:” “The perfection of man is the love of use:” “Man, in his perfect form, is heaven:” “What is from Him, is Him:” “Ends always ascend as nature descends:” And the truly poetic account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, as it consists of inflexions according to the form of heaven, can be read without instruction He almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, by strange insights of the structure of the human body and mind. “It is never permitted to any one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look at the back of his head; for then the influx which is from the Lord is disturbed.” The angels, from the sound of the voice, know a man’s love; from the articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and from the sense of the words, his science.

In the “Conjugal Love,” he has unfolded the science of marriage. Of this book, one would say, that, with the highest elements, it has failed of success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, which Plato attempted in the “Banquet;” the love, which, Dante says, Casella sang among the angels in Paradise; and which, as rightly celebrated, in its genesis, fruition, and effect, might well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the genesis of all institutions, customs, and manners. The book had been grand, if the Hebraism had been omitted, and the law stated without Gothicism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension of state which the nature of things requires. It is a fine Platonic development of the science of marriage; teaching that sex is universal, and not local; virility in the male qualifying every organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in woman. Therefore, in the real or spiritual world, the nuptial union is not momentary, but incessant and total; and chastity not a local, but a universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful, the wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went on increasing in beauty evermore.

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates the circumstance of marriage; and, though he finds false marriages on the earth, fancies a wiser choice in heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and friendships are momentary. Do you love me? means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, we are happy with the same happiness; but presently one of us passes into the perception of new truth; — we are divorced, and no tension in nature can hold us to each other. I know how delicious is this cup of love, — I existing for you, you existing for me; but it is a child’s clinging to his toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nuptial chamber; to keep the picture-alphabet through which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the outdoor landscape, remembered from the evening fireside, it seems cold and desolate, whilst you cower over the coals; but, once abroad again, we pity those who can forego the magnificence of nature, for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true subject of the “Conjugal Love” is conversation, whose laws are profoundly eliminated. It is false, if literally applied to marriage. For God is the bride or bridegroom of the soul. Heaven is not the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls. We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple of one thought, and part as though we parted not, to join another thought in other fellowships of joy. So far from there being anything divine in the low and proprietary sense of, Do you love me? it is only when you leave and lose me, by casting yourself on a sentiment which is higher than both of us, that I draw near, and find myself at your side; and I am repelled, if you fix your eye on me, and demand love. In fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes every moment. You love the worth in me; then I am your husband: but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of worth that is beyond me. Meantime, I adore the greater worth in another, and so become his wife. He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, and is wife of receiver of that influence.

Whether a self-inquisitorial habit, that he grew into, from jealousy of the sins to which men of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentangling and demonstrating that particular form of moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can resist. I refer to his feeling of the profanation of thinking to what is good “from scientifics.” “To reason about faith, is to doubt and deny.” He was painfully alive to the difference between knowing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are conjurers and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of moral and mental power, which, perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination, as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate. It is hard to carry a full cup: and this man, profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring that he loved analysis, and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not solitary, nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he makes war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief, and the sound of wailing, all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengeful, whose faces resembled a round, broad-cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and Dean Swift, nobody ever had such science of filth and corruption.

These books should be used with caution. It is dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of thought. True in transition, they become false if fixed. It requires, for his just apprehension, almost a genius equal to his own. But when his visions become the stereotyped language of multitudes of persons, of all degrees of age and capacity, they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent and virtuous young men, as part of their education, through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with much pomp and graduation, the highest truths known to ancient wisdom were taught. An ardent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or twenty years, might read once these books of Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and conscience, and then throw them aside forever. Genius is ever haunted by similar dreams, when the hells and the heavens are opened to it. But these pictures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth — not as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good: then this is safely seen.

Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central spontaneity; it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks power to generate life. There is no individual in it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all those atoms and laminae lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What seems an individual and a will, is none. There is an immense chain of intermediation, extending from center to extremes, which bereaves every agency of all freedom and character. The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought comes into each mind by influence from a society of spirits that surround it, and into these from a higher society, and so on. All his types mean the same few things. All his figures speak one speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human relenting, remarks, “one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;” and when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away, — it is plain theologic Swedenborg, like the rest. His heavens and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. The thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues, — sinks into entire sympathy with his society. This want reacts to the center of the system. Though the agency of “the Lord” is in every line referred to by name, it never becomes alive. There is no lustre in that eye which gazes from the center, and which should vivify the immense dependency of beings.

The vice of Swedenborg’s mind is its theologic determination. Nothing with him has the liberality of universal wisdom, but we are always in a church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore of right and wrong to man, had the same excess of influence for him, it has had for the nations. The mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less an available element in education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of all modern souls in this department of thought, wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and conserve what had already arrived at its natural term, and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring from its prominence, before western modes of thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.

The excess of influence shows itself in the incongruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. “What have I to do,” asks the impatient reader, “with jasper and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony; what with arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with lepers and emerods; what with heave-offerings and unleavened bread; chariots of fire, dragons crowned and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for orientals, these are nothing to me. The more learning you bring to explain them, the more glaring the impertinence. The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the Spartan, ‘Why do you speak so much to the purpose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?’ My learning is such as God gave me in my birth and habit, in the delight and study of my eyes, and not of another man’s. Of all absurdities, this of some foreigner, purposing to take away my rhetoric, and substitute his own, and amuse me with pelican and stork, instead of thrush and robin; palm-trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and hickory, — seems the most needless.” Locke said, “God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.” Swedenborg’s history points the remark. The parish disputes, in the Swedish church, between the friends and foes of Luther and Melancthon, concerning “faith alone,” and “works alone,” intrude themselves into his speculations upon the economy of the universe, and of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop’s son, for whom the heavens are opened, so that he sees with eyes, and in the richest symbolic forms, the awful truth of things, and utters again, in his books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputable secrets of moral nature, — with all these grandeurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran bishop’s son; his judgments are those of a Swedish polemic, and his vast enlargements purchased by adamantine limitations. He carries his controversial memory with him, in his visits to the souls. He is like Michel Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the cardinal who had offended him to roast under a mountain of devils; or, like Dante, who avenged, in vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or, perhaps still more like Montaigne’s parish priest, who, if a hailstorm passes over the village, thinks the day of doom has come, and the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of Melancthon, and Luther, and Wolfius, and his own books, which he advertises among the angels.

Under the same theologic cramp, many of his dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in morals is, that evils should be shunned as sins. But he does not know what evil is, or what good is, who thinks any ground remains to be occupied, after saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the element of personality of Deity. But nothing is added. One man, you say, dreads crysipelas, — show him that this dread is evil: or, one dreads hell, — show him that dread is evil. He who loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence, and lives with God. The less we have to do with our sins, the better. No man can afford to waste his moments in compunctions. “That is active duty,” say the Hindoos, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge, which is for our liberation; all other duty is good only unto weariness.”

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation. Euripides rightly said, —

“Goodness and being in the gods are one; He who imputes ill to them makes them none.”

To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his apostrophe to “poor old Nickie Ben,”

“O wad ye tak a thought, and mend!”

has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. Everything is superficial, and perishes, but love and truth only. The largest is always the truest sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit of the Indian Vishnu,-”I am the same to all mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my love or hatred. They who serve me with adoration, — I am in them, and they in me. If one whose ways are altogether evil, serve me alone, he is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous spirit, and obtaineth eternal happiness.”

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations of the other world, — only his probity and genius can entitle it to any serious regard. His revelations destroy their credit by running into detail. If a man say, that the Holy Ghost hath informed him that the Last Judgment (or the last of the judgments) took place in 1757; or, that the Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by themselves, and the English in a heaven by themselves; I reply, that the Spirit which is holy, is reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates’ Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if he proposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it dissuaded him. “What God is,” he said, “I know not; what he is not I know.” The Hindoos have denominated the Supreme Being, the “Internal Check.” The illuminated Quakers explained their Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, but it appears as an obstruction to anything unfit. But the right examples are private experiences, which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly speaking, Swedenborg’s revelation is a confounding of planes, — a capital offence in so learned a categorist. This is to carry the law of surface into the plane of substance, to carry individualism and its fopperies into the realm of essences and generals, which is dislocation and chaos.

The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. But it is certain that it must tally with what is best in nature. It must not be inferior in tone to the already known works of the artist who sculptures the globes of the firmament, and writes the moral law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides, and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating key-note of nature and spirit is sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees.

In this mood, we hear the rumor that the seer has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad muse loves night and death, and the pit. His Inferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the same relation to the generosities and joys of truth, of which human souls have already made us cognizant, as a man’s bad dreams bear to his ideal life. It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which nightly turns many an honest gentleman, benevolent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a dog about the outer yards and kennels of creation. When he mounts into the heavens, I do not hear its language. A man should not tell me that he has walked among the angels; his proof is, that his eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have actually walked the earth? These angels that Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of their discipline and culture; they are all country parsons; their heaven is a fete champetre, and evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason’s procession. How different is Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when he asserts that, “in some sort, love is greater than God,” his heart beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible across the centuries. ’Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.

It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground, and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature; others are forever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of things, and the primary relation of mind to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and rudiments of the Mother-Tongue, — how could he not read off one strain into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of that heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books? Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and, like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His great name will turn a sentence. His books have become a monument. His laurels so largely mixed with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the spot.

Yet, in this immolation of genius and fame at the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many opinions conflict as to the true center. In the shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast; the pilot chooses with science, — I plant myself here; all will sink before this; “he comes to land who sails with me.” Do not rely on heavenly favor, or on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common sense, the old usage and main chance of men; nothing can keep you, — not fate, nor health, nor admirable intellect; none can keep you, but rectitude only, rectitude forever and ever! — and, with a tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, inventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. I think of him as of some transmigratory votary of Indian legend, who says, “Though I be dog, or jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and to God.”

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to mankind, which is now only beginning to be known. By the science of experiment and use, he made his first steps; he observed and published the laws of nature; and, ascending by just degrees, from events to their summits and causes, he was fired with piety at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to his joy and worship. This was his first service. If the glory was too bright for his eyes to bear, if he staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive service to men, not less than the first, — perhaps, in the great circle of being, and in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side. Nothing so thin, but has these two faces; and, when the observer has seen the obverse, he turns it over to see the reverse.

Life is a pitching of this penny, — heads or tails. We never tire of this game, because there is still a slight shudder of astonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at the contrast of the two faces. A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street; but it occurs that he also is bought and sold. He sees the beauty of a human face, and searches the cause of that beauty, which must be more beautiful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, cherishes his children; but he asks himself, why? and whereto? This head and this tail are called, in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite; Relative and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and many fine names beside.

Each man is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature; and it will easily happen that men will be found devoted to one or the other. One class has the perception of difference, and is conversant with facts and surfaces; cities and persons; and the bringing certain things to pass; — the men of talent and action. Another class have the perception of identity, and are men of faith and philosophy, men of genius.

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely more kind.

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design — he will presently undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments, his thought has dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so that the works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, existed first in an artist’s mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction, which impair the executed models. So did the church, the state, college, court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen that the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and, like dreaming beggars, they assume to speak and act as if these values were already substantiated.

On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury, — the animal world, including the animal in the philosopher and poet also, — and the practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are never excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest, — weigh heavily on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a trading planet to exist; no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not softened by any misgivings of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone have reason.

Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence. No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic, also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other. After dinner, a man believes less, denies more; verities have lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science; ideas are disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid portion of society; and a man comes to be valued by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. “Nephew,” said Sir Godfrey, “you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world.” “I don’t know how great men you may be,” said the Guinea man, “but I don’t like your looks. I have often bought a man much better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas. Thus, the men of the senses revenge themselves on the professors, and repay scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with the philosopher, and weigh man by the pound. — They believe that mustard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches are incendiary, revolvers to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous, — you must eat more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,

“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang,”

and when he advised a young scholar perplexed with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well drunk. “The nerves,” says Cabanis, “they are the man.” My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. “For his part,” he says, “he puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it.”

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that it runs into indifferentism, and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years hence. Life’s well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have had enough of it. “Ah,” said my languid gentleman at Oxford, “there’s nothing new or true, — and no matter.”

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees nothing but the bundle of hay. “There is so much trouble in coming into the world,” said Lord Bolingbroke, “and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that ’tis hardly worth while to be here at all.” I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, “Mankind is a damned rascal:” and the natural corollary is pretty sure to follow,— “The world lives by humbug, and so will I.”

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray? — You are both in extremes, he says. You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence, and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.

Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption, — pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain, — they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings, wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to make up his mind, yea or nay, — why not suspend the judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am here to consider, — to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides.

Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates, to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains reasonable, “that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent it.” Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch mankind nearest, — shall the young man aim at a leading part in law, in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the present order of “competition,” and the friends of “attractive and associated labor.” The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is from the poor man’s hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, “We have no thoughts.” Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage; but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to think of Plutarch’s heroes. In short, since true fortitude of understanding consists “in not letting what we know be embarrassed by what we do not know,” we ought to secure those advantages which we can command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn, and get, and have, and climb. “Men are a sort of moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the air. If they keep too much at home, they pine.” Let us have a robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not with skipping ghosts.

This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic, — this of consideration, of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal denying, nor of universal doubting, — doubting even that he doubts; least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies, than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety, and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet; art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is excellent in mankind, — a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win, — he will see and judge.

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen, entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who uses them, — is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.

These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.

A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of the Essays remained to me from my father’s library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument, “lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of Montaigne.” Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence, I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of Mr. Sterling’s, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio’s translation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet’s library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal for me.

In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness, and independence of the country gentleman’s life. He took up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most. Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France, — Henry IV. and Montaigne.

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow. But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf. “Five or six as ridiculous stories,” too, he says, “can be told of me, as of any man living.” But, with all this really superfluous frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader’s mind.

“When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be perceived by himself.”

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic pair of scales, and wrote, Que sais-je? under it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, “You may play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate, — I stand here for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues, and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know, — my house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer; and a hundred straws just as ridiculous, — than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress, and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting, the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last, with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame is not mine; let it lie at fate’s and nature’s door.”

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony, yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech; it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves, and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception, — in his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style rises to passion.

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of thirty-three, he had been married. “But,” he says, “might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would have had me; but ’tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by example, not choice.” In the hour of death he gave the same weight to custom. Que sais-je? What do I know.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers, soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.

Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero, — dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men’s eyes conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors. Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.

But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior mind will pass through this domain of equilibration, — I should rather say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and blockheads.

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing power which remains itself in all changes.

The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism. His politics are those of the “Soul’s Errand” of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, “There is none who is worthy of my love or hatred;” while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce, and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil’s attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for him. But he says, There are doubts.

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are shown up to the public at the marshal’s office. They will never be so formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But I mean honestly by them — that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or they of me.

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. ’Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, “Action, action, my dear fellows, is for you!” Bad as was to me this detection by San Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, “We discover that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent.”

This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private observers, — I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops. What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I think that the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous; and that, though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet it supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more stupendous he finds the natural and moral economy, and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance.

There is the power of moods, each setting at nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs. There is the power of complexions, obviously modifying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs and unbeliefs appear to be structural; and, as soon as each man attains the poise and vivacity which allow the whole machinery to play, he will not need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate all opinions in his own life. Our life is March weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save our life; but a book, or a bust, or only the sound of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall be the seal of Solomon: fate is for imbeciles: all is possible to the resolved mind. Presently, a new experience gives a new turn to our thoughts: common sense resumes its tyranny: we say, “Well, the army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners, and poetry: and, look you, — on the whole, selfishness plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce, and the best citizen.” Are the opinions of a man on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach evidence? And what guaranty for the permanence of his opinions? I like not the French celerity, — a new church and state once a week. — This is the second negation; and I shall let it pass for what it will. As far as it asserts rotation of states of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy, namely, in the record of larger periods. What is the mean of many states; of all the states? Does the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is no community of sentiment discoverable in distant times and places? And when it shows the power of self-interest, I accept that as a part of the divine law, and must reconcile it with aspiration the best I can.

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense of mankind, in all ages, — that the laws of the world do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush us. Fate, in the shape of Kinde or nature, grows over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; Love and Fortune, blind; and Destiny, deaf. We have too little power of resistance against this ferocity which champs us up. What front can we make against these unavoidable, victorious, maleficent forces? What can I do against the influence of Race, in my history? What can I do against hereditary and constitutional habits, against scrofula, lymph, impotence? against climate, against barbarism, in my country? I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly; feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

But the main resistance which the affirmative impulse finds, and one including all others, is in the doctrine of the Illusionists. There is a painful rumor in circulation, that we have been practiced upon in all the principal performances of life, and free agency is the emptiest name. We have been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, with woman, with children, with sciences, with events which leave us exactly where they found us. The mathematics, ’tis complained, leave the mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so do all events and actions. I find a man who has passed through all the sciences, the churl he was; and, through all the offices, learned, civil, and social, can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact, we may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory of our state of education, that God is a substance, and his method is illusion. The eastern sages owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the whole world is beguiled.

Or, shall I state it thus? — The astonishment of life, is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it; — is then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings are nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room, it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo, — he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it, that, whether he is a man of worth or a sot, is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes cooperation impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy with his thought from the village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste, and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.

There are these, and more than these diseases of thought, which our ordinary teachers do not attempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good nature inclines us to virtue’s side, say, There are no doubts, — and lie for the right? Is life to be led in a brave or in a cowardly manner? and is not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all manliness? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier to that which is virtue? Can you not believe that a man of earnest and burly habit may find small good in tea, essays, and catechism, and want a rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farming, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt, and terror, to make things plain to him; and has he not a right to insist on being convinced in his own way? When he is convinced, he will be worth the pains.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them. Some minds are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they profess to entertain are rather a civility or accommodation to the common discourse of their company. They may well give themselves leave to speculate, for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into night, but infinite invitation on the other side. Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and they are encompassed with divinities. Others there are, to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion in nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or parasite faith; not a sight of realities, but an instinctive reliance on the seers and believers of realities. The manners and thoughts of believers astonish them, and convince them that these have seen something which is hid from themselves. But their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and presently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the believer.

Great believers are always reckoned infidels, impracticable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. Charitable souls come with their projects, and ask his cooperation. How can he hesitate? It is the rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where you can, and to turn your sentence with something auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he is forced to say, “O, these things will be as they must be: what can you do? These particular griefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit of such trees as we see growing. It is vain to complain of the leaf or the berry: cut it off; it will bear another just as bad. You must begin your cure lower down.” The generosities of the day prove an intractable element for him. The people’s questions are not his; their methods are not his; and, against all the dictates of good nature, he is driven to say, he has no pleasure in them.

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of the divine Providence, and of the immortality of the soul, his neighbors cannot put the statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He had rather stand charged with the imbecility of skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he says, in the moral design of the universe; it exists hospitably for the weal of the souls; but your dogmas seem to me caricatures; why should I make believe them? Will any say, this is cold and infidel? The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They will exult in his far-sighted good-will, that can abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradition and common belief, without losing a jot of strength. It sees to the end of all transgression. George Fox saw “that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but withal, an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over that of darkness.”

The final solution in which skepticism is lost is in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and their weight allowed to all objections: the moral sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. This is the drop which balances the sea. I play with the miscellany of facts, and take those superficial views which we call skepticism; but I know that they will presently appear to me in that order which makes skepticism impossible. A man of thought must feel the thought that is parent of the universe, that the masses of nature do undulate and flow.

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life and objects. The world is saturated with deity and with law. He is content with just and unjust, with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning gulf between the ambition of man and his power of performance, between the demand and supply of power, which makes the tragedy of all souls.

Charles Fourier announced that “the attractions of man are proportioned to his destinies;” in other words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet, all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown the heaven and earth to every child, and filled him with a desire for the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction, — to each man is administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital power per day, — a cup as large as space, and one drop of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning, with an appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the first motion to prove his strength — hands, feet, senses, gave way, and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the sirens sang, “The attractions are proportioned to the destinies.” In every house, in the heart of each maiden, and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, — between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.

The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one thing, and say the reverse. The appearance is immoral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend downward, to justify despondency, to promote rogues, to defeat the just; and, by knaves, as by martyrs, the just cause is carried forward. Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on, which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence, without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal cause. —

“If my bark sink, ’tis to another sea.”

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say, “I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power;” no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakspeare’s youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs, were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strongest party, — neither then could king, prelate, or puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time. Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it. It had become, by all causes, a national interest, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English history, — but not a whit less considerable, because it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker’s-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the London ‘prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from Malone’s laborious computations in regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which, “out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors; and 1899 were entirely his own.” And the preceding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone’s sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII., I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell, where, — instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare’s hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm.

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his resources; and, at that day our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world, —

 ”Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops’ line
  And the tale of Troy divine.”

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology, — that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster, or at Washington, speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes, the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, — all perished, — which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself, overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delhi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debt which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church, — these collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer, all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts, and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there was none. All the truly diomatic and national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas, Aesop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, down to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled, and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and let pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered, — the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player, — nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare’s time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him; and I find among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Ariminius; with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated, without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw, — Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society; — yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was on the introduction of Shakspeare into German by Lessing, and the translation of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet should find such wondering readers. Now, literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to proof; and with what results? Beside some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars’ Theater: its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village, with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty-five shillings ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the “Modern Plutarch,” and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard, and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet’s question to the ghost, —

           ”What may this mean,
  That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
  Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world’s dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia’s villa, “the antres vast and desarts idle,” of Othello’s captivity, — where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, — in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India; in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting; the Ballads of Spain and Scotland, — the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of those skyey sentences, — aerolites, — which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or, which gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart, — on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the ways whereby we may come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes: and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of Sonnets, without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men? What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office or function, or district of man’s work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakspeare valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was, — and he is the best in the world. But it turns out; that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasions which gave the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man and described the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries: he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic, out of notice. ’Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a king’s message is written.

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self, — the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass; the tragic and comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction: he always rides.

The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history; any one acquainted with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet’s mind, the fact has gone quite over into the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates, that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, “It was rumored abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?” Not less sovereign and cheerful, — much more sovereign and cheerful is the tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his festive style.

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfections of humanity.

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols, and imparts this power, — what is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements, which waited on his command, into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, “very superior pyrotechny this evening!” Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran— “The heavens and the earth, and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?” As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night’s Dream, or a Winter Evening’s Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos, — that he should not be wise for himself, — it must even go into the world’s history, that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede, beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanishes; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam’s fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them. It must be conceded that these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakspeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection; and love is compatible with universal wisdom.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century, Bonaparte is far the best known, and the most powerful; and owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg’s theory, that every organ is made up of homogeneous particles; or, as it is sometimes expressed, every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little kidneys, etc. Following this analogy, if any man is found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.

In our society, there is a standing antagonism between the conservative and the democratic classes; between those who have made their fortunes, and the young and the poor who have fortunes to make; between the interests of dead labor, — that is, the labor of hands long ago still in the grave, which labor is now entombed in money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by idle capitalists, — and the interests of living labor, which seeks to possess itself of land, and buildings, and money stocks. The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually losing numbers by death. The second class is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always outnumbering the other, and recruiting its numbers every hour by births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the competition of all, and to multiply avenues; — the class of business men in America, in England, in France, and throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon is its representative. The instinct of active, brave, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate Democrat. He had their virtues, and their vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That tendency is material, pointing at a sensual success, and employing the richest and most various means to that end; conversant with mechanical powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately learned and skilful, but subordinating all intellectual and spiritual forces into means to a material success. To be the rich man is the end. “God has granted” says the Koran, “to every people a prophet in its own tongue.” Paris, and London, and New York, the spirit of commerce, of money, and material power, were also to have their prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent.

Every one of the million readers of anecdotes, or memoirs, or lives of Napoleon, delights in the page, because he studies in it his own history. Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers. He is no saint, — to use his own word, “no capuchin,” and he is no hero, in the high sense. The man in the street finds in him the qualities and powers of other men in the street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived at such a commanding position, that he could indulge all those tastes which the common man possesses, but is obliged to conceal and deny; good society, good books, fast traveling, dress, dinners, servants without number, personal weight, the execution of his ideas, the standing in the attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, palaces, and conventional honors, — precisely what is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nineteenth century, — this powerful man possessed.

It is true that a man of Napoleon’s truth of adaptation to the mind of the masses around him becomes not merely representative, but actually a monopolizer and usurper of other minds. Thus Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every good word, that was spoken in France. Dumont relates that he sat in the gallery of the Convention, and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It struck Dumont that he could fit it with a peroration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and showed to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pronounced it admirable, and declared he would incorporate it into his harangue, to-morrow, to the Assembly. “It is impossible,” said Dumont, “as, unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin.” “If you have shown it to Lord Elgin, and to fifty persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow:” and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next day’s session. For Mirabeau, with his overpowering personality, felt that these things, which his presence inspired, were as much his own, as if he had said them, and that his adoption of them gave them their weight. Much more absolute and centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau’s popularity, and to much more than his predominance in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon’s stamp almost ceases to have a private speech and opinion. He is so largely receptive, and is so placed, that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelligence, wit, and power, of the age and country. He gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes the system of weights and measures; he levels the Alps; he builds the road. All distinguished engineers, savants, statists, report to him; so likewise do all good heads in every kind; he adopts the best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not these alone, but on every happy and memorable expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

Bonaparte was the idol of common men, because he had in transcendent degree the qualities and powers of common men. There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great class he represented, for power and wealth, — but Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the means. All the sentiments which embarrass men’s pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The sentiments were for women and children. Fontanes, in 1804, expressed Napoleon’s own sense, when, in behalf of the Senate, he addressed him,— “Sire, the desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.” The advocates of liberty, and of progress, are “ideologists;” — a word of contempt often in his mouth;— “Necker is an ideologist:” “Lafayette is an ideologist.”

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares that, “if you would succeed, you must not be too good.” It is an advantage, within certain limits, to have renounced the dominion of the sentiments of piety, gratitude, and generosity; since, what was an impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes a convenient weapon for our purposes; just as the river which was a formidable barrier, winter transforms into the smoothest of roads.

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and affections, and would help himself with his hands and his head. With him is no miracle, and no magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money, and in troops, and a very consistent and wise master-workman. He is never weak and literary, but acts with the solidity and the precision of natural agents. He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with things. Men give way before such a man as before natural events. To be sure, there are men enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, smiths, sailors, and mechanics generally; and we know how real and solid such men appear in the presence of scholars and grammarians; but these men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte superadded to this mineral and animal force, insight and generalization, so that men saw in him combined the natural and the intellectual power, as if the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to cipher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presuppose him. He came unto his own, and they received him. This ciphering operative knows what he is working with, and what is the product. He knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that each should do after its kind.

The art of war was the game in which he exerted his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in having always more forces than the enemy, on the point where the enemy is attacked, or where he attacks: and his whole talent is strained by endless manoeuvre and evolution, to march always on the enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and rapidly manoeuvring, so as always to bring two men against one at the point of engagement, will be an overmatch for a much larger body of men.

The times, his constitution, and his early circumstances, combined to develop this pattern democrat. He had the virtues of his class, and the conditions for their activity. That common sense, which no sooner respects any end, than it finds the means to effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the choice, simplification, and combining of means; the directness and thoroughness of his work; the prudence with which all was seen, and the energy with which all was done, make him the natural organ and head of what I may almost call, from its extent, the modern party.

Nature must have far the greatest share in every success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone and iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or seventeen hours, of going many days together without rest or food, except by snatches, and with the speed and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embarrassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer itself to be balked or misled by any pretences of others, or any superstition, or any heat or haste of his own. “My hand of iron,” he said, “was not at the extremity of my arm; it was immediately connected with my head.” He respected the power of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his superiority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior men, on his opinionativeness and waging war with nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his star: and he pleased himself, as well as the people, when he styled himself the “Child of Destiny.” “They charge me,” he said, “with the commission of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit crimes. Nothing has been more simple than my elevation: ’tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or crime: it was owing to the peculiarity of the times, and to my reputation of having fought well against the enemies of my country. I have always marched with the opinion of great masses, and with events. Of what use, then, would crimes be to me?” Again he said, speaking of his son, “My son cannot replace me; I could not replace myself. I am the creature of circumstances.” He had a directness of action never before combined with so much comprehension. He is a realist, terrific to all talkers, and confused truth-obscuring persons. He sees where the matter hinges, throws himself on the precise point of resistance, and slights all other considerations. He is strong in the right manner, namely, by insight. He never blundered into victory, but won his battles in his head, before he won them on the field. His principal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no other. In 1796, he writes to the Directory: “I have conducted the campaign without consulting any one. I should have done no good, if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the notions of another person. I have gained some advantages over superior forces, and when totally destitute of everything, because, in the persuasion that your confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as prompt as my thoughts.”

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecility of kings and governors. They are a class of persons much to be pitied, for they know not what they should do. The weavers strike for bread; and the king and his ministers, not knowing what to do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon understood his business. Here was a man who, in each moment and emergency, knew what to do next. It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, and, after each action, wait for an impulse from abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the world if his ends had been purely public. As he is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraordinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, self-denying, self-postponing, sacrificing everything to his aim, — money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, to his aim; not misled, like common adventurers, by the splendor of his own means. “Incidents ought not to govern policy,” he said, “but policy, incidents.” “To be hurried away by every event, is to have no political system at all. His victories were only so many doors, and he never for a moment lost sight of his way onward, in the dazzle and uproar of the present circumstance. He knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He would shorten a straight line to come at his object. Horrible anecdotes may, no doubt, be collected from his history, of the price at which he bought his successes; but he must not therefore be set down as cruel; but only as one who knew no impediment to his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, — but woe to what thing or person stood in his way! Not bloodthirsty, but not sparing of blood, — and pitiless. He saw only the object: the obstacle must give way. “Sire, General Clarke cannot combine with General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Austrian battery.”— “Let him carry the battery.”— “Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy artillery is sacrified: Sire, what orders?”— “Forward, forward!” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, gives, in his “Military Memoirs,” the following sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz.— “At the moment in which the Russian army was making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came riding at full speed toward the artillery. ‘You are losing time,’ he cried; ‘fire upon those masses; they must be engulfed; fire upon the ice!’ The order remained unexecuted for ten minutes. In vain several officers and myself were placed on the slope of a hill to produce the effect; their balls and mine rolled upon the ice, without breaking it up. Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of the heavy projectiles produced the desired effect. My method was immediately followed by the adjoining batteries, and in less than no time we buried ‘some’ [Footnote: As I quote at second-hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, I dare not adopt the high figure I find.] thousands of Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake.”

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. “There shall be no Alps,” he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France. He laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked everything, and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.

We like to see everything do its office after its kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattlesnake; and, if fighting be the best mode of adjusting national differences (as large majorities of men seem to agree), certainly Bonaparte was right in making it thorough. “The grand principle of war,” he said, “was, that an army ought always to be ready, by day and by night, and at all hours, to make all the resistance it is capable of making.” He never economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile position, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, grape-shot, — to annihilate all defense. On any point of resistance, he concentrated squadron on squadron in overwhelming numbers, until it was swept out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chasseurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of Jena, Napoleon said, “My lads, you must not fear death; when soldiers brave death, they drive him into the enemy’s ranks.” In the fury of assault, he no more spared himself. He went to the edge of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did what he could, and all that he could. He came, several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own person was all but lost. He was flung into the marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between him and his troops, in the melee, and he was brought off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. Each victory was a new weapon. “My power would fall, were I not to support it by new achievements. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest must maintain me.” He felt, with every wise man, that as much life is needed for conservation as for creation. We are always in peril, always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruction, and only to be saved by invention and courage.

This vigor was guarded and tempered by the coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his intrenchments. His very attack was never the inspiration of courage, but the result of calculation. His idea of the best defense consists in being still the attacking party. “My ambition,” he says, “was great, but was of a cold nature.” In one of his conversations with Las Casas, he remarked, “As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind; I mean unprepared courage, that which, is necessary on an unexpected occasion; and which, in spite of the most unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment and decision;” and he did not hesitate to declare that he was himself eminently endowed with this “two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he had met with few persons equal to himself in this respect.”

Everything depended on the nicety of his combinations, and the stars were not more punctual than his arithmetic. His personal attention descended to the smallest particulars. “At Montebello, I ordered Kellermann to attack with eight hundred horse, and with these he separated the six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was half a league off, and required a quarter of an hour to arrive on the field of action; and I have observed, that it is always these quarters of an hour that decide the fate of a battle.” “Before he fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little about what he should do in case of success, but a great deal about what he should do in case of a reverse of fortune. “The same prudence and good sense mark all his behavior. His instructions to his secretary at the Tuilleries are worth remembering. “During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not wake me when you have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to be lost.” It was a whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated his practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. He directed Bourienne to leave all letters unopened for three weeks, and then observed with satisfaction how large a part of the correspondence had thus disposed of itself, and no longer required an answer. His achievement of business was immense, and enlarges the known powers of man. There have been many working kings, from Ulysses to William of Orange, but none who accomplished a tithe of this man’s performance.

To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the advantage of having been born to a private and humble fortune. In his latter days, he had the weakness of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the prescription of aristocracy; but he knew his debt to his austere education, and made no secret of his contempt for the born kings, and for “the hereditary asses,” as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. He said that, “in their exile, they had learned nothing, and forgot nothing.” Bonaparte had passed through all the degrees of military service, but also was citizen before he was emperor, and so had the key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates discover the information and justness of measurement of the middle class. Those who had to deal with him found that he was not to be imposed upon, but could cipher as well as another man. This appears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors himself, detected overcharges and errors, and reduced the claims by considerable sums.

His grand weapon, namely, the millions whom he directed, he owed to the representative character which clothed him. He interests us as he stands for France and for Europe; and he exists as captain and king, only as far as the Revolution, or the interest of the industrious masses found an organ and a leader in him. In the social interests, he knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw himself naturally on that side. I like an incident mentioned by one of his biographers at St. Helena. “When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, saying, ‘Respect the burden, Madam.’” In the time of the empire, he directed attention to the improvement and embellishment of the market of the capital. “The market-place,” he said, “is the Louvre of the common people.” The principal works that have survived him are his magnificent roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a sort of freedom and companionship grew up between him and them, which the forms of his court never permitted between the officers and himself. They performed, under his eye, that which no others could do. The best document of his relation to his troops is the order of the day on the morning of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon promises the troops that he will keep his person out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently explains the devotion of the army to their leader.

But though there is in particulars this identity between Napoleon and the mass of the people, his real strength lay in their conviction that he was their representative in his genius and aims, not only when he courted, but when he controlled, and even when he decimated them by his conscriptions. He knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to philosophize on liberty and equality; and, when allusion was made to the precious blood of centuries, which was spilled by the killing of the Duc d’Enghien, he suggested, “Neither is my blood ditch-water” The people felt that no longer the throne was occupied, and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates, secluded from all community with the children of the soil, and holding the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten state of society. Instead of that vampire, a man of themselves held, in the Tuilleries, knowledge and ideas like their own, opening, of course, to them and their children, all places of power and trust. The day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the means and opportunities of young men, was ended, and a day of expansion and demand was come. A market for all the powers and productions of man was opened: brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal France was changed into a young Ohio or New York; and those who smarted under the immediate rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the necessary severities of the military system which had driven out the oppressor. And even when the majority of the people had begun to ask, whether they had really gained anything under the exhausting levies of men and money of the new master, — the whole talent of the country, in every rank and kindred, took his part, and defended him as its natural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely on the higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him, “Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.”

Napoleon met this natural expectation. The necessity of his position required a hospitality to every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts; and his feelings went along with this policy. Like every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his power with other masters, and an impatience of fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men, and found none. “Good God!” he said, “how rare men are! There are eighteen millions in Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, — Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, with larger experience, his respect for mankind was not increased. In a moment of bitterness, he said to one of his oldest friends, “Men deserve the contempt with which they inspire me. I have only to put some gold lace on the coat of my virtuous republicans, and they immediately become just what I wish them.” This impatience at levity was, however, an oblique tribute of respect to those able persons who commanded his regard, not only when he found them friends and coadjutors, but also when they resisted his will. He could not confound Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette, and Bernadotte, with the danglers of his court; and, in spite of the detraction which his systematic egotism dictated toward the great captains who conquered with and for him, ample acknowledgements are made by him to Lannes Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, Massena, Murat, Ney, and Augereau. If he felt himself their patron, and founder of their fortunes, as when he said, “I made my generals out of mud,” he could not hide his satisfaction in receiving from them a seconding and support commensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In the Russian campaign, he was so much impressed by the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he said, “I have two hundred millions in my coffers, and I would give them all for Ney.” The characters which he has drawn of several of his marshals are discriminating, and, though they did not content the insatiable vanity of French officers, are, no doubt, substantially just. And, in fact, every species of merit was sought and advanced under his government. “I know,” he said, “the depth and draught of water of every one of my generals.” Natural power was sure to be well received at his court. Seventeen men, in his time, were raised from common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connection. “When soldiers have been baptized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one rank in my eyes.”

When a natural king becomes a titular king, everybody is pleased and satisfied. The Revolution entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder-monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh of his flesh, and the creature of his party: but there is something in the success of grand talent which enlists an universal sympathy. For, in the prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and malversation, all reasonable men have an interest; and, as intellectual beings, we feel the air purified by the electric shock, when material force is overthrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we are removed out of the reach of local and accidental partialities, man feels that Napoleon fights for him; these are honest victories; this strong steam-engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us. This capacious head, revolving and disposing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked through Europe; this prompt invention; this inexhaustible resource; — what events! what romantic pictures! what strange situations! — when spying the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing up his army for battle, in sight of the Pyramids, and saying to his troops, “From the tops of those pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;” fording the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isthmus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic projects agitated him. “Had Acre fallen, I should have changed the face of the world.” His army, on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, presented him with a bouquet of forty standards taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, the pleasure he took in making these contrasts glaring; as when he pleased himself with making kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris, and at Erfurt.

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecision, and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor, who took occasion by the beard, and showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage, and thoroughness. “The Austrians,” he said, “do not know the value of time.” I should cite him, in his earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power does not consist in any wild or extravagant force; in any enthusiasm, like Mahomet’s; or singular power of persuasion; but in the exercise of common sense on each emergency, instead of abiding by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is that which vigor always teaches, — that there is always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly doubts is not that man’s life an answer. When he appeared, it was the belief of all military men that there could be nothing new in war; as it is the belief of men to-day, that nothing new can be undertaken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and customs; and as it is, at all times, the belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society; and, moreover, knew that he knew better. I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on his own sense, and did not care a bean for other people’s. The world treated his novelties just as it treats everybody’s novelties, — made infinite objection: mustered all the impediments; but he snapped his finger at their objections. “What creates great difficulty,” he remarks, “in the profession of the land commander, is the necessity of feeding so many men and animals. If he allows himself to be guided by the commissaries, he will never stir, and all his expeditions will fail.” An example of his common sense is what he says of the passage of the Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating after the other, had described as impracticable. “The winter,” says Napoleon, “is not the most unfavorable season for the passage of lofty mountains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the real and only danger to be apprehended in the Alps. On those high mountains, there are often very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with extreme calmness in the air.” Read his account, too, of the way in which battles are gained. “In all battles, a moment occurs, when the bravest troops, after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined to run. That terror proceeds from a want of confidence in their own courage; and it only requires a slight opportunity, a pretense, to restore confidence to them. The art is to give rise to the opportunity, and to invent the pretense. At Arcola, I won the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, and gained the day with this handful. You see that two armies are two bodies which meet, and endeavor to frighten each other: a moment of panic occurs, and that moment must be turned to advantage. When a man has been present in many actions, he distinguishes that moment without difficulty; it is as easy as casting up an addition.”

This deputy of the nineteenth century added to his gifts a capacity for speculation on general topics. He delighted in running through the range of practical, of literary, and of abstract questions. His opinion is always original, and to the purpose. On the voyage to Egypt, he liked, after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to support a proposition, and as many to oppose it. He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on questions of religion, the different kinds of government, and the art of war. One day, he asked, whether the planets were inhabited? On another, what was the age of the world? Then he proposed to consider the probability of the destruction of the globe, either by water or by fire; at another time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, and the interpretation of dreams. He was very fond of talking of religion. In 1806, he conversed with Fournier, bishop of Montpelier, on matters of theology. There were two points on which they could not agree, viz., that of hell, and that of salvation out of the pale of the church. The Emperor told Josephine, that he disputed like a devil on these two points, on which the bishop was inexorable. To the philosophers he readily yielded all that was proved against religion as the work of men and time; but he would not hear of materialism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and said, “You may talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?” He delighted in the conversation of men of science, particularly of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of letters he slighted; “they were manufacturers of phrases.” Of medicine, too, he was fond of talking, and with those of its practitioners whom he most esteemed,-with Corvisart at Paris, and with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. “Believe me, “he said to the last, “we had better leave off all these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you nor I know anything about. Why throw obstacles in the way of its defense? Its own means are superior to all the apparatus of your laboratories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me, that all your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medicine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal than useful to mankind. Water, air, and cleanliness, are the chief articles in my pharmacopeia.”

His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and General Gourgaud, at St. Helena, have great value, after all the deduction that, it seems, is to be made from them, on account of his known disingenuousness. He has the goodnature of strength and conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear narrative of his battles; — good as Caesar’s; his good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists, and his own equality as a writer to his varying subject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign in Egypt.

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In intervals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace, Napoleon appears as a man of genius, directing on abstract questions the native appetite for truth, and the impatience of words, he was wont to show in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, a romance, a bon mot, as well as a stratagem in a campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by the terrors of a fiction, to which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society; of the throng who fill the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course, the rich and aristocratic did not like him. England, the center of capital, and Rome and Austria, centers of tradition and genealogy, opposed him. The consternation of the dull and conservative classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old women of the Roman conclave, — who in their despair took hold of anything, and would cling to red-hot iron, — the vain attempts of statists to amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria to bribe him; and the instinct of the young, ardent, and active men, everywhere, which pointed him out as the giant of the middle class, make his history bright and commanding. He had the virtues of the masses of his constituents; he had also their vices. I am sorry that the brilliant picture has its reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treacherous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we should find the same fact in the history of this champion, who proposed to himself simply a brilliant career, without any stipulation or scruple concerning the means.

Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the most cultivated age and population of the world, — he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. He is unjust to his generals; egotistic, and monopolizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte; intriguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance from Paris, because the familiarity of his manners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a boundless liar. The official paper, his “Moniteurs,” and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what he wished to be believed; and worse, — he sat, in his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly falsifying facts, and dates, and characters, and giving to history, a theatrical eclat. Like all Frenchmen, he has a passion for stage effect. Every action that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doctrine of the immortality of the soul, are all French. “I must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give the liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.” To make a great noise is his favorite design. “A great reputation is a great noise; the more there is made, the farther off it is heard. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall; but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.” His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His theory of influence is not flattering. “There are two levers for moving men, — interest and fear. Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friendship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even love my brothers; perhaps Joseph, a little, from habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I love him too; but why? — because his character pleases me; he is stern and resolute, and, I believe, the fellow never shed a tear. For my part, I know very well that I have no true friends. As long as I continue to be what I am, I may have as many pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility to women; but men should be firm in heart and purpose, or they should have nothing to do with war and government.” He was thoroughly unscrupulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown, and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no generosity; but mere vulgar hatred; he was intensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at cards; he was a prodigious gossip; and opened letters; and delighted in his infamous police; and rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and women about him, boasting that “he knew everything;” and interfered with the cutting the dresses of the women; and listened after the hurrahs and the compliments of the street, incognito. His manners were coarse. He treated women with low familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears and pinching their cheeks, when he was in good humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to his last days. It does not appear that he listened at keyholes, or, at least, that he “was caught at it”. In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

In describing the two parties into which modern society divides itself, — the democrat and the conservative, — I said, Bonaparte represents the democrat, or the party of men of business, against the stationary or conservative party. I omitted then to say, what is material to the statement, namely, that these two parties differ only as young and old. The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed, — because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to represent the whole history of this party, its youth and its age; yes, and with poetic justice, its fate, in his own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, still waits for its organ and representative, in a lover and a man of truly public and universal aims.

Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed, and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away, like the smoke of his artillery and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was, in principle, suicidal. France served him with life, and limb, and estate, as long as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the reward, — they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux, — they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of the hand, so that the man cannot open his fingers; and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So, this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France, and of Europe, in 1814, was, “enough of him;” “assez de Bonaparte.”

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that in him lay, to live and thrive without moral principle. It was the nature of things, the eternal law of man and of the world, which baulked and ruined him; and the result, in a million experiments, will be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient as the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

I find a provision in the constitution of the world for the writer or secretary, who is to report the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that everywhere throbs and works. His office is a reception of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of the eminent and characteristic experiences.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent.

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature strives upward; and, in man, the report is something more than print of the seal. It is a new and finer form of the original. The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts which transpired do not lie in it inert; but some subside, and others shine; so that soon we have a new picture, composed of the eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to communicate; and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the universal joy of conversation, some men are born with exalted powers for this second creation. Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone; his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affairs. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore commended to his pen, — and he will write. In his eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported. In conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials; as our German poet said, “some god gave me the power to paint what I suffer.” He draws his rents from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the power of talking wisely. Vexations, and a tempest of passion, only fill his sails; as the good Luther writes, “When I am angry I can pray well, and preach well;” and if we knew the genesis of fine-strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complaisance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might see the spasms in the muscles of the neck. His failures are the preparation of his victories. A new thought, or a crisis of passion, apprises him that all that he has yet learned and written is exoteric — is not the fact, but some rumor of the fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? No; he begins again to describe in the new light which has shined on him, — if, by some means, he may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. Whatever can be thought can be spoken, and still rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and works, until, at last, it moulds them to its perfect will, and is articulated.

This striving after imitative expression, which one meets everywhere, is significant of the aim of nature, but is mere stenography. There are higher degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments for those whom she elects to a superior office; for the class of scholars or writers, who see connection where the multitude see fragments, and who are impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to supply the axis on which the frame of things turns. Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of things. He is no permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of the realm, provided and prepared from of old and from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. There is a certain heat in the breast, which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine. Every thought which dawns on the mind, in the moment of its emergency announces its own rank, — whether it is some whimsy, or whether it is a power.

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other side, invitation and need enough of his gift. Society has, at all times, the same want, namely, of one sane man with adequate powers of expression to held up each object of monomania in its right relation. The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, railroad, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crochet. But let one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy in its right neighborhood and bearings, — the illusion vanishes, and the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of the monitor.

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must also wish, with other men, to stand well with his contemporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, which is of no import, unless the scholars heed it. In this country, the emphasis of conversation, and of public opinion, commends the practical man; and the solid portion of the community is named with significant respect in every circle. Our people are of Bonaparte’s opinion concerning ideologists. Ideas are subversive of social order and comfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. It is believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from New York to Smyrna; or, the running up and down to procure a company of subscribers to set a-going five or ten thousand spindles; or, the negotiations of a caucus, and the practising on the prejudices and facility of country-people, to secure their votes in November, — is practical and commendable.

If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defense of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness, and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like, — but you do it at your peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery reformer embodies his aspiration in some rite or covenant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monastery and his dance; and, although each prates of spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is anti-spiritual. But where are his new things of today? In actions of enthusiasm, this drawback appears: but in those lower activities, which have no higher aim than to make us more comfortable and more cowardly, in actions of cunning, actions that steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative from the practical faculty, and put a ban on reason and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred books, “Children only, and not the learned, speak of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame end, and the place which is gained by the followers of the one is gained by the followers of the other. That man seeth, who seeth that the speculative and the practical doctrines are one.” For great action must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. The greatest action may easily be one of the most private circumstances.

This disparagement will not come from the leaders, but from inferior persons. The robust gentlemen who stand at the head of the practical class, share the ideas of the time, and have too much sympathy with the speculative class. It is not from men excellent in any kind, that disparagement of any other is to be looked for. With such, Talleyrand’s question is ever the main one; not, is he rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? — but, Is he anybody? does he stand for something? He must be good of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that State-street, all that the common sense of mankind asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but as you know. Able men do not care in what kind a man is able, so only that he is able. A master likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be orator, artist, craftsman, or king.

Society has really no graver interest than the well-being of the literary class. And it is not to be denied that men are cordial in their recognition and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still the writer does not stand with us on any commanding ground. I think this to be his own fault. A pound passes for a pound. There have been times when he was a sacred person; he wrote Bibles; the first hymns; the codes; the epics; tragic songs; Sibylline verses; Chaldean oracles; Laconian sentences inscribed on temple walls. Every word was true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote without levity, and without choice. Every word was carved, before his eyes, into the earth and sky; and the sun and stars were only letters of the same purport; and of no more necessity. But how can he be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad government, or must bark, all the year round, in opposition; or write conventional criticism, or profligate novels; or, at any rate, write without thought, and without recurrence, by day and night, to the sources of inspiration?

Some reply to these questions may be furnished by looking over the list of men of literary genius in our age. Among these, no more instructive name occurs than that of Goethe, to represent the power and duties of the scholar or writer.

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the popular external life and aims of the nineteenth century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, and taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach of weakness, which, but for him, would lie on the intellectual works of the period. He appears at a time when a general culture has spread itself, and has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social comfort and cooperation have come in. There is no poet, but scores of poetic writers; no Columbus, but hundreds of post-captains, with transit-telescope, barometer, and concentrated soup and pemmican; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any number of clever parliamentary and forensic debaters; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divinity; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap press, reading-rooms, and book-clubs, without number. There was never such a miscellany of facts. The world extends itself like American trade. We conceive Greek or Roman life, — life in the middle ages — to be a simple and comprehensive affair; but modern life to respect a multitude of things, which is distracting.

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity; hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sciences, and, by his own versatility, to dispose of them with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the variety of coats of convention with which life had got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce these, and to draw his strength from nature, with which he lived in full communion. What is strange, too, he lived in a small town, in a petty state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Germany played no such leading part in the world’s affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a French, or English, or, once, a Roman or Attic genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limitation in his muse. He is not a debtor to his position, but was born with a free and controlling genius.

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth’s population, researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean arts, geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the multitude. One looks at a king with reverence; but if one should chance to be at a congress of kings, the eye would take liberties with the peculiarities of each. These are not wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms, to which the poet has confided the results of eighty years of observation. This reflective and critical wisdom makes the poem more truly the flower of this time. It dates itself. Still he is a poet, — poet of a prouder laurel than any contemporary, and under this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a hero’s strength and grace.

The wonder of the book is its superior intelligence. In the menstruum of this man’s wit, the past and the present ages, and their religions, politics, and modes of thinking, are dissolved into archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail through his head! The Greeks said, that Alexander went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the other day, as far; and one step farther he hazarded, and brought himself safe back. There is a heart-cheering freedom in his speculation. The immense horizon which journeys with us lends its majesties to trifles, and to matters of convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal performances. He was the soul of his century. If that was learned, and had become, by population, compact organization, and drill of parts, one great Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing savants to classify, this man’s mind had ample chambers for the distribution of all. He had a power to unite the detached atoms again by their own law. He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close beside us, and showed that the dullness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of his masks:— “His very flight is presence in disguise:” that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague, than once in Rome or Antioch. He sought him in public squares and main streets, in boulevards and hotels; and, in the solidest kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed the lurking daemonic power; that, in actions of routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins itself; and this, by tracing the pedigree of every usage and practice, every institution, utensil, and means, home to its origin in the structure of man. He had an extreme impatience of conjecture, and of rhetoric. “I have guesses enough of my own; if a man write a book, let him set down only what he knows.” He writes in the plainest and lowest tone, omitting a great deal more than he writes, and putting ever a thing for a word. He has explained the distinction between the antique and the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its scope and laws. He has said the best things about nature that ever were said. He treats nature as the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did, — and, with whatever loss of French tabulation and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; and they have some doctorial skill. Eyes are better, on the whole, than telescopes or microscopes. He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in his mind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea of modern botany, that a leaf, or the eye of a leaf, is the unit of botany, and that every part of the plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new condition; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may be converted into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be considered the unit of the skeleton; the head was only the uppermost vertebra transformed. “The plant goes from knot to knot, closing, at last, with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot, and closes with the head. Men and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae, the powers being concentrated in the head.” In optics, again, he rejected the artificial theory of seven colors, and considered that every color was the mixture of light and darkness in new proportions. It is really of very little consequence what topic he writes upon. He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravitation toward truth. He will realize what you say. He hates to be trifled with, and to be made to say over again some old wife’s fable, that has had possession of men’s faith these thousand years. He may as well see if it is true as another. He sifts it. I am here, he would say, to be the measure and judge of these things. Why should I take them on trust? And, therefore, what he says of religion, of passion, of marriage, of manners, property, of paper money, of periods or beliefs, of omens, of luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten.

Take the most remarkable example that could occur of this tendency to verify every term in popular use. The Devil had played an important part in mythology in all times. Goethe would have no word that does not cover a thing. The same measure will still serve: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.” So he flies at the throat of this imp. He shall be real; he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall dress like a gentleman, and accept the manner, and walk in the streets, and be well initiated in the life of Vienna, and of Heidelberg, in 1820, — or he shall not exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone, and blue-fire, and, instead of looking in books and pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness, and unbelief that, in crowds, or in solitude, darkens over the human thought, — and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by everything he added, and by everything he took away. He found that the essence of this hobgoblin, which had hovered in shadow about the habitations of men, ever since they were men, was pure intellect, applied, — as always there is a tendency, — to the service of the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Mephistopheles, the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus. I have no design to enter into any analysis of his numerous works. They consist of translations, criticisms, dramas, lyric and every other description of poems, literary journals, and portraits of distinguished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the Wilhelm Meister.

Wilhelm Meister is a novel in every sense, the first of its kind, called by its admirers the only delineation of modern society, — as if other novels, those of Scott, for example, dealt with costume and condition, this with the spirit of life. It is a book over which some veil is still drawn. It is read by very intelligent persons with wonder and delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this century can compare with it in its delicious sweetness, so new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying it with so many and so solid thoughts, just insights into life, and manners, and characters; so many good hints for the conduct of life, so many unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and never a trace of rhetoric or dullness. A very provoking book to the curiosity of young men of genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of light reading, those who look in it for the entertainment they find in a romance, are disappointed. On the other hand, those who begin it with the higher hope to read in it a worthy history of genius, and the just award of the laurels to its toils and denials, have also reason to complain. We had an English romance here, not long ago, professing to embody the hope of a new age, and to unfold the political hope of the party called “Young England,” in which the only reward of virtue is a seat in parliament, and a peerage. Goethe’s romance has a conclusion as lame and immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its continuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified picture. In the progress of the story, the characters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic convention: they quit the society and habits of their rank; they lose their wealth; they become the servants of great ideas, and of the most generous social ends; until, at last, the hero, who is the center and fountain of an association for the rendering of the noblest benefits to the human race, no longer answers to his own titled name: it sounds foreign and remote in his ear.

“I am only man,” he says; “I breathe and work for man,” and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices. Goethe’s hero, on the contrary, has so many weaknesses and impurities, and keeps such bad company, that the sober English public, when the book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of the world, and with knowledge of laws; the persons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few strokes, and not a word too much, the book remains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must even let it go its way, and be willing to get what good from it we can, assured that it has only begun its office, and has millions of readers yet to serve.

The argument is the passage of a democrat to the aristocracy, using both words in their best sense. And this passage is not made in any mean or creeping way, but through the hall door. Nature and character assist, and the rank is made real by sense and probity in the nobles. No generous youth can escape this charm of reality in the book, so that it is highly stimulating to intellect and courage. The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the book as “thoroughly modern and prosaic; the romantic is completely leveled in it; so is the poetry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats only of the ordinary affairs of men: it is a poeticized civic and domestic story. The wonderful in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusiastic dreaming:” — and yet, what is also characteristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and it remained his favorite reading to the end of his life.

What distinguishes Goethe for French and English readers, is a property which he shares with his nation, — a habitual reference to interior truth. In England and in America there is a respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, or in regular opposition to any, the public is satisfied. In France, there is even a greater delight in intellectual brilliancy, for its own sake. And, in all these countries, men of talent write from talent. It is enough if the understanding is occupied, the taste propitiated, — so many columns so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable way. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, whence, all these thoughts?

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise; holding things because they are things. If he cannot rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist, and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind — the burden of truth to be declared, — more or less understood; and it constitutes his business and calling in the world, to see those facts through, and to make them known. What signifies that he trips and stammers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that this method or his tropes are inadequate? That message will find method and imagery, articulation and melody. Though he were dumb, it would speak. If not, — if there be no such God’s word in the man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent, how brilliant he is?

It makes a great difference to the force of any sentence, whether there be a man behind it, or no. In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But, through every clause and part of speech of a right book, I meet the eyes of the most determined of men: his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble, — can go far and live long.

In England and America, one may be an adept in the writing of a Greek or Latin poet, without any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a presumption that he holds heroic opinions, or undervalues the fashions of his town. But the German nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these subjects: the student, out of the lecture-room, still broods on the lessons; and the professor cannot divest himself of the fancy, that the truths of philosophy have some application to Berlin and Munich. This earnestness enables them to out-see men of much more talent. Hence, almost all the valuable distinctions which are current in higher conversation, have been derived to us from Germany. But, whilst men distinguished for wit and learning, in England and France, adopt their study and their side with a certain levity, and are not understood to be very deeply engaged, from grounds of character, to the topic or the part they espouse, — Goethe, the head and body of the German nation, does not speak from talent, but the truth shines through: he is very wise, though his talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable independence which converse with truth gives: hear you, or forbear, his fact abides; and your interest in the writer is not confined to his story, and he dismissed from memory, when he has performed his task creditably, as a baker when he has left his loaf; but his work is the least part of him. The old Eternal Genius who built the world has confided himself more to this man than to any other. I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart. Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture. He has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be his portion; a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, nor overawed; of a stoical self-command and self-denial, and having one test for all men, — What can you teach me? All possessions are valued by him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time, being itself.

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts, and sciences, and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he had not right to know; there is no weapon in the army of universal genius he did not take into his hand, but with peremptory heed that he should not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. He lays a ray of light under every fact, and between himself and his dearest property. From him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The lurking daemons sat to him, and the saint who saw the daemons; and the metaphysical elements took form. “Piety itself is no aim, but only a means whereby, through purest inward peace, we may attain to highest culture.” And his penetration of every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still more statuesque. His affections help him, like women employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of him you may be, — if so you shall teach him aught which your good-will cannot, — were it only what experience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot hate anybody; his time is worth too much. Temperamental antagonisms may be suffered, but like feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across kingdoms.

His autobiography, under the title of “Poetry and Truth Out of My Life,” is the expression of the idea, — now familiar to the world through the German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and New, when that book appeared, — that a man exists for culture; not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him. The reaction of things on the man is the only noteworthy result. An intellectual man can see himself as a third person; therefore his faults and delusions interest him equally with his successes. Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success. This idea reigns in the Dichtung und Wahrheit, and directs the selection of the incidents; and nowise the external importance of events, the rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of course, the book affords slender materials for what would be reckoned with us a “Life of Goethe;” — few dates; no correspondence; no details of offices or employments; no light on his marriage; and, a period of ten years, that should be the most active in his life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk in silence. Meantime, certain love-affairs, that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest importance: he crowds us with detail: — certain whimsical opinions, cosmogonies, and religions of his own invention, and, especially his relations to remarkable minds, and to critical epochs of thought: — these he magnifies. His “Daily and Yearly Journal,” his “Italian Travels,” his “Campaign in France” and the historical part of his “Theory of Colors,” have the same interest. In the last, he rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Voltaire, etc.; and the charm of this portion of the book consists in the simplest statement of the relation betwixt these grandees of European scientific history and himself; the mere drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Bacon, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the line is for the time and person, a solution of the formidable problem, and gives pleasure when Iphigenia and Faust do not, without any cost of invention comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust. This law giver of art is not an artist. Was it that he knew too much, that his sight was microscopic, and interfered with the just perspective, the seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems, and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate: this he adds loosely, as letters, of the parties, leaves from their journals, or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to: and, hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, xenien, etc.

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the world out of gratitude; who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savants, and leisure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Socrates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Madame de Stael said, she was only vulnerable on that side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable aspect. All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted and sickly, that one is ever wishing them somewhere else. We seldom see anybody who is not uneasy or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at home and happy in his century and the world. None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed the game. In this aim of culture, which is the genius of his works, is their power. The idea of absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender to the torrent, of poetic inspiration is higher; but compared with any motives on which books are written in England and America, this is very truth, and has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. Thus has he brought back to a book some of its ancient might and dignity.

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and country, when original talent was oppressed under the load of books, and mechanical auxiliaries, and the distracting variety of claims, taught men how to dispose of this mountainous miscellany, and make it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions, — two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time, and for all time. This cheerful laborer, with no external popularity or provocation, drawing his motive and his plan from his own breast, tasked himself with stints for a giant, and, without relaxation or rest, except by alternating his pursuits, worked on for eighty years with the steadiness of his first zeal.

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man is the most composite of all creatures: the wheel-insect, volvox globator, is at the other extreme. We shall learn to draw rents and revenues from the immense patrimony of the old and recent ages. Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence of all times: that the disadvantages of any epoch exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers with his sunshine and music close by the darkest and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will hold on men or hours. The world is young; the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

THE END

MEMOIRS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI by R. F. Fuller

Edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Channing and James Freeman Clarke

On September 1, 1837, female members attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time and Emerson had invited Margaret Fuller for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure she would be present for the evening get-together. Fuller would prove to be an important figure in Transcendentalism. However, her greatest achievements were working as an ardent campaigner for women’s rights, as she became the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her landmark work Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist book of the United States. Fuller was an advocate of women’s education and the right to employment. She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves. Tragically, the author died, aged forty, in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as she was travelling to the United States in 1850.

In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller. Within a week of her death, her New York editor Horace Greeley suggested to Emerson that a biography should be prepared quickly “before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away”. Published with the title The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Fuller’s words were heavily censored or rewritten. The three editors were not concerned about accuracy, as they felt public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure. Nevertheless, the memoir was to become one of the bestsellers of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century.

The only surviving image of Margaret Fuller, 1846

CONTENTS

VOLUME I.

I. YOUTH.

II. CAMBRIDGE

III. STUDIES.

IV. CHARACTER. — AIMS AND IDEAS OF LIFE.

V. CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON

VOLUME II.

VI. JAMAICA PLAIN

X. SELF-SOVEREIGNTY.

VII. NEW YORK

VIII. EUROPE

IX. HOMEWARD

VOLUME I.

* * * * *

 Only a learned and a manly soul
    I purposed her, that should with even powers
  The rock, the spindle, and the shears control
    Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours.

BEN JONSON.

 Però che ogni diletto nostro e doglia
  Sta in si e nò saper, voler, potere;
  Adunque quel sol può, che col dovere
  Ne trae la ragion fuor di sua soglia.

 Adunque tu, lettor di queste note,
  S’ a te vuoi esser buono, e agli altri caro,
  Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

I. YOUTH.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

* * * * *

 ”Aus Morgenduft gewebt und Sonnenklarheit
  Der Dichtung Schleir aus der Hand der Wahrheit.”

GOETHE.

           ”The million stars which tremble
  O’er the deep mind of dauntless infancy.”

TENNYSON.

 ”Wie leicht ward er dahin gefragen,
     Was war dem Glücklichen zu schwer!
  Wie tanzte vor des Lebens Wagen
     Die luftige Begleitung her!
  Die Liebe mit dem süssen Lohne,
     Das Glück mit seinem gold’nen Kranz,
  Der Ruhm mit seiner Sternenkrone,
     Die Wahrheit in der Sonne Glanz.”

SCHILLER

 What wert thou then? A child most infantine,
  Yet wandering far beyond that innocent age,
  In all but its sweet looks and mien divine;
  Even then, methought, with the world’s tyrant rage
  A patient warfare thy young heart did wage,
  When those soft eyes of scarcely conscious thought
  Some tale, or thine own fancies, would engage
  To overflow with tears, or converse fraught
  With passion o’er their depths its fleeting light had wrought.’

SHELLE

 ”And I smiled, as one never smiles but once;
  Then first discovering my own aim’s extent,
  Which sought to comprehend the works of God.
  And God himself, and all God’s intercourse
  With the human mind.”

BROWNING.

I.

YOUTH.

* * * * *

‘Tieck, who has embodied so many Runic secrets, explained to me what I have often felt toward myself, when he tells of the poor changeling, who, turned from the door of her adopted home, sat down on a stone and so pitied herself that she wept. Yet me also, the wonderful bird, singing in the wild forest, has tempted on, and not in vain.’

Thus wrote Margaret in the noon of life, when looking back through
youth to the “dewy dawn of memory.” She was the eldest child of
Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, and was born in Cambridge-Port,
Massachusetts, on the 23d of May, 1810.

Among her papers fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth, prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an autobiographical romance.

PARENTS.

‘My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely endowed with that sagacious energy, which the state of New England society, for the last half century, has been so well fitted to develop. His father was a clergyman, settled as pastor in Princeton, Massachusetts, within the bounds of whose parish-farm was Wachuset. His means were small, and the great object of his ambition was to send his sons to college. As a boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing himself for Harvard University, and when there of preparing himself for the profession of Law. As a Lawyer, again, the ends constantly presented were to work for distinction in the community, and for the means of supporting a family. To be an honored citizen, and to have a home on earth, were made the great aims of existence. To open the deeper fountains of the soul, to regard life here as the prophetic entrance to immortality, to develop his spirit to perfection, — motives like these had never been suggested to him, either by fellow-beings or by outward circumstances. The result was a character, in its social aspect, of quite the common sort. A good son and brother, a kind neighbor, an active man of business — in all these outward relations he was but one of a class, which surrounding conditions have made the majority among us. In the more delicate and individual relations, he never approached but two mortals, my mother and myself.

‘His love for my mother was the green spot on which he stood apart from the common-places of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence. She was one of those fair and flower-like natures, which sometimes spring up even beside the most dusty highways of life — a creature not to be shaped into a merely useful instrument, but bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic, — of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the golden age.’

DEATH IN THE HOUSE.

‘My earliest recollection is of a death, — the death of a sister, two years younger than myself. Probably there is a sense of childish endearments, such as belong to this tie, mingled with that of loss, of wonder, and mystery; but these last are prominent in memory. I remember coming home and meeting our nursery-maid, her face streaming with tears. That strange sight of tears made an indelible impression. I realize how little I was of stature, in that I looked up to this weeping face; — and it has often seemed since, that — full-grown for the life of this earth, I have looked up just so, at times of threatening, of doubt, and distress, and that just so has some being of the next higher order of existences looked down, aware of a law unknown to me, and tenderly commiserating the pain I muse endure in emerging from my ignorance.

‘She took me by the hand and led me into a still and dark chamber, — then drew aside the curtain and showed me my sister. I see yet that beauty of death! The highest achievements of sculpture are only the reminder of its severe sweetness. Then I remember the house all still and dark, — the people in their black clothes and dreary faces, — the scent of the newly-made coffin, — my being set up in a chair and detained by a gentle hand to hear the clergyman, — the carriages slowly going, the procession slowly doling out their steps to the grave. But I have no remembrance of what I have since been told I did, — insisting, with loud cries, that they should not put the body in the ground. I suppose that my emotion was spent at the time, and so there was nothing to fix that moment in my memory.

‘I did not then, nor do I now, find any beauty in these ceremonies. What had they to do with the sweet playful child? Her life and death were alike beautiful, but all this sad parade was not. Thus my first experience of life was one of death. She who would have been the companion of my life was severed from me, and I was left alone. This has made a vast difference in my lot. Her character, if that fair face promised right, would have been soft, graceful and lively: it would have tempered mine to a gentler and more gradual course.

OVERWORK.

‘My father, — all whose feelings were now concentred on me, — instructed me himself. The effect of this was so far good that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak persons as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented to me. My father was a man of business, even in literature; he had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated memories of success and good repute. He was, beside, well read in French literature, and in English, a Queen Anne’s man. He hoped to make me the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as the income of his profession enabled him to give me means of acquiring. At the very beginning, he made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit it to be with the next. He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible. Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds. As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and every feeling, there was finally produced a state of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring me, — even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid temperament, — to a premature grave.

‘No one understood this subject of health then. No one knew why this child, already kept up so late, was still unwilling to retire. My aunts cried out upon the “spoiled child, the most unreasonable child that ever was, — if brother could but open his eyes to see it, — who was never willing to go to bed.” They did not know that, so soon as the light was taken away, she seemed to see colossal faces advancing slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came, till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. They did not know that, when at last she went to sleep, it was to dream of horses trampling over her, and to awake once more in fright; or, as she had just read in her Virgil, of being among trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet, and rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it would reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her “leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy,” — never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night. Often she dreamed of following to the grave the body of her mother, as she had done that of her sister, and woke to find the pillow drenched in tears. These dreams softened her heart too much, and cast a deep shadow over her young days; for then, and later, the life of dreams, — probably because there was in it less to distract the mind from its own earnestness, — has often seemed to her more real, and been remembered with more interest, than that of waking hours.

‘Poor child! Far remote in time, in thought, from that period, I look back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and perceive that I had no natural childhood.’

BOOKS.

‘Thus passed my first years. My mother was in delicate health, and much absorbed in the care of her younger children. In the house was neither dog nor bird, nor any graceful animated form of existence. I saw no persons who took my fancy, and real life offered no attraction. Thus my already over-excited mind found no relief from without, and was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. I was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily. In this branch of study, first by my father, and afterwards by a tutor, I was trained to quite a high degree of precision. I was expected to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and in translating to give the thoughts in as few well-arranged words as possible, and without breaks or hesitation, — for with these my father had absolutely no patience.

‘Indeed, he demanded accuracy and clearness in everything: you must not speak, unless you can make your meaning perfectly intelligible to the person addressed; must not express a thought, unless you can give a reason for it, if required; must not make a statement, unless sure of all particulars — such were his rules. “But,” “if,” “unless,” “I am mistaken,” and “it may be so,” were words and phrases excluded from the province where he held sway. Trained to great dexterity in artificial methods, accurate, ready, with entire command of his resources, he had no belief in minds that listen, wait, and receive. He had no conception of the subtle and indirect motions of imagination and feeling. His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation, and self-forgetfulness. He made the common prose world so present to me, that my natural bias was controlled. I did not go mad, as many would do, at being continually roused from my dreams. I had too much strength to be crushed, — and since I must put on the fetters, could not submit to let them impede my motions. My own world sank deep within, away from the surface of my life; in what I did and said I learned to have reference to other minds. But my true life was only the dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect, and that coarse, but wearable stuff woven by the ages, — Common Sense.

‘In accordance with this discipline in heroic common sense, was the influence of those great Romans, whose thoughts and lives were my daily food during those plastic years. The genius of Rome displayed itself in Character, and scarcely needed an occasional wave of the torch of thought to show its lineaments, so marble strong they gleamed in every light. Who, that has lived with those men, but admires the plain force of fact, of thought passed into action? They take up things with their naked hands. There is just the man, and the block he casts before you, — no divinity, no demon, no unfulfilled aim, but just the man and Rome, and what he did for Rome. Everything turns your attention to what a man can become, not by yielding himself freely to impressions, not by letting nature play freely through him, but by a single thought, an earnest purpose, an indomitable will, by hardihood, self-command, and force of expression. Architecture was the art in which Rome excelled, and this corresponds with the feeling these men of Rome excite. They did not grow, — they built themselves up, or were built up by the fate of Rome, as a temple for Jupiter Stator. The ruined Roman sits among the ruins; he flies to no green garden; he does not look to heaven; if his intent is defeated, if he is less than he meant to be, he lives no more. The names which end in “us,” seem to speak with lyric cadence. That measured cadence, — that tramp and march, — which are not stilted, because they indicate real force, yet which seem so when compared with any other language, — make Latin a study in itself of mighty influence. The language alone, without the literature, would give one the thought of Rome. Man present in nature, commanding nature too sternly to be inspired by it, standing like the rock amid the sea, or moving like the fire over the land, either impassive, or irresistible; knowing not the soft mediums or fine flights of life, but by the force which he expresses, piercing to the centre.

‘We are never better understood than when we speak of a “Roman virtue,” a “Roman outline.” There is somewhat indefinite, somewhat yet unfulfilled in the thought of Greece, of Spain, of modern Italy; but ROME! it stands by itself, a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose is what it utters. Every Roman was an emperor. It is well that the infallible church should have been founded on this rock, that the presumptuous Peter should hold the keys, as the conquering Jove did before his thunderbolts, to be seen of all the world. The Apollo tends flocks with Admetus; Christ teaches by the lonely lake, or plucks wheat as he wanders through the fields some Sabbath morning. They never come to this stronghold; they could not have breathed freely where all became stone as soon as spoken, where divine youth found no horizon for its all-promising glance, but every thought put on, before it dared issue to the day in action, its toga virilis.

‘Suckled by this wolf, man gains a different complexion from that which is fed by the Greek honey. He takes a noble bronze in camps and battle-fields; the wrinkles of council well beseem his brow, and the eye cuts its way like the sword. The Eagle should never have been used as a symbol by any other nation: it belonged to Rome.

‘The history of Rome abides in mind, of course, more than the literature. It was degeneracy for a Roman to use the pen; his life was in the day. The “vaunting” of Rome, like that of the North American Indians, is her proper literature. A man rises; he tells who he is, and what he has done; he speaks of his country and her brave men; he knows that a conquering god is there, whose agent is his own right hand; and he should end like the Indian, “I have no more to say.”

‘It never shocks us that the Roman is self-conscious. One wants no universal truths from him, no philosophy, no creation, but only his life, his Roman life felt in every pulse, realized in every gesture. The universal heaven takes in the Roman only to make us feel his individuality the more. The Will, the Resolve of Man! — it has been expressed, — fully expressed!

‘I steadily loved this ideal in my childhood, and this is the cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know how to stand firm on the ground, before he can fly. In vain for me are men more, if they are less, than Romans. Dante was far greater than any Roman, yet I feel he was right to take the Mantuan as his guide through hell, and to heaven.

‘Horace was a great deal to me then, and is so still. Though his words do not abide in memory, his presence does: serene, courtly, of darting hazel eye, a self-sufficient grace, and an appreciation of the world of stern realities, sometimes pathetic, never tragic. He is the natural man of the world; he is what he ought to be, and his darts never fail of their aim. There is a perfume and raciness, too, which makes life a banquet, where the wit sparkles no less that the viands were bought with blood.

‘Ovid gave me not Rome, nor himself, but a view into the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology. This path I followed, have been following ever since; and now, life half over, it seems to me, as in my childhood, that every thought of which man is susceptible, is intimated there. In those young years, indeed, I did not see what I now see, but loved to creep from amid the Roman pikes to lie beneath this great vine, and see the smiling and serene shapes go by, woven from the finest fibres of all the elements. I knew not why, at that time, — but I loved to get away from the hum of the forum, and the mailed clang of Roman speech, to these shifting shows of nature, these Gods and Nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill.

‘As with Rome I antedated the world of deeds, so I lived in those Greek forms the true faith of a refined and intense childhood. So great was the force of reality with which these forms impressed me, that I prayed earnestly for a sign, — that it would lighten in some particular region of the heavens, or that I might find a bunch of grapes in the path, when I went forth in the morning. But no sign was given, and I was left a waif stranded upon the shores of modern life!

‘Of the Greek language, I knew only enough to feel that the sounds told the same story as the mythology; — that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was a stern composure. I wish I had learned as much of Greece as of Rome, — so freely does the mind play in her sunny waters, where there is no chill, and the restraint is from within out; for these Greeks, in an atmosphere of ample grace, could not be impetuous, or stern, but loved moderation as equable life always must, for it is the law of beauty.

‘With these books I passed my days. The great amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling, which, under other circumstances, might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts of others. This was not a tame state, for the energies brought out by rapid acquisition gave glow enough. I thought with rapture of the all-accomplished man, him of the many talents, wide resources, clear sight, and omnipotent will. A Cæsar seemed great enough. I did not then know that such men impoverish the treasury to build the palace. I kept their statues as belonging to the hall of my ancestors, and loved to conquer obstacles, and fed my youth and strength for their sake.

* * * * *

‘Still, though this bias was so great that in earliest years I learned, in these ways, how the world takes hold of a powerful nature, I had yet other experiences. None of these were deeper than what I found in the happiest haunt of my childish years, — our little garden. Our house, though comfortable, was very ugly, and in a neighborhood which I detested, — every dwelling and its appurtenances having a mesquin and huddled look. I liked nothing about us except the tall graceful elms before the house, and the dear little garden behind. Our back door opened on a high flight of steps, by which I went down to a green plot, much injured in my ambitious eyes by the presence of the pump and tool-house. This opened into a little garden, full of choice flowers and fruit-trees, which was my mother’s delight, and was carefully kept. Here I felt at home. A gate opened thence into the fields, — a wooden gate made of boards, in a high, unpainted board wall, and embowered in the clematis creeper. This gate I used to open to see the sunset heaven; beyond this black frame I did not step, for I liked to look at the deep gold behind it. How exquisitely happy I was in its beauty, and how I loved the silvery wreaths of my protecting vine! I never would pluck one of its flowers at that time, I was so jealous of its beauty, but often since I carry off wreaths of it from the wild-wood, and it stands in nature to my mind as the emblem of domestic love.

‘Of late I have thankfully felt what I owe to that garden, where the best hours of my lonely childhood were spent. Within the house everything was socially utilitarian; my books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden. There my thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. I loved to gaze on the roses, the violets, the lilies, the pinks; my mother’s hand had planted them, and they bloomed for me. I culled the most beautiful. I looked at them on every side. I kissed them, I pressed them to my bosom with passionate emotions, such as I have never dared express to any human being. An ambition swelled my heart to be as beautiful, as perfect as they. I have not kept my vow. Yet, forgive, ye wild asters, which gleam so sadly amid the fading grass; forgive me, ye golden autumn flowers, which so strive to reflect the glories of the departing distant sun; and ye silvery flowers, whose moonlight eyes I knew so well, forgive! Living and blooming in your unchecked law, ye know nothing of the blights, the distortions, which beset the human being; and which at such hours it would seem that no glories of free agency could ever repay!

* * * * *

‘There was, in the house, no apartment appropriated to the purpose of a library, but there was in my father’s room a large closet filled with books, and to these I had free access when the task-work of the day was done. Its window overlooked wide fields, gentle slopes, a rich and smiling country, whose aspect pleased without much occupying the eye, while a range of blue hills, rising at about twelve miles distance, allured to reverie. “Distant mountains,” says Tieck, “excite the fancy, for beyond them we place the scene of our Paradise.” Thus, in the poems of fairy adventure, we climb the rocky barrier, pass fearless its dragon caves, and dark pine forests, and find the scene of enchantment in the vale behind. My hopes were never so definite, but my eye was constantly allured to that distant blue range, and I would sit, lost in fancies, till tears fell on my cheek. I loved this sadness; but only in later years, when the realities of life had taught me moderation, did the passionate emotions excited by seeing them again teach how glorious were the hopes that swelled my heart while gazing on them in those early days.

‘Melancholy attends on the best joys of a merely ideal life, else I should call most happy the hours in the garden, the hours in the book closet. Here were the best French writers of the last century; for my father had been more than half a Jacobin, in the time when the French Republic cast its glare of promise over the world. Here, too, were the Queen Anne authors, his models, and the English novelists; but among them I found none that charmed me. Smollett, Fielding, and the like, deal too broadly with the coarse actualities of life. The best of their men and women — so merely natural, with the nature found every day — do not meet our hopes. Sometimes the simple picture, warm with life and the light of the common sun, cannot fail to charm, — as in the wedded love of Fielding’s Amelia, — but it is at a later day, when the mind is trained to comparison, that we learn to prize excellence like this as it deserves. Early youth is prince-like: it-will bend only to “the king, my father.” Various kinds of excellence please, and leave their impression, but the most commanding, alone, is duly acknowledged at that all-exacting age.

‘Three great authors it was my fortune to meet at this important period, — all, though of unequal, yet congenial powers, — all of rich and wide, rather than aspiring genius, — all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took in, — all fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to be lost sight of, or superseded, but always to be apprehended more and more.

   ’Ever memorable is the day on which I first took a volume of
    SHAKSPEARE in my hand to read. It was on a Sunday.

‘ — This day was punctiliously set apart in our house. We had family prayers, for which there was no time on other days. Our dinners were different, and our clothes. We went to church. My father put some limitations on my reading, but — bless him for the gentleness which has left me a pleasant feeling for the day! — he did not prescribe what was, but only what was not, to be done. And the liberty this left was a large one. “You must not read a novel, or a play;” but all other books, the worst, or the best, were open to me. The distinction was merely technical. The day was pleasing to me, as relieving me from the routine of tasks and recitations; it gave me freer play than usual, and there were fewer things occurred in its course, which reminded me of the divisions of time; still the church-going, where I heard nothing that had any connection with my inward life, and these rules, gave me associations with the day of empty formalities, and arbitrary restrictions; but though the forbidden book or walk always seemed more charming then, I was seldom tempted to disobey. —

‘This Sunday — I was only eight years old — I took from the book-shelf a volume lettered SHAKSPEARE. It was not the first time I had looked at it, but before I had been deterred from attempting to read, by the broken appearance along the page, and preferred smooth narrative. But this time I held in my hand “Romeo and Juliet” long enough to get my eye fastened to the page. It was a cold winter afternoon. I took the book to the parlor fire, and had there been ‘seated an hour or two, when my father looked up and asked what I was reading so intently. “Shakspeare,” replied the child, merely raising her eye from the page. “Shakspeare, — that won’t do; that’s no book for Sunday; go put it away and take another.” I went as I was bid, but took no other. Returning to my seat, the unfinished story, the personages to whom I was but just introduced, thronged and burnt my brain. I could not bear it long; such a lure it was impossible to resist. I went and brought the book again. There were several guests present, and I had got half through the play before I again attracted attention. “What is that child about that she don’t hear a word that’s said to her?” quoth my aunt. “What are you reading?” said my father. “Shakspeare” was again the reply, in a clear, though somewhat impatient, tone. “How?” said my father angrily, — then restraining himself before his guests,— “Give me the book and go directly to bed.”

‘Into my little room no care of his anger followed me. Alone, in the dark, I thought only of the scene placed by the poet before my eye, where the free flow of life, sudden and graceful dialogue, and forms, whether grotesque or fair, seen in the broad lustre of his imagination, gave just what I wanted, and brought home the life I seemed born to live. My fancies swarmed like bees, as I contrived the rest of the story; — what all would do, what say, where go. My confinement tortured me. I could not go forth from this prison to ask after these friends; I could not make my pillow of the dreams about them which yet I could not forbear to frame. Thus was I absorbed when my father entered. He felt it right, before going to rest, to reason with me about my disobedience, shown in a way, as he considered, so insolent. I listened, but could not feel interested in what he said, nor turn my mind from what engaged it. He went away really grieved at my impenitence, and quite at a loss to understand conduct in me so unusual.

‘ — Often since I have seen the same misunderstanding between parent and child, — the parent thrusting the morale, the discipline, of life upon the child, when just engrossed by some game of real importance and great leadings to it. That is only a wooden horse to the father, — the child was careering to distant scenes of conquest and crusade, through a country of elsewhere unimagined beauty. None but poets remember their youth; but the father who does not retain poetical apprehension of the world, free and splendid as it stretches out before the child, who cannot read his natural history, and follow out its intimations with reverence, must be a tyrant in his home, and the purest intentions will not prevent his doing much to cramp him. Each new child is a new Thought, and has bearings and discernings, which the Thoughts older in date know not yet, but must learn. —

‘My attention thus fixed on Shakspeare, I returned to him at every hour I could command. Here was a counterpoise to my Romans, still more forcible than the little garden. My author could read the Roman nature too, — read it in the sternness of Coriolanus, and in the varied wealth of Cæsar. But he viewed these men of will as only one kind of men; he kept them in their place, and I found that he, who could understand the Roman, yet expressed in Hamlet a deeper thought.

‘In CERVANTES, I found far less productive talent,— ‘indeed, a far less powerful genius, — but the same wide wisdom, a discernment piercing the shows and symbols of existence, yet rejoicing in them all, both for their own life, and as signs of the unseen reality. Not that Cervantes philosophized, — his genius was too deeply philosophical for that; he took things as they came before him, and saw their actual relations and bearings. Thus the work he produced was of deep meaning, though he might never have expressed that meaning to himself. It was left implied in the whole. A Coleridge comes and calls Don Quixote the pure Reason, and Sancho the Understanding. Cervantes made no such distinctions in his own mind; but he had seen and suffered enough to bring out all his faculties, and to make him comprehend the higher as well as the lower part of our nature. Sancho is too amusing and sagacious to be contemptible; the Don too noble and clear-sighted towards absolute truth, to be ridiculous. And we are pleased to see manifested in this way, how the lower must follow and serve the higher, despite its jeering mistrust and the stubborn realities which break up the plans of this pure-minded champion.

   ’The effect produced on the mind is nowise that described by
    Byron: —

“Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away,” &c.

‘On the contrary, who is not conscious of a sincere reverence for the Don, prancing forth on his gaunt steed? Who would not rather be he than any of the persons who laugh at him? — Yet the one we would wish to be is thyself, Cervantes, unconquerable spirit! gaining flavor and color like wine from every change, while being carried round the world; in whose eye the serene sagacious laughter could not be dimmed by poverty, slavery, or unsuccessful authorship. Thou art to us still more the Man, though less the Genius, than Shakspeare; thou dost not evade our sight, but, holding the lamp to thine own magic shows, dost enjoy them with us.

‘My third friend was MOLIÉRE, one very much lower, both in range and depth, than the-others, but, as far as he goes, of the same character. Nothing secluded or partial is there about his genius, — a man of the world, and a man by himself, as he is. It was, indeed, only the poor social world of Paris that he saw, but he viewed it from the firm foundations of his manhood, and every lightest laugh rings from a clear perception, and teaches life anew.

‘These men were all alike in this, — they loved the natural history of man. Not what he should be, but what he is, was the favorite subject of their thought. Whenever a noble leading opened to the eye new paths of light, they rejoiced; but it was never fancy, but always fact, that inspired them. They loved a thorough penetration of the murkiest dens, and most tangled paths of nature; they did not spin from the desires of their own special natures, but reconstructed the world from materials which they collected on every side. Thus their influence upon me was not to prompt me to follow out thought in myself so much as to detect it everywhere, for each of these men is not only a nature, but a happy interpreter of many natures. They taught me to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience. Perhaps, too, they taught me to overvalue an outward experience at the expense of inward growth; but all this I did not appreciate till later.

‘It will be seen that my youth was not unfriended, since those great minds came to me in kindness. A moment of action in one’s self, however, is worth an age of apprehension through others; not that our deeds are better, but that they produce a renewal of our being. I have had more productive moments and of deeper joy, but never hours of more tranquil pleasure than those in which these demi-gods visited me, — and with a smile so familiar, that I imagined the world to be full of such. They did me good, for by them a standard was early given of sight and thought, from which I could never go back, and beneath which I cannot suffer patiently my own life or that of any friend to fall. They did me harm, too, for the child fed with meat instead of milk becomes too soon mature. Expectations and desires were thus early raised, after which I must long toil before they can be realized. How poor the scene around, how tame one’s own existence, how meagre and faint every power, with these beings in my mind! Often I must cast them quite aside in order to grow in my small way, and not sink into despair. Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dulness that they blunt the senses and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later, — that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences, but should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpretation are needed. With me, much of life was devoured in the bud.

FIRST FRIEND.

‘For a few months, this bookish and solitary life was invaded by interest in a living, breathing figure. At church, I used to look around with a feeling of coldness and disdain, which, though I now well understand its causes, seems to my wiser mind as odious as it was unnatural. The puny child sought everywhere for the Roman or Shakspeare figures, and she was met by the shrewd, honest eye, the homely decency, or the smartness of a New England village on Sunday. There was beauty, but I could not see it then; it was not of the kind I longed for. In the next pew sat a family who were my especial aversion. There were five daughters, the eldest not above four-and-twenty, — yet they had the old fairy, knowing look, hard, dry, dwarfed, strangers to the All-Fair, — were working-day residents in this beautiful planet. They looked as if their thoughts had never strayed beyond the jobs of the day, and they were glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear looking at them.

‘As my eye one day was ranging about with its accustomed coldness, and the proudly foolish sense of being in a shroud of thoughts that were not their thoughts, it was arrested by a face most fair, and well-known as it seemed at first glance, — for surely I had met her before and waited for her long. But soon I saw that she was a new apparition foreign to that scene, if not to me. Her dress, — the arrangement of her hair, which had the graceful pliancy of races highly cultivated for long, — the intelligent and full picture of her eye, whose reserve was in its self-possession, not in timidity, — all combined to make up a whole impression, which, though too young to understand, I was well prepared to feel.

‘How wearisome now appears that thorough-bred millefleur beauty, the distilled result of ages of European culture! Give me rather the wild heath on the lonely hill-side, than such a rose-tree from the daintily clipped garden. But, then, I had but tasted the cup, and knew not how little it could satisfy; more, more, was all my cry; continued through years, till I had been at the very fountain. Indeed, it was a ruby-red, a perfumed draught, and I need not abuse the wine because I prefer water, but merely say I have had enough of it. Then, the first sight, the first knowledge of such a person was intoxication.

‘She was an English lady, who, by a singular chance, was cast upon this region for a few months. Elegant and captivating, her every look and gesture was tuned to a different pitch from anything I had ever known. She was in various ways “accomplished,” as it is called, though to what degree I cannot now judge. She painted in oils; — I had never before seen any one use the brush, and days would not have been too long for me to watch the pictures growing beneath her hand. She played the harp; and its tones are still to me the heralds of the promised land I saw before me then. She rose, she looked, she spoke; and the gentle swaying motion she made all through life has gladdened memory, as the stream does the woods and meadows.

‘As she was often at the house of one of our neighbors, and afterwards at our own, my thoughts were fixed on her with all the force of my nature. It was my first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me wholly. I had seen her, — I should see her, — and my mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed from this source. My task-work I went through with, as I have done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride that could not bear to fail, or be questioned. Could I cease from doing the work of the day, and hear the reason sneeringly given,— “Her head is so completely taken up with —— that she can do nothing”? Impossible.

‘Should the first love be blighted, they say, the mind loses its sense of eternity. All forms of existence seem fragile, the prison of time real, for a god is dead. Equally true is this of friendship. I thank Heaven that this first feeling was permitted its free flow. The years that lay between the woman and the girl only brought her beauty into perspective, and enabled me to see her as I did the mountains from my window, and made her presence to me a gate of Paradise. That which she was, that which she brought, that which she might have brought, were mine, and over a whole region of new life I ruled proprietor of the soil in my own right.

‘Her mind was sufficiently unoccupied to delight in my warm devotion. She could not know what it was to me, but the light cast by the flame through so delicate a vase cheered and charmed her. All who saw admired her in their way; but she would lightly turn her head from their hard or oppressive looks, and fix a glance of full-eyed sweetness on the child, who, from a distance, watched all her looks and motions. She did not say much to me — not much to any one; she spoke in her whole being rather than by chosen words. Indeed, her proper speech was dance or song, and what was less expressive did not greatly interest her. But she saw much, having in its perfection the woman’s delicate sense for sympathies and attractions. We walked in the fields, alone. Though others were present, her eyes were gliding over all the field and plain for the objects of beauty to which she was of kin. She was not cold to her seeming companions; a sweet courtesy satisfied them, but it hung about her like her mantle that she wore without thinking of it; her thoughts were free, for these civilized beings can really live two lives at the same moment. With them she seemed to be, but her hand was given to the child at her side; others did not observe me, but to her I was the only human presence. Like a guardian spirit she led me through the fields and groves, and every tree, every bird greeted me, and said, what I felt, “She is the first angel of your life.”

‘One time I had been passing the afternoon with her. She had been playing to me on the harp, and I sat listening in happiness almost unbearable. Some guests were announced. She went into another room to receive them, and I took up her book. It was Guy Mannering, then lately published, and the first of Scott’s novels I had ever seen. I opened where her mark lay, and read merely with the feeling of continuing our mutual existence by passing my eyes over the same page where hers had been. It was the description of the rocks on the sea-coast where the little Harry Bertram was lost. I had never seen such places, and my mind was vividly stirred to imagine them. The scene rose before me, very unlike reality, doubtless, but majestic and wild. I was the little Harry Bertram, and had lost her, — all I had to lose, — and sought her vainly in long dark caves that had no end, plashing through the water; while the crags beetled above, threatening to fall and crush the poor child. Absorbed in the painful vision, tears rolled down my cheeks. Just then she entered with light step, and full-beaming eye. When she saw me thus, a soft cloud stole over her face, and clothed every feature with a lovelier tenderness than I had seen there before. She did not question, but fixed on me inquiring looks of beautiful love. I laid my head against her shoulder and wept, — dimly feeling that I must lose her and all, — all who spoke to me of the same things, — that the cold wave must rush over me. She waited till my tears were spent, then rising, took from a little box a bunch of golden amaranths or everlasting flowers, and gave them to me. They were very fragrant. “They came,” she said, “from Madeira.” These flowers stayed with me seventeen years. “Madeira” seemed to me the fortunate isle, apart in the blue ocean from all of ill or dread. Whenever I saw a sail passing in the distance, — if it bore itself with fulness of beautiful certainty, — I felt that it was going to Madeira. Those thoughts are all gone now. No Madeira exists for me now, — no fortunate purple isle, — and all these hopes and fancies are lifted from the sea into the sky. Yet I thank the charms that fixed them here so long, — fixed them till perfumes like those of the golden flowers were drawn from the earth, teaching me to know my birth-place.

‘I can tell little else of this time, — indeed, I remember little, except the state of feeling in which I lived. For I lived, and when this is the case, there is little to tell in the form of thought. We meet — at least those who are true to their instincts meet — a succession of persons through our lives, all of whom have some peculiar errand to us. There is an outer circle, whose existence we perceive, but with whom we stand in no real relation. They tell us the news, they act on us in the offices of society, they show us kindness and aversion; but their influence does not penetrate; we are nothing to them, nor they to us, except as a part of the world’s furniture. Another circle, within this, are dear and near to us. We know them and of what kind they are. They are to us not mere facts, but intelligible thoughts of the divine mind. We like to see how they are unfolded; we like to meet them and part from them: we like their action upon us and the pause that succeeds and enables us to appreciate its quality. Often we leave them on our path, and return no more, but we bear them in our memory, tales which have been told, and whose meaning has been felt.

‘But yet a nearer group there are, beings born under the same star, and bound with us in a common destiny. These are not mere acquaintances, mere friends, but, when we meet, are sharers of our very existence. There is no separation; the same thought is given at the same moment to both, — indeed, it is born of the meeting, and would not otherwise have been called into existence at all. These not only know themselves more, but are more for having met, and regions of their being, which would else have laid sealed in cold obstruction, burst into leaf and bloom and song.

‘The times of these meetings are fated, nor will either party be able ever to meet any other person in the same way. Both seem to rise at a glance into that part of the heavens where the word can be spoken, by which they are revealed to one another and to themselves. The step in being thus gained, can never be lost, nor can it be re-trod; for neither party will be again what the other wants. They are no longer fit to interchange mutual influence, for they do not really need it, and if they think they do, it is because they weakly pine after a past pleasure.

‘To this inmost circle of relations but few are admitted, because some prejudice or lack of courage has prevented the many from listening to their instincts the first time they manifested themselves. If the voice is once disregarded it becomes fainter each time, till, at last, it is wholly silenced, and the man lives in this world, a stranger to its real life, deluded like the maniac who fancies he has attained his throne, while in reality he is on a bed of musty straw. Yet, if the voice finds a listener and servant the first time of speaking, it is encouraged to more and more clearness. Thus it was with me, — from no merit of mine, but because I had the good fortune to be free enough to yield to my impressions. Common ties had not bound me; there were no traditionary notions in my mind; I believed in nothing merely because others believed in it; I had taken no feelings on trust. Thus my mind was open to their sway.

‘This woman came to me, a star from the east, a morning star, and I worshipped her. She too was elevated by that worship, and her fairest self called out. To the mind she brought assurance that there was a region congenial with its tendencies and tastes, a region of elegant culture and intercourse, whose object, fulfilled or not, was to gratify the sense of beauty, not the mere utilities of life. In our relation she was lifted to the top of her being. She had known many celebrities, had roused to passionate desire many hearts, and became afterwards a wife; but I do not believe she ever more truly realized her best self than towards the lonely child whose heaven she was, whose eye she met, and whose possibilities she predicted. “He raised me,” said a woman inspired by love, “upon the pedestal of his own high thoughts, and wings came at once, but I did not fly away. I stood there with downcast eyes worthy of his love, for he had made me so.”

‘Thus we do always for those who inspire us to expect from them the best. That which they are able to be, they become, because we demand it of them. “We expect the impossible — and find it.”

‘My English friend went across the sea. She passed into her former life, and into ties that engrossed her days. But she has never ceased to think of me. Her thoughts turn forcibly back to the child who was to her all she saw of the really New World. On the promised coasts she had found only cities, careful men and women, the aims and habits of ordinary life in her own land, without that elegant culture which she, probably, over-estimated, because it was her home. But in the mind of the child she found the fresh prairie, the untrodden forests for which she had longed. I saw in her the storied castles, the fair stately parks and the wind laden with tones from the past, which I desired to know. We wrote to one another for many years; — her shallow and delicate epistles did not disenchant me, nor did she fail to see something of the old poetry in my rude characters and stammering speech. But we must never meet again.

‘When this friend was withdrawn I fell into a profound depression. I knew not how to exert myself, but lay bound hand and foot. Melancholy enfolded me in an atmosphere, as joy had done. This suffering, too, was out of the gradual and natural course. Those who are really children could not know such love, or feel such sorrow. “I am to blame,” said my father, “in keeping her at home so long merely to please myself. She needs to be with other girls, needs play and variety. She does not seem to me really sick, but dull rather. She eats nothing, you say. I see she grows thin. She ought to change the scene.”

‘I was indeed dull. The books, the garden, had lost all charm. I had the excuse of headache, constantly, for not attending to my lessons. The light of life was set, and every leaf was withered. At such an early age there are no back or side scenes where the mind, weary and sorrowful, may retreat. Older, we realize the width of the world more, and it is not easy to despair on any point. The effort at thought to which we are compelled relieves and affords a dreary retreat, like hiding in a brick-kiln till the shower be over. But then all joy seemed to have departed with my friend, and the emptiness of our house stood revealed. This I had not felt while I every day expected to see or had seen her, or annoyance and dulness were unnoticed or swallowed up in the one thought that clothed my days with beauty. But now she was gone, and I was roused from habits of reading or reverie to feel the fiery temper of the soul, and to learn that it must have vent, that it would not be pacified by shadows, neither meet without consuming what lay around it. I avoided the table as much as possible, took long walks and lay in bed, or on the floor of my room. I complained of my head, and it was not wrong to do so, for a sense of dulness and suffocation, if not pain, was there constantly.

‘But when it was proposed that I should go to school, that was a remedy I could not listen to with patience for a moment. The peculiarity of my education had separated me entirely from the girls around, except that when they were playing at active games, I would sometimes go out and join them. I liked violent bodily exercise, which always relieved my nerves. But I had no success in associating with them beyond the mere play. Not only I was not their school-mate, but my book-life and lonely habits had given a cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with a hauteur which turned all hearts away. Yet, as this reserve was superficial, and rather ignorance than arrogance, it produced no deep dislike. Besides, the girls supposed me really superior to themselves, and did not hate me for feeling it, but neither did they like me, nor wish to have me with them. Indeed, I had gradually given up all such wishes myself; for they seemed to me rude, tiresome, and childish, as I did to them dull and strange. This experience had been earlier, before I was admitted to any real friendship; but now that I had been lifted into the life of mature years, and into just that atmosphere of European life to which I had before been tending, the thought of sending me to school filled me with disgust.

‘Yet what could I tell my father of such feelings? I resisted all I could, but in vain. He had no faith in medical aid generally, and justly saw that this was no occasion for its use. He thought I needed change of scene, and to be roused to activity by other children. “I have kept you at home,” he said, “because I took such pleasure in teaching you myself, and besides I knew that you would learn faster with one who is so desirous to aid you. But you will learn fast enough wherever you are, and you ought to be more with others of your own age. I shall soon hear that you are better, I trust.”’

SCHOOL-LIFE.

The school to which Margaret was sent was that of the Misses Prescott, in Groton, Massachusetts. And her experience there has been described with touching truthfulness by herself, in the story of “Mariana.”[A]

‘At first her school-mates were captivated with her ways; her love of wild dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and of wit. She was always new, always surprising, and, for a time, charming.

‘But after a while, they tired of her. She could never be depended on to join in their plans, yet she expected them, to follow out hers with their whole strength. She was very loving, even infatuated in her own affections, and exacted from those who had professed any love for her the devotion she was willing to bestow.

‘Yet there was a vein of haughty caprice in her character, and a love of solitude, which made her at times wish to retire apart, and at these times she would expect to be entirely understood, and let alone, yet to be welcomed back when she returned. She did not thwart others in their humors, but she never doubted of great indulgence from them.

‘Some singular habits she had, which, when new, charmed, but, after acquaintance, displeased her companions. She had by nature the same habit and power of excitement that is described in the spinning dervishes of the East. Like them she would spin until all around her were giddy, while her own brain, instead of being disturbed, was excited to great action. Pausing, she would declaim, verses of others, or her own, or act many parts, with strange catchwords and burdens, that seemed to act with mystical power on her own fancy, sometimes stimulating her to convulse the hearers with laughter, sometimes to melt them to tears. When her power began to languish, she would spin again till fired to re-commence her singular drama, into which she wove figures from the scenes of her earlier childhood, her companions, and the dignitaries she sometimes saw, with fantasies unknown to life, unknown to heaven or earth.

‘This excitement, as may be supposed, was not good for her. It usually came on in the evening, and often spoiled her sleep. She would wake in the night, and cheat her restlessness by inventions that teased, while they sometimes diverted her companions.

‘She was also a sleep-walker; and this one trait of her case did somewhat alarm her guardians, who, otherwise, showed the profound ignorance as to this peculiar being, usual in the overseeing of the young. They consulted a physician, who said she would outgrow it, and prescribed a milk diet.

‘Meantime, the fever of this ardent and too early stimulated nature was constantly increased by the restraints and narrow routine of the boarding school. She was always devising means to break in upon it. She had a taste — which would have seemed ludicrous to her mates, if they had not felt some awe of her, from the touch of genius and power that never left her — for costume and fancy dresses. There was always some sash twisted about her, some drapery, something odd in the arrangement of her hair and dress; so that the methodical preceptress dared not let her go out without a careful scrutiny and remodelling, whose soberizing effects generally disappeared the moment she was in the free air.

‘At last a vent was assured for her in private theatricals. Play followed play, and in these and the rehearsals, she found entertainment congenial with her. The principal parts, as a matter of course, fell to her lot; most of the good suggestions and arrangements came from her: and, for a time, she ruled mostly, and shone triumphant.

‘During these performances, the girls had heightened their bloom with artificial red; this was delightful to them, it was something so out of the way. But Mariana, after the plays were over, kept her carmine saucer on the dressing-table, and put on her blushes, regularly as the morning. When stared and jeered at, she at first said she did it because she thought it made her look pretty; but, after a while, she became petulant about it, — would make no reply to any joke, but merely kept up the habit.

‘This irritated the girls, as all eccentricity does the world in general, more than vice or malignity. They talked it over among themselves till they were wrought up to a desire of punishing, once for all, this sometimes amusing, but so often provoking non-conformist. And having obtained leave of the mistress, they laid, with great glee, a plan, one evening, which was to be carried into execution next day at dinner.

‘Among Mariana’s irregularities was a great aversion to the meal-time ceremonial, — so long, so tiresome, she found it, to be seated at a certain moment, and to wait while each one was served, at so large a table, where there was scarcely any conversation; and from day to day it became more heavy to sit there, or go there at all; often as possible she excused herself on the ever-convenient plea of headache, and was hardly ever ready when the dinner-bell rang.

‘To-day the summons found her on the balcony, but gazing on the beautiful prospect. I have heard her say afterwards, that she had scarcely in her life been so happy, — and she was one with whom happiness was a still rapture. It was one of the most blessed summer days; the shadows of great white clouds empurpled the distant hills for a few moments, only to leave them more golden; the tall grass of the wide fields waved in the softest breeze. Pure blue were the heavens, and the same hue of pure contentment was in the heart of Mariana.

‘Suddenly on her bright mood jarred the dinner-bell. At first rose her usual thought, I will not, cannot go; and then the must, which daily life can always enforce, even upon the butterflies and birds, came, and she walked reluctantly to her room. She merely changed her dress, and never thought of adding the artificial rose to her cheek.

‘When she took her seat in the dining-hall, and was asked if she would be helped, raising her eyes, she saw the person who asked her was deeply rouged, with a bright glaring spot, perfectly round, on either cheek. She looked at the next, — same apparition! She then slowly passed her eyes down the whole line, and saw the same, with a suppressed smile distorting every countenance. Catching the design at once, she deliberately looked along her own side of the table, at every schoolmate in turn; every one had joined in the trick. The teachers strove to be grave, but she saw they enjoyed the joke. The servants could not suppress a titter.

‘When Warren Hastings stood at the bar of Westminster Hall, — when the Methodist preacher walked through a line of men, each of whom greeted him with a brickbat or rotten egg, — they had some preparation for the crisis, though it might be very difficult to meet it with an impassible brow. Our little girl was quite unprepared to find herself in the midst of a world which despised her, and triumphed in her disgrace.

‘She had ruled like a queen, in the midst of her companions; she had shed her animation through their lives, and loaded them with prodigal favors, nor once suspected that a popular favorite might not be loved. Now she felt that she had been but a dangerous plaything in the hands of those whose hearts she never had doubted.

‘Yet the occasion found her equal to it, for Mariana had the kind of spirit which, in a better cause, had made the Roman matron truly say of her death-wound, “It is not painful, Poetus.” She did not blench, — she did not change countenance. She swallowed her dinner with apparent composure. She made remarks to those near her, as if she had no eyes.

‘The wrath of the foe, of course, rose higher, and the moment they were freed from the restraints of the dining room, they all ran off, gayly calling, and sarcastically laughing, with backward glances, at Mariana, left alone.

‘Alone she went to her room, locked the door, and threw herself on the floor in strong convulsions. These had sometimes threatened her life, in earlier childhood, but of later years she had outgrown them. School-hours came, and she was not there. A little girl, sent to her door, could get no answer. The teachers became alarmed, and broke it open. Bitter was their penitence, and that of her companions, at the state in which they found her. For some hours terrible anxiety was felt, but at last nature, exhausted, relieved herself by a deep slumber.

‘From this Mariana arose an altered being. She made no reply to the expressions of sorrow from her companions, none to the grave and kind, but undiscerning, comments of her teacher. She did not name the source of her anguish, and its poisoned dart sank deeply in. This was the thought which stung her so:— “What, not one, not a single one, in the hour of trial, to take my part? not one who refused to take part against me?” Past words of love, and caresses, little heeded at the time, rose to her memory, and gave fuel to her distempered heart. Beyond the sense of burning resentment at universal perfidy, she could not get. And Mariana, born for love, now hated all the world.

‘The change, however, which these feelings made in her conduct and appearance, bore no such construction to the careless observer. Her gay freaks were quite gone, her wildness, her invention. Her dress was uniform, her manner much subdued. Her chief interest seemed to be now in her studies, and in music. Her companions she never sought; but they, partly from uneasy, remorseful feelings, partly that they really liked her much better now that she did not puzzle and oppress them, sought her continually. And here the black shadow comes upon her life, the only stain upon the history of Mariana.

‘They talked to her, as girls having few topics naturally do, of one another. Then the demon rose within her, and spontaneously, without design, generally without words of positive falsehood, she became a genius of discord amongst them. She fanned those flames of envy and jealousy which a wise, true word from a third person will often quench forever; and by a glance, or seemingly light reply, she planted the seeds of dissension, till there was scarcely a peaceful affection, or sincere intimacy, in the circle where she lived, and could not but rule, for she was one whose nature was to that of the others as fire to clay.

‘It was at this time that I came to the school, and first saw Mariana. Me she charmed at once, for I was a sentimental child, who, in my early ill health, had been indulged in reading novels, till I had no eyes for the common. It was not, however, easy to approach her. Did I offer to run and fetch her handkerchief, she was obliged to go to her room, and would rather do it herself. She did not like to have people turn over for her the leaves of the music-book as she played. Did I approach my stool to her feet, she moved away as if to give me room. The bunch of wild flowers, which I timidly laid beside her plate, was left untouched. After some weeks, my desire to attract her notice really preyed upon me; and one day, meeting her alone in the entry, I fell upon my knees, and, kissing her hand, cried “O, Mariana, do let me love you, and try to love me a little!” But my idol snatched away her hand, and laughing wildly, ran into her room. After that day, her manner to me was not only cold, but repulsive, and I felt myself scorned.

‘Perhaps four months had passed thus, when, one afternoon, it became obvious that something more than common was brewing. Dismay and mystery were written in many faces of the older girls; much whispering was going on in corners.

‘In the evening, after prayers, the principal bade us stay; and, in a grave, sad voice, summoned forth Mariana to answer charges to be made against her.

‘Mariana stood up and leaned against the chimney-piece. Then eight of the older girls came forward, and preferred against her charges, — alas! too well founded, of calumny and falsehood.

‘At first, she defended herself with self-possession and eloquence. But when she found she could no more resist the truth, she suddenly threw herself down, dashing her head with all her force against the iron hearth, on which a fire was burning, and was taken up senseless.

‘The affright of those present was great. Now that they had perhaps killed her, they reflected it would have been as well if they had taken warning from the former occasion, and approached very carefully a nature so capable of any extreme. After a while she revived, with a faint groan, amid the sobs of her companions. I was on my knees by the bed, and held her cold hand. One of those most aggrieved took it from me, to beg her pardon, and say, it was impossible not to love her. She made no reply.

‘Neither that night, nor for several days, could a word be obtained from her, nor would she touch food; but, when it was presented to her, or any one drew near from any cause, she merely turned away her head, and gave no sign. The teacher saw that some terrible nervous affection had fallen upon her — that she grew more and more feverish. She knew not what to do.

‘Meanwhile, a new revolution had taken place in the mind of the passionate but nobly-tempered child. All these months nothing but the sense of injury had rankled in her heart. She had gone on in one mood, doing what the demon prompted, without scruple, and without fear.

‘But at the moment of detection, the tide ebbed, and the bottom of her soul lay revealed to her eye. How black, how stained, and sad! Strange, strange, that she had not seen before the baseness and cruelty of falsehood, the loveliness of truth! Now, amid the wreck, uprose the moral nature, which never before had attained the ascendant. “But,” she thought, “too late sin is revealed to me in all its deformity, and sin-defiled, I will not, cannot live. The main-spring of life is broken.”

‘The lady who took charge of this sad child had never well understood her before, but had always looked on her with great tenderness. And now love seemed, — when all around were in the greatest distress, fearing to call in medical aid, fearing to do without it, — to teach her where the only balm was to be found that could heal the wounded spirit.

‘One night she came in, bringing a calming draught. Mariana was sitting as usual, her hair loose, her dress the same robe they had put on her at first, her eyes fixed vacantly upon the whited wall. To the proffers and entreaties of her nurse, she made no reply.

‘The lady burst into tears, but Mariana did not seem even to observe it.

‘The lady then said, “O, my child, do not despair; do not think that one great fault can mar a whole life! Let me trust you; let me tell you the griefs of my sad life. I will tell you, Mariana, what I never expected to impart to any one.”

‘And so she told her tale. It was one of pain, of shame, borne not for herself, but for one near and dear as herself. Mariana knew the dignity and reserve of this lady’s nature. She had often admired to see how the cheek, lovely, but no longer young, mantled with the deepest blush of youth, and the blue eyes were cast down at any little emotion. She had understood the proud sensibility of her character. She fixed her eyes on those now raised to hers, bright with fast-falling tears. She heard the story to the end, and then, without saying a word, stretched out her hand for the cup.

‘She returned to life, but it was as one who had passed through the valley of death. The heart of stone was quite broken in her, — the fiery will fallen from flame to coal. When her strength was a little restored, she had all her companions summoned, and said to them,— “I deserved to die, but a generous trust has called me back to life. I will be worthy of it, nor ever betray the trust, or resent injury more. Can you forgive the past?”

‘And they not only forgave, but, with love and earnest tears, clasped in their arms the returning sister. They vied with one another in offices of humble love to the humbled one; and let it be recorded, as an instance of the pure honor of which young hearts are capable, that these facts, known to some forty persons, never, so far as I know, transpired beyond those walls.

‘It was not long after this that Mariana was summoned home. She went thither a wonderfully instructed being, though in ways those who had sent her forth to learn little dreamed of.

‘Never was forgotten the vow of the returning prodigal. Mariana could not resent, could not play false. The terrible crisis, which she so early passed through, probably prevented the world from hearing much of her. A wild fire was tamed in that hour of penitence at the boarding-school, such as has oftentimes wrapped court and camp in a destructive glow.’

[Footnote A: Summer on the Lakes, p. 81.]

SELF-CULTURE.

Letters written to the beloved teacher, who so wisely befriended Margaret in her trial-hour, will best show how this high-spirited girl sought to enlarge and harmonize her powers.

‘Cambridge, July 11, 1825. — Having excused myself from accompanying my honored father to church, which I always do in the afternoon, when possible, I devote to you the hours which Ariosto and Helvetius ask of my eyes, — as, lying on my writing-desk, they put me in mind that they must return this week to their owner.

‘You keep me to my promise of giving you some sketch of my pursuits. I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano, till seven, when we breakfast. Next I read French, — Sismondi’s Literature of the South of Europe, — till eight, then two or three lectures in Brown’s Philosophy. About half-past nine I go to Mr. Perkins’s school and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, if the conversation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an hour over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but I am often interrupted. At six, I walk, or take a drive. Before going to bed, I play or sing, for half an hour or so, to make all sleepy, and, about eleven, retire to write a little while in my journal, exercises on what I have read, or a series of characteristics which I am filling up according to advice. Thus, you see, I am learning Greek, and making acquaintance with metaphysics, and French and Italian literature.

‘“How,” you will say, “can I believe that my indolent, fanciful, pleasure-loving pupil, perseveres in such a course?” I feel the power of industry growing every day, and, besides the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately given through a friend, I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable. I am determined on distinction, which formerly I thought to win at an easy rate; but now I see that long years of labor must be given to secure even the “succès de societé,” — which, however, shall never content me. I see multitudes of examples of persons of genius, utterly deficient in grace and the power of pleasurable excitement. I wish to combine both. I know the obstacles in my way. I am wanting in that intuitive tact and polish, which nature has bestowed upon some, but which I must acquire. And, on the other hand, my powers of intellect, though sufficient, I suppose, are not well disciplined. Yet all such hindrances may be overcome by an ardent spirit. If I fail, my consolation shall be found in active employment.’

* * * * *

‘Cambridge, March 5, 1826. — Duke Nicholas is to succeed the Emperor Alexander, thus relieving Europe from the sad apprehension of evil to be inflicted by the brutal Constantine, and yet depriving the Holy Alliance of its very soul. We may now hope more strongly for the liberties of unchained Europe; we look in anxious suspense for the issue of the struggle of Greece, the result of which seems to depend on the new autocrat. I have lately been reading Anastasius, the Greek Gil Bias, which has excited and delighted me; but I do not think you like works of this cast. You did not like my sombre and powerful Ormond, — though this is superior to Ormond in every respect; it translates you to another scene, hurls you into the midst of the burning passions of the East, whose vicissitudes are, however, interspersed by deep pauses of shadowy reflective scenes, which open upon you like the green watered little vales occasionally to be met with in the burning desert. There is enough of history to fix profoundly the attention, and prevent you from revolting from scenes profligate and terrific, and such characters as are never to be met with in our paler climes. How delighted am I to read a book which can absorb me to tears and shuddering, — not by individual traits of beauty, but by the spirit of adventure, — happiness which one seldom enjoys after childhood in this blest age, so philosophic, free, and enlightened to a miracle, but far removed from the ardent dreams and soft credulity of the world’s youth. Sometimes I think I would give all our gains for those times when young and old gathered in the feudal hall, listening with soul-absorbing transport to the romance of the minstrel, unrestrained and regardless of criticism, and when they worshipped nature, not as high-dressed and pampered, but as just risen from the bath.’

‘Cambridge, May 14, 1826. — I am studying Madame de Stael, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Castiliain ballads, with great delight. There’s an assemblage for you. Now tell me, had you rather be the brilliant De Stael or the useful Edgeworth? — though De Stael is useful too, but it is on the grand scale, on liberalizing, regenerating principles, and has not the immediate practical success that Edgeworth has. I met with a parallel the other day between Byron and Rousseau, and had a mind to send it to you, it was so excellent.’

* * * * *

‘Cambridge, Jan. 10, 1827. — As to my studies, I am engrossed in reading the elder Italian poets, beginning with Berni, from whom I shall proceed to Pulci and Politian. I read very critically. Miss Francis[A] and I think of reading Locke, as introductory to a course of English metaphysics, and then De Stael on Locke’s system. Allow me to introduce this lady to you as a most interesting woman, in my opinion. She is a natural person, — a most rare thing in this age of cant and pretension. Her conversation is charming, — she brings all her powers to bear upon it; her style is varied, and she has a very pleasant and spirited way of thinking. I should judge, too, that she possesses peculiar purity of mind. I am going to spend this evening with her, and wish you were to be with us.’

* * * * *

‘Cambridge, Jan. 3, 1828. — I am reading Sir William Temple’s works, with great pleasure. Such enlarged views are rarely to be found combined with such acuteness and discrimination. His style, though diffuse, is never verbose or overloaded, but beautifully expressive; ’tis English, too, though he was an accomplished linguist, and wrote much and well in. French, Spanish, and Latin. The latter he used, as he says of the Bishop of Munster, (with whom he corresponded in that tongue,) “more like a man of the court and of business than a scholar.” He affected not Augustan niceties, but his expressions are free and appropriate. I have also read a most entertaining book, which I advise you to read, (if you have not done so already,) Russell’s Tour in Germany. There you will find more intelligent and detailed accounts than I have seen anywhere of the state of the German universities, Viennese court, secret associations, Plica Polonica, and other very interesting matters. There is a minute account of the representative government given to his subjects by the Duke of Weimar. I have passed a luxurious afternoon, having been in bed from dinner till tea, reading Rammohun Roy’s book, and framing dialogues aloud on every argument beneath the sun. Really, I have not had my mind so exercised for months; and I have felt a gladiatorial disposition lately, and don’t enjoy mere light conversation. The love of knowledge is prodigiously kindled within my soul of late; I study much and reflect more, and feel an aching wish for some person with whom I might talk fully and openly.

‘Did you ever read the letters and reflections of Prince de Ligne, the most agreeable man of his day? I have just had it, and if it is new to you, I recommend it as an agreeable book to read at night just before you go to bed. There is much curious matter concerning Catharine II.’s famous expedition into Taurida, which puts down some of the romantic stories prevalent on that score, but relates more surprising realities. Also it gives much interesting information about that noble philosopher, Joseph II., and about the Turkish tactics and national character.’

* * * * *

‘Cambridge, Jan. 1830. — You need not fear to revive painful recollections. I often think of those sad experiences. True, they agitate me deeply. But it was best so. They have had a most powerful effect on my character. I tremble at whatever looks like dissimulation. The remembrance of that evening subdues every proud, passionate impulse. My beloved supporter in those sorrowful hours, your image shines as fair to my mind’s eye as it did in 1825, when I left you with my heart overflowing with gratitude for your singular and judicious tenderness. Can I ever forget that to your treatment in that crisis of youth I owe the true life, — the love of Truth and Honor?’

[Footnote A: Lydia Maria Child.]

LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE.

BY JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

* * * * *

“Extraordinary, generous seeking.”

GOETHE.

 ”Through, brothers, through, — this be
  Our watchword in danger or sorrow,
  Common clay to its mother dust,
  All nobleness heavenward!”

THEODORE KOERNER.

 ”Thou friend whose presence on my youthful heart
  Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain;
  How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
  In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
  Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
  And walk as free as light the clouds among!”

SHELLY.

“There are not a few instances of that conflict, known also to the fathers, of the spirit with the flesh, the inner with the outer man, of the freedom of the will with the necessity of nature, the pleasure of the individual with the conventions of society, of the emergency of the case with the despotism of the rule. It is this, which, while it makes the interest of life, makes the difficulty of living. It is a struggle, indeed, between unequal powers, — between the man, who is a conscious moral person, and nature, or events, or bodies of men, which either want personality or unity; and hence the man, after fearful and desolating war, sometimes rises on the ruins of all the necessities of nature and all the prescriptions of society. But what these want in personality they possess in number, in recurrency, in invulnerability. The spirit of man, an agent indeed of curious power and boundless resource, but trembling with sensibilities, tender and irritable, goes out against the inexorable conditions of destiny, the lifeless forces of nature, or the ferocious cruelty of the multitude, and long before the hands are weary or the invention exhausted, the heart may be broken in the warfare.”

N.A. REVIEW, Jan., 1817, article “Dichtung und Wahrheit.”

II. CAMBRIDGE

* * * * *

The difficulty which we all feel in describing our past intercourse and friendship with Margaret Fuller, is, that the intercourse was so intimate, and the friendship so personal, that it is like making a confession to the public of our most interior selves. For this noble person, by her keen insight and her generous interest, entered into the depth of every soul with which she stood in any real relation. To print one of her letters, is like giving an extract from our own private journal. To relate what she was to us, is to tell how she discerned elements of worth and beauty where others could only have seen what was common-place and poor; it is to say what high hopes, what generous assurance, what a pure ambition, she entertained on our behalf, — a hope and confidence which may well be felt as a rebuke to our low attainments and poor accomplishments.

Nevertheless, it seems due to this great soul that those of us who have been blessed and benefited by her friendship should be willing to say what she has done for us, — undeterred by the thought that to reveal her is to expose ourselves.

My acquaintance with Sarah Margaret Fuller began in 1829. We both lived in Cambridge, and from that time until she went to Groton to reside, in 1833, I saw her, or heard from her, almost every day. There was a family connection, and we called each other cousin.[A] During this period, her intellect was intensely active. With what eagerness did she seek for knowledge! What fire, what exuberance, what reach, grasp, overflow of thought, shone in her conversation! She needed a friend to whom to speak of her studies, to whom to express the ideas which were dawning and taking shape in her mind. She accepted me for this friend, and to me it was a gift of the gods, an influence like no other.

For the first few months of our acquaintance, our intercourse was simply that of two young persons seeking entertainment in each other’s society. Perhaps a note written at this time will illustrate the easy and graceful movement of her mind in this superficial kind of intercourse.

‘March 16th, 1830. Half-past six, morning. — I have encountered that most common-place of glories, sunrise, (to say naught of being praised and wondered at by every member of the family in succession,) that I might have leisure to answer your note even as you requested. I thank you a thousand times for “The Rivals.”[B] Alas!! I must leave my heart in the book, and spend the livelong morning in reading to a sick lady from some amusing story-book. I tell you of this act of (in my professedly unamiable self) most unwonted charity, for three several reasons. Firstly, and foremostly, because I think that you, being a socialist by vocation, a sentimentalist by nature, and a Channingite from force of circumstances and fashion, will peculiarly admire this little self-sacrifice exploit. Secondly, because ’tis neither conformable to the spirit of the nineteenth century, nor the march of mind, that those churlish reserves should be kept up between the right and left hands, which belonged to ages of barbarism and prejudice, and could only have been inculcated for their use. Thirdly, and lastly, the true ladylike reason, — because I would fain have my correspondent enter into and sympathize with my feelings of the moment.

‘As to the relationship; ’tis, I find, on inquiry, by no means to be compared with that between myself and —— ; of course, the intimacy cannot be so great. But no matter; it will enable me to answer your notes, and you will interest my imagination much more than if I knew you better. But I am exceeding legitimate note-writing limits. With a hope that this epistle may be legible to your undiscerning eyes, I conclude,

‘Your cousin only thirty-seven degrees removed,

‘M.’

The next note which I shall give was written not many days after, and is in quite a different vein. It is memorable to me as laying the foundation of a friendship which brought light to my mind, which enlarged my heart, and gave elevation and energy to my aims and purposes. For nearly twenty years, Margaret remained true to the pledges of this note. In a few years we were separated, but our friendship remained firm. Living in different parts of the country, occupied with different thoughts and duties, making other friends, — sometimes not seeing nor hearing from each other for months, — we never met without my feeling that she was ready to be interested in all my thoughts, to love those whom I loved, to watch my progress, to rebuke my faults and follies, to encourage within me every generous and pure aspiration, to demand of me, always, the best that I could be or do, and to be satisfied with no mediocrity, no conformity to any low standard.

And what she thus was to me, she was to many others. Inexhaustible in power of insight, and with a good-will “broad as ether,” she could enter into the needs, and sympathize with the various excellences, of the greatest variety of characters. One thing only she demanded of all her friends, — that they should have some “extraordinary generous seeking,”[C] that they should not be satisfied with the common routine of life, — that they should aspire to something higher, better, holier, than they had now attained. Where this element of aspiration existed, she demanded no originality of intellect, no greatness of soul. If these were found, well; but she could love, tenderly and truly, where they were not. But for a worldly character, however gifted, she felt and expressed something very like contempt. At this period, she had no patience with self-satisfied mediocrity. She afterwards learned patience and unlearned contempt; but at the time of which I write, she seemed, and was to the multitude, a haughty and supercilious person, — while to those whom she loved, she was all the more gentle, tender and true.

Margaret possessed, in a greater degree than any person I ever knew, the power of so magnetizing others, when she wished, by the power of her mind, that they would lay open to her all the secrets of their nature. She had an infinite curiosity to know individuals, — not the vulgar curiosity which seeks to find out the circumstances of their outward lives, but that which longs to understand the inward springs of thought and action in their souls. This desire and power both rested on a profound conviction of her mind in the individuality of every human being. A human being, according to her faith, was not the result of the presence and stamp of outward circumstances, but an original monad, with a certain special faculty, capable of a certain fixed development, and having a profound personal unity, which the ages of eternity might develop, but could not exhaust. I know not if she would have stated her faith in these terms, but some such conviction appeared in her constant endeavor to see and understand the germinal principle, the special characteristic, of every person whom she deemed worthy of knowing at all. Therefore, while some persons study human nature in its universal laws, and become great philosophers, moralists and teachers of the race, — while others study mankind in action, and, seeing the motives and feelings by which masses are swayed, become eminent politicians, sagacious leaders, and eminent in all political affairs, — a few, like Margaret, study character, and acquire the power of exerting profoundest influence on individual souls.

I had expressed to her my desire to know something of the history of her mind, — to understand her aims, her hopes, her views of life. In a note written in reply, she answered me thus: —

‘I cannot bring myself to write you what you wished. You would be disappointed, at any rate, after all the solemn note of preparation; the consciousness of this would chill me now. Besides, I cannot be willing to leave with you such absolute vagaries in a tangible, examinable shape. I think of your after-smiles, of your colder moods. But I will tell you, when a fitting opportunity presents, all that can interest you, and perhaps more. And excuse my caution. I do not profess, I may not dare, to be generous in these matters.’

To this I replied to the effect that, “in my coldest mood I could not criticize words written in a confiding spirit;” and that, at all events, she must not expect of me a confidence which she dared not return. This was the substance of a note to which Margaret thus replied: —

‘I thank you for your note. Ten minutes before I received it, I scarcely thought that anything again would make my stifled heart throb so warm a pulse of pleasure. Excuse my cold doubts, my selfish arrogance, — you will, when I tell you that this experiment has before had such uniform results; those who professed to seek my friendship, and whom, indeed, I have often truly loved, have always learned to content themselves with that inequality in the connection which I have never striven to veil. Indeed, I have thought myself more valued and better beloved, because the sympathy, the interest, were all on my side. True! such regard could never flatter my pride, nor gratify my affections, since it was paid not to myself, but to the need they had of me; still, it was dear and pleasing, as it has given me an opportunity of knowing and serving many lovely characters; and I cannot see that there is anything else for me to do on earth. And I should rejoice to cultivate generosity, since (see that since) affections gentler and more sympathetic are denied me.

‘I would have been a true friend to you; ever ready to solace your pains and partake your joy as far as possible. Yet I cannot but rejoice that I have met a person who could discriminate and reject a proffer of this sort. Two years ago I should have ventured to proffer you friendship, indeed, on seeing such an instance of pride in you; but I have gone through a sad process of feeling since, and those emotions, so necessarily repressed, have lost their simplicity, their ardent beauty. Then, there was nothing I might not have disclosed to a person capable of comprehending, had I ever seen such an one! Now there are many voices of the soul which I imperiously silence. This results not from any particular circumstance or event, but from a gradual ascertaining of realities.

‘I cannot promise you any limitless confidence, but I can promise that no timid caution, no haughty dread shall prevent my telling you the truth of my thoughts on any subject we may have in common. Will this satisfy you? Oh let it! suffer me to know you.’

In a postscript she adds, ‘No other cousin or friend of any style is to see this note.’ So for twenty years it has lain unseen, but for twenty years did we remain true to the pledges of that period. And now that noble heart sleeps beneath the tossing Atlantic, and I feel no reluctance in showing to the world this expression of pure youthful ardor. It may, perhaps, lead some wise worldlings, who doubt the possibility of such a relation, to reconsider the grounds of their scepticism; or, if not that, it may encourage some youthful souls, as earnest and eager as ours, to trust themselves to their hearts’ impulse, and enjoy some such blessing as came to us.

Let me give extracts from other notes and letters, written by
Margaret, about the same period.

‘Saturday evening, May 1st, 1830. — The holy moon and merry-toned wind of this night woo to a vigil at the open window; a half-satisfied interest urges me to live, love and perish! in the noble, wronged heart of Basil;[D] my Journal, which lies before me, tempts to follow out and interpret the as yet only half-understood musings of the past week. Letter-writing, compared with any of these things, takes the ungracious semblance of a duty. I have, nathless, after a two hours’ reverie, to which this resolve and its preliminaries have formed excellent warp, determined to sacrifice this hallowed time to you.

‘It did not in the least surprise me that you found it impossible at the time to avail yourself of the confidential privileges I had invested you with. On the contrary, I only wonder that we should ever, after such gage given and received, (not by a look or tone, but by letter,) hold any frank communication. Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous. I felt this even before I sent my note, but could not persuade myself to consign an impulse so embodied, to oblivion, from any consideration of expediency.’ * *

* * * * *

‘May 4th, 1830. — * * I have greatly wished to see among us such a person of genius as the nineteenth century can afford — i.e., one who has tasted in the morning of existence the extremes of good and ill, both imaginative and real. I had imagined a person endowed by nature with that acute sense of Beauty, (i.e., Harmony or Truth,) and that vast capacity of desire, which give soul to love and ambition. I had wished this person might grow up to manhood alone (but not alone in crowds); I would have placed him in a situation so retired, so obscure, that he would quietly, but without bitter sense of isolation, stand apart from all surrounding him. I would have had him go on steadily, feeding his mind with congenial love, hopefully confident that if he only nourished his existence into perfect life, Fate would, at fitting season, furnish an atmosphere and orbit meet for his breathing and exercise. I wished he might adore, not fever for, the bright phantoms of his mind’s creation, and believe them but the shadows of external things to be met with hereafter. After this steady intellectual growth had brought his powers to manhood, so far as the ideal can do it, I wished this being might be launched into the world of realities, his heart glowing with the ardor of an immortal toward perfection, his eyes searching everywhere to behold it; I wished he might collect into one burning point those withering, palsying convictions, which, in the ordinary routine of things, so gradually pervade the soul; that he might suffer, in brief space, agonies of disappointment commensurate with his unpreparedness and confidence. And I thought, thus thrown back on the representing pictorial resources I supposed him originally to possess, with such material, and the need he must feel of using it, such a man would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory, — a centre, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally, — a man fitted to act as interpreter to the one tale of many-languaged eyes!

‘What words are these! Perhaps you will feel as if I sought but for the longest and strongest. Yet to my ear they do but faintly describe the imagined powers of such a being.’

Margaret’s home at this time was in the mansion-house formerly belonging to Judge Dana, — a large, old-fashioned building, since taken down, standing about a quarter of a mile from the Cambridge Colleges, on the main road to Boston. The house stood back from the road, on rising ground, which overlooked an extensive landscape. It was always a pleasure to Margaret to look at the outlines of the distant hills beyond the river, and to have before her this extent of horizon and sky. In the last year of her residence in Cambridge, her father moved to the old Brattle place, — a still more ancient edifice, with large, old-fashioned garden, and stately rows of Linden trees. Here Margaret enjoyed the garden walks, which took the place of the extensive view.

During these five years her life was not diversified by events, but was marked by an inward history. Study, conversation, society, friendship, and reflection on the aim and law of life, made up her biography. Accordingly, these topics will constitute the substance of this chapter, though sometimes, in order to give completeness to a subject, we may anticipate a little, and insert passages from the letters and journals of her Groton life.

[Footnote A: I had once before seen Margaret, when we were both children about five years of age. She made an impression on my mind which was never effaced, and I distinctly recollect the joyful child, with light flowing locks and bright face, who led me by the hand down the back-steps of her house into the garden. This was when her father lived in Cambridgeport, in a house on Cherry street, in front of which still stand some handsome trees, planted by him in the year of Margaret’s birth.]

[Footnote B: “The Rivals” was a novel I had lent her, — if I remember right, by the author of “The Collegians;” a writer who in those days interested us not a little.]

[Footnote C: These words of Goethe, which I have placed among the mottoes at the beginning of this chapter, were written by Margaret on the first page of a richly gilt and bound blank book, which she gave to me, in 1832, for a private journal. The words of Körner are also translated by herself, and were given to me about the same time.]

[Footnote D: The hero of a novel she was reading.]

I.

FRIENDSHIP.

“Friendly love perfecteth mankind.”

BACON.

 ”To have found favor in thy sight
    Will still remain
  A river of thought, that full of light
    Divides the plain.”

MILNES.

“Cui potest vita esse vitalis, (ut ait Ennius,) quæ non in amici mutatâ benevolentiâ requiescat?” — CICERO.

* * * * *

It was while living at Cambridge that Margaret commenced several of those friendships which lasted through her life, and which were the channels for so large a part of her spiritual activity. In giving some account of her in these relations, there is only the alternative of a prudent reserve which omits whatever is liable to be misunderstood, or a frank utterance which confides in the good sense and right feeling of the reader. By the last course, we run the risk of allowing our friend to be misunderstood; but by the first we make it certain that the most important part of her character shall not be understood at all. I have, therefore, thought it best to follow, as far as I can, her own ideas on this subject, which I find in two of her letters to myself. The first is dated, Groton, Jan. 8th, 1839. I was at that time editing a theological and literary magazine, in the West, and this letter was occasioned by my asking her to allow me to publish therein certain poems, and articles of hers, which she had given me to read.

‘And I wish now, as far as I can, to give my reasons for what you consider absurd squeamishness in me. You may not acquiesce in my view, but I think you will respect it as mine and be willing to act upon it so far as I am concerned.

‘Genius seems to me excusable in taking the public for a confidant. Genius is universal, and can appeal to the common heart of man. But even here I would not have it too direct. I prefer to see the thought or feeling made universal. How different the confidence of Goethe, for instance, from that of Byron!

‘But for us lesser people, who write verses merely as vents for the overflowings of a personal experience, which in every life of any value craves occasionally the accompaniment of the lyre, it seems to me that all the value of this utterance is destroyed by a hasty or indiscriminate publicity. The moment I lay open my heart, and tell the fresh feeling to any one who chooses to hear, I feel profaned.

‘When it has passed into experience, when the flower has gone to seed, I don’t care who knows it, or whither they wander. I am no longer it, — I stand on it. I do not know whether this is peculiar to me, or not, but I am sure the moment I cease to have any reserve or delicacy about a feeling, it is on the wane.

‘About putting beautiful verses in your Magazine, I have no feeling except what I should have about furnishing a room. I should not put a dressing-case into a parlor, or a book-case into a dressing-room, because, however good things in their place, they were not in place there. And this, not in consideration of the public, but of my own sense of fitness and harmony.’

The next extract is from a letter written to me in 1842, after a journey which we had taken to the White Mountains, in the company of my sister, and Mr. and Mrs. Farrar. During this journey Margaret had conversed with me concerning some passages of her private history and experience, and in this letter she asks me to be prudent in speaking of it, giving her reasons as follows: —

‘Cambridge, July 31, 1842. — … I said I was happy in having no secret. It is my nature, and has been the tendency of my life, to wish that all my thoughts and deeds might lie, as the “open secrets” of Nature, free to all who are able to understand them. I have no reserves, except intellectual reserves; for to speak of things to those who cannot receive them is stupidity, rather than frankness. But in this case, I alone am not concerned. Therefore, dear James, give heed to the subject. You have received a key to what was before unknown of your friend; you have made use of it, now let it be buried with the past, over whose passages profound and sad, yet touched with heaven-born beauty, “let silence stand sentinel.”’

I shall endeavor to keep true to the spirit of these sentences in speaking of Margaret’s friendships. Yet not to speak of them in her biography would be omitting the most striking feature of her character. It would be worse than the play of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. Henry the Fourth without Sully, Gustavus Adolphus without Oxenstiern, Napoleon without his marshals, Socrates without his scholars, would be more complete than Margaret without her friends. So that, in touching on these private relations, we must be everywhere “bold,” yet not “too bold.” The extracts will be taken indiscriminately from letters written to many friends.

The insight which Margaret displayed in finding her friends, the magnetism by which she drew them toward herself, the catholic range of her intimacies, the influence which she exercised to develop the latent germ of every character, the constancy with which she clung to each when she had once given and received confidence, the delicate justice which kept every intimacy separate, and the process of transfiguration which took place when she met any one on this mountain of Friendship, giving a dazzling lustre to the details of common life, — all these should be at least touched upon and illustrated, to give any adequate view of her in these relations.

Such a prejudice against her had been created by her faults of manner, that the persons she might most wish to know often retired from her and avoided her. But she was “sagacious of her quarry,” and never suffered herself to be repelled by this. She saw when any one belonged to her, and never rested till she came into possession of her property. I recollect a lady who thus fled from her for several years, yet, at last, became most nearly attached to her. This “wise sweet” friend, as Margaret characterized her in two words, a flower hidden in the solitude of deep woods, Margaret saw and appreciated from the first.

See how, in the following passage, she describes to one of her friends her perception of character, and her power of attracting it, when only fifteen years old.

‘Jamaica Plains, July, 1840. — Do you remember my telling you, at Cohasset, of a Mr. —— staying with us, when I was fifteen, and all that passed? Well, I have not seen him since, till, yesterday, he came here. I was pleased to find, that, even at so early an age, I did not overrate those I valued. He was the same as in memory; the powerful eye dignifying an otherwise ugly face; the calm wisdom, and refined observation, the imposing manière d’être, which anywhere would give him an influence among men, without his taking any trouble, or making any sacrifice, and the great waves of feeling that seemed to rise as an attractive influence, and overspread his being. He said, nothing since his childhood had been so marked as his visit to our house; that it had dwelt in his thoughts unchanged amid all changes. I could have wished he had never returned to change the picture. He looked at me continually, and said, again and again, he should have known me anywhere; but O how changed I must be since that epoch of pride and fulness! He had with him his son, a wild boy of five years old, all brilliant with health and energy, and with the same powerful eye. He said, — You know I am not one to confound acuteness and rapidity of intellect with real genius; but he is for those an extraordinary child. He would astonish you, but I look deep enough into the prodigy to see the work of an extremely nervous temperament, and I shall make him as dull as I can. “Margaret,” (pronouncing the name in the same deliberate searching way he used to do,) “I love him so well, I will try to teach him moderation. If I can help it, he shall not feed on bitter ashes, nor try these paths of avarice and ambition.” It made me feel very strangely to hear him talk so to my old self. What a gulf between! There is scarce a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he remembered and loved. I felt affection for him still; for his character was formed then, and had not altered, except by ripening and expanding! But thus, in other worlds, we shall remember our present selves.’

Margaret’s constancy to any genuine relation, once established, was surprising. If her friends’ aim changed, so as to take them out of her sphere, she was saddened by it, and did not let them go without a struggle. But wherever they continued “true to the original standard,” (as she loved to phrase it) her affectionate interest would follow them unimpaired through all the changes of life. The principle of this constancy she thus expresses in a letter to one of her brothers: —

‘Great and even fatal errors (so far as this life is concerned) could not destroy my friendship for one in whom I am sure of the kernel of nobleness.’

She never formed a friendship until she had seen and known this germ of good; and afterwards judged conduct by this. To this germ of good, to this highest law of each individual, she held them true. But never did she act like those who so often judge of their friend from some report of his conduct, as if they had never known him, and allow the inference from a single act to alter the opinion formed by an induction from years of intercourse. From all such weakness Margaret stood wholly free.

I have referred to the wide range of Margaret’s friendships. Even at this period this variety was very apparent. She was the centre of a group very different from each other, and whose only affinity consisted in their all being polarized by the strong attraction of her mind, — all drawn toward herself. Some of her friends were young, gay and beautiful; some old, sick or studious. Some were children of the world, others pale scholars. Some were witty, others slightly dull. But all, in order to be Margaret’s friends, must be capable of seeking something, — capable of some aspiration for the better. And how did she glorify life to all! all that was tame and common vanishing away in the picturesque light thrown over the most familiar things by her rapid fancy, her brilliant wit, her sharp insight, her creative imagination, by the inexhaustible resources of her knowledge, and the copious rhetoric which found words and images always apt and always ready. Even then she displayed almost the same marvellous gift of conversation which afterwards dazzled all who knew her, — with more perhaps of freedom, since she floated on the flood of our warm sympathies. Those who know Margaret only by her published writings know her least; her notes and letters contain more of her mind; but it was only in conversation that she was perfectly free and at home.

Margaret’s constancy in friendship caused her to demand it in others, and thus she was sometimes exacting. But the pure Truth of her character caused her to express all such feelings with that freedom and simplicity that they became only as slight clouds on a serene sky, giving it a tenderer beauty, and casting picturesque shades over the landscape below. From her letters to different friends I select a few examples of these feelings.

‘The world turns round and round, and you too must needs be negligent and capricious. You have not answered my note; you have not given me what I asked. You do not come here. Do not you act so, — it is the drop too much. The world seems not only turning but tottering, when my kind friend plays such a part.’

* * * * *

‘You need not have delayed your answer so long; why not at once answer the question I asked? Faith is not natural to me; for the love I feel to others is not in the idleness of poverty, nor can I persist in believing the best; merely to save myself pain, or keep a leaning place for the weary heart. But I should believe you, because I have seen that your feelings are strong and constant; they have never disappointed me, when closely scanned.’

* * * * *

‘July 6, 1832. — I believe I behaved very badly the other evening. I did not think so yesterday. I had been too surprised and vexed to recover very easily, but to-day my sophistries have all taken wing, and I feel that nothing good could have made me act with such childish petulance and bluntness towards one who spoke from friendly emotions. Be at peace; I will astonish you by my repose, mildness, and self-possession. No, that is silly; but I believe it cannot be right to be on such terms with any one, that, on the least vexation, I indulge my feelings at his or her expense. We will talk less, but we shall be very good friends still, I hope. Shall not we?’

In the last extract, we have an example of that genuine humility, which, being a love of truth, underlaid her whole character, notwithstanding its seeming pride. She could not have been great as she was, without it.[A]

‘December 19th, 1829. — I shall always be glad to have you come to me when saddened. The melancholic does not misbecome you. The lights of your character are wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath, — its gentle, down-looking shades. Sadness in some is intolerably ungraceful and oppressive; it affects one like a cold rainy day in June or September, when all pleasure departs with the sun; everything seems out of place and irrelative to the time; the clouds are fog, the atmosphere leaden, — but ’tis not so with you.’

Of her own truthfulness to her friends, which led her frankly to speak to them of their faults or dangers, her correspondence gives constant examples.

The first is from a letter of later date than properly belongs to this chapter, but is so wholly in her spirit of candor that I insert it here. It is from a letter written in 1843.

‘I have been happy in the sight of your pure design, of the sweetness and serenity of your mind. In the inner sanctuary we met. But I shall say a few blunt words, such as were frequent in the days of intimacy, and, if they are needless, you will let them fall to the ground. Youth is past, with its passionate joys and griefs, its restlessness, its vague desires. You have chosen your path, you have rounded out your lot, your duties are before you. Now beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dulness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness. Remember the limitations that threaten every professional man, only to be guarded against by great earnestness and watchfulness. So take care of yourself, and let not the intellect more than the spirit be quenched.

* * * * *

‘It is such a relief to me to be able to speak to you upon a subject which I thought would never lie open between us. Now there will be no place which does not lie open to the light. I can always say what I feel. And the way in which you took it, so like yourself, so manly and noble, gives me the assurance that I shall have the happiness of seeing in you that symmetry, that conformity in the details of life with the highest aims, of which I have sometimes despaired. How much higher, dear friend, is “the mind, the music breathing from the” life, than anything we can say! Character is higher than intellect; this I have long felt to be true; may we both live as if we knew it.

* * ‘I hope and believe we may be yet very much to each other. Imperfect as I am, I feel myself not unworthy to be a true friend. Neither of us is unworthy. In few natures does such love for the good and beautiful survive the ruin of all youthful hopes, the wreck of all illusions.’

* * * * *

‘I supposed our intimacy would terminate when I left Cambridge. Its continuing to subsist is a matter of surprise to me. And I expected, ere this, you would have found some Hersilia, or such-like, to console you for losing your Natalia. See, my friend, I am three and twenty. I believe in love and friendship, but I cannot but notice that circumstances have appalling power, and that those links which are not riveted by situation, by interest, (I mean, not mere worldly interest, but the instinct of self-preservation,) may be lightly broken by a chance touch. I speak not in misanthropy, I believe

“Die Zeit ist schlecht, doch giebts noch grosse Herzen.”

‘Surely I maybe pardoned for aiming at the same results with the chivalrous “gift of the Gods.” I cannot endure to be one of those shallow beings who can never get beyond the primer of experience, — who are ever saying, —

       ”Ich habe geglaubt, nun glaube ich erst recht,
      Und geht es auch wunderlich, geht es auch schlecht,
        Ich bleibe in glaubigen Orden.”

Yet, when you write, write freely, and if I don’t like what you say, let me say so. I have ever been frank, as if I expected to be intimate with you good three-score years and ten. I am sure we shall always esteem each other. I have that much faith.’

* * * * *

‘Jan. 1832. — All that relates to — must be interesting to me, though I never voluntarily think of him now. The apparent caprice of his conduct has shaken my faith, but not destroyed my hope. That hope, if I, who have so mistaken others, may dare to think I know myself, was never selfish. It is painful to lose a friend whose knowledge and converse mingled so intimately with the growth of my mind, — an early friend to whom I was all truth and frankness, seeking nothing but equal truth and frankness in return. But this evil may be borne; the hard, the lasting evil was to learn to distrust my own heart, and lose all faith in my power of knowing others. In this letter I see again that peculiar pride, that contempt of the forms and shows of goodness, that fixed resolve to be anything but “like unto the Pharisees,” which were to my eye such happy omens. Yet how strangely distorted are all his views! The daily influence of his intercourse with me was like the breath he drew; it has become a part of him. Can he escape from himself? Would he be unlike all other mortals? His feelings are as false as those of Alcibiades. He influenced me, and helped form me to what I am. Others shall succeed him. Shall I be ashamed to owe anything to friendship? But why do I talk? — a child might confute him by defining the term human being. He will gradually work his way into light; if too late for our friendship, not, I trust, too late for his own peace and honorable well-being. I never insisted on being the instrument of good to him. I practised no little arts, no! not to effect the good of the friend I loved. I have prayed to Heaven, (surely we are sincere when doing that,) to guide him in the best path for him, however far from me that path might lead. The lesson I have learned may make me a more useful friend, a more efficient aid to others than I could be to him; yet I hope I shall not be denied the consolation of knowing surely, one day, that all which appeared evil in the companion of happy years was but error.’

* * * * *

‘I think, since you have seen so much of my character, that you must be sensible that any reserves with those whom I call my friends, do not arise from duplicity, but an instinctive feeling that I could not be understood. I can truly say that I wish no one to overrate me; undeserved regard could give me no pleasure; nor will I consent to practise charlatanism, either in friendship or anything else.’

* * * * *

‘You ought not to think I show a want of generous confidence, if I sometimes try the ground on which I tread, to see if perchance it may return the echoes of hollowness.’

* * * * *

‘Do not cease to respect me as formerly. It seems to me that I have reached the “parting of the ways” in my life, and all the knowledge which I have toiled to gain only serves to show me the disadvantages of each. None of those who think themselves my friends can aid me; each, careless, takes the path to which present convenience impels; and all would smile or stare, could they know the aching and measureless wishes, the sad apprehensiveness, which make me pause and strain my almost hopeless gaze to the distance. What wonder if my present conduct should be mottled by selfishness and incertitude? Perhaps you, who can make your views certain, cannot comprehend me; though you showed me last night a penetration which did not flow from sympathy. But this I may say — though the glad light of hope and ambitious confidence, which has vitalized my mind, should be extinguished forever, I will not in life act a mean, ungenerous, or useless part. Therefore, let not a slight thing lessen your respect for me. If you feel as much pain as I do, when obliged to diminish my respect for any person, you will be glad of this assurance. I hope you will not think this note in the style of a French novel.’

[Footnote A: According to Dryden’s beautiful statement —

 ’For as high turrets, in their airy sweep
  Require foundations, in proportion deep
  And lofty cedars as far upward shoot
  As to the nether heavens they drive the root;
  So low did her secure foundation lie,
  She was not humble, but humility.’]

POWER OF CIRCUMSTANCES.

‘Do you remember a conversation we had in the garden, one starlight evening, last summer, about the incalculable power which outward circumstances have over the character? You would not sympathize with the regrets I expressed, that mine had not been formed amid scenes and persons of nobleness and beauty, eager passions and dignified events, instead of those secret trials and petty conflicts which make my transition state so hateful to my memory and my tastes. You then professed the faith which I resigned with such anguish, — the faith which a Schiller could never attain, — a faith in the power of the human will. Yet now, in every letter, you talk to me of the power of circumstances. You tell me how changed you are. Every one of your letters is different from the one preceding, and all so altered from your former self. For are you not leaving all our old ground, and do you not apologize to me for all your letters? Why do you apologize? I think I know you very, very well; considering that we are both human, and have the gift of concealing our thoughts with words. Nay, further — I do not believe you will be able to become anything which I cannot understand. I know I can sympathize with all who feel and think, from a Dryfesdale up to a Max Piccolomini. You say, you have become a machine. If so, I shall expect to find you a grand, high-pressure, wave-compelling one — requiring plenty of fuel. You must be a steam-engine, and move some majestic fabric at the rate of thirty miles an hour along the broad waters of the nineteenth century. None of your pendulum machines for me! I should, to be sure, turn away my head if I should hear you tick, and mark the quarters of hours; but the buzz and whiz of a good large life-endangerer would be music to mine ears. Oh, no! sure there is no danger of your requiring to be set down quite on a level, kept in a still place, and wound up every eight days. Oh no, no! you are not one of that numerous company, who

                — “live and die,
      Eat, drink, wake, sleep between,
      Walk, talk like clock-work too,
      So pass in order due,
                  Over the scene,
      To where the past — is past,
      The future — nothing yet,” &c. &c.

But we must all be machines: you shall be a steam-engine; — shall be a mill, with extensive water-privileges, — and I will be a spinning jenny. No! upon second thoughts, I will not be a machine. I will be an instrument, not to be confided to vulgar hands, — for instance, a chisel to polish marble, or a whetstone to sharpen steel!’

In an unfinished tale, Margaret has given the following studies of character. She is describing two of the friends of the hero of her story. Unquestionably the traits here given were taken from life, though it might not be easy to recognize the portrait of any individual in either sketch. Yet we insert it here to show her own idea of this relation, and her fine feeling of the action and reaction of these subtle intimacies.

‘Now, however, I found companions, in thought, at least One, who had great effect on my mind, I may call Lytton. He was as premature as myself; at thirteen a man in the range of his thoughts, analyzing motives, and explaining principles, when he ought to have been playing cricket, or hunting in the woods. The young Arab, or Indian, may dispense with mere play, and enter betimes into the histories and practices of manhood, for all these are, in their modes of life, closely connected with simple nature, and educate the body no less than the mind; but the same good cannot be said of lounging lazily under a tree, while mentally accompanying Gil Blas through his course of intrigue and adventure, and visiting with him the impure atmosphere of courtiers, picaroons, and actresses. This was Lytton’s favorite reading; his mind, by nature subtle rather than daring, would in any case have found its food in the now hidden workings of character and passion, the by-play of life, the unexpected and seemingly incongruous relations to be found there. He loved the natural history of man, not religiously, but for entertainment. What he sought, he found, but paid the heaviest price. All his later days were poisoned by his subtlety, which made it impossible for him to look at any action with a single and satisfied eye. He tore the buds open to see if there were no worm sheathed in the blushful heart, and was so afraid of overlooking some mean possibility, that he lost sight of virtue. Grubbing like a mole beneath the surface of earth, rather than reading its living language above, he had not faith enough to believe in the flower, neither faith enough to mine for the gem, and remains at penance in the limbo of halfnesses, I trust not forever. Then all his characteristics wore brilliant hues. He was very witty, and I owe to him the great obligation of being the first and only person who has excited me to frequent and boundless gayety. The sparks of his wit were frequent, slight surprises; his was a slender dart, and rebounded easily to the hand. I like the scintillating, arrowy wit far better than broad, genial humor. The light metallic touch pleases me. When wit appears as fun and jollity, she wears a little of the Silenus air; — the Mercurial is what I like.

‘In later days, — for my intimacy with him lasted many years, — he became the feeder of my intellect. He delighted to ransack the history of a nation, of an art or a science, and bring to me all the particulars. Telling them fixed them in his own memory, which was the most tenacious and ready I have ever known; he enjoyed my clear perception as to their relative value, and I classified them in my own way. As he was omnivorous, and of great mental activity, while my mind was intense, though rapid in its movements, and could only give itself to a few things of its own accord, I traversed on the wings of his effort large demesnes that would otherwise have remained quite unknown to me. They were not, indeed, seen to the same profit as my own province, whose tillage I knew, and whose fruits were the answer to my desire; but the fact of seeing them at all gave a largeness to my view, and a candor to my judgment. I could not be ignorant how much there was I did not know, nor leave out of sight the many sides to every question, while, by the law of affinity, I chose my own.

‘Lytton was not loved by any one. He was not positively hated, or disliked; for there was nothing which the general mind could take firm hold of enough for such feelings. Cold, intangible, he was to play across the life of others. A momentary resentment was sometimes felt at a presence which would not mingle with theirs; his scrutiny, though not hostile, was recognized as unfeeling and impertinent, and his mirth unsettled all objects from their foundations. But he was soon forgiven and forgotten. Hearts went not forth to war against or to seek one who was a mere experimentalist and observer in existence. For myself, I did not love, perhaps, but was attached to him, and the attachment grew steadily, for it was founded, not on what I wanted of him, but on his truth to himself. His existence was a real one; he was not without a pathetic feeling of his wants, but was never tempted to supply them by imitating the properties of any other character. He accepted the law of his being, and never violated it. This is next best to the nobleness which transcends it. I did not disapprove, even when I disliked, his acts.

‘Amadin, my other companion, was as slow and deep of feeling, as Lytton was brilliant, versatile, and cold. His temperament was generally grave, even to apparent dulness; his eye gave little light, but a slow fire burned in its depths. His was a character not to be revealed to himself, or others, except by the important occasions of life. Though every day, no doubt, deepened and enriched him, it brought little that he could show or recall. But when his soul, capable of religion, capable of love, was moved, all his senses were united in the word or action that followed, and the impression made on you was entire. I have scarcely known any capable of such true manliness as he. His poetry, written, or unwritten, was the experience of life. It lies in few lines, as yet, but not one of them will ever need to be effaced.

‘Early that serious eye inspired in me a trust that has never been deceived. There was no magnetism in him, no lights and shades that could stir the imagination; no bright ideal suggested by him stood between the friend and his self. As the years matured that self, I loved him more, and knew him as he knew himself, always in the present moment; he could never occupy my mind in absence.’

Another of her early friends, Rev. F.H. Hedge, has sketched his acquaintance with her in the following paper, communicated by him for these memoirs. Somewhat older than Margaret, and having enjoyed an education at a German university, his conversation was full of interest and excitement to her. He opened to her a whole world of thoughts and speculations which gave movement to her mind in a congenial direction.

* * * * *

“My acquaintance with Margaret commenced in the year 1823, at Cambridge, my native place and hers. I was then a member of Harvard College, in which my father held one of the offices of instruction, and I used frequently to meet her in the social circles of which the families connected with the college formed the nucleus. Her father, at this time, represented the county of Middlesex in the Congress of the United States.

“Margaret was then about thirteen, — a child in years, but so precocious in her mental and physical developments, that she passed for eighteen or twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society, as a lady full-grown.

“When I recall her personal appearance, as it was then and for ten or twelve years subsequent to this, I have the idea of a blooming girl of a florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness, of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress or conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering. With no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time, her face was one that attracted, that awakened a lively interest, that made one desirous of a nearer acquaintance. It was a face that fascinated, without satisfying. Never seen in repose, never allowing a steady perusal of its features, it baffled every attempt to judge the character by physiognomical induction. You saw the evidence of a mighty force, but what direction that force would assume, — whether it would determine itself to social triumphs, or to triumphs of art, — it was impossible to divine. Her moral tendencies, her sentiments, her true and prevailing character, did not appear in the lines of her face. She seemed equal to anything, but might not choose to put forth her strength. You felt that a great possibility lay behind that brow, but you felt, also, that the talent that was in her might miscarry through indifference or caprice.

“I said she had no pretensions to beauty. Yet she was not plain. She escaped the reproach of positive plainness, by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, dancing, busy eyes, which, though usually half closed from near-sightedness, shot piercing glances at those with whom she conversed, and, most of all, by the very peculiar and graceful carriage of her head and neck, which all who knew her will remember as the most characteristic trait in her personal appearance.

“In conversation she had already, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and made much the same impression in society that she did in after years, with the exception, that, as she advanced in life, she learned to control that tendency to sarcasm, — that disposition to ‘quiz,’ — which was then somewhat excessive. It frightened shy young people from her presence, and made her, for a while, notoriously unpopular with the ladies of her circle.

“This propensity seems to have been aggravated by unpleasant encounters in her school-girl experience. She was a pupil of Dr. Park, of Boston, whose seminary for young ladies was then at the height of a well-earned reputation, and whose faithful and successful endeavors in this department have done much to raise the standard of female education among us. Here the inexperienced country girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing misses of the city, who pleased themselves with giggling criticisms not inaudible, nor meant to be inaudible to their subject, on whatsoever in dress and manner fell short of the city mark. Then it was first revealed to her young heart, and laid up for future reflection, how large a place in woman’s world is given to fashion and frivolity. Her mind reacted on these attacks with indiscriminate sarcasms. She made herself formidable by her wit, and, of course, unpopular. A root of bitterness sprung up in her which years of moral culture were needed to eradicate.

“Partly to evade the temporary unpopularity into which she had fallen, and partly to pursue her studies secure from those social avocations which were found unavoidable in the vicinity of Cambridge and Boston, in 1824 or 5 she was sent to Groton, where she remained two years in quiet seclusion.

“On her return to Cambridge, in 1826, I renewed my acquaintance, and an intimacy was then formed, which continued until her death. The next seven years, which were spent in Cambridge, were years of steady growth, with little variety of incident, and little that was noteworthy of outward experience, but with great intensity of the inner life. It was with her, as with most young women, and with most young men, too, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a period of preponderating sentimentality, a period of romance and of dreams, of yearning and of passion. She pursued at this time, I think, no systematic study, but she read with the heart, and was learning more from social experience than from books.

“I remember noting at this time a trait which continued to be a prominent one through life, — I mean, a passionate love for the beautiful, which comprehended all the kingdoms of nature and art. I have never known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from the contemplation of lovely forms.

“Her intercourse with girls of her own age and standing was frank and excellent. Personal attractions, and the homage which they received, awakened in her no jealousy. She envied not their success, though vividly aware of the worth of beauty, and inclined to exaggerate her own deficiencies in that kind. On the contrary, she loved to draw these fair girls to herself, and to make them her guests, and was never so happy as when surrounded, in company, with such a bevy. This attraction was mutual, as, according to Goethe, every attraction is. Where she felt an interest, she awakened an interest. Without flattery or art, by the truth and nobleness of her nature, she won the confidence, and made herself the friend and intimate, of a large number of young ladies, — the belles of their day, — with most of whom she remained in correspondence during the greater part of her life.

“In our evening re-unions she was always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew around her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction of the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a prominent object.

“I have spoken of her conversational talent. It continued to develop itself in these years, and was certainly her most decided gift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearing her converse. She did many things well, but nothing so well as she talked. It is the opinion of all her friends, that her writings do her very imperfect justice. For some reason or other, she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips. She required the stimulus of attentive ears, and answering eyes, to bring out all her power. She must have her auditory about her.

“Her conversation, as it was then, I have seldom heard equalled. It was not so much attractive as commanding. Though remarkably fluent and select, it was neither fluency, nor choice diction, nor wit, nor sentiment, that gave it its peculiar power, but accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment, which contrasted strongly and charmingly with the youth and sex of the speaker. I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking ‘like a book’ was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it. The fact was, her speech, though finished and true as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen, had always an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment, — the result of some organic provision that made finished sentences as natural to her as blundering and hesitation are to most of us. With a little more imagination, she would have made an excellent improvisatrice.

“Here let me say a word respecting the character of Margaret’s mind. It was what in woman is generally called a masculine mind; that is, its action was determined by ideas rather than by sentiments. And yet, with this masculine trait, she combined a woman’s appreciation of the beautiful in sentiment and the beautiful in action. Her intellect was rather solid than graceful, yet no one was more alive to grace. She was no artist, — she would never have written an epic, or romance, or drama, — yet no one knew better the qualities which go to the making of these; and though catholic as to kind, no one was more rigorously exacting as to quality. Nothing short of the best in each kind would content her.

“She wanted imagination, and she wanted productiveness. She wrote with difficulty. Without external pressure, perhaps, she would never have written at all. She was dogmatic, and not creative. Her strength was in characterization and in criticism. Her critique on Goethe, in the second volume of the Dial, is, in my estimation, one of the best things she has written. And, as far as it goes, it is one of the best criticisms extant of Goethe.

“What I especially admired in her was her intellectual sincerity. Her judgments took no bribe from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom nor tradition, nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was not what should be believed, or what ought to be true, but what is true. Her yes and no were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unexpected dissent from the common-places of popular acceptation.”

* * * * *

Margaret, we have said, saw in each of her friends the secret interior capability, which might become hereafter developed into some special beauty or power. By means of this penetrating, this prophetic insight, she gave each to himself, acted on each to draw out his best nature, gave him an ideal out of which he could draw strength and liberty hour by hour. Thus her influence was ever ennobling, and each felt that in her society he was truer, wiser, better, and yet more free and happy, than elsewhere. The “dry light” which Lord Bacon loved, she never knew; her light was life, was love, was warm with sympathy and a boundless energy of affection and hope. Though her love flattered and charmed her friends, it did not spoil them, for they knew her perfect truth. They knew that she loved them, not for what she imagined, but for what she saw, though she saw it only in the germ. But as the Greeks beheld a Persephone and Athene in the passing stranger, and ennobled humanity into ideal beauty, Margaret saw all her friends thus idealized. She was a balloon of sufficient power to take us all up with her into the serene depth of heaven, where she loved to float, far above the low details of earthly life. Earth lay beneath us as a lovely picture, — its sounds came up mellowed into music.

Margaret was, to persons younger than herself, a Makaria and Natalia. She was wisdom and intellectual beauty, filling life with a charm and glory “known to neither sea nor land.” To those of her own age she was sibyl and seer, — a prophetess, revealing the future, pointing the path, opening their eyes to the great aims only worthy of pursuit in life. To those older than herself she was like the Euphorion in Goethe’s drama, child of Faust and Helen, — a wonderful union of exuberance and judgment, born of romantic fulness and classic limitation. They saw with surprise her clear good-sense balancing her now of sentiment and ardent courage. They saw her comprehension of both sides of every question, and gave her their confidence, as to one of equal age, because of so ripe a judgment.

But it was curious to see with what care and conscience she kept her friendships distinct. Her fine practical understanding, teaching her always the value of limits, enabled her to hold apart all her intimacies, nor did one ever encroach on the province of the other. Like a moral Paganini, she played always on a single string, drawing from each its peculiar music, — bringing wild beauty from the slender wire, no less than from the deep-sounding harp string. Some of her friends had little to give her when compared with others; but I never noticed that she sacrificed in any respect the smaller faculty to the greater. She fully realized that the Divine Being makes each part of this creation divine, and that He dwells in the blade of grass as really if not as fully as in the majestic oak which has braved the storm for a hundred years. She felt in full the thought of a poem which she once copied for me from Barry Cornwall, which begins thus: —

 ”She was not fair, nor full of grace,
  Nor crowned with thought, nor aught beside
  No wealth had she of mind or face,
  To win our love, or gain our pride, —
  No lover’s thought her heart could touch, —
  No poet’s dream was round her thrown;
  And yet we miss her — ah, so much!
  Now — she has flown.”

I will close this section of Cambridge Friendship with the two following passages, the second of which was written to some one unknown to me:

‘Your letter was of cordial sweetness to me, as is ever the thought of our friendship, — that sober-suited friendship, of which the web was so deliberately and well woven, and which wears so well.

* * * * *

‘I want words to express the singularity of all my past relations; yet let me try.

‘From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being who could keep the key of my character; that there would be none on whom I could always lean, from whom I could always learn; that I should be a pilgrim and sojourner on earth, and that the birds and foxes would be surer of a place to lay the head than I. You understand me, of course; such beings can only find their homes in hearts. All material luxuries, all the arrangements of society, are mere conveniences to them.

‘This thought, all whose bearings I did not, indeed, understand, affected me sometimes with sadness, sometimes with pride. I mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being; I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way, that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife. All this I did not understand as I do now; but this destiny of the thinker, and (shall I dare to say it?) of the poetic priestess, sibylline, dwelling in the cave, or amid the Lybian sands, lay yet enfolded in my mind. Accordingly, I did not look on any of the persons, brought into relation with me, with common womanly eyes.

‘Yet, as my character is, after all, still more feminine than masculine, it would sometimes happen that I put more emotion into a state than I myself knew. I really was capable or attachment, though it never seemed so till the hour of separation. And if a connexion was torn up by the roots, the soil of my existence showed an unsightly wound, which long refused to clothe itself in verdure.

‘With regard to yourself, I was to you all that I wished to be. I knew that I reigned in your thoughts in my own way. And I also lived with you more truly and freely than with any other person. We were truly friends, but it was not friends as men are friends to one another, or as brother and sister. There was, also, that pleasure, which may, perhaps, be termed conjugal, of finding oneself in an alien nature. Is there any tinge of love in this? Possibly! At least, in comparing it with my relation to — , I find that was strictly fraternal. I valued him for himself. I did not care for an influence over him, and was perfectly willing to have one or fifty rivals in his heart. * *

* * ‘I think I may say, I never loved. I but see my possible life reflected on the clouds. As in a glass darkly, I have seen what I might feel as child, wife, mother, but I have never really approached the close relations of life. A sister I have truly been to many, — a brother to more, — a fostering nurse to, oh how many! The bridal hour of many a spirit, when first it was wed, I have shared, but said adieu before the wine was poured out at the banquet. And there is one I always love in my poetic hour, as the lily looks up to the star from amid the waters; and another whom I visit as the bee visits the flower, when I crave sympathy. Yet those who live would scarcely consider that I am among the living, — and I am isolated, as you say.

‘My dear — , all is well; all has helped me to decipher the great poem of the universe. I can hardly describe to you the happiness which floods my solitary hours. My actual life is yet much clogged and impeded, but I have at last got me an oratory; where I can retire and pray. With your letter, vanished a last regret. You did not act or think unworthily. It is enough. As to the cessation of our confidential inter course, circumstances must have accomplished that long ago; my only grief was that you should do it with your own free will, and for reasons that I thought unworthy. I long to honor you, to be honored by you. Now we will have free and noble thoughts of one another, and all that is best of our friendship shall remain.’

II.

CONVERSATION. — SOCIAL INTERCOURSE.

“Be thou what thou singly art, and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature, and live but one man.”

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

 ”Ah, how mournful look in letters
  Black on white, the words to me,
  Which from lips of thine cast fetters
  Bound the heart, or set It free.”

GOETHE, translated by J.S. Dwight.

 ”Zu erfinden, zu beschliessen,
  Bleibe, Kunstler, oft allein;
  Deines Wirkes zu geniessen
  Eile freudig zum Verein,
  Hier im Ganzen schau erfahre
  Deines eignes Lebenslauf,
  Und die Thaten mancher Jahre
  Gehn dir in dem Nachbar auf.”

GOETHE, Artist’s Song.

* * * * *

When I first knew Margaret, she was much in society, but in a circle of her own, — of friends whom she had drawn around her, and whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent. Of those belonging to this circle, let me recall a few characters.

The young girls whom Margaret had attracted were very different from herself, and from each other. From Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, they came to her, and the little circle of companions would meet now in one house, and now in another, of these pleasant towns. There was A —— , a dark-haired, black-eyed beauty, with clear olive complexion, through which the rich blood flowed. She was bright, beauteous, and cold as a gem, — with clear perceptions of character within a narrow limit, — enjoying society, and always surrounded with admirers, of whose feelings she seemed quite unconscious. While they were just ready to die of unrequited love, she stood untouched as Artemis, scarcely aware of the deadly arrows which had flown from her silver bow. I remember that Margaret said, that Tennyson’s little poem of the skipping-rope must have been written for her, — where the lover expressing his admiration of the fairy-like motion and the light grace of the lady, is told —

 ”Get off, or else my skipping-rope
  Will hit you in the eye.”

Then there was B —— , the reverse of all this, — tender, susceptible, with soft blue eyes, and mouth of trembling sensibility. How sweet were her songs, in which a single strain of pure feeling ever reminded me of those angel symphonies, —

 ”In all whose music, the pathetic minor
  Our ears will cross— “

and when she sang or spoke, her eyes had often the expression of one looking in at her thought, not out at her companion.

Then there was C —— , all animated and radiant with joyful interest in life, — seeing with ready eye the beauty of Nature and of Thought, — entering with quick sympathy into all human interest, taking readily everything which belonged to her, and dropping with sure instinct whatever suited her not. Unknown to her was struggle, conflict, crisis; she grew up harmonious as the flower, drawing nutriment from earth and air, — from “common things which round us lie,” and equally from the highest thoughts and inspirations.

Shall I also speak of D —— , whose beauty had a half-voluptuous character, from those ripe red lips, those ringlets overflowing the well-rounded shoulders, and the hazy softness of those large eyes? Or of E —— , her companion, beautiful too, but in a calmer, purer style, — with eye from which looked forth self-possession, truth and fortitude? Others, well worth notice, I must not notice now.

But among the young men who surrounded Margaret, a like variety prevailed. One was to her interesting, on account of his quick, active intellect, and his contempt for shows and pretences; for his inexhaustible wit, his exquisite taste, his infinitely varied stores of information, and the poetic view which he took of life, painting it with Rembrandt depths of shadow and bursts of light. Another she gladly went to for his compact, thoroughly considered views of God and the world, — for his culture, so much more deep and rich than any other we could find here, — for his conversation, opening in systematic form new fields of thought. Yet men of strong native talent, and rich character, she also liked well to know, however deficient in culture, knowledge, or power of utterance. Each was to her a study, and she never rested till she had found the bottom of every mind, — till she had satisfied herself of its capacity and currents, — measuring it with her sure line, as

— “All human wits
  Are measured, but a few.”

It was by her singular gift of speech that she cast her spells and worked her wonders in this little circle. Full of thoughts and full of words; capable of poetic improvisation, had there not been a slight overweight of a tendency to the tangible and real; capable of clear, complete, philosophic statement, but for the strong tendency to life which melted down evermore in its lava-current the solid blocks of thought; she was yet, by these excesses, better fitted for the arena of conversation. Here she found none adequate for the equal encounter; when she laid her lance in rest, every champion must go down before it. How fluent her wit, which, for hour after hour, would furnish best entertainment, as she described scenes where she had lately been, or persons she had lately seen! Yet she readily changed from gay to grave, and loved better the serious talk which opened the depths of life. Describing a conversation in relation to Christianity, with a friend of strong mind, who told her he had found, in this religion, a home for his best and deepest thoughts, she says— ‘ Ah! what a pleasure ‘to meet with such a daring, yet realizing, mind as his!’ But her catholic taste found satisfaction in intercourse with persons quite different from herself in opinions and tendencies, as the following letter, written in her twentieth year, will indicate:

* * * * *

‘I was very happy, although greatly restrained by the apprehension of going a little too far with these persons of singular refinement and settled opinions.

‘However, I believe I did pretty well, though I did make one or two little mistakes, when most interested; but I was not so foolish as to try to retrieve them. One occasion more particularly, when Mr. G —— , after going more fully into his poetical opinions than I could have expected, stated his sentiments: first, that Wordsworth had, in truth, guided, or, rather, completely vivified the poetry of this age; secondly, that ‘t was his influence which had, in reality, given all his better individuality to Byron. He recurred again and again to this opinion, con amore, and seemed to wish much for an answer; but I would not venture, though ’twas hard for me to forbear, I knew so well what I thought. Mr. G — — ‘s Wordsworthianism, however, is excellent; his beautiful simplicity of taste, and love of truth, have preserved him from any touch of that vague and imbecile enthusiasm, which has enervated almost all the exclusive and determined admirers of the great poet whom I have known in these parts. His reverence, his feeling, are thoroughly intelligent. Everything in his mind is well defined; and his horror of the vague, and false, nay, even (suppose another horror here, for grammar’s sake) of the startling and paradoxical, have their beauty. I think I could know Mr. G —— long, and see him perpetually, without any touch of satiety; such variety is made by the very absence of pretension, and the love of truth. I found much amusement in leading him to sketch the scenes and persons which Lockhart portrays in such glowing colors, and which he, too, has seen with the eye of taste, but how different!’

* * * * *

Our friend was well aware that her forte was in conversation. Here she felt at home. Here she felt her power, and the excitement which the presence of living persons brought, gave all her faculties full activity ‘After all,’ she says, in a letter,

‘this writing is mighty dead. Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything — not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the mind!’

Again, in 1832: —

‘Conversation is my natural element. I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion. Whether this be nature or the force of circumstances, I know not; it is my habit, and bespeaks a second-rate mind.’

I am disposed to think, much as she excelled in general conversation, that her greatest mental efforts were made in intercourse with individuals. All her friends will unite in the testimony, that whatever they may have known of wit and eloquence in others, they have never seen one who, like her, by the conversation of an hour or two, could not merely entertain and inform, but make an epoch in one’s life. We all dated back to this or that conversation with Margaret, in which we took a complete survey of great subjects, came to some clear view of a difficult question, saw our way open before us to a higher plane of life, and were led to some definite resolution or purpose which has had a bearing on all our subsequent career. For Margaret’s conversation turned, at such times, to life, — its destiny, its duty, its prospect. With comprehensive glance she would survey the past, and sum up, in a few brief words, its results; she would then turn to the future, and, by a natural order, sweep through its chances and alternatives, — passing ever into a more earnest tone, into a more serious view, — and then bring all to bear on the present, till its duties grew plain, and its opportunities attractive. Happy he who can lift conversation, without loss of its cheer, to the highest uses! Happy he who has such a gift as this, an original faculty thus accomplished by culture, by which he can make our common life rich, significant and fair, — can give to the hour a beauty and brilliancy which shall make it eminent long after, amid dreary years of level routine!

I recall many such conversations. I remember one summer’s day, in which we rode together, on horseback, from Cambridge to Newton, — a day all of a piece, in which my eloquent companion helped me to understand my past life, and her own, — a day which left me in that calm repose which comes to us, when we clearly apprehend what we ought to do, and are ready to attempt it. I recall other mornings when, not having seen her for a week or two, I would walk with her for hours, beneath the lindens or in the garden, while we related to each other what we had read in our German studies. And I always left her astonished at the progress of her mind, at the amount of new thoughts she had garnered, and filled with a new sense of the worth of knowledge, and the value of life.

There were other conversations, in which, impelled by the strong instinct of utterance, she would state, in words of tragical pathos, her own needs and longings, — her demands on life, — the struggles of mind, and of heart, — her conflicts with self, with nature, with the limitations of circumstances, with insoluble problems, with an unattainable desire. She seemed to feel relief from the expression of these thoughts, though she gained no light from her companion. Many such conversations I remember, while she lived in Cambridge, and one such in Groton; but afterwards, when I met her, I found her mind risen above these struggles, and in a self-possessed state which needed no such outlet for its ferment.

It is impossible to give any account of these conversations; but I add a few scraps, to indicate, however slightly, something of her ordinary manner.

‘Rev. Mr. —— preached a sermon on TIME. But what business had he to talk about time? We should like well to hear the opinions of a great man, who had made good use of time; but not of a little man, who had not used it to any purpose. I wished to get up and tell him to speak of something which he knew and felt.’

* * * * * ‘The best criticism on those sermons which proclaim so loudly the dignity of human nature was from our friend E.S. She said, coming out from Dr. Channing’s church, that she felt fatigued by the demands the sermon made on her, and would go home and read what Jesus said,— “Ye are of more value than many sparrows.” That she could bear; it did not seem exaggerated praise.’

* * * * *

‘The Swedenborgians say, “that is Correspondence,” and the phrenologists, “that it is Approbativeness,” and so think they know all about it. It would not be so, if we could be like the birds, — make one method, and then desert it, and make a new one, — as they build their nests.’

* * * * *

‘As regards crime, we cannot understand what we have not already felt; — thus, all crimes have formed part of our minds. We do but recognize one part of ourselves in the worst actions of others. When you take the subject in this light, do you not incline to consider the capacity for action as something widely differing from the experience of a feeling?’

* * * * *

‘How beautiful the life of Benvenuto Cellini! How his occupations perpetually impelled to thought, — to gushings of thought naturally excited!’

* * * * *

‘Father lectured me for looking satirical when the man of Words spake, and so attentive to the man of Truth, — that is, of God.’

Margaret used often to talk about the books which she and I were reading.

GODWIN. ‘I think you will be more and more satisfied with Godwin. He has fully lived the double existence of man, and he casts the reflexes on his magic mirror from a height where no object in life’s panorama can cause one throb of delirious hope or grasping ambition. At any rate, if you study him, you may know all he has to tell. He is quite free from vanity, and conceals not miserly any of his treasures from the knowledge of posterity.

M’LLE. D’ESPINASSE. ‘I am swallowing by gasps that cauldrony beverage of selfish passion and morbid taste, the letters of M’lle D’Espinasse. It is good for me. How odious is the abandonment of passion, such as this, unshaded by pride or delicacy, unhallowed by religion, — a selfish craving only; every source of enjoyment stifled to cherish this burning thirst. Yet the picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death. I should not like Delphine now.’

Events in life, apparently trivial, often seemed to her full of mystic significance, and it was her pleasure to turn such to poetry. On one occasion, the sight of a passion-flower, given by one lady to another, and then lost, appeared to her so significant of the character, relation, and destiny of the two, that it drew from her lines of which two or three seem worth preserving, as indicating her feeling of social relations.

 ’Dear friend, my heart grew pensive when I saw
    The flower, for thee so sweetly set apart,
  By one whose passionless though tender heart
    Is worthy to bestow, as angels are,
  By an unheeding hand conveyed away,
    To close, in unsoothed night, the promise of its day.

* * * * *

 ’The mystic flower read in thy soul-filled eye
    To its life’s question the desired reply,
  But came no nearer. On thy gentle breast
    It hoped to find the haven of its rest;
  But in cold night, hurried afar from thee,
    It closed its once half-smiling destiny.

 ’Yet thus, methinks, it utters as it dies, —
    ”By the pure truth of those calm, gentle eyes
  Which saw my life should find its aim in thine,
    I see a clime where no strait laws confine.
  In that blest land where twos ne’er know a three,
    Save as the accord of their fine sympathy,
  O, best-loved, I will wait for thee!”’

III. STUDIES.

 ”Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schönen
  Drangst du in der Erkenntniss Land;
  An höhen Glanz sich zu gewöhnen
  Uebt sich, am Reize der Verstand.
  Was bei dem Saitenklang der Musen
  Mit süssem Beben dich, durchdrang,
  Erzog die Kraft in deinem Busen,
  Die sich dereinst zum Weltgeist schwang.”

SCHILLER.

 ”To work, with heart resigned and spirit strong;
  Subdue, with patient toil, life’s bitter wrong,
  Through Nature’s dullest, as her brightest ways,
  We will march onward, singing to thy praise.”

E.S., in the Dial.

“The peculiar nature of the scholar’s occupation consists in this, — that science, and especially that side of it from which he conceives of the whole, shall continually burst forth before him in new and fairer forms. Let this fresh spiritual youth never grow old within him; let no form become fixed and rigid; let each sunrise bring him new joy and love in his vocation, and larger views of its significance.”

FICHTE.

* * * * *

Of Margaret’s studies while at Cambridge, I knew personally only of the German. She already, when I first became acquainted with her, had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian and Spanish literature. But all this amount of reading had not made her “deep-learned in books and shallow in herself;” for she brought to the study of most writers “a spirit and genius equal or superior.” — so far, at least, as the analytic understanding was concerned. Every writer whom she studied, as every person whom she knew, she placed in his own class, knew his relation to other writers, to the world, to life, to nature, to herself. Much as they might delight her, they never swept her away. She breasted the current of their genius, as a stately swan moves up a stream, enjoying the rushing water the more because she resists it. In a passionate love-struggle she wrestled thus with the genius of De Staël, of Rousseau, of Alfieri, of Petrarch.

The first and most striking element in the genius of Margaret was the clear, sharp understanding, which keenly distinguished between things different, and kept every thought, opinion, person, character, in its own place, not to be confounded with any other. The god Terminus presided over her intellect. She knew her thoughts as we know each other’s faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities. Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both. No sophist could pass on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy. This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show the one Truth, or the one Law, manifesting itself in such various phenomena. Add to this her profound faith in truth, which made her a Realist of that order that thoughts to her were things. The world of her thoughts rose around her mind as a panorama, — the sun-in the sky, the flowers distinct in the foreground, the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance, — and all in pure light and shade, all in perfect perspective.

Margaret began to study German early in 1832. Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards in the Foreign Quarterly.

I believe that in about three months from the time that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of its literature. Within the year, she had read Goethe’s Faust, Tasso, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck’s William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Körner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller’s principal dramas, and his lyric poetry. Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies. Her mind opened under this influence, as the apple-blossom at the end of a warm week in May. The thought and the beauty of this rich literature equally filled her mind and fascinated her imagination.

* * * * *

But if she studied books thus earnestly, still more frequently did she turn to the study of men. Authors and their personages were not ideal beings merely, but full of human blood and life. So living men and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid fancy, — every trait intensified, developed, ennobled. Lessing says that “The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him as art ought to flatter, — painting the face not as it actually is, but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the resistance of the material worked in.” Margaret’s portrait-painting intellect treated persons in this way. She saw them as God designed them, — omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from friction of untoward circumstances. If we may be permitted to take a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they actually were, but as they really were. This accounts for her high estimate of her friends, — too high, too flattering, indeed, but justified to her mind by her knowledge of their interior capabilities.

* * * * *

The following extract illustrates her power, even at the age of nineteen, of comprehending the relations of two things lying far apart from each other, and of rising to a point of view which could overlook both: —

‘I have had, — while staying a day or two in Boston, — some of Shirley’s, Ford’s, and Hey wood’s plays from the Athenæum. There are some noble strains of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical, all-absorbing, passion. One of the finest fictions I recollect in those specimens of the Italian novelists, — which you, I think, read when I did, — noble, where it illustrated the Italian national spirit, is ruined by the English novelist, who has transplanted it to an uncongenial soil; yet he has given it beauties which an Italian eye could not see, by investing the actors with deep, continuing, truly English affections.’

* * * * *

The following criticism on some of the dialogues of Plato, (dated June 3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the book, illustrates her downright way of asking world-revered authors to accept the test of plain common sense. As a finished or deliberate opinion, it ought not to be read; for it was not intended as such, but as a first impression hastily sketched. But read it as an illustration of the method in which her mind worked, and you will see that she meets the great Plato modestly, but boldly, on human ground, asking him for satisfactory proof of all that he says, and treating him as a human being, speaking to human beings.

‘June 3, 1833. — I part with Plato with regret. I could have wished to “enchant myself,” as Socrates would say, with him some days longer. Eutyphron is excellent. Tis the best specimen I have ever seen of that mode of convincing. There is one passage in which Socrates, as if it were aside, — since the remark is quite away from the consciousness of Eutyphron, — declares, “qu’il aimerait incomparablement mieux des principes fixes et inébranlables à l’habilité de Dédale avec les tresors de Tantale.” I delight to hear such things from those whose lives have given the right to say them. For ’tis not always true what Lessing says, and I, myself, once thought, —

     ”F. — Von was fur Tugenden spricht er denn?
      MINNA. —— Er spricht von keiner; denn ihn fehlt keine.”

   For the mouth sometimes talketh virtue from the overflowing of
    the heart, as well as love, anger, &c.

‘“Crito” I have read only once, but like it. I have not got it in my heart though, so clearly as the others. The “Apology” I deem only remarkable for the noble tone of sentiment, and beautiful calmness. I was much affected by Phaedo, but think the argument weak in many respects. The nature of abstract ideas is clearly set forth; but there is no justice in reasoning, from their existence, that our souls have lived previous to our present state, since it was as easy for the Deity to create at once the idea of beauty within us, as the sense which brings to the soul intelligence that it exists in some outward shape. He does not clearly show his opinion of what the soul is; whether eternal as the Deity, created by the Deity, or how. In his answer to Simmias, he takes advantage of the general meaning of the words harmony, discord, &c. The soul might be a result, without being a harmony. But I think too many things to write, and some I have not had time to examine. Meanwhile I can think over parts, and say to myself, “beautiful,” “noble,” and use this as one of my enchantments.’

* * * * *

‘I send two of your German books. It pains me to part with Ottilia. I wish we could learn books, as we do pieces of music, and repeat them, in the author’s order, when taking a solitary walk. But, now, if I set out with an Ottilia, this wicked fairy association conjures up such crowds of less lovely companions, that I often cease to feel the influence of the elect one. I don’t like Goethe so well as Schiller now. I mean, I am not so happy in reading him. That perfect wisdom and merciless nature seems cold, after those seducing pictures of forms more beautiful than truth. Nathless, I should like to read the second part of Goethe’s Memoirs, if you do not use it now.’

* * * * *

1832. — I am thinking how I omitted to talk a volume to you about the “Elective Affinities.” Now I shall never say half of it, for which I, on my own account, am sorry. But two or three things I would ask: —

‘What do you think of Charlotte’s proposition, that the accomplished pedagogue must be tiresome in society?

‘Of Ottilia’s, that the afflicted, and ill-educated, are oftentimes singled out by fate to instruct others, and her beautiful reasons why?

‘And what have you thought of the discussion touching graves and monuments?

‘I am now going to dream of your sermon, and of Ottilia’s china-asters. Both shall be driven from my head to-morrow, for I go to town, allured by despatches from thence, promising much entertainment. Woe unto them if they disappoint me!

‘Consider it, I pray you, as the “nearest duty” to answer my questions, and not act as you did about the sphinx-song.’

* * * * *

‘I have not anybody to speak to, that does not talk common-place, and I wish to talk about such an uncommon person, — about Novalis! a wondrous youth, and who has only written one volume. That is pleasant! I feel as though I could pursue my natural mode with him, get acquainted, then make my mind easy in the belief that I know all that is to be known. And he died at twenty-nine, and, as with Körner, your feelings may be single; you will never be called upon to share his experience, and compare his future feelings with his present. And his life was so full and so still.

Then it is a relief, after feeling the immense superiority of Goethe. It seems to me as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe. I have felt this lately, in reading his lyric poems. I am enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully: but when I shut the book, it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked with such an immense variety that belong to beings I had thought so different. What can I bring? There is no answer in my mind, except “It is so,” or “It will be so,” or “No doubt such and such feel so.” Yet, while my judgment becomes daily more tolerant towards others, the same attracting and repelling work is going on in my feelings. But I persevere in reading the great sage, some part of every day, hoping the time will come, when I shall not feel so overwhelmed, and leave off this habit of wishing to grasp the whole, and be contented to learn a little every day, as becomes a pupil.

‘But now the one-sidedness, imperfection, and glow, of a mind like that of Novalis, seem refreshingly human to me. I have wished fifty times to write some letters giving an account, first, of his very pretty life, and then of his one volume, as I re-read it, chapter by chapter. If you will pretend to be very much interested, perhaps I will get a better pen, and write them to you.’ * *

NEED OF COMMUNION.

‘Aug. 7, 1832. — I feel quite lost; it is so long since I have talked myself. To see so many acquaintances, to talk so many words, and never tell my mind completely on any subject — to say so many things which do not seem called out, makes me feel strangely vague and movable.

‘’Tis true, the time is probably near when I must live alone, to all intents and purposes, — separate entirely my acting from my thinking world, take care of my ideas without aid, — except from the illustrious dead, — answer my own questions, correct my own feelings, and do all that hard work for myself. How tiresome ’tis to find out all one’s self-delusion! I thought myself so very independent, because I could conceal some feelings at will, and did not need the same excitement as other young characters did. And I am not independent, nor never shall be, while I can get anybody to minister to me. But I shall go where there is never a spirit to come, if I call ever so loudly.

‘Perhaps I shall talk to you about Körner, but need not write. He charms me, and has become a fixed star in the heaven of my thought; but I understand all that he excites perfectly. I felt very ‘new about Novalis,— “the good Novalis,” as you call him after Mr. Carlyle. He is, indeed, good, most enlightened, yet most pure; every link of his experience framed — no, beaten — from the tried gold.

‘I have read, thoroughly, only two of his pieces, “Die Lehrlinge zu Sais,” and “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” From the former I have only brought away piecemeal impressions, but the plan and treatment of the latter, I believe, I understand. It describes the development of poetry in a mind; and with this several other developments are connected. I think I shall tell you all I know about it, some quiet time after your return, but if not, will certainly keep a Novalis-journal for you some favorable season, when I live regularly for a fort night.’

* * * * *

‘June, 1833. — I return Lessing. I could hardly get through Miss Sampson. E. Galeotti is good in the same way as Minna. Well-conceived and sustained characters, interesting situations, but never that profound knowledge of human nature, those minute beauties, and delicate vivifying traits, which lead on so in the writings of some authors, who may be nameless. I think him easily followed; strong, but not deep.’

* * * * *

‘May, 1833. — Groton. — I think you are wrong in applying your artistical ideas to occasional poetry. An epic, a drama, must have a fixed form in the mind of the poet from the first; and copious draughts of ambrosia quaffed in the heaven of thought, soft fanning gales and bright light from the outward world, give muscle and bloom, — that is, give life, — to this skeleton. But all occasional poems must be moods, and can a mood have a form fixed and perfect, more than a wave of the sea?’

* * * * *

‘Three or four afternoons I have passed very happily at my beloved haunt in the wood, reading Goethe’s “Second Residence in Rome.” Your pencil-marks show that you have been before me. I shut the book each time with an earnest desire to live as he did, — always to have some engrossing object of pursuit. I sympathize deeply with a mind in that state. While mine is being used up by ounces, I wish pailfuls might be poured into it. I am dejected and uneasy when I see no results from my daily existence, but I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.’ * *

* * * * *

‘I think I am less happy, in many respects, than you, but particularly in this. You can speak freely to me of all your circumstances and feelings, can you not? It is not possible for me to be so profoundly frank with any earthly friend. Thus my heart has no proper home; it only can prefer some of its visiting-places to others; and with deep regret I realize that I have, at length, entered on the concentrating stage of life. It was not time. I had been too sadly cramped. I had not learned enough, and must always remain imperfect. Enough! I am glad I have been able to say so much.’

* * * * *

‘I have read nothing, — to signify, — except Goethe’s “Campagne in Frankreich.” Have you looked through it, and do you remember his intercourse with the Wertherian Plessing? That tale pained me exceedingly. We cry, “help, help,” and there is no help — in man at least. How often I have thought, if I could see Goethe, and tell him my state of mind, he would support and guide me! He would be able to understand; he would show me how to rule circumstances, instead of being ruled by them; and, above all, he would not have been so sure that all would be for the best, without our making an effort to act out the oracles; he would have wished to see me what Nature intended. But his conduct to Plessing and Ohlenschlager shows that to him, also, an appeal would have been vain.’

‘Do you really believe there is anything “all-comprehending” but religion? Are not these distinctions imaginary? Must not the philosophy of every mind, or set of minds, be a system suited to guide them, and give a home where they can bring materials among which to accept, reject, and shape at pleasure? Novalis calls those, who harbor these ideas, “unbelievers;” but hard names make no difference. He says with disdain, “To such, philosophy is only a system which will spare them the trouble of reflecting.” Now this is just my case. I do want a system which shall suffice to my character, and in whose applications I shall have faith. I do not wish to reflect always, if reflecting must be always about one’s identity, whether “ich” am the true “ich” &c. I wish to arrive at that point where I can trust myself, and leave off saying, “It seems to me,” and boldly feel, It is so TO ME. My character has got its natural regulator, my heart beats, my lips speak truth, I can walk alone, or offer my arm to a friend, or if I lean on another, it is not the debility of sickness, but only wayside weariness. This is the philosophy I want; this much would satisfy me.

‘Then Novalis says, “Philosophy is the art of discovering the place of truth in every encountered event and circumstance, to attune all relations to truth.”

   ’Philosophy is peculiarly home-sickness; an over-mastering
    desire to be at home.

   ’I think so; but what is there all-comprehending;
    eternally-conscious, about that?’

* * * * *

‘Sept., 1832.— “Not see the use of metaphysics?” A moderate portion, taken at stated intervals, I hold to be of much use as discipline of the faculties. I only object to them as having an absorbing and anti-productive tendency. But ’tis not always so; may not be so with you. Wait till you are two years older, before you decide that ’tis your vocation. Time enough at six-and-twenty to form yourself into a metaphysical philosopher. The brain does not easily get too dry for that. Happy you, in these ideas which give you a tendency to optimism. May you become a proselyte to that consoling faith. I shall never be able to follow you, but shall look after you with longing eyes.’

* * * * *

‘Groton. — Spring has come, and I shall see you soon. If I could pour into your mind all the ideas which have passed through mine, you would be well entertained, I think, for three or four days. But no hour will receive aught beyond its own appropriate wealth.

‘I am at present engaged in surveying the level on which the public mind is poised. I no longer lie in wait for the tragedy and comedy of life; the rules of its prose engage my attention. I talk incessantly with common-place people, full of curiosity to ascertain the process by which materials, apparently so jarring and incapable of classification, get united into that strange whole, the American public. I have read all Jefferson’s letters, the North American, the daily papers, &c., without end. H. seems to be weaving his Kantisms into the American system in a tolerably happy manner.’

* * * * *

* * ‘George Thompson has a voice of uncommon compass and beauty; never sharp in its highest, or rough and husky in its lowest, tones. A perfect enunciation, every syllable round and energetic; though his manner was the one I love best, very rapid, and full of eager climaxes. Earnestness in every part, — sometimes impassioned earnestness, — a sort of “Dear friends, believe, pray believe, I love you, and you MUST believe as I do” expression, even in the argumentative parts. I felt, as I have so often done before, if I were a man, the gift I would choose should be that of eloquence. That power of forcing the vital currents of thousands of human hearts into ONE current, by the constraining power of that most delicate instrument, the voice, is so intense, — yes, I would prefer it to a more extensive fame, a more permanent influence.’

‘Did I describe to you my feelings on hearing Mr. Everett’s eulogy on Lafayette? No; I did not. That was exquisite. The old, hackneyed story; not a new anecdote, not a single reflection of any value; but the manner, the manner^ the delicate inflections of voice, the elegant and appropriate gesture, the sense of beauty produced by the whole, which thrilled us all to tears, flowing from a deeper and purer source than that which answers to pathos. This was fine; but I prefer the Thompson manner. Then there is Mr. Webster’s, unlike either; simple grandeur, nobler, more impressive, less captivating. I have heard few fine speakers; I wish I could hear a thousand.

Are you vexed by my keeping the six volumes of your Goethe? I read him very little either; I have so little time, — many things to do at home, — my three children, and three pupils besides, whom I instruct.

‘By the way, I have always thought all that was said about the anti-religious tendency of a classical education to be old wives’ tales. But their puzzles about Virgil’s notions of heaven and virtue, and his gracefully-described gods and goddesses, have led me to alter my opinions; and I suspect, from reminiscences of my own mental history, that if all governors do not think the same ‘t is from want of that intimate knowledge of their pupils’ minds which I naturally possess. I really find it difficult to keep their morale steady, and am inclined to think many of my own sceptical sufferings are traceable to this source. I well remember what reflections arose in my childish mind from a comparison of the Hebrew history, where every moral obliquity is shown out with such naïveté, and the Greek history, full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power, with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over their vices and failings.’

* * * * *

‘My own favorite project, since I began seriously to entertain any of that sort, is six historical tragedies; of which I have the plans of three quite perfect. However, the attempts I have made on them have served to show me the vast difference between conception and execution. Yet I am, though abashed, not altogether discouraged. My next favorite plan is a series of tales illustrative of Hebrew history. The proper junctures have occurred to me during my late studies on the historical books of the Old Testament. This task, however, requires a thorough and imbuing knowledge of the Hebrew manners and spirit, with a chastened energy of imagination, which I am as yet far from possessing. But if I should be permitted peace and time to follow out my ideas, I have hopes. Perhaps it is a weakness to confide to you embryo designs, which never may glow into life, or mock me by their failure.’

* * * * *

‘I have long had a suspicion that no mind can systematize its knowledge, and carry on the concentrating processes, without some fixed opinion on the subject of metaphysics. But that indisposition, or even dread of the study, which you may remember, has kept me from meddling with it, till lately, in meditating on the life of Goethe, I thought I must get some idea of the history of philosophical opinion in Germany, that I might be able to judge of the influence it exercised upon his mind. I think I can comprehend him every other way, and probably interpret him satisfactorily to others, — if I can get the proper materials. When I was in Cambridge, I got Fichte and Jacobi; I was much interrupted, but some time and earnest thought I devoted. Fichte I could not understand at all; though the treatise which I read was one intended to be popular, and which he says must compel (bezwingen) to conviction. Jacobi I could understand in details, but not in system. It seemed to me that his mind must have been moulded by some other mind, with which I ought to be acquainted, in order to know him well, — perhaps Spinoza’s. Since I came home, I have been consulting Buhle’s and Tennemann’s histories of philosophy, and dipping into Brown, Stewart, and that class of books.’

* * * * *

‘After I had cast the burden of my cares upon you, I rested, and read Petrarch for a day or two. But that could not last. I had begun to “take an account of stock,” as Coleridge calls it, and was forced to proceed. He says few persons ever did this faithfully, without being dissatisfied with the result, and lowering their estimate of their supposed riches. With me it has ended in the most humiliating sense of poverty; and only just enough pride is left to keep your poor friend off the parish. As it is, I have already asked items of several besides yourself; but, though they have all given what they had, it has by no means answered my purpose; and I have laid their gifts aside, with my other hoards, which gleamed so fairy bright, and are now, in the hour of trial, turned into mere slate-stones. I am not sure that even if I do find the philosopher’s stone, I shall be able to transmute them into the gold they looked so like formerly. It will be long before I can give a distinct, and at the same time concise, account of my present state. I believe it is a great era. I am thinking now, — really thinking, I believe; certainly it seems as if I had never done so before. If it does not kill me, something will come of it. Never was my mind so active; and the subjects are God, the universe, immortality. But shall I be fit for anything till I have absolutely re-educated myself? Am I, can I make myself, fit to write an account of half a century of the existence of one of the master-spirits of this world? It seems as if I had been very arrogant to dare to think it; yet will I not shrink back from what I have undertaken, — even by failure I shall learn much.’

* * * * *

‘I am shocked to perceive you think I am writing the life of Goethe. No, indeed! I shall need a great deal of preparation before I shall have it clear in my head, I have taken a great many notes; but I shall not begin to write it, till it all lies mapped out before me. I have no materials for ten years of his life, from the time he went to Weimar, up to the Italian journey. Besides, I wish to see the books that have been written about him in Germany, by friend or foe. I wish to look at the matter from all sides. New lights are constantly dawning on me; and I think it possible I shall come out from the Carlyle view, and perhaps from yours, and distaste you, which will trouble me.

* * ‘How am I to get the information I want, unless I go to Europe? To whom shall I write to choose my materials? I have thought of Mr. Carlyle, but still more of Goethe’s friend, Von Muller. I dare say he would be pleased at the idea of a life of G. written in this hemisphere, and be very willing to help me. If you have anything to tell me, you will, and not mince matters. Of course, my impressions of Goethe’s works cannot be influenced by information I get about his life; but, as to this latter, I suspect I must have been hasty in my inferences. I apply to you without scruple. There are subjects on which men and women usually talk a great deal, but apart from one another. You, however, are well aware that I am very destitute of what is commonly called modesty. With regard to this, how fine the remark of our present subject: “Courage and modesty are virtues which every sort of society reveres, because they are virtues which cannot be counterfeited; also, they are known by the same hue.” When that blush does not come naturally to my face, I do not drop a veil to make people think it is there. All this may be very unlovely, but it is I.’

CHANNING ON SLAVERY.

‘This is a noble work. So refreshing its calm, benign atmosphere, after the pestilence-bringing gales of the day. It comes like a breath borne over some solemn sea which separates us from an island of righteousness. How valuable is it to have among us a man who, standing apart from the conflicts of the herd, watches the principles that are at work, with a truly paternal love for what is human, and may be permanent; ready at the proper point to give his casting-vote to the cause of Right! The author has amplified on the grounds of his faith, to a degree that might seem superfluous, if the question had not become so utterly bemazed and bedarkened of late. After all, it is probable that, in addressing the public at large, it is not best to express a thought in as few words as possible; there is much classic authority for diffuseness.’

RICHTER.

Groton.— ‘Ritcher says, the childish heart vies in the height of its surges with the manly, only is not furnished with lead for sounding them.

‘How thoroughly am I converted to the love of Jean Paul, and wonder at the indolence or shallowness which could resist so long, and call his profuse riches want of system! What a mistake! System, plan, there is, but on so broad a basis that I did not at first comprehend it. In every page I am forced to pencil. I will make me a book, or, as he would say, bind me a bouquet from his pages, and wear it on my heart of hearts, and be ever refreshing my wearied inward sense with its exquisite fragrance. I must have improved, to love him as I do.’

IV. CHARACTER. — AIMS AND IDEAS OF LIFE.

 ”O friend, how flat and tasteless such a life!
  Impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed,
  Still toilsomely ascending step by step,
  Into an unknown realm of dark blue clouds.
  What crowns the ascent? Speak, or I go no further.
  I need a goal, an aim. I cannot toil,
  Because the steps are here in their ascent
  Tell me THE END, or I sit still and weep.”

“NATURLICHE TOCHTER,”

Translated by Margaret.

“And so he went onward, ever onward, for twenty-seven years — then, indeed, he had gone far enough.”

GOETHE’S words concerning Schiller

* * * * *

I would say something of Margaret’s inward condition, of her aims and views in life, while in Cambridge, before closing this chapter of her story. Her powers, whether of mind, heart, or will, have been sufficiently indicated in what has preceded. In the sketch of her friendships and of her studies, we have seen the affluence of her intellect, and the deep tenderness of her woman’s nature. We have seen the energy which she displayed in study and labor.

But to what aim were these powers directed? Had she any clear view of the demands and opportunities of life, any definite plan, any high, pure purpose? This is, after all, the test question, which detects the low-born and low-minded wearer of the robe of gold, —

“Touch them inwardly, they smell of copper.”

Margaret’s life had an aim, and she was, therefore, essentially a moral person, and not merely an overflowing genius, in whom “impulse gives birth to impulse, deed to deed.” This aim was distinctly apprehended and steadily pursued by her from first to last. It was a high, noble one, wholly religious, almost Christian. It gave dignity to her whole career, and made it heroic.

This aim, from first to last, was SELF-CULTURE. If she ever was ambitious of knowledge and talent, as a means of excelling others, and gaining fame, position, admiration, — this vanity had passed before I knew her, and was replaced by the profound desire for a full development of her whole nature, by means of a full experience of life.

In her description of her own youth, she says, ‘VERY EARLY I KNEW THAT
THE ONLY OBJECT IN LIFE WAS TO GROW.’ This is the passage: —

‘I was now in the hands of teachers, who had not, since they came on the earth, put to themselves one intelligent question as to their business here. Good dispositions and employment for the heart gave a tone to all they said, which was pleasing, and not perverting. They, no doubt, injured those who accepted the husks they proffered for bread, and believed that exercise of memory was study, and to know what others knew, was the object of study. But to me this was all penetrable. I had known great living minds. — I had seen how they took their food and did their exercise, and what their objects were. Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow. I was often false to this knowledge, in idolatries of particular objects, or impatient longings for happiness, but I have never lost sight of it, have always been controlled by it, and this first gift of thought has never been superseded by a later love.’

In this she spoke truth. The good and the evil which flow from this great idea of self-development she fully realized. This aim of life, originally self-chosen, was made much more clear to her mind by the study of Goethe, the great master of this school, in whose unequalled eloquence this doctrine acquires an almost irresistible beauty and charm.

“Wholly religious, and almost Christian,” I said, was this aim. It was religious, because it recognized something divine, infinite, imperishable in the human soul, — something divine in outward nature and providence, by which the soul is led along its appointed way. It was almost Christian in its superiority to all low, worldly, vulgar thoughts and cares; in its recognition of a high standard of duty, and a great destiny for man. In its strength, Margaret was enabled to do and bear, with patient fortitude, what would have crushed a soul not thus supported. Yet it is not the highest aim, for in all its forms, whether as personal improvement, the salvation of the soul, or ascetic religion, it has at its core a profound selfishness. Margaret’s soul was too generous for any low form of selfishness. Too noble to become an Epicurean, too large-minded to become a modern ascetic, the defective nature of her rule of life, showed itself in her case, only in a certain supercilious tone toward “the vulgar herd,” in the absence (at this period) of a tender humanity, and in an idolatrous hero-worship of genius and power. Afterward, too, she may have suffered from her desire for a universal human experience, and an unwillingness to see that we must often be content to enter the Kingdom, of Heaven halt and maimed, — that a perfect development here must often be wholly renounced.

But how much better to pursue with devotion, like that of Margaret, an imperfect aim, than to worship with lip-service, as most persons do, even though it be in a loftier temple, and before a holier shrine! With Margaret, the doctrine of self-culture was a devotion to which she sacrificed all earthly hopes and joys, — everything but manifest duty. And so her course was “onward, ever onward,” like that of Schiller, to her last hour of life.

 Burned in her cheek with ever deepening fire
  The spirit’s YOUTH, which never passes by; —
  The COURAGE which, though worlds in hate conspire,
  Conquers, at last, their dull hostility; —
  The lofty FAITH, which, ever mounting higher,
  Now presses on, now waiteth patiently, —
  With which the good tends ever to his goal,
  With which day finds, at last, the earnest soul.

But this high idea which governed our friend’s life, brought her into sharp conflicts, which constituted the pathos and tragedy of her existence, — first with her circumstances, which seemed so inadequate to the needs of her nature, — afterwards with duties to relatives and friends, — and, finally, with the law of the Great Spirit, whose will she found it so hard to acquiesce in.

The circumstances in which Margaret lived appeared to her life a prison. She had no room for utterance, no sphere adequate; her powers were unemployed. With what eloquence she described this want of a field! Often have I listened with wonder and admiration, satisfied that she exaggerated the evil, and yet unable to combat her rapid statements. Could she have seen in how few years a way would open before her, by which she could emerge into an ample field, — how soon she would find troops of friends, fit society, literary occupation, and the opportunity of studying the great works of art in their own home, — she would have been spared many a sharp pang.

Margaret, like every really earnest and deep nature, felt the necessity of a religious faith as the foundation of character. The first notice which I find of her views on this point is contained in the following letter to one of her youthful friends, when only nineteen: —

* * * * *

‘I have hesitated much whether to tell you what you ask about my religion. You are mistaken! I have not formed an opinion. I have determined not to form settled opinions at present. Loving or feeble natures need a positive religion, a visible refuge, a protection, as much in the passionate season of youth as in those stages nearer to the grave. But mine is not such. My pride is superior to any feelings I have yet experienced: my affection is strong admiration, not the necessity of giving or receiving assistance or sympathy. When disappointed, I do not ask or wish consolation, — I wish to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source; I will not have my thoughts diverted, or my feelings soothed; ’tis therefore that my young life is so singularly barren of illusions. I know, I feel the time must come when this proud and impatient heart shall be stilled, and turn from the ardors of Search and Action, to lean on something above. But — shall I say it? — the thought of that calmer era is to me a thought of deepest sadness; so remote from my present being is that future existence, which still the mind may conceive. I believe in Eternal Progression. I believe in a God, a Beauty and Perfection to which I am to strive all my life for assimilation. From these two articles of belief, I draw the rules by which I strive to regulate my life. But, though I reverence all religions as necessary to the happiness of man, I am yet ignorant of the religion of Revelation. Tangible promises! well defined hopes! are things of which I do not now feel the need. At present, my soul is intent on this life, and I think of religion as its rule; and, in my opinion, this is the natural and proper course from youth to age. What I have written is not hastily concocted, it has a meaning. I have given you, in this little space, the substance of many thoughts, the clues to many cherished opinions. ’Tis a subject on which I rarely speak. I never said so much but once before. I have here given you all I know, or think, on the most important of subjects — could you but read understandingly!’

* * * * *

I find, in her journals for 1833, the following passages, expressing the religious purity of her aspirations at that time: —

‘Blessed Father, nip every foolish wish in blossom. Lead me any way to truth and goodness; but if it might be, I would not pass from idol to idol. Let no mean sculpture deform a mind disorderly, perhaps ill-furnished, but spacious and life-warm. Remember thy child, such as thou madest her, and let her understand her little troubles, when possible, oh, beautiful Deity!’

* * * * *

‘Sunday morning. — Mr. — preached on the nature of our duties, social and personal. The sweet dew of truth penetrated my heart like balm. He pointed out the various means of improvement, whereby the humblest of us may be beneficent at last. How just, how nobly true, — how modestly, yet firmly uttered, — his opinions of man, — of time, — of God!

‘My heart swelled with prayer. I began to feel hope that time and toil might strengthen me to despise the “vulgar parts of felicity,” and live as becomes an immortal creature. I am sure, quite sure, that I am getting into the right road. Oh, lead me, my Father! root out false pride and selfishness from my heart; inspire me with virtuous energy, and enable me to improve every talent for the eternal good of myself and others.’

A friend of Margaret, some years older than herself, gives me the following narrative: —

“I was,” says she, in substance, “suffering keenly from a severe trial, and had secluded myself from all my friends, when Margaret, a girl of twenty, forced her way to me. She sat with me, and gave me her sympathy, and, with most affectionate interest, sought to draw me away from my gloom. As far as she was able, she gave me comfort. But as my thoughts were then much led to religious subjects, she sought to learn my religious experience, and listened to it with great interest. I told her how I had sat in darkness for two long years, waiting for the light, and in full faith that it would come; how I had kept my soul patient and quiet, — had surrendered self-will to God’s will, — had watched and waited till at last His great mercy came in an infinite peace to my soul. Margaret was never weary of asking me concerning this state, and said, ‘I would gladly give all my talents and knowledge for such an experience as this.’

“Several years after,” continues this friend, “I was travelling with her, and we sat, one lovely night, looking at the river, as it rolled beneath the yellow moonlight. We spoke again of God’s light in the soul, and I said— ‘Margaret! has that light dawned on your soul?’ She answered, ‘I think it has. But, oh! it is so glorious that I fear it will not be permanent, and so precious that I dare not speak of it, lest it should be gone.’

“That was the whole of our conversation, and I did not speak to her again concerning it.”

* * * * *

Before this time, however, during her residence at Cambridge, she seemed to reach the period of her existence in which she descended lowest into the depths of gloom. She felt keenly, at this time, the want of a home for her heart. Full of a profound tendency toward life, capable of an ardent love, her affections were thrown back on her heart, to become stagnant, and for a while to grow bitter there; Then it was that she felt how empty and worthless were all the attainments and triumphs of the mere intellect; then it was that “she went about to cause her heart to despair of all the labor she had taken under the sun.” Had she not emerged from this valley of the shadow of death, and come on to a higher plane of conviction and hope, her life would have been a most painful tragedy. But, when we know how she passed on and up, ever higher and higher, to the mountain-top, leaving one by one these dark ravines and mist-shrouded valleys, and ascending to where a perpetual sunshine lay, above the region of clouds, and was able to overlook with eagle glance the widest panorama, — we can read, with sympathy indeed, but without pain, the following extracts from a journal: —

‘It was Thanksgiving day, (Nov., 1831,) and I was obliged to go to church, or exceedingly displease my father. I almost always suffered much in church from a feeling of disunion with the hearers and dissent from the preacher; but to-day, more than ever before, the services jarred upon me from their grateful and joyful tone. I was wearied out with mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sadness. I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness; but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet I could not remember ever voluntarily to have done a wrong thing, and my aspiration seemed very high. I looked round the church, and envied all the little children; for I supposed they had parents who protected them, so that they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty. I knew not, then, that none could have any father but God. I knew not, that I was not the only lonely one, that I was not the selected Oedipus, the special victim of an iron law. I was in haste for all to be over, that I might get into the free air. * *

‘I walked away over the fields as fast as I could walk. This was my custom at that time, when I could no longer bear the weight of my feelings, and fix my attention on any pursuit; for I do believe I never voluntarily gave way to these thoughts one moment. The force I exerted I think, even now, greater than I ever knew in any other character. But when I could bear myself no longer, I walked many hours, till the anguish was wearied out, and I returned in a state of prayer. To-day all seemed to have reached its height. It seemed as if I could never return to a world in which I had no place, — to the mockery of humanities. I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer. It was a sad and sallow day of the late autumn. Slow processions of sad clouds were passing over a cold blue sky; the hues of earth were dull, and gray, and brown, with sickly struggles of late green here and there; sometimes a moaning gust of wind drove late, reluctant leaves across the path; — there was no life else. In the sweetness of my present peace, such days seem to me made to tell man the worst of his lot; but still that November wind can bring a chill of memory.

‘I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fulness of its spring life. It was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marvelled that it did not quite lose itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child. I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it MUST do it, — that it must make all this false true, — and sow new and immortal plants in the garden of God, before it could return again. I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the ALL, and all was mine. This truth came to me, and I received it unhesitatingly; so that I was for that hour taken up into God. In that true ray most of the relations of earth seemed mere films, phenomena. * *

‘My earthly pain at not being recognized never went deep after this hour. I had passed the extreme of passionate sorrow; and all check, all failure, all ignorance, have seemed temporary ever since. When I consider that this will be nine years ago next November, I am astonished that I have not gone on faster since; that I am not yet sufficiently purified to be taken back to God. Still, I did but touch then on the only haven of Insight. You know what I would say. I was dwelling in the ineffable, the unutterable. But the sun of earth set, and it grew dark around; the moment came for me to go. I had never been accustomed to walk alone at night, for my father was very strict on that subject, but now I had not one fear. When I came back, the moon was riding clear above the houses. I went into the churchyard, and there offered a prayer as holy, if not as deeply true, as any I know now; a prayer, which perhaps took form as the guardian angel of my life. If that word in the Bible, Selah, means what gray-headed old men think it does, when they read aloud, it should be written here, — Selah!

‘Since that day, I have never more been completely engaged in self; but the statue has been emerging, though slowly, from the block. Others may not see the promise even of its pure symmetry, but I do, and am learning to be patient. I shall be all human yet; and then the hour will come to leave humanity, and live always in the pure ray.

‘This first day I was taken up; but the second time the Holy Ghost descended like a dove. I went out again for a day, but this time it was spring. I walked in the fields of Groton. But I will not describe that day; its music still sounds too sweetly near. Suffice it to say, I gave it all into our Father’s hands, and was no stern-weaving Fate more, but one elected to obey, and love, and at last know. Since then I have suffered, as I must suffer again, till all the complex be made simple, but I have never been in discord with the grand harmony.’

GROTON AND PROVIDENCE.

LETTERS AND JOURNALS.

* * * * *

   ”What hath not man sought out and found,
  But his dear God? Who yet his glorious love
  Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground
    With showers, and frosts, with love and awe.”

HERBERT.

“No one need pride himself upon Genius, for it is the free-gift of God; but of honest Industry and true devotion to his destiny any man may well be proud; indeed, this thorough, integrity of purpose is itself the Divine Idea in its most common form, and no really honest mind is without communion with God”

FICHTE.

 ”God did anoint thee with his odorous oil,
  To wrestle, not to reign; and he assigns
  All thy tears over, like pure crystallines,
  For younger fellow-workers of the soil
  To wear for amulets. So others shall
  Take patience, labor, to their hearts and hands,
  From thy hands, and thy heart, and thy brave cheer,
  And God’s grace fructify through thee to all.”

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

 ”While I was restless, nothing satisfied,
  Distrustful, most perplexed — yet felt somehow
  A mighty power was brooding, taking shape
  Within me; and this lasted till one night
  When, as I sat revolving it and more,
  A still voice from without said,— ‘Seest thou not,
  Desponding child, whence came defeat and loss?
  Even from thy strength.’”

BROWNING.

III.

GROTON AND PROVIDENCE.

* * * * *

‘Heaven’s discipline has been invariable to me. The seemingly most pure and noble hopes have been blighted; the seemingly most promising connections broken. The lesson has been endlessly repeated: “Be humble, patient, self-sustaining; hope only for occasional aids; love others, but not engrossingly, for by being much alone your appointed task can best be done!” What a weary work is before me, ere that lesson shall be fully learned! Who shall wonder at the stiff-necked, and rebellious folly of young Israel, bowing down to a brute image, though the prophet was bringing messages from the holy mountain, while one’s own youth is so obstinately idolatrous! Yet will I try to keep the heart with diligence, nor ever fear that the sun is gone out because I shiver in the cold and dark!’

Such was the tone of resignation in which Margaret wrote from Groton, Massachusetts, whither, much to her regret, her father removed in the spring of 1833. Extracts from letters and journals will show how stern was her schooling there, and yet how constant was her faith, that

   ”God keeps a niche
  In heaven to hold our idols! And albeit
  He breaks them to our faces, and denies
  That our close kisses should impair their white,
  I know we shall behold them raised, complete,
  The dust shook from their beauty, — glorified,
  New Memnons singing in the great God-light.”

SAD WELCOME HOME.

‘Groton, April 25, 1833. — I came hither, summoned by the intelligence, that our poor — had met with a terrible accident. I found the dear child, — who had left me so full of joy and eagerness, that I thought with a sigh, not of envy, how happy he, at least, would be here, — burning with fever. He had expected me impatiently, and was very faint lest it should not be “Margaret” who had driven up. I confess I greeted our new home with a flood of bitter tears. He behaves with great patience, sweetness, and care for the comfort of others. This has been a severe trial for mother, fatigued, too, as she was, and full of care; but her conduct is angelic. I try to find consolation in all kinds of arguments, and to distract my thoughts till the precise amount of injury is surely known. I am not idle a moment. When not-with — , in whose room I sit, sewing, and waiting upon him, or reading aloud a great part of the day, I solace my soul with Goethe, and follow his guidance into realms of the “Wahren, Guten, and Schönen.”’

OCCUPATIONS.

‘May, 1833. — As to German, I have done less than I hoped, so much had the time been necessarily broken up. I have with me the works of Goethe which I have not yet read, and am now engaged upon “Kunst and Alterthum,” and “Campagne in Frankreich.” I still prefer Goethe to any one, and, as I proceed, find more and more to learn, and am made to feel that my general notion of his mind is most imperfect, and needs testing and sifting.

‘I brought your beloved Jean Paul with me, too. I cannot yet judge well, but think we shall not be intimate. His infinitely variegated, and certainly most exquisitely colored, web fatigues attention. I prefer, too, wit to humor, and daring imagination to the richest fancy. Besides, his philosophy and religion seem to be of the sighing sort, and, having some tendency that way myself, I want opposing force in a favorite author. Perhaps I have spoken unadvisedly; if so, I shall recant on further knowledge.’

And thus recant she did, when familiar acquaintance with the genial and sagacious humorist had won for him her reverent love.

RICHTER.

     ’Poet of Nature! Gentlest of the wise,
        Most airy of the fanciful, most keen
      Of satirists! — thy thoughts, like butterflies,
        Still near the sweetest scented flowers have been
      With Titian’s colors thou canst sunset paint,
        With Raphael’s dignity, celestial love;
      With Hogarth’s pencil, each deceit and feint
        Of meanness and hypocrisy reprove;

     Canst to devotion’s highest flight sublime
        Exalt the mind, by tenderest pathos’ art,
        Dissolve, in purifying tears, the heart,
      Or bid it, shuddering, recoil at crime;
        The fond illusions of the youth and maid,
      At which so many world-formed sages sneer,
        When by thy altar-lighted torch displayed,
      Our natural religion must appear.
      All things in thee tend to one polar star,
      Magnetic all thy influences are!’

‘Some murmur at the “want of system” in Richter’s writings.

     ’A labyrinth! a flowery wilderness!
        Some in thy “slip-boxes” and “honey-moons”
      Complain of — want of order, I confess,
        But not of system in its highest sense.
      Who asks a guiding clue through this wide mind,
      In love of Nature such will surely find.
        In tropic climes, live like the tropic bird,
      Whene’er a spice-fraught grove may tempt thy stay;
        Nor be by cares of colder climes disturbed —
      No frost the summer’s bloom shall drive away;
      Nature’s wide temple and the azure dome
      Have plan enough, for the free spirit’s home!’

‘Your Schiller has already given me great pleasure. I have been reading the “Revolt in the Netherlands” with intense interest, and have reflected much upon it. The volumes are numbered in my little book-case, and as the eye runs over them, I thank the friendly heart that put all this genius and passion within my power.

‘I am glad, too, that you thought of lending me “Bigelow’s Elements.” I have studied the Architecture attentively, till I feel quite mistress of it all. But I want more engravings, Vitruvius, Magna Græcia, the Ionian Antiquities, &c. Meanwhile, I have got out all our tours in Italy. Forsyth, a book I always loved much, I have re-read with increased pleasure, by this new light. Goethe, too, studied architecture while in Italy; so his books are full of interesting information; and Madame De Stael, though not deep, is tasteful.’

* * * * *

‘American History! Seriously, my mind is regenerating as to my country, for I am beginning to appreciate the United States and its great men. The violent antipathies, — the result of an exaggerated love for, shall I call it by so big a name as the “poetry of being?” — and the natural distrust arising from being forced to hear the conversation of half-bred men, all whose petty feelings were roused to awkward life by the paltry game of local politics, — are yielding to reason and calmer knowledge. Had I but been educated in the knowledge of such men as Jefferson, Franklin, Rush! I have learned now to know them partially. And I rejoice, if only because my father and I can have so much in common on this topic. All my other pursuits have led me away from him; here he has much information and ripe judgment. But, better still, I hope to feel no more that sometimes despairing, sometimes insolently contemptuous, feeling of incongeniality with my time and place. Who knows but some proper and attainable object of pursuit may present itself to the cleared eye? At any rate, wisdom is good, if it brings neither bliss nor glory.’

* * * * *

March, 1834. — Four pupils are a serious and fatiguing charge for one of my somewhat ardent and impatient disposition. Five days in the week I have given daily lessons in three languages, in Geography and History, besides many other exercises on alternate days. This has consumed often eight, always five hours of my day. There has been, also, a great deal of needle-work to do, which is now nearly finished, so that I shall not be obliged to pass my time about it when everything looks beautiful, as I did last summer. We have had very poor servants, and, for some time past, only one. My mother has been often ill. My grandmother, who passed the winter with us, has been ill. Thus, you may imagine, as I am the only grown-up daughter, that my time has been considerably taxed.

‘But as, sad or merry, I must always be learning, I laid down a course of study at the beginning of winter, comprising certain subjects, about which I had always felt deficient. These were the History and Geography of modern Europe, beginning the former in the fourteenth century; the Elements of Architecture; the works of Alfieri, with his opinions on them; the historical and critical works of Goethe and Schiller, and the outlines of history of our own country.

‘I chose this time as one when I should have nothing to distract or dissipate my mind. I have nearly completed this course, in the style I proposed, — not minute or thorough. I confess, — though I have had only three evenings in the week, and chance hours in the day, for it. I am very glad I have undertaken it, and feel the good effects already. Occasionally, I try my hand at composition, but have not completed anything to my own satisfaction. I have sketched a number of plans, but if ever accomplished, it must be in a season of more joyful energy, when my mind has been renovated, and refreshed by change of scene or circumstance. My translation of Tasso cannot be published at present, if ‘it ever is.’

* * * * *

‘My object is to examine thoroughly, as far as my time and abilities will permit, the evidences of the Christian Religion. I have endeavored to get rid of this task as much and as long as possible; to be content with superficial notions, and, if I may so express it, to adopt religion as a matter of taste. But I meet with infidels very often; two or three of my particular friends are deists; and their arguments, with distressing sceptical notions of my own, are haunting me forever. I must satisfy myself; and having once begun, I shall go on as far as I can.

‘My mind often swells with thoughts on these subjects, which I long to pour out on some person of superior calmness and strength, and fortunate in more accurate knowledge. I should feel such a quieting reaction. But, generally, it seems best that I should go through these conflicts alone. The process will be slower, more irksome, more distressing, but the results will be my own, and I shall feel greater confidence in them.’

MISS MARTINEAU.

In the summer of 1835, Margaret found a fresh stimulus to self-culture in the society of Miss Martineau, whom she met while on a visit at Cambridge, in the house of her friend, Mrs. Farrar. How animating this intercourse then was to her, appears from her journals.

Miss Martineau received me so kindly as to banish all embarrassment at once. We had some talk about “Carlyleism,” and I was not quite satisfied with the ground she took, but there was no opportunity for full discussion. I wished to give myself wholly up to receive an impression of her. What shrewdness in detecting various shades of character! Yet, what she said of Hannah More and Miss Edgeworth, grated upon my feelings.’

Again, later: —

‘I cannot conceive how we chanced upon the subject of our conversation, but never shall I forget what she said. It has bound me to her. In that hour, most unexpectedly to me, we passed the barrier that separates acquaintance from friendship, and I saw how greatly her heart is to be valued.’

And again: —

‘We sat together close to the pulpit. I was deeply moved by Mr.— ‘s manner of praying for “our friends,” and I put up this prayer for my companion, which I recorded, as it rose in my heart: “Author of good, Source of all beauty and holiness, thanks to Thee for the purifying, elevating communion that I have enjoyed with this beloved and revered being. Grant, that the thoughts she has awakened, and the bright image of her existence, may live in my memory, inciting my earth-bound spirit to higher words and deeds. May her path be guarded and blessed. May her noble mind be kept firmly poised in its native truth, unsullied by prejudice or error, and strong to resist whatever outwardly or inwardly shall war against its high vocation. May each day bring to this generous seeker new riches of true philosophy and of Divine Love. And, amidst all trials, give her to know and feel that Thou, the All-sufficing, art with her, leading her on through eternity to likeness of Thyself.”

* * * * *

‘I sigh for an intellectual guide. Nothing but the sense of what God has done for me, in bringing me nearer to himself, saves me from despair. With what envy I looked at Flaxman’s picture of Hesiod sitting at the feet of the Muse! How blest would it be to be thus instructed in one’s vocation! Anything would I do and suffer, to be sure that, when leaving earth, I should not be haunted with recollections of “aims unreached, occasions lost.” I have hoped some friend would do, — what none has ever yet done, — comprehend me wholly, mentally, and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself. I have had some hope that Miss Martineau might be this friend, but cannot yet tell. She has what I want, — vigorous reasoning powers, invention, clear views of her objects, — and she has been trained to the best means of execution. Add to this, that there are no strong intellectual sympathies between us, such as would blind her to my defects.’

* * * * *

‘A delightful letter from Miss Martineau. I mused long upon the noble courage with which she stepped forward into life, and the accurate judgment with which she has become acquainted with its practical details, without letting her fine imagination become tamed. I shall be cheered and sustained, amidst all fretting and uncongenial circumstances, by remembrance of her earnest love of truth and ardent faith.’

ILLNESS

‘A terrible feeling in my head, but kept about my usual avocations. Read Ugo Foscolo’s Sepolcri, and Pindemonti’s answer, but could not relish either, so distressing was the weight on the top of the brain; sewed awhile, and then went out to get warm, but could not, though I walked to the very end of Hazel-grove, and the sun was hot upon me. Sat down, and, though seemingly able to think with only the lower part of my head, meditated literary plans, with full hope that, if I could command leisure, I might do something good. It seemed as if I should never reach home, as I was obliged to sit down incessantly.

‘For nine long days and nights, without intermission, all was agony, — fever and dreadful pain in my head. Mother tended me like an angel all that time, scarcely ever leaving me, night or day. My father, too, habitually so sparing in tokens of affection, was led by his anxiety to express what he felt towards me in stronger terms than he had ever used in the whole course of my life. He thought I might not recover, and one morning, coming into my room, after a few moments’ conversation, he said: “My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault.” These words, — so strange from him, who had scarce ever in my presence praised me, and who, as I knew, abstained from praise as hurtful to his children, — affected me to tears at the time, although I could not foresee how dear and consolatory this extravagant expression of regard would very soon become. The family were deeply moved by the fervency of his prayer of thanksgiving, on the Sunday morning when I was somewhat recovered; and to mother he said, “I have no room for a painful thought now that our daughter is restored.”

‘For myself, I thought I should die; but I was calm, and looked to God without fear. When I remembered how much struggle awaited me if I remained, and how improbable it was that any of my cherished plans would bear fruit, I felt willing to go. But Providence did not so will it. A much darker dispensation for our family was in store.’

DEATH OF HER FATHER.

‘On the evening of the 30th of September, 1835, my father was seized with cholera, and on the 2d of October, was a corpse. For the first two days, my grief, under this calamity, was such as I dare not speak of. But since my father’s head is laid in the dust, I feel an awful calm, and am becoming familiar with the thoughts of being an orphan. I have prayed to God that duty may now be the first object, and self set aside. May I have light and strength to do what is right, in the highest sense, for my mother, brothers, and sister. * *

‘It has been a gloomy week, indeed. The children have all been ill, and dearest mother is overpowered with sorrow, fatigue, and anxiety. I suppose she must be ill too, when the children recover. I shall endeavor to keep my mind steady, by remembering that there is a God, and that grief is but for a season. Grant, oh Father, that neither the joys nor sorrows of this past year shall have visited my heart in vain! Make me wise and strong for the performance of immediate duties, and ripen me, by what means Thou seest best, for those which lie beyond.

‘My father’s image follows me constantly. Whenever I am in my room, he seems to open the door, and to look on me with a complacent, tender smile. What would I not give to have it in my power, to make that heart once more beat with joy! The saddest feeling is the remembrance of little things, in which I have fallen short of love and duty. I never sympathized in his liking for this farm, and secretly wondered how a mind which had, for thirty years, been so widely engaged in the affairs of men, could care so much for trees and crops. But now, amidst the beautiful autumn days, I walk over the grounds, and look with painful emotions at every little improvement. He had selected a spot to place a seat where I might go to read alone, and had asked me to visit it. I contented myself with “When you please, father;” but we never went! What would I not now give, if I had fixed a time, and shown more interest! A day or two since, I went there. The tops of the distant blue hills were veiled in delicate autumn haze; soft silence brooded over the landscape; on one side, a brook gave to the gently sloping meadow spring-like verdure; on the other, a grove, — which he had named for me, — lay softly glowing in the gorgeous hues of October. It was very sad. May this sorrow give me a higher sense of duty in the relationships which remain.

‘Dearest mother is worn to a shadow. Sometimes, when I look on her pale face, and think of all her grief, and the cares and anxieties which now beset her, I am appalled by the thought that she may not continue with us long. Nothing sustains me now but the thought that God, who saw fit to restore me to life when I was so very willing to leave it, — more so, perhaps than I shall ever be again, — must have some good work for me to do.’

* * * * *

‘Nov. 3, 1835. — I thought I should be able to write ere now, how our affairs were settled, but that time has not come yet. My father left no will, and, in consequence, our path is hedged in by many petty difficulties. He has left less property than we had anticipated, for he was not fortunate in his investments in real estate. There will, however, be enough to maintain my mother, and educate the children decently. I have often had reason to regret being of the softer sex, and never more than now. If I were an eldest son, I could be guardian to my brothers and sister, administer the estate, and really become the head of my family. As it is, I am very ignorant of the management and value of property, and of practical details. I always hated the din of such affairs, and hoped to find a life-long refuge from them in the serene world of literature and the arts. But I am now full of desire to learn them, that I may be able to advise and act, where it is necessary. The same mind which has made other attainments, can, in time, compass these, however uncongenial to its nature and habits.’

* * * * *

‘I shall be obliged to give up selfishness in the end. May God enable me to see the way clear, and not to let down the intellectual, in raising the moral tone of my mind. Difficulties and duties became distinct the very night after my father’s death, and a solemn prayer was offered then, that I might combine what is due to others with what is due to myself. The spirit of that prayer I shall constantly endeavor to maintain. What ought to be done for a few months to come is plain, and, as I proceed, the view will open.’

TRIAL.

The death of her father brought in its train a disappointment as keen as Margaret could well have been called on to bear. For two years and more she had been buoyed up to intense effort by the promise of a visit to Europe, for the end of completing her culture. And as the means of equitably remunerating her parents for the cost of such a tour, she had faithfully devoted herself to the teaching of the younger members of the family. Her honored friends, Professor and Mrs. Farrar, who were about visiting the Old World, had invited her to be their companion; and, as Miss Martineau was to return to England in the ship with them, the prospect before her was as brilliant with generous hopes as her aspiring imagination could conceive. But now, in her journal of January 1, 1836, she writes: —

‘The New-year opens upon me under circumstances inexpressibly sad. I must make the last great sacrifice, and, apparently, for evil to me and mine. Life, as I look forward, presents a scene of struggle and privation only. Yet “I bate not a jot of heart,” though much “of hope.” My difficulties are not to be compared with those over which many strong souls have triumphed. Shall I then despair? If I do, I am not a strong soul.’

Margaret’s family treated her, in this exigency, with the grateful consideration due to her love, and urgently besought her to take the necessary means, and fulfil her father’s plan. But she could not make up her mind to forsake them, preferring rather to abandon her long-cherished literary designs. Her struggles and her triumph thus appear in her letters: —

‘January 30, 1836. — I was a great deal with Miss Martineau, while in Cambridge, and love her more than ever. She is to stay till August, and go to England with Mr. and Mrs. Farrar. If I should accompany them I shall be with her while in London, and see the best literary society. If I should go, you will be with mother the while, will not you?[A] Oh, dear E —— , you know not how I fear and tremble to come to a decision. My temporal all seems hanging upon it, and the prospect is most alluring. A few thousand dollars would make all so easy, so safe. As it is, I cannot tell what is coming to us, for the estate will not be settled when I go. I pray to God ceaselessly that I may decide wisely.’

* * * * *

‘April 17th, 1836. — If I am not to go with you I shall be obliged to tear my heart, by a violent effort, from its present objects and natural desires. But I shall feel the necessity, and will do it if the life-blood follows through the rent. Probably, I shall not even think it best to correspond with you at all while you are in Europe. Meanwhile, let us be friends indeed. The generous and unfailing love which you have shown me during these three years, when I could be so little to you, your indulgence for my errors and fluctuations, your steady faith in my intentions, have done more to shield and sustain me than any other earthly influence. If I must now learn to dispense with feeling them constantly near me, at least their remembrance can never, never be less dear. I suppose I ought, instead of grieving that we are soon to be separated, now to feel grateful for an intimacy of extraordinary permanence, and certainly of unstained truth and perfect freedom on both sides.

   ’As to my feelings, I take no pleasure in speaking of them;
    but I know not that I could give you a truer impression of
    them, than by these lines which I translate from the German of
    Uhland. They are entitled “JUSTIFICATION.”

     ”Our youthful fancies, idly fired,
        The fairest visions would embrace;
      These, with impetuous tears desired,
        Float upward into starry space;
      Heaven, upon the suppliant wild,
        Smiles down a gracious No! — In vain
      The strife! Yet be consoled, poor child,
        For the wish passes with the pain.

     But when from such idolatry
        The heart has turned, and wiser grown,
      In earnestness and purity
        Would make a nobler plan its own, —
      Yet, after all its zeal and care,
        Must of its chosen aim despair, —
      Some bitter tears may be forgiven
        By Man, at least, — we trust, by Heaven.”’

[Footnote A: Her eldest brother.]

BIRTH-DAY.

‘May 23d, 1836. — I have just been reading Goethe’s Lebensregel. It is easy to say “Do not trouble yourself with useless regrets for the past; enjoy the present, and leave the future to God.” But it is not easy for characters, which are by nature neither calm nor careless, to act upon these rules. I am rather of the opinion of Novalis, that “Wer sich der hochsten Lieb ergeben Genest von ihnen Wunden nie.”

‘But I will endeavor to profit by the instructions of the great philosopher who teaches, I think, what Christ did, to use without overvaluing the world.

‘Circumstances have decided that I must not go to Europe, and shut upon me the door, as I think, forever, to the scenes I could have loved. Let me now try to forget myself, and act for others’ sakes. What I can do with my pen, I know not. At present, I feel no confidence or hope. The expectations so many have been led to cherish by my conversational powers, I am disposed to deem ill-founded. I do not think I can produce a valuable work. I do not feel in my bosom that confidence necessary to sustain me in such undertakings, — the confidence of genius. But I am now but just recovered from bodily illness, and still heart-broken by sorrow and disappointment. I may be renewed again, and feel differently. If I do not soon, I will make up my mind to teach. I can thus get money, which I will use for the benefit of my dear, gentle, suffering mother, — my brothers and sister. This will be the greatest consolation to me, at all events.’

DEATH IN LIFE.

‘The moon tempted me out, and I set forth for a house at no great distance. The beloved south-west was blowing; the heavens were flooded with light, which could not diminish the tremulously pure radiance of the evening star; the air was full of spring sounds, and sweet spring odors came up from the earth. I felt that happy sort of feeling, as if the soul’s pinions were budding. My mind was full of poetic thoughts, and nature’s song of promise was chanting in my heart.

‘But what a change when I entered that human dwelling! I will try to give you an impression of what you, I fancy, have never come in contact with. The little room — they have but one — contains a bed, a table, and some old chairs. A single stick of wood burns in the fire-place. It is not needed now, but those who sit near it have long ceased to know what spring is. They are all frost. Everything is old and faded, but at the same time as clean and carefully mended as possible. For all they know of pleasure is to get strength to sweep those few boards, and mend those old spreads and curtains. That sort of self-respect they have, and it is all of pride their many years of poor-tith has left them.

‘And there they sit, — mother and daughter! In the mother, ninety years have quenched every thought and every feeling, except an imbecile interest about her daughter, and the sort of self-respect I just spoke of. Husband, sons, strength, health, house and lands, all are gone. And yet these losses have not had power to bow that palsied head to the grave. Morning by morning she rises without a hope, night by night she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, “the tomb of her dead self,” we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it in its summer day.

‘But can we think of spring, or summer, or anything joyous or really life-like, when we look at the daughter? — that bloodless effigy of humanity, whose care is to eke out this miserable existence by means of the occasional doles of those who know how faithful and good a child she has been to that decrepit creature; who thinks herself happy if she can be well enough, by hours of patient toil, to perform those menial services which they both require; whose talk is of the price of pounds of sugar, and ounces of tea, and yards of flannel; whose only intellectual resource is hearing five or six verses of the Bible read every day,— “my poor head,” she says, “cannot bear any more;” and whose only hope is the death to which she has been so slowly and wearily advancing, through many years like this.

‘The saddest part is, that she does not wish for death. She clings to this sordid existence. Her soul is now so habitually enwrapt in the meanest cares, that if she were to be lifted two or three steps upward, she would not know what to do with life; how, then, shall she soar to the celestial heights? Yet she ought; for she has ever been good, and her narrow and crushing duties have been performed with a self-sacrificing constancy, which I, for one, could never hope to equal.

‘While I listened to her, — and I often think it good for me to listen to her patiently, — the expressions you used in your letter, about “drudgery,” occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the “soul’s impulses.” It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what “Ought” means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good enough to love the Ought.

‘Then I came again into the open air, and saw those resplendent orbs moving so silently, and thought that they were perhaps tenanted, not only by beings in whom I can see the germ of a possible angel, but by myriads like this poor creature, in whom that germ is, so far as we can see, blighted entirely, I could not help saying, “O my Father! Thou, whom we are told art all Power, and also all Love, how canst Thou suffer such even transient specks on the transparence of Thy creation? These grub-like lives, undignified even by passion, — these life-long quenchings of the spark divine. — why dost Thou suffer them? Is not Thy paternal benevolence impatient till such films be dissipated?”

‘Such questionings once had power to move my spirit deeply; now, they but shade my mind for an instant. I have faith in a glorious explanation, that shall make manifest perfect justice and perfect wisdom.’

LITERATURE.

Cut off from access to the scholars, libraries, lectures, galleries of art, museums of science, antiquities, and historic scenes of Europe, Margaret bent her powers to use such opportunities of culture as she could command in her solitary country-home. Journals and letters thus bear witness to her zeal: —

‘I am having one of my “intense” times, devouring book after book. I never stop a minute, except to talk with mother, having laid all little duties on the shelf for a few days. Among other things, I have twice read through the life of Sir J. Mackintosh; and it has suggested so much to me, that I am very sorry I did not talk it over with you. It is quite gratifying, after my late chagrin, to find Sir James, with all his metaphysical turn, and ardent desire to penetrate it, puzzling so over the German philosophy, and particularly what I was myself troubled about, at Cambridge, — Jacobi’s letters to Fichte.

‘Few things have ever been written more discriminating or more beautiful than his strictures upon the Hindoo character, his portrait of Fox, and his second letter to Robert Hall, after his recovery from derangement. Do you remember what he says of the want of brilliancy in Priestley’s moral sentiments? Those remarks, though slight, seem to me to show the quality of his mind more decidedly than anything in the book. That so much learning, benevolence, and almost unparalleled fairness of mind, should be in a great measure lost to the world, for want of earnestness of purpose, might impel us to attach to the latter attribute as much importance as does the wise uncle in Wilhelm Meister.’

* * * * *

‘As to what you say of Shelley, it is true that the unhappy influences of early education prevented his ever attaining clear views of God, life, and the soul. At thirty, he was still a seeker, — an experimentalist. But then his should not be compared with such a mind as — — ‘s, which, having no such exuberant fancy to tame, nor various faculties to develop, naturally comes to maturity sooner. Had Shelley lived twenty years longer, I have no doubt he would have become a fervent Christian, and thus have attained that mental harmony which was necessary to him. It is true, too, as you say, that we always feel a melancholy imperfection in what he writes. But I love to think of those other spheres in which so pure and rich a being shall be perfected; and I cannot allow his faults of opinion and sentiment to mar my enjoyment of the vast capabilities, and exquisite perception of beauty, displayed everywhere in his poems.’

* * * * *

‘March 17, 1836. — I think Herschel will be very valuable to me, from the slight glance I have taken of it, and I thank Mr. F.; but do not let him expect anything of me because I have ventured on a book so profound as the Novum Organum. I have been examining myself with severity, intellectually as well as morally, and am shocked to find how vague and superficial is all my knowledge. I am no longer surprised that I should have appeared harsh and arrogant in my strictures to one who, having a better-disciplined mind, is more sensible of the difficulties in the way of really knowing and doing anything, and who, having more Wisdom, has more Reverence too. All that passed at your house will prove very useful to me; and I trust that I am approximating somewhat to that genuine humility which is so indispensable to true regeneration. But do not speak of this to — , for I am not yet sure of the state of my mind.’

* * * * *

‘1836. — I have, for the time, laid aside De Stael and Bacon, for Martineau and Southey. I find, with delight, that the former has written on the very subjects I wished most to talk out with her, and probably I shall receive more from her in this way than by personal intercourse, — for I think more of her character when with her, and am stimulated through my affections. As to Southey, I am steeped to the lips in enjoyment. I am glad I did not know this poet earlier; for I am now just ready to receive his truly exalting influences in some degree. I think, in reading, I shall place him next to Wordsworth. I have finished Herschel, and really believe I am a little wiser. I have read, too, Heyne’s letters twice, Sartor Resartus once, some of Goethe’s late diaries, Coleridge’s Literary Remains, and drank a great deal from Wordsworth. By the way, do you know his “Happy Warrior”? I find my insight of this sublime poet perpetually deepening.’

* * * * *

‘Mr. —— says the Wanderjahre is “wise.” It must be presumed so; and yet one is not satisfied. I was perfectly so with my manner of interpreting the Lehrjahre; but this sequel keeps jerking my clue, and threatens to break it. I do not know our Goethe yet. I have changed my opinion about his religious views many times. Sometimes I am tempted to think that it is only his wonderful knowledge of human nature which has excited in me such reverence for his philosophy, and that no worthy fabric has been elevated on this broad foundation. Yet often, when suspecting that I have found a huge gap, the next turning it appears that it was but an air-hole, and there is a brick all ready to stop it. On the whole, though my enthusiasm for the Goetherian philosophy is checked, my admiration for the genius of Goethe is in nowise lessened, and I stand in a sceptical attitude, ready to try his philosophy, and, if needs must, play the Eclectic.’

‘Did I write that a kind-hearted neighbor, fearing I might be dull, sent to offer me the use of a book-caseful of Souvenirs, Gems, and such-like glittering ware? I took a two or three year old “Token,” and chanced on a story, called the “Gentle Boy,” which I remembered to have heard was written by somebody in Salem. It is marked by so much grace and delicacy of feeling, that I am very desirous to know the author, whom I take to be a lady.’ * *

‘With regard to what you say about the American Monthly, my answer is, I would gladly sell some part of my mind for lucre, to get the command of time; but I will not sell my soul: that is, I am perfectly willing to take the trouble of writing for money to pay the seamstress; but I am not willing to have what I write mutilated, or what I ought to say dictated to suit the public taste. You speak of my writing about Tieck. It is my earnest wish to interpret the German authors of whom I am most fond to such Americans as are ready to receive. Perhaps some might sneer at the notion of my becoming a teacher; but where I love so much, surely I might inspire others to love a little; and I think this kind of culture would be precisely the counterpoise required by the utilitarian tendencies of our day and place. My very imperfections may be of value. While enthusiasm is yet fresh, while I am still a novice, it may be more easy to communicate with those quite uninitiated, than when I shall have attained to a higher and calmer state of knowledge. I hope a periodical may arise, by and by, which may think me worthy to furnish a series of articles on German literature, giving room enough and perfect freedom to say what I please. In this case, I should wish to devote at least eight numbers to Tieck, and should use the Garden of Poesy, and my other translations.

‘I have sometimes thought of translating his Little Red Riding Hood, for children. If it could be adorned with illustrations, like those in the “Story without an End,” it would make a beautiful little book; but I do not know that this could be done in Boston. There is much meaning that children could not take in; but, as they would never discover this till able to receive the whole, the book corresponds exactly with my notions of what a child’s book should be.

‘I should like to begin the proposed series with a review of Heyne’s letters on German Literature, which afford excellent opportunity for some preparatory hints. My plans are so undecided for several coming months, that I cannot yet tell whether I shall have the time and tranquillity needed to write out the whole course, though much tempted by the promise of perfect liberty. I could engage, however, to furnish at least two articles on Novalis and Körner. I trust you will be interested in my favorite Körner. Great is my love for both of them. But I wish to write something which shall not only be free from exaggeration, but which shall seem so, to those unacquainted with their works.

   ’I have so much reading to go through with this month, that
    I have but few hours for correspondents. I have already
    discussed five volumes in German, two in French, three in
    English, and not without thought and examination.

‘Tell — that I read “Titan” by myself, in the afternoons and evenings of about three weeks. She need not be afraid to undertake it. Difficulties of detail may, perhaps, not be entirely conquered without a master or a good commentary, but she could enjoy all that is most valuable alone. I should be very unwilling to read it with a person of narrow or unrefined mind; for it is a noble work, and fit to raise a reader into that high serene of thought where pedants cannot enter.’

FAREWELL TO GROTON.

‘The place is beautiful, in its way, but its scenery is too tamely smiling and sleeping. My associations with it are most painful. There darkened round us the effects of my father’s ill-judged exchange, — ill-judged, so far at least as regarded himself, mother, and me, — all violently rent from the habits of our former life, and cast upon toils for which we were unprepared: there my mother’s health was impaired, and mine destroyed; there my father died; there were undergone the miserable perplexities of a family that has lost its head; there I passed through the conflicts needed to give up all which my heart had for years desired, and to tread a path for which I had no skill, and no-call, except that it must be trodden by some one, and I alone was ready. Wachuset and the Peterboro’ hills are blended in my memory with hours of anguish as great as I am capable of suffering. I used to look at them towering to the sky, and feel that I, too, from birth, had longed to rise, and, though for the moment crushed, was not subdued.

‘But if those beautiful hills, and wide, rich fields, saw this sad lore well learned, they also saw some precious lessons given in faith, fortitude, self-command, and unselfish love. There too, in solitude, the mind acquired more power of concentration, and discerned the beauty of strict method; there too, more than all, the heart was awakened to sympathize with the ignorant, to pity the vulgar, to hope for the seemingly worthless, and to commune with the Divine Spirit of Creation, which cannot err, which never sleeps, which will not permit evil to be permanent, nor its aim of beauty in the smallest particular eventually to fail.’

WINTER IN BOSTON.

In the autumn of 1836 Margaret went to Boston, with the two-fold design of teaching Latin and French in Mr. Alcott’s school, which was then highly prosperous, and of forming classes of young ladies in French, German, and Italian.

Her view of Mr. Alcott’s plan of education was thus hinted in a journal, one day, after she had been talking with him, and trying to place herself in his mental position: —

Mr. A. ‘O for the safe and natural way of Intuition! I cannot grope like a mole in the gloomy passages of experience. To the attentive spirit, the revelation contained in books is only so far valuable as it comments upon, and corresponds with, the universal revelation. Yet to me, a being social and sympathetic by natural impulse, though recluse and contemplative by training and philosophy, the character and life of Jesus have spoken more forcibly than any fact recorded in human history. This story of incarnate Love has given me the key to all mysteries, and showed me what path should be taken in returning to the Fountain of Spirit. Seeing that other redeemers have imperfectly fulfilled their tasks, I have sought a new way. They all, it seemed to me, had tried to influence the human being at too late a day, and had laid their plans too wide. They began with men; I will begin with babes. They began with the world; I will begin with the family. So I preach the Gospel of the Nineteenth Century.’

M. ‘But, preacher, you make three mistakes.

‘You do not understand the nature of Genius or creative power.

‘You do not understand the reaction of matter on spirit.

‘You are too impatient of the complex; and, not enjoying variety in unity, you become lost in abstractions, and cannot illustrate your principles.’

On the other hand, Mr. Alcott’s impressions of Margaret were thus noted in his diaries: —

“She is clearly a person given to the boldest speculation, and of liberal and varied acquirements. Not wanting in imaginative power, she has the rarest good sense and discretion. She adopts the Spiritual Philosophy, and has the subtlest perception of its bearings. She takes large and generous views of all subjects, and her disposition is singularly catholic. The blending of sentiment and of wisdom in her is most remarkable; and her taste is as fine as her prudence. I think her the most brilliant talker of the day. She has a quick and comprehensive wit, a firm command of her thoughts, and a speech to win the ear of the most cultivated.”

In her own classes Margaret was very successful, and thus in a letter sums up the results: —

‘I am still quite unwell, and all my pursuits and propensities have a tendency to make my head worse. It is but a bad head, — as bad as if I were a great man! I am not entitled to so bad a head by anything I have done; but I flatter myself it is very interesting to suffer so much, and a fair excuse for not writing pretty letters, and saying to my friends the good things I think about them.

‘I was so desirous of doing all I could, that I took a great deal more upon myself than I was able to bear. Yet now that the twenty-five weeks of incessant toil are over, I rejoice in it all, and would not have done an iota less. I have fulfilled all my engagements faithfully; have acquired more power of attention, self-command, and fortitude; have acted in life as I thought I would in my lonely meditations; and have gained some knowledge of means. Above all, — blessed be the Father of our spirits! — my aims are the same as they were in the happiest flight of youthful fancy. I have learned too, at last, to rejoice in all past pain, and to see that my spirit has been judiciously tempered for its work. In future I may sorrow, but can I ever despair?

‘The beginning of the winter was forlorn. I was always ill; and often thought I might not live, though the work was but just begun. The usual disappointments, too, were about me. Those from whom aid was expected failed, and others who aided did not understand my aims. Enthusiasm for the things loved best fled when I seemed to be buying and selling them. I could not get the proper point of view, and could not keep a healthful state of mind. Mysteriously a gulf seemed to have opened between me and most intimate friends, and for the first time for many years I was entirely, absolutely, alone. Finally, my own character and designs lost all romantic interest, and I felt vulgarized, profaned, forsaken, — though obliged to smile brightly and talk wisely all the while. But these clouds at length passed away.

‘And now let me try to tell you what has been done. To one class I taught the German language, and thought it good success, when, at the end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at a lesson, and very well. This class, of course, was not interesting, except in the way of observation and analysis of language.

‘With more advanced pupils I read, in twenty-four weeks, Schiller’s Don Carlos, Artists, and Song of the Bell, besides giving a sort of general lecture on Schiller; Goethe’s Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, first part of Faust, — three weeks of thorough study this, as valuable to me as to them, — and Clavigo, — thus comprehending samples of all his efforts in poetry, and bringing forward some of his prominent opinions; Lessing’s Nathan, Minna, Emilia Galeotti; parts of Tieck’s Phantasus, and nearly the whole first volume of Richter’s Titan.

‘With the Italian class, I read parts of Tasso, Petrarch — whom they came to almost adore, — Ariosto, Alfieri, and the whole hundred cantos of the Divina Commedia, with the aid of the fine Athenæum copy, Flaxman’s designs, and all the best commentaries. This last piece of work was and will be truly valuable to myself.

‘I had, besides, three private pupils, Mrs. —— , who became very attractive to me, —— , and little —— , who had not the use of his eyes. I taught him Latin orally, and read the History of England and Shakspeare’s historical plays in connection. This lesson was given every day for ten weeks, and was very interesting, though very fatiguing. The labor in Mr. Alcott’s school was also quite exhausting. I, however, loved the children, and had many valuable thoughts suggested, and Mr. A.’s society was much to me.

‘As you may imagine, the Life of Goethe is not yet written; but I have studied and thought about it much. It grows in my mind with everything that does grow there. My friends in Europe have sent me the needed books on the subject, and I am now beginning to work in good earnest. It is very possible that the task may be taken from me by somebody in England, or that in doing it I may find myself incompetent; but I go on in hope, secure, at all events, that it will be the means of the highest culture.’

In addition to other labors, Margaret translated, one evening every week, German authors into English, for the gratification of Dr. Channing; their chief reading being in De Wette and Herder.

‘It was not very pleasant,’ she writes, ‘for Dr. C. takes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us feminine people, with our habits of ducking, diving, or flying for truth. Doubtless, however, he makes better use of what he gets, and if his sympathies were livelier he would not view certain truths in so steady a light. But there is much more talking than reading; and I like talking with him. I do not feel that constraint which some persons complain of, but am perfectly free, though less called out than by other intellects of inferior power. I get too much food for thought from him, and am not bound to any tiresome formality of respect on account of his age and rank in the world of intellect. He seems desirous to meet even one young and obscure as myself on equal terms, and trusts to the elevation of his thoughts to keep him in his place.’

She found higher satisfaction still in his preaching: —

‘A discourse from Dr. C. on the spirituality of man’s nature. This was delightful! I came away in the most happy, hopeful, and heroic mood. The tone of the discourse was so dignified, his manner was so benignant and solemnly earnest, in his voice there was such a concentration of all his force, physical and moral, to give utterance to divine truth, that I felt purged as by fire. If some speakers feed intellect more, Dr. C. feeds the whole spirit. O for a more calm, more pervading faith in the divinity of my own nature! I am so far from being thoroughly tempered and seasoned, and am sometimes so presumptuous, at others so depressed. Why cannot I lay more to heart the text, “God is never in a hurry: let man be patient and confident”?

PROVIDENCE.

In the spring of 1837, Margaret received a very favorable offer to become a principal teacher in the Greene Street School, at Providence, R.I.

‘The proposal is, that I shall teach the elder girls my favorite branches, for four hours a day, — choosing my own hours, and arranging the course, — for a thousand dollars a year, if, upon trial, I am well enough pleased to stay. This would be independence, and would enable me to do many slight services for my family. But, on the other hand, I am not sure that I shall like the situation, and am sanguine that, by perseverance, the plan of classes in Boston might be carried into full effect. Moreover, Mr. Ripley, — who is about publishing a series of works on Foreign Literature, — has invited me to prepare the “Life of Goethe,” on very advantageous terms. This I should much prefer. Yet when the thousand petty difficulties which surround us are considered, it seems unwise to relinquish immediate independence.’

She accepted, therefore, the offer which promised certain means of aiding her family, and reluctantly gave up the precarious, though congenial, literary project.

SCHOOL EXPERIENCES.

‘The new institution of which I am to be “Lady Superior” was dedicated last Saturday. People talk to me of the good I am to do; but the last fortnight has been so occupied in the task of arranging many scholars of various ages and unequal training, that I cannot yet realize this new era. * *

‘The gulf is vast, wider than I could have conceived possible, between me and my pupils; but the sight of such deplorable ignorance, such absolute burial of the best powers, as I find in some instances, makes me comprehend, better than before, how such a man as Mr. Alcott could devote his life to renovate elementary education. I have pleasant feelings when I see that a new world has already been opened to them. * *

‘Nothing of the vulgar feeling towards teachers, too often to be observed in schools, exists towards me. The pupils seem to reverence my tastes and opinions in all things; they are docile, decorous, and try hard to please; they are in awe of my displeasure, but delighted whenever permitted to associate with me on familiar terms. As I treat them like ladies, they are anxious to prove that they deserve to be so treated. * *

‘There is room here for a great move in the cause of education, and if I could resolve on devoting five or six years to this school, a good work might, doubtless, be done. Plans are becoming complete in my mind, ways and means continually offer, and, so far as I have tried them, they succeed. I am left almost as much at liberty as if no other person was concerned. Some sixty scholars are more or less under my care, and many of them begin to walk in the new paths pointed out. General activity of mind, accuracy in processes, constant looking for principles, and search after the good and the beautiful, are the habits I strive to develop. * *

‘I will write a short record of the last day at school. For a week past I have given the classes in philosophy, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral science, short lectures on the true objects of study, with advice as to their future course; and to-day, after recitation, I expressed my gratification that the minds of so many had been opened to the love of good and beauty.

‘Then came the time for last words. First, I called into the recitation room the boys who had been under my care. They are nearly all interesting, and have showed a chivalric feeling in their treatment of me. People talk of women not being able to govern boys; but I have always found it a very easy task. He must be a coarse boy, indeed, who, when addressed in a resolute, yet gentle manner, by a lady, will not try to merit her esteem. These boys have always rivalled one another in respectful behavior. I spoke a few appropriate words to each, mentioning his peculiar errors and good deeds, mingling some advice with more love, which will, I hope, make it remembered. We took a sweet farewell. With the younger girls I had a similar interview.’

‘Then I summoned the elder girls, who have been my especial charge. I reminded them of the ignorance in which some of them were found, and showed them how all my efforts had necessarily been directed to stimulating their minds, — leaving undone much which, under other circumstances, would have been deemed indispensable. I thanked them for the favorable opinion of my government which they had so generally expressed, but specified three instances in which I had been unjust. I thanked them, also, for the moral beauty of their conduct, bore witness that an appeal to conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the faith thus confirmed, that young persons can be best guided by addressing their highest nature. I declared my consciousness of having combined, not only in speech but in heart, tolerance and delicate regard for the convictions of their parents, with fidelity to my own, frankly uttered. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my never having cajoled or caressed them into good. Every word of praise had been earned; all my influence over them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their faults; I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength; I had offered to them, always, the loftiest motives, and had made every other end subordinate to that of spiritual growth. With a heartfelt blessing, I dismissed them; but none stirred, and we all sat for some moments, weeping. Then I went round the circle and bade each, separately, farewell.’

PERSONS.

Margaret’s Providence journals are made extremely piquant and entertaining, by her life-like portraiture of people and events; and every page attests the scrupulous justice with which she sought to penetrate through surfaces to reality, and, forgetting personal prejudices, to apply universally the test of truth. A few sketches of public characters may suffice to show with what sagacious, all-observing eyes, she looked about her.

‘At the whig caucus, I heard TRISTAM BURGESS,— “The old bald Eagle!” His baldness increases the fine effect of his appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated, that the contour of his very strongly marked head might be revealed to every eye. His personnel, as well as I could see, was fitted to command respect rather than admiration. He is a venerable, not a beautiful old man.

‘He is a rhetorician, — if I could judge from this sample; style in woven and somewhat ornate, matter frequently wrought up to a climax, manner rather declamatory, though strictly that of a gentleman and a scholar. One art in his oratory was, no doubt, very effective, before he lost force and distinctness of voice. I allude to his way, — after having reasoned a while, till he has reached the desired conclusion, — of leaning forward, with hands reposing but figure very earnest, and communicating, confidentially as it were, the result to the audience. The impression produced in former days, when those low, emphatic passages could be distinctly heard, must have been very strong. Yet there is too much apparent trickery in this, to bear frequent repetition. His manner is well adapted for argument, and for the expression either of satire or of chivalric sentiment.’

* * * * *

‘Mr. JOHN NEAL addressed my girls on the destiny and vocation of Woman in this country. He gave, truly, a manly view, though not the view of common men, and it was pleasing to watch his countenance, where energy is animated by genius. He then spoke to the boys, in the most noble and liberal spirit, on the exercise of political rights. If there is one among them who has the germ of a truly independent man, too generous to become a party tool, and with soul enough to think, as well as feel, for himself, those words were not spoken in vain. He was warmed up into giving a sketch of his boyhood. It was an eloquent narrative, and is ineffaceably impressed on my memory, with every look and gesture of the speaker. What gave chief charm to this history was its fearless ingenuousness. It was delightful to note the impression produced by his magnetic genius and independent character.

‘In the evening we had a long conversation upon Woman, Whigism, modern English Poets, Shakspeare, — and, in particular, Richard the Third, — about which we had actually a fight. Mr. Neal does not argue quite fairly, for he uses reason while it lasts, and then helps himself out with wit, sentiment and assertion. I should quarrel with his definitions upon almost every subject, but his fervid eloquence, brilliancy, endless resource, and ready tact, give him great advantage. There was a sort of exaggeration and coxcombry in his talk; but his lion-heart, and keen sense of the ludicrous, alike in himself as in others, redeem them. I should not like to have my motives scrutinized as he would scrutinize them, for I prefer rather to disclose them myself than to be found out; but I was dissatisfied in parting from this remarkable man before having seen him more thoroughly.

* * * * *

‘Mr. WHIPPLE addressed the meeting at length. His presence is not imposing, though his face is intellectual. It is difficult to look at him, for you cannot be taken prisoner by his eye, while, en revanche, he can look at you as long as he pleases; and, as usual, with one who can get the better of his auditors, he does not call out the best in them. His gestures are remarkably fine, free, graceful, and expressive. He has no natural advantages of voice, — for it is without compass, depth, sweetness, — and has none of the winning tones which reach the inmost soul, and none of the tones of passionate energy, which raise you out of your own world into the speaker’s. But his modulation is smooth, measured, dignified, though occasionally injured by too elaborate a swell, and his enunciation is admirable.

‘His theme was one which has been so thoroughly discussed that novelty was not to be looked for; but his method and arrangement were excellent, though parts were too much expanded, and the whole might well have been condensed. There were many felicitous popular hits. The humorous touches were skilful, and the illustrations on a broad scale good, though in single images he failed. Altogether, there was a pervading air of ease and mastery, which showed him fit to be a leader of the flock. Though not a man of the Webster class, he is among the first of the second class of men who apply their powers to practical purposes, — and that is saying much.’

* * * * *

‘I went to hear JOSEPH JOHN GURNEY, one of the most distinguished and influential, it is said, of the English Quakers. He is a thick-set, beetle-browed man, with a well-to-do-in-the-world air of pious stolidity. I was grievously disappointed; for Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But his manner was as wooden as his matter, and had no merit but that of distinct elocution. His sermon was a tissue of texts, illy selected, and worse patched together, in proof of the assertion that a belief in the Trinity is the one thing needful, and that reason, unless manacled by a creed, is the one thing dangerous. His figures were paltry, his thoughts narrowed down, and his very sincerity made corrupt by spiritual pride. One could not but pity his notions of the Holy Ghost, and his bat-like fear of light. His Man-God seemed to be the keeper of a mad-house, rather than the informing Spirit of all spirits. After finishing his discourse, Mr. G. sang a prayer, in a tone of mingled shout and whine, and then requested his audience to sit a while in devout meditation. For one, I passed the interval in praying for him, that the thick film of self-complacency might be removed from the eyes of his spirit, so that he might no more degrade religion.’

* * * * *

‘Mr. HAGUE is of the Baptist persuasion, and is very popular with his own sect. He is small, and carries his head erect; he has a high and intellectual, though not majestic, forehead; his brows are lowering and, when knit in indignant denunciation, give a thunderous look to the countenance, and beneath them flash, sparkle, and flame, — for all that may be said of light in rapid motion is true of them, — his dark eyes. Hazel and blue eyes with their purity, steadfastness, subtle penetration and radiant hope, may persuade and win, but black is the color to command. His mouth has an equivocal expression, but as an orator perhaps he gains power by the air of mystery this gives.

‘He has a very active intellect, sagacity and elevated sentiment; and, feeling strongly that God is love, can never preach without earnestness. His power comes first from his glowing vitality of temperament. While speaking, his every muscle is in action, and all his action is towards one object. There is perfect abandon. He is permeated, overborne, by his thought. This lends a charm above grace, though incessant nervousness and heat injure his manner. He is never violent, though often vehement; pleading tones in his voice redeem him from coarseness, even when most eager; and he throws himself into the hearts of his hearers, not in weak need of sympathy, but in the confidence of generous emotion. His second attraction is his individuality. He speaks direct from the conviction of his spirit, without temporizing, or artificial method. His is the “unpremeditated art,” and therefore successful. He is full of intellectual life; his mind has not been fettered by dogmas, and the worship of beauty finds a place there. I am much interested in this truly animated being.’

* * * * *

‘Mr. R.H. DANA has been giving us readings in the English dramatists, beginning with Shakspeare. The introductory was beautiful. After assigning to literature its high place in the education of the human soul, he announced his own view in giving these readings: that he should never pander to a popular love of excitement, but quietly, without regard to brilliancy or effect, would tell what had struck him in these poets; that he had no belief in artificial processes of acquisition or communication, and having never learned anything except through love, he had no hope of teaching any but loving spirits, &c. All this was arrayed in a garb of most delicate grace; but a man of such genuine refinement undervalues the cannon-blasts and rockets which are needed to rouse the attention of the vulgar. His naïve gestures, the rapt expression of his face, his introverted eye, and the almost childlike simplicity of his pathos, carry one back into a purer atmosphere, to live over again youth’s fresh emotions. I greatly enjoyed his readings in Hamlet, and have reviewed in connection what Goethe and Coleridge have said. Both have successfully seized on the main points in the character of Hamlet, and Mr. D. took nearly the same range. His views of Ophelia, however, are unspeakably more just than are those of Serlo in Wilhelm Meister. I regret that the whole course is not to be on Shakspeare, for I should like to read with him all the plays.

‘I never have met with a person of finer perceptions. He leaves out nothing; though he over-refines on some passages. He has the most exquisite taste, and freshens the souls of his hearers with ever new beauty. He is greatly indebted to the delicacy of his physical organization for the delicacy of his mental appreciation. But when he has told you what he likes, the pleasure of intercourse is over: for he is a man of prejudice more than of reason, and though he can make a lively exposé of his thoughts and feelings, he does not justify them. In a word, Mr. Dana has the charms and the defects of one whose object in life has been to preserve his individuality unprofaned.’

ART.

While residing at Providence, and during her visits to Boston, in her vacations, Margaret’s mind was opening more and more to the charms of art.

‘The Ton-Kunst, the Ton-Welt, give me now more stimulus than the written Word; for music seems to contain everything in nature, unfolded into perfect harmony. In it the all and each are manifested in most rapid transition; the spiral and undulatory movement of beautiful creation is felt throughout, and, as we listen, thought is most clearly, because most mystically, perceived. * *

‘I have been to hear Neukomm’s Oratorio of David. It is to music what Barry Cornwall’s verses and Talfourd’s Ion are to poetry. It is completely modern, and befits an age of consciousness. Nothing can be better arranged as a drama; the parts are in excellent gradation, the choruses are grand and effective, the composition, as a whole, brilliantly imposing. Yet it was dictated by taste and science only. Where are the enrapturing visions from the celestial world which shone down upon Haydn and Mozart; where the revelations from the depths of man’s nature, which impart such passion to the symphonies of Beethoven; where, even, the fascinating fairy land, gay with delight, of Rossini? O, Genius! none but thee shall make our hearts and heads throb, our cheeks crimson, our eyes overflow, or fill our whole being with the serene joy of faith.’ * *

‘I went to see Vandenhoff twice, in Brutus and Virginius. Another fine specimen of the conscious school; no inspiration, yet much taste. Spite of the thread-paper Tituses, the chambermaid Virginias, the washerwoman Tullias, and the people, made up of half a dozen chimney-sweeps, in carters’ frocks and red nightcaps, this man had power to recall a thought of the old stately Roman, with his unity of will and deed. He was an admirable father, that fairest, noblest part, — with a happy mixture of dignity and tenderness, blending the delicate sympathy of the companion with the calm, wisdom of the teacher, and showing beneath the zone of duty a heart that has not forgot to throb with youthful love. This character, — which did actual fathers know how to be, they would fulfil the order of nature, and image Deity to their children, — Vandenhoff represented sufficiently, at least, to call up the beautiful ideal.’

FANNY KEMBLE.

‘When in Boston, I saw the Kembles twice, — in “Much ado about Nothing,” and “The Stranger.” The first night I felt much disappointed in Miss K. In the gay parts a coquettish, courtly manner marred the wild mirth and wanton wit of Beatrice. Yet, in everything else, I liked her conception of the part; and where she urges Benedict to fight with Claudio, and where she reads Benedict’s sonnet, she was admirable. But I received no more pleasure from Miss K.’s acting out the part than I have done in reading it, and this disappointed me. Neither did I laugh, but thought all the while of Miss K., — how very graceful she was, and whether this and that way of rendering the part was just. I do not believe she has comic power within herself, though tasteful enough to comprehend any part. So I went home, vexed because my “heart was not full,” and my “brain not on fire” with enthusiasm. I drank my milk, and went to sleep, as on other dreary occasions, and dreamed not of Miss Kemble.

‘Next night, however, I went expectant, and all my soul was satisfied. I saw her at a favorable distance, and she looked beautiful. And as the scene rose in interest, her attitudes, her gestures, had the expression which an Angelo could give to sculpture. After she tells her story, — and I was almost suffocated by the effort she made to divulge her sin and fall, — she sunk to the earth, her head bowed upon her knee, her white drapery falling in large, graceful folds about this broken piece of beautiful humanity, crushed in the very manner so well described by Scott when speaking of a far different person, “not as one who intentionally stoops, kneels, or prostrates himself to excite compassion, but like a man borne down on all sides by the pressure of some invisible force, which crushes him to the earth without power of resistance.” A movement of abhorrence from me, as her insipid confidante turned away, attested the triumph of the poet-actress. Had not all been over in a moment, I believe I could not have refrained from rushing forward to raise the fair frail being, who seemed so prematurely humbled in her parent dust. I burst into tears; and, with the stifled, hopeless feeling of a real sorrow, continued to weep till the very end; nor could I recover till I left the house.

‘That is genius, which could give such life to this play; for, if I may judge from other parts, it is defaced by inflated sentiments, and verified by few natural touches. I wish I had it to read, for I should like to recall her every tone and look.’

* * * * *

‘I have been studying Flaxman and Retzsch. How pure, how immortal, the language of Form! Fools cannot fancy they fathom its meaning; witless dillettanti cannot degrade it by hackneyed usage; none but genius can create or reproduce it. Unlike the colorist, he who expresses his thought in form is secure as man can be against the ravages of time.’

* * * * *

‘I went to the Athenæum in an agonizing conflict of mind, when some high influence was needed to rouse me from the state of sickly sensitiveness, which, much as I despise, I cannot wholly conquer. How soothing it was to feel the blessed power of the Ideal world, to be surrounded, once more with the records of lives poured out in embodying thought in beauty! I seemed to breathe my native atmosphere, and smoothed my ruffled pinions.’

* * * * *

‘No wonder God made a world to express his thought. Who, that has a soul for beauty, does not feel the need of creating, and that the power of creation alone can satisfy the spirit? When I thus reflect, the Artist seems the only fortunate man. Had I but as much creative genius as I have apprehensiveness!’

* * * * *

‘How transcendently lovely was the face of one young angel by Raphael! It was the perfection of physical, moral, and mental life. Variegated wings, of pinkish-purple touched with green, like the breasts of doves, and in perfect harmony with the complexion, spring from the shoulders upwards, and against them leans the divine head. The eye seems fixed on the centre of being, and the lips are gently parted, as if uttering strains of celestial melody.’

* * * * *

‘The head of Aspasia was instinct with the voluptuousness of intellect. From the eyes, the cheek, the divine lip, one might hive honey. Both the Loves were exquisite: one, that zephyr sentiment which visits all the roses of life; the other, the Amore Greco, may be fitly described in these words of Landor: “There is a gloom in deep love, as in deep water; there is a silence in it which suspends the foot, and the folded arms and the dejected head are the images it reflects. No voice shakes its surface; the Muses themselves approach it with a tardy and a timid step, with a low and tremulous and melancholy song.”’

* * * * *

‘The Sibyl I understood. What grace in that beautiful oval! what apprehensiveness in the eye! Such is female Genius; it alone understands the God. The Muses only sang the praises of Apollo; the Sibyls interpreted his will. Nay, she to whom it was offered, refused the divine union, and preferred remaining a satellite to being absorbed into the sun. You read in the eye of this one, and the observation is confirmed by the low forehead, that the secret of her inspiration lay in the passionate enthusiasm of her nature, rather than in the ideal perfection of any faculty.

* * * * *

‘A Christ, by Raphael, that I saw the other night, brought Christianity more home to my heart, made me more long to be like Jesus, than ever did sermon. It is from one of the Vatican frescoes. The Deity, — a stern, strong, wise man, of about forty-five, in a square velvet cap, truly the Jewish God, inflexibly just, yet jealous and wrathful, — is at the top of the picture, looking with a gaze of almost frowning scrutiny down into his world. A step below is the Son. Stately angelic shapes kneel near him in dignified adoration, — brothers, but not peers. A cloud of more ecstatic seraphs floats behind the Father. At the feet of the Son is the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove. In the description, by a connoisseur, of this picture, read to me while I was looking at it, it is spoken of as in Raphael’s first manner, cold, hard, trammeled. But to me how did that face proclaim the Infinite Love! His head is bent back, as if seeking to behold the Father. His attitude expresses the need of adoring something higher, in order to keep him at his highest. What sweetness, what purity, in the eyes! I can never express it; but I felt, when looking at it, the beauty of reverence, of self-sacrifice, to a degree that stripped the Apollo of his beams.’

MAGNANIMITY.

Immediately after reading Miss Martineau’s book on America, Margaret felt bound in honor to write her a letter, the magnanimity of which is brought out in full relief, by contrast with the expressions already given of her affectionate regard. Extracts from this letter, recorded in her journals, come here rightfully in place: —

‘On its first appearance, the book was greeted by a volley of coarse and outrageous abuse, and the nine days’ wonder was followed by a nine days’ hue-and-cry. It was garbled, misrepresented, scandalously ill-treated. This was all of no consequence. The opinion of the majority you will find expressed in a late number of the North American Review. I should think the article, though ungenerous, not more so than great part of the critiques upon your book.

‘The minority may be divided into two classes: The one, consisting of those who knew you but slightly, either personally, or in your writings. These have now read your book; and, seeing in it your high ideal standard, genuine independence, noble tone of sentiment, vigor of mind and powers of picturesque description, they value your book very much, and rate you higher for it.

‘The other comprises those who were previously aware of these high qualities, — and who, seeing in a book to which they had looked for a lasting monument to your fame, a degree of presumptuousness, irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many points, which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing. To this class I belong.

‘I got the book as soon as it came out, — long before I received the copy endeared by your handwriting, — and devoted myself to reading it. I gave myself up to my natural impressions, without seeking to ascertain those of others. Frequently I felt pleasure and admiration, but more frequently disappointment, sometimes positive distaste.

‘There are many topics treated of in this book of which I am not a judge; but I do pretend, even where I cannot criticize in detail, to have an opinion as to the general tone of thought. When Herschel writes his Introduction to Natural Philosophy, I cannot test all he says, but I cannot err about his fairness, his manliness, and wide range of knowledge. When Jouffroy writes his lectures, I am not conversant with all his topics of thought, but I can appreciate his lucid style and admirable method. When Webster speaks on the currency, I do not understand the subject, but I do understand his mode of treating it, and can see what a blaze of light streams from his torch. When Harriet Martineau writes about America, I often cannot test that rashness and inaccuracy of which I hear so much, but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness, of habits of patient investigation, of completeness, of arrangement, are felt throughout the book; and, for all its fine descriptions of scenery, breadth of reasoning, and generous daring, I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend, and I think a few months given to ripen it, to balance, compare, and mellow, would have made it so. * *

‘Certainly you show no spirit of harshness towards this country in general. I think your tone most kindly. But many passages are deformed by intemperance of epithet. * * Would your heart, could you but investigate the matter, approve such overstatement, such a crude, intemperate tirade as you have been guilty of about Mr. Alcott, — a true and noble man, a philanthropist, whom a true and noble woman, also a philanthropist, should have delighted to honor; whose disinterested and resolute efforts, for the redemption of poor humanity, all independent and faithful minds should sustain, since the “broadcloth” vulgar will be sure to assail them; a philosopher, worthy of the palmy times of ancient Greece; a man whom Carlyle and Berkely, whom you so uphold, would delight to honor; a man whom the worldlings of Boston hold in as much horror as the worldlings of ancient Athens did Socrates. They smile to hear their verdict confirmed from the other side of the Atlantic, by their censor, Harriet Martineau.

‘I do not like that your book should be an abolition book. You might have borne your testimony as decidedly as you pleased; but why leaven the whole book with it? This subject haunts us on almost every page. It is a great subject, but your book had other purposes to fulfil.

‘I have thought it right to say all this to you, since I felt it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear that I must lose you. Not that I think all authors are like Gil Bias’ archbishop. No; if your heart turns from me, I shall still love you, still think you noble. I know it must be so trying to fail of sympathy, at such a time, where we expect it. And, besides, I felt from the book that the sympathy between us is less general than I had supposed, it was so strong on several points. It is strong enough for me to love you ever, and I could no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had not spoken out now.’

SPIRITUAL LIFE.

‘You question me as to the nature of the benefits conferred upon me by Mr. E.’s preaching. I answer, that his influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American, and that from him I first learned what is meant by an inward life. Many other springs have since fed the stream of living waters, but he first opened the fountain. That the “mind is its own place,” was a dead phrase to me, till he cast light upon my mind. Several of his sermons stand apart in memory, like landmarks of my spiritual history. It would take a volume to tell what this one influence did for me. But perhaps I shall some time see that it was best for me to be forced to help myself.’

* * * * *

‘Some remarks which I made last night trouble me, and I cannot fix my attention upon other things till I have qualified them. I suffered myself to speak in too unmeasured terms, and my expressions were fitted to bring into discredit the religious instruction which has been given me, or which I have sought.

‘I do not think “all men are born for the purpose of unfolding beautiful ideas;” for the vocation of many is evidently the culture of affections by deeds of kindness. But I do think that the vocations of men and women differ, and that those who are forced to act out of their sphere are shorn of inward and outward brightness.

‘For myself, I wish to say, that, if I am in a mood of darkness and despondency, I nevertheless consider such a mood unworthy of a Christian, or indeed of any one who believes in the immortality of the soul. No one, who had steady faith in this and in the goodness of God, could be otherwise than cheerful. I reverence the serenity of a truly religious mind so much, that I think, if I live, I may some time attain to it.

‘Although I do not believe in a Special Providence regulating outward events, and could not reconcile such a belief with what I have seen of life, I do not the less believe in the paternal government of a Deity. That He should visit the souls of those who seek Him seems to me the nobler way to conceive of his influence. And if there were not some error in my way of seeking, I do not believe I should suffer from languor or deadness on spiritual subjects, at the time when I have most need to feel myself at home there. To find this error is my earnest wish; and perhaps I am now travelling to that end, though by a thorny road. It is a mortification to find so much yet to do; for at one time the scheme of things seemed so clear, that, with Cromwell, I might say, “I was once in grace.” With my mind I prize high objects as much as then: it is my heart which is cold. And sometimes I fear that the necessity of urging them on those under my care dulls my sense of their beauty. It is so hard to prevent one’s feelings from evaporating in words.’

* * * * *

‘“The faint sickness of a wounded heart.” How frequently do these words of Beckford recur to my mind! His prayer, imperfect as it is, says more to me than many a purer aspiration. It breathes such an experience of impassioned anguish. He had everything, — health, personal advantages, almost boundless wealth, genius, exquisite taste, culture; he could, in some way, express his whole being. Yet well-nigh he sank beneath the sickness of the wounded heart; and solitude, “country of the unhappy,” was all he craved at last.

‘Goethe, too, says he has known, in all his active, wise, and honored life, no four weeks of happiness. This teaches me on the other side; for, like Goethe, I have never given way to my feelings, but have lived active, thoughtful, seeking to be wise. Yet I have long days and weeks of heartache; and at those times, though I am busy every moment, and cultivate every pleasant feeling, and look always upwards to the pure ideal region, yet this ache is like a bodily wound, whose pain haunts even when it is not attended to, and disturbs the dreams of the patient who has fallen asleep from exhaustion.

‘There is a German in Boston, who has a wound in his breast, received in battle long ago. It never troubles him, except when he sings, and then, if he gives out his voice with much expression, it opens, and cannot, for a long time, be stanched again. So with me: when I rise into one of those rapturous moods of thought, such as I had a day or two since, my wound opens again, and all I can do is to be patient, and let it take its own time to skin over. I see it will never do more. Some time ago I thought the barb was fairly out; but no, the fragments rankle there still, and will, while there is any earth attached to my spirit. Is it not because, in my pride, I held the mantle close, and let the weapon, which some friendly physician might have extracted, splinter in the wound?’

* * * * *

‘Sunday, July, 1838. — I partook, for the first time, of the Lord’s Supper. I had often wished to do so, but had not been able to find a clergyman, — from whom I could be willing to receive it, — willing to admit me on my own terms. Mr. H —— did so; and I shall ever respect and value him, if only for the liberality he displayed on this occasion. It was the Sunday after the death of his wife, a lady whom I truly honored, and should, probably, had we known one another longer, have also loved. She was the soul of truth and honor; her mind was strong, her reverence for the noble and beautiful fervent, her energy in promoting the best interests of those who came under her influence unusual. She was as full of wit and playfulness as of goodness. Her union with her husband was really one of mind and heart, of mutual respect and tenderness; likeness in unlikeness made it strong. I wished particularly to share in this rite on an occasion so suited to bring out its due significance.’

FAREWELL TO SUMMER.

 ’The Sun, the Moon, the Waters, and the Air,
  The hopeful, holy, terrible, and fair,
    All that is ever speaking, never spoken,
    Spells that are ever breaking, never broken,
  Have played upon my soul; and every string
  Confessed the touch, which once could make it ring
    Celestial notes. And still, though changed the tone,
    Though damp and jarring fall the lyre hath known
  It would, if fitly played, its deep notes wove
  Into one tissue of belief and love,
    Yield melodies for angel audience meet,
    And pæans fit Creative Power to greet.
  O injured lyre! thy golden frame is marred,
  No garlands deck thee, no libations poured
    Tell to the earth the triumphs of thy song;
    No princely halls echo thy strains along.
  But still the strings are there; and, if they break,
  Even in death rare melody will make,
    Might’st thou once more be tuned, and power be given
    To tell in numbers all thou canst of heaven!’

VISITS TO CONCORD.

BY R.W. EMERSON.

EXTRACT FROM A LETTER FROM MADAME ARCONATI TO R.W. EMERSON.

Je n’ai point rencontré, dans ma vie, de femme plus noble; ayant autant de sympathie pour ses semblables, et dont l’esprit fut plus vivifiant. Je me suis tout de suite sentie attirée par elle. Quand je fis sa connoissance, j’ignorais que ce fut une femme remarquable.

IV.

VISITS TO CONCORD.

* * * * *

I became acquainted with Margaret in 1835. Perhaps it was a year earlier that Henry Hedge, who had long been her friend, told me of her genius and studies, and loaned me her manuscript translation of Goethe’s Tasso. I was afterwards still more interested in her, by the warm praises of Harriet Martineau, who had become acquainted with her at Cambridge, and who, finding Margaret’s fancy for seeing me, took a generous interest in bringing us together. I remember, during a week in the winter of 1835-6, in which Miss Martineau was my guest, she returned again and again to the topic of Margaret’s excelling genius and conversation, and enjoined it on me to seek her acquaintance: which I willingly promised. I am not sure that it was not in Miss Martineau’s company, a little earlier, that I first saw her. And I find a memorandum, in her own journal, of a visit, made by my brother Charles and myself, to Miss Martineau, at Mrs. Farrar’s. It was not, however, till the next July, after a little diplomatizing in billets by the ladies, that her first visit to our house was arranged, and she came to spend a fortnight with my wife. I still remember the first half-hour of Margaret’s conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness, — a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, — the nasal tone of her voice, — all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far. It is to be said, that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them. I believe I fancied her too much interested in personal history; and her talk was a comedy in which dramatic justice was done to everybody’s foibles. I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked; for I was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics, and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me, and, when I returned to my library, had much to think of the crackling of thorns under a pot. Margaret, who had stuffed me out as a philosopher, in her own fancy, was too intent on establishing a good footing between us, to omit any art of winning. She studied my tastes, piqued and amused me, challenged frankness by frankness, and did not conceal the good opinion of me she brought with her, nor her wish to please. She was curious to know my opinions and experiences. Of course, it was impossible long to hold out against such urgent assault. She had an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to give an absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes, which were so plain at first, soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joy and superabundant life.

This rumor was much spread abroad, that she was sneering, scoffing, critical, disdainful of humble people, and of all but the intellectual. I had heard it whenever she was named. It was a superficial judgment. Her satire was only the pastime and necessity of her talent, the play of superabundant animal spirits. And it will be seen, in the sequel, that her mind presently disclosed many moods and powers, in successive platforms or terraces, each above each, that quite effaced this first impression, in the opulence of the following pictures.

Let us hear what she has herself to say on the subject of tea-table-talk, in a letter to a young lady, to whom she was already much attached: —

I am repelled by your account of your party. It is beneath you to amuse yourself with active satire, with what is vulgarly called quizzing. When such a person as —— chooses to throw himself in your way, I sympathize with your keen perception of his ridiculous points. But to laugh a whole evening at vulgar nondescripts, — is that an employment for one who was born passionately to love, to admire, to sustain truth? This would be much more excusable in a chameleon like me. Yet, whatever may be the vulgar view of my character, I can truly say, I know not the hour in which I ever looked for the ridiculous. It has always been forced upon me, and is the accident of my existence. I would not want the sense of it when it comes, for that would show an obtuseness of mental organization; but, on peril of my soul, I would not move an eyelash to look for it.’

When she came to Concord, she was already rich in friends, rich in experiences, rich in culture. She was well read in French, Italian, and German literature. She had learned Latin and a little Greek. But her English reading was incomplete; and, while she knew Molière, and Rousseau, and any quantity of French letters, memoirs, and novels, and was a dear student of Dante and Petrarca, and knew German books more cordially than any other person, she was little read in Shakspeare; and I believe I had the pleasure of making her acquainted with Chaucer, with Ben Jonson, with Herbert, Chapman, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, with Bacon, and Sir Thomas Browne. I was seven years her senior, and had the habit of idle reading in old English books, and, though riot much versed, yet quite enough to give me the right to lead her. She fancied that her sympathy and taste had led her to an exclusive culture of southern European books.

She had large experiences. She had been a precocious scholar at Dr. Park’s school; good in mathematics and in languages. Her father, whom she had recently lost had been proud of her, and petted her. She had drawn at Cambridge, numbers of lively young men about her. She had had a circle of young women who were devoted to her, and who described her as “a wonder of intellect, who had yet no religion.” She had drawn to her every superior young man or young woman she had met, and whole romances of life and love had been confided, counselled, thought, and lived through, in her cognizance and sympathy.

These histories are rapid, so that she had already beheld many times the youth, meridian, and old age of passion. She had, besides, selected, from so many, a few eminent companions, and already felt that she was not likely to see anything more beautiful than her beauties, anything more powerful and generous than her youths. She had found out her own secret by early comparison, and knew what power to draw confidence, what necessity to lead in every circle, belonged of right to her. Her powers were maturing, and nobler sentiments were subliming the first heats and rude experiments. She had outward calmness and dignity. She had come to the ambition to be filled with all nobleness.

Of the friends who surrounded her, at that period, it is neither easy to speak, nor not to speak. A life of Margaret is impossible without them, she mixed herself so inextricably with her company; and when this little book was first projected, it was proposed to entitle it “Margaret and her Friends,” the subject persisting to offer itself in the plural number. But, on trial, that form proved impossible, and it only remained that the narrative, like a Greek tragedy, should suppose the chorus always on the stage, sympathizing and sympathized with by the queen of the scene.

Yet I remember these persons as a fair, commanding troop, every one of them adorned by some splendor of beauty, of grace, of talent, or of character, and comprising in their band persons who have since disclosed sterling worth and elevated aims in the conduct of life.

Three beautiful women, — either of whom would have been the fairest ornament of Papanti’s Assemblies, but for the presence of the other, — were her friends. One of these early became, and long remained, nearly the central figure in Margaret’s brilliant circle, attracting to herself, by her grace and her singular natural eloquence, every feeling of affection, hope, and pride.

Two others I recall, whose rich and cultivated voices in song were, — one a little earlier, the other a little later, — the joy of every house into which they came; and, indeed, Margaret’s taste for music was amply gratified in the taste and science which several persons among her intimate friends possessed. She was successively intimate with two sisters, whose taste for music had been opened, by a fine and severe culture, to the knowledge and to the expression of all the wealth of the German masters.

I remember another, whom every muse inspired, skilful alike with the pencil and the pen, and by whom both were almost contemned for their inadequateness, in the height and scope of her aims.

‘With her,’ said Margaret, ‘I can talk of anything. She is like me. She is able to look facts in the face. We enjoy the clearest, widest, most direct communication. She may be no happier than —— , but she will know her own mind too clearly to make any great mistake in conduct, and will learn a deep meaning from her days.’

‘It is not in the way of tenderness that I love —— . I prize her always; and this is all the love some natures ever know. And I also feel that I may always expect she will be with me. I delight to picture to myself certain persons translated, illuminated. There are a few in whom I see occasionally the future being piercing, promising, — whom I can strip of all that masks their temporary relations, and elevate to their natural position. Sometimes I have not known these persons intimately, — oftener I have; for it is only in the deepest hours that this light is likely to break out. But some of those I have best befriended I cannot thus portray, and very few men I can. It does not depend at all on the beauty of their forms, at present; it is in the eye and the smile, that the hope shines through. I can see exactly how —— will look: not like this angel in the paper; she will not bring flowers, but a living coal, to the lips of the singer; her eyes will not burn as now with smothered fires, they will be ever deeper, and glow more intensely; her cheek will be smooth, but marble pale; her gestures nobly free, but few.’

Another was a lady who was devoted to landscape-painting, and who enjoyed the distinction of being the only pupil of Allston, and who, in her alliance with Margaret, gave as much honor as she received, by the security of her spirit, and by the heroism of her devotion to her friend. Her friends called her “the perpetual peace-offering,” and Margaret says of her,— ‘She is here, and her neighborhood casts the mildness and purity too of the moonbeam on the else parti-colored scene.’

There was another lady, more late and reluctantly entering Margaret’s circle, with a mind as high, and more mathematically exact, drawn by taste to Greek, as Margaret to Italian genius, tempted to do homage to Margaret’s flowing expressive energy, but still more inclined and secured to her side by the good sense and the heroism which Margaret disclosed, perhaps not a little by the sufferings which she addressed herself to alleviate, as long as Margaret lived. Margaret had a courage in her address which it was not easy to resist. She called all her friends by their Christian names. In their early intercourse I suppose this lady’s billets were more punctiliously worded than Margaret liked; so she subscribed herself, in reply, ‘Your affectionate “Miss Fuller.”’ When the difficulties were at length surmounted, and the conditions ascertained on which two admirable persons could live together, the best understanding grew up, and subsisted during her life. In her journal is a note: —

‘Passed the morning in Sleepy Hollow, with —— . What fine, just distinctions she made! Worlds grew clearer as we talked. I grieve to see her fine frame subject to such rude discipline. But she truly said, “I am not a failed experiment; for, in the bad hours, I do not forget what I thought in the better.”’

None interested her more at that time, and for many years after, than a youth with whom she had been acquainted in Cambridge before he left the University, and the unfolding of whose powers she had watched with the warmest sympathy. He was an amateur, and, but for the exactions not to be resisted of an American, that is to say, of a commercial, career, — his acceptance of which she never ceased to regard as an apostasy, — himself a high artist. He was her companion, and, though much younger, her guide in the study of art. With him she examined, leaf by leaf, the designs of Raphael, of Michel Angelo, of Da Vinci, of Guercino, the architecture of the Greeks, the books of Palladio, the Ruins, and Prisons of Piranesi; and long kept up a profuse correspondence on books and studies in which they had a mutual interest. And yet, as happened so often, these literary sympathies, though sincere, were only veils and occasions to beguile the time, so profound was her interest in the character and fortunes of her friend.

There was another youth, whom she found later, of invalid habit, which had infected in some degree the tone of his mind, but of a delicate and pervasive insight, and the highest appreciation for genius in letters, arts, and life. Margaret describes ‘his complexion as clear in its pallor, and his eye steady.’ His turn of mind, and his habits of life, had almost a monastic turn, — a jealousy of the common tendencies of literary men either to display or to philosophy. Margaret was struck with the singular fineness of his perceptions, and the pious tendency of his thoughts, and enjoyed with him his proud reception, not as from above, but almost on equal ground, of Homer and Æschylus, of Dante and Petrarch, of Montaigne, of Calderon, of Goethe. Margaret wished, also, to defend his privacy from the dangerous solicitations to premature authorship: —

‘His mind should be approached close by one who needs its fragrance. All with him leads rather to glimpses and insights, than to broad, comprehensive views. Till he needs the public, the public does not need him. The lonely lamp, the niche, the dark cathedral grove, befit him best. Let him shroud himself in the symbols of his native ritual, till he can issue forth on the wings of song.’

She was at this time, too, much drawn also to a man of poetic sensibility, and of much reading, — which he took the greatest pains to conceal, — studious of the art of poetry, but still more a poet in his conversation than in his poems, — who attracted Margaret by the flowing humor with which he filled the present hour, and the prodigality with which he forgot all the past.

‘Unequal and uncertain,’ she says, ‘but in his good moods, of the best for a companion, absolutely abandoned to the revelations of the moment, without distrust or check of any kind, unlimited and delicate, abundant in thought, and free of motion, he enriches life, and fills the hour.’

‘I wish I could retain — — ‘s talk last night. It was wonderful; it was about all the past experiences frozen down in the soul, and the impossibility of being penetrated by anything. “Had I met you,” said he, “when I was young! — but now nothing can penetrate.” Absurd as was what he said, on one side, it was the finest poetic-inspiration on the other, painting the cruel process of life, except where genius continually burns over the stubble fields.

“Life,” he said, “is continually eating us up.” He said, “Mr. E. is quite wrong about books. He wants them all good; now I want many bad. Literature is not merely a collection of gems, but a great system of interpretation.” He railed at me as artificial. “It don’t strike me when you are alone with me,” he says; “but it does when others are present. You don’t follow out the fancy of the moment; you converse; you have treasured thoughts to tell; you are disciplined, — artificial.” I pleaded guilty, and observed that I supposed that it must be so with one of any continuity of thought, or earnestness of character. “As to that,” says he, “I shall not like you the better for your excellence. I don’t know what is the matter. I feel strongly attracted towards you; but there is a drawback in my mind, — I don’t know exactly what. You will always be wanting to grow forward; now I like to grow backward, too. You are too ideal. Ideal people anticipate their lives; and they make themselves and everybody around them restless, by always being beforehand with themselves.”

‘I listened attentively; for what he said was excellent. Following up the humor of the moment, he arrests admirable thoughts on the wing. But I cannot but see, that what they say of my or other obscure lives is true of every prophetic, of every tragic character. And then I like to have them make me look on that side, and reverence the lovely forms of nature, and the shifting moods, and the clinging instincts. But I must not let them disturb me. There is an only guide, the voice in the heart, that asks, “Was thy wish sincere? If so, thou canst not stray from nature, nor be so perverted but she will make thee true again.” I must take my own path, and learn from them all, without being paralyzed for the day. We need great energy, faith, and self-reliance to endure to-day. My age may not be the best, my position may be bad, my character ill-formed; but Thou, oh Spirit! hast no regard to aught but the seeking heart; and, if I try to walk upright, wilt guide me. What despair must he feel, who, after a whole life passed in trying to build up himself, resolves that it would have been far better if he had kept still as the clod of the valley, or yielded easily as the leaf to every breeze! A path has been appointed me. I have walked in it as steadily as I could. I am what I am; that which I am not, teach me in the others. I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of doubt. E. must not shake me in my worldliness, nor —— in the fine motion that has given me what I have of life, nor this child of genius make me lay aside the armor, without which I had lain bleeding on the field long since; but, if they can keep closer to nature, and learn to interpret her as souls, also, let me learn from them what I have not.’

And, in connection with this conversation, she has copied the following lines which this gentleman addressed to her: —

“TO MARGARET.

 I mark beneath thy life the virtue shine
  That deep within the star’s eye opes its day;
  I clutch the gorgeous thoughts thou throw’st away
  From the profound unfathomable mine,
  And with them this mean common hour do twine,
  As glassy waters on the dry beach play.
  And I were rich as night, them to combine
  With, my poor store, and warm me with thy ray.
  From the fixed answer of those dateless eyes
  I meet bold hints of spirit’s mystery
  As to what’s past, and hungry prophecies
  Of deeds to-day, and things which are to be;
  Of lofty life that with the eagle flies,
  And humble love that clasps humanity.”

I have thus vaguely designated, among the numerous group of her friends, only those who were much in her company, in the early years of my acquaintance with her.

She wore this circle of friends, when I first knew her, as a necklace of diamonds about her neck. They were so much to each other, that Margaret seemed to represent them all, and, to know her, was to acquire a place with them. The confidences given her were their best, and she held them to them. She was an active, inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought, and the nobleness in New England, seemed, at that moment, related to her, and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were open to her, and every hospitable attention eagerly offered. Her arrival was a holiday, and so was her abode. She stayed a few days, often a week, more seldom a month, and all tasks that could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating, to talk with this joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad web of relations to so many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been finally referred.

Persons were her game, specially, if marked by fortune, or character, or success; — to such was she sent. She addressed them with a hardihood, — almost a haughty assurance, — queen-like. Indeed, they fell in her way, where the access might have seemed difficult, by wonderful casualties; and the inveterate recluse, the coyest maid, the waywardest poet, made no resistance, but yielded at discretion, as if they had been waiting for her, all doors to this imperious dame. She disarmed the suspicion of recluse scholars by the absence of bookishness. The ease with which she entered into conversation made them forget all they had heard of her; and she was infinitely less interested in literature than in life. They saw she valued earnest persons, and Dante, Petrarch, and Goethe, because they thought as she did, and gratified her with high portraits, which she was everywhere seeking. She drew her companions to surprising confessions. She was the wedding-guest, to whom the long-pent story must be told; and they were not less struck, on reflection, at the suddenness of the friendship which had established, in one day, new and permanent covenants. She extorted the secret of life, which cannot be told without setting heart and mind in a glow; and thus had the best of those she saw. Whatever romance, whatever virtue, whatever impressive experience, — this came to her; and she lived in a superior circle; for they suppressed all their common-place in her presence.

She was perfectly true to this confidence. She never confounded relations, but kept a hundred fine threads in her hand, without crossing or entangling any. An entire intimacy, which seemed to make both sharers of the whole horizon of each others’ and of all truth, did not yet make her false to any other friend; gave no title to the history that an equal trust of another friend had put in her keeping. In this reticence was no prudery and no effort. For, so rich her mind, that she never was tempted to treachery, by the desire of entertaining. The day was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years, — from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe, — never saw her without surprise at her new powers.

Of the conversations above alluded to, the substance was whatever was suggested by her passionate wish for equal companions, to the end of making life altogether noble. With the firmest tact she led the discourse into the midst of their daily living and working, recognizing the good-will and sincerity which each man has in his aims, and treating so playfully and intellectually all the points, that one seemed to see his life en beau, and was flattered by beholding what he had found so tedious in its workday weeds, shining in glorious costume. Each of his friends passed before him in the new light; hope seemed to spring under his feet, and life was worth living. The auditor jumped for joy, and thirsted for unlimited draughts. What! is this the dame, who, I heard, was sneering and critical? this the blue-stocking, of whom I stood in terror and dislike? this wondrous woman, full of counsel, full of tenderness, before whom every mean thing is ashamed, and hides itself; this new Corinne, more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent, who seems to have learned all languages, Heaven knows when or how, — I should think she was born to them, — magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles like this, ‘Yours is an example of a destiny springing from character:’ and, again, ‘I see your destiny hovering before you, but it always escapes from you.’

The test of this eloquence was its range. It told on children, and on old people; on men of the world, and on sainted maids. She could hold them all by her honeyed tongue. A lady of the best eminence, whom Margaret occasionally visited, in one of our cities of spindles, speaking one day of her neighbors, said, “I stand in a certain awe of the moneyed men, the manufacturers, and so on, knowing that they will have small interest in Plato, or in Biot; but I saw them approach Margaret, with perfect security, for she could give them bread that they could eat.” Some persons are thrown off their balance when in society; others are thrown on to balance; the excitement of company, and the observation of other characters, correct their biases. Margaret always appeared to unexpected advantage in conversation with a large circle. She had more sanity than any other; whilst, in private, her vision was often through colored lenses.

Her talents were so various, and her conversation so rich and entertaining, that one might talk with her many times, by the parlor fire, before he discovered the strength which served as foundation to so much accomplishment and eloquence. But, concealed under flowers and music, was the broadest good sense, very well able to dispose of all this pile of native and foreign ornaments, and quite able to work without them. She could always rally on this, in every circumstance, and in every company, and find herself on a firm footing of equality with any party whatever, and make herself useful, and, if need be, formidable.

The old Anaximenes, seeking, I suppose, for a source sufficiently diffusive, said, that Mind must be in the air, which, when all men breathed, they were filled with one intelligence. And when men have larger measures of reason, as Æsop, Cervantes, Franklin, Scott, they gain in universality, or are no longer confined to a few associates, but are good company for all persons, — philosophers, women, men of fashion, tradesmen, and servants. Indeed, an older philosopher than Anaximenes, namely, language itself, had taught to distinguish superior or purer sense as common sense.

Margaret had, with certain limitations, or, must we say, strictures, these larger lungs, inhaling this universal element, and could speak to Jew and Greek, free and bond, to each in his own tongue. The Concord stage-coachman distinguished her by his respect, and the chambermaid was pretty sure to confide to her, on the second day, her homely romance.

I regret that it is not in my power to give any true report of Margaret’s conversation. She soon became an established friend and frequent inmate of our house, and continued, thenceforward, for years, to come, once in three or four months, to spend a week or a fortnight with us. She adopted all the people and all the interests she found here. Your people shall be my people, and yonder darling boy I shall cherish as my own. Her ready sympathies endeared her to my wife and my mother, each of whom highly esteemed her good sense and sincerity. She suited each, and all. Yet, she was not a person to be suspected of complaisance, and her attachments, one might say, were chemical.

She had so many tasks of her own, that she was a very easy guest to entertain, as she could be left to herself, day after day, without apology. According to our usual habit, we seldom met in the forenoon. After dinner, we read something together, or walked, or rode. In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held, whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner; — talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest. Her topics were numerous, but the cardinal points of poetry, love, and religion, were never far off. She was a student of art, and, though untravelled, knew, much better than most persons who had been abroad, the conventional reputation of each of the masters. She was familiar with all the field of elegant criticism in literature. Among the problems of the day, these two attracted her chiefly, Mythology and Demonology; then, also, French Socialism, especially as it concerned woman; the whole prolific family of reforms, and, of course, the genius and career of each remarkable person.

She had other friends, in this town, beside those in my house. A lady, already alluded to, lived in the village, who had known her longer than I, and whose prejudices Margaret had resolutely fought down, until she converted her into the firmest and most efficient of friends. In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne, already then known to the world by his Twice-Told Tales, came to live in Concord, in the “Old Manse,” with his wife, who was herself an artist. With these welcomed persons Margaret formed a strict and happy acquaintance. She liked their old house, and the taste which had filled it with new articles of beautiful form, yet harmonized with the antique furniture left by the former proprietors. She liked, too, the pleasing walks, and rides, and boatings, which that neighborhood commanded.

In 1842, William Ellery Channing, whose wife was her sister, built a house in Concord, and this circumstance made a new tie and another home for Margaret.

ARCANA.

It was soon evident that there was somewhat a little pagan about her; that she had some faith more or less distinct in a fate, and in a guardian genius; that her fancy, or her pride, had played with her religion. She had a taste for gems, ciphers, talismans, omens, coincidences, and birth-days. She had a special love for the planet Jupiter, and a belief that the month of September was inauspicious to her. She never forgot that her name, Margarita, signified a pearl. ‘When I first met with the name Leila,’ she said, ‘I knew, from the very look and sound, it was mine; I knew that it meant night, — night, which brings out stars, as sorrow brings out truths.’ Sortilege she valued. She tried sortes biblicæ, and her hits were memorable. I think each new book which interested her, she was disposed to put to this test, and know if it had somewhat personal to say to her. As happens to such persons, these guesses were justified by the event. She chose carbuncle for her own stone, and when a dear friend was to give her a gem, this was the one selected. She valued what she had somewhere read, that carbuncles are male and female. The female casts out light, the male has his within himself. ‘Mine,’ she said, ‘is the male.’ And she was wont to put on her carbuncle, a bracelet, or some selected gem, to write letters to certain friends. One of her friends she coupled with the onyx, another in a decided way with the amethyst. She learned that the ancients esteemed this gem a talisman to dispel intoxication, to give good thoughts and understanding ‘The Greek meaning is antidote against drunkenness.’ She characterized her friends by these stones, and wrote to the last mentioned, the following lines: —

‘TO —— .

 ’Slow wandering on a tangled way,
  To their lost child pure spirits say: —
  The diamond marshal thee by day,
  By night, the carbuncle defend,
  Heart’s blood of a bosom friend.
    On thy brow, the amethyst,
      Violet of purest earth,
    When by fullest sunlight kissed,
      Best reveals its regal birth;
  And when that haloed moment flies,
  Shall keep thee steadfast, chaste, and wise.’

Coincidences, good and bad, contretemps, seals, ciphers, mottoes, omens, anniversaries, names, dreams, are all of a certain importance to her. Her letters are often dated on some marked anniversary of her own, or of her correspondent’s calendar. She signalized saints’ days, “All-Souls,” and “All-Saints,” by poems, which had for her a mystical value. She remarked a preëstablished harmony of the names of her personal friends, as well as of her historical favorites; that of Emanuel, for Swedenborg; and Rosencrantz, for the head of the Rosicrucians. ‘If Christian Rosencrantz,’ she said, ‘is not a made name, the genius of the age interfered in the baptismal rite, as in the cases of the archangels of art, Michael and Raphael, and in giving the name of Emanuel to the captain of the New Jerusalem. Sub rosa crux, I think, is the true derivation, and not the chemical one, generation, corruption, &c.’ In this spirit, she soon surrounded herself with a little mythology of her own. She had a series of anniversaries, which she kept. Her seal-ring of the flying Mercury had its legend. She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time: —

‘In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.’

She valued, of course, the significance of flowers, and chose emblems for her friends from her garden.

‘TO —— , WITH HEARTSEASE.

 ’Content, in purple lustre clad,
  Kingly serene, and golden glad,
  No demi-hues of sad contrition,
  No pallors of enforced submission; —
  Give me such content as this,
  And keep awhile the rosy bliss.’

DÆMONOLOGY.

This catching at straws of coincidence, where all is geometrical, seems the necessity of certain natures. It, is true, that, in every good work, the particulars are right, and, that every spot of light on the ground, under the trees, is a perfect image of the sun. Yet, for astronomical purposes, an observatory is better than an orchard; and in a universe which is nothing but generations, or an unbroken suite of cause and effect, to infer Providence, because a man happens to find a shilling on the pavement just when he wants one to spend, is puerile, and much as if each of us should date his letters and notes of hand from his own birthday, instead of from Christ’s or the king’s reign, or the current Congress. These, to be sure, are also, at first, petty and private beginnings, but, by the world of men, clothed with a social and cosmical character.

It will be seen, however, that this propensity Margaret held with certain tenets of fate, which always swayed her, and which Goethe, who had found room and fine names for all this in his system, had encouraged; and, I may add, which her own experiences, early and late, seemed strangely to justify.

Some extracts, from her letters to different persons, will show how this matter lay in her mind.

‘December 17, 1829. — The following instance of beautiful credulity, in Rousseau, has taken my mind greatly. This remote seeking for the decrees of fate, this feeling of a destiny, casting its shadows from the very morning of thought, is the most beautiful species of idealism in our day. ’Tis finely manifested in Wallenstein, where the two common men sum up their superficial observations on the life and doings of Wallenstein, and show that, not until this agitating crisis, have they caught any idea of the deep thoughts which shaped that hero, who has, without their feeling it, moulded their existence.

‘“Tasso,” says Rousseau, “has predicted my misfortunes. Have you remarked that Tasso has this peculiarity, that you cannot take from his work a single strophe, nor from any strophe a single line, nor from any line a single word, without disarranging the whole poem? Very well! take away the strophe I speak of, the stanza has no connection with those that precede or follow it; it is absolutely useless. Tasso probably wrote it involuntarily, and without comprehending it himself.”

‘As to the impossibility of taking from Tasso without disarranging the poem, &c., I dare say ’tis not one whit more justly said of his, than, of any other narrative poem. Mais, n’importe, ’tis sufficient if Rousseau believed this. I found the stanza in question; admire its meaning beauty.

‘I hope you have Italian enough to appreciate the singular perfection in expression. If not, look to Fairfax’s Jerusalem Delivered, Canto 12, Stanza 77; but Rousseau says these lines have no connection with what goes before, or after; they are preceded, stanza 76, by these three lines, which he does not think fit to mention.’

* * * * *

     ”Misero mostro d’infelice amore;
  Misero mostro a cui sol pena è degna
  Dell’ immensa impietà, la vita indegna.”

 ”Vivrò fra i miei tormenti e fra le cure,
  Mie giuste furie, forsennato errante.
  Paventerò l’ombre solinghe e scure,
  Che l’primo error mi recheranno avante
  E del sol che scoprì le mie sventure,
  A schivo ed in orrore avrò il sembiante.
  Temerò me medesmo; e da me stesso
  Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso.”

LA GERUSALEMME: LIBERATA, C. XII. 76, 77.

TO R.W.E.

‘Dec.12, 1843. — When Goethe received a letter from Zelter, with a handsome superscription, he said. “Lay that aside; it is Zelter’s true hand-writing. Every man has a dæmon, who is busy to confuse and limit his life. No way is the action of this power more clearly shown, than in the hand-writing. On this occasion, the evil influences have been evaded; the mood, the hand, the pen and paper have conspired to let our friend write truly himself.”

‘You may perceive, I quote from memory, as the sentences are anything but Goethean; but I think often of this little passage. With me, for weeks and months, the dæmon works his will. Nothing succeeds with me. I fall ill, or am otherwise interrupted. At these times, whether of frost, or sultry weather, I would gladly neither plant nor reap, — wait for the better times, which sometimes come, when I forget that sickness is ever possible; when all interruptions are upborne like straws on the full stream of my life, and the words that accompany it are as much in harmony as sedges murmuring near the bank. Not all, yet not unlike. But it often happens, that something presents itself, and must be done, in the bad time; nothing presents itself in the good: so I, like the others, seem worse and poorer than I am.’

In another letter to an earlier friend, she expatiates a little.

‘As to the Dæmoniacal, I know not that I can say to you anything more precise than you find from Goethe. There are no precise terms for such thoughts. The word instinctive indicates their existence. I intimated it in the little piece on the Drachenfels. It may be best understood, perhaps, by a symbol. As the sun shines from the serene heavens, dispelling noxious exhalations, and calling forth exquisite thoughts on the surface of earth in the shape of shrub or flower, so gnome-like works the fire within the hidden caverns and secret veins of earth, fashioning existences which have a longer share in time, perhaps, because they are not immortal in thought. Love, beauty, wisdom, goodness are intelligent, but this power moves only to seize its prey. It is not necessarily either malignant or the reverse, but it has no scope beyond demonstrating its existence. When conscious, self-asserting, it becomes (as power working for its own sake, unwilling to acknowledge love for its superior, must) the devil. That is the legend of Lucifer, the star that would not own its centre. Yet, while it is unconscious, it is not devilish, only dæmoniac. In nature, we trace it in all volcanic workings, in a boding position of lights, in whispers of the wind, which has no pedigree; in deceitful invitations of the water, in the sullen rock, which never shall find a voice, and in the shapes of all those beings who go about seeking what they may devour. We speak of a mystery, a dread; we shudder, but we approach still nearer, and a part of our nature listens, sometimes answers to this influence, which, if not indestructible, is at least indissolubly linked with the existence of matter.

‘In genius, and in character, it works, as you say, instinctively; it refuses to be analyzed by the understanding, and is most of all inaccessible to the person who possesses it. We can only say, I have it, he has it. You have seen it often in the eyes of those Italian faces you like. It is most obvious in the eye. As we look on such eyes, we think on the tiger, the serpent, beings who lurk, glide, fascinate, mysteriously control. For it is occult by its nature, and if it could meet you on the highway, and be familiarly known as an acquaintance, could not exist. The angels of light do not love, yet they do not insist on exterminating it.

‘It has given rise to the fables of wizard, enchantress, and the like; these beings are scarcely good, yet not necessarily bad. Power tempts them. They draw their skills from the dead, because their being is coeval with that of matter, and matter is the mother of death.’

In later days, she allowed herself sometimes to dwell sadly on the resistances which she called her fate, and remarked, that ‘all life that has been or could be natural to me, is invariably denied.’

She wrote long afterwards: —

‘My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy hours, but they all lead to sorrow, and not only the cups of wine, but of milk, seem drugged with poison, for me. It does not seem to be my fault, this destiny. I do not court these things, — they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract.’

TEMPERAMENT.

I said that Margaret had a broad good sense, which brought her near to all people. I am to say that she had also a strong temperament, which is that counter force which makes individuality, by driving all the powers in the direction of the ruling thought or feeling, and, when it is allowed full sway, isolating them. These two tendencies were always invading each other, and now one and now the other carried the day. This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer. We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would say with emphasis the very word.

I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament. In the first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner, — that, with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk. She had a strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her fate. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total prostration. She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed formed for high emergencies.

Her life concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy moments. The rest was a void. She had read that a man of letters must lose many days, to work well in one. Much more must a Sappho or a sibyl. The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain. ‘If I had wist!— ‘ she writes, ‘I am a worse self-tormentor than Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire. My beautiful lore, like the tropic clime, hatches scorpions to sting me. There is a verse, which Annie of Lochroyan sings about her ring, that torments my memory, ’tis so true of myself.’

When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises, and had a feeling as if a voice cried, Stand from under! — as if, a little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses, which no friendship could avert or console. This feeling partly wore off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more purely intellectual natures. She seemed more vulnerable. For the same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my strength, — her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and, later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve, she had a determination of blood to the head. ‘My parents,’ she said,

‘were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.’

She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She read and wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in recent years.

She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of herself, ‘A man’s ambition with a woman’s heart, is an evil lot.’ In some verses which she wrote ‘To the Moon,’ occur these lines: —

 ’But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
  A human secret, like my own, I trace;
  For, through the woman’s smile looks the male eye.’

And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of Balzac’s, “Le Livre Mystique,” in which an equivocal figure exerts alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of the plot.

Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious, and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would carry, and to draw advantage from it. ‘Attica,’ she said to a friend, ‘is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.’

‘I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and leap, blind force for the sake of force.’

* * * * *

‘Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.’

* * * * *

‘Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods. The more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at giving out thought and life in regulated rations, — the more I weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without props and sedan chairs.’

TO R.W.E.

‘Dec. 26, 1839. — If you could look into my mind just now, you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter, describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due direction.

‘I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.’

She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon’s, and, later, that of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the progress of intimacy, to write every day. ‘I think less than a daily offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems to pass unspoken.’ In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has ‘more than a hundred correspondents;’ and it was her habit there to devote one day of every week to those distant friends. The facility with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders of the press would shrink from, — assumed and performed, — when her friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonder, and with fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health, and the manner in which her life heaped itself in high and happy moments, which were avenged by lassitude and pain.

‘As each task comes,’ she said, ‘I borrow a readiness from its aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend. Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.’

I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated, and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow circulation of others as a torrent with a rill. She found no full expression of it but in music. Beethoven’s Symphony was the only right thing the city of the Puritans had for her. Those to whom music has a representative value, affording them a stricter copy of their inward life than any other of the expressive arts, will, perhaps, enter into the spirit which dictated the following letter to her patron saint, on her return, one evening, from the Boston Academy of Music.

TO BEETHOVEN.

‘Saturday Evening. 25th Nov., 1843.

‘My only friend,

‘How shall I thank thee for once more breaking the chains of my sorrowful slumber? My heart beats. I live again, for I feel that I am worthy audience for thee, and that my being would be reason enough for thine.

‘Master, my eyes are always clear. I see that the universe is rich, if I am poor. I see the insignificance of my sorrows. In my will, I am not a captive; in my intellect, not a slave. Is it then my fault that the palsy of my affections benumbs my whole life?

‘I know that the curse is but for the time. I know what the eternal justice promises. But on this one sphere, it is sad. Thou didst say, thou hadst no friend but thy art. But that one is enough. I have no art, in which to vent the swell of a soul as deep as thine, Beethoven, and of a kindred frame. Thou wilt not think me presumptuous in this saying, as another might. I have always known that thou wouldst welcome and know me, as would no other who ever lived upon the earth since its first creation.

‘Thou wouldst forgive me, master, that I have not been true to my eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every side “the pangs of despised love.” Thou didst the same; but thou didst borrow from those errors the inspiration of thy genius. Why is it not thus with me? Is it because, as a woman, I am bound by a physical-law, which prevents the soul from manifesting itself? Sometimes the moon seems mockingly to say so, — to say that I, too, shall not shine, unless I can find a sun. O, cold and barren moon, tell a different tale!

‘But thou, oh blessed master! dost answer all my questions, and make it my privilege to be. Like a humble wife to the sage, or poet, it is my triumph that I can understand and cherish thee: like a mistress, I arm thee for the fight: like a young daughter, I tenderly bind thy wounds. Thou art to me beyond compare, for thou art all I want. No heavenly sweetness of saint or martyr, no many-leaved Raphael, no golden Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee. The infinite Shakspeare, the stern Angelo, Dante, — bittersweet like thee, — are no longer seen in thy presence. And, beside these names, there are none that could vibrate in thy crystal sphere. Thou hast all of them, and that ample surge of life besides, that great winged being which they only dreamed of. There is none greater than Shakspeare; he, too, is a god; but his creations are successive; thy fiat comprehends them all.

‘Last summer, I met thy mood in nature, on those wide impassioned plains flower and crag-bestrown. There, the tide of emotion had rolled over, and left the vision of its smiles and sobs, as I saw to-night from thee.

‘If thou wouldst take me wholly to thyself — ! I am lost in this world, where I sometimes meet angels, but of a different star from mine. Even so does thy spirit plead with all spirits. But thou dost triumph and bring them all in.

‘Master, I have this summer envied the oriole which had even a swinging nest in the high bough. I have envied the least flower that came to seed, though that seed were strown to the wind. But I envy none when I am with thee.’

SELF-ESTEEM.

Margaret at first astonished and repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger. She spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. In the coolest way, she said to her friends, ‘I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’ In vain, on one occasion, I professed my reverence for a youth of genius, and my curiosity in his future,— ‘O no, she was intimate with his mind,’ and I ‘spoiled him, by overrating him.’ Meantime, we knew that she neither had seen, nor would see, his subtle superiorities.

I have heard, that from the beginning of her life, she idealized herself as a sovereign. She told — she early saw herself to be intellectually superior to those around her, and that for years she dwelt upon the idea, until she believed that she was not her parents’ child, but an European princess confided to their care. She remembered, that, when a little girl, she was walking one day under the apple trees with such an air and step, that her father pointed her out to her sister, saying, Incedit regina. And her letters sometimes convey these exultations, as the following, which was written to a lady, and which contained Margaret’s translation of Goethe’s “Prometheus.”

To —— .

1838. — Which of us has not felt the questionings expressed in this bold fragment? Does it not seem, were we gods, or could steal their fire, we would make men not only happier, but free, — glorious? Yes, my life is strange; thine is strange. We are, we shall be, in this life, mutilated beings, but there is in my bosom a faith, that I shall see the reason; a glory, that I can endure to be so imperfect; and a feeling, ever elastic, that fate and time shall have the shame and the blame, if I am mutilated. I will do all I can, — and, if one cannot succeed, there is a beauty in martyrdom.

Your letters are excellent. I did not mean to check your writing, only I thought that you might wish a confidence that I must anticipate with a protest. But I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or guards, still a queen.

It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense. She could say, as if she were stating a scientific fact, in enumerating the merits of somebody, ‘He appreciates me.’ There was something of hereditary organization in this, and something of unfavorable circumstance in the fact, that she had in early life no companion, and few afterwards, in her finer studies; but there was also an ebullient sense of power, which she felt to be in her, which as yet had found no right channels. I remember she once said to me, what I heard as a mere statement of fact, and nowise as unbecoming, that ‘no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to a full expression; that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to such as she conversed with.’

Her impatience she expressed as she could. ‘I feel within myself,’ she said,

‘an immense force, but I cannot bring it out. It may sound like a joke, but I do feel something corresponding to that tale of the Destinies falling in love with Hermes.’

In her journal, in the summer of 1844, she writes: —

‘Mrs. Ware talked with me about education, — wilful education, — in which she is trying to get interested. I talk with a Goethean moderation on this subject, which rather surprises her and —— , who are nearer the entrance of the studio. I am really old on this subject. In near eight years’ experience, I have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great talent at explanation, tact in the use of means, and immediate and invariable power over the minds of my pupils. My wish has been, to purify my own conscience, when near them; give clear views of the aims of this life; show them where the magazines of knowledge lie; and leave the rest to themselves and the Spirit, who must teach and help them to self-impulse. I told Mrs. W. it was much if we did not injure them; if they were passing the time in a way that was not bad, so that good influences have a chance. Perhaps people in general must expect greater outward results, or they would feel no interest.’

Again:

‘With the intellect I always have, always shall, overcome; but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life! O, my God! shall the life never be sweet?’

I have inquired diligently of those who saw her often, and in different companies, concerning her habitual tone, and something like this is the report: — In conversation, Margaret seldom, except as a special grace, admitted others upon an equal ground with herself. She was exceedingly tender, when she pleased to be, and most cherishing in her influence; but to elicit this tenderness, it was necessary to submit first to her personally. When a person was overwhelmed by her, and answered not a word, except, “Margaret, be merciful to me, a sinner,” then her love and tenderness would come like a seraph’s, and often an acknowledgment that she had been too harsh, and even a craving for pardon, with a humility, — which, perhaps, she had caught from the other. But her instinct was not humility, — that was always an afterthought.

This arrogant tone of her conversation, if it came to be the subject of comment, of course, she defended, and with such broad good nature, and on grounds of simple truth, as were not easy to set aside. She quoted from Manzoni’s Carmagnola, the lines: —

 ”Tolga il ciel che alcuno
  Piu altamente di me pensi ch’io stesso.”

“God forbid that any one should conceive more highly of me than I myself.” Meantime, the tone of her journals is humble, tearful, religious, and rises easily into prayer.

I am obliged to an ingenious correspondent for the substance of the following account of this idiosyncrasy: —

Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art. She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her. No one could be more lenient in her judgments of those whom she saw to be living in this light. Their faults were to be held as “the disproportions of the ungrown giant.” But the faults of persons who were unjustified by this ideal, were odious. Unhappily, her constitutional self-esteem sometimes blinded the eyes that should have seen that an idea lay at the bottom of some lives which she did not quite so readily comprehend as beauty; that truth had other manifestations than those which engaged her natural sympathies; that sometimes the soul illuminated only the smallest arc — of a circle so large that it was lost in the clouds of another world.

This apology reminds me of a little speech once made to her, at his own house, by Dr. Channing, who held her in the highest regard: “Miss Fuller, when I consider that you are and have all that Miss —— has so long wished for, and that you scorn her, and that she still admires you, — I think her place in heaven will be very high.”

But qualities of this kind can only be truly described by the impression they make on the bystander; and it is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any other. Many years since, one of her earliest and fastest friends quoted Spenser’s sonnet as accurately descriptive of Margaret: —

 ”Rudely thou wrongest my dear heart’s desire,
       In finding fault with her too portly pride;
  The thing which I do most in her admire
       Is of the world unworthy most envied.
  For, in those lofty looks is close implied
       Scorn of base things, disdain of foul dishonor,
  Threatening rash eyes which gaze on her so wide
       That loosely they ne dare to look upon her:
  Such pride is praise, such portliness is honor,
       That boldened innocence bears in her eyes;
  And her fair countenance, like a goodly banner,
       Spreads in defiance of all enemies.
  Was never in this world aught worthy tried,
       Without a spark of some self-pleasing pride.”

BOOKS.

She had been early remarked for her sense and sprightliness, and for her skill in school exercises. Now she had added wide reading, and of the books most grateful to her. She had read the Italian poets by herself, and from sympathy. I said, that, by the leading part she naturally took, she had identified herself with all the elegant culture in this country. Almost every person who had any distinction for wit, or art, or scholarship, was known to her; and she was familiar with the leading books and topics. There is a kind of undulation in the popularity of the great writers, even of the first rank. We have seen a recent importance given to Behmen and Swedenborg; and Shakspeare has unquestionably gained with the present generation. It is distinctive, too, of the taste of the period, — the new vogue given to the genius of Dante. An edition of Cary’s translation, reprinted in Boston, many years ago, was rapidly sold; and, for the last twenty years, all studious youths and maidens have been reading the Inferno. Margaret had very early found her way to Dante, and from a certain native preference which she felt or fancied for the Italian genius. The following letter, though of a later date, relates to these studies: —

TO R.W.E.

‘December, 1842. — When you were here, you seemed to think I might perhaps have done something on the Vita Nuova; and the next day I opened the book, and considered how I could do it. But you shall not expect that, either, for your present occasion. When I first mentioned it to you, it was only as a piece of Sunday work, which I thought of doing for you alone; and because it has never seemed to me you entered enough into the genius of the Italian to apprehend the mind, which has seemed so great to me, and a star unlike, if not higher than all the others in our sky. Else, I should have given you the original, rather than any version of mine. I intended to translate the poems, with which it is interspersed, into plain prose. Milnes and Longfellow have tried each their power at doing it in verse, and have done better, probably, than I could, yet not well. But this would not satisfy me for the public. Besides, the translating Dante is a piece of literary presumption, and challenges a criticism to which I am not sure that I am, as the Germans say, gewachsen. Italian, as well as German, I learned by myself, unassisted, except as to the pronunciation. I have never been brought into connection with minds trained to any severity in these kinds of elegant culture. I have used all the means within my reach, but my not going abroad is an insuperable defect in the technical part of my education. I was easily capable of attaining excellence, perhaps mastery, in the use of some implements. Now I know, at least, what I do not know, and I get along by never voluntarily going beyond my depth, and, when called on to do it, stating my incompetency. At moments when I feel tempted to regret that I could not follow out the plan I had marked for myself, and develop powers which are not usual here, I reflect, that if I had attained high finish and an easy range in these respects, I should not have been thrown back on my own resources, or known them as I do. But Lord Brougham should not translate Greek orations, nor a maid-of-all-work attempt such a piece of delicate handling as to translate the Vita Nuova.’

Here is a letter, without date, to another correspondent:

‘To-day, on reading over some of the sonnets of Michel Angelo, I felt them more than usual. I know not why I have not read them thus before, except that the beauty was pointed out to me at first by another, instead of my coming unexpectedly upon it of myself. All the great writers, all the persons who have been dear to me, I have found and chosen; they have not been proposed to me. My intimacy with them came upon me as natural eras, unexpected and thrice dear. Thus I have appreciated, but not been able to feel, Michel Angelo as a poet.

‘It is a singular fact in my mental history, that, while I understand the principles and construction of language much better than formerly, I cannot read so well les langues méridionales. I suppose it is that I am less méridionale myself. I understand the genius of the north better than I did.’

Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, were her friends among the old poets, — for to Ariosto she assigned a far lower place, — Alfieri and Manzoni, among the new. But what was of still more import to her education, she had read German books, and, for the three years before I knew her, almost exclusively, — Lessing, Schiller, Richter, Tieck, Novalis, and, above all, GOETHE. It was very obvious, at the first intercourse with her, though her rich and busy mind never reproduced undigested reading, that the last writer, — food or poison, — the most powerful of all mental reagents, — the pivotal mind in modern literature, — for all before him are ancients, and all who have read him are moderns, — that this mind had been her teacher, and, of course, the place was filled, nor was there room for any other. She had that symptom which appears in all the students of Goethe, — an ill-dissembled contempt of all criticism on him which they hear from others, as if it were totally irrelevant; and they are themselves always preparing to say the right word, — a prestige which is allowed, of course, until they do speak: when they have delivered their volley, they pass, like their foregoers, to the rear.

The effect on Margaret was complete. She was perfectly timed to it. She found her moods met, her topics treated, the liberty of thought she loved, the same climate of mind. Of course, this book superseded all others, for the time, and tinged deeply all her thoughts. The religion, the science, the Catholicism, the worship of art, the mysticism and dæmonology, and withal the clear recognition of moral distinctions as final and eternal, all charmed her; and Faust, and Tasso, and Mignon, and Makaria, and Iphigenia, became irresistible names. It was one of those agreeable historical coincidences, perhaps invariable, though not yet registered, the simultaneous appearance of a teacher and of pupils, between whom exists a strict affinity. Nowhere did Goethe find a braver, more intelligent, or more sympathetic reader. About the time I knew her, she was meditating a biography of Goethe, and did set herself to the task in 1837. She spent much time on it, and has left heaps of manuscripts, which are notes, transcripts, and studies in that direction. But she wanted leisure and health to finish it, amid the multitude of projected works with which her brain teemed. She used great discretion on this point, and made no promises. In 1839, she published her translation of Eckermann, a book which makes the basis of the translation of Eckermann since published in London, by Mr. Oxenford. In the Dial, in July, 1841, she wrote an article on Goethe, which is, on many accounts, her best paper.

CRITICISM.

Margaret was in the habit of sending to her correspondents, in lieu of letters, sheets of criticism on her recent readings. From such quite private folios, never intended for the press, and, indeed, containing here and there names and allusions, which it is now necessary to veil or suppress, I select the following notices, chiefly of French books. Most of these were addressed to me, but the three first to an earlier friend.

‘Reading Schiller’s introduction to the Wars of the League, I have been led back to my old friend, the Duke of Sully, and his charming king. He was a man, that Henri! How gay and graceful seems his unflinching frankness! He wore life as lightly as the feather in his cap. I have become much interested, too, in the two Guises, who had seemed to me mere intriguers, and not of so splendid abilities, when I was less able to appreciate the difficulties they daily and hourly combated. I want to read some more books about them. Do you know whether I could get Matthieu, or de Thou, or the Memoirs of the House of Nevers?

‘I do not think this is a respectable way of passing my summer, but I cannot help it.

‘I never read any life of Molière. Are the facts very interesting? You see clearly in his writing what he was: a man not high, not poetic; but firm, wide, genuine, whose clearsightedness only made him more noble. I love him well that he could see without showing these myriad mean faults of the social man, and yet make no nearer approach to misanthropy than his Alceste. These witty Frenchmen. Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière, are great as were their marshals and preux chevaliers; when the Frenchman tries to be poetical, he becomes theatrical, but he can be romantic, and also dignified, maugre shrugs and snuff-boxes.’

* * * * *

‘Thursday Evening. — Although I have been much engaged these two days. I have read Spiridion twice. I could have wished to go through it the second time more at leisure, but as I am going away, I thought I would send it back, lest it should be wanted before my return.

‘The development of the religious sentiment being the same as in Hélene, I at first missed the lyric effusion of that work, which seems to me more and more beautiful, as I think of it more. This, however, was a mere prejudice, of course, as the thought here is poured into a quite different mould, and I was not troubled by it on a second reading.

‘Again, when I came to look at the work by itself, I thought the attempt too bold. A piece of character-painting does not seem to be the place for a statement of these wide and high subjects. For here the philosophy is not merely implied in the poetry and religion, but assumes to show a face of its own. And, as none should meddle with these matters who are not in earnest, so, such will prefer to find the thought of a teacher or fellow-disciple expressed as directly and as bare of ornament as possible.

‘I was interested in De Wette’s Theodor, and that learned and (on dit) profound man seemed to me so to fail, that I did not finish the book, nor try whether I could believe the novice should ever arrive at manly stature.

‘I am not so clear as to the scope and bearing of this book, as of that. I suppose if I were to read Lamennais, or L’Erminier, I should know what they all want or intend. And if you meet with Les paroles d’un Croyant, I will beg you to get it for me, for I am more curious than ever. I had supposed the view taken by these persons in France, to be the same with that of Novalis and the German Catholics, in which I have been deeply interested. But from this book, it would seem to approach the faith of some of my friends here, which has been styled Psychotheism. And the gap in the theoretical fabric is the same as with them. I read with unutterable interest the despair of Alexis in his Eclectic course, his return to the teachings of external nature, his new birth, and consequent appreciation of poetry and music. But the question of Free Will, — how to reconcile its workings with necessity and compensation, — how to reconcile the life of the heart with that of the intellect, — how to listen to the whispering breeze of Spirit, while breasting, as a man should, the surges of the world, — these enigmas Sand and her friends seem to have solved no better than M.F. and her friends.

‘The practical optimism is much the same as ours, except that there is more hope for the masses — soon.

‘This work is written with great vigor, scarce any faltering on the wing. The horrors are disgusting, as are those of every writer except Dante. Even genius should content itself in dipping the pencil in cloud and mist. The apparitions of Spiridion are managed with great beauty. As in Hélene, as in Novalis, I recognized, with delight, the eye that gazed, the ear that listened, till the spectres came, as they do to the Highlander on his rocky couch, to the German peasant on his mountain. How different from the vulgar eye which looks, but never sees! Here the beautiful apparition advances from the solar ray, or returns to the fountain of light and truth, as it should, when eagle eyes are gazing.

‘I am astonished at her insight into the life of thought. She must know it through some man. Women, under any circumstances, can scarce do more than dip the foot in this broad and deep river; they have not strength to contend with the current. Brave, if they do not delicately shrink from the cold water. No Sibyls have existed like those of Michel Angelo; those of Raphael are the true brides of a God, but not themselves divine. It is easy for women to be heroic in action, but when it comes to interrogating God, the universe, the soul, and, above all, trying to live above their own hearts, they dart down to their nests like so many larks, and, if they cannot find them, fret like the French Corinne. Goethe’s Makaria was born of the stars. Mr. Flint’s Platonic old lady a lusus naturæ, and the Dudevant has loved a philosopher.

‘I suppose the view of the present state of Catholicism no way exaggerated. Alexis is no more persecuted than Abelard was, and is so, for the same reasons. From the examinations of the Italian convents in Leopold’s time, it seems that the grossest materialism not only reigns, but is taught and professed in them. And Catholicism loads and infects as all dead forms do, however beautiful and noble during their lives.’ * *

GEORGE SAND, AGAIN.

‘1839. — When I first knew George Sand, I thought I found tried the experiment I wanted. I did not value Bettine so much; she had not pride enough for me; only now when I am sure of myself, would I pour out my soul at the feet of another. In the assured soul it is kingly prodigality; in one which cannot forbear, it is mere babyhood. I love abandon only when natures are capable of the extreme reverse. I knew Bettine would end in nothing, when I read her book. I knew she could not outlive her love.

‘But in Les Sept Cordes de la Lyre, which I read first, I saw the knowledge of the passions, and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which rose above them. I loved Hélene, who could so well hear the terrene voices, yet keep her eye fixed on the stars. That would be my wish, also, to know all, then choose; I ever revered her, for I was not sure that I could have resisted the call of the Now, could have left the spirit, and gone to God. And, at a more ambitious age, I could not have refused the philosopher. But I hoped from her steadfastness, and I thought I heard the last tones of a purified life: — Gretchen, in the golden cloud, raised above all past delusions, worthy to redeem and upbear the wise man, who stumbled into the pit of error while searching for truth.

‘Still, in André, and in Jacques, I traced the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law, to know that license is the foe of freedom. And, though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dank and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and began a new existence beneath the sun of a true Ideal.

‘But here (in the Lettres d’un Voyageur) what do I see? An unfortunate bewailing her loneliness, bewailing her mistakes, writing for money! She has genius, and a manly grasp of mind, but not a manly heart! Will there never be a being to combine a mail’s mind and woman’s heart, and who yet finds life too rich to weep over? Never?

‘When I read in Leone Lioni the account of the jeweller’s daughter’s life with her mother, passed in dress and in learning to be looked at when dressed, avec un front impassible, it reminded me exceedingly of —— , and her mother. What a heroine she would be for Sand! She has the same fearless softness with Juliet, and a sportive naïveté, a mixture of bird and kitten, unknown to the dupe of Lioni.

‘If I were a man, and wished a wife, as many do, merely as an ornament, or silken toy, I would take —— as soon as any I know. Her fantastic, impassioned, and mutable nature would yield an inexhaustible amusement. She is capable of the most romantic actions; — wild as the falcon, and voluptuous as the tuberose, — yet she has not in her the elements of romance, like a deeper and less susceptible nature. My cold and reasoning E., with her one love lying, perhaps, never to be unfolded, beneath such sheaths of pride and reserve, would make a far better heroine.

‘Both these characters are natural, while S. and T. are naturally factitious, because so imitative, and her mother differs from Juliet and her mother, by the impulse a single strong character gave them. Even at this distance of time, there is a slight but perceptible taste of iron in the water.

‘George Sand disappoints me, as almost all beings have, especially since I have been brought close to her person by the Lettres d’un Voyageur. Her remarks on Lavater seem really shallow, and hasty, à la mode du genre feménin. No self-ruling Aspasia she, but a frail woman mourning over a lot. Any peculiarity in her destiny seems accidental. She is forced to this and that, to earn her bread forsooth!

‘Yet her style, — with what a deeply smouldering fire it burns! — not vehement, but intense, like Jean Jacques.’

ALFRED DE VIGNY.

‘Sept., 1839.

‘“La harpe tremble encore, et la flûte soupire.”

‘Sometimes we doubt this, and think the music has finally ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the parade-ground of social life. The ear grows dull.

     ’”Faith asks her daily bread,
      And Fancy is no longer fed.”

‘So materialistic is the course of common life, that we ask daily new Messiahs from literature and art, to turn us from the Pharisaic observance of law, to the baptism of spirit. But stars arise upon our murky sky, and the flute soupire from the quarter where we least expect it.

‘La jeune France! I had not believed in this youthful pretender. I thought she had no pure blood in her veins, no aristocratic features in her face, no natural grace in her gait. I thought her an illegitimate child of the generous, but extravagant youth of Germany. I thought she had been left at the foundling hospital, as not worth a parent’s care, and that now, grown up, she was trying to prove at once her parentage and her charms by certificates which might be headed, Innocent Adultery, Celestial Crime, &c.

‘The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not dispel these impressions. And I thought Chateaubriand (far too French for my taste also,) belonged to l’ancien régime, and that Béranger and Courier stood apart. Nodier, Paul de Kock, Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as little.

‘But I have now got a peep at this galaxy. I begin to divine the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres. I perceive that la jeune France is the legitimate, though far younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her, but of a common mother. I see, at least begin to see, what she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too light.

‘Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau, prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the hill-top, — as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country that has no heed of them till her railroads and canals are finished, — I need not jot down my petty impressions of the movement writers. I wish to speak of one among them, aided, honored by them, but not of them. He is to la jeune France rather the herald of a tourney, or the master of ceremonies at a patriotic festival, than a warrior for her battles, or an advocate to win her cause.

‘The works of M. de Vigny having come in my way, I have read quite through this thick volume.

‘I read, a year since, in the London and Westminster, an admirable sketch of Armand Carrel. The writer speaks particularly of the use of which Carrel’s experience of practical life had been to him as an author; how it had tempered and sharpened the blade of his intellect to the Damascene perfection. It has been of like use to de Vigny, though not in equal degree.

‘De Vigny passed, — but for manly steadfastness, he would probably say wasted, — his best years in the army. He is now about forty; and we have in this book the flower of these best years. It is a night-blooming Cereus, for his days were passed in the duties of his profession. These duties, so tiresome and unprofitable in time of peace, were the ground in which the seed sprang up, which produced these many-leaved and calm night-flowers.

‘The first portion of this volume, Servitude et Grandeurs Militaires, contains an account of the way in which he received his false tendency. Cherished on the “wounded knees” of his aged father, he listened to tales of the great Frederic, whom the veteran had known personally. After an excellent sketch of the king, he says: “I expatiate here, almost in spite of myself, because this was the first great man whose portrait was thus drawn for me at home, — a portrait after nature, — and because my admiration of him was the first symptom of my useless love of arms, — the first cause of one of the most complete delusions of my life.” This admiration for the great king remained so lively in his mind, that even Bonaparte in his gestures seemed to him, in later days, a plagiarist.

‘At the military school, “the drum stifled the voices of our masters, and the mysterious voices of books seemed to us cold and pedantic. Tropes and logarithms seemed to us only steps to mount to the star of the Legion of Honor, — the fairest star of heaven to us children.”

‘“No meditation could keep long in chains heads made constantly giddy by the noise of cannon and bells for the Te Deum. When one of our former comrades returned to pay us a visit in uniform, and his arm in a scarf, we blushed at our books, and threw them at the heads of our teachers. Our teachers were always reading us bulletins from the grande armée, and our cries of Vive l’Empereur interrupted Tacitus and Plato. Our preceptors resembled heralds of arms, our study halls barracks, and our examinations reviews.”

‘Thus was he led into the army; and, he says, “It was only very late, that I perceived that my services were one long mistake, and that I had imported into a life altogether active, a nature altogether contemplative.”

‘He entered the army at the time of Napoleon’s fall, and, like others, wasted life in waiting for war. For these young persons could not believe that peace and calm were possible to France; could not believe that she could lead any life but one of conquest.

‘As De Vigny was gradually undeceived, he says: “Loaded with an ennui which I did not dream of in a life I had so ardently desired, it became a necessity to me to detach myself by night from the vain and tiresome tumult of military days. From these nights, in which I enlarged in silence the knowledge I had acquired from our public and tumultuous studies, proceeded my poems and books. From these days, there remain to me these recollections, whose chief traits I here assemble around one idea. For, not reckoning for the glory of arms, either on the present or future, I sought it in the souvenirs of my comrades. My own little adventures will not serve, except as frame to those pictures of the military life, and of the manners of our armies, all whose traits are by no means known.”

‘And thus springs up, in the most natural manner, this little book on the army.

‘It has the truth, the delicacy, and the healthiness of a production native to the soil; the merit of love-letters, journals, lyric poems, &c., written without any formal intention of turning life into a book, but because the writer could not help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best, because with profounder connoissance du fait. For De Vigny is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence of these birds of heaven. But in few ways, except their own broken harp-tone’s thrill, have their peculiar sorrows and difficulties been so well illustrated. The character of the soldier, with its virtues and faults, is portrayed with such delicacy, that to condense would ruin. The peculiar reserve, the habit of duty, the beauty of a character which cannot look forward, and need not look back, are given with distinguished finesse.

‘Of the three stories which adorn this part of the book, Le Cachet Rouge is the loveliest, La Canne au Jonc the noblest. Never was anything more sweetly naïve than parts of Le Cachet Rouge. La pauvre petite femme, she was just such a person as my —— . And then the farewell injunctions, — du pauvre petite maré, — the nobleness and the coarseness of the poor captain. It is as original as beautiful, c’est dire beaucoup. In La Canne au Jonc, Collingwood, who embodies the high feeling of duty, is taken too raw out of a book, — his letters to his daughters. But the effect on the character of le Capitaine Renaud, and the unfolding of his interior life, are done with the spiritual beauty of Manzoni.

‘Cinq-Mars is a romance in the style of Walter Scott. It is well brought out, figures in good relief, lights well distributed, sentiment high, but nowhere exaggerated, knowledge exact, and the good and bad of human nature painted with that impartiality which becomes a man, and a man of the world. All right, no failure anywhere; also, no wonderful success, no genius, no magic. It is one of those works which I should consider only excusable as the amusement of leisure hours; and, though few could write it, chiefly valuable to the writer.

‘Here he has arranged, as in a bouquet, what he knew, — and a great deal it is, — of the time of Louis XIII., as he has of the Regency in “La Marechale d’Ancre,” — a much finer work, indeed one of the best-arranged and finished modern dramas. The Leonora Galigai is better than anything I have seen in Victor Hugo, and as good as Schiller. Stello is a bolder attempt. It is the history of three poets, — Gilbert, André Chenier, Chatterton. He has also written a drama called Chatterton, inferior to the story here. The “marvellous boy” seems to have captivated his imagination marvellously. In thought, these productions are worthless; for taste, beauty of sentiment, and power of description, remarkable. His advocacy of the poets’ cause is about as effective and well-planned as Don Quixote’s tourney with the wind-mill. How would you provide for the poet bon homme De Vigny? — from a joint-stock company Poet’s Fund, or how?

   ’His translation of Othello, which I glanced at, is good for a
    Frenchman.

‘Among his poems, La Frégate, La Sérieuse, Madame de Soubise, and Dolorida, please me especially. The last has an elegiac sweetness and finish, which are rare. It also makes a perfect gem of a cabinet picture. Some have a fine strain of natural melody, and give you at once the key-note of the situation, as this: —

     ’”J’aime le son du cor le soir, au fond des bois,
      Soit qu’il chante,” &c.

And

     ’”Qu’il est doux, qu’il est doux d’ecouter les histoires
      Des histoires du temps passe
      Quand les branches des arbres sont noires,
      Quand la neige est essaisse, et charge un sol glacé,
      Quand seul dans un ciel pâle un peuplier s’élance,
      Quand sous le manteau blanc qui vient de le cacher
      L’immobile corbeau sur l’arbre se balance
      Comme la girouette au bout du long clocher.”

   ’These poems generally are only interesting as the leisure
    hours of an interesting man.

‘De Vigny writes in an excellent style; soft, fresh, deliberately graceful. Such a style is like fine manners; you think of the words select, appropriate, rather than distinguished, or beautiful. De Vigny is a perfect gentleman; and his refinement is rather that of the gentleman than that of the poets whom he is so full of. In character, he looks naturally at those things which interest the man of honor and the man of taste. But for literature, he would have known nothing about the poets. He should be the elegant and instructive companion of social, not the priest or the minstrel of solitary hours.

‘Neither has he logic or grasp with his reasoning powers, though of this, also, he is ambitious. Observation is his forte. To see, and to tell with grace, often with dignity and pathos, what he sees, is his proper vocation. Yet, where he fails, he has too much tact and modesty to be despised; and we cannot enough admire the absence of faults in a man whose ambition soared so much beyond his powers, and in an age and a country so full of false taste. He is never seduced into sentimentality, paradox, violent contrast, and, above all, never makes the mistake of confounding the horrible with the sublime. Above all, he never falls into the error, common to merely elegant minds, of painting leading minds “en gigantesque.” His Richelieu and his Bonaparte are treated with great calmness, and with dignified ease, almost as beautiful as majestic superiority.

‘In this volume is contained all that is on record of the inner life of a man of forty years. How many suns, how many rains and dews, to produce a few buds and flowers, some sweet, but not rich fruit! We cannot help demanding of the man of talent that he should be like “the orange tree, that busy plant.” But, as Landor says, “He who has any thoughts of any worth can, and probably will, afford to let the greater part lie fallow.”

‘I have not made a note upon De Vigny’s notions of abnegation, which he repeats as often as Dr. Channing the same watch-word of self-sacrifice. It is that my views are not yet matured, and I can have no judgment on the point.’

BÉRANGER.

‘Sept., 1839. — I have lately been reading some of Béranger’s chansons. The hour was not propitious. I was in a mood the very reverse of Roger Bontemps, and beset with circumstances the most unsuited to make me sympathize with the prayer —

     ’”Pardonnez la gaieté
          De ma philosophie;”

yet I am not quite insensible to their wit, high sentiment, and spontaneous grace. A wit that sparkles all over the ocean of life, a sentiment that never puts the best foot forward, but prefers the tone of delicate humor, to the mouthings of tragedy; a grace so aerial, that it nowhere requires the aid of a thought, for in the light refrains of these productions, the meaning is felt as much as in the most pointed lines. Thus, in “Les Mirmidons,” the refrain —

     ’”Mirmidons, race féconde,
        Mirmidons
      Enfin nous commandons,
      Jupiter livre le monde,
      Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons, (bis.)”

‘The swarming of the insects about the dead lion is expressed as forcibly as in the most sarcastic passage of the chanson. In “La Faridondaine” every sound is a witticism, and levels to the ground a bevy of what Byron calls “garrison people.” “Halte là! ou la système des interpretations” is equally witty, though there the form seems to be as much in the saying, as in the comic melody of sound.

‘In “Adieux à la Campagne,” “Souvenirs du Peuple,” “La Déesse de la Liberté,” “La Convoi de David,” a melancholy pathos breathes, which touches the heart the more that it is so unpretending. “Ce n’est plus Lisette,” “Mon Habit,” “L’Indépendant,” “Vous vieillirez, O ma belle Maitresse,” a gentle graceful sadness wins us. In “Le Dieu des Bonnes Gens,” “Les Etoiles qui filent,” “Les Conseils de Lise,” “Treize à Table,” a noble dignity is admired, while such as “La Fortune” and “La Métempsycose” are inimitable in their childlike playfulness. “Ma Vocation” I have had and admired for many years. He is of the pure ore, a darling fairy changling of great mother Nature; the poet of the people, and, therefore, of all in the upper classes sufficiently intelligent and refined to appreciate the wit and sentiment of the people. But his wit is so truly French in its lightness and sparkling, feathering vivacity, that one like me, accustomed to the bitterness of English tonics, suicidal November melancholy, and Byronic wrath of satire, cannot appreciate him at once. But when used to the gentler stimuli, we like them best, and we also would live awhile in the atmosphere of music and mirth, content if we have “bread for to-day, and hope for to-morrow.”

   ’There are fine lines in his “Cinq Mai;” the sentiment is as
    grand as Manzoni’s, though not sustained by the same majestic
    sweep of diction, as, —

     ’”Ce rocher repousse l’espérance,
      L’Aigle n’est plus dans le secret des dieux,
      Il fatiguait la victoire à le suivre,
      Elle était lasse: il ne l’attendit pas.”

‘And from “La Gérontocratie, ou les infiniment petits:”

     ’”Combien d’imperceptibles êtres,
      De petits jésuites bilieux!
      De milliers d’autres petits prêtres,
      Lui portent de petits bons dieux.”

‘But wit, poet, man of honor, tailor’s grandson and fairy’s favorite, he must speak for himself, and the best that can be felt or thought of him cannot be said in the way of criticism. I will copy and keep a few of his songs. I should like to keep the whole collection by me, and take it up when my faith in human nature required the gentlest of fortifying draughts.

   ’How fine his answer to those who asked about the “de” before
    his name! —

     ’”Je suis vilain,
      Vilain, vilain,” &c.
      J’honore une race commune,
      Car, sensible, quoique malin,
      Je n’ai flatté que l’infortune.”

‘In a note to “Couplets on M. Laisney, imprimeur à Peronne,” he says: “It was in his printing-house that I was put to prentice; not having been able to learn orthography, he imparted to me the taste for poetry, gave me lessons in versification, and corrected my first essays.”

‘Of Bonaparte, —

     ’”Un conquérant, dans sa fortune altière,
      Se fit un jeu des sceptres et des lois,
      Et de ses pieds on peut voir la poussière
      Empreinte encore sur le bandeau des rois.”

   ’I admire, also, “Le Violon brisé,” for its grace and
    sweetness. How fine Béranger on Waterloo! —

‘“Its name shall never sadden verse of mine.”’

TO R.W.E.

‘Niagara, 1st June, 1843. — I send you a token, made by the hands of some Seneca Indian lady. If you use it for a watch-pocket, hang it, when you travel, at the head of your bed, and you may dream of Niagara. If you use it for a purse, you can put in it alms for poets and artists, and the subscription-money you receive for Mr. Carlyle’s book. His book, as it happened, you gave me as a birthday gift, and you may take this as one to you; for, on yours, was W.’s birthday, J.’s wedding-day, and the day of — — ‘s death, and we set out on this journey. Perhaps there is something about it on the purse. The “number five which nature loves,” is repeated on it.

‘Carlyle’s book I have, in some sense, read. It is witty, full of pictures, as usual. I would have gone through with it, if only for the sketch of Samson, and two or three bits of fun which happen to please me. No doubt it may be of use to rouse the unthinking to a sense of those great dangers and sorrows. But how open is he to his own assault. He rails himself out of breath at the short-sighted, and yet sees scarce a step before him. There is no valuable doctrine in his book, except the Goethean, Do to-day the nearest duty. Many are ready for that, could they but find the way. This he does not show. His proposed measures say nothing. Educate the people. That cannot be done by books, or voluntary effort, under these paralyzing circumstances. Emigration! According to his own estimate of the increase of population, relief that way can have very slight effect. He ends as he began; as he did in Chartism. Everything is very bad. You are fools and hypocrites, or you would make it better. I cannot but sympathize with him about hero-worship; for I, too, have had my fits of rage at the stupid irreverence of little minds, which also is made a parade of by the pedantic and the worldly. Yet it is a good sign. Democracy is the way to the new aristocracy, as irreligion to religion. By and by, if there are great men, they will not be brilliant exceptions, redeemers, but favorable samples of their kind.

‘Mr. C.’s tone is no better than before. He is not loving, nor large; but he seems more healthy and gay.

‘We have had bad weather here, bitterly cold. The place is what I expected: it is too great and beautiful to agitate or surprise: it satisfies: it does not excite thought, but fully occupies. All is calm; even the rapids do not hurry, as we see them in smaller streams. The sound, the sight, fill the senses and the mind.

‘At Buffalo, some ladies called on us, who extremely regretted they could not witness our emotions, on first seeing Niagara. “Many,” they said, “burst into tears; but with those of most sensibility, the hands become cold as ice, and they would not mind if buckets of cold water were thrown over them!”’

NATURE.

Margaret’s love of beauty made her, of course, a votary of nature, but rather for pleasurable excitement than with a deep poetic feeling. Her imperfect vision and her bad health were serious impediments to intimacy with woods and rivers. She had never paid, — and it is a little remarkable, — any attention to natural sciences. She neither botanized, nor geologized, nor dissected. Still she delighted in short country rambles, in the varieties of landscape, in pastoral country, in mountain outlines, and, above all, in the sea-shore. At Nantasket Beach, and at Newport, she spent a month or two of many successive summers. She paid homage to rocks, woods, flowers, rivers, and the moon. She spent a good deal of time out of doors, sitting, perhaps, with a book in some sheltered recess commanding a landscape. She watched, by day and by night, the skies and the earth, and believed she knew all their expressions. She wrote in her journal, or in her correspondence, a series of “moonlights,” in which she seriously attempts to describe the light and scenery of successive nights of the summer moon. Of course, her raptures must appear sickly and superficial to an observer, who, with equal feeling, had better powers of observation.

Nothing is more rare than a talent to describe landscape, and, especially, skyscape, or cloudscape, although a vast number of letters, from correspondents between the ages of twenty and thirty, are filled with experiments in this kind. Margaret, in her turn, made many vain attempts, and, to a lover of nature, who knows that every day has new and inimitable lights and shades, one of these descriptions is as vapid as the raptures of a citizen arrived at his first meadow. Of course, he is charmed, but, of course, he cannot tell what he sees, or what pleases him. Yet Margaret often speaks with a certain tenderness and beauty of the impressions made upon her.

TO —— .

‘Fishkill, 25 Nov., 1844. — You would have been happy as I have been in the company of the mountains. They are companions both bold and calm. They exhilarate and they satisfy. To live, too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the realization of a dream. Though I have been reading and thinking, yet this has been my life.’

‘After they were all in bed,’ she writes from the “Manse,” in Concord,

‘I went out, and walked till near twelve. The moonlight filled my heart. These embowering elms stood in solemn black, the praying monastics of this holy night; full of grace, in every sense; their life so full, so hushed; not a leaf stirred.’

* * * * *

‘You say that nature does not keep her promise; but, surely, she satisfies us now and then for the time. The drama is always in progress, but here and there she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the time, the sense and the thought. We have no care for promises. Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit, — all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full? Is it because of the superficial mind, or the believing heart, that I can say this?’

* * * * *

‘Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature! We lean upon thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own. That is knowledge, for that is love. Thought will never reach it.’

ART.

There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home. In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings. The BOSTON ATHENÆUM, — on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine! — added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster; — the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova. The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino, — all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike. It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring.

To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo. Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our dreams and readings. It was easy to collect, from the drawing-rooms of the city, a respectable picture-gallery for a summer exhibition. This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary. The Brimmer donation, in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and other masters. The separate chamber in which these collections were at first contained, made a favorite place of meeting for Margaret and a few of her friends, who were lovers of these works.

First led perhaps by Goethe, afterwards by the love she herself conceived for them, she read everything that related to Michel Angelo and Raphael. She read, pen in hand, Quatremère de Quincy’s lives of those two painters, and I have her transcripts and commentary before me. She read Condivi, Vasari, Benvenuto Cellini, Duppa, Fuseli, and Von Waagen, — great and small. Every design of Michel, the four volumes of Raphael’s designs, were in the rich portfolios of her most intimate friend. ‘I have been very happy,’ she writes, ‘with four hundred and seventy designs of Raphael in my possession for a week.’

* * * * *

These fine entertainments were shared with many admirers, and, as I now remember them, certain months about the years 1839, 1840, seem colored with the genius of these Italians. Our walls were hung with prints of the Sistine frescoes; we were all petty collectors; and prints of Correggio and Guercino took the place, for the time, of epics and philosophy.

In the summer of 1839, Boston was still more rightfully adorned with the Allston Gallery; and the sculptures of our compatriots Greenough, and Crawford, and Powers, were brought hither. The following lines were addressed by Margaret to the Orpheus: —

‘CRAWFORD’S ORPHEUS.

 ’Each Orpheus must to the abyss descend,
    For only thus the poet can be wise, —
  Must make the sad Persephone his friend,
    And buried love to second life arise;
  Again his love must lose, through too much love,
    Must lose his life by living life too true;
  For what he sought below has passed above,
    Already done is all that he would do;
  Must tune all being with his single lyre;
    Must melt all rocks free from their primal pain,
  Must search all nature with his one soul’s fire;
    Must bind anew all forms in heavenly chain:
  If he already sees what he must do,
  Well may he shade his eyes from the far-shining view.’

Margaret’s love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist, in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored to see what she saw. But, on several occasions, finding myself unable to reach it, I came to suspect my guide, and to believe, at last, that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic, grounds. As it has proved one of the most difficult problems of the practical astronomer to obtain an achromatic telescope, so an achromatic eye, one of the most needed, is also one of the rarest instruments of criticism.

She was very susceptible to pleasurable stimulus, took delight in details of form, color, and sound. Her fancy and imagination were easily stimulated to genial activity, and she erroneously thanked the artist for the pleasing emotions and thoughts that rose in her mind. So that, though capable of it, she did not always bring that highest tribunal to a work of art, namely, the calm presence of greatness, which only greatness in the object can satisfy. Yet the opinion was often well worth hearing on its own account, though it might be wide of the mark as criticism. Sometimes, too, she certainly brought to beautiful objects a fresh and appreciating love; and her written notes, especially on sculpture, I found always original and interesting. Here are some notes on the Athenæum Gallery of Sculpture, in August, 1840, which she sent me in manuscript: —

‘Here are many objects worth study. There is Thorwaldsen’s Byron. This is the truly beautiful, the ideal Byron. This head is quite free from the got-up, caricatured air of disdain, which disfigures most likenesses of him, as it did himself in real life; yet sultry, stern, all-craving, all-commanding. Even the heavy style of the hair, too closely curled for grace, is favorable to the expression of concentrated life. While looking at this head, you learn to account for the grand failure in the scheme of his existence. The line of the cheek and chin are here, as usual, of unrivalled beauty.

‘The bust of Napoleon is here also, and will naturally be named, in connection with that of Byron, since the one in letters, the other in arms, represented more fully than any other the tendency of their time; more than any other gave it a chance for reaction. There was another point of resemblance in the external being of the two, perfectly corresponding with that of the internal, a sense of which peculiarity drew on Byron some ridicule. I mean that it was the intention of nature, that neither should ever grow fat, but remain a Cassius in the commonwealth. And both these heads are taken while they were at an early age, and so thin as to be still beautiful. This head of Napoleon is of a stern beauty. A head must be of a style either very stern or very chaste, to make a deep impression on the beholder; there must be a great force of will and withholding of resources, giving a sense of depth below depth, which we call sternness; or else there must be that purity, flowing as from an inexhaustible fountain through every lineament, which drives far off or converts all baser natures. Napoleon’s head is of the first description; it is stern, and not only so, but ruthless. Yet this ruthlessness excites no aversion; the artist has caught its true character, and given us here the Attila, the instrument of fate to serve a purpose not his own. While looking on it, came full to mind the well-known lines, —

                 ’”Speak gently of his crimes:
      Who knows, Scourge of God, but in His eyes, those crimes
      Were virtues?”

His brows are tense and damp with the dews of thought. In that head you see the great future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, that Russia’s snows, and mountains of the slain, seem the tragedy that must naturally follow the appearance of such an actor. You turn from him, feeling that he is a product not of the day, but of the ages, and that the ages must judge him.

‘Near him is a head of Ennius, very intellectual; self-centred and self-fed; but wrung and gnawed by unceasing thoughts.

‘Yet, even near the Ennius and Napoleon, our American men look worthy to be perpetuated in marble or bronze, if it were only for their air of calm, unpretending sagacity. If the young American were to walk up an avenue lined with such effigies, he might not feel called to such greatness as the strong Roman wrinkles tell of, but he must feel that he could not live an idle life, and should nerve himself to lift an Atlas weight without repining or shrinking.

‘The busts of Everett and Allston, though admirable as every-day likenesses, deserved a genius of a different order from Clevenger. Clevenger gives the man as he is at the moment, but does not show the possibilities of his existence. Even thus seen, the head of Mr. Everett brings back all the age of Pericles, so refined and classic is its beauty. The two busts of Mr. Webster, by Clevenger and Powers, are the difference between prose, — healthy and energetic prose, indeed, but still prose, — and poetry. Clevenger’s is such as we see Mr. Webster on any public occasion, when his genius is not called forth. No child could fail to recognize it in a moment. Powers’ is not so good as a likeness, but has the higher merit of being an ideal of the orator and statesman at a great moment. It is quite an American Jupiter in its eagle calmness of conscious power.

‘A marble copy of the beautiful Diana, not so spirited as the Athenæum cast. S. C —— thought the difference was one of size. This work may be seen at a glance; yet does not tire one after survey. It has the freshness of the woods, and of morning dew. I admire those long lithe limbs, and that column of a throat. The Diana is a woman’s ideal of beauty; its elegance, its spirit, its graceful, peremptory air, are what we like in our own sex: the Venus is for men. The sleeping Cleopatra cannot be looked at enough; always her sleep seems sweeter and more graceful, always more wonderful the drapery. A little Psyche, by a pupil of Bartolini, pleases us much thus far. The forlorn sweetness with which she sits there, crouched down like a bruised butterfly, and the languid tenacity of her mood, are very touching. The Mercury and Ganymede with the Eagle, by Thorwaldsen, are still as fine as on first acquaintance. Thorwaldsen seems the grandest and simplest of modern sculptors. There is a breadth in his thought, a freedom in his design, we do not see elsewhere.

‘A spaniel, by Gott, shows great talent, and knowledge of the animal. The head is admirable; it is so full of playfulness and of doggish knowingness.’

I am tempted, by my recollection of the pleasure it gave her, to insert here a little poem, addressed to Margaret by one of her friends, on the beautiful imaginative picture in the gallery of 1840, called “The Dream.”

 ”A youth, with gentle brow and tender cheek,
    Dreams in a place so silent, that no bird,
  No rustle of the leaves his slumbers break;
    Only soft tinkling from the stream is heard,
  As in bright little waves it comes to greet
  The beauteous One, and play upon his feet.

 ”On a low bank, beneath the thick shade thrown,
    Soft gleams over his brown hair are flitting,
  His golden plumes, bending, all lovely shone;
    It seemed an angel’s home where he was sitting,
  Erect, beside, a silver lily grew,
  And over all the shadow its sweet beauty threw.

 ”Dreams he of life? O, then a noble maid
    Toward him floats, with eyes of starry light,
  In richest robes all radiantly arrayed,
    To be his ladye and his dear delight.
  Ah no! the distance shows a winding stream;
  No lovely ladye moves, no starry eyes do gleam.

 ”Cold is the air, and cold the mountains blue;
    The banks are brown, and men are lying there,
  Meagre and old; O, what have they to do
    With joyous visions of a youth so fair?
  He must not ever sleep as they are sleeping,
  Onward through life he must be ever sweeping.

 ”Let the pale glimmering distance pass away;
    Why in the twilight art thou slumbering there?
  Wake, and come forth into triumphant day;
    Thy life and deeds must all be great and fair.
  Canst thou not from the lily learn true glory,
  Pure, lofty, lowly? — such should be thy story.

 ”But no! thou lovest the deep-eyéd Past,
    And thy heart clings to sweet remembrances;
  In dim cathedral aisles thou’lt linger last,
    And fill thy mind with flitting fantasies.
  But know, dear One, the world is rich to-day,
  And the unceasing God gives glory forth alway.”

I have said she was never weary of studying Michel Angelo and Raphael; and here are some manuscript “notes,” which she sent me one day, containing a clear expression of her feeling toward each of these masters, after she had become tolerably familiar with their designs, as far as prints could carry her: —

‘On seeing such works as these of Michel Angelo, we feel the need of a genius scarcely inferior to his own, which should invent some word, or some music, adequate to express our feelings, and relieve us from the Titanic oppression.

‘“Greatness,” “majesty,” “strength,” — to these words we had before thought we attached their proper meaning. But now we repent that they ever passed our lips. Created anew by the genius of this man, we would create language anew, and give him a word of response worthy his sublime profession of faith. Could we not at least have reserved “godlike” for him? For never till now did we appreciate the primeval vigor of creation, the instant swiftness with which thought can pass to deed; never till now appreciate the passage, “Let there be light, and there was light,” which, be grateful, Michel! was clothed in human word before thee.

‘One feels so repelled and humbled, on turning from Raphael to his contemporary, that I could have hated him as a Gentile Choragus might hate the prophet Samuel. Raphael took us to his very bosom, as if we had been fit for disciples, —

     ’”Parting with smiles the hair upon the brow,
      And telling me none ever was preferred”

   ’This man waves his serpent wand over me, and beauty’s self
    seems no better than a golden calf!

‘I could not bear M. De Quincy for intimating that the archangel Michel could be jealous; yet I can easily see that he might have given cause, by undervaluing his divine contemporary. Raphael was so sensuous, so lovely and loving. All undulates to meet the eye, glides or floats upon the soul’s horizon, as soft as is consistent with perfectly distinct and filled-out forms. The graceful Lionardo might see his pictures in moss; the beautiful Raphael on the cloud, or wave, or foliage; but thou, Michel, didst look straight upwards to the heaven, and grasp and bring thine down from the very sun of invention.

‘How Raphael revels in the image! His life is all reproduced; nothing was abstract or conscious. Pantheism, Polytheism, Greek god of Beauty, Apollo Musagetes, — what need of life beyond the divine work? “I paint,” said he, “from an idea that comes into my mind.”

‘But thou, Michel, didst not only feel but see the divine Ideal. Thine is the conscious monotheism of Jewry. Like thy own Moses, even on the mount of celestial converse, thou didst ask thy God to show now his face, and didst write his words, not in the alphabet of flowers, but on stone tables.

‘It is, indeed, the two geniuses of Greece and Jewry, which are reproduced in these two men. Thaumaturgus nature saw fit to wait but a very few years before using these moulds again, in smaller space. Would you read the Bible aright? look at Michel; the Greek Mythology? look at Raphael. Would you know how the sublime coëxists with the beautiful, or the beautiful with the sublime? would you see power and truth regnant on the one side, with beauty and love harmonious and ministrant, but subordinate; or would you look at the other aspect of Deity? — study here. Would you open all the founts of marvel, admiration, and tenderness? — study both.

‘One is not higher than the other; yet I am conscious of a slight rebuke from Michel, for having so poured out my soul at the feet of his brother angel. He seems to remind of Mr. E.’s view, and ask, “Why did you not question whether there was not aught else? why not reserve some inaccessible stronghold for me? why did you unlock the floodgates of the mind to such tides of emotion?” But there is no reality or permanence in this; it is only a reminder that the feminine part of human nature must not be dominant.

‘The prophets of Michel Angelo excite all my admiration at the man capable of giving to such a physique an expression which commands it. The soul is worthily lodged in these powerful frames; and she has the ease and dignity of one accustomed to command, and to command servants able to obey her hests. Who else could have so animated such forms, that they are imposing, but never heavy? The strong man is made so majestic by his office, that you scarcely feel how strong he is. The wide folds of the drapery, the breadth of light and shade, are great as anything in

“the large utterance of the early gods.”

‘How they read, — these prophets and sibyls! Never did the always-baffled, always reäspiring hope of the finite to compass the infinite find such expression, except in the sehnsucht of music. They are buried in the volume. They cannot believe that it has not somewhere been revealed, the word of enigma, the link between the human and divine, matter and spirit. Evidently, they hope to find it on the very next page. I have always thought, that clearly enough did nature and the soul’s own consciousness respond to the craving for immortality. I have thought it great weakness to need the voucher of a miracle, or of any of those direct interpositions of a divine power, which, in common parlance, are alone styled revelation. When the revelations of nature seemed to me so clear, I had thought it was the weakness of the heart, or the dogmatism of the understanding, which had such need of a book. But in these figures of Michel, the highest power seizes upon a scroll, hoping that some other mind may have dived to the depths of eternity for the desired pearl, and enable him, without delay, consciously to embrace the Everlasting Now.

‘How fine the attendant intelligences! So youthful and fresh, yet so strong. Some merely docile and reverent, others eager for utterance before the thought be known, — so firm is the trust in its value, so great the desire for sympathy. Others so brilliant in the attention of the inquiring eye, so intelligent in every feature, that they seem to divine the whole, before they hear it.

‘Zachariah is much the finer of the two prophets.

‘Of the sibyls, the Cumæa would be disgusting, from her overpowering strength in the feminine form, if genius had not made her tremendous. Especially the bosom gives me a feeling of faintness and aversion I cannot express. The female breast looks made for the temple of sweet and chaste thoughts, while this is so formed as to remind you of the lioness in her lair, and suggest a word which I will not write.

‘The Delphica is even beautiful, in Michel’s fair, calm, noble style, like the mother and child asleep in the Persica, and Night in the casts I have just seen.

‘The Libica is also more beautiful than grand. Her adjuncts are admirable. The elder figure, in the lowest pannel, — with what eyes of deep experience, and still unquenched enthusiasm, he sits meditating on the past! The figures at top are fiery with genius, especially the melancholy one, worthy to lift any weight, if he did but know how to set about it. As it is, all his strength may be wasted, yet he no whit the less noble.

‘But the Persica is my favorite above all. She is the true sibyl. All the grandeur of that wasted frame comes from within. The life of thought has wasted the fresh juices of the body, and hardened the sere leaf of her cheek to parchment; every lineament is sharp, every tint tarnished; her face is seamed with wrinkles, — usually as repulsive on a woman’s face as attractive on a man. We usually feel, on looking at a woman, as if Nature had given them their best dower, and Experience could prove little better than a step-dame. But here, her high ambition and devotion to the life of thought gives her the masculine privilege of beauty in advancing years. Read on, hermitess of the world! what thou seekest is not there, yet thou dost not seek in vain.

‘The adjuncts to this figure are worthy of it. On the right, below, those two divine sleepers, redeeming human nature, and infolding expectation in a robe of pearly sheen. Here is the sweetness of strength, — honey to the valiant; on the other side, its awfulness, — meat to the strong man. His sleep is more powerful than the waking of myriads of other men. What will he do when he has recruited his strength in this night’s slumber? What wilt thou sing of it, wild-haired child of the lyre?

‘I admire the heavy fall of the sleeper’s luxuriant hair, which reminds one of the final shutting down of night upon a sullen twilight.

‘The other figures, too, are full of augury, sad but life-like, in its poetry. On the shield, how perfectly is the expression of being struck home to the heart given! I wish I could have that shield, in some shape. Only a single blow was needed; the hand was sure, the breast shrinking, but unresisting. Die, child of my affection, child of my old age! Let the blood follow to the hilt, for it is the sword of the Lord!

‘In looking again, this shield is on the Libica, and that of the Persica represents conquest, not sacrifice.

‘Over all these figures broods the spirit of prophecy. You see their sternest deed is under the theocratic form. There is pride in action, but no selfism in these figures.

‘When I first came to Michel, I clung to the beautiful Raphael, and feared his Druidical axe. But now, after the sibyls of Michel, it is unsafe to look at those of Raphael; for they seem weak, which is not so, only seems so, beside the sterner ideal.

‘The beauty of composition here is great, and you feel that Michel’s works are looked at fragment-wise in comparison. Here the eye glides along so naturally, does so easily justice to each part.’

LETTERS.

I fear the remark already made on that susceptibility to details in art and nature which precluded the exercise of Margaret’s sound catholic judgment, must be extended to more than her connoisseurship. She had a sound judgment, on which, in conversation, she could fall back, and anticipate and speak the best sense of the largest company. But, left to herself, and in her correspondence, she was much the victim of Lord Bacon’s idols of the cave, or self-deceived by her own phantasms. I have looked over volumes of her letters to me and others. They are full of probity, talent, wit, friendship, charity, and high aspiration. They are tainted with a mysticism, which to me appears so much an affair of constitution, that it claims no more respect than the charity or patriotism of a man who has dined well, and feels better for it. One sometimes talks with a genial bon vivant, who looks as if the omelet and turtle have got into his eyes. In our noble Margaret, her personal feeling colors all her judgment of persons, of books, of pictures, and even of the laws of the world. This is easily felt in ordinary women, and a large deduction is civilly made on the spot by whosoever replies to their remark. But when the speaker has such brilliant talent and literature as Margaret, she gives so many fine names to these merely sensuous and subjective phantasms, that the hearer is long imposed upon, and thinks so precise and glittering nomenclature cannot be of mere muscae volitantes, phoenixes of the fancy, but must be of some real ornithology, hitherto unknown to him. This mere feeling exaggerates a host of trifles into a dazzling mythology. But when one goes to sift it, and find if there be a real meaning, it eludes search. Whole sheets of warm, florid writing are here, in which the eye is caught by “sapphire,” “heliotrope,” “dragon,” “aloes,” “Magna Dea,” “limboes,” “stars,” and “purgatory,” but can connect all this, or any part of it, with no universal experience.

In short, Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism. That dangerous vertigo nature in her case adopted, and was to make respectable. As it sometimes happens that a grandiose style, like that of the Alexandrian Platonists, or like Macpherson’s Ossian, is more stimulating to the imagination of nations, than the true Plato, or than the simple poet, so here was a head so creative of new colors, of wonderful gleams, — so iridescent, that it piqued curiosity, and stimulated thought, and communicated mental activity to all who approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her fancy, and she made numerous mistakes. Her integrity was perfect, and she was led and followed by love, and was really bent on truth, but too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy.

FRIENDSHIP.

 ”Friends she must have, but in no one could find
  A tally fitted to so large a mind.”

It is certain that Margaret, though unattractive in person, and assuming in manners, so that the girls complained that “she put upon them,” or, with her burly masculine existence, quite reduced them to satellites, yet inspired an enthusiastic attachment. I hear from one witness, as early as 1829, that “all the girls raved about Margaret Fuller,” and the same powerful magnetism wrought, as she went on, from year to year, on all ingenuous natures. The loveliest and the highest endowed women were eager to lay their beauty, their grace, the hospitalities of sumptuous homes, and their costly gifts, at her feet. When I expressed, one day, many years afterwards, to a lady who knew her well, some surprise at the homage paid her by men in Italy, — offers of marriage having there been made her by distinguished parties, — she replied: “There is nothing extraordinary in it. Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in love with her, she understood them so well.” She had seen many persons, and had entire confidence in her own discrimination of characters. She saw and foresaw all in the first interview. She had certainly made her own selections with great precision, and had not been disappointed. When pressed for a reason, she replied, in one instance,

‘I have no good reason to give for what I think of —— . It is a dæmoniacal intimation. Everybody at —— praised her, but their account of what she said gave me the same unfavorable feeling. This is the first instance in which I have not had faith, if you liked a person. Perhaps I am wrong now; perhaps, if I saw her, a look would give me a needed clue to her character, and I should change my feeling. Yet I have never been mistaken in these intimations, as far as I recollect. I hope I am now.’

I am to add, that she gave herself to her friendships with an entireness not possible to any but a woman, with a depth possible to few women. Her friendships, as a girl with girls, as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had passages of romantic sacrifice and of ecstatic fusion, which I have heard with the ear, but could not trust my profane pen to report. There were, also, the ebbs and recoils from the other party, — the mortal unequal to converse with an immortal, — ingratitude, which was more truly incapacity, the collapse of overstrained affections and powers. At all events, it is clear that Margaret, later, grew more strict, and values herself with her friends on having the tie now “redeemed from all search after Eros.” So much, however, of intellectual aim and activity mixed with her alliances, as to breathe a certain dignity and myrrh through them all. She and her friends are fellow-students with noblest moral aims. She is there for help and for counsel. ‘Be to the best thou knowest ever true!’ is her language to one. And that was the effect of her presence. Whoever conversed with her felt challenged by the strongest personal influence to a bold and generous life. To one she wrote, —

‘Could a word from me avail you, I would say, that I have firm faith that nature cannot be false to her child, who has shown such an unalterable faith in her piety towards her.’

* * * * *

‘These tones of my dear — — ‘s lyre are of the noblest. Will they sound purely through her experiences? Will the variations be faithful to the theme? Not always do those who most devoutly long for the Infinite, know best how to modulate their finite into a fair passage of the eternal Harmony.

‘How many years was it the cry of my spirit, —

 ”Give, give, ye mighty Gods!
  Why do ye thus hold back?” —

and, I suppose, all noble young persons think for the time that they would have been more generous than the Olympians. But when we have learned the high lesson to deserve, — that boon of manhood, — we see they esteemed us too much, to give what we had not earned.’

The following passages from her journal and her letters are sufficiently descriptive, each in its way, of her strong affections.

‘At Mr. G.’s we looked over prints, the whole evening, in peace. Nothing fixed my attention so much as a large engraving of Madame Recamier in her boudoir. I have so often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame De Stael.

‘It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. I like to be sure of it, for it is the same love which angels feel, where —

‘“Sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib.”

‘It is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes; only it is purely intellectual and spiritual. Its law is the desire of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek in another being what it finds not in itself. Thus the beautiful seek the strong, and the strong the beautiful; the mute seeks the eloquent, &c.; the butterfly settles always on the dark flower. Why did Socrates love Alcibiades? Why did Körner love Schneider? How natural is the love of Wallenstein for Max; that of De Stael for De Recamier; mine for —— . I loved —— , for a time, with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. Her face was always gleaming before me; her voice was always echoing in my ear; all poetic thoughts clustered round the dear image. This love was a key which unlocked for me many a treasure which I still possess; it was the carbuncle which cast light into many of the darkest caverns of human nature. She loved me, too, though not so much, because her nature was “less high, less grave, less large, less deep.” But she loved more tenderly, less passionately. She loved me, for I well remember her suffering when she first could feel my faults, and knew one part of the exquisite veil rent away; how she wished to stay apart, and weep the whole day.

* * * * *

‘I do not love her now with passion, but I still feel towards her as I can to no other woman. I thought of all this as I looked at Madame Recamier.’

* * * * *

TO R.W.E.

‘7th Feb., 1843. — I saw the letter of your new friend, and liked it much; only, at this distance, one could not be sure whether it was the nucleus or the train of a comet, that lightened afar. The daemons are not busy enough at the births of most men. They do not give them individuality deep enough for truth to take root in. Such shallow natures cannot resist a strong head; its influence goes right through them. It is not stopped and fermented long enough. But I do not understand this hint of hesitation, because you have many friends already. We need not economize, we need not hoard these immortal treasures. Love and thought are not diminished by diffusion. In the widow’s cruse is oil enough to furnish light for all the world.’

* * * * *

TO R.W.E.

‘15th March, 1842. — It is to be hoped, my best one, that the experiences of life will yet correct your vocabulary, and that you will not always answer the burst of frank affection by the use of such a word as “flattery.”

‘Thou knowest, O all-seeing Truth! whether that hour is base or unworthy thee, in which the heart turns tenderly towards some beloved object, whether stirred by an apprehension of its needs, or of its present beauty, or of its great promise; when it would lay before it all the flowers of hope and love, would soothe its weariness as gently as might the sweet south, and flatter it by as fond an outbreak of pride and devotion as is seen on the sunset clouds. Thou knowest whether these promptings, whether these longings, be not truer than intellectual scrutiny of the details of character; than cold distrust of the exaggerations even of heart. What we hope, what we think of those we love, is true, true as the fondest dream of love and friendship that ever shone upon the childish heart.

‘The faithful shall yet meet a full-eyed love, ready as profound, that never needs turn the key on its retirement, or arrest the stammering of an overweening trust.’

* * * * *

TO ——

‘I wish I could write you often, to bring before you the varied world-scene you cannot so well go out to unfold for yourself. But it was never permitted me, even where I wished it most. But the forest leaves fall unseen, and make a soil on which shall be reared the growths and fabrics of a nobler era. This thought rounds off each day. Your letter was a little golden key to a whole volume of thoughts and feelings. I cannot make the one bright drop, like champagne in ice, but must pour a full gush, if I speak at all, and not think whether the water is clear either.’

With this great heart, and these attractions, it was easy to add daily to the number of her friends. With her practical talent, her counsel and energy, she was pretty sure to find clients and sufferers enough, who wished to be guided and supported. ‘Others,’ she said, ‘lean on this arm, which I have found so frail. Perhaps it is strong enough to have drawn a sword, but no better suited to be used as a bolt, than that of Lady Catharine Douglas, of loyal memory.’ She could not make a journey, or go to an evening party, without meeting a new person, who wished presently to impart his history to her. Very early, she had written to —— , ‘My museum is so well furnished, that I grow lazy about collecting new specimens of human nature.’ She had soon enough examples of the historic development of rude intellect under the first rays of culture. But, in a thousand individuals, the process is much the same; and, like a professor too long pent in his college, she rejoiced in encountering persons of untutored grace and strength, and felt no wish to prolong the intercourse when culture began to have its effect I find in her journal a characteristic note, on receiving a letter on books and speculations, from one whom she had valued for his heroic qualities in a life of adventure: —

‘These letters of —— are beautiful, and moved me deeply. It looks like the birth of a soul. But I loved thee, fair, rich earth, — and all that is gone forever. This that comes now, we know in much farther stages. Yet there is silver sweet in the tone, generous nobility in the impulses.’

* * * * *

‘Poor Tasso in the play offered his love and service too officiously to all. They all rejected it, and declared him mad, because he made statements too emphatic of his feelings. If I wanted only ideal figures to think about, there are those in literature I like better than any of your living ones. But I want far more. I want habitual intercourse, cheer, inspiration, tenderness. I want these for myself; I want to impart them. I have done as Timon did, for these last eight years. My early intercourses were more equal, because more natural. Since I took on me the vows of renunciation, I have acted like a prodigal. Like Timon, I have loved to give, perhaps not from beneficence, but from restless love. Now, like Fortunatus, I find my mistresses will not thank me for fires made of cinnamon; rather they run from too rich an odor. What shall I do? not curse, like him, (oh base!) nor dig my grave in the marge of the salt tide. Give an answer to my questions, dæmon! Give a rock for my feet, a bird of peaceful and sufficient song within my breast! I return to thee, my Father, from the husks that have been offered me. But I return as one who meant not to leave Thee.’

Of course, she made large demands on her companions, and would soon come to sound their knowledge, and guess pretty nearly the range of their thoughts. There yet remained to command her constancy, what she valued more, the quality and affection proper to each. But she could rarely find natures sufficiently deep and magnetic. With her sleepless curiosity, her magnanimity, and her diamond-ring, like Annie of Lochroyan’s, to exchange for gold or for pewter, she might be pardoned for her impatient questionings. To me, she was uniformly generous; but neither did I escape. Our moods were very different; and I remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised with hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness. She stigmatized our friendship as commercial. It seemed, her magnanimity was not met, but I prized her only for the thoughts and pictures she brought me; — so many thoughts, so many facts yesterday, — so many to-day; — when there was an end of things to tell, the game was up: that, I did not know, as a friend should know, to prize a silence as much as a discourse, — and hence a forlorn feeling was inevitable; a poor counting of thoughts, and a taking the census of virtues, was the unjust reception so much love found. On one occasion, her grief broke into words like these: ‘The religious nature remained unknown to you, because it could not proclaim itself, but claimed to be divined. The deepest soul that approached you was, in your eyes, nothing but a magic lantern, always bringing out pretty shows of life.’

But as I did not understand the discontent then, — of course, I cannot now. It was a war of temperaments, and could not be reconciled by words; but, after each party had explained to the uttermost, it was necessary to fall back on those grounds of agreement which remained and leave the differences henceforward in respectful silence. The recital may still serve to show to sympathetic persons the true lines and enlargements of her genius. It is certain that this incongruity never interrupted for a moment the intercourse, such as it was, that existed between us.

I ought to add here, that certain mental changes brought new questions into conversation. In the summer of 1840, she passed into certain religious states, which did not impress me as quite healthy, or likely to be permanent; and I said, “I do not understand your tone; it seems exaggerated. You are one who can afford to speak and to hear the truth. Let us hold hard to the common-sense, and let us speak in the positive degree.”

And I find, in later letters from her, sometimes playful, sometimes grave allusions to this explanation.

‘Is —— there? Does water meet water? — no need of wine, sugar, spice, or even a soupçon of lemon to remind of a tropical climate? I fear me not. Yet, dear positives, believe me superlatively yours, MARGARET.’

The following letter seems to refer, under an Eastern guise, and with something of Eastern exaggeration of compliment too, to some such native sterilities in her correspondent: —

* * * * *

TO R.W.E.

‘23d Feb., 1840. — I am like some poor traveller of the desert, who saw, at early morning, a distant palm, and toiled all day to reach it. All day he toiled. The unfeeling sun shot pains into his temples; the burning air, filled with sand, checked his breath; he had no water, and no fountain sprung along his path. But his eye was bright with courage, for he said, “When I reach the lonely palm, I will lie beneath its shade. I will refresh myself with its fruit. Allah has reared it to such a height, that it may encourage the wandering, and bless and sustain the faint and weary.” But when he reached it, alas! it had grown too high to shade the weary man at its foot. On it he saw no clustering dates, and its one draught of wine was far beyond his reach. He saw at once that it was so. A child, a bird, a monkey, might have climbed to reach it. A rude hand might have felled the whole tree; but the full-grown man, the weary man, the gentle-hearted, religious man, was no nearer to its nourishment for being close to the root; yet he had not force to drag himself further, and leave at once the aim of so many fond hopes, so many beautiful thoughts. So he lay down amid the inhospitable sands. The night dews pierced his exhausted frame; the hyena laughed, the lion roared, in the distance; the stars smiled upon him satirically from their passionless peace; and he knew they were like the sun, as unfeeling, only more distant. He could not sleep for famine. With the dawn he arose. The palm stood as tall, as inaccessible, as ever; its leaves did not so much as rustle an answer to his farewell sigh. On and on he went, and came, at last, to a living spring. The spring was encircled by tender verdure, wild fruits ripened near, and the clear waters sparkled up to tempt his lip. The pilgrim rested, and refreshed himself, and looked back with less pain to the unsympathizing palm, which yet towered in the distance.

‘But the wanderer had a mission to perform, which must have forced him to leave at last both palm and fountain. So on and on he went, saying to the palm, “Thou art for another;” and to the gentle waters, “I will return.”

‘Not far distant was he when the sirocco came, and choked with sand the fountain, and uprooted the fruit-trees. When years have passed, the waters will have forced themselves up again to light, and a new oasis will await a new wanderer. Thou, Sohrab, wilt, ere that time, have left thy bones at Mecca. Yet the remembrance of the fountain cheers thee as a blessing; that of the palm haunts thee as a pang.

‘So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Genuine Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not. Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or worldly discontent?’

PROBLEMS OF LIFE.

Already, too, at this time, each of the main problems of human life had been closely scanned and interrogated by her, and some of them had been much earlier settled. A worshipper of beauty, why could not she also have been beautiful? — of the most radiant sociality, why should not she have been so placed, and so decorated, as to have led the fairest and highest? In her journal is a bitter sentence, whose meaning I cannot mistake: ‘Of a disposition that requires the most refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire it: — poor Mignon! fear not the transition through death; no penal fires can have in store worse torments than thou art familiar with already.’

In the month of May, she writes: —

‘When all things are blossoming, it seems so strange not to blossom too; that the quick thought within cannot remould its tenement. Man is the slowest aloes, and I am such a shabby plant, of such coarse tissue. I hate not to be beautiful, when all around is so.’

Again, after recording a visit to a family, whose taste and culture, united to the most liberal use of wealth, made the most agreeable of homes, she writes:

‘Looking out on the wide view, I felt the blessings of my comparative freedom. I stand in no false relations. Who else is so happy? Here are these fair, unknowing children envying the depth of my mental life. They feel withdrawn by sweet duties from reality. Spirit! I accept; teach me to prize and use whatsoever is given me.’

‘At present,’ she writes elsewhere, ‘it skills not. I am able to take the superior view of life, and my place in it. But I know the deep yearnings of the heart and the bafflings of time will be felt again, and then I shall long for some dear hand to hold. But I shall never forget that my curse is nothing, compared with that of those who have entered into those relations, but not made them real; who only seem husbands, wives, and friends.’

‘I remain fixed to be, without churlishness or coldness, as much alone as possible. It is best for me. I am not fitted to be loved, and it pains me to have close dealings with those who do not love, to whom my feelings are “strange.” Kindness and esteem are very well. I am willing to receive and bestow them; but these alone are not worth feelings such as mine. And I wish I may make no more mistakes, but keep chaste for mine own people.’

There is perhaps here, as in a passage of the same journal quoted already, an allusion to a verse in the ballad of the Lass of Lochroyan: —

 ”O yours was gude, and gude enough,
    But aye the best was mine;
  For yours was o’ the gude red gold,
    But mine o’ the diamond fine.”

‘There is no hour of absolute beauty in all my past, though some have been made musical by heavenly hope, many dignified by intelligence. Long urged by the Furies, I rest again in the temple of Apollo. Celestial verities dawn constellated as thoughts in the Heaven of my mind.

‘But, driven from home to home, as a renouncer, I get the picture and the poetry of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron, and lead, are in my casket. No one loves me; but I love many a good deal, and see, more or less, into their eventual beauty. Meanwhile, I have no fetter on me, no engagement, and, as I look on others, — almost every other, — can I fail to feel this a great privilege? I have nowise tied my hands or feet; yet the varied calls on my sympathy have been such, that I hope not to be made partial, cold, or ignorant, by this isolation. I have no child; but now, as I look on these lovely children of a human birth, what low and neutralizing cares they bring with them to the mother! The children of the muse come quicker, and have not on them the taint of earthly corruption.’

Practical questions in plenty the days and months brought her to settle, — questions requiring all her wisdom, and sometimes more than all. None recurs with more frequency, at one period, in her journals, than the debate with herself, whether she shall make literature a profession. Shall it be woman, or shall it be artist?

WOMAN, OR ARTIST?

Margaret resolved, again and again, to devote herself no more to these disappointing forms of men and women, but to the children of the muse. ‘The dramatis personæ’ she said, ‘of my poems shall henceforth be chosen from the children of immortal Muse. I fix my affections no more on these frail forms.’ But it was vain; she rushed back again to persons, with a woman’s devotion.

Her pen was a non-conductor. She always took it up with some disdain, thinking it a kind of impiety to attempt to report a life so warm and cordial, and wrote on the fly-leaf of her journal, —

‘“Scrivo sol per sfogar’ l’interno.”’

‘Since you went away,’ she said, ‘I have thought of many things I might have told you, but I could not bear to be eloquent and poetical. It is a mockery thus to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one’s own heart’s blood. One would fain be no more artist, or philosopher, or lover, or critic, but a soul ever rushing forth in tides of genial life.’

* * * * *

‘26 Dec., 1842. — I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby. These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians. What I demand of men, — that they could act out all their thoughts, — these have. They are lives; — and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year, — there is the energy to redeem them. Do you not admire Lord Herbert’s two poems on life, and the conjectures concerning celestial life? I keep reading them.’

* * * * *

‘When I look at my papers, I feel as if I had never had a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself; and ’tis only when, on talking with people, I find I tell them what they did not know, that my confidence at all returns.’

* * * * *

‘My verses, — I am ashamed when I think there is scarce a line of poetry in them, — all rhetorical and impassioned, as Goethe said of De Stael. However, such as they are, they have been overflowing drops from the somewhat bitter cup of my existence.’

* * * * *

‘How can I ever write with this impatience of detail? I shall never be an artist; I have no patient love of execution; I am delighted with my sketch, but if I try to finish it, I am chilled. Never was there a great sculptor who did not love to chip the marble.’

* * * * *

‘I have talent and knowledge enough to furnish a dwelling for friendship, but not enough to deck with golden gifts a Delphi for the world.’

* * * * *

‘Then a woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our knowledge; and, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, and fly, and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write, and, without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in us. Because we seemed to know all, they think we can tell all; and, finding we can tell so little, lose faith in their first opinion of us, which, nathless, was true.’

And again:

‘These gentlemen are surprised that I write no better, because I talk so well. But I have served a long apprenticeship to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel inspired. The means are pleasant; my voice excites me, my pen never. I shall not be discouraged, nor take for final what they say, but sift from it the truth, and use it. I feel the strength to dispense with all illusions. I will stand steady, and rejoice in the severest probations.’

* * * * *

‘What a vulgarity there seems in this writing for the multitude! We know not yet, have not made ourselves known to a single soul, and shall we address those still more unknown? Shall we multiply our connections, and thus make them still more superficial?

‘I would go into the crowd, and meet men for the day, to help them for the day, but for that intercourse which most becomes us. Pericles, Anaxagoras, Aspasia, Cleone, is circle wide enough for me. I should think all the resources of my nature, and all the tribute it could enforce from external nature, none too much to furnish the banquet for this circle.

‘But where to find fit, though few, representatives for all we value in humanity? Where obtain those golden keys to the secret treasure-chambers of the soul? No samples are perfect. We must look abroad into the wide circle, to seek a little here, and a little there, to make up our company. And is not the “prent book” a good beacon-light to tell where we wait the bark? — a reputation, the means of entering the Olympic game, where Pindar may perchance be encountered?

‘So it seems the mind must reveal its secret; must reproduce. And I have no castle, and no natural circle, in which I might live, like the wise Makaria, observing my kindred the stars, and gradually enriching my archives. Makaria here must go abroad, or the stars would hide their light, and the archive remain a blank.

‘For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitly-bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist.’

HEROISM.

These practical problems Margaret had to entertain and to solve the best way she could. She says truly, ‘there was none to take up her burden whilst she slept.’ But she was formed for action, and addressed herself quite simply to her part. She was a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money; and these negatives will suggest what difficulties were to be surmounted where the tasks dictated by her talents required the good-will of “good society,” in the town where she was to teach and write. But she was even-tempered and erect, and, if her journals are sometimes mournful, her mind was made up, her countenance beamed courage and cheerfulness around her. Of personal influence, speaking strictly, — an efflux, that is, purely of mind and character, excluding all effects of power, wealth, fashion, beauty, or literary fame, — she had an extraordinary degree; I think more than any person I have known. An interview with her was a joyful event. Worthy men and women, who had conversed with her, could not forget her, but worked bravely on in the remembrance that this heroic approver had recognized their aims. She spoke so earnestly, that the depth of the sentiment prevailed, and not the accidental expression, which might chance to be common. Thus I learned, the other day, that, in a copy of Mrs. Jameson’s Italian Painters, against a passage describing Correggio as a true servant of God in his art, above sordid ambition, devoted to truth, “one of those superior beings of whom there are so few;” Margaret wrote on the margin, ‘And yet all might be such.’ The book lay long on the table of the owner, in Florence, and chanced to be read there by a young artist of much talent. “These words,” said he, months afterwards, “struck out a new strength in me. They revived resolutions long fallen away, and made me set my face like a flint.”

But Margaret’s courage was thoroughly sweet in its temper. She accused herself in her youth of unamiable traits, but, in all the later years of her life, it is difficult to recall a moment of malevolence. The friends whom her strength of mind drew to her, her good heart held fast; and few persons were ever the objects of more persevering kindness. Many hundreds of her letters remain, and they are alive with proofs of generous friendship given and received.

Among her early friends, Mrs. Farrar, of Cambridge, appears to have discovered, at a critical moment in her career, the extraordinary promise of the young girl, and some false social position into which her pride and petulance, and the mistakes of others, had combined to bring her, and she set herself, with equal kindness and address, to make a second home for Margaret in her own house, and to put her on the best footing in the agreeable society of Cambridge. She busied herself, also, as she could, in removing all superficial blemishes from the gem. In a well-chosen travelling party, made up by Mrs. Farrar, and which turned out to be the beginning of much happiness by the friendships then formed, Margaret visited, in the summer of 1835, Newport, New York, and Trenton Falls; and, in the autumn, made the acquaintance, at Mrs. F.’s house, of Miss Martineau, whose friendship, at that moment, was an important stimulus to her mind.

Mrs. Farrar performed for her, thenceforward, all the offices of an almost maternal friendship. She admired her genius, and wished that all should admire it. She counselled and encouraged her, brought to her side the else unsuppliable aid of a matron and a lady, sheltered her in sickness, forwarded her plans with tenderness and constancy, to the last. I read all this in the tone of uniform gratitude and love with which this lady is mentioned in Margaret’s letters. Friendships like this praise both parties; and the security with which people of a noble disposition approached Margaret, indicated the quality of her own infinite tenderness. A very intelligent woman applied to her what Stilling said of Goethe: “Her heart, which few knew, was as great as her mind, which all knew;” and added, that, “in character, Margaret was, of all she had beheld, the largest woman, and not a woman who wished, to be a man.” Another lady added, “She never disappointed you. To any one whose confidence she had once drawn out, she was thereafter faithful. She could talk of persons, and never gossip; for she had a fine instinct that kept her from any reality, and from any effect of treachery.” I was still more struck with the remark that followed. “Her life, since she went abroad, is wholly unknown to me; but I have an unshaken trust that what Margaret did she can defend.”

She was a right brave and heroic woman. She shrunk from no duty, because of feeble nerves. Although, after her father died, the disappointment of not going to Europe with Miss Martineau and Mrs. Farrar was extreme, and her mother and sister wished her to take her portion of the estate and go; and, on her refusal, entreated the interference of friends to overcome her objections; Margaret would not hear of it, and devoted herself to the education of her brothers and sisters, and then to the making a home for the family. She was exact and punctual in money matters, and maintained herself, and made her full contribution to the support of her family, by the reward of her labors as a teacher, and in her conversation classes. I have a letter from her at Jamaica Plain, dated November, 1840, which begins,

‘This day I write you from my own hired house, and am full of the dignity of citizenship. Really, it is almost happiness. I retain, indeed, some cares and responsibilities; but these will sit light as feathers, for I can take my own time for them. Can it be that this peace will be mine for five whole months? At any rate, five days have already been enjoyed.’

Here is another, written in the same year: —

‘I do not wish to talk to you of my ill-health, except that I like you should know when it makes me do anything badly, since I wish you to excuse and esteem me. But let me say, once for all, in reply to your letter, that you are mistaken if you think I ever wantonly sacrifice my health. I have learned that we cannot injure ourselves without injuring others; and besides, that we have no right; for ourselves are all we know of heaven. I do not try to domineer over myself. But, unless I were sure of dying, I cannot dispense with making some exertion, both for the present and the future. There is no mortal, who, if I laid down my burden, would take care of it while I slept. Do not think me weakly disinterested, or, indeed, disinterested at all.’

Every one of her friends knew assuredly that her sympathy and aid would not fail them when required. She went, from the most joyful of all bridals, to attend a near relative during a formidable surgical operation. She was here to help others. As one of her friends writes, ‘She helped whoever knew her.’ She adopted the interests of humble persons, within her circle, with heart-cheering warmth, and her ardor in the cause of suffering and degraded women, at Sing-Sing, was as irresistible as her love of books. She had, many years afterwards, scope for the exercise of all her love and devotion, in Italy, but she came to it as if it had been her habit and her natural sphere. The friends who knew her in that country, relate, with much surprise, that she, who had all her lifetime drawn people by her wit, should recommend herself so highly, in Italy, by her tenderness and large affection. Yet the tenderness was only a face of the wit; as before, the wit was raised above all other wit by the affection behind it. And, truly, there was an ocean of tears always, in her atmosphere, ready to fall.

There was, at New York, a poor adventurer, half patriot, half author, a miserable man, always in such depths of distress, with such squadrons of enemies, that no charity could relieve, and no intervention save him. He believed Europe banded for his destruction, and America corrupted to connive at it. Margaret listened to these woes with such patience and mercy, that she drew five hundred dollars, which had been invested for her in a safe place, and put them in those hapless hands, where, of course, the money was only the prey of new rapacity, to be bewailed by new reproaches. When one of her friends had occasion to allude to this, long afterwards, she replied: —

‘In answer to what you say of —— , I wish, indeed, the little effort I made for him had been wiselier applied. Yet these are not the things one regrets. It will not do to calculate too closely with the affectionate human impulse. We must consent to make many mistakes, or we should move too slow to help our brothers much. I am sure you do not regret what you spent on Miani, and other worthless people. As things looked then, it would have been wrong not to have risked the loss.’

TRUTH.

But Margaret crowned all her talents and virtues with a love of truth, and the power to speak it. In great and in small matters, she was a woman of her word, and gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort that flows from plain dealing. Her nature was frank and transparent, and she had a right to say, as she says in her journal: —

‘I have the satisfaction of knowing, that, in my counsels, I have given myself no air of being better than I am.’

And again: —

‘In the chamber of death, I prayed in very early years, “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.” O, the granting of this prayer is sometimes terrible to me! I walk over the burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet. Yet nothing but truth will do; no love will serve that is not eternal, and as large as the universe; no philanthropy in executing whose behests I myself become unhealthy; no creative genius which bursts asunder my life, to leave it a poor black chrysalid behind. And yet this last is too true of me.’

She describes a visit made in May, 1844, at the house of some valued friends in West Roxbury, and adds: ‘We had a long and deep conversation, happy in its candor. Truth, truth, thou art the great preservative! Let free air into the mind, and the pestilence cannot lurk in any corner.’

And she uses the following language in an earnest letter to another friend: —

‘My own entire sincerity, in every passage of life, gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions.’

* * * * *

‘Reading to-day a few lines of —— , I thought with refreshment of such lives as T.’s, and V.’s, and W.’s, so private and so true, where each line written is really the record of a thought or a feeling. I hate poems which are a melancholy monument of culture for the sake of being cultivated, not of growing.’

Even in trifles, one might find with her the advantage and the electricity of a little honesty. I have had from an eye-witness a note of a little scene that passed in Boston, at the Academy of Music. A party had gone early, and taken an excellent place to hear one of Beethoven’s symphonies. Just behind them were soon seated a young lady and two gentlemen, who made an incessant buzzing, in spite of bitter looks cast on them by the whole neighborhood, and destroyed all the musical comfort. After all was over, Margaret leaned across one seat, and catching the eye of this girl, who was pretty and well-dressed, said, in her blandest, gentlest voice, “May I speak with you one moment?” “Certainly,” said the young lady, with a fluttered, pleased look, bending forward. “I only wish to say,” said Margaret, “that I trust, that, in the whole course of your life, you will not suffer so great a degree of annoyance as you have inflicted on a large party of lovers of music this evening.” This was said with the sweetest air, as if to a little child, and it was as good as a play to see the change of countenance which the young lady exhibited, who had no replication to make to so Christian a blessing.

On graver occasions, the same habit was only more stimulated; and I cannot remember certain passages which called it into play, without new regrets at the costly loss which our community sustains in the loss of this brave and eloquent soul.

People do not speak the truth, not for the want of not knowing and preferring it, but because they have not the organ to speak it adequately. It requires a clear sight, and, still more, a high spirit, to deal with falsehood in the decisive way. I have known several honest persons who valued truth as much as Peter and John, but, when they tried to speak it, they grew red and black in the face instead of Ananias, until, after a few attempts, they decided that aggressive truth was not their vocation, and confined themselves thenceforward to silent honesty, except on rare occasions, when either an extreme outrage, or a happier inspiration, loosened their tongue. But a soul is now and then incarnated, whom indulgent nature has not afflicted with any cramp or frost, but who can speak the right word at the right moment, qualify the selfish and hypocritical act with its real name, and, without any loss of serenity, hold up the offence to the purest daylight. Such a truth-speaker is worth more than the best police, and more than the laws or governors; for these do not always know their own side, but will back the crime for want of this very truth-speaker to expose them. That is the theory of the newspaper, — to supersede official by intellectual influence. But, though the apostles establish the journal, it usually happens that, by some strange oversight, Ananias slips into the editor’s chair. If, then, we could be provided with a fair proportion of truth-speakers, we could very materially and usefully contract the legislative and the executive functions. Still, the main sphere for this nobleness is private society, where so many mischiefs go unwhipped, being out of the cognizance of law, and supposed to be nobody’s business. And society is, at all times, suffering for want of judges and headsmen, who will mark and lop these malefactors.

Margaret suffered no vice to insult her presence, but called the offender to instant account, when the law of right or of beauty was violated. She needed not, of course, to go out of her way to find the offender, and she never did, but she had the courage and the skill to cut heads off which were not worn with honor in her presence. Others might abet a crime by silence, if they pleased; she chose to clear herself of all complicity, by calling the act by its name.

It was curious to see the mysterious provocation which the mere presence of insight exerts in its neighborhood. Like moths about a lamp, her victims voluntarily came to judgment: conscious persons, encumbered with egotism; vain persons, bent on concealing some mean vice; arrogant reformers, with some halting of their own; the compromisers, who wished to reconcile right and wrong; — all came and held out their palms to the wise woman, to read their fortunes, and they were truly told. Many anecdotes have come to my ear, which show how useful the glare of her lamp proved in private circles, and what dramatic situations it created. But these cannot be told. The valor for dragging the accused spirits among his acquaintance to the stake is not in the heart of the present writer. The reader must be content to learn that she knew how, without loss of temper, to speak with unmistakable plainness to any party, when she felt that the truth or the right was injured. For the same reason, I omit one or two letters, most honorable both to her mind and heart, in which she felt constrained to give the frankest utterance to her displeasure. Yet I incline to quote the testimony of one witness, which is so full and so pointed, that I must give it as I find it.

“I have known her, by the severity of her truth, mow down a crop of evil, like the angel of retribution itself, and could not sufficiently admire her courage. A conversation she had with Mr. —— , just before he went to Europe, was one of these things; and there was not a particle of ill-will in it, but it was truth which she could not help seeing and uttering, nor he refuse to accept.

“My friends told me of a similar verdict, pronounced upon Mr. —— , at Paris, which they said was perfectly tremendous. They themselves sat breathless; Mr. —— was struck dumb; his eyes fixed on her with wonder and amazement, yet gazing too with an attention which seemed like fascination. When she had done, he still looked to see if she was to say more, and when he found she had really finished, he arose, took his hat, said faintly, ‘I thank you.’ and left the room. He afterwards said to Mr. —— , ‘I never shall speak ill of her. She has done me good.’ And this was the greater triumph, for this man had no theories of impersonality, and was the most egotistical and irritable of self-lovers, and was so unveracious, that one had to hope in charity that his organ for apprehending truth was deficient.”

ECSTASY.

I have alluded to the fact, that, in the summer of 1840, Margaret underwent some change in the tone and the direction of her thoughts, to which she attributed a high importance. I remember, at an earlier period, when in earnest conversation with her, she seemed to have that height and daring, that I saw she was ready to do whatever she thought; and I observed that, with her literary riches, her invention and wit, her boundless fun and drollery, her light satire, and the most entertaining conversation in America, consisted a certain pathos of sentiment, and a march of character, threatening to arrive presently at the shores and plunge into the sea of Buddhism and mystical trances. The literature of asceticism and rapturous piety was familiar to her. The conversation of certain mystics, who had appeared in Boston about this time, had interested her, but in no commanding degree. But in this year, 1840, in which events occurred which combined great happiness and pain for her affections, she remained for some time in a sort of ecstatic solitude. She made many attempts to describe her frame of mind to me, but did not inspire me with confidence that she had now come to any experiences that were profound or permanent. She was vexed at the want of sympathy on my part, and I again felt that this craving for sympathy did not prove the inspiration. There was a certain restlessness and fever, which I did not like should deceive a soul which was capable of greatness. But jets of magnanimity were always natural to her; and her aspiring mind, eager for a higher and still a higher ground, made her gradually familiar with the range of the mystics, and, though never herself laid in the chamber called Peace, never quite authentically and originally speaking from the absolute or prophetic mount, yet she borrowed from her frequent visits to its precincts an occasional enthusiasm, which gave a religious dignity to her thought.

‘I have plagues about me, but they don’t touch me now. I thank nightly the benignant Spirit, for the unaccustomed serenity in which it enfolds me.

‘ —— is very wretched; and once I could not have helped taking on me all his griefs, and through him the griefs of his class; but now I drink only the wormwood of the minute, and that has always equal parts, — a drop of sweet to a drop of bitter. But I shall never be callous, never unable to understand home-sickness. Am not I, too, one of the band who know not where to lay their heads? Am I wise enough to hear such things? Perhaps not; but happy enough, surely. For that Power which daily makes me understand the value of the little wheat amid the field of tares, and shows me how the kingdom of heaven is sown in the earth like a grain of mustard-seed, is good to me, and bids me call unhappiness happy.’

* * * * *

TO ——

‘March, 1842. — My inward life has been more rich and deep, and of more calm and musical flow than ever before. It seems to me that Heaven, whose course has ever been to cross-bias me, as Herbert said, is no niggard in its compensations. I have indeed been forced to take up old burdens, from which I thought I had learned what they could teach; the pen has been snatched from my hand just as I most longed to use it; I have been forced to dissipate, when I most wished to concentrate; to feel the hourly presence of others’ mental wants, when, it seemed, I was just on the point of satisfying my own. But a new page is turned, and an era begun, from which I am not yet sufficiently remote to describe it as I would. I have lived a life, if only in the music I have heard, and one development seemed to follow another therein, as if bound together by destiny, and all things were done for me. All minds, all scenes, have ministered to me. Nature has seemed an ever-open secret; the Divine, a sheltering love; truth, an always-springing fountain; and my soul more alone, and less lonely, more hopeful, patient, and, above all, more gentle and humble in its living. New minds have come to reveal themselves to me, though I do not wish it, for I feel myself inadequate to the ties already formed. I have not strength or time to meet the thoughts of those I love already. But these new have come with gifts too fair to be refused, and which have cheered my passive mind.’

* * * * *

‘June, 1844. — Last night, in the boat, I could not help thinking, each has something, none has enough. I fear to want them all; and, through ages, if not forever, promises and beckons the life of reception, of renunciation. Passing every seven days from one region to the other, the maiden grows weary of packing the trunk, yet blesses Thee, O rich God!’

Her letters at this period betray a pathetic alternation of feeling, between her aspiring for a rest in the absolute Centre, and her necessity of a perfect sympathy with her friends. She writes to one of them: —

‘What I want, the word I crave, I do not expect to hear from the lips of man. I do not wish to be, I do not wish to have, a mediator; yet I cannot help wishing, when I am with you, that some tones of the longed-for music could be vibrating in the air around us. But I will not be impatient again; for, though I am but as I am, I like not to feel the eyes I have loved averted.’

CONVERSATION.

I have separated and distributed as I could some of the parts which blended in the rich composite energy which Margaret exerted during the ten years over which my occasional interviews with her were scattered. It remains to say, that all these powers and accomplishments found their best and only adequate channel in her conversation; — a conversation which those who have heard it, unanimously, as far as I know, pronounced to be, in elegance, in range, in flexibility, and adroit transition, in depth, in cordiality, and in moral aim, altogether admirable; surprising and cheerful as a poem, and communicating its own civility and elevation like a charm to all hearers. She was here, among our anxious citizens, and frivolous fashionists, as if sent to refine and polish her countrymen, and announce a better day. She poured a stream of amber over the endless store of private anecdotes, of bosom histories, which her wonderful persuasion drew forth, and transfigured them into fine fables. Whilst she embellished the moment, her conversation had the merit of being solid and true. She put her whole character into it, and had the power to inspire. The companion was made a thinker, and went away quite other than he came. The circle of friends who sat with her were not allowed to remain spectators or players, but she converted them into heroes, if she could. The muse woke the muses, and the day grew bright and eventful. Of course, there must be, in a person of such sincerity, much variety of aspect, according to the character of her company. Only, in Margaret’s case, there is almost an agreement in the testimony to an invariable power over the minds of all. I conversed lately with a gentleman who has vivid remembrances of his interviews with her in Boston, many years ago, who described her in these terms:— “No one ever came so near. Her mood applied itself to the mood of her companion, point to point, in the most limber, sinuous, vital way, and drew out the most extraordinary narratives; yet she had a light sort of laugh, when all was said, as if she thought she could live over that revelation. And this sufficient sympathy she had for all persons indifferently, — for lovers, for artists, and beautiful maids, and ambitious young statesmen, and for old aunts, and coach-travellers. Ah! she applied herself to the mood of her companion, as the sponge applies itself to water.” The description tallies well enough with my observation. I remember she found, one day, at my house, her old friend Mr. —— , sitting with me. She looked at him attentively, and hardly seemed to know him. In the afternoon, he invited her to go with him to Cambridge. The next, day she said to me, ‘You fancy that you know — . It is too absurd; you have never seen him. When I found him here, sitting like a statue, I was alarmed, and thought him ill. You sit with courteous, unconfiding smile, and suppose him to be a mere man of talent. He is so with you. But the moment I was alone with him, he was another creature; his manner, so glassy and elaborate before, was full of soul, and the tones of his voice entirely different.’ And I have no doubt that she saw expressions, heard tones, and received thoughts from her companions, which no one else ever saw or heard from the same parties, and that her praise of her friends, which seemed exaggerated, was her exact impression. We were all obliged to recall Margaret’s testimony, when we found we were sad blockheads to other people.

I find among her letters many proofs of this power of disposing equally the hardest and the most sensitive people to open their hearts, on very short acquaintance. Any casual rencontré, in a walk, in a steamboat, at a concert, became the prelude to unwonted confidences.

* * * * *

1843.— ‘I believe I told you about one new man, a Philistine, at Brook Farm. He reproved me, as such people are wont, for my little faith. At the end of the first meeting in the hall, he seemed to me perfectly hampered in his old ways and technics, and I thought he would not open his mind to the views of others for years, if ever. After I wrote, we had a second meeting, by request, on personal relations; at the end of which, he came to me, and expressed delight, and a feeling of new light and life, in terms whose modesty might have done honor to the wisest.’

* * * * *

‘This afternoon we met Mr. —— in his wood; and he sat down and told us the story of his life, his courtship, and painted the portraits of his father and mother with most amusing naïveté. He says:— “How do you think I offered myself? I never had told Miss —— that I loved her; never told her she was handsome; and I went to her, and said, ‘Miss —— , I’ve come to offer myself; but first I’ll give you my character. I’m very poor; you’ll have to work: I’m very cross and irascible; you’ll have everything to bear: and I’ve liked many other pretty girls. Now what do you say?’ and she said, ‘I’ll have you:’ and she’s been everything to me.”

‘“My mother was a Calvinist, very strict, but she was always reading ‘Abelard and Eloisa,’ and crying over it. At sixteen I said to her: ‘Mother, you’ve brought me up well; you’ve kept me strict. Why don’t I feel that regeneration they talk of? why an’t I one of the elect?’ And she talked to me about the potter using his clay as he pleased; and I said: ‘Mother, God is not a potter: He’s a perfect being; and he can’t treat the vessels he makes, anyhow, but with perfect justice, or he’s no God. So I’m no Calvinist.’”’

* * * * *

Here is a very different picture: —

‘ —— has infinite grace and shading in her character: a springing and tender fancy, a Madonna depth of meditative softness, and a purity which has been unstained, and keeps her dignified even in the most unfavorable circumstances. She was born for the love and ornament of life. I can scarcely forbear weeping sometimes, when I look on her, and think what happiness and beauty she might have conferred. She is as yet all unconscious of herself, and she rather dreads being with me, because I make her too conscious. She was on the point, at —— , of telling me all she knew of herself; but I saw she dreaded, while she wished, that I should give a local habitation and a name to what lay undefined, floating before her, the phantom of her destiny; or rather lead her to give it, for she always approaches a tragical clearness when talking with me.’

* * * * *

‘ —— has been to see us. But it serves not to know such a person, who perpetually defaces the high by such strange mingling with the low. It certainly is not pleasant to hear of God and Miss Biddeford in a breath. To me, this hasty attempt at skimming from the deeps of theosophy is as unpleasant as the rude vanity of reformers. Dear Beauty! where, where, amid these morasses and pine barrens, shall we make thee a temple? where find a Greek to guard it, — clear-eyed, deep-thoughted, and delicate enough to appreciate the relations and gradations which nature always observes?’

An acute and illuminated woman, who, in this age of indifferentism, holds on with both hands to the creed of the Pilgrims, writes of Margaret, whom she saw but once:— “She looked very sensible, but as if contending with ill health and duties. She lay, all the day and evening, on the sofa, and catechized me, who told my literal traditions, like any old bobbin-woman.”

I add the testimony of a man of letters, and most competent observer, who had, for a long time, opportunities of daily intercourse with her: —

“When I knew Margaret, I was so young, and perhaps too much disposed to meet people on my own ground, that I may not be able to do justice to her. Her nature was so large and receptive, so sympathetic with youth and genius, so aspiring, and withal so womanly in her understanding, that she made her companion think more of himself, and of a common life, than of herself. She was a companion as few others, if indeed any one, have been. Her heart was underneath her intellectualness, her mind was reverent, her spirit devout; a thinker without dryness; a scholar without pedantry. She could appreciate the finest thoughts, and knew the rich soil and large fields of beauty that made the little vase of otto. With her unusual wisdom and religious spirit, she seemed like the priestess of the youth, opening to him the fields of nature; but she was more than a priestess, a companion also. As I recall her image, I think she may have been too intellectual, and too conscious of intellectual relation, so that she was not sufficiently self-centred on her own personality; and hence something of a duality: but I may not be correct in this impression.”

V. CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON

BY R.W. EMERSON.

“Do not scold me; they are guests of my eyes. Do not frown, — they want no bread; they are guests of my words.”

TARTAR ECLOGUES

CONVERSATIONS IN BOSTON.

* * * * *

In the year 1839, Margaret removed from Groton, and, with her mother and family, took a house at Jamaica Plain, five miles from Boston. In November of the next year the family removed to Cambridge, and rented a house there, near their old home. In 1841, Margaret took rooms for the winter in town, retaining still the house in Cambridge. And from the day of leaving Groton, until the autumn of 1844, when she removed to New York, she resided in Boston, or its immediate vicinity. Boston was her social centre. There were the libraries, galleries, and concerts which she loved; there were her pupils and her friends; and there were her tasks, and the openings of a new career.

I have vaguely designated some of the friends with whom she was on terms of intimacy at the time when I was first acquainted with her. But the range of her talents required an equal compass in her society; and she gradually added a multitude of names to the list. She knew already all the active minds at Cambridge; and has left a record of one good interview she had with Allston. She now became intimate with Doctor Channing, and interested him to that point in some of her studies, that, at his request, she undertook to render some selections of German philosophy into English for him. But I believe this attempt was soon abandoned. She found a valuable friend in the late Miss Mary Rotch, of New Bedford, a woman of great strength of mind, connected with the Quakers not less by temperament than by birth, and possessing the best lights of that once spiritual sect. At Newport, Margaret had made the acquaintance of an elegant scholar, in Mr. Calvert, of Maryland. In Providence, she had won, as by conquest, such a homage of attachment, from young and old, that her arrival there, one day, on her return from a visit to Bristol, was a kind of ovation. In Boston, she knew people of every class, — merchants, politicians, scholars, artists, women, the migratory genius, and the rooted capitalist, — and, amongst all, many excellent people, who were every day passing, by new opportunities, conversations, and kind offices, into the sacred circle of friends. The late Miss Susan Burley had many points of attraction for her, not only in her elegant studies, but also in the deep interest which that lady took in securing the highest culture for women. She was very well read, and, avoiding abstractions, knew how to help herself with examples and facts. A friendship that proved of great importance to the next years was that established with Mr. George Ripley; an accurate scholar, a man of character, and of eminent powers of conversation, and already then deeply engaged in plans of an expansive practical bearing, of which the first fruit was the little community which nourished for a few years at Brook Farm. Margaret presently became connected with him in literary labors, and, as long as she remained in this vicinity, kept up her habits of intimacy with the colonists of Brook Farm. At West-Roxbury, too, she knew and prized the heroic heart, the learning and wit of Theodore Parker, whose literary aid was, subsequently, of the first importance to her. She had an acquaintance, for many years, — subject, no doubt, to alternations of sun and shade, — with Mr. Alcott. There was much antagonism in their habitual views, but each learned to respect the genius of the other. She had more sympathy with Mr. Alcott’s English friend, Charles Lane, an ingenious mystic, and bold experimenter in practical reforms, whose dexterity and temper in debate she frankly admired, whilst his asceticism engaged her reverence. Neither could some marked difference of temperament remove her from the beneficent influences of Miss Elizabeth Peabody, who, by her constitutional hospitality to excellence, whether mental or moral, has made her modest abode for so many years the inevitable resort of studious feet, and a private theatre for the exposition of every question of letters, of philosophy, of ethics, and of art.

The events in Margaret’s life, up to the year 1840, were few, and not of that dramatic interest which readers love. Of the few events of her bright and blameless years, how many are private, and must remain so. In reciting the story of an affectionate and passionate woman, the voice lowers itself to a whisper, and becomes inaudible. A woman in our society finds her safety and happiness in exclusions and privacies. She congratulates herself when she is not called to the market, to the courts, to the polls, to the stage, or to the orchestra. Only the most extraordinary genius can make the career of an artist secure and agreeable to her. Prescriptions almost invincible the female lecturer or professor of any science must encounter; and, except on points where the charities which are left to women as their legitimate province interpose against the ferocity of laws, with us a female politician is unknown. Perhaps this fact, which so dangerously narrows the career of a woman, accuses the tardiness of our civility, and many signs show that a revolution is already on foot.

Margaret had no love of notoriety, or taste for eccentricity, to goad her, and no weak fear of either. Willingly she was confined to the usual circles and methods of female talent. She had no false shame. Any task that called out her powers was good and desirable. She wished to live by her strength. She could converse, and teach, and write. She took private classes of pupils at her own house. She organized, with great success, a school for young ladies at Providence, and gave four hours a day to it, during two years. She translated Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, and published in 1839. In 1841, she translated the Letters of Gunderode and Bettine, and published them as far as the sale warranted the work. In 1843, she made a tour to Lake Superior and to Michigan, and published an agreeable narrative of it, called “Summer on the Lakes.”

Apparently a more pretending, but really also a private and friendly service, she edited the “Dial,” a quarterly journal, for two years from its first publication in 1840. She was eagerly solicited to undertake the charge of this work, which, when it began, concentrated a good deal of hope and affection. It had its origin in a club of speculative students, who found the air in America getting a little close and stagnant; and the agitation had perhaps the fault of being too secondary or bookish in its origin, or caught not from primary instincts, but from English, and still more from German books. The journal was commenced with much hope, and liberal promises of many coöperators. But the workmen of sufficient culture for a poetical and philosophical magazine were too few; and, as the pages were filled by unpaid contributors, each of whom had, according to the usage and necessity of this country, some paying employment, the journal did not get his best work, but his second best. Its scattered writers had not digested their theories into a distinct dogma, still less into a practical measure which the public could grasp; and the magazine was so eclectic and miscellaneous, that each of its readers and writers valued only a small portion of it. For these reasons it never had a large circulation, and it was discontinued after four years. But the Dial betrayed, through all its juvenility, timidity, and conventional rubbish, some sparks of the true love and hope, and of the piety to spiritual law, which had moved its friends and founders, and it was received by its early subscribers with almost a religious welcome. Many years after it was brought to a close, Margaret was surprised in England by very warm testimony to its merits; and, in 1848, the writer of these pages found it holding the same affectionate place in many a private bookshelf in England and Scotland, which it had secured at home. Good or bad, it cost a good deal of precious labor from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all. As editor, she received a compensation for the first years, which was intended to be two hundred dollars per annum, but which, I fear, never reached even that amount.

But it made no difference to her exertion. She put so much heart into it that she bravely undertook to open, in the Dial, the subjects which most attracted her; and she treated, in turn, Goethe, and Beethoven, the Rhine and the Romaic Ballads, the Poems of John Sterling, and several pieces of sentiment, with a spirit which spared no labor; and, when the hard conditions of journalism held her to an inevitable day, she submitted to jeopardizing a long-cherished subject, by treating it in the crude and forced article for the month. I remember, after she had been compelled by ill health to relinquish the journal into my hands, my grateful wonder at the facility with which she assumed the preparation of laborious articles, that might have daunted the most practised scribe.

But in book or journal she found a very imperfect expression of herself, and it was the more vexatious, because she was accustomed to the clearest and fullest. When, therefore, she had to choose an employment that should pay money, she consulted her own genius, as well as the wishes of a multitude of friends, in opening a class for conversation. In the autumn of 1839, she addressed the following letter, intended for circulation, to Mrs. George Ripley, in which her general design was stated: —

‘My dear friend: — The advantages of a weekly meeting, for conversation, might be great enough to repay the trouble of attendance, if they consisted only in supplying a point of union to well-educated and thinking women, in a city which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts, at present, nothing of the kind, and where I have heard many, of mature age, wish for some such means of stimulus and cheer, and those younger, for a place where they could state their doubts and difficulties, with a hope of gaining aid from the experience or aspirations of others. And, if my office were only to suggest topics, which would lead to conversation of a better order than is usual at social meetings, and to turn back the current when digressing into personalities or common-places, so that what is valuable in the experience of each might be brought to bear upon all, I should think the object not unworthy of the effort.

‘But my ambition goes much further. It is to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge, and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our minds. To systematize thought, and give a precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements to test and classify what they receive. To ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us, in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action.

‘Could a circle be assembled in earnest, desirous to answer the questions, — What were we born to do? and how shall we do it? — which so few ever propose to themselves till their best years are gone by, I should think the undertaking a noble one, and, if my resources should prove sufficient to make me its moving spring, I should be willing to give to it a large portion of those coming years, which will, as I hope, be my best. I look upon it with no blind enthusiasm, nor unlimited faith, but with a confidence that I have attained a distinct perception of means, which, if there are persons competent to direct them, can supply a great want, and promote really high objects. So far as I have tried them yet, they have met with success so much beyond my hopes, that my faith will not easily be shaken, nor my earnestness chilled. Should I, however, be disappointed in Boston, I could hardly hope that such a plan could be brought to bear on general society, in any other city of the United States. But I do not fear, if a good beginning can be made. I am confident that twenty persons cannot be brought together from better motives than vanity or pedantry, to talk upon such subjects as we propose, without finding in themselves great deficiencies, which they will be very desirous to supply.

‘Should the enterprise fail, it will be either from incompetence in me, or that sort of vanity in them which wears the garb of modesty. On the first of these points, I need not speak. I cannot be supposed to have felt so much the wants of others, without feeling my own still more deeply. And, from the depth of this feeling, and the earnestness it gave, such power as I have yet exerted has come. Of course, those who are inclined to meet me, feel a confidence in me, and should they be disappointed, I shall regret it not solely or most on my own account. I have not given my gauge without measuring my capacity to sustain defeat. For the other, I know it is very hard to lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the art of coterie criticism, and the “delicate disdains” of good society, and fearlessly meet the light, even though it flow from the sun of truth. Yet, as, without such generous courage, nothing of value can be learned or done, I hope to see many capable of it; willing that others should think their sayings crude, shallow, or tasteless, if, by such unpleasant means, they may attain real health and vigor, which need no aid from rouge or candle-light, to brave the light of the world.

‘Since I saw you, I have been told of persons who are desirous to join the class, “if only they need not talk.” I am so sure that the success of the whole depends on conversation being general, that I do not wish any one to come, who does not intend, if possible, to take an active part. No one will be forced, but those who do not talk will not derive the same advantages with those who openly state their impressions, and can consent to have it known that they learn by blundering, as is the destiny of man here below. And general silence, or side talks, would paralyze me. I should feel coarse and misplaced, were I to harangue over-much. In former instances, I have been able to make it easy and even pleasant, to twenty-five out of thirty, to bear their part, to question, to define, to state, and examine opinions. If I could not do as much now, I should consider myself as unsuccessful, and should withdraw. But I shall expect communication to be effected by degrees, and to do a great deal myself at the first meetings. My method has been to open a subject, — for instance, Poetry, as expressed in —

       External Nature;
        The life of man;
        Literature;
        The fine arts;
      or, The history of a nation to be studied in —
        Its religious and civil institutions;
        Its literature and arts;
        The characters of its great men;

and, after as good a general statement as I know how to make, select a branch of the subject, and lead others to give their thoughts upon it. When they have not been successful in verbal utterance of their thoughts, I have asked them to attempt it in writing. At the next meeting, I would read these “skarts of pen and ink” aloud, and canvass their adequacy, without mentioning the names of the writers. I found this less necessary, as I proceeded, and my companions attained greater command both of thought and language; but for a time it was useful, and may be now. Great advantage in point of discipline may be derived from even this limited use of the pen.

‘I do not wish, at present, to pledge myself to any course of subjects. Generally, I may say, they will be such as literature and the arts present in endless profusion. Should a class be brought together, I should wish, first, to ascertain our common ground, and, in the course of a few meetings, should see whether it be practicable to follow out the design in my mind, which, as yet, would look too grand on paper.

‘Let us see whether there will be any organ, before noting down the music to which it may give breath.’

Accordingly, a class of ladies assembled at Miss Peabody’s rooms, in West Street, on the 6th November, 1839. Twenty-five were present, and the circle comprised some of the most agreeable and intelligent women to be found in Boston and its neighborhood. The following brief report of this first day’s meeting remains: —

‘Miss Fuller enlarged, in her introductory conversation, on the topics which she touched in her letter to Mrs. Ripley.

‘Women are now taught, at school, all that men are; they run over, superficially, even more studies, without being really taught anything. When they come to the business of life, they find themselves inferior, and all their studies have not given them that practical good sense, and mother wisdom, and wit, which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning-wheel. But, with this difference; men are called on, from a very early period, to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for purposes of display.

‘It is to supply this defect,’ Miss Fuller said, ‘that these conversations have been planned. She was not here to teach; but she had had some experience in the management of such a conversation as was now proposed; she meant to give her view on each subject, and provoke the thoughts of others.

‘It would be best to take subjects on which we know words, and have vague impressions, and compel ourselves to define those words. We should have, probably, mortifications to suffer; but we should be encouraged by the rapid gain that comes from making a simple and earnest effort for expression.’

Miss Fuller had proposed the Grecian Mythology as the subject of the first conversations, and now gave her reasons for the choice.

‘It is quite separated from all exciting local subjects. It is serious, without being solemn, and without excluding any mode of intellectual action; it is playful, as well as deep. It is sufficiently wide, for it is a complete expression of the cultivation of a nation. It is objective and tangible. It is, also, generally known, and associated with all our ideas of the arts.

‘It originated in the eye of the Greek. He lived out of doors: his climate was genial, his senses were adapted to it. He was vivacious and intellectual, and personified all he beheld. He saw the oreads, naiads, nereids. Their forms, as poets and painters give them, are the very lines of nature humanized, as the child’s eye sees faces in the embers or in the clouds.

‘Other forms of the mythology, as Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, are great instincts, or ideas, or facts of the internal constitution, separated and personified.’

After exhibiting their enviable mental health, and rebutting the cavils of some of the speakers, — who could not bear, in Christian times, by Christian ladies, that heathen Greeks should be envied, — Miss Fuller declared,

‘that she had no desire to go back, and believed we have the elements of a deeper civilization; yet, the Christian was in its infancy; the Greek in its maturity; nor could she look on the expression of a great nation’s intellect, as insignificant. These fables of the Gods were the result of the universal sentiments of religion, aspiration, intellectual action, of a people, whose political and æsthetic life had become immortal; and we must leave off despising, if we would begin to learn.’

The reporter closes her account by saying:— “Miss Fuller’s thoughts were much illustrated, and all was said with the most captivating address and grace, and with beautiful modesty. The position in which she placed herself with respect to the rest, was entirely ladylike, and companionable. She told what she intended, the earnest purpose with which she came, and, with great tact, indicated the indiscretions that might spoil the meeting.”

Here is Margaret’s own account of the first days.

TO R.W.E.

‘25th Nov., 1839. — My class is prosperous. I was so fortunate as to rouse, at once, the tone of simple earnestness, which can scarcely, when once awakened, cease to vibrate. All seem in a glow, and quite as receptive as I wish. They question and examine, yet follow leadings; and thoughts, not opinions, have ruled the hour every time. There are about twenty-five members, and every one, I believe, full of interest. The first time, ten took part in the conversation; the last, still more. Mrs. —— came out in a way that surprised me. She seems to have shaken off a wonderful number of films. She showed pure vision, sweet sincerity, and much talent. Mrs. ——  —— keeps us in good order, and takes care that Christianity and morality are not forgotten. The first day’s topic was, the genealogy of heaven and earth; then the Will, (Jupiter); the Understanding, (Mercury): the second day’s, the celestial inspiration of genius, perception, and transmission of divine law, (Apollo); the terrene inspiration, the impassioned abandonment of genius, (Bacchus). Of the thunderbolt, the caduceus, the ray, and the grape, having disposed as well as might be, we came to the wave, and the sea-shell it moulds to Beauty, and Love her parent and her child.

‘I assure you, there is more Greek than Bostonian spoken at the meetings; and we may have pure honey of Hymettus to give you yet.’

To another friend she wrote: —

‘The circle I meet interests me. So even devoutly thoughtful seems their spirit, that, from the very first, I took my proper place, and never had the feeling I dreaded, of display, of a paid Corinne. I feel as I would, truly a teacher and a guide. All are intelligent; five or six have talent. But I am never driven home for ammunition; never put to any expense; never truly called out. What I have is always enough; though I feel how superficially I am treating my subject.’

Here is an extract from the letter of a lady, who joined the class, for the first time, at the eighth meeting, to her friend in New Haven: —

“Christmas made a holiday for Miss Fuller’s class, but it met on Saturday, at noon. As I sat there, my heart overflowed with joy at the sight of the bright circle, and I longed to have you by my side, for I know not where to look for so much character, culture, and so much love of truth and beauty, in any other circle of women and girls. The names and faces would not mean so much to you as to me, who have seen more of the lives, of which they are the sign. Margaret, beautifully dressed, (don’t despise that, for it made a fine picture,) presided with more dignity and grace than I had thought possible. The subject was Beauty. Each had written her definition, and Margaret began with reading her own. This called forth questions, comments, and illustrations, on all sides. The style and manner, of course, in this age, are different, but the question, the high point from which it was considered, and the earnestness and simplicity of the discussion, as well as the gifts and graces of the speakers, gave it the charm of a Platonic dialogue. There was no pretension or pedantry in a word that was said. The tone of remark and question was simple as that of children in a school class; and, I believe, every one was gratified.”

The conversations thus opened proceeded with spirit and success. Under the mythological forms, room was found for opening all the great questions, on which Margaret and her friends wished to converse. Prometheus was made the type of Pure Reason; Jupiter, of Will; Juno, the passive side of the same, or Obstinacy; Minerva, Intellectual Power, Practical Reason; Mercury, Executive Power, Understanding; Apollo was Genius, the Sun; Bacchus was Geniality, the Earth’s answer. “Apollo and Bacchus were contrasted,” says the reporter. “Margaret unfolded her idea of Bacchus. His whole life was triumph. Born from fire; a divine frenzy; the answer of the earth to the sun, — of the warmth of joy to the light of genius. He is beautiful, also; not severe in youthful beauty, like Apollo; but exuberant, — liable to excess. She spoke of the fables of his destroying Pentheus, &c., and suggested the interpretations. This Bacchus was found in Scripture. The Indian Bacchus is glowing; he is the genial apprehensive power; the glow of existence; mere joy.”

Venus was Grecian womanhood, instinctive; Diana, chastity; Mars, Grecian manhood, instinctive. Venus made the name for a conversation on Beauty, which was extended through four meetings, as it brought in irresistibly the related topics of poetry, genius, and taste. Neptune was Circumstance; Pluto, the Abyss, the Undeveloped; Pan, the glow and sportiveness and music of Nature; Ceres, the productive power of Nature; Proserpine, the Phenomenon.

Under the head of Venus, in the fifth conversation, the story of Cupid and Psyche was told with fitting beauty, by Margaret; and many fine conjectural interpretations suggested from all parts of the room. The ninth conversation turned on the distinctive qualities of poetry, discriminating it from the other fine arts. Rhythm and Imagery, it was agreed, were distinctive. An episode to dancing, which the conversation took, led Miss Fuller to give the thought that lies at the bottom of different dances. Of her lively description the following record is preserved: —

‘Gavottes, shawl dances, and all of that kind, are intended merely to exhibit the figure in as many attitudes as possible. They have no character, and say nothing, except, Look! how graceful I am!

‘The minuet is conjugal; but the wedlock is chivalric. Even so would Amadis wind slow, stately, calm, through the mazes of life, with Oriana, when he had made obeisances enough to win her for a partner.

‘English, German, Swiss, French, and Spanish dances all express the same things, though in very different ways. Love and its life are still the theme.

‘In the English country dance, the pair who have chosen one another, submit decorously to the restraints of courtship and frequent separations, cross hands, four go round, down outside, in the most earnest, lively, complacent fashion. If they join hands to go down the middle, and exhibit their union to all spectators, they part almost as soon as meet, and disdain not to give hands right and left to the most indifferent persons, like marriage in its daily routine.

‘In the Swiss, the man pursues, stamping with energy, marking the time by exulting flings, or snapping of the fingers, in delighted confidence of succeeding at last; but the maiden coyly, demurely, foots it round, yet never gets out of the way, intending to be won.

‘The German asks his madchen if she will, with him, for an hour forget the cares and common-places of life in a tumult of rapturous sympathy, and she smiles with Saxon modesty her Ja. He sustains her in his arms; the music begins. At first, in willing mazes they calmly imitate the planetary orbs, but the melodies flow quicker, their accordant hearts beat higher, and they whirl at last into giddy raptures, and dizzy evolutions, which steal from life its free-will and self-collection, till nothing is left but mere sensation.

‘The French couple are somewhat engaged with one another, but almost equally so with the world around them. They think it well to vary existence with plenty of coquetry and display. First, the graceful reverence to one another, then to their neighbors. Exhibit your grace in the chassé, — made apparently solely for the purpose of déchasséing; — then civil intimacy between the ladies, in la chaine, then a decorous promenade of partners, then right and left with all the world, and balance, &c. The quadrille also offers opportunity for talk. Looks and sympathetic motions are not enough for our Parisian friends, unless eked out by words.

‘The impassioned bolero and fandango are the dances for me. They are not merely loving, but living; they express the sweet Southern ecstasy at the mere gift of existence. These persons are together, they live, they are beautiful; how can they say this in sufficiently plain terms? — I love, I live, I am beautiful! — I put on my festal dress to do honor to my happiness; I shake my castanets, that my hands, too, may be busy; I felice, — felicissima!’

This first series of conversations extended to thirteen, the class meeting once a week at noon, and remaining together for two hours. The class were happy, and the interest increased. A new series of thirteen more weeks followed, and the general subject of the new course was “the Fine Arts.” A few fragmentary notes only of these hours have been shown me, but all those who bore any part in them testify to their entire success. A very competent witness has given me some interesting particulars: —

“Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed, and, altogether, looked sumptuously. She began them with an exordium, in which she gave her leading views; and those exordiums were excellent, from the elevation of the tone, the ease and flow of discourse, and from the tact with which they were kept aloof from any excess, and from the gracefulness with which they were brought down, at last, to a possible level for others to follow. She made a pause, and invited the others to come in. Of course, it was not easy for every one to venture her remark, after an eloquent discourse, and in the presence of twenty superior women, who were all inspired. But whatever was said, Margaret knew how to seize the good meaning of it with hospitality, and to make the speaker feel glad, and not sorry, that she had spoken. She showed herself thereby fit to preside at such meetings, and imparted to the susceptible a wonderful reliance on her genius.”

In her writing she was prone to spin her sentences without a sure guidance, and beyond the sympathy of her reader. But in discourse, she was quick, conscious of power, in perfect tune with her company, and would pause and turn the stream with grace and adroitness, and with so much spirit, that her face beamed, and the young people came away delighted, among other things, with “her beautiful looks.” When she was intellectually excited, or in high animal spirits, as often happened, all deformity of features was dissolved in the power of the expression. So I interpret this repeated story of sumptuousness of dress, that this appearance, like her reported beauty, was simply an effect of a general impression of magnificence made by her genius, and mistakenly attributed to some external elegance; for I have been told by her most intimate friend, who knew every particular of her conduct at that time, that there was nothing of special expense or splendor in her toilette.

The effect of the winter’s work was happiest. Margaret was made intimately known to many excellent persons.[A] In this company of matrons and maids, many tender spirits had been set in ferment. A new day had dawned for them; new thoughts had opened; the secret of life was shown, or, at least, that life had a secret. They could not forget what they had heard, and what they had been surprised into saying. A true refinement had begun to work in many who had been slaves to trifles. They went home thoughtful and happy, since the steady elevation of Margaret’s aim had infused a certain unexpected greatness of tone into the conversation. It was, I believe, only an expression of the feeling of the class, the remark made, perhaps at the next year’s course, by a lady of eminent powers, previously by no means partial to Margaret, and who expressed her frank admiration on leaving the house:— “I never heard, read of, or imagined a conversation at all equal to this we have now heard.”

The strongest wishes were expressed, on all sides, that the conversations should be renewed at the beginning of the following winter. Margaret willingly consented; but, as I have already intimated, in the summer and autumn of 1840, she had retreated to some interior shrine, and believed that she came into life and society with some advantage from this devotion.

Of this feeling the new discussion bore evident traces. Most of the last year’s class returned, and new members gave in their names. The first meeting was holden on the twenty-second of November, 1840. By all accounts it was the best of all her days. I have again the notes, taken at the time, of the excellent lady at whose house it was held, to furnish the following sketch of the first and the following meetings. I preface these notes by an extract from a letter of Margaret.

TO W.H.C.

‘Sunday, Nov. 8th, 1840. — On Wednesday I opened with my class. It was a noble meeting. I told them the great changes in my mind, and that I could not be sure they would be satisfied with me now, as they were when I was in deliberate possession of myself. I tried to convey the truth, and though I did not arrive at any full expression of it, they all, with glistening eyes, seemed melted into one love. Our relation is now perfectly true, and I do not think they will ever interrupt me. —— sat beside me, all glowing; and the moment I had finished, she began to speak. She told me afterwards, she was all kindled, and none there could be strangers to her more. I was really delighted by the enthusiasm of Mrs. —— . I did not expect it. All her best self seemed called up, and she feels that these meetings will be her highest pleasure. —— , too, was most beautiful. I went home with Mrs. F., and had a long attack of nervous headache. She attended anxiously on me, and asked if it would be so all winter. I said, if it were I did not care; and truly I feel just now such a separation from pain and illness, — such a consciousness of true life, while suffering most, — that pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.’

[Footnote A: A friend has furnished me with the names of so many of the ladies as she recollects to have met, at one or another time, at these classes. Some of them were perhaps only occasional members. The list recalls how much talent, beauty, and worth were at that time constellated here: —

Mrs. George Bancroft, Mrs. Barlow, Miss Burley, Mrs. L.M. Child, Miss
Mary Channing, Miss Sarah Clarke, Mrs. E.P. Clark, Miss Dorr, Mrs.
Edwards, Mrs. R.W. Emerson, Mrs. Farrar, Miss S.J. Gardiner, Mrs. R.W.
Hooper, Mrs. S. Hooper, Miss Haliburton, Miss Howes, Miss E. Hoar,
Miss Marianne Jackson, Mrs. T. Lee, Miss Littlehale, Mrs. E.G. Loring,
Mrs. Mack, Mrs. Horace Mann, Mrs. Newcomb, Mrs. Theodore Parker, Miss
E.P. Peabody, Miss S. Peabody, Mrs. S. Putnam, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs.
Josiah Quincy, Miss B. Randall, Mrs. Samuel Ripley, Mrs. George
Ripley, Mrs. George Russell, Miss Ida Russell, Mrs. Frank Shaw, Miss
Anna B. Shaw, Miss Caroline Sturgis, Miss Tuckerman, Miss Maria White,
Mrs. S.G. Ward, Miss Mary Ward, Mrs. W. Whiting.]

CONVERSATIONS ON THE FINE ARTS.

“Miss Fuller’s fifth conversation was pretty much a monologue of her own. The company collected proved much larger than any of us had anticipated: a chosen company, — several persons from homes out of town, at considerable inconvenience; and, in one or two instances, fresh from extreme experiences of joy and grief, — which Margaret felt a very grateful tribute to her. She knew no one came for experiment, but all in earnest love and trust, and was moved by it quite to the heart, which threw an indescribable charm of softness over her brilliancy. It is sometimes said, that women never are so lovely and enchanting in the company of their own sex, merely, but it requires the other to draw them out. Certain it is that Margaret never appears, when I see her, either so brilliant and deep in thought, or so desirous to please, or so modest, or so heart-touching, as in this very party. Well, she began to say how gratifying it was to her to see so many come, because all knew why they came, — that it was to learn from each other and ourselves the highest ends of life, where there could be no excitements and gratifications of personal ambition, &c. She spoke of herself, and said she felt she had undergone changes in her own mind since the last winter, as doubtless we all felt we had done; that she was conscious of looking at all things less objectively, — more from the law with which she identified herself. This, she stated, was the natural progress of our individual being, when we did not hinder its development, to advance from objects to law, from the circumference of being, where we found ourselves at our birth, to the centre.

“This advance was enacted poesy. We could not, in our individual lives, amid the disturbing influences of other wills, which had as much right to their own action as we to ours, enact poetry entirely; the discordant, the inferior, the prose, would intrude, but we should always keep in mind that poetry of life was not something aside, — a path that might or might not be trod, — it was the only path of the true soul; and prose you may call the deviation. We might not always be poetic in life, but we might and should be poetic in our thought and intention. The fine arts were one compensation for the necessary prose of life. The man who could not write his thought of beauty in his life, — the materials of whose life would not work up into poetry, — wrote it in stone, drew it on canvas, breathed it in music, or built it in lofty rhyme. In this statement, however, she guarded her meaning, and said that to seek beauty was to miss it often. We should only seek to live as harmoniously with the great laws as our social and other duties permitted, and solace ourselves with poetry and the fine arts.”

I find a further record by the same friendly scribe, which seems a second and enlarged account of the introductory conversation, or else a sketch of the course of thought which ran through several meetings, and which very naturally repeated occasionally the same thoughts. I give it as I find it: —

“She then recurred to the last year’s conversations; and, first, the Grecian mythologies, which she looked at as symbolical of a deeper intellectual and æsthetic life than we were wont to esteem it, when looking at it from a narrow religious point of view. We had merely skimmed along the deeper study. She spoke of the conversations on the different part played by Inspiration and Will in the works of man, and stated the different views of inspiration, — how some had felt it was merely perception; others apprehended it as influx upon the soul from the soul-side of its being. Then she spoke of the conversation upon poesy as the ground of all the fine arts, and also of the true art of life; it being not merely truth, not merely good, but the beauty which integrates both. On this poesy, she dwelt long, aiming to show how life, — perfect life, — could be the only perfect manifestation of it. Then she spoke of the individual as surrounded, however, by prose, — so we may here call the manifestation of the temporary, in opposition to the eternal, always trenching on it, and circumscribing and darkening. She spoke of the acceptance of this limitation, but it should be called by the right name, and always measured; and we should inwardly cling to the truth that poesy was the natural life of the soul; and never yield inwardly to the common notion that poesy was a luxury, out of the common track; but maintain in word and life that prose carried the soul out of its track; and then, perhaps, it would not injure us to walk in these by-paths, when forced thither. She admitted that prose was the necessary human condition, and quickened our life indirectly by necessitating a conscious demand on the source of life. In reply to a remark I made, she very strongly stated the difference between a poetic and a dilettante life, and sympathized with the sensible people who were tired of hearing all the young ladies of Boston sighing like furnace after being beautiful. Beauty was something very different from prettiness, and a microscopic vision missed the grand whole. The fine arts were our compensation for not being able to live out our poesy, amid the conflicting and disturbing forces of this moral world in which we are. In sculpture, the heights to which our being comes are represented; and its nature is such as to allow us to leave out all that vulgarizes, — all that bridges over to the actual from the ideal. She dwelt long upon sculpture, which seems her favorite art. That was grand, when a man first thought to engrave his idea of man upon a stone, the most unyielding and material of materials, — the backbone of this phenomenal earth, — and, when he did not succeed, that he persevered; and so, at last, by repeated efforts, the Apollo came to be.

“But, no; music she thought the greatest of arts, — expressing what was most interior, — what was too fine to be put into any material grosser than air; conveying from soul to soul the most secret motions of feeling and thought. This was the only fine art which might be thought to be nourishing now. The others had had their day. This was advancing upon a higher intellectual ground.

“Of painting she spoke, but not so well. She seemed to think painting worked more by illusion than sculpture. It involved more prose, from its representing more objects. She said nothing adequate about color.

“She dwelt upon the histrionic art as the most complete, its organ being the most flexible and powerful.

“She then spoke of life, as the art, of which these all were beautiful symbols; and said, in recurring to her opinions expressed last winter, of Dante and Wordsworth, that she had taken another view, deeper, and more in accordance with some others which were then expressed. She acknowledged that Wordsworth had done more to make all men poetical, than perhaps any other; that he was the poet of reflection; that where he failed to poetize his subject, his simple faith intimated to the reader a poetry that he did not find in the book. She admitted that Dante’s Narrative was instinct with the poetry concentrated often in single words. She uttered her old heresies about Milton, however, unmodified.

“I do not remember the transition to modern poetry and Milnes; but she read (very badly indeed) the Legendary Tale.

“We then had three conversations upon Sculpture, one of which was taken up very much in historical accounts of the sculpture of the ancients, in which color was added to form, and which seemed to prove that they were not, after all, sufficiently intellectual to be operated on by form exclusively. The question, of course, arose whether there was a modern sculpture, and why not. This led us to speak of the Greek sculpture as growing naturally out of their life and religion, and how alien it was to our life and to our religion. The Swiss lion, carved by Thorwaldsen out of the side of a mountain rock, was described as a natural growth. Those who had seen it described it; and Mrs. —— spoke of it. She was also led to the story of her acquaintance with Thorwaldsen, and drew tears from many eyes with her natural eloquence.

“Mrs. C. asked, if sculpture could express as well as painting the idea of immortality.

“Margaret thought the Greek art expressed immortality as much as Christian art, but did not throw it into the future, by preëminence. They expressed it in the present, by casting out of the mortal body every expression of infirmity and decay. The idealization of the human form makes a God. The fact that man can conceive and express this perfection of being, is as good a witness to immortality, as the look of aspiration in the countenance of a Magdalen.

“It is quite beyond the power of my memory to recall all the bright utterances of Margaret, in these conversations on Sculpture. It was a favorite subject with her. Then came two or three conversations on Painting, in which it seemed to be conceded that color expressed passion, whilst sculpture more severely expressed thought: yet painting did not exclude the expression of thought, or sculpture that of feeling, — witness Niobe, — but it must be an universal feeling, like the maternal sentiment.”

* * * * *

“March 22, 1841. — The question of the day was, What is life?

“Let us define, each in turn, our idea of living. Margaret did not believe we had, any of us, a distinct idea of life.

“A.S. thought so great a question ought to be given for a written definition. ‘No,’ said Margaret, ‘that is of no use. When we go away to think of anything, we never do think. We all talk of life. We all have some thought now. Let us tell it. C —— , what is life?’

“C —— replied,— ‘It is to laugh, or cry, according to our organization.’

“‘Good,’ said Margaret, ‘but not grave enough. Come, what is life? I know what I think; I want you to find out what you think.’

“Miss P. replied,— ‘Life is division from one’s principle of life in order to a conscious reörganization. We are cut up by time and circumstance, in order to feel our reproduction of the eternal law.’

“Mrs. E.,— ‘We live by the will of God, and the object of life is to submit,’ and went on into Calvinism.

“Then came up all the antagonisms of Fate and Freedom.

“Mrs. H. said,— ‘God created us in order to have a perfect sympathy from us as free beings.’

“Mrs. A.B. said she thought the object of life was to attain absolute freedom. At this Margaret immediately and visibly kindled.

“C.S. said,— ‘God creates from the fulness of life, and cannot but create; he created us to overflow, without being exhausted, because what he created, necessitated new creation. It is not to make us happy, but creation is his happiness and ours.’

“Margaret was then pressed to say what she considered life to be.

“Her answer was so full, clear, and concise, at once, that it cannot but be marred by being drawn through the scattering medium of my memory. But here are some fragments of her satisfying statement.

“She began with God as Spirit, Life, so full as to create and love eternally, yet capable of pause. Love and creativeness are dynamic forces, out of which we, individually, as creatures, go forth bearing his image, that is, having within our being the same dynamic forces, by which we also add constantly to the total sum of existence, and shaking off ignorance, and its effects, and by becoming more ourselves, i.e., more divine; — destroying sin in its principle, we attain to absolute freedom, we return to God, conscious like himself, and, as his friends, giving, as well as receiving, felicity forevermore. In short, we become gods, and able to give the life which we now feel ourselves able only to receive.

“On Saturday morning, Mrs. L.E. and Mrs. E.H. were present, and begged Margaret to repeat the statement concerning life, with which she closed the last conversation. Margaret said she had forgotten every word she said. She must have been inspired by a good genius, to have so satisfied everybody. — but the good genius had left her. She would try, however, to say what she thought, and trusted it would resemble what she had said already. She then went into the matter, and, true enough, she did not use a single word she used before.”

The fame of these conversations spread wide through all families and social circles of the ladies attending, and the golden report they gave, led to a proposal, that Margaret should undertake an evening class, of four or five lessons, to which gentlemen should also be admitted. This was put in effect, in the course of the winter, and I had myself the pleasure of assisting at one — the second — of these soirées. The subject was Mythology, and several gentlemen took part in it. Margaret spoke well, — she could not otherwise, — but I remember that she seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men, whom she had not had the advantage of training, and who fancied, no doubt, that, on such a question, they, too, must assert and dogmatize.

But, how well or ill they fared, may still be known; since the same true hand which reported for the Ladies’ Class, drew up, at the time, the following note of the Evenings of Mythology. My distance from town, and engagements, prevented me from attending again. I was told that on the preceding and following evenings the success was more decisive.

“Margaret’s plan, in these conversations, was a very noble one, and, had it been seconded, as she expected, they would have been splendid. She thought, that, by admitting gentlemen, who had access, by their classical education, to the whole historical part of the mythology, her own comparative deficiency, as she felt it, in this part of learning, would be made up; and that taking her stand on the works of art, which were the final development in Greece of these multifarious fables, the whole subject might be swept from zenith to nadir. But all that depended on others entirely failed. Mr. W. contributed some isolated facts, — told the etymology of names, and cited a few fables not so commonly known as most; but, even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess, on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party, while no one brought an idea, except herself.

“Her general idea was, that, upon the Earth-worship and Sabæanism of earlier ages, the Grecian genius acted to humanize and idealize, but, still, with some regard to the original principle. What was a seed, or a root, merely, in the Egyptian mind, became a flower in Greece, — Isis, and Osiris, for instance, are reproduced in Ceres and Proserpine, with some loss of generality, but with great gain of beauty; Hermes, in Mercury, with only more grace of form, though with great loss of grandeur; but the loss of grandeur was also an advance in philosophy, in this instance, the brain in the hand being the natural consequence of the application of Idea to practice, — the Hermes of the Egyptians.

“I do not feel that the class, by their apprehension of Margaret, do any justice to the scope and depth of her views. They come, — myself among the number, — I confess, — to be entertained; but she has a higher purpose. She, amid all her infirmities, studies and thinks with the seriousness of one upon oath, and there has not been a single conversation this winter, in either class, that had not in it the spirit which giveth life. Just in proportion to the importance of the subject, does she tax her mind, and say what is most important; while, of necessity, nothing is reported from the conversations but her brilliant sallies, her occasional paradoxes of form, and, sometimes, her impatient reacting upon dulness and frivolity. In particular points, I know, some excel her; in particular departments I sympathize more with some other persons; but, take her as a whole, she has the most to bestow on others by conversation of any person I have ever known. I cannot conceive of any species of vanity living in her presence. She distances all who talk with her.

“Mr. E. only served to display her powers. With his sturdy reiteration of his uncompromising idealism, his absolute denial of the fact of human nature, he gave her opportunity and excitement to unfold and illustrate her realism and acceptance of conditions. What is so noble is, that her realism is transparent with idea, — her human nature is the germ of a divine life. She proceeds in her search after the unity of things, the divine harmony, not by exclusion, as Mr. E. does, but by comprehension, — and so, no poorest, saddest spirit, but she will lead to hope and faith. I have thought, sometimes, that her acceptance of evil was too great, — that her theory of the good to be educed proved too much. But in a conversation I had with her yesterday, I understood her better than I had done. ‘It might never be sin to us, at the moment,’ she said, ‘it must be an excess, on which conscience puts the restraint.’”

The classes thus formed were renewed in November of each year, until Margaret’s removal to New York, in 1844. But the notes of my principal reporter fail me at this point. Afterwards, I have only a few sketches from a younger hand. In November, 1841, the class numbered from twenty-five to thirty members: the general subject is stated as “Ethics.” And the influences on Woman seem to have been discussed under the topics of the Family, the School, the Church, Society, and Literature. In November, 1842, Margaret writes that the meetings have been unusually spirited, and congratulates herself on the part taken in them by Miss Burley, as ‘a presence so positive as to be of great value to me.’ The general subject I do not find. But particular topics were such as these:— “Is the ideal first or last; divination or experience?” “Persons who never awake to life in this world.” “Mistakes;” “Faith;” “Creeds;” “Woman;” “Dæmonology;” “Influence;” “Catholicism” (Roman); “The Ideal.”

In the winter of 1843-4, the general subject was “Education.” Culture, Ignorance, Vanity, Prudence, Patience, and Health, appear to have been the titles of conversations, in which wide digressions, and much autobiographic illustration, with episodes on War, Bonaparte, Goethe, and Spinoza, were mingled. But the brief narrative may wind up with a note from Margaret on the last day.

‘28th April, 1844. — It was the last day with my class. How noble has been my experience of such relations now for six years, and with so many and so various minds! Life is worth living, is it not?

‘We had a most animated meeting. On bidding me good-bye, they all, and always, show so much good-will and love, that I feel I must really have become a friend to them. I was then loaded with beautiful gifts, accompanied with those little delicate poetic traits, of which I should delight to tell you, if we were near. Last came a beautiful bouquet, passion-flower, heliotrope, and soberer blooms. Then I went to take my repose on C — — ‘s sofa, and we had a most serene afternoon together.’

VOLUME II.

* * * * *

 Only a learned and a manly soul
    I purposed her, that should with even powers
  The rock, the spindle, and the shears control
    Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours.

BEN JONSON

 Però che ogni diletto nostro e doglia
  Sta in sì e nò saper, voler, potere;
  Adunque quel sol può, che col dovere
  Ne trae la ragion fuor di sua soglia.

 Adunque tu, lettor di queste note,
  S’a tè vuoi esser buono, e agli altri caro,
  Vogli sempre poter quel che tu debbi.

LEONARDO DA VINCI.

VI. JAMAICA PLAIN

BY W.H. CHANNING.

* * * * *

                        ”Quando
  Lo raggio della grazia, onde s’accende
  Verace amore, e che poi cresce amando,
  Multiplicato in tè tanto risplende,
  Che ti conduce su per quella scala,
  U’ senza risalir nessun discende,
  Qual ti negasse ‘l vin della sua fiàla
  Por la tua sete, in libertà non fôra,
  Se non com’ acqua oh’ al mar non si cala.”

DANTE.

 ”Weite Welt und breites Leben,
  Langer Jahre redlich Streben,
  Stets geforscht und stets gegründet,
  Nie geschlossen, oft geründet,
  Aeltestes bewahrt mit Treue,
  Freundlich aufgefasstes Neue,
  Heitern Sinn und reine Zwecke:
  Nun! man kommt wohl eine Strecke.”

GOETHE.

                 ”My purpose holds
  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
  Of all the western stars, until I die.
  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.”

TENNYSON.

“Remember how august the heart is. It contains the temple not only of Love but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of one to the extremity of the other.”

LANDOR

 ”If all the gentlest-hearted friends I knew
   Concentred in one heart their gentleness,
   That still grew gentler till its pulse was less
   For life than pity, — I should yet be slow
   To bring my own heart nakedly below
   The palm of such a friend, that he should press
   My false, ideal joy and fickle woe
   Out to full light and knowledge.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT.

VI.

JAMAICA PLAIN

* * * * *

I.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

It was while Margaret was residing at Jamaica Plain, in the summer of 1839, that we first really met as friends, though for several years previous we had been upon terms of kindest mutual regard. And, as the best way of showing how her wonderful character opened upon me, the growth of our acquaintance shall be briefly traced.

The earliest recollection of Margaret is as a schoolmate of my sisters, in Boston. At that period she was considered a prodigy of talent and accomplishment; but a sad feeling prevailed, that she had been overtasked by her father, who wished to train her like a boy, and that she was paying the penalty for undue application, in nearsightedness, awkward manners, extravagant tendencies of thought, and a pedantic style of talk, that made her a butt for the ridicule of frivolous companions. Some seasons later, I call to mind seeing, at the “Commencements” and “Exhibitions” of Harvard University, a girl, plain in appearance, but of dashing air, who was invariably the centre of a listening group, and kept their merry interest alive by sparkles of wit and incessant small-talk. The bystanders called her familiarly, “Margaret,” “Margaret Fuller;” for, though young, she was already noted for conversational gifts, and had the rare skill of attracting to her society, not spirited collegians only, but men mature in culture and of established reputation. It was impossible not to admire her fluency and fun; yet, though curiosity was piqued as to this entertaining personage, I never sought an introduction, but, on the contrary, rather shunned encounter with one so armed from head to foot in saucy sprightliness.

About 1830, however, we often met in the social circles of Cambridge, and I began to observe her more nearly. At first, her vivacity, decisive tone, downrightness, and contempt of conventional standards, continued to repel. She appeared too intense in expression, action, emphasis, to be pleasing, and wanting in that retenue which we associate with delicate dignity. Occasionally, also, words flashed from her of such scathing satire, that prudence counselled the keeping at safe distance from a body so surcharged with electricity. Then, again, there was an imperial — shall it be said imperious? — air, exacting deference to her judgments and loyalty to her behests, that prompted pride to retaliatory measures. She paid slight heed, moreover, to the trim palings of etiquette, but swept through the garden-beds and into the doorway of one’s confidence so cavalierly, that a reserved person felt inclined to lock himself up in his sanctum. Finally, to the coolly-scanning eye, her friendships wore a look of such romantic exaggeration, that she seemed to walk enveloped in a shining fog of sentimentalism. In brief, it must candidly be confessed, that I then suspected her of affecting the part of a Yankee Corinna.

But soon I was charmed, unaware, with the sagacity of her sallies, the profound thoughts carelessly dropped by her on transient topics, the breadth and richness of culture manifested in her allusions or quotations, her easy comprehension of new views, her just discrimination, and, above all, her truthfulness. “Truth at all cost,” was plainly her ruling maxim. This it was that made her criticism so trenchant, her contempt of pretence so quick and stern, her speech so naked in frankness, her gaze so searching, her whole attitude so alert. Her estimates of men, books, manners, events, art, duty, destiny, were moulded after a grand ideal; and she was a severe judge from the very loftiness of her standard. Her stately deportment, border though it might on arrogance, but expressed high-heartedness. Her independence, even if haughty and rash, was the natural action of a self-centred will, that waited only fit occasion to prove itself heroic. Her earnestness to read the hidden history of others was the gauge of her own emotion. The enthusiasm that made her speech so affluent, when measured by the average scale, was the unconscious overflow of a poetic temperament. And the ardor of her friends’ affection proved the faithfulness of her love. Thus gradually the mist melted away, till I caught a glimpse of her real self. We were one evening talking of American literature, — she contrasting its boyish crudity, half boastful, half timid, with the tempered, manly equipoise of thorough-bred European writers, and I asserting that in its mingled practicality and aspiration might be read bright auguries; when, betrayed by sympathy, she laid bare her secret hope of what Woman might be and do, as an author, in our Republic. The sketch was an outline only, and dashed off with a few swift strokes, but therein appeared her own portrait, and we were strangers no more.

It was through the medium of others, however, that at this time I best learned to appreciate Margaret’s nobleness of nature and principle. My most intimate friend in the Theological School, James Freeman Clarke, was her constant companion in exploring the rich gardens of German literature; and from his descriptions I formed a vivid image of her industry, comprehensiveness, buoyancy, patience, and came to honor her intelligent interest in high problems of science, her aspirations after spiritual greatness, her fine æsthetic taste, her religiousness. By power to quicken other minds, she showed how living was her own. Yet more near were we brought by common attraction toward a youthful visitor in our circle, the untouched freshness of whose beauty was but the transparent garb of a serene, confiding, and harmonious soul, and whose polished grace, at once modest and naïve, sportive and sweet, fulfilled the charm of innate goodness of heart. Susceptible in temperament, anticipating with ardent fancy the lot of a lovely and refined woman, and morbidly exaggerating her own slight personal defects, Margaret seemed to long, as it were, to transfuse with her force this nymph-like form, and to fill her to glowing with her own lyric fire. No drop of envy tainted the sisterly love, with which she sought by genial sympathy thus to live in another’s experience, to be her guardian-angel, to shield her from contact with the unworthy, to rouse each generous impulse, to invigorate thought by truth incarnate in beauty, and with unfelt ministry to weave bright threads in her web of fate. Thus more and more Margaret became an object of respectful interest, in whose honor, magnanimity and strength I learned implicitly to trust.

Separation, however, hindered our growing acquaintance, as we both left Cambridge, and, with the exception of a few chance meetings in Boston and a ramble or two in the glens and on the beaches of Rhode Island, held no further intercourse till the summer of 1839, when, as has been already said, the friendship, long before rooted, grew up and leafed and bloomed.

II.

A CLUE.

* * * * *

I have no hope of conveying to readers my sense of the beauty of our relation, as it lies in the past with brightness falling on it from Margaret’s risen spirit. It would be like printing a chapter of autobiography, to describe what is so grateful in memory, its influence upon one’s self. And much of her inner life, as confidentially disclosed, could not be represented without betraying a sacred trust. All that can be done is to open the outer courts, and give a clue for loving hearts to follow. To such these few sentences may serve as a guide.

‘When I feel, as I do this morning, the poem of existence, I am repaid for all trial. The bitterness of wounded affection, the disgust at unworthy care, the aching sense of how far deeds are transcended by our lowest aspirations, pass away as I lean on the bosom of Nature, and inhale new life from her breath. Could but love, like knowledge, be its own reward!’

‘Oftentimes I have found in those of my own sex more gentleness, grace, and purity, than in myself; but seldom the heroism which I feel within my own breast. I blame not those who think the heart cannot bleed because it is so strong; but little they dream of what lies concealed beneath the determined courage. Yet mine has been the Spartan sternness, smiling while it hides the wound. I long rather for the Christian spirit, which even on the cross prays, “Father, forgive them,” and rises above fortitude to heavenly satisfaction.’

* * * * *

‘Remember that only through aspirations, which sometimes make me what is called unreasonable, have I been enabled to vanquish unpropitious circumstances, and save my soul alive.’

* * * * *

‘All the good I have ever done has been by calling on every nature for its highest. I will admit that sometimes I have been wanting in gentleness, but never in tenderness, nor in noble faith.’

* * * * *

‘The heart which hopes and dares is also accessible to terror, and this falls upon it like a thunderbolt. It can never defend itself at the moment, it is so surprised. There is no defence but to strive for an equable temper of courageous submission, of obedient energy, that shall make assault less easy to the foe.

‘This is the dart within the heart, as well as I can tell it: — At moments, the music of the universe, which daily I am upheld by hearing, seems to stop. I fall like a bird when the sun is eclipsed, not looking for such darkness. The sense of my individual law — that lamp of life — flickers. I am repelled in what is most natural to me. I feel as, when a suffering child, I would go and lie with my face to the ground, to sob away my little life.’

* * * * *

‘In early years, when, though so frank as to the thoughts of the mind, I put no heart confidence in any human being, my refuge was in my journal. I have burned those records of my youth, with its bitter tears, and struggles, and aspirations. Those aspirations were high, and have gained only broader foundations and wider reach. But the leaves had done their work. For years to write there, instead of speaking, had enabled me to soothe myself; and the Spirit was often my friend, when I sought no other. Once again I am willing to take up the cross of loneliness. Resolves are idle, but the anguish of my soul has been, deep. It will not be easy to profane life by rhetoric.’

* * * * *

‘I woke thinking of the monks of La Trappe; — how could they bear their silence? When the game of life was lost for me, in youthful anguish I knew well the desire for that vow; but if I had taken it, my heart would have burned out my physical existence long ago.’

* * * * *

‘Save me from plunging into the depths to learn the worst, or from being led astray by the winged joys of childish feeling. I pray for truth in proportion as there is strength to receive.’

* * * * *

‘My law is incapable of a charter. I pass all bounds, and cannot do otherwise. Those whom it seems to me I am to meet again in the Ages, I meet, soul to soul, now. I have no knowledge of any circumstances except the degree of affinity.’

* * * * *

‘I feel that my impatient nature needs the dark days. I would learn the art of limitation, without compromise, and act out my faith with a delicate fidelity. When loneliness becomes too oppressive, I feel Him drawing me nearer, to be soothed by the smile of an All-Intelligent Love. He will not permit the freedom essential to growth to be checked. If I can give myself up to Him, I shall not be too proud, too impetuous, neither too timid, and fearful of a wound or cloud.’

III.

TRANSCENDENTALISM.

* * * * *

The summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of the Transcendental movement in New England. The rise of this enthusiasm was as mysterious as that of any form of revival; and only they who were of the faith could comprehend how bright was this morning-time of a new hope. Transcendentalism was an assertion of the inalienable integrity of man, of the immanence of Divinity in instinct. In part, it was a reaction against Puritan Orthodoxy; in part, an effect of renewed study of the ancients, of Oriental Pantheists, of Plato and the Alexandrians, of Plutarch’s Morals, Seneca and Epictetus; in part, the natural product of the culture of the place and time. On the somewhat stunted stock of Unitarianism, — whose characteristic dogma was trust in individual reason as correlative to Supreme Wisdom, — had been grafted German Idealism, as taught by masters of most various schools, — by Kant and Jacobi, Fichte and Novalis, Schelling and Hegel, Schleiermacher and De Wette, by Madame de Stael, Cousin, Coleridge, and Carlyle; and the result was a vague yet exalting conception of the godlike nature of the human spirit. Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted. Amidst materialists, zealots, and sceptics, the Transcendentalist believed in perpetual inspiration, the miraculous power of will, and a birthright to universal good. He sought to hold communion face to face with the unnameable Spirit of his spirit, and gave himself up to the embrace of nature’s beautiful joy, as a babe seeks the breast of a mother. To him the curse seemed past; and love was without fear. “All mine is thine” sounded forth to him in ceaseless benediction, from flowers and stars, through the poetry, art, heroism of all ages, in the aspirations of his own genius, and the budding promise of the time. His work was to be faithful, as all saints, sages, and lovers of man had been, to Truth, as the very Word of God. His maxims were,— “Trust, dare and be; infinite good is ready for your asking; seek and find. All that your fellows can claim or need is that you should become, in fact, your highest self; fulfil, then, your ideal.” Hence, among the strong, withdrawal to private study and contemplation, that they might be “alone with the Alone;” solemn yet glad devotedness to the Divine leadings in the inmost will; calm concentration of thought to wait for and receive wisdom; dignified independence, stern yet sweet, of fashion and public opinion; honest originality of speech and conduct, exempt alike from apology or dictation, from servility or scorn. Hence, too, among the weak, whimsies, affectation, rude disregard of proprieties, slothful neglect of common duties, surrender to the claims of natural appetite, self-indulgence, self-absorption, and self-idolatry.

By their very posture of mind, as seekers of the new, the Transcendentalists were critics and “come-outers” from the old. Neither the church, the state, the college, society, nor even reform associations, had a hold upon their hearts. The past might be well enough for those who, without make-belief, could yet put faith in common dogmas and usages; but for them the matin-bells of a new day were chiming, and the herald-trump of freedom was heard upon the mountains. Hence, leaving ecclesiastical organizations, political parties, and familiar circles, which to them were brown with drought, they sought in covert nooks of friendship for running waters, and fruit from the tree of life. The journal, the letter, became of greater worth than the printed page; for they felt that systematic results were not yet to be looked for, and that in sallies of conjecture, glimpses and flights of ecstasy, the “Newness” lifted her veil to her votaries. Thus, by mere attraction of affinity, grew together the brotherhood of the “Like-minded,” as they were pleasantly nicknamed by outsiders, and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same opinion. The only password of membership to this association, which had no compact, records, or officers, was a hopeful and liberal spirit; and its chance conventions were determined merely by the desire of the caller for a “talk,” or by the arrival of some guest from a distance with a budget of presumptive novelties. Its “symposium” was a pic-nic, whereto each brought of his gains, as he felt prompted, a bunch of wild grapes from the woods, or bread-corn from his threshing-floor. The tone of the assemblies was cordial welcome for every one’s peculiarity; and scholars, farmers, mechanics, merchants, married women, and maidens, met there on a level of courteous respect. The only guest not tolerated was intolerance; though strict justice might add, that these “Illuminati” were as unconscious of their special cant as smokers are of the perfume of their weed, and that a professed declaration of universal independence turned out in practice to be rather oligarchic.

Of the class of persons most frequently found at these meetings
Margaret has left the following sketch: —

‘“I am not mad, most noble Festus,” was Paul’s rejoinder, as he turned upon his vulgar censor with the grace of a courtier, the dignity of a prophet, and the mildness of a saint. But many there are, who, adhering to the faith of the soul with that unusual earnestness which the world calls “mad,” can answer their critics only by the eloquence of their characters and lives. Now, the other day, while visiting a person whose highest merit, so far as I know, is to save his pennies, I was astounded by hearing him allude to some of most approved worth among us, thus: “You know we consider those men insane.”

‘What this meant, I could not at first well guess, so completely was my scale of character turned topsy-turvy. But revolving the subject afterward, I perceived that WE was the multiple of Festus, and THOSE MEN of Paul. All the circumstances seemed the same as in that Syrian hall; for the persons in question were they who cared more for doing good than for fortune and success, — more for the one risen from the dead than for fleshly life, — more for the Being in whom we live and move than for King Agrippa.

‘Among this band of candidates for the mad-house, I found the young poet who valued insight of nature’s beauty, and the power of chanting to his fellow-men a heavenly music, above the prospect of fortune, political power, or a standing in fashionable society. At the division of the goods of this earth, he was wandering like Schiller’s poet. But the difference between American and German regulations would seem to be, that in Germany the poet, when not “with Jove,” is left at peace on earth; while here he is, by a self-constituted police, declared “mad.”

‘Another of this band was the young girl who, early taking a solemn view of the duties of life, found it difficult to serve an apprenticeship to its follies. She could not turn her sweetness into “manner,” nor cultivate love of approbation at the expense of virginity of heart. In so called society she found no outlet for her truest, fairest self, and so preferred to live with external nature, a few friends, her pencil, instrument, and books. She, they say, is “mad.”

‘And he, the enthusiast for reform, who gives away fortune, standing in the world, peace, and only not life, because bigotry is now afraid to exact the pound of flesh as well as the ducats, — he, whose heart beats high with hopes for the welfare of his race, is “mad.”

‘And he, the philosopher, who does not tie down his speculation to the banner of the day, but lets the wings of his thought upbear him where they will, as if they were stronger and surer than the balloon let off for the amusement of the populace, — he must be “mad.” Off with him to the moon! that paradise of noble fools, who had visions of possibilities too grand and lovely for this sober earth.

‘And ye, friends, and lovers, who see, through all the films of human nature, in those you love, a divine energy, worthy of creatures who have their being in very God, ye, too, are “mad” to think they can walk in the dust, and yet shake it from their feet when they come upon the green. These are no winged Mercuries, no silver-sandalled Madonnas. Listen to “the world’s” truth and soberness, and we will show you that your heart would be as well placed in a hospital, as in these air-born palaces.

‘And thou, priest, seek thy God among the people, and not in the shrine. The light need not penetrate thine own soul. Thou canst catch the true inspiration from the eyes of thy auditors. Not the Soul of the World, not the ever-flowing voice of nature, but the articulate accents of practical utility, should find thy ear ever ready. Keep always among men, and consider what they like; for in the silence of thine own breast will be heard the voices that make men “mad.” Why shouldst thou judge of the consciousness of others by thine own? May not thine own soul have been made morbid, by retiring too much within? If Jesus of Nazareth had not fasted and prayed so much alone, the devil could never have tempted him; if he had observed the public mind more patiently and carefully, he would have waited till the time was ripe, and the minds of men prepared for what he had to say. He would thus have escaped the ignominious death, which so prematurely cut short his “usefulness.” Jewry would thus, gently, soberly, and without disturbance, have been led to a better course.

‘“Children of this generation!” — ye Festuses and Agrippas! — ye are wiser, we grant, than “the children of light;” yet we advise you to commend to a higher tribunal those whom much learning, or much love, has made “mad.” For if they stay here, almost will they persuade even you!’

Amidst these meetings of the Transcendentalists it was, that, after years of separation, I again found Margaret. Of this body she was member by grace of nature. Her romantic freshness of heart, her craving for the truth, her self-trust, had prepared her from childhood to be a pioneer in prairie-land; and her discipline in German schools had given definite form and tendency to her idealism. Her critical yet aspiring intellect filled her with longing for germs of positive affirmation in place of the chaff of thrice-sifted negation; while her æsthetic instinct responded in accord to the praise of Beauty as the beloved heir of Good and Truth, whose right it is to reign. On the other hand, strong common-sense saved her from becoming visionary, while she was too well-read as a scholar to be caught by conceits, and had been too sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful effeminacy. It was a pleasing surprise to see how this friend of earlier days was acknowledged as a peer of the realm, in this new world of thought. Men, — her superiors in years, fame and social position, — treated her more with the frankness due from equal to equal, than the half-condescending deference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves to women. They did not talk down to her standard, nor translate their dialect into popular phrase, but trusted to her power of interpretation. It was evident that they prized her verdict, respected her criticism, feared her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire. Very observable was it, also, how, in side-talks with her, they became confidential, seemed to glow and brighten into their best mood, and poured out in full measure what they but scantily hinted in the circle at large.

IV.

GENIUS.

* * * * *

It was quite a study to watch the phases through which Margaret passed, in one of these assemblies. There was something in the air and step with which she chose her place in the company, betokening an instinctive sense, that, in intellect, she was of blood royal and needed to ask no favors. And then she slowly gathered her attention to take in the significance of the scene. Near-sighted and habitually using an eye-glass, she rapidly scanned the forms and faces, pausing intently where the expression of particular heads or groups suggested thought, and ending her survey with some apt home-thrust to her next neighbors, as if to establish full rapport, and so to become a medium for the circulating life. Only when thus in magnetic relations with all present, by a clear impress of their state and place, did she seem prepared to rise to a higher stage of communion. Then she listened, with ear finely vibrating to every tone, with all capacities responsive in sympathy, with a swift and ductile power of appreciation, that made her feel to the quick the varying moods of different speakers, and yet the while with coolest self-possession. Now and then a slight smile, flickering over her countenance, as lightning plays on the surface of a cloud, marked the inward process whereby she was harmonizing in equilibrium opposing thoughts. And, as occasion offered, a felicitous quotation, pungent apothegm, or symbolic epithet, dropped unawares in undertone, showed how swiftly scattered rays were brought in her mind to a focus.

When her turn came, by a graceful transition she resumed the subject where preceding speakers had left it, and, briefly summing up their results, proceeded to unfold her own view. Her opening was deliberate, like the progress of some massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality. Articulateness, just emphasis and varied accent, brought out most delicate shades and brilliant points of meaning, while a rhythmical collocation of words gave a finished form to every thought. She was affluent in historic illustration and literary allusion, as well as in novel hints. She knew how to concentrate into racy phrases the essential truth gathered from wide research, and distilled with patient toil; and by skilful treatment she could make green again the wastes of common-place. Her statements, however rapid, showed breadth of comprehension, ready memory, impartial judgment, nice analysis of differences, power of penetrating through surfaces to realities, fixed regard to central laws and habitual communion with the Life of life. Critics, indeed, might have been tempted to sneer at a certain oracular grandiloquence, that bore away her soberness in moments of elation; though even the most captious must presently have smiled at the humor of her descriptive touches, her dexterous exposure of folly and pretension, the swift stroke of her bright wit, her shrewd discernment, promptitude, and presence of mind. The reverential, too, might have been pained at the sternness wherewith popular men, measures, and established customs, were tried and found guilty, at her tribunal; but even while blaming her aspirations as rash, revolutionary and impractical, no honest conservative could fail to recognize the sincerity of her aim. And every deep observer of character would have found the explanation of what seemed vehement or too high-strung, in the longing of a spirited woman to break every trammel that checked her growth or fettered her movement.

In conversations like these, one saw that the richness of Margaret’s genius resulted from a rare combination of opposite qualities. To her might have been well applied the words first used as describing George Sand: “Thou large-brained Woman, and large-hearted Man.” She blended in closest union and swift interplay feminine receptiveness with masculine energy. She was at once impressible and creative, impulsive and deliberate, pliant in sympathy yet firmly self-centred, confidingly responsive while commanding in originality. By the vivid intensity of her conceptions, she brought out in those around their own consciousness, and, by the glowing vigor of her intellect, roused into action their torpid powers. On the other hand, she reproduced a truth, whose germ had just been imbibed from others, moulded after her own image and quickened by her own life, with marvellous rapidity. And the presence of congenial minds so stimulated the prolific power of her imagination, that she was herself astonished at the fresh beauty of her new-born thoughts. ‘There is a mortifying sense,’ she writes,

‘of having played the Mirabeau after a talk with a circle of intelligent persons. They come with a store of acquired knowledge and reflection, on the subject in debate, about which I may know little, and have reflected less; yet, by mere apprehensiveness and prompt intuition, I may appear their superior. Spontaneously I appropriate all their material, and turn it to my own ends, as if it was my inheritance from a long train of ancestors. Rays of truth flash out at the moment, and they are startled by the light thrown over their familiar domain. Still they are gainers, for I give them new impulse, and they go on their way rejoicing in the bright glimpses they have caught. I should despise myself, if I purposely appeared thus brilliant, but I am inspired as by a power higher than my own.’

All friends will bear witness to the strict fidelity of this sketch. There were seasons when she seemed borne irresistibly on to the verge of prophecy, and fully embodied one’s notion of a sibyl.

Admirable as Margaret appeared in public, I was yet more affected by this peculiar mingling of impressibility and power to influence, when brought within her private sphere. I know not how otherwise to describe her subtle charm, than by saying that she was at once a clairvoyante and a magnetizer. She read another’s bosom-secret, and she imparted of her own force. She interpreted the cipher in the talisman of one’s destiny, that he had tried in vain to spell alone; by sympathy she brought out the invisible characters traced by experience on his heart; and in the mirror of her conscience he might see the image of his very self, as dwarfed in actual appearance, or developed after the divine ideal. Her sincerity was terrible. In her frank exposure no foible was spared, though by her very reproof she roused dormant courage and self-confidence. And so unerring seemed her insight, that her companion felt as if standing bare before a disembodied spirit, and communicated without reserve thoughts and emotions, which, even to himself, he had scarcely named.

This penetration it was that caused Margaret to be so dreaded, in general society, by superficial observers. They, who came nigh enough to test the quality of her spirit, could not but perceive how impersonal was her justice; but, contrasted with the dead flat of conventional tolerance, her candor certainly looked rugged and sharp. The frivolous were annoyed at her contempt of their childishness, the ostentatious piqued at her insensibility to their show, and the decent scared lest they should be stripped of their shams; partisans were vexed by her spurning their leaders; and professional sneerers, — civil in public to those whom in private they slandered, — could not pardon the severe truth whereby she drew the sting from their spite. Indeed, how could so undisguised a censor but shock the prejudices of the moderate, and wound the sensibilities of the diffident; how but enrage the worshippers of new demi-gods in literature, art and fashion, whose pet shrines she demolished; how but cut to the quick, alike by silence or by speech, the self-love of the vain, whose claims she ignored? So gratuitous, indeed, appeared her hypercriticism, that I could not refrain from remonstrance, and to one of my appeals she thus replied:

‘If a horror for the mania of little great men, so prevalent in this country, — if aversion to the sentimental exaggerations to which so many minds are prone, — if finding that most men praise, as well as blame, too readily, and that overpraise desecrates the lips and makes the breath unworthy to blow the coal of devotion, — if rejection of the —— s and —— s, from a sense that the priestess must reserve her pæans for Apollo, — if untiring effort to form my mind to justice and revere only the superlatively good, that my praise might be praise; if this be to offend, then have I offended.’

V.

THE DIAL.

* * * * *

Several talks among the Transcendentalists, during the autumn of 1839, turned upon the propriety of establishing an organ for the expression of freer views than the conservative journals were ready to welcome. The result was the publication of the “Dial,” the first number of which appeared early in the summer of 1840, under the editorship of Margaret, aided by R.W. Emerson and George Ripley. How moderate were her own hopes, in regard to this enterprise, is clearly enough shown by passages from her correspondence.

‘Jamaica Plain, 22d March, 1840. * * * I have a great deal written, but, as I read it over, scarce a word seems pertinent to the place or time. When I meet people, it is easy to adapt myself to them; but when I write, it is into another world, — not a better one, perhaps, but one with very dissimilar habits of thought to this wherein I am domesticated. How much those of us, who have been formed by the European mind, have to unlearn, and lay aside, if we would act here! I would fain do something worthily that belonged to the country where I was born, but most times I fear it may not be.

‘What others can do, — whether all that has been said is the mere restlessness of discontent, or there are thoughts really struggling for utterance, — will be tested now. A perfectly free organ is to be offered for the expression of individual thought and character. There are no party measures to be carried, no particular standard to be set up. A fair, calm tone, a recognition of universal principles, will, I hope, pervade the essays in every form. I trust there will be a spirit neither of dogmatism nor of compromise, and that this journal will aim, not at leading public opinion, but at stimulating each man to judge for himself, and to think more deeply and more nobly, by letting him see how some minds are kept alive by a wise self-trust. We must not be sanguine as to the amount of talent which will be brought to bear on this publication. All concerned are rather indifferent, and there is no great promise for the present. We cannot show high culture, and I doubt about vigorous thought. But we shall manifest free action as far as it goes, and a high aim. It were much if a periodical could be kept open, not to accomplish any outward object, but merely to afford an avenue for what of liberal and calm thought might be originated among us, by the wants of individual minds.’ * *

* * * * *

‘April 19, 1840. — Things go on pretty well, but doubtless people will be disappointed, for they seem to be looking for the Gospel of Transcendentalism. It may prove as Jouffroy says it was with the successive French ministries: “The public wants something positive, and, seeing that such and such persons are excellent at fault-finding, it raises them to be rulers, when, lo! they have no noble and full Yea, to match their shrill and bold Nay, and so are pulled down again.” Mr. Emerson knows best what he wants; but he has already said it in various ways. Yet, this experiment is well worth trying; hearts beat so high, they must be full of something, and here is a way to breathe it out quite freely. It is for dear New England that I want this review. For myself, if I had wished to write a few pages now and then, there were ways and means enough of disposing of them. But in truth I have not much to say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find that, so far from being an original genius, I have not yet learned to think to any depth, and that the utmost I have done in life has been to form my character to a certain consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth with a little better grace than I did at first. For this the world will not care much, so I shall hazard a few critical remarks only, or an unpretending chalk sketch now and then, till I have learned to do something. There will be beautiful poesies; about prose we know not yet so well. We shall be the means of publishing the little Charles Emerson left as a mark of his noble course, and, though it lies in fragments, all who read will be gainers.’

* * * * *

‘1840. — Since the Revolution, there has been little, in the circumstances of this country, to call out the higher sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is the same on nations as on individuals, — it leaves the nobler faculties undeveloped. The need of bringing out the physical resources of a vast extent of country, the commercial and political fever incident to our institutions, tend to fix the eyes of men on what is local and temporary, on the external advantages of their condition. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by a correspondent deepening of its sources, is likely to vulgarize rather than to raise the thought of a nation, depriving them of another sort of education through sentiments of reverence, and leading the multitude to believe themselves capable of judging what they but dimly discern. They see a wide surface, and forget the difference between seeing and knowing. In this hasty way of thinking and living they traverse so much ground that they forget that not the sleeping railroad passenger, but the botanist, the geologist, the poet, really see the country, and that, to the former, “a miss is as good as a mile.” In a word, the tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally. This tendency is no way balanced by the slight literary culture common here, which is mostly English, and consists in a careless reading of publications of the day, having the same utilitarian tendency with our own proceedings. The infrequency of acquaintance with any of the great fathers of English lore marks this state of things.

‘New England is now old enough, — some there have leisure enough, — to look at all this; and the consequence is a violent reaction, in a small minority, against a mode of culture that rears such fruits. They see that political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions — vital religion; and, seeing that these changes cannot be wrought from without inwards, they are trying to quicken the soul, that they may work from within outwards. Disgusted with the vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy, they become radicals; disgusted with the materialistic working of “rational” religion, they become mystics. They quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough. They would, perhaps, be patient if they thought this the mere sensuality of childhood in our nation, which it might outgrow; but they think that they see the evil widening, deepening, — not only debasing the life, but corrupting the thought, of our people, and they feel that if they know not well what should be done, yet that the duty of every good man is to utter a protest against what is done amiss.

‘Is this protest undiscriminating? are these opinions crude? do these proceedings threaten to sap the bulwarks on which men at present depend? I confess it all, yet I see in these men promise of a better wisdom than in their opponents. Their hope for man is grounded on his destiny as an immortal soul, and not as a mere comfort-loving inhabitant of earth, or as a subscriber to the social contract. It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul. Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual. In these principles I have confidence so profound, that I am not afraid to trust those who hold them, despite their partial views, imperfectly developed characters, and frequent want of practical sagacity. I believe, if they have opportunity to state and discuss their opinions, they will gradually sift them, ascertain their grounds and aims with clearness, and do the work this country needs. I hope for them as for “the leaven that is hidden in the bushel of meal, till all be leavened.” The leaven is not good by itself, neither is the meal; let them combine, and we shall yet have bread.

‘Utopia it is impossible to build up. At least, my hopes for our race on this one planet are more limited than those of most of my friends. I accept the limitations of human nature, and believe a wise acknowledgment of them one of the best conditions of progress. Yet every noble scheme, every poetic manifestation, prophesies to man his eventual destiny. And were not man ever more sanguine than facts at the moment justify, he would remain torpid, or be sunk in sensuality. It is on this ground that I sympathize with what is called the “Transcendental party,” and that I feel their aim to be the true one. They acknowledge in the nature of man an arbiter for his deeds, — a standard transcending sense and time, — and are, in my view, the true utilitarians. They are but at the beginning of their course, and will, I hope, learn how to make use of the past, as well as to aspire for the future, and to be true in the present moment.

‘My position as a woman, and the many private duties which have filled my life, have prevented my thinking deeply on several of the great subjects which these friends have at heart. I suppose, if ever I become capable of judging, I shall differ from most of them on important points. But I am not afraid to trust any who ‘are true, and in intent noble, with their own course, nor to aid in enabling them to express their thoughts, whether I coincide with them or not.

‘On the subject of Christianity, my mind is clear. If Divine, it will stand the test of any comparison. I believe the reason it has so imperfectly answered to the aspirations of its Founder is, that men have received it on external grounds. I believe that a religion, thus received, may give the life an external decorum, but will never open the fountains of holiness in the soul.

‘One often thinks of Hamlet as the true representative of idealism in its excess. Yet if, in his short life, man be liable to some excess, should we not rather prefer to have the will palsied like Hamlet, by a deep-searching tendency and desire for poetic perfection, than to have it enlightened by worldly sagacity, as in the case of Julius Cæsar, or made intense by pride alone, as in that of Coriolanus?

‘After all, I believe it is absurd to attempt to speak on these subjects within the limits of a letter. I will try to say what I mean in print some day. Yet one word as to “the material,” in man. Is it not the object of all philosophy, as well as of religion and poetry, to prevent its prevalence? Must not those who see most truly be ever making statements of the truth to combat this sluggishness, or worldliness? What else are sages, poets, preachers, born to do? Men go an undulating course, — sometimes on the hill, sometimes in the valley. But he only is in the right who in the valley forgets not the hill-prospect, and knows in darkness that the sun will rise again. That is the real life which is subordinated to, not merged in, the ideal; he is only wise who can bring the lowest act of his life into sympathy with its highest thought. And this I take to be the one only aim of our pilgrimage here. I agree with those who think that no true philosophy will try to ignore or annihilate the material part of man, but will rather seek to put it in its place, as servant and minister to the soul.’

VI.

THE WOMAN.

* * * * *

In 1839 I had met Margaret upon the plane of intellect. In the summer of 1840, on my return from the West, she was to be revealed in a new aspect.

It was a radiant and refreshing morning, when I entered the parlor of her pleasant house, standing upon a slope beyond Jamaica Plain to the south. She was absent at the moment, and there was opportunity to look from the windows on a cheerful prospect, over orchards and meadows, to the wooded hills and the western sky. Presently Margaret appeared, bearing in her hand a vase of flowers, which she had been gathering in the garden. After exchange of greetings, her first words were of the flowers, each of which was symbolic to her of emotion, and associated with the memory of some friend. I remember her references only to the Daphne Odora, the Provence Rose, the sweet-scented Verbena, and the Heliotrope; the latter being her chosen emblem, true bride of the sun that it is.

From flowers she passed to engravings hanging round the room. ‘Here,’ said she, ‘are Dante and Beatrice.

 ”Approach, and know that I am Beatrice.
  The power of ancient love was strong within me.”

‘She is beautiful enough, is not she, for that higher moment? But Dante! Yet who could paint a Dante, — and Dante in heaven? They give but his shadow, as he walked in the forest-maze of earth. Then here is the Madonna del Pesce; not divine, like the Foligno, not deeply maternal, like the Seggiola, not the beätified “Mother of God” of the Dresden gallery, but graceful, and “not too bright and good for human nature’s daily food.” And here is Raphael himself, the young seer of beauty, with eyes softly contemplative, yet lit with central fires,’ &c.

There were gems, too, and medallions and seals, to be examined, each enigmatical, and each blended by remembrances with some fair hour of her past life.

Talk on art led the way to Greece and the Greeks, whose mythology Margaret was studying afresh. She had been culling the blooms of that poetic land, and could not but offer me leaves from her garland. She spoke of the statue of Minerva-Polias, cut roughly from an olive-tree, yet cherished as the heaven-descended image of the most sacred shrine, to which was due the Panathenaic festival.

‘The less ideal perfection in the figure, the greater the reverence of the adorer. Was not this because spiritual imagination makes light of results, and needs only a germ whence to unfold Olympic splendors?’

She spoke of the wooden column, left standing from the ruins of the first temple to Juno, amidst the marble walls of the magnificent fane erected in its place: —

   ’This is a most beautiful type, is not it, of the manner in
    which life’s earliest experiences become glorified by our
    perfecting destiny?’

‘In the temple of Love and the Graces, one Grace bore a rose, a second a branch of myrtle, a third dice; — who can read that riddle?

‘“Better is it,” said Appollonius, “on entering a small shrine to find there a statue of gold and ivory, than in a large temple to behold only a coarse figure of terra cotta.” How often, after leaving with disgust the so-called great affairs of men, do we find traces of angels’ visits in quiet scenes of home.

‘The Hours and the Graces appear as ornaments on all thrones and shrines, except those of Vulcan and Pluto. Alas for us, when we become so sunk in utilitarian toil as to be blind to the beauty with which even common cares are daily wreathed!’

And so on and on, with myth and allusion.

Next, Margaret spoke of the friends whose generosity had provided the decorations on her walls, and the illustrated books for her table, — friends who were fellow-students in art, history, or science, — friends whose very life she shared. Her heart seemed full to overflow with sympathy for their joys and sorrows, their special trials and struggles, their peculiar tendencies of character and respective relations. The existence of each was to her a sacred process, whose developments she watched with awe, and whose leadings she reverently sought to aid. She had scores of pretty anecdotes to tell, sweet bowers of sentiment to open, significant lessons of experience to interpret, and scraps of journals or letters to read aloud, as the speediest means of introducing me to her chosen circle. There was a fascinating spell in her piquant descriptions, and a genial glow of sympathy animated to characteristic movement the figures, who in varying pantomime replaced one another on the theatre of her fancy. Frost-bound New England melted into a dreamland of romance beneath the spice-breeze of her Eastern narrative. Sticklers for propriety might have found fault at the freedom with which she confided her friends’ histories to one who was a comparative stranger to them; but I could not but note how conscientiousness reined in her sensibilities and curbed their career, as they reached the due bounds of privacy. She did but realize one’s conception of the transparent truthfulness that will pervade advanced societies of the future, where the very atmosphere shall be honorable faith.

Nearer and nearer Margaret was approaching a secret throned in her heart that day; and the preceding transitions were but a prelude of her orchestra before the entrance of the festal group. Unconsciously she made these preparations for paying worthy honors to a high sentiment. She had lately heard of the betrothal of two of her best-loved friends; and she wished to communicate the graceful story in a way that should do justice to the facts and to her own feelings. It was by a spontaneous impulse of her genius, and with no voluntary foreshaping, that she had grouped the previous tales; but no drama could have been more artistically constructed than the steps whereby she led me onward to the denouement; and the look, tone, words, with which she told it, were fluent with melody as the song of an improvisatrice.

Scarcely had she finished, when, offering some light refreshment, — as it was now past noon, — she proposed a walk in the open air. She led the way to Bussey’s wood, her favorite retreat during the past year, where she had thought and read, or talked with intimate friends. We climbed the rocky path, resting a moment or two at every pretty point, till, reaching a moss-cushioned ledge near the summit, she seated herself. For a time she was silent, entranced in delighted communion with the exquisite hue of the sky, seen through interlacing boughs and trembling leaves, and the play of shine and shadow over the wide landscape. But soon, arousing from her reverie, she took up the thread of the morning’s talk. My part was to listen; for I was absorbed in contemplating this, to me, quite novel form of character. It has been seen how my early distaste for Margaret’s society was gradually changed to admiration. Like all her friends, I had passed through an avenue of sphinxes before reaching the temple. But now it appeared that thus far I had never been admitted to the adytum.

As, leaning on one arm, she poured out her stream of thought, turning now and then her eyes full upon me, to see whether I caught her meaning, there was leisure to study her thoroughly. Her temperament was predominantly what the physiologists would call nervous-sanguine; and the gray eye, rich brown hair and light complexion, with the muscular and well-developed frame, bespoke delicacy balanced by vigor. Here was a sensitive yet powerful being, fit at once for rapture or sustained effort, intensely active, prompt for adventure, firm for trial. She certainly had not beauty; yet the high arched dome of the head, the changeful expressiveness of every feature, and her whole air of mingled dignity and impulse, gave her a commanding charm. Especially characteristic were two physical traits. The first was a contraction of the eyelids almost to a point, — a trick caught from near-sightedness, — and then a sudden dilation, till the iris seemed to emit flashes; — an effect, no doubt, dependent on her highly-magnetized condition. The second was a singular pliancy of the vertebræ and muscles of the neck, enabling her by a mere movement to denote each varying emotion; in moments of tenderness, or pensive feeling, its curves were swan-like in grace, but when she was scornful or indignant it contracted, and made swift turns like that of a bird of prey. Finally, in the animation, yet abandon of Margaret’s attitude and look, were rarely blended the fiery force of northern, and the soft languor of southern races.

Meantime, as I was thus, through her physiognomy, tracing the outlines of her spiritual form, she was narrating chapters from the book of experience. How superficially, heretofore, had I known her! We had met chiefly as scholars. But now I saw before me one whose whole life had been a poem, — of boundless aspiration and hope almost wild in its daring, — of indomitable effort amidst poignant disappointment, — of widest range, yet persistent unity. Yes! here was a poet in deed, a true worshipper of Apollo, who had steadfastly striven to brighten and make glad existence, to harmonize all jarring and discordant strings, to fuse most hard conditions and cast them in a symmetric mould, to piece fragmentary fortunes into a mosaic symbol of heavenly order. Here was one, fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought, sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging, descendants of the prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of beauty for which her spirit pined, she would have developed into one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of her fate she keenly felt.

But the tragedy of Margaret’s history was deeper yet. Behind the poet was the woman, — the fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was the confession that her heart had found no home. A “book-worm,” “a dilettante,” “a pedant,” I had heard her sneeringly called; but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin pride, and her absorption in study the natural vent of emotions, which had met no object worthy of life-long attachment. At once, many of her peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitution of fancy for fact, — which had annoyed me during the previous season, as inconsistent in a person of such capacious judgment and sustained self-government, — were now referred to the morbid influence of affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness, by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst upon me, and as, rapidly recalling the past, I saw how faithful she had kept to her high purposes, — how patient, gentle, and thoughtful for others, how active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she had been, — I could not but bow to her in reverence.

We walked back to the house amid a rosy sunset, and it was with no surprise that I heard her complain of an agonizing nervous headache, which compelled her at once to retire, and call for assistance. As for myself, while going homeward, I reflected with astonishment on the unflagging spiritual energy with which, for hour after hour, she had swept over lands and seas of thought, and, as my own excitement cooled, I became conscious of exhaustion, as if a week’s life had been concentrated in a day.

The interview, thus hastily sketched, may serve as a fair type of our usual intercourse. Always I found her open-eyed to beauty, fresh for wonder, with wings poised for flight, and fanning the coming breeze of inspiration. Always she seemed to see before her,

 ”A shape all light, which with one hand did fling
    Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
  And the invisible rain did ever sing
    A silver music on the mossy lawn.”

Yet more and more distinctly did I catch a plaintive tone of sorrow in her thought and speech, like the wail of an Æolian harp heard at intervals from some upper window. She had never met one who could love her as she could love; and in the orange-grove of her affections the white, perfumed blossoms and golden fruit wasted away unclaimed. Through the mask of slight personal defects and ungraceful manners, of superficial hauteur and egotism, and occasional extravagance of sentiment, no equal had recognized the rare beauty of her spirit. She was yet alone.

Among her papers remains this pathetic petition: —

‘I am weary of thinking. I suffer great fatigue from living. Oh God, take me! take me wholly! Thou knowest that I love none but Thee. All this beautiful poesy of my being lies in Thee. Deeply I feel it. I ask nothing. Each desire, each passionate feeling, is on the surface only; inmostly Thou keepest me strong and pure. Yet always to be thus going out into moments, into nature, and love, and thought! Father, I am weary! Reassume me for a while, I pray Thee. Oh let me rest awhile in Thee, Thou only Love! In the depth of my prayer I suffer much. Take me only awhile. No fellow-being will receive me. I cannot pause; they will not detain me by their love. Take me awhile, and again I will go forth on a renewed service. It is not that I repine, my Father, but I sink from want of rest, and none will shelter me. Thou knowest it all. Bathe me in the living waters of Thy Love.’

VII. THE FRIEND.

* * * * *

Yet, conscious as she was of an unfulfilled destiny, and of an undeveloped being, Margaret was no pining sentimentalist. The gums oozing from wounded boughs she burned as incense in her oratory; but in outward relations she was munificent with sympathy.

‘Let me be, Theodora, a bearer of heavenly gifts to my fellows,’

is written in her journals, and her life fulfilled the aspiration. The more one observed her, the more surprising appeared the variety, earnestness, and constancy of her friendships. Far and wide reached her wires of communication, and incessant was the interchange of messages of good-will. She was never so preoccupied and absorbed as to deny a claimant for her affectionate interest; she never turned her visitors back upon themselves, mortified and vexed at being misunderstood. With delicate justice she appreciated the special form, force, tendency of utterly dissimilar characters and her heart responded to every appeal alike of humblest suffering or loftiest endeavor. In the plain, yet eloquent phrase of the backwoodsman, “the string of her door-latch was always out,” and every wayfarer was free to share the shelter of her roof, or a seat beside her hearth-stone. Or, rather, it might be said, in symbol of her wealth of spirit, her palace, with its galleries of art, its libraries and festal-halls, welcomed all guests who could enjoy and use them.

She was, indeed, The Friend. This was her vocation. She bore at her girdle a golden key to unlock all caskets of confidence. Into whatever home she entered she brought a benediction of truth, justice, tolerance, and honor; and to every one who sought her to confess, or seek counsel, she spoke the needed word of stern yet benignant wisdom. To how many was the forming of her acquaintance an era of renovation, of awakening from sloth, indulgence or despair, to heroic mastery of fate, of inward serenity and strength, of new-birth to real self-hood, of catholic sympathies, of energy consecrated to the Supreme Good. Thus writes to her one who stands among the foremost in his own department: “What I am I owe, in large measure, to the stimulus you imparted. You roused my heart with high hopes; you raised my aims from paltry and vain pursuits to those which tasked and fed the soul; you inspired me with a great ambition, and made me see the worth and meaning of life; you awakened in me confidence in my own powers, showed me my special and distinct ability, and quickened my individual consciousness by intelligent sympathy with tendencies and feelings which I but half understood; you gave me to myself. This is a most benign influence to exercise, and for it, above all other benefits, gratitude is due. Therefore have you an inexhaustible bank of gratitude to draw from. Bless God that he has allotted to you such a ministry.”

The following extracts from her letters will show how profusely Margaret poured out her treasures upon her friends; but they reveal, too, the painful processes of alchemy whereby she transmuted her lead into gold.

‘Your idea of friendship apparently does not include intellectual intimacy, as mine does, but consists of mutual esteem and spiritual encouragement. This is the thought represented, on antique gems and bas-reliefs, of the meeting between God and Goddess, I find; for they rather offer one another the full flower of being, than grow together. As in the figures before me, Jupiter, king of Gods and men, meets Juno, the sister and queen, not as a chivalric suppliant, but as a stately claimant; and she, crowned, pure, majestic, holds the veil aside to reveal herself to her august spouse.’

* * * * *

‘How variously friendship is represented in literature! Sometimes the two friends kindle beacons from afar to apprize one another that they are constant, vigilant, and each content in his several home. Sometimes, two pilgrims, they go different routes in service of the same saint, and remember one another as they give alms, learn wisdom, or pray in shrines along the road. Sometimes, two knights, they bid farewell with mailed hand of truth and honor all unstained, as they ride forth on their chosen path to test the spirit of high emprise, and free the world from wrong, — to meet again for unexpected succor in the hour of peril, or in joyful surprise to share a frugal banquet on the plat of greensward opening from forest glades. Sometimes, proprietors of two neighboring estates, they have interviews in the evening to communicate their experiments and plans, or to study together the stars from an observatory; if either is engaged he simply declares it; they share enjoyments cordially; they exchange praise or blame frankly; in citizen-like good-fellowship they impart their gains.

‘All these views of friendship are noble and beautiful, yet they are not enough for our manifold nature. Friends should be our incentives to Right, yet not only our guiding, but our prophetic stars. To love by sight is much, to love by faith is more; together they make up the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. Friends should love not merely for the absolute worth of each to the other, but on account of a mutual fitness of character. They are not merely one another’s priests or gods, but ministering angels, exercising in their part the same function as the Great Soul does in the whole, — of seeing the perfect through the imperfect, nay, creating it there. Why am I to love my friend the less for any obstruction in his life? Is not that the very time for me to love most tenderly, when I must see his life in despite of seeming? When he shows it to me I can only admire; I do not give myself, I am taken captive.

‘But how shall I express my meaning? Perhaps I can do so from the tales of chivalry, where I find what corresponds far more thoroughly with my nature, than in these stoical statements. The friend of Amadis expects to hear prodigies of valor of the absent Preux, but if he be mutilated in one of his first battles, shall he be mistrusted by the brother of his soul, more than if he had been tested in a hundred? If Britomart finds Artegall bound in the enchanter’s spell, can she doubt therefore him whom she has seen in the magic glass? A Britomart does battle in his cause, and frees him from the evil power, while a dame of less nobleness might sit and watch the enchanted sleep, weeping night and day, or spur on her white palfrey to find some one more helpful than herself. These friends in chivalry are always faithful through the dark hours to the bright. The Douglas motto, “tender and true,” seems to me most worthy of the strongest breast. To borrow again from Spencer, I am entirely satisfied with the fate of the three brothers. I could not die while there was yet life in my brother’s breast. I would return from the shades and nerve him with twofold life for the fight. I could do it, for our hearts beat with one blood. Do you not see the truth and happiness of this waiting tenderness? The verse —

     ”Have I a lover
        Who is noble and free,
      I would he were nobler
        Than to love me,” —

does not come home to my heart, though this does: —

     ”I could not love thee, sweet, so much,
        Loved I not honor more.”

* * * ‘October 10th, 1840. — I felt singular pleasure in seeing you quote Hood’s lines on “Melancholy.” I thought nobody knew and loved his serious poems except myself, and two or three others, to whom I imparted them.[A] Do you like, also, the ode to Autumn, and —

“Sigh on, sad heart, for love’s eclipse”?

It was a beautiful time when I first read these poems. I was staying in Hallowell, Maine, and could find no books that I liked, except Hood’s poems. You know how the town is built, like a terraced garden on the river’s bank; I used to go every afternoon to the granite quarry which crowns these terraces, and read till the sunset came casting its last glory on the opposite bank. They were such afternoons as those in September and October, clear, soft, and radiant. Nature held nothing back. ’Tis many years since, and I have never again seen the Kennebec, but remember it as a stream of noble character. It was the first river I ever sailed up, realizing all which that emblem discloses of life. Greater still would the charm have been to sail downward along an unknown stream, seeking not a home, but a ship upon the ocean.’

* * * * *

‘Newbury, Oct. 18, 1840. — It rained, and the day was pale and sorrowful, the thick-fallen leaves even shrouded the river. We went out in the boat, and sat under the bridge. The pallid silence, the constant fall of the rain and leaves, were most soothing, life had been for many weeks so crowded with thought and feeling, pain and pleasure, rapture and care. Nature seemed gently to fold us in her matron’s mantle. On such days the fall of the leaf does not bring sadness, only meditation. Earth seemed to loose the record of past summer hours from her permanent life, as lightly, and spontaneously, as the great genius casts behind him a literature, — the Odyssey he has outgrown. In the evening the rain ceased, the west wind came, and we went out in the boat again for some hours; indeed, we staid till the last clouds passed from the moon. Then we climbed the hill to see the full light in solemn sweetness over fields, and trees, and river.

‘I never enjoyed anything more in its way than the three days alone with —— in her boat, upon the little river. Not without reason was it that Goethe limits the days of intercourse to three, in the Wanderjahre. If you have lived so long in uninterrupted communion with any noble being, and with nature, a remembrance of man’s limitations seems to call on Polycrates to cast forth his ring. She seemed the very genius of the scene, so calm, so lofty, and so secluded. I never saw any place that seemed to me so much like home. The beauty, though so great, is so unobtrusive.

‘As we glided along the river, I could frame my community far more naturally and rationally than —— . A few friends should settle upon the banks of a stream like this, planting their homesteads. Some should be farmers, some woodmen, others bakers, millers, &c. By land, they should carry to one another the commodities; on the river they should meet for society. At sunset many, of course, would be out in their boats, but they would love the hour too much ever to disturb one another. I saw the spot where we should discuss the high mysteries that Milton speaks of. Also, I saw the spot where I would invite select friends to live through the noon of night, in silent communion. When we wished to have merely playful chat, or talk on politics or social reform, we would gather in the mill, and arrange those affairs while grinding the corn. What a happy place for children to grow up in! Would it not suit little —— to go to school to the cardinal flowers in her boat, beneath the great oak-tree? I think she would learn more than in a phalanx of juvenile florists. But, truly, why has such a thing never been? One of these valleys so immediately suggests an image of the fair company that might fill it, and live so easily, so naturally, so wisely. Can we not people the banks of some such affectionate little stream? I distrust ambitious plans, such as Phalansterian organizations!

‘ —— is quite bent on trying his experiment. I hope he may succeed; but as they were talking the other evening, I thought of the river, and all the pretty symbols the tide-mill presents, and felt if I could at all adjust the economics to the more simple procedure, I would far rather be the miller, hoping to attract by natural affinity some congenial baker, “und so weiter.” However, one thing seems sure, that many persons will soon, somehow, somewhere, throw off a part, at least, of these terrible weights of the social contract, and see if they cannot lie more at ease in the lap of Nature. I do not feel the same interest in these plans, as if I had a firmer hold on life, but I listen with much pleasure to the good suggestions.’

* * * * *

‘Oct. 19th, 1840. —— was here. Generally I go out of the room when he comes, for his great excitability makes me nervous, and his fondness for detail is wearisome. But to-night I was too much fatigued to do anything else, and did not like to leave mother; so I lay on the sofa while she talked with him.

‘My mind often wandered, yet ever and anon, as I listened again to him, I was struck with admiration at the compensations of Nature. Here is a man, isolated from his kind beyond any I know, of an ambitious temper and without an object of tender affections and without a love or a friend. I don’t suppose any mortal, unless it be his aged mother, cares more for him than we do, — scarce any value him so much. The disease, which has left him, in the eyes of men, a scathed and blighted tree, has driven him back to Nature, and she has not refused him sympathy. I was surprised by the refinement of his observations on the animals, his pets. He has carried his intercourse with them to a degree of perfection we rarely attain with our human friends. There is no misunderstanding between him and his dogs and birds; and how rich has been the acquaintance in suggestion! Then the flowers! I liked to hear him, for he recorded all their pretty ways, — not like a botanist, but a lover. His interview with the Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain was most romantic. And what he said of the Yuca seems to me so pretty, that I will write it down, though somewhat more concisely than he told it: —

‘“I had kept these plants of the Yuca Filamentosa six or seven years, though they had never bloomed. I knew nothing of them, and had no notion of what feelings they would excite. Last June I found in bud the one which had the most favorable exposure. A week or two after, another, which was more in the shade, put out flower-buds, and I thought I should be able to watch them, one after the other; but, no! the one which was most favored waited for the other, and both flowered together at the full of the moon. This struck me as very singular, but as soon as I saw the flower by moonlight I understood it. This flower is made for the moon, as the Heliotrope is for the sun, and refuses other influences or to display her beauty in any other light.

‘“The first night I saw it in flower, I was conscious of a peculiar delight, I may even say rapture. Many white flowers are far more beautiful by day; the lily, for instance, with its firm, thick leaf, needs the broadest light to manifest its purity. But these transparent leaves of greenish white, which look dull in the day, are melted by the moon to glistening silver. And not only does the plant not appear in its destined hue by day, but the flower, though, as bell-shaped, it cannot quite close again after having once expanded, yet presses its petals together as closely as it can, hangs down its little blossoms, and its tall stalk seems at noon to have reared itself only to betray a shabby insignificance. Thus, too, with the leaves, which have burst asunder suddenly like the fan-palm to make way for the stalk, — their edges in the day time look ragged and unfinished, as if nature had left them in a hurry for some more pleasing task. On the day after the evening when I had thought it so beautiful, I could not conceive how I had made such a mistake.

‘“But the second evening I went out into the garden again. In clearest moonlight stood my flower, more beautiful than ever. The stalk pierced the air like a spear, all the little bells had erected themselves around it in most graceful array, with petals more transparent than silver, and of softer light than the diamond. Their edges were clearly, but not sharply defined. They seemed to have been made by the moon’s rays. The leaves, which had looked ragged by day, now seemed fringed by most delicate gossamer, and the plant might claim with pride its distinctive epithet of Filamentosa. I looked at it till my feelings became so strong that I longed to share it. The thought which filled my mind was that here we saw the type of pure feminine beauty in the moon’s own flower. I have since had further opportunity of watching the Yuca, and verified these observations, that she will not flower till the full moon, and chooses to hide her beauty from the eye of day.”

   ’Might not this be made into a true poem, if written out
    merely as history of the plant, and no observer introduced?
    How finely it harmonizes with all legends of Isis, Diana, &c.!
    It is what I tried to say in the sonnet, —

         Woman’s heaven,
      Where palest lights a silvery sheen diffuse.

   ’In tracing these correspondences, one really does take hold
    of a Truth, of a Divine Thought.’ * *

* * * * *

‘October 25th, 1840. — This week I have not read any book, nor once walked in the woods and fields. I meant to give its days to setting outward things in order, and its evenings to writing. But, I know not how it is, I can never simplify my life; always so many ties, so many claims! However, soon the winter winds will chant matins and vespers, which may make my house a cell, and in a snowy veil enfold me for my prayer. If I cannot dedicate myself this time, I will not expect it again. Surely it should be! These Carnival masks have crowded on me long enough, and Lent must be at hand. * *

‘ —— and —— have been writing me letters, to answer which required all the time and thought I could give for a day or two. — — ‘s were of joyful recognition, and so beautiful I would give much to show them to you. — — ‘s have singularly affected me. They are noble, wise, of most unfriendly friendliness. I don’t know why it is, I always seem to myself to have gone so much further with a friend than I really have. Just as at Newport I thought —— met me, when he did not, and sang a joyful song which found no echo, so here —— asks me questions which I thought had been answered in the first days of our acquaintance, and coldly enumerates all the charming qualities which make it impossible for him to part with me! He scolds me, though in the sweetest and solemnest way. I will not quote his words, though their beauty tempts me, for they do not apply, they do not touch ME.

‘Why is it that the religion of my nature is so much hidden from my peers? why do they question me, who never question them? why persist to regard as a meteor an orb of assured hope? Can no soul know me wholly? shall I never know the deep delight of gratitude to any but the All-Knowing? I shall wait for —— very peaceably, in reverent love as ever; but I cannot see why he should not have the pleasure of knowing now a friend, who has been “so tender and true.”’

* * * * *

‘ —— was here, and spent twenty-four hours in telling me a tale of deepest tragedy. Its sad changes should be written out in Godwin’s best manner: such are the themes he loved, as did also Rousseau. Through all the dark shadows shone a pure white ray, one high, spiritual character, a man, too, and of advanced age. I begin to respect men more, — I mean actual men. What men may be, I know; but the men of to-day have seemed to me of such coarse fibre, or else such poor wan shadows!

‘ —— had scarcely gone, when —— came and wished to spend a few hours with me. I was totally exhausted, but I lay down, and she sat beside me, and poured out all her noble feelings and bright fancies. There was little light in the room, and she gleamed like a cloud

— “of pearl and opal,”

and reminded me more than ever of

— “the light-haired Lombardess Singing a song of her own native land,”

to the dying Correggio, beside the fountain.

‘I am astonished to see how much Bettine’s book is to all these people. This shows how little courage they have had to live out themselves. She really brings them a revelation. The men wish they had been loved by Bettine; the girls wish to write down the thoughts that come, and see if just such a book does not grow up. —— , however, was one of the few who do not over-estimate her; she truly thought Bettine only publishes what many burn. Would not genius be common as light, if men trusted their higher selves?’

* * * * *

‘I heard in town that —— is a father, and has gone to see his child. This news made me more grave even than such news usually does; I suppose because I have known the growth of his character so intimately. I called to mind a letter he had written me of what we had expected of our fathers. The ideal father, the profoundly wise, provident, divinely tender and benign, he is indeed the God of the human heart. How solemn this moment of being called to prepare the way, to make way for another generation! What fulfilment does it claim in the character of a man, that he should be worthy to be a father! — what purity of motive, what dignity, what knowledge! When I recollect how deep the anguish, how deeper still the want, with which I walked alone in hours of childish passion, and called for a Father, often saying the word a hundred times, till stifled by sobs, how great seems the duty that name imposes! Were but the harmony preserved throughout! Could the child keep learning his earthly, as he does his heavenly Father, from all best experience of life, till at last it were the climax: “I am the Father. Have ye seen me? — ye have seen the Father.” But how many sons have we to make one father? Surely, to spirits, not only purified but perfected, this must appear the climax of earthly being, — a wise and worthy parentage. Here I always sympathize with Mr. Alcott. He views the relation truly.’

* * * * *

‘Dec. 3, 1840. —— bids me regard her “as a sick child;” and the words recall some of the sweetest hours of existence. My brother Edward was born on my birth-day, and they said he should be my child. But he sickened and died just as the bud of his existence showed its first bright hues. He was some weeks wasting away, and I took care of him always half the night. He was a beautiful child, and became very dear to me then. Still in lonely woods the upturned violets show me the pleading softness of his large blue eyes, in those hours when I would have given worlds to prevent his suffering, and could not. I used to carry him about in my arms for hours; it soothed him, and I loved to feel his gentle weight of helpless purity upon my heart, while night listened around. At last, when death came, and the soul took wing like an overtasked bird from his sweet form, I felt what I feel now. Might I free —— , as that angel freed him!

‘In daily life I could never hope to be an unfailing fountain of energy and bounteous love. My health is frail; my earthly life is shrunk to a scanty rill; I am little better than an aspiration, which the ages will reward, by empowering me to incessant acts of vigorous beauty. But now it is well with me to be with those who do not suffer overmuch to have me suffer. It is best for me to serve where I can better bear to fall short. I could visit —— more nobly than in daily life, through the soul of our souls. When she named me her Priestess, that name made me perfectly happy. Long has been my consecration; may I not meet those I hold dear at the altar? How would I pile up the votive offerings, and crowd the fires with incense? Life might be full and fair; for, in my own way, I could live for my friends.’ * *

* * * * *

‘Dec. 8th, 1840. — My book of amusement has been the Evenings of St. Petersburg. I do not find the praises bestowed on it at all exaggerated. Yet De Maistre is too logical for me. I only catch a thought here and there along the page. There is a grandeur even in the subtlety of his mind. He walks with a step so still, that, but for his dignity, it would be stealthy, yet with brow erect and wide, eye grave and deep. He is a man such as I have never known before.’ * *

‘I went to see Mrs. Wood in the Somnambula. Nothing could spoil this opera, which expresses an ecstasy, a trance of feeling, better than anything I ever heard. I have loved every melody in it for years, and it was happiness to listen to the exquisite modulations as they flowed out of one another, endless ripples on a river deep, wide and strewed with blossoms. I never have known any one more to be loved than Bellini. No wonder the Italians make pilgrimages to his grave. In him thought and feeling flow always in one tide; he never divides himself. He is as melancholy as he is sweet; yet his melancholy is not impassioned, but purely tender.’

* * * * *

‘Dec. 15, 1840. — I have not time to write out as I should this sweet story of Melissa, but here is the outline: —

‘More than four years ago she received an injury, which caused her great pain in the spine, and went to the next country town to get medical advice. She stopped at the house of a poor blacksmith, an acquaintance only, and has never since been able to be moved. Her mother and sister come by turns to take care of her. She cannot help herself in any way, but is as completely dependent as an infant. The blacksmith and his wife gave her the best room in their house, have ever since ministered to her as to a child of their own, and, when people pity them for having to bear such a burthen, they say, “It is none, but a blessing.”

‘Melissa suffers all the time, and great pain. She cannot amuse or employ herself in any way, and all these years has been as dependent on others for new thoughts, as for daily cares. Yet her mind has deepened, and her character refined, under those stern teachers, Pain and Gratitude, till she has become the patron saint of the village, and the muse of the village school-mistress. She has a peculiar aversion to egotism, and could not bear to have her mother enlarge upon her sufferings.

   ’”Perhaps it will pain the lady to hear that,” said the mild,
    religious sufferer, who had borne all without a complaint.

   ”Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” The poor are the
    generous: the injured, the patient and loving.

All that —— said of this girl was in perfect harmony with what De Maistre says of the saint of St. Petersburg, who, almost devoured by cancer, when, asked, “Quelle est la premiere grace que vous demanderez a Dieu, ma chére enfant, lorsque vous serez devant lui?” she replied, “Je lui demanderai pour mes bienfaiteurs la grace de Paimer autant que je l’aime.”

‘When they were lamenting for her, “Je ne suis pas, dit elle, aussi malheureuse que vous le croyez; Dieu me fait la grace de ne peuser, qu’a lui.”’ * *

‘Next of Edith. Tall, gaunt, hard-favored was this candidate for the American calendar; but Bonilacia might be her name. From her earliest years she had valued all she knew, only as she was to teach it again. Her highest ambition was to be the school-mistress; her recreation to dress the little ragged things, and take care of them out of school hours. She had some taste for nursing the grown-up, but this was quite subordinate to her care of the buds of the forest. Pure, perfectly beneficent, lived Edith, and never thought of any thing or person, but for its own sake. When she had attained midway the hill of life, she happened to be boarding in the house with a young farmer, who was lost in admiration of her lore. How he wished he, too, could read! “What, can’t you read? O, let me teach you!”— “You never can; I was too thick-skulled to learn even at school. I am sure I never could now.” But Edith was not to be daunted by any fancies of incapacity, and set to work with utmost zeal to teach this great grown man the primer. She succeeded, and won his heart thereby. He wished to requite the raising him from the night of ignorance, as Howard and Nicholas Poussin did the kind ones who raised them from the night of the tomb, by the gift of his hand. Edith consented, on condition that she might still keep school. So he had his sister come to “keep things straight.” Edith and he go out in the morning, — he to his field, she to her school, and meet again at eventide, to talk, and plan and, I hope, to read also.

‘The first use Edith made of her accession of property through her wedded estate, was to give away all she thought superfluous to a poor family she had long pitied, and to invite a poor sick woman to her “spare chamber.” Notwithstanding a course like this, her husband has grown rich, and proves that the pattern of the widow’s cruse was not lost in Jewry.

‘Edith has become the Natalia of the village, as is Melissa its “Schöne Seele.”’

* * * * *

‘Dec., 22, 1840.— “Community” seems dwindling to a point, and I fancy the best use of the plan, as projected thus far, will prove the good talks it has caused here, upon principles. I feel and find great want of wisdom in myself and the others. We are not ripe to reconstruct society yet. O Christopher Columbus! how art thou to be admired, when we see how other men go to work with their lesser enterprises! —— knows deepest what he wants, but not well how to get it. —— has a better perception of means, and less insight as to principles; but this movement has done him a world of good. All should say, however, that they consider this plan as a mere experiment, and are willing to fail. I tell them that they are not ready till they can say that. —— says he can bear to be treated unjustly by all concerned, — which is much. He is too sanguine, as it appears to me, but his aim is worthy, and, with his courage and clear intellect, his experiment will not, at least to him, be a failure.’

* * * * *

‘Feb. 19, 1841. — Have I never yet seen so much as one of my spiritual family? The other night they sat round me, so many who have thought they loved, or who begin to love me. I felt myself kindling the same fire in all their souls. I looked on each, and no eye repelled me. Yet there was no warmth for me on all those altars. Their natures seemed deep, yet there was ‘not one from which I could draw the living fountain. I could only cheat the hour with them, prize, admire, and pity. It was sad; yet who would have seen sadness in me? * *

‘Once I was almost all intellect; now I am almost all feeling. Nature vindicates her rights, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust. This cannot last long; I shall burn to ashes if all this smoulders here much longer. I must die if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism.

‘I meant to have translated the best passages of “Die Gunderode,” — which I prefer to Bettine’s correspondence with Goethe. The two girls are equal natures, and both in earnest. Goethe made a puppet-show, for his private entertainment, of Bettine’s life, and we wonder she did not feel he was not worthy of her homage. Gunderode is to me dear and admirable, Bettine only interesting. Gunderode is of religious grace, Bettine the fulness of instinctive impulse; Gunderode is the ideal, Bettine nature; Gunderode throws herself into the river because the world is all too narrow, Bettine lives and follows out every freakish fancy, till the enchanting child degenerates into an eccentric and undignified old woman. There is a medium somewhere. Philip Sidney found it; others had it found for them by fate.’

* * * * *

‘March 29. 1841. — * * Others have looked at society with far deeper consideration than I. I have felt so unrelated to this sphere, that it has not been hard for me to be true. Also, I do not believe in Society. I feel that every man must struggle with these enormous ills, in some way, in every age; in that of Moses, or Plato, or Angelo, as in our own. So it has not moved me much to see my time so corrupt, but it would if I were in a false position.

‘ —— went out to his farm yesterday, full of cheer, as one who doeth a deed with sincere good will. He has shown a steadfastness and earnestness of purpose most grateful to behold. I do not know what their scheme will ripen to; at present it does not deeply engage my hopes. It is thus far only a little better way than others. I doubt if they will get free from all they deprecate in society.’

* * * * *

‘Paradise Farm, Newport, July, 1841. — Here are no deep forests, no stern mountains, nor narrow, sacred valleys; but the little white farm-house looks down from its gentle slope on the boundless sea, and beneath the moon, beyond the glistening corn-fields, is heard the endless surge. All around the house is most gentle and friendly, with many common flowers, that seem to have planted themselves, and the domestic honey-suckle carefully trained over the little window. Around are all the common farm-house sounds, — the poultry making a pleasant recitative between the carols of singing birds; even geese and turkeys are not inharmonious when modulated by the diapasons of the beach. The orchard of very old apple-trees, whose twisted forms tell of the glorious winds that have here held revelry, protects a little homely garden, such as gives to me an indescribable refreshment, where the undivided vegetable plots and flourishing young fruit-trees, mingling carelessly, seem as if man had dropt the seeds just where he wanted the plants, and they had sprung up at once. The family, too, look, at first glance, well-suited to the place, — homely, kindly, unoppressed, of honest pride and mutual love, not unworthy to look out upon the far-shining sea.

‘Many, many sweet little things would I tell you, only they are so very little. I feel just now as if I could live and die here. I am out in the open air all the time, except about two hours in the early morning. And now the moon is fairly gone late in the evening. While she was here, we staid out, too. Everything seems sweet here, so homely, so kindly; the old people chatting so contentedly, the young men and girls laughing together in the fields, — not vulgarly, but in the true kinsfolk way, — little children singing in the house and beneath the berry-bushes. The never-ceasing break of the surf is a continual symphony, calming the spirits which this delicious air might else exalt too much. Everything on the beach becomes a picture; the casting the seine, the ploughing the deep for seaweed. This, when they do it with horses, is prettiest of all; but when you see the oxen in the surf, you lose all faith in the story of Europa, as the gay waves tumble in on their lazy sides. The bull would be a fine object on the shore, but not, not in the water. Nothing short of a dolphin will do! Late to-night, from the highest Paradise rocks, seeing —— wandering, and the horsemen careering on the beach, so spectrally passing into nature, amid the pale, brooding twilight, I almost thought myself in the land of souls!

‘But in the morning it is life, all cordial and common. This half-fisherman, half-farmer life seems very favorable to manliness. I like to talk with the fishermen; they are not boorish, not limited, but keen-eyed, and of a certain rude gentleness. Two or three days ago I saw the sweetest picture. There is a very tall rock, one of the natural pulpits, at one end of the beach. As I approached, I beheld a young fisherman with his little girl; he had nestled her into a hollow of the rock, and was standing before her, with his arms round her, and looking up in her face. Never was anything so pretty. I stood and stared, country fashion; and presently he scrambled up to the very top with her in his arms. She screamed a little as they went, but when they were fairly up on the crest of the rock, she chuckled, and stretched her tiny hand over his neck, to go still further. Yet, when she found he did not wish it, she leaned against his shoulder, and he sat, feeling himself in the child like that exquisite Madonna, and looking out over the great sea. Surely, the “kindred points of heaven and home” were known in his breast, whatever guise they might assume.

‘The sea is not always lovely and bounteous, though generally, since we have been here, she has beamed her bluest. The night of the full moon we staid out on the far rocks. The afternoon was fair: the sun set nobly, wrapped in a violet mantle, which he left to the moon, in parting. She not only rose red, lowering, and of impatient attitude, but kept hiding her head all the evening with an angry, struggling movement. —— said, “This is not Dian;” and I replied, “No; now we see the Hecate.” But the damp, cold wind came sobbing, and the waves began wailing, too, till I was seized with a feeling of terror, such as I never had before, even in the darkest, and most treacherous, rustling wood. The moon seemed sternly to give me up to the dæmons of the rock, and the waves to mourn a tragic chorus, till I felt their cold grasp. I suffered so much, that I feared we should never get home without some fatal catastrophe. Never was I more relieved than when, as we came up the hill, the moon suddenly shone forth. It was ten o’clock, and here every human sound is hushed, and lamp put out at that hour. How tenderly the grapes and tall corn-ears glistened and nodded! and the trees stretched out their friendly arms, and the scent of every humblest herb was like a word of love. The waves, also, at that moment put on a silvery gleam, and looked most soft and regretful. That was a real voice from nature.’

* * * * *

‘February, 1842. — I am deeply sad at the loss of little Waldo, from whom I hoped more than from almost any living being. I cannot yet reconcile myself to the thought that the sun shines upon the grave of the beautiful blue-eyed boy, and I shall see him no more.

‘Five years he was an angel to us, and I know not that any person was ever more the theme of thought to me. As I walk the streets they swarm with apparently worthless lives, and the question will rise, why he, why just he, who “bore within himself the golden future,” must be torn away? His father will meet him again; but to me he seems lost, and yet that is weakness. I must meet that which he represented, since I so truly loved it. He was the only child I ever saw, that I sometimes wished I could have called mine.

‘I loved him more than any child I ever knew, as he was of nature more fair and noble. You would be surprised to know how dear he was to my imagination. I saw him but little, and it was well; for it is unwise to bind the heart where there is no claim. But it is all gone, and is another of the lessons brought by each year, that we are to expect suggestions only, and not fulfilments, from each form of beauty, and to regard them merely as Angels of The Beauty.’

* * * * *

‘June, 1842. — Why must children be with perfect people, any more than people wait to be perfect to be friends? The secret is, — is it not? — for parents to feel and be willing their children should know that they are but little older than themselves: only a class above, and able to give them some help in learning their lesson. Then parent and child keep growing together, in the same house. Let them blunder as we blundered. God is patient for us; why should not we be for them? Aspiration teaches always, and God leads, by inches. A perfect being would hurt a child no less than an imperfect.’

* * * * *

‘It always makes my annoyances seem light, to be riding about to visit these fine houses. Not that I am intolerant towards the rich, but I cannot help feeling at such times how much characters require the discipline of difficult circumstances. To say nothing of the need the soul has of a peace and courage that cannot be disturbed, even as to the intellect, how can one be sure of not sitting down in the midst of indulgence to pamper tastes alone, and how easy to cheat one’s self with the fancy that a little easy reading or writing is quite work. I am safer; I do not sleep on roses. I smile to myself, when with these friends, at their care of me. I let them do as they will, for I know it will not last long enough to spoil me.’

* * * * *

‘I take great pleasure in talking with Aunt Mary.[B] Her strong and simple nature checks not, falters not. Her experience is entirely unlike mine, as, indeed, is that of most others whom I know. No rapture, no subtle process, no slow fermentation in the unknown depths, but a rill struck out from the rock, clear and cool in all its course, the still, small voice. She says the guide of her life has shown itself rather as a restraining, than an impelling principle. I like her life, too, as far as I see it; it is dignified and true.’

* * * * *

‘Cambridge, July, 1842. — A letter at Providence would have been like manna in the wilderness. I came into the very midst of the fuss,[C] and, tedious as it was at the time, I am glad to have seen it. I shall in future be able to believe real, what I have read with a dim disbelief of such times and tendencies. There is, indeed, little good, little cheer, in what I have seen: a city full of grown-up people as wild, as mischief-seeking, as full of prejudice, careless slander, and exaggeration, as a herd of boys in the play-ground of the worst boarding-school. Women whom I have seen, as the domestic cat, gentle, graceful, cajoling, suddenly showing the disposition, if not the force, of the tigress. I thought I appreciated the monstrous growths of rumor before, but I never did. The Latin poet, though used to a court, has faintly described what I saw and heard often, in going the length of a street. It is astonishing what force, purity and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods. These absurdities, of course, are linked with good qualities, with energy of feeling, and with a love of morality, though narrowed and vulgarized by the absence of the intelligence which should enlighten. I had the good discipline of trying to make allowance for those making none, to be charitable to their want of charity, and cool without being cold. But I don’t know when I have felt such an aversion to my environment, and prayed so earnestly day by day,— “O, Eternal! purge from my inmost heart this hot haste about ephemeral trifles,” and “keep back thy servant from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me.”

‘What a change from the almost vestal quiet of “Aunt Mary’s” life, to all this open-windowed, open-eyed screaming of “poltroon,” “nefarious plan,” “entire depravity,” &c. &c.’

* * * * *

‘July, 1842. Boston. — I have been entertaining the girls here with my old experiences at Groton. They have been very fresh in my mind this week. Had I but been as wise in such matters then as now, how easy and fair I might have made the whole! Too late, too late to live, but not too late to think! And as that maxim of the wise Oriental teaches, “the Acts of this life shall be the Fate of the next.”’

* * * ‘I would have my friends tender of me, not because I am frail, but because I am capable of strength; — patient, because they see in me a principle that must, at last, harmonize all the exuberance of my character. I did not well understand what you felt, but I am willing to admit that what you said of my “over-great impetuosity” is just. You will, perhaps, feel it more and more. It may at times hide my better self. When it does, speak, I entreat, as harshly as you feel. Let me be always sure I know the worst I believe you will be thus just, thus true, for we are both servants of Truth.’

* * * * *

‘August, 1842. Cambridge. — Few have eyes for the pretty little features of a scene. In this, men are not so good as boys. Artists are always thus young; poets are; but the pilgrim does not lay aside his belt of steel, nor the merchant his pack, to worship the flowers on the fountain’s brink. I feel, like Herbert, the weight of “business to be done,” but the bird-like particle would skim and sing at these sweet places. It seems strange to leave them; and that we do so, while so fitted to live deeply in them, shows that beauty is the end but not the means.

‘I have just been reading the new poems of Tennyson. Much has he thought, much suffered, since the first ecstasy of so fine an organization clothed all the world with rosy light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of fancy and passion, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life, and his conclusions are calmly noble. In these later verses is a still, deep sweetness; how different from the intoxicating, sensuous melody of his earlier cadence! I have loved him much this time, and taken him to heart as a brother. One of his themes has long been my favorite, — the last expedition of Ulysses, — and his, like mine, is the Ulysses of the Odyssey, with his deep romance of wisdom, and not the worldling of the Iliad. How finely marked his slight description of himself and of Telemachus. In Dora, Locksley Hall, the Two Voices, Morte D’Arthur, I find my own life, much of it, written truly out.’

* * * * *

Concord, August 25. 1842. — Beneath this roof of peace, beneficence, and intellectual activity, I find just the alternation of repose and satisfying pleasure that I need. * * *

   ’Do not find fault with the hermits and scholars. The true text
    is: —

     ”Mine own Telemachus
      He does his work — I mine.”

‘All do the work, whether they will or no; but he is “mine own Telemachus” who does it in the spirit of religion, never believing that the last results can be arrested in any one measure or set of measures, listening always to the voice of the Spirit, — and who does this more than —— ?

‘After the first excitement of intimacy with him, — when I was made so happy by his high tendency, absolute purity, the freedom and infinite graces of an intellect cultivated much beyond any I had known, — came with me the questioning season. I was greatly disappointed in my relation to him. I was, indeed, always called on to be worthy, — this benefit was sure in our friendship. But I found no intelligence of my best self; far less was it revealed to me in new modes; for not only did he seem to want the living faith which enables one to discharge this holiest office of a friend, but he absolutely distrusted me in every region of my life with which he was unacquainted. The same trait I detected in his relations with others. He had faith in the Universal, but not in the Individual Man: he met men, not as a brother, but as a critic. Philosophy appeared to chill instead of exalting the poet.

‘But now I am better acquainted with him. His “accept” is true; the “I shall learn,” with which he answers every accusation, is no less true. No one can feel his limitations, in fact, more than he, though he always speaks confidently from his present knowledge as all he has yet, and never qualifies or explains. He feels himself “shut up in a crystal cell,” from which only “a great love or a great task could release me,” and hardly expects either from what remains in this life. But I already see so well how these limitations have fitted him for his peculiar work, that I can no longer quarrel with them; while from his eyes looks out the angel that must sooner or later break every chain. Leave him in his cell affirming absolute truth; protesting against humanity, if so he appears to do; the calm observer of the courses of things. Surely, “he keeps true to his thought, which is the great matter.” He has already paid his debt to his time; how much more he will give we cannot know; but already I feel how invaluable is a cool mind, like his, amid the warring elements around us. As I look at him more by his own law, I understand him better; and as I understand him better, differences melt away. My inmost heart blesses the fate that gave me birth in the same clime and time, and that has drawn me into such a close bond with him as, it is my hopeful faith, will never be broken, but from sphere to sphere ever more hallowed. * * *

‘What did you mean by saying I had imbibed much of his way of thought? I do indeed feel his life stealing gradually into mine; and I sometimes think that my work would have been more simple, and my unfolding to a temporal activity more rapid and easy, if we had never met. But when I look forward to eternal growth, I am always aware that I am far larger and deeper for him. His influence has been to me that of lofty assurance and sweet serenity. He says, I come to him as the European to the Hindoo, or the gay Trouvére to the Puritan in his steeple hat. Of course this implies that our meeting is partial. I present to him the many forms of nature and solicit with music; he melts them all into spirit and reproves performance with prayer. When I am with God alone, I adore in silence. With nature I am filled and grow only. With most men I bring words of now past life, and do actions suggested by the wants of their natures rather than my own. But he stops me from doing anything, and makes me think.’

* * * * *

October, 1842 * * To me, individually, Dr. Channing’s kindness was great; his trust and esteem were steady, though limited, and I owe him a large debt of gratitude.

‘His private character was gentle, simple, and perfectly harmonious, though somewhat rigid and restricted in its operations. It was easy to love, and a happiness to know him, though never, I think, a source of the highest social pleasure to be with him. His department was ethics; and as a literary companion, he did not throw himself heartily into the works of creative genius, but looked, wherever he read, for a moral. In criticism he was deficient in “individuality,” if by that the phrenologists mean the power of seizing on the peculiar meanings of special forms. I have heard it said, that, under changed conditions, he might have been a poet. He had, indeed, the poetic sense of a creative spirit working everywhere. Man and nature were living to him; and though he did not yield to sentiment in particulars he did in universals. But his mind was not recreative, or even representative.

‘He was deeply interesting to me as having so true a respect for woman. This feeling in him was not chivalrous; it was not the sentiment of an artist; it was not the affectionateness of the common son of Adam, who knows that only her presence can mitigate his loneliness; but it was a religious reverence. To him she was a soul with an immortal destiny. Nor was there at the bottom of his heart one grain of masculine assumption. He did not wish that Man should protect her, but that God should protect her and teach her the meaning of her lot.

‘In his public relations he is to be regarded not only as a check upon the evil tendencies of his era, but yet more as a prophet of a better age already dawning as he leaves us. In his later days he filled yet another office of taking the middle ground between parties. Here he was a fairer figure than ever before. His morning prayer was, “Give me more light; keep my soul open to the light;” and it was answered. He steered his middle course with sails spotless and untorn. He was preserved in a wonderful degree from the prejudices of his own past, the passions of the present, and the exaggerations of those who look forward to the future. In the writings where, after long and patient survey, he sums up the evidence on both sides, and stands umpire, with the judicial authority of a pure intent, a steadfast patience, and a long experience, the mild wisdom of age is beautifully tempered by the ingenuous sweetness of youth. These pieces resemble charges to a jury; they have always been heard with affectionate deference, if not with assent, and have, exerted a purifying influence.’ * *

* * * * *

‘November, 1842. — When souls meet direct and all secret thoughts are laid open, we shall need no forbearance, no prevention, no care-taking of any kind. Love will be pure light, and each action simple, — too simple to be noble. But there will not be always so much to pardon in ourselves and others. Yesterday we had at my class a conversation on Faith. Deeply true things were said and felt. But to-day the virtue has gone out of me; I have accepted all, and yet there will come these hours of weariness, — weariness of human nature in myself and others. “Could ye not watch one hour?” Not one faithfully through! * * To speak with open heart and “tongue affectionate and true,” — to enjoy real repose and the consciousness of a thorough mutual understanding in the presence of friends when we do meet, is what is needed. That being granted, I do believe I should not wish any surrender of time or thought from a human being. But I have always a sense that I cannot meet or be met in haste; as —— said he could not look at the works of art in a chance half-hour, so cannot I thus rudely and hastily turn over the leaves of any mind. In peace, in stillness that permits the soul to flow, beneath the open sky, I would see those I love.’

[Footnote A: This was some years before their reprint in this country, it should be noticed.]

[Footnote B: Miss Rotch, of New Bedford.]

[Footnote C: The Dorr rebellion.]

VIII. SOCIALISM.

* * * * *

In the preceding extracts will have been noticed frequent reference to the Association Movement, which, during the winter of 1840-41, was beginning to appear simultaneously at several points in New England. In Boston and its vicinity several friends, for whose characters Margaret felt the highest honor, and with many of whose views, theoretic and practical, she accorded, were earnestly considering the possibility of making such industrial, social, and educational arrangements, as would simplify economies, combine leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of caste, equalize refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole. Chief among these was the Rev. George Ripley, who, convinced by his experience in a faithful ministry, that the need was urgent for a thorough application of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about staking his all of fortune, reputation, position, and influence, in an attempt to organize a joint-stock community at Brook Farm. How Margaret was inclined to regard this movement has been already indicated. While at heart sympathizing with the heroism that prompted it, in judgment she considered it premature. But true to her noble self, though regretting the seemingly gratuitous sacrifice of her friends, she gave them without stint the cheer of her encouragement and the light of her counsel. She visited them often; entering genially into their trials and pleasures, and missing no chance to drop good seed in every furrow upturned by the ploughshare or softened by the rain. In the secluded yet intensely animated circle of these co-workers I frequently met her during several succeeding years, and rejoice to bear testimony to the justice, magnanimity, wisdom, patience, and many-sided good-will, that governed her every thought and deed. The feelings with which she watched the progress of this experiment are thus exhibited in her journals: —

‘My hopes might lead to Association, too, — an association, if not of efforts, yet of destinies. In such an one I live with several already, feeling that each one, by acting out his own, casts light upon a mutual destiny, and illustrates the thought of a mastermind. It is a constellation, not a phalanx, to which I would belong.’

* * * * *

‘Why bind oneself to a central or any doctrine? How much nobler stands a man entirely unpledged, unbound! Association may be the great experiment of the age, still it is only an experiment. It is not worth while to lay such stress on it; let us try it, induce others to try it, — that is enough.’

* * * * *

‘It is amusing to see how the solitary characters tend to outwardness, — to association, — while the social and sympathetic ones emphasize the value of solitude, — of concentration, — so that we hear from each the word which, from his structure, we least expect.’

* * * * *

‘On Friday I came to Brook Farm. The first day or two here is desolate. You seem to belong to nobody — to have a right to speak to nobody; but very soon you learn to take care of yourself, and then the freedom of the place is delightful.

‘It is fine to see how thoroughly Mr. and Mrs. R. act out, in their own persons, what they intend.

‘All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground: The aim is perfection; patience the road. The present object is to give ourselves and others a tolerable chance. Let us not be too ambitious in our hopes as to immediate results. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approximation only. Parents and teachers expect to do too much. They are not legislators, but only interpreters to the next generation. Soon, very soon, does the parent become merely the elder brother of his child; — a little wiser, it is to be hoped. —— differed from me as to some things I said about the gradations of experience, — that “to be brought prematurely near perfect beings would chill and discourage.” He thought it would cheer and console. He spoke well, — with a youthful nobleness. —— said “that the most perfect person would be the most impersonal” — philosophical bull that, I trow— “and, consequently, would impede us least from God.” Mr. R. spoke admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the sans-culotte tendency in their manners, — throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough. Yet, as the majority differ from me, to begin with, — that being the reason this subject was chosen, — they showed, on the whole, more respect and interest than I had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation which my part requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual. Still, I should like to have to face all this; it would have the same good effects that the Athenian assemblies had on the minds obliged to encounter them.

‘Sunday. A glorious day; — the woods full of perfume. I was out all the morning. In the afternoon, Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here, as I could not work. —— said:— “They would all like to work for a person of genius. They would not like to have this service claimed from them, but would like to render it of their own accord.” “Yes,” I told her; “but where would be my repose, when they were always to be judging whether I was worth it or not. It would be the same position the clergyman is in, or the wandering beggar with his harp. Each day you must prove yourself anew. You are not in immediate relations with material things.”

‘We talked of the principles of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because all the confidence in it I had was as an experiment worth trying, and that it was a part of the great wave of inspired thought. —— declared they none of them had confidence beyond this; but they seem to me to have. Then I said, “that though I entirely agreed about the dignity of labor, and had always wished for the present change, yet I did not agree with the principle of paying for services by time;[A] neither did I believe in the hope of excluding evil, for that was a growth of nature, and one condition of the development of good.” We had valuable discussion on these points.

‘All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and, by every day’s observation of me, will see that she ought not to have done it.’

* * * * *

‘In the evening, a husking in the barn. Men, women, and children, all engaged. It was a most picturesque scene, only not quite light enough to bring it out fully. I staid and helped about half an hour, then took a long walk beneath the stars.’

* * * * *

‘Wednesday. I have been too much absorbed to-day by others, and it has made me almost sick. Mrs. —— came to see me, and we had an excellent talk, which occupied nearly all the morning. Then Mrs. —— wanted to see me, but after a few minutes I found I could not bear it, and lay down to rest. Then —— came. Poor man; — his feelings and work are wearing on him. He looks really ill now. Then —— and I went to walk in the woods. I was deeply interested in all she told me. If I were to write down all she and four other married women have confided to me, these three days past, it would make a cento, on one subject, in five parts. Certainly there should be some great design in my life; its attractions are so invariable.’

* * * * *

‘In the evening, a conversation on Impulse. The reason for choosing this subject is the great tendency here to advocate spontaneousness, at the expense of reflection. It was a much better conversation than the one before. None yawned, for none came, this time, from mere curiosity. There were about thirty-five present, which is a large enough circle. Many engaged in the talk. I defended nature, as I always do; — the spirit ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated to-night the claims of Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk. —— spoke well. She seemed in a much more reverent humor than the other night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled. —— , seated on the floor, with the light falling from behind on his long gold locks, made, with sweet, serene aspect, and composed tones, a good exposé of his way of viewing things.’

* * * * *

‘Saturday. Well, good-by, Brook Farm. I know more about this place than I did when I came; but the only way to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned, associate in trying it. Some good things are proven, and as for individuals, they are gainers. Has not —— vied, in her deeds of love, with “my Cid,” and the holy Ottilia? That girl who was so rude to me stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-by. Truly, the soft answer turneth away wrath.

‘I have found myself here in the amusing position of a conservative. Even so is it with Mr. R. There are too many young people in proportion to the others. I heard myself saying, with a grave air, “Play out the play, gentles.” Thus, from generation to generation, rises and falls the wave.’

Again, a year afterward, she writes: —

‘Here I have passed a very pleasant week. The tone of the society is much sweeter than when I was here a year ago. There is a pervading spirit of mutual tolerance and gentleness, with great sincerity. There is no longer a passion for grotesque freaks of liberty, but a disposition, rather, to study and enjoy the liberty of law. The great development of mind and character observable in several instances, persuades me that this state of things affords a fine studio for the soul-sculptor. To a casual observer it may seem as if there was not enough of character here to interest, because there are no figures sufficiently distinguished to be worth painting for the crowd; but there is enough of individuality in free play to yield instruction; and one might have, from a few months’ residence here, enough of the human drama to feed thought for a long time.’

Thus much for Margaret’s impressions of Brook Farm and its inmates. What influence she in turn exerted on those she met there, may be seen from the following affectionate tribute, offered by one of the young girls alluded to in the journal: —

“Would that I might aid even slightly, in doing justice to the noble-hearted woman whose departure we must all mourn. But I feel myself wholly powerless to do so; and after I explain what my relation to her was, you will understand how this can be, without holding me indolent or unsympathetic.

“When I first met Miss Fuller, I had already cut from my moorings, and was sailing on the broad sea of experience, conscious that I possessed unusual powers of endurance, and that I should meet with sufficient to test their strength. She made no offer of guidance, and once or twice, in the succeeding year, alluded to the fact that she ‘had never helped me.’ This was in a particular sense, of course, for she helped all who knew her. She was interested in my rough history, but could not be intimate, in any just sense, with a soul so unbalanced, so inharmonious as mine then was. For my part, I reverenced her. She was to me the embodiment of wisdom and tenderness. I heard her converse, and, in the rich and varied intonations of her voice, I recognized a being to whom every shade of sentiment was familiar. She knew, if not by experience then by no questionable intuition, how to interpret the inner life of every man and woman; and, by interpreting, she could soothe and strengthen. To her, psychology was an open book. When she came to Brook Farm, it was my delight to wait on one so worthy of all service, — to arrange her late breakfast in some remnants of ancient China, and to save her, if it might be, some little fatigue or annoyance, during each day. After a while she seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard.”

Being a confirmed Socialist, I often had occasion to discuss with Margaret the problems involved in the “Combined Order” of life; and though unmoved by her scepticism, I could not but admire the sagacity, foresight, comprehensiveness, and catholic sympathy with which she surveyed this complicated subject. Her objections, to be sure, were of the usual kind, and turned mainly upon two points, — the difficulty of so allying labor and capital as to secure the hoped-for coöperation, and the danger of merging the individual in the mass to such degree as to paralyze energy, heroism, and genius; but these objections were urged in a way that brought out her originality and generous hopes. There was nothing abject, timid, or conventional in her doubts. The end sought she prized; but the means she questioned. Though pleased in listening to sanguine visions of the future, she was slow to credit that an organization by “Groups and Series” would yield due incentive for personal development, while ensuring equilibrium through exact and universal justice. She felt, too, that Society was not a machine to be put together and set in motion, but a living body, whose breath must be Divine inspiration, and whose healthful growth is only hindered by forcing. Finally, while longing as earnestly as any Socialist for “Liberty and Law made one in living union,” and assured in faith that an era was coming of “Attractive Industry” and “Harmony,” she was still for herself inclined to seek sovereign independence in comparative isolation. Indeed, at this period, Margaret was in spirit and in thought preëminently a Transcendentalist.

[Footnote A: This was a transitional arrangement only.]

IX. CREDO.

* * * * *

In regard to Transcendentalism again, there was reason to rejoice in having found a friend, so firm to keep her own ground, while so liberal to comprehend another’s stand-point, as was Margaret. She knew, not only theoretically, but practically, how endless are the diversities of human character and of Divine discipline, and she reverenced fellow-spirits too sincerely ever to wish to warp them to her will, or to repress their normal development. She was stern but in one claim, that each should be faithful to apparent leadings of the Truth; and could avow widest differences of conviction without feeling that love was thereby chilled, or the hand withheld from cordial aid. Especially did she render service by enabling one, — through her blended insight, candor, and clearness of understanding, — to see in bright reflection his own mental state.

It would be doing injustice to a person like Margaret, always more enthusiastic than philosophical, to attribute to her anything like a system of theology; for, hopeful, reverent, aspiring, and free from scepticism, she felt too profoundly the vastness of the universe and of destiny ever to presume that with her span rule she could measure the Infinite. Yet the tendency of her thoughts can readily be traced in the following passages from note-books and letters: —

‘When others say to me, and not without apparent ground, that “the Outward Church is a folly which keeps men from enjoying the communion of the Church Invisible, and that in the desire to be helped by, and to help others, men lose sight of the only sufficient help, which they might find by faithful solitary intentness of spirit,” I answer it is true, and the present deadness and emptiness summon us to turn our thoughts in that direction. Being now without any positive form of religion, any unattractive symbols, or mysterious rites, we are in the less danger of stopping at surfaces, of accepting a mediator instead of the Father, a sacrament instead of the Holy Ghost. And when I see how little there is to impede and bewilder us, I cannot but accept, — should it be for many years, — the forlornness, the want of fit expression, the darkness as to what is to be expressed, even that characterize our time.

‘But I do not, therefore, as some of our friends do, believe that it will always be so, and that the church is tottering to its grave, never to rise again. The church was the growth of human nature, and it is so still. It is but one result of the impulse which makes two friends clasp one another’s hands, look into one another’s eyes at sight of beauty, or the utterance of a feeling of piety. So soon as the Spirit has mourned and sought, and waited long enough to open new depths, and has found something to express, there will again be a Cultus, a Church. The very people, who say that none is needed, make one at once. They talk with, they write to one another. They listen to music, they sustain themselves with the poets; they like that one voice should tell the thoughts of several minds, one gesture proclaim that the same life is at the same moment in many breasts.

‘I am myself most happy in my lonely Sundays, and do not feel the need of any social worship, as I have not for several years, which I have passed in the same way. Sunday is to me priceless as a day of peace and solitary reflection. To all who will, it may be true, that, as Herbert says: —

     ”Sundays the pillars are
      On which Heaven’s palace arched lies;
      The other days fill up the space
      And hollow room with vanities;”

and yet in no wise “vanities,” when filtered by the Sunday crucible. After much troubling of the waters of my life, a radiant thought of the meaning and beauty of earthly existence will descend like a healing angel. The stillness permits me to hear a pure tone from the One in All. But often I am not alone. The many now, whose hearts, panting for truth and love, have been made known to me, whose lives flow in the same direction as mine, and are enlightened by the same star, are with me. I am in church, the church invisible, undefiled by inadequate expression. Our communion is perfect; it is that of a common aspiration; and where two or three are gathered together in one region, whether in the flesh or the spirit, He will grant their request. Other communion would be a happiness, — to break together the bread of mutual thought, to drink the wine of loving life, — but it is not necessary.

‘Yet I cannot but feel that the crowd of men whose pursuits are not intellectual, who are not brought by their daily walk into converse with sages and poets, who win their bread from an earth whose mysteries are not open to them, whose worldly intercourse is more likely to stifle than to encourage the sparks of love and faith in their breasts, need on that day quickening more than repose. The church is now rather a lecture-room than a place of worship; it should be a school for mutual instruction. I must rejoice when any one, who lays spiritual things to heart, feels the call rather to mingle with men, than to retire and seek by himself.

‘You speak of men going up to worship by “households,” &c. Were the actual family the intellectual family, this might be; but as social life now is, how can it? Do we not constantly see the child, born in the flesh to one father, choose in the spirit another? No doubt this is wrong, since the sign does not stand for the thing signified, but it is one feature of the time. How will it end? Can families worship together till it does end?

* * * * *

‘I have let myself be cheated out of my Sunday, by going to hear Mr. —— . As he began by reading the first chapter of Isaiah, and the fourth of John’s Epistle, I made mental comments with pure delight. “Bring no more vain oblations.” “Every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.” “We know that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because he hath given us of the Spirit.” Then pealed the organ, full of solemn assurance. But straightway uprose the preacher to deny mysteries, to deny the second birth, to deny influx, and to renounce the sovereign gift of insight, for the sake of what he deemed a “rational” exercise of will. As he spoke I could not choose but deny him all through, and could scarce refrain from rising to expound, in the light of my own faith, the words of those wiser Jews which had been read. Was it not a sin to exchange friendly greeting as we parted, and yet tell him no word of what was in my mind?

‘Still I saw why he looked at things as he did. The old religionists did talk about “grace, conversion,” and the like, technically, without striving to enter into the idea, till they quite lost sight of it. Undervaluing the intellect, they became slaves of a sect, instead of organs of the Spirit. This Unitarianism has had its place. There was a time for asserting “the dignity of human nature,” and for explaining total depravity into temporary inadequacy, — a time to say that the truths of essence, if simplified at all in statement from their infinite variety of existence, should be spoken of as One, rather than Three, though that number, if they would only let it reproduce itself simply, is of highest significance. Yet the time seems now to have come for reinterpreting the old dogmas. For one I would now preach the Holy Ghost as zealously as they have been preaching Man, and faith instead of the understanding, and mysticism instead &c. But why go on? It certainly is by no means useless to preach. In my experience of the divine gifts of solitude, I had forgotten what might be done in this other way. That crowd of upturned faces, with their look of unintelligent complacency! Give tears and groans, rather, if there be a mixture of physical excitement and bigotry. Mr. —— is heard because, though he has not entered into the secret of piety, he wishes to be heard, and with a good purpose, — can make a forcible statement, and kindle himself with his own thoughts. How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone, since they are content with so little! Can none wake the spark that will melt them, till they take beautiful forms? Were one to come now, who could purge us with fire, how would these masses glow and be clarified!

‘Mr. —— made a good suggestion:— “Such things could not be said in the open air.” Let men preach for the open air, and speak now thunder and lightning, now dew and rustling leaves. Yet must the preacher have the thought of his day before he can be its voice. None have it yet; but some of our friends, perhaps, are nearer than the religious world at large, because neither ready to dogmatize, as if they had got it, nor content to stop short with mere impressions and presumptuous hopes. I feel that a great truth is coming. Sometimes it seems as if we should have it among us in a day. Many steps of the Temple have been ascended, steps of purest alabaster, and of shining jasper, also of rough-brick, and slippery moss-grown stone. We shall reach what we long for, since we trust and do not fear, for our God knows not fear, only reverence, and his plan is All in All.’

* * * * *

‘Who can expect to utter an absolutely pure and clear tone on these high subjects? Our earthly atmosphere is too gross to permit it. Yet, a severe statement has rather an undue charm for me, as I have a nature of great emotion, which loves free abandonment. I am ready to welcome a descending Moses, come to turn all men from idolatries. For my priests have been very generally of the Pagan greatness, revering nature and seeking excellence, but in the path of progress, not of renunciation. The lyric inspirations of the poet come very differently on the ear from the “still, small voice.” They are, in fact, all one revelation; but one must be at the centre to interpret it. To that centre I have again and again been drawn, but my large natural life has been, as yet, but partially transfused with spiritual consciousness. I shun a premature narrowness, and bide my time. But I am drawn to look at natures who take a different way, because they seem to complete my being for me. They, too, tolerate me in my many phases for the same reason, probably. It pleased me to see, in one of the figures by which the Gnostics illustrated the progress of man, that Severity corresponded to Magnificence.’

* * * * *

‘In my quiet retreat, I read Xenophon, and became more acquainted with his Socrates. I had before known only the Socrates of Plato, one much more to my mind. Socrates conformed to the Greek Church, and it is evident with a sincere reverence, because it was the growth of the national mind. He thought best to stand on its platform, and to illustrate, though with keen truth, by received forms. This was his right way, as his influence was naturally private, for individuals who could in some degree respond to the teachings of his dæmon; he knew the multitude would not understand him. But it was the other way that Jesus took, preaching in the fields, and plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath.’

* * * * *

‘Is it my defect of spiritual experience, that while that weight of sagacity, which is the iron to the dart of genius, is needful to satisfy me, the undertone of another and a deeper knowledge does not please, does not command me? Even in Handel’s Messiah, I am half incredulous, half impatient, when the sadness of the second part comes to check, before it interprets, the promise of the first; and the strain, “Was ever sorrow like to his sorrow,” is not for me, as I have been, as I am. Yet Handel was worthy to speak of Christ. The great chorus, “Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead; for as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” if understood in the large sense of every man his own Saviour, and Jesus only representative of the way all must walk to accomplish our destiny, is indeed a worthy gospel.’

* * * * *

‘Ever since —— told me how his feelings had changed towards Jesus, I have wished much to write some sort of a Credo, out of my present state, but have had no time till last night. I have not satisfied myself in the least, and have written very hastily, yet, though not full enough to be true, this statement is nowhere false to me.

* * * ‘Whatever has been permitted by the law of being, must be for good, and only in time not good. We trust, and are led forward by experience. Light gives experience of outward life, faith of inward life, and then we discern, however faintly, the necessary harmony of the two. The moment we have broken through an obstruction, not accidentally, but by the aid of faith, we begin to interpret the Universe, and to apprehend why evil is permitted. Evil is obstruction; Good is accomplishment.

‘It would seem that the Divine Being designs through man to express distinctly what the other forms of nature only intimate, and that wherever man remains imbedded in nature, whether from sensuality, or because he is not yet awakened to consciousness, the purpose of the whole remains unfulfilled. Hence our displeasure when Man is not in a sense above Nature. Yet, when he is not so closely bound with all other manifestations, as duly to express their Spirit, we are also displeased. He must be at once the highest form of Nature, and conscious of the meaning she has been striving successively to unfold through those below him. Centuries pass; whole races of men are expended in the effort to produce one that shall realize this Ideal, and publish Spirit in the human form. Here and there is a degree of success. Life enough is lived through a man, to justify the great difficulties attendant on the existence of mankind. And then throughout all realms of thought vibrates the affirmation, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

‘I do not mean to lay an undue stress upon the position and office of man merely because I am of his race, and understand best the scope of his destiny. The history of the earth, the motions of the heavenly bodies, suggest already modes of being higher than ours, and which fulfil more deeply the office of interpretation. But I do suppose man’s life to be the rivet in one series of the great chain, and that all higher existences are analogous to his. Music suggests their mode of being, and, when carried up on its strong wings, we foresee how the next step in the soul’s ascension shall interpret man to the universe, as he now interprets those forms beneath himself. * *

‘The law of Spirit is identical, whether displaying itself as genius, or as piety, but its modes of expression are distinct dialects. All souls desire to become the fathers of souls, as citizens, legislators, poets, artists, sages, saints; and, so far as they are true to the law of their incorruptible essence, they are all Anointed, all Emanuel, all Messiah; but they are all brutes and devils so far as subjected to the law of corruptible existence.

‘As wherever there is a tendency a form is gradually evolved, as its Type, — so is it the law of each class and order of human thoughts to produce a form which shall be the visible representation of its aim and strivings, and stand before it as its King. This effort to produce a kingly type it was, that clothed itself with power as Brahma or Osiris, that gave laws as Confucius or Moses, that embodied music and eloquence in the Apollo. This it was that incarnated itself, at one time as Plato, at another as Michel Angelo, at another as Luther, &c. Ever seeking, it has produced Ideal after Ideal of the beauty, into which mankind is capable of being developed; and one of the highest, in some respects the very highest, of these kingly types, was the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

‘Few believe more in his history than myself, and it is very dear to me. I believe, in my own way, in the long preparation of ages for his coming, and the truth of prophecy that announced him. I see a necessity, in the character of Jesus, why Abraham should have been the founder of his nation, Moses its lawgiver, and David its king and poet. I believe in the genesis of the patriarchs, as given in the Old Testament. I believe in the prophets, — that they foreknew not only what their nation longed for, but what the development of universal Man requires, — a Redeemer, an Atoner, a Lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world. I believe that Jesus came when the time was ripe, and that he was peculiarly a messenger and Son of God. I have nothing to say in denial of the story of his birth; whatever the actual circumstances were, he was born of a Virgin, and the tale expresses a truth of the soul. I have no objection to the miracles, except where they do not happen to please one’s feelings. Why should not a spirit, so consecrate and intent, develop new laws, and make matter plastic? I can imagine him walking the waves, without any violation of my usual habits of thought. He could not remain in the tomb, they say; certainly not, — death is impossible to such a being. He remained upon earth; most true, and all who have met him since on the way, have felt their hearts burn within them. He ascended to heaven; surely, how could it be otherwise?

‘Would I could express with some depth what I feel as to religion in my very soul; it would be a clear note of calm assurance. But for the present this must suffice with regard to Christ. I am grateful here, as everywhere, when Spirit bears fruit in fulness; it attests the justice of aspiration, it kindles faith, it rebukes sloth, it enlightens resolve. But so does a beautiful infant. Christ’s life is only one modification of the universal harmony. I will not loathe sects, persuasions, systems, though I cannot abide in them one moment, for I see that by most men they are still needed. To them their banners, their tents; let them be Fire-worshippers, Platonists, Christians; let them live in the shadow of past revelations. But, oh, Father of our souls, the One, let me seek Thee! I would seek Thee in these forms, and in proportion as they reveal Thee, they teach me to go beyond themselves. I would learn from them all, looking only to Thee! But let me set no limits from the past, to my own soul, or to any soul.

‘Ages may not produce one worthy to loose the shoes of the Prophet of Nazareth; yet there will surely be another manifestation of that Word which was in the beginning. And all future manifestations will come, like Christianity, “not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil.” The very greatness of this manifestation demands a greater. As an Abraham called for a Moses, and a Moses for a David, so does Christ for another Ideal. We want a life more complete and various than that of Christ. We have had a Messiah to teach and reconcile; let us now have a Man to live out all the symbolical forms of human life, with the calm beauty of a Greek God, with the deep consciousness of a Moses, with the holy love and purity of Jesus.’

X. SELF-SOVEREIGNTY.

* * * * *

To one studying the signs of the times, it was quite instructive to watch the moods of a mind so sensitive as Margaret’s; for her delicate meter indicated in advance each coming change in the air-currents of thought. But I was chiefly interested in the processes whereby she was gaining harmony and unity. The more one studied her, the more plainly he saw that her peculiar power was the result of fresh, fervent, exhaustless, and indomitable affections. The emotive force in her, indeed, was immense in volume, and most various in tendency; and it was wonderful to observe the outward equability of one inwardly so impassioned.

This was, in fact, the first problem to be solved in gaining real knowledge of her commanding character: “How did a person, by constitution so impetuous, become so habitually serene?” In temperament Margaret seemed a Bacchante,[A] prompt for wild excitement, and fearless to tread by night the mountain forest, with song and dance of delirious mirth; yet constantly she wore the laurel in token of purification, and, with water from fresh fountains, cleansed the statue of Minerva. Stagnancy and torpor were intolerable to her free and elastic impulses; a brilliant fancy threw over each place and incident Arcadian splendor; and eager desire, with energetic purposes, filled her with the consciousness of large latent life: and yet the lower instincts were duly subordinated to the higher, and dignified self-control ordered her deportment. Somehow, according to the doctrine of the wise Jacob Boehme, the fierce, hungry fire had met in embrace the meek, cool water, and was bringing to birth the pleasant light-flame of love. The transformation, though not perfected, was fairly begun.

Partly I could see how this change had been wrought. Ill health, pain, disappointment, care, had tamed her spirits. A wide range through the romantic literature of ancient and modern times had exalted while expending her passions. In the world of imagination, she had discharged the stormful energy which would have been destructive in actual life. And in thought she had bound herself to the mast while sailing past the Sirens. Through sympathy, also, from childhood, with the tragi-comedy of many lives around her, she had gained experience of the laws and limitations of providential order. Gradually, too, she had risen to higher planes of hope, whence opened wider prospects of destiny and duty. More than all, by that attraction of opposites which a strong will is most apt to feel, she had sought, as chosen companions, persons of scrupulous reserve, of modest coolness, and severe elevation of view. Finally, she had been taught, by a discipline specially fitted to her dispositions, to trust the leadings of the Divine Spirit. The result was, that at this period Margaret had become a Mystic. Her prisoned emotions found the freedom they pined for in contemplation of nature’s exquisite harmonies, — in poetic regards of the glory that enspheres human existence, when seen as a whole from beyond the clouds, — and above all in exultant consciousness of life ever influent from the All-Living.

A few passages from, her papers will best illustrate this proneness to rapture.

‘My tendency is, I presume, rather to a great natural than to a deep religious life. But though others may be more conscientious and delicate, few have so steady a faith in Divine Love. I may be arrogant and impetuous, but I am never harsh and morbid. May there not be a mediation, rather than a conflict, between piety and genius? Greek and Jew, Italian and Saxon, are surely but leaves on one stern, at last.’

* * * * *

‘I am in danger of giving myself up to experiences till they so steep me in ideal passion that the desired goal is forgotten in the rich present. Yet I think I am learning how to use life more wisely.’

* * * * *

‘Forgive me, beautiful ones, who earlier learned the harmony of your beings, — with whom eye, voice, and hand are already true to the soul! Forgive me still some “lispings and stammerings of the passionate age.” Teach me, — me, also, — to utter my paean in its full sweetness. These long lines are radii from one centre; aid me to fill the circumference. Then each moment, each act, shall be true. The pupil has found the carbuncle,[B] but knows not yet how to use it day by day. But “though his companions wondered at the pupil, the master loved him.” He loves me, my friends. Do ye trust me. Wash the tears and black stains from the records of my life by the benignity of a true glance; make each discord harmony, by striking again the key-note; forget the imperfect interviews, burn the imperfect letters, till at last the full song bursts forth, the key-stone is given from heaven to the arch, the past is all pardoned and atoned for, and we live forever in the Now.’ * *

* * * * *

‘Henceforth I hope I shall not write letters thus full of childish feeling; for in feeling I am indeed a child, and the least of children. Soon I must return into the Intellect, for there in sight, at least, I am a man, and could write the words very calmly and in steadfast flow. But, lately, the intellect has been so subordinated to the soul, that I am not free to enter the Basilikon, and plead and hear till I am called. But let me not stay too long in this Sicilian valley, gathering my flowers, for “night cometh.”’

* * * * *

‘The other evening, while hearing the Creation, in the music of “There shoots the healing plant,” I felt what I would ever feel for suffering souls. Somewhere in nature is the Moly, the Nepenthe, desired from the earliest ages of mankind. No wonder the music dwelt so exultingly on the passage: —

“In native worth and honor clad.”

Yes; even so would I ever see man. I will wait, and never despair, through all the dull years.’

* * * * *

‘I am “too fiery.” Even so. Ceres put her foster child in the fire because she loved him. If they thought so before, will they not far more now? Yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything. Let my friends be patient and gentle, and teach me to be so. I never promised any one patience or gentleness, for those beautiful traits are not natural to me; but I would learn them. Can I not?’

* * * * *

‘Of all the books, and men, and women, that have touched me these weeks past, what has most entered my soul is the music I have heard, — the masterly expression from that violin; the triumph of the orchestra, after the exploits on the piano; Braham, in his best efforts, when he kept true to the dignity of art; the Messiah, which has been given on two successive Sundays, and the last time in a way that deeply expressed its divine life; but above all, Beethoven’s seventh symphony. What majesty! what depth! what tearful sweetness! what victory! This was truly a fire upon an altar. There are a succession of soaring passages, near the end of the third movement, which touch me most deeply. Though soaring, they hold on with a stress which almost breaks the chains of matter to the hearer. O, how refreshing, after polemics and philosophy, to soar thus on strong wings! Yes, Father, I will wander in dark ways with the crowd, since thou seest best for me to be tied down. But only in thy free ether do I know myself. When I read Beethoven’s life, I said, “I will never repine.” When I heard this symphony, I said, “I will triumph.”

* * * * *

‘To-day I have finished the life of Raphael, by Quatremere de Quincy, which has so long engaged me. It scarce goes deeper than a catalogue raisonnée, but is very complete in its way. I could make all that splendid era alive to me, and inhale the full flower of the Sanzio. Easily one soars to worship these angels of Genius. To venerate the Saints you must well nigh be one.

‘I went out upon the lonely rock which commands so delicious a panoramic view. A very mild breeze had sprung up after the extreme heat. A sunset of the melting kind was succeeded by a perfectly clear moon-rise. Here I sat, and thought of Raphael. I was drawn high up in the heaven of beauty, and the mists were dried from the white plumes of contemplation.’#/

‘Only by emotion do we know thee, Nature. To lean upon thy heart, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own; — that is knowledge, for that is love, the love of infinite beauty, of infinite love. Thought will never make us be born again.

‘My fault is that I think I feel too much. O that my friends would teach me that “simple art of not too much!” How can I expect them to bear the ceaseless eloquence of my nature?’

* * * * *

‘Often it has seemed that I have come near enough to the limits to see what they are. But suddenly arises afar the Fata Morgana, and tells of new Sicilies, of their flowery valleys and fields of golden grain. Then, as I would draw near, my little bark is shattered on the rock, and I am left on the cold wave. Yet with my island in sight I do not sink.’

* * * * *

‘I look not fairly to myself, at the present moment. If noble growths are always slow, others may ripen far worthier fruit than is permitted to my tropical heats and tornadoes. Let me clasp the cross on my breast, as I have done a thousand times before.’

     ’Let me but gather from the earth one full-grown fragrant flower;
      Within my bosom let it bloom through, its one blooming hour;
      Within my bosom let it die, and to its latest breath
      My own shall answer, “Having lived, I shrink not now from death.”
      It is this niggard halfness that turns my heart to stone;
      ’T is the cup seen, not tasted, that makes the infant moan.
      For once let me press firm my lips upon the moment’s brow,
      For once let me distinctly feel I am all happy now,
      And bliss shall seal a blessing upon that moment’s brow.’

‘I was in a state of celestial happiness, which lasted a great while. For months I was all radiant with faith, and love, and life. I began to be myself. Night and day were equally beautiful, and the lowest and highest equally holy. Before, it had seemed as if the Divine only gleamed upon me; but then it poured into and through me a tide of light. I have passed down from the rosy mountain, now; but I do not forget its pure air, nor how the storms looked as they rolled beneath my feet. I have received my assurance, and if the shadows should lie upon me for a century, they could never make me forgetful of the true hour. Patiently I bide my time.’

The last passage describes a peculiar illumination, to which Margaret often referred as the period when her earthly being culminated, and when, in the noon-tide of loving enthusiasm, she felt wholly at one with God, with Man, and the Universe. It was ever after, to her, an earnest that she was of the Elect. In a letter to one of her confidential female friends, she thus fondly looks back to this experience on the mount of transfiguration: —

‘You know how, when the leadings of my life found their interpretation, I longed to share my joy with those I prized most; for I felt that if they could but understand the past we should meet entirely. They received me, some more, some less, according to the degree of intimacy between our natures. But now I have done with the past, and again move forward. The path looks more difficult, but I am better able to bear its trials. We shall have much communion, even if not in the deepest places. I feel no need of isolation, but only of temperance in thought and speech, that the essence may not evaporate in words, but grow plenteous within. The Life will give me to my own. I am not yet so worthy to love as some others are, because my manifold nature is not yet harmonized enough to be faithful, and I begin, to see how much it was the want of a pure music in me that has made the good doubt me. Yet have I been true to the best light I had, and if I am so now much will be given.

‘During my last weeks of solitude I was very happy, and all that had troubled me became clearer. The angel was not weary of waiting for Gunhilde, till she had unravelled her mesh of thought, and seeds of mercy, of purification, were planted in the breast. Whatever the past has been, I feel that I have always been reading on and on, and that the Soul of all souls has been patient in love to mine. New assurances were given me, that if I would be faithful and humble, there was no experience that would not tell its heavenly errand. If shadows have fallen, already they give way to a fairer if more tempered light; and for the present I am so happy that the spirit kneels.

‘Life, is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope: and I take it to my breast. Amid these scenes of beauty, all that is little, foreign, unworthy, vanishes like a dream. So shall it be some time amidst the Everlasting Beauty, when true joy shall begin and never cease.’

Filled thus as Margaret was with ecstasy, she was yet more than willing, — even glad, — to bear her share in the universal sorrow. Well she knew that pain must be proportioned to the fineness and fervor of her organization; that the very keenness of her sensibility exposed her to constant disappointment or disgust; that no friend, however faithful, could meet the demands of desires so eager, of sympathies so absorbing. Contrasted with her radiant visions, how dreary looked actual existence; how galling was the friction of petty hindrances; how heavy the yoke of drudging care! Even success seemed failure, when measured by her conscious aim; and experience had brought out to consciousness excesses and defects, which humbled pride while shaming self-confidence. But suffering as she did with all the intensity of so passionate a nature, Margaret still welcomed the searching discipline. ‘It is only when Persephone returns from lower earth that she weds Dyonysos, and passes from central sadness into glowing joy,’ she writes. And again: ‘I have no belief in beautiful lives; we are born to be mutilated; and the blood must flow till in every vein its place is supplied by the Divine ichor.’ And she reiterates: ‘The method of Providence with me is evidently that of “cross-biassing,” as Herbert hath it. In a word, to her own conscience and to intimate friends she avowed, without reserve, that there was in her ‘much rude matter that needed to be spiritualized.’ Comment would but weaken the pathos of the following passages, in which so plainly appears a once wilful temper striving, with child-like faith, to obey: —

‘I have been a chosen one; the lesson of renunciation was early, fully taught, and the heart of stone quite broken through. The Great Spirit wished to leave me no refuge but itself. Convictions have been given, enough to guide me many years if I am steadfast. How deeply, how gratefully I feel this blessing, as the fabric of others’ hopes are shivering round me. Peace will not always flow thus softly in my life; but, O, our Father! how many hours has He consecrated to Himself. How often has the Spirit chosen the time, when no ray came from without, to descend upon the orphan life!’

* * * * *

‘A humbler, tenderer spirit! Yes, I long for it. But how to gain it? I see no way but prayerfully to bend myself to meet the hour. Let friends be patient with me, and pardon some faint-heartedness. The buds will shiver in the cold air when the sheaths drop. It will not be so long. The word “Patience” has been spoken; it shall be my talisman. A nobler courage will be given, with gentleness and humility. My conviction is clear that all my troubles are needed, and that one who has had so much light thrown upon the path, has no excuse for faltering steps.’

* * * * *

‘Could we command enthusiasm; had we an interest with the gods which would light up those sacred fires at will, we should be even seraphic in our influences. But life, if not a complete waste of wearisome hours, must be checkered with them; and I find that just those very times, when I feel all glowing and radiant in the happiness of receiving and giving out again the divine fluid, are preludes to hours of languor, weariness, and paltry doubt, born of —

           ”The secret soul’s mistrust
      To find her fair ethereal wings
        Weighed down by vile, degraded dust.”

‘To this, all who have chosen or been chosen to a life of thought must submit. Yet I rejoice in my heritage. Should I venture to complain? Perhaps, if I were to reckon up the hours of bodily pain, those passed in society with which I could not coalesce, those of ineffectual endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature and of art, or, worse still, to reproduce the beautiful in some way for myself, I should find they far outnumbered those of delightful sensation, of full and soothing thought, of gratified tastes and affections, and of proud hope. Yet these last, if few, how lovely, how rich in presage! None, who have known them, can in their worst estate fail to hope that they may be again upborne to higher, purer blue.’

* * * * *

‘As I was steeped in the divine tenth book of the Republic, came — — ‘s letter, in which he so insultingly retracts his engagements. I finished the book obstinately, but could get little good of it; then went to ask comfort of the descending sun in the woods and fields. What a comment it was on the disparity between my pursuits and my situation to receive such a letter while reading that book! However, I will not let life’s mean perplexities blur from my eye the page of Plato; nor, if natural tears must be dropt, murmur at a lot, which, with all its bitterness, has given time and opportunity to cherish an even passionate love for Truth and Beauty.’

* * * * *

‘Black Friday it has been, and my heart is well nigh wearied out. Shall I never be able to act and live with persons of views high as my own? or, at least, with some steadiness of feeling for me to calculate upon? Ah, me! what woes within and without; what assaults of folly; what mean distresses; and, oh, what wounds from cherished hands! Were ye the persons who should stab thus? Had I, too, the Roman right to fold my robe about me decently, and breathe the last sigh! The last! Horrible, indeed, should sobs, deep as these, be drawn to all eternity. But no; life could not hold out for more than one lease of sorrow. This anguish, however, will be wearied out, as I know by experience, alas! of how many such hours.’

* * * * *

‘I am reminded to-day of the autumn hours at Jamaica Plain, where, after arranging everything for others that they wanted of me, I found myself, at last, alone in my still home, where everything, for once, reflected my feelings. It was so still, the air seemed full of spirits. How happy I was! with what sweet and solemn happiness! All things had tended to a crisis in me, and I was in a higher state, mentally and spiritually, than I ever was before or shall be again, till death shall introduce me to a new sphere. I purposed to spend the winter in study and self-collection, and to write constantly. I thought I should thus be induced to embody in beautiful forms all that lay in my mind, and that life would ripen into genius. But a very little while these fair hopes bloomed; and, since I was checked then, I do never expect to blossom forth on earth, and all postponements come naturally. At that time it seemed as if angels left me. Yet, now, I think they still are near. Renunciation appears to be entire, and I quite content; yet, probably, ‘t is no such thing, and that work is to be done over and over again.’

* * * * *

‘Do you believe our prayers avail for one another? and that happiness is good for the soul? Pray, then, for me, that I may have a little peace, — some green and flowery spot, ‘mid which my thoughts may rest; yet not upon fallacy, but only upon something genuine. I am deeply homesick, yet where is that home? If not on earth, why should we look to heaven? I would fain truly live wherever I must abide, and bear with full energy on my lot, whatever it is. He, who alone knoweth, will affirm that. I have tried to work whole-hearted from an earnest faith. Yet my hand is often languid, and my heart is slow. I would be gone; but whither? I know not; if I cannot make this spot of ground yield the corn and roses, famine must be my lot forever and ever, surely.’

* * * * *

‘I remember how at a similar time of perplexity, when there were none to counsel, hardly one to sympathize, and when the conflicting wishes of so many whom I loved pressed the aching heart on every side, after months of groping and fruitless thought, the merest trifle precipitated the whole mass; all became clear as crystal, and I saw of what use the tedious preparation had been, by the deep content I felt in the result.’

* * * * *

‘Beethoven! Tasso! It is well to think of you! What sufferings from baseness, from coldness! How rare and momentary were the flashes of joy, of confidence and tenderness, in these noblest lives! Yet could not their genius be repressed. The Eternal Justice lives. O, Father, teach the spirit the meaning of sorrow, and light up the generous fires of love and hope and faith, without which I cannot live!’

* * * * *

‘What signifies it that Thou dost always give me to drink more deeply of the inner fountains? And why do I seek a reason for these repulsions and strange arrangements of my mortal lot, when I always gain from them a deeper love for all men, and a deeper trust in Thee? Wonderful are thy ways! But lead me the darkest and the coldest as Thou wilt.’

* * * * *

‘Please, good Genius of my life, to make me very patient, resolute, gentle, while no less ardent; and after having tried me well, please present, at the end of some thousand years or so, a sphere of congenial and consecutive labors; of heart-felt, heart-filling wishes carried out into life on the instant; of aims obviously, inevitably proportioned to my highest nature. Sometime, in God’s good time, let me live as swift and earnest as a flash of the eye. Meanwhile, let me gather force slowly, and drift along lazily, like yonder cloud, and be content to end in a few tears at last.’

* * * * *

‘To-night I lay on the sofa, and saw how the flame shot up from beneath, through the mass of coal that had been piled above. It shot up in wild beautiful jets, and then unexpectedly sank again, and all was black, unsightly and forlorn. And thus, I thought, is it with my life at present. Yet if the fire beneath persists and conquers, that black dead mass will become all radiant, life-giving, fit for the altar or the domestic hearth. Yes, and it shall be so.’

* * * * *

‘My tendency at present is to the deepest privacy. Where can I hide till I am given to myself? Yet I love the others more and more. When they are with me I must give them the best from my scrip. I see their infirmities, and would fain heal them, forgetful of my own! But am I left one moment alone, then, a poor wandering pilgrim, but no saint, I would seek the shrine, and would therein die to the world. Then if from the poor relics some miracles might be wrought, that should be for my fellows. Yet some of the saints were able to work in their generation, for they had renounced all!’

* * * * *

‘Forget, if you can, all of petulant or overstrained that may have displeased you in me, and commend me in your prayers to my best self. When, in the solitude of the spirit, comes upon you some air from the distance, a breath of aspiration, of faith, of pure tenderness, then believe that the Power which has guided me so faithfully, emboldens my thoughts to frame a prayer for you.’

* * * * *

‘Beneath all pain inflicted by Nature, be not only serene, but more; let it avail thee in prayer. Put up, at the moment of greatest suffering, a prayer; not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the Sovereign Spirit will accept thy ransom.’

* * * * *

‘Strive, strive, my soul, to be innocent; yes! beneficent. Does any man wound thee? not only forgive, but Work into thy thought intelligence of the kind of pain, that thou mayest never inflict it on another spirit. Then its work is done; it will never search thy whole nature again. O, love much, and be forgiven!’

* * * * *

‘No! we cannot leave society while one clod remains unpervaded by divine life. We cannot live and grow in consecrated earth, alone. Let us rather learn to stand up like the Holy Father, and with extended arms bless the whole world.’

* * * * *

‘It will be happiness indeed, if, on passing this first stage, we are permitted, in some degree, to alleviate the ills of those we love, — to lead them on a little way; to aid them when they call. Often it seems to me, it would be sweet to feel that I had certainly conferred one benefit. All my poor little schemes for others are apparently blighted, and now, as ever, I am referred to the Secular year for the interpretation of my moments.’

In one of Margaret’s manuscripts is found this beautiful symbol:— ‘There is a species of Cactus, from whose outer bark, if torn by an ignorant person, there exudes a poisonous liquid; but the natives, who know the plant, strike to the core, and there find a sweet, refreshing juice, that renews their strength.’ Surely the preceding extracts prove that she was learning how to draw life-giving virtue from the very heart of evil. No superficial experience of sorrow embittered her with angry despair; but through profound acceptance, she sought to imbibe, from every ill, peace, purity and gentleness.

* * * * *

The two fiery trials through which she had been made to pass, and through which she was yet to pass again and again, — obstruction to the development of her genius, and loneliness of heart, — were the very furnace needed to burn the dross from her gold, till it could fitly image the Heavenly Refiner. By inherited traits, and indiscreet treatment, self-love had early become so excessive that only severest discipline could transmute it to disinterestedness. Pity for her own misfortunes had, indeed, taught her to curb her youthful scorn for mediocrity, and filled her with considerateness and delicate sensibility. Constant experience, too, of the wonderful modes whereby her fate was shaped by overruling mercy, had chastened her love of personal sway, and her passion for a commanding career; and Margaret could humble herself, — did often humble herself, — with an all-resigning contrition, that was most touching to witness in one naturally so haughty. Of this the following letter to a valued friend gives illustration: —

‘I ought, I know, to have laid aside my own cares and griefs, been on the alert for intelligence that would gratify you, and written letters such as would have been of use and given pleasure to my wise, tender, ever faithful friend. But no; I first intruded on your happiness with my sorrowful epistles, and then, because you did not seem to understand my position, with sullen petulance I resolved to write no more. Nay, worse; I tried to harden my heart against you, and felt, “If you cannot be all, you shall be nothing.”

‘It was a bad omen that I lost the locket you gave me, which I had constantly worn. Had that been daily before my eyes, to remind me of all your worth, — of the generosity with which you, a ripe and wise character, received me to the privileges of equal friendship; of the sincerity with which you reproved and the love with which you pardoned my faults; of how much you taught me, and bore with from me, — it would have softened the flint of my heart, and I should have relaxed from my isolation.

‘How shall I apologize for feelings which I now recognize as having been so cold, so bitter and unjust? I can only say I have suffered greatly, till the tone of my spirits seems destroyed. Since I have been at leisure to realize how very ill I have been, under what constant pain and many annoyances I have kept myself upright, and how, if I have not done my work, I have learned my lesson to the end, I should be inclined to excuse myself for every fault, except this neglect and ingratitude against friends. Yet, if you can forgive, I will try to forgive myself, and I do think I shall never so deeply sin again.’

Yet, though thus frank to own to herself and to her peers her errors, Margaret cherished a trust in her powers, a confidence in her destiny, and an ideal of her being, place and influence, so lofty as to be extravagant. In the morning-hour and mountain-air of aspiration, her shadow moved before her, of gigantic size, upon the snow-white vapor.

In accordance with her earnest charge, ‘Be true as Truth to me,’ I could not but expose this propensity to self-delusion; and her answer is her best explanation and defence: —

‘I protest against your applying to me, even in your most transient thought, such an epithet as “determined exaggeration.” Exaggeration, if you will; but not determined. No; I would have all open to the light, and would let my boughs be pruned, when they grow rank and unfruitful, even if I felt the knife to the quick of my being. Very fain would I have a rational modesty, without self-distrust; and may the knowledge of my failures leaven my soul, and check its intemperance. If you saw me wholly, you would not, I think, feel as you do; for you would recognize the force, that regulates my life and tempers the ardor with an eventual calmness. You would see, too, that the more I take my flight in poetical enthusiasm, the stronger materials I bring back for my nest. Certainly I am nowise yet an angel; but neither am I an utterly weak woman, and far less a cold intellect. God is rarely afar off. Exquisite nature is all around. Life affords vicissitudes enough to try the energies of the human will. I can pray, I can act, I can learn, I can constantly immerse myself in the Divine Beauty. But I also need to love my fellow-men, and to meet the responsive glance of my spiritual kindred.’

Again, she says: —

‘I like to hear you express your sense of my defects. The word “arrogance” does not, indeed, appear to me to be just; probably because I do not understand what you mean. But in due time I doubtless shall; for so repeatedly have you used it, that it must stand for something real in my large and rich, yet irregular and unclarified nature. But though I like to hear you, as I say, and think somehow your reproof does me good, by myself, I return to my native bias, and feel as if there was plenty of room in the universe for my faults, and as if I could not spend time in thinking of them, when so many things interest me more. I have no defiance or coldness, however, as to these spiritual facts which I do not know; but I must follow my own law, and bide my time, even if, like Oedipus, I should return a criminal, blind and outcast, to ask aid from the gods. Such possibilities, I confess, give me great awe; for I have more sense than most, of the tragic depths that may open suddenly in the life. Yet, believing in God, anguish cannot be despair, nor guilt perdition. I feel sure that I have never wilfully chosen, and that my life has been docile to such truth as was shown it. In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.’

Such Egoism as this, though lacking the angel grace of unconsciousness, has a stoical grandeur that commands respect. Indeed, in all that Margaret spoke, wrote, or did, no cynic could detect the taint of meanness. Her elation came not from opium fumes of vanity, inhaled in close chambers of conceit, but from the stimulus of sunshine, fresh breezes, and swift movement upon the winged steed of poesy. Her existence was bright with romantic interest to herself. There was an amplitude and elevation in her aim, which were worthy, as she felt, of human honor and of heavenly aid; and she was buoyed up by a courageous good-will, amidst all evils, that she knew would have been recognized as heroic in the chivalric times, when “every morning brought a noble chance.” Neither was her self-regard of an engrossing temper. On the contrary, the sense of personal dignity taught her the worth of the lowliest human being, and her intense desire for harmonious conditions quickened a boundless compassion for the squalid, downcast, and drudging multitude. She aspired to live in majestic fulness of benignant and joyful activity, leaving a track of light with every footstep; and, like the radiant Iduna, bearing to man the golden apples of immortality, she would have made each meeting with her fellows rich with some boon that should never fade, but brighten in bloom forever.

This characteristic self-esteem determined the quality of Margaret’s influence, which was singularly penetrating, and most beneficent where most deeply and continuously felt. Chance acquaintance with her, like a breath from the tropics, might have prematurely burst the buds of feeling in sensitive hearts, leaving after blight and barrenness. Natures, small in compass and of fragile substance, might have been distorted and shattered by attempts to mould themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses, — whose latent law was honorable integrity, — eccentric spirits might have found encouragement for capricious license. Her morbid subjectivity, too, might, by contagion, have affected others with undue self-consciousness. And, finally, even intimate friends might have been tempted, by her flattering love, to exaggerate their own importance, until they recognized that her regard for them was but one niche in a Pantheon at whose every shrine she offered incense. But these ill effects were superficial accidents. The peculiarity of her power was to make all who were in concert with her feel the miracle of existence. She lived herself with such concentrated force in the moments, that she was always effulgent with thought and affection, — with conscience, courage, resource, decision, a penetrating and forecasting wisdom. Hence, to associates, her presence seemed to touch even common scenes and drudging cares with splendor, as when, through the scud of a rain-storm, sunbeams break from serene blue openings, crowning familiar things with sudden glory. By manifold sympathies, yet central unity, she seemed in herself to be a goodly company, and her words and deeds imparted the virtue of a collective life. So tender was her affection, that, like a guardian genius, she made her friends’ souls her own, and identified herself with their fortunes; and yet, so pure and high withal was her justice, that, in her recognition of their past success and present claims, there came a summons for fresh endeavor after the perfect. The very thought of her roused manliness to emulate the vigorous freedom, with which one was assured, that wherever placed she was that instant acting; and the mere mention of her name was an inspiration of magnanimity, and faithfulness, and truth.

‘“Sincere has been their striving; great their love,”

‘is a sufficient apology for any life,’ wrote Margaret; and how preëminently were these words descriptive of herself. Hers was indeed

 ”The equal temper of heroic hearts,
  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

This indomitable aspiration found utterance in the following verses, on

‘SUB ROSA CRUX.

 ’In times of old, as we are told,
      When men more childlike at the feet
    Of Jesus sat than now,
  A chivalry was known, more bold
  Than ours, and yet of stricter vow,
      And worship more complete.

 ’Knights of the Rosy Cross! they bore
  Its weight within the breast, but wore
    Without the sign, in glistening ruby bright.
  The gall and vinegar they drank alone,
  But to the world at large would only own
    The wine of faith, sparkling with rosy light.

 ’They knew the secret of the sacred oil,
    Which, poured upon the prophet’s head,
      Could keep him wise and pure for aye,
  Apart from all that might distract or soil;
    With this their lamps they fed,
  Which burn in their sepulchral shrines,
      Unfading night and day.

   ’The pass-word now is lost
  To that initiation full and free;
    Daily we pay the cost
  Of our slow schooling for divine degree.
    We know no means to feed an undying lamp,
    Our lights go out in every wind and damp.

   ’We wear the cross of Ebony and Gold,
  Upon a dark back-ground a form of light,
    A heavenly hope within a bosom cold,
  A starry promise in a frequent night;
    And oft the dying lamp must trim again,
    For we are conscious, thoughtful, striving men.

 ’Yet be we faithful to this present trust,
  Clasp to a heart resigned this faithful Must;
      Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold,
      Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold;
  Forget not oft to waft the prayer on high; —
  The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky.

 ’And by that lovely light all truth revealed, —
  The cherished forms, which sad distrust concealed,
      Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand,
      The kindred angels of a faithful band;
  Ruby and ebon cross then cast aside,
  No lamp more needed, for the night has died.

 ’”Be to the best thou knowest ever true,”
    Is all the creed.
  Then be thy talisman of rosy hue,
    Or fenced with thorns, that wearing, thou must bleed,
  Or, gentle pledge of love’s prophetic view,
    The faithful steps it will securely lead.

 ’Happy are all who reach that distant shore,
    And bathe in heavenly day;
  Happiest are those who high the banner bore,
    To marshal others on the way,
  Or waited for them, fainting and way-worn,
    By burthens overborne.’

[Footnote A: This sentence was written before I was aware that Margaret, as will be seen hereafter, had used the same symbol to describe Madame Sand. The first impulse, of course, when I discovered this coincidence, was to strike out the above passage; yet, on second thought, I have retained it, as indicating an actual resemblance between these two grand women. In Margaret, however, the benediction of their noble-hearted sister, Elizabeth Barrett, had already been fulfilled; for she to “woman’s claim” had ever joined

“the angel-grace Of a pure genius sanctified from blame.”]

[Footnote B: Novalis.]

NEW YORK.

JOURNALS, LETTERS, &c.

* * * * *

 ”How much, preventing God, how much. I owe
    To the defences thou hast round me set!
  Example, Custom, Fear, Occasion slow, —
    These scorned bondsmen were my parapet.
    I dare not peep over this parapet,
  To gauge with glance the roaring gulf below,
  The depths of sin to which I had descended,
  Had not these me against myself defended.”

 ”Di tè, finor, chiesto non hai severa
  Ragione a tè; di sua virtù non cade
  Sospetto in cor conscio a se stesso.”

ALFIERI.

 ”He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend;
  Eternity mourns that. ’Tis an ill cure
  For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
  Where sorrow’s held intrusive, and turned out,
  There wisdom, will not enter, nor true power,
  Nor aught that dignifies humanity.”

TAYLOR.

 ”That time of year thou may’st in me behold,
    When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
    Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
  In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
    As after sunset fadeth in the west;
  Which by and by black night doth take away, —
    Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
  In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
    That on the ashes of his youth doth lie;
  As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
    Consumed with that which it was nourished by.”

SHAKSPEARE. [Sonnet lxxiii.]

 ”Aber zufrieden mit stillerem Ruhme,
  Brechen die Frauen des Augenblick’s Blume,
  Nähren sie sorgsam mit liebendem Fleiss,
  Freier in ihrem gebundenen Wirken,
  Reicher als er in des Wissens Bezirken
  Und in der Dichtung unendlichem Kreiz.”

SCHILLER.

 ”Not like to like, but like in difference;
  Yet in the long years liker must they grow, —
  The man be more of woman, she of man;
  He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
  Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
  She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
  More as the double-natured poet each;
  Till at the last she set herself to man,
  Like perfect music unto noble words.”

TENNYSON.

VII. NEW YORK

* * * * *

LEAVING HOME.

Incessant exertion in teaching and writing, added to pecuniary anxieties and domestic cares, had so exhausted Margaret’s energy, in 1844, that she felt a craving for fresh interests, and resolved to seek an entire change of scene amid freer fields of action.

‘The tax on my mind is such,’ she writes,

‘and I am so unwell, that I can scarcely keep up the spring of my spirits, and sometimes fear that I cannot go through with the engagements of the winter. But I have never stopped yet in fulfilling what I have undertaken, and hope I shall not be compelled to now. How farcical seems the preparation needed to gain a few moments’ life; yet just so the plant works all the year round for a few days’ flower.’

But in brighter mood she says, again: —

‘I congratulate myself that I persisted, against every persuasion, in doing all I could last winter; for now I am and shall be free from debt, and I look on the position of debtor with a dread worthy of some respectable Dutch burgomaster. My little plans for others, too, have succeeded; our small household is well arranged, and all goes smoothly as a wheel turns round. Mother, moreover, has learned not to be over-anxious when I suffer, so that I am not obliged to suppress my feelings when it is best to yield to them. Thus, having more calmness, I feel often that a sweet serenity is breathed through every trifling duty. I am truly grateful for being enabled to fulfil obligations which to some might seem humble, but which to me are sacred.’

And in mid-summer comes this pleasant picture: —

‘Every day, I rose and attended to the many little calls which are always on me, and which have been more of late. Then, about eleven, I would sit down to write, at my window, close to which is the apple-tree, lately full of blossoms, and now of yellow birds. Opposite me was Del Sarto’s Madonna; behind me Silenus, holding in his arms the infant Pan. I felt very content with my pen, my daily bouquet, and my yellow birds. About five I would go out and walk till dark; then would arrive my proofs, like crabbed old guardians, coming to tea every night. So passed each day. The 23d of May, my birth-day, about one o’clock, I wrote the last line of my little book;[A] then I went to Mount Auburn, and walked gently among the graves.’

As the brothers had now left college, and had entered or were entering upon professional and commercial life, while the sister was married, and the mother felt calls to visit in turn her scattered children, it was determined to break up the “Home.” ‘As a family,’ Margaret writes,

‘we are henceforth to be parted. But though for months I had been preparing for this separation, the last moments were very sad. Such tears are childish tears, I know, and belie a deeper wisdom. It is foolish in me to be so anxious about my family. As I went along, it seemed as if all I did was for God’s sake; but if it had been, could I now thus fear? My relations to them are altogether fair, so far as they go. As to their being no more to me than others of my kind, there is surely a mystic thrill betwixt children of one mother, which can never cease to be felt till the soul is quite born anew. The earthly family is the scaffold whereby we build the spiritual one. The glimpses we here obtain of what such relations should be are to me an earnest that the family is of Divine Order, and not a mere school of preparation. And in the state of perfect being which we call Heaven, I am assured that family ties will attain to that glorified beauty of harmonious adaptation, which stellar groups in the pure blue typify.’

Margaret’s admirable fidelity, as daughter and sister, — amidst her incessant literary pursuits, and her far-reaching friendships, — can be justly appreciated by those only who were in her confidence; but from the following slight sketches generous hearts can readily infer what was the quality of her home-affections.

‘Mother writes from Canton that my dear old grandmother is dead. I regret that you never saw her. She was a picture of primitive piety, as she sat holding the “Saint’s Rest” in her hand, with her bowed, trembling figure, and her emphatic nods, and her sweet blue eyes. They were bright to the last, though she was ninety. It is a great loss to mother, who felt a large place warmed in her heart by the fond and grateful love of this aged parent.’

‘We cannot be sufficiently grateful for our mother, — so so fair a blossom of the white amaranth; truly to us a mother in this, that we can venerate her piety. Our relations to her have known no jar. Nothing vulgar has sullied them; and in this respect life has been truly domesticated. Indeed, when I compare my lot with others, it seems to have had a more than usual likeness to home; for relations have been as noble as sincerity could make them, and there has been a frequent breath of refined affection, with its sweet courtesies. Mother thanks God in her prayers for “all the acts of mutual love which have been permitted;” and looking back, I see that these have really been many. I do not recognize this, as the days pass, for to my desires life would be such a flower-chain of symbols, that what is done seems very scanty, and the thread shows too much.

‘She has just brought me a little bouquet. Her flowers have suffered greatly by my neglect, when I would be engrossed by other things in her absences. But, not to be disgusted or deterred, whenever she can glean one pretty enough, she brings it to me. Here is the bouquet, — a very delicate rose, with its half-blown bud, heliotrope, geranium, lady-pea, heart’s-ease; all sweet-scented flowers! Moved by their beauty, I wrote a short note, to which this is the reply. Just like herself![B]

‘“I should not love my flowers if they did not put forth all the strength they have, in gratitude for your preserving care, last winter, and your wasted feelings over the unavoidable effects of the frost, that came so unexpectedly to nip their budding beauties. I appreciate all you have done, knowing at what cost any plant must be nourished by one who sows in fields more precious than those opened, in early life, to my culture. One must have grown up with flowers, and found joy and sweetness in them, amidst disagreeable occupations, to take delight in their whole existence as I do. They have long had power to bring me into harmony with the Creator, and to soothe almost any irritation. Therefore I understand your love for these beautiful things, and it gives me real pleasure to procure them for you.

‘“You have done everything that the most affectionate and loving daughter could, under all circumstances. My faith in your generous desire to increase my happiness is founded on the knowledge I have gained of your disposition, through your whole life. I should ask your sympathy and aid, whenever it could be available, knowing that you would give it first to me. Waste no thought on neglected duties. I know of none. Let us pursue our appointed paths, aiding each other in rough places; and if I live to need the being led by the hand, I always feel that you will perform this office wisely and tenderly. We shall ever have perfect peace between us. Yours, in all love.”’

Margaret adds: —

‘It has been, and still is, hard for me to give up the thought of serenity, and freedom from toil and care, for mother, in the evening of a day which has been all one work of disinterested love. But I am now confident that she will learn from every trial its lesson; and if I cannot be her protector, I can be at least her counsellor and soother.’

From the less private parts of Margaret’s correspondence with the younger members of the family, some passages may be selected, as attesting her quick and penetrating sympathy, her strict truth, and influential wisdom. They may be fitly prefaced by these few but emphatic words from a letter of one of her brothers: —

“I was much impressed, during my childhood, at Groton, with an incident that first disclosed to me the tenderness of Margaret’s character. I had always viewed her as a being of different nature from myself, to whose altitudes of intellectual life I had no thought of ascending. She had been absent during the winter, and on her return asked me for some account of my experiences. Supposing that she could not enter into such insignificant details, I was not frank or warm in my confidence, though I gave no reason for my reserve; and the matter had passed from my mind, when our mother told me that Margaret had shed tears, because I seemed to heed so little her sisterly sympathy. ‘Tears from one so learned,’ thought I, ‘for the sake of one so inferior!’ Afterwards, my heart opened to her, as to no earthly friend.

“The characteristic trait of Margaret, to which all her talents and acquirements were subordinate, was sympathy, — universal sympathy. She had that large intelligence and magnanimity which enabled her to comprehend the struggles and triumphs of every form of character. Loving all about her, whether rich or poor, rude or cultivated, as equally formed after a Divine Original, with an equal birth-right of immortal growth, she regarded rather their aspirations than their accomplishments. And this was the source of her marvellous influence. Those who had never thought of their own destiny, nor put faith in their own faculties, found in her society not so much a display of her gifts, as surprising discoveries of their own. She revealed to them the truth, that all can be noble by fidelity to the highest self. She appreciated, with delicate tenderness, each one’s peculiar trials, and, while never attempting to make the unhappy feel that their miseries were unreal, she pointed out the compensations of their lot, and taught them how to live above misfortune. She had consolation and advice for every one in trouble, and wrote long letters to many friends, at the expense not only of precious time, but of physical pain.

“When now, with the experience of a man, I look back upon her wise guardianship over our childhood, her indefatigable labors for our education, her constant supervision in our family affairs, her minute instructions as to the management of multifarious details, her painful conscientiousness in every duty; and then reflect on her native inaptitude and even disgust for practical affairs, on her sacrifice, — in the very flower of her genius, — of her favorite pursuits, on her incessant drudgery and waste of health, on her patient bearing of burdens, and courageous conflict with difficult circumstances, her character stands before me as heroic.”

It was to this brother that Margaret wrote as follows: —

‘It is a great pleasure to me to give you this book; both that I have a brother whom I think worthy to value it, and that I can give him something worthy to be valued more and more through all his life. Whatever height we may attain in knowledge, whatever facility in the expression of thoughts, will only enable us to do more justice to what is drawn from so deep a source of faith and intellect, and arrayed, oftentimes, in the fairest hues of nature. Yet it may not be well for a young mind to dwell too near one tuned to so high a pitch as this writer, lest, by trying to come into concord with him, the natural tones be overstrained, and the strings weakened by untimely pressure. Do not attempt, therefore, to read this book through, but keep it with you, and when the spirit is fresh and earnest turn to it. It is full of the tide-marks of great thoughts, but these can be understood by one only who has gained, by experience, some knowledge of these tides. The ancient sages knew how to greet a brother who had consecrated his life to thought, and was never disturbed from his purpose by a lower aim. But it is only to those perfected in purity that Pythagoras can show a golden thigh.

‘One word as to your late readings. They came in a timely way to admonish you, amidst mere disciplines, as to the future uses of such disciplines. But systems of philosophy are mere pictures to him, who has not yet learned how to systematize. From an inward opening of your nature these knowledges must begin to be evolved, ere you can apprehend aught beyond their beauty, as revealed in the mind of another. Study in a reverent and patient spirit, blessing the day that leads you the least step onward. Do not ride hobbies. Do not hasten to conclusions. Be not coldly sceptical towards any thinker, neither credulous of his views. A man, whose mind is full of error, may give us the genial sense of truth, as a tropical sun, while it rears crocodiles, yet ripens the wine of the palm-tree.

‘To turn again to my Ancients: while they believed in self-reliance with a force little known in our day, they dreaded no pains of initiation, but fitted themselves for intelligent recognition of the truths on which our being is based, by slow gradations of travel, study, speech, silence, bravery, and patience. That so it may be with you, dear —— , hopes your sister and friend.’

A few extracts from family letters written at different times, and under various conditions, may be added.

‘I read with great interest the papers you left with me. The picture and the emotions suggested are genuine. The youthful figure, no doubt, stands portress at the gate of Infinite Beauty; yet I would say to one I loved as I do you, do not waste these emotions, nor the occasions which excite them. There is danger of prodigality, — of lavishing the best treasures of the breast on objects that cannot be the permanent ones. It is true, that whatever thought is awakened in the mind becomes truly ours; but it is a great happiness to owe these influences to a cause so proportioned to our strength as to grow with it. I say this merely because I fear that the virginity of heart which I believe essential to feeling a real love, in all its force and purity, may be endangered by too careless excursions into the realms of fancy.’

* * * * *

‘It is told us, we should pray, “lead us not into temptation;” and I agree. Yet I think it cannot be, that, with a good disposition, and the means you have had to form your mind and discern a higher standard, your conduct or happiness can be so dependent on circumstances, as you seem to think. I never advised your taking a course which would blunt your finer powers and I do not believe that winning the means of pecuniary independence need do so. I have not found that it does, in my own case, placed at much greater disadvantage than you are. I have never considered, either, that there was any misfortune in your lot. Health, good abilities, and a well-placed youth, form a union of advantages possessed by few, and which leaves you little excuse for fault or failure. And so to your better genius and the instruction of the One Wise, I commend you.’

* * * * *

‘It gave me great pleasure to get your last letter, for these little impromptu effusions are the genuine letters. I rejoice that man and nature seem harmonious to you, and that the heart beats in unison with the voices of Spring. May all that is manly, sincere, and pure, in your wishes, be realized! Obliged to live myself without the sanctuary of the central relations, yet feeling I must still not despair, nor fail to profit by the precious gifts of life, while “leaning upon our Father’s hand,” I still rejoice, if any one can, in the true temper, and with well-founded hopes, secure a greater completeness of earthly existence. This fortune is as likely to be yours, as any one’s I know. It seems to me dangerous, however, to meddle with the future. I never lay my hand on it to grasp it with impunity.’

* * * * *

‘Of late I have often thought of you with strong yearnings of affection and desire to see you. It would seem to me, also, that I had not devoted myself to you enough, if I were not conscious that by any more attention to the absent than I have paid, I should have missed the needed instructions from the present. And I feel that any bond of true value will endure necessary neglect.’

* * * * *

‘There is almost too much of bitter mixed in the cup of life. You say religion is a mere sentiment with you, and that if you are disappointed in your first, your very first hopes and plans, you do not know whether you shall be able to act well. I do not myself see how a reflecting soul can endure the passage through life, except by confidence in a Power that must at last order all things right, and the resolution that it shall not be our own fault if we are not happy, — that we will resolutely deserve to be happy. There are many bright glimpses in life, many still hours; much worthy toil, some deep and noble joys; but, then, there are so many, and such long, intervals, when we are kept from all we want, and must perish but for such thoughts.’

* * * * *

‘You need not fear, dear —— , my doing anything to chill you. I am only too glad of the pure happiness you so sweetly describe. I well understand what you say of its invigorating you for every enterprise. I was always sure it would be so with me, — that resigned, I could do well, but happy I could do excellently. Happiness must, with the well-born, expand the generous affections towards all men, and invigorate one to deserve what the gods have given.’

Margaret’s charities and courtesies were not limited to her kindred. She fell, at once, into agreeable relations with her domestics, became their confidant, teacher, and helper, studied their characters, consulted their convenience, warned them of their dangers or weaknesses, and rejoiced to gratify their worthy tastes; and, in return, no lady could receive, from servants, more punctual or hearty attendance. She knew how to command and how to persuade, and her sympathy was perfect. They felt the power of her mind, her hardy directness, prompt judgment, decision and fertility of resource, and liked to aid one who knew so well her own wants. ‘Around my path,’ she writes,

‘how much humble love continually flows. These every-day and lowly friends never forget my wishes, never censure my whims, make no demands on me, and load me with gifts and uncomplaining service. Though sometimes forgetful of their claims, I try to make it up when we do meet, and I trust give little pain as I pass along this world.’

Even in extreme cases of debasement she found more to admire than to contemn, and won the confidence of the fallen by manifesting her real respect. “There was in my family,” writes a friend, “a very handsome young girl, who had been vicious in her habits, and so enamored of one of her lovers, that when he deserted her, she attempted to drown herself. She was rescued, and some good people were eager to reform her life. While she was engaged in housework for us, Margaret saw her, and one day asked —— if she could not help her. —— replied: ‘No! for should I begin to talk with her, I should show my consciousness of her history so much as to be painful.’ Margaret was very indignant at this weakness. Said she,

‘This girl is taken away, you know, from all her objects of interest, and must feel her life vacant and dreary. Her mind should be employed; she should be made to feel her powers.’

It was plain that if Margaret had been near her, she would have devoted herself at once to her education and reestablishment.”

About the time of breaking up their home, Margaret thus expressed, to one of her brothers, her hopes and plans.

‘You wish, dear —— , that I was not obliged to toil and spin, but could live, for a while, like the lilies. I wish so, too, for life has fatigued me, my strength is little, and the present state of my mind demands repose and refreshment, that it may ripen some fruit worthy of the long and deep experiences through which I have passed. I do not regret that I have shared the labors and cares of the suffering million, and have acquired a feeling sense of the conditions under which the Divine has appointed the development of the human. Yet, if our family affairs could now be so arranged, that I might be tolerably tranquil for the next six or eight years, I should go out of life better satisfied with the page I have turned in it, than I shall if I must still toil on. A noble career is yet before me, if I can be unimpeded by cares. I have given almost all my young energies to personal relations; but, at present, I feel inclined to impel the general stream of thought. Let my nearest friends also wish that I should now take share in more public life.’

[Footnote A: Summer on the Lakes.]

[Footnote B: The editor must offer as excuse for printing, without permission asked, this note, found carefully preserved among Margaret’s papers, that he knew no other way of so truly indicating the relation between mother and daughter. This lily is eloquent of the valley where it grew. W.H.C.]

THE HIGHLANDS.

Seeking thus, at once, expansion and rest in new employments, Margaret determined, in the autumn of 1844, to accept a liberal offer of Messrs. Greeley and McElrath, to become a constant contributor to the New York Tribune. But before entering upon her new duties, she found relaxation, for a few weeks, amid the grand scenery of the Hudson. In October, she writes from Fishkill Landing: —

‘Can I find words to tell you how I enjoy being here, encircled by the majestic beauty of these mountains? I felt regret, indeed, in bidding farewell to Boston, so many marks of affection were shown me at the last, and so many friendships, true if imperfect, were left behind. But now I am glad to feel enfranchized in the society of Nature. I have a well-ordered, quiet house to dwell in, with nobody’s humors to consult but my own. From my windows I see over the tops of variegated trees the river, with its purple heights beyond, and a few moments’ walk brings me to the lovely shore, where sails are gliding continually by, and the huge steamers sweep past with echoing tread, and a train of waves, whose rush relieves the monotone of the ripples. In the country behind us are mountain-paths, and lonely glens, with gurgling streams, and many-voiced water-falls. And over all are spread the gorgeous hues of autumn.’

And again: —

‘“From the brain of the purple mountain” flows forth cheer to my somewhat weary mind. I feel refreshed amid these bolder shapes of nature. Mere gentle and winning landscapes are not enough. How I wish my birth had been cast among the sources of the streams, where the voice of hidden torrents is heard by night, and the eagle soars, and the thunder resounds in prolonged peals, and wide blue shadows fall like brooding wings across the valleys! Amid such scenes, I expand and feel at home. All the fine days I spend among the mountain passes, along the mountain brooks, or beside the stately river. I enjoy just the tranquil happiness I need in communion with this fair grandeur.’

And, again: —

‘The boldness, sweetness, and variety here, are just what I like. I could pass the autumn in watching the exquisite changes of light and shade on the heights across the river. How idle to pretend that one could live and write as well amid fallow flat fields! This majesty, this calm splendor, could not but exhilarate the mind, and make it nobly free and plastic.’

These few weeks among the Highlands, — spent mostly in the open air, under October’s golden sunshine, the slumberous softness of the Indian summer, or the brilliant, breezy skies of November, — were an important era for Margaret. She had —

                     ”lost the dream of Doing
              And the other dream of Done;
                The first spring in the pursuing,
              The first pride in the Begun,
  First recoil from incompleteness in the face of what is won.”

But she was striving, also, to use her own words, ‘to be patient to the very depths of the heart, to expect no hasty realizations, not to make her own plan her law of life, but to learn the law and plan of God.’ She adds, however: —

‘What heaven it must be to have the happy sense of accomplishing something, and to feel the glow of action without exhausted weariness! Surely the race would have worn itself out by corrosion, if men in all ages had suffered, as we now do, from the consciousness of an unattained Ideal.’

Extracts from journals will best reveal her state of mind.

‘I have a dim consciousness of what the terrible experiences must be by which the free poetic element is harmonized with the spirit of religion. In their essence and their end these are one, but rarely in actual existence. I would keep what was pure and noble in my old native freedom, with that consciousness of falling below the best convictions which now binds me to the basest of mankind, and find some new truth that shall reconcile and unite them. Once it seemed to me, that my heart was so capable of goodness, my mind of clearness, that all should acknowledge and claim me as a friend. But now I see that these impulses were prophetic of a yet distant period. The “intensity” of passion, which so often unfits me for life, or, rather, for life here, is to be moderated, not into dulness or languor, but a gentler, steadier energy.’

‘The stateliest, strongest vessel must sometimes be brought into port to rent. If she will not submit to be fastened to the dock, stripped of her rigging, and scrutinized by unwashed artificers, she may spring a leak when riding most proudly on the subject wave. Norway fir nor English oak can resist forever the insidious assaults of the seemingly conquered ocean. The man who clears the barnacles from the keel is more essential than he who hoists the pennant on the lofty mast.’

* * * * *

‘A week of more suffering than I have had for a long time, — from Sunday to Sunday, — headache night and day! And not only there has been no respite, but it has been fixed in one spot — between the eyebrows! — what does that promise? — till it grew real torture. Then it has been depressing to be able to do so little, when there was so much I had at heart to do. It seems that the black and white guardians, depicted on the Etrurian monuments, and in many a legend, are always fighting for my life. Whenever I have any cherished purpose, either outward obstacles swarm around, which the hand that would be drawing beautiful lines must be always busy in brushing away, or comes this great vulture, and fastens his iron talons on the brain.

‘But at such times the soul rises up, like some fair child in whom sleep has been mistaken for death, a living flower in the dark tomb. He casts aside his shrouds and bands, rosy and fresh from the long trance, undismayed, not seeing how to get out, yet sure there is a way.

‘I think the black jailer laughs now, hoping that while I want to show that Woman can have the free, full action of intellect, he will prove in my own self that she has not physical force to bear it. Indeed, I am too poor an example, and do wish I was bodily strong and fair. Yet, I will not be turned from the deeper convictions.’

‘Driven from home to home, as a Renouncer, I gain the poetry of each. Keys of gold, silver, iron, lead, are in my casket. Though no one loves me as I would be loved, I yet love many well enough to see into their eventual beauty. Meanwhile, I have no fetters, and when one perceives how others are bound in false relations, this surely should be regarded as a privilege. And so varied have been my sympathies, that this isolation will not, I trust, make me cold, ignorant, nor partial. My history presents much superficial, temporary tragedy. The Woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture; the Man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled. Yet the time will come, when, from the union of this tragic king and queen, shall be born a radiant sovereign self.’

* * * * *

‘I have quite a desire to try my powers in a narrative poem; but my head teems with plans, of which there will be time for very few only to take form. Milton, it is said, made for himself a list of a hundred subjects for dramas, and the recorder of the fact seems to think this many. I think it very few, so filled is life with innumerable themes.’

* * * * *

‘Sunday Evening. — I have employed some hours of the day, with great satisfaction, in copying the Poet’s Dreams from the Pentameron of Landor. I do not often have time for such slow, pleasing labor. I have thus imprinted the words in my mind, so that they will often recur in their original beauty.

‘I have added three sonnets of Petrarca, all written after the death of Laura. They are among his noblest, all pertinent to the subject, and giving three aspects of that one mood. The last lines of the last sonnet are a fit motto for Boccaccio’s dream.

‘In copying both together, I find the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary.

   ’How fine it is to see the terms “onesto,” “gentile,” used in
    their original sense and force.

            ’Soft, solemn day!
      Where earth and heaven together seem to meet,
        I have been blest to greet
      From human thought a kindred sway;
        In thought these stood
        So near the simple Good,
      That what we nobleness and honor call,
      They viewed as honesty, the common dower of all.’

Margaret was reading, in these weeks, the Four Books of Confucius,
the Desatir, some of Taylor’s translations from the Greek, a work on
Scandinavian Mythology, Moehler’s Symbolism, Fourier’s Noveau Monde
Industriel, and Landor’s Pentameron, — but she says, in her journal,

‘No book is good enough to read in the open air, among these mountains; even the best seem partial, civic, limiting, instead of being, as man’s voice should be, a tone higher than nature’s.’

And again: —

‘This morning came — — ‘s letter, announcing Sterling’s death: —

‘“Weep for Dedalus all that is fairest.”

‘The news was very sad: Sterling did so earnestly wish to do a man’s work, and had done so small a portion of his own. This made me feel how fast my years are flitting by, and nothing done. Yet these few beautiful days of leisure I cannot resolve to give at all to work. I want absolute rest, to let the mind lie fallow, to keep my whole nature open to the influx of truth.’

At this very time, however, she was longing to write with full freedom and power. ‘Formerly,’ she says,

‘the pen did not seem to me an instrument capable of expressing the spirit of a life like mine. An enchanter’s mirror, on which, with a word, could be made to rise all apparitions of the universe, grouped in new relations; a magic ring, that could transport the wearer, himself invisible, into each region of grandeur or beauty; a divining-rod, to tell where lie the secret fountains of refreshment; a wand, to invoke elemental spirits; — only such as these seemed fit to embody one’s thought with sufficient swiftness and force. In earlier years I aspired to wield the sceptre or the lyre; for I loved with wise design and irresistible command to mould many to one purpose, and it seemed all that man could desire to breathe in music and speak in words, the harmonies of the universe. But the golden lyre was not given to my hand, and I am but the prophecy of a poet. Let me use, then, the slow pen. I will make no formal vow to the long-scorned Muse; I assume no garland; I dare not even dedicate myself as a novice; I can promise neither patience nor energy: — but I will court excellence, so far as an humble heart and open eye can merit it, and, if I may gradually grow to some degree of worthiness in this mode of expression, I shall be grateful.’

WOMAN.

It was on “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” that Margaret was now testing her power as a writer. ‘I have finished the pamphlet,’ she writes, ‘though the last day it kept spinning out beneath my hand. After taking a long walk, early one most exhilarating morning, I sat down to work, and did not give it the last stroke till near nine in the evening. Then I felt a delightful glow, as if I had put a good deal of my true life in it, and as if, should I go away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on the earth.’

A few extracts from her manuscripts upon this subject may be of interest, as indicating the spirit and aim with which she wrote: —

‘To those of us who hate emphasis and exaggeration, who believe that whatever is good of its kind is good, who shrink from love of excitement and love of sway, who, while ready for duties of many kinds, dislike pledges and bonds to any, — this talk about “Woman’s Sphere,” “Woman’s Mission,” and all such phrases as mark the present consciousness of an impending transition from old conventions to greater freedom, are most repulsive. And it demands some valor to lift one’s head amidst the shower of public squibs, private sneers, anger, scorn, derision, called out by the demand that women should be put on a par with their brethren, legally and politically; that they should hold property not by permission but by right, and that they should take an active part in all great movements. But though, with Mignon, we are prompted to characterize heaven as the place where

“Sie fragen nicht nach Mann nie Weib,”

yet it is plain that we must face this agitation; and beyond the dull clouds overhead hangs in the horizon Venus, as morning-star, no less fair, though of more melting beauty, than the glorious Jupiter, who shares with her the watch.

* * * * *

‘The full, free expression of feeling must be rare, for this book of Bettina Brentano’s to produce such an effect. Men who have lived in the society of women all their days, seem never before to have dreamed of their nature; they are filled with wonderment and delight at these revelations, and because they see the woman, fancy her a genius. But in truth her inspiration is nowise extraordinary; and I have letters from various friends, lying unnoticed in my portfolio, which are quite as beautiful. For one, I think that these veins of gold should pass in secret through the earth, inaccessible to all who will not take the trouble to mine for them. I do not like Bettina for publishing her heart, and am ready to repeat to her Serlo’s reproof to Aurelia.’

* * * * *

‘How terrible must be the tragedy of a woman who awakes to find that she has given herself wholly to a person for whom she is not eternally fitted! I cannot look on marriage as on the other experiments of life: it is the one grand type that should be kept forever sacred. There are two kinds of love experienced by high and rich souls. The first seeks, according to Plato’s myth, another half, as being not entire in itself, but needing a kindred nature to unlock its secret chambers of emotion, and to act with quickening influence on all its powers, by full harmony of senses, affections, intellect, will; the second is purely ideal, beholding in its object divine perfection, and delighting in it only in degree as it symbolizes the essential good. But why is not this love steadily directed to the Central Spirit, since in no form, however suggestive in beauty, can God be fully revealed? Love’s delusion is owing to one of man’s most godlike qualities, — the earnestness with which he would concentrate his whole being, and thus experience the Now of the I Am. Yet the noblest are not long deluded; they love really the Infinite Beauty, though they may still keep before them a human form, as the Isis, who promises hereafter a seat at the golden tables. How high is Michel Angelo’s love, for instance, compared with Petrarch’s! Petrarch longs, languishes; and it is only after the death of Laura that his muse puts on celestial plumage. But Michel always soars; his love is a stairway to the heavens.

* * * * *

‘Might not we women do something in regard to this Texas Annexation project? I have never felt that I had any call to take part in public affairs before; but this is a great moral question, and we have an obvious right to express our convictions. I should like to convene meetings of the women everywhere, and take our stand.

* * * * *

‘Had Christendom but been true to its standard, while accommodating its modes of operation to the calls of successive times, woman would now have not only equal power with man, — for of that omnipotent nature will never permit her to be defrauded, — but a chartered power, too fully recognized to be abused. Indeed, all that is wanting is, that man should prove his own freedom by making her free. Let him abandon conventional restriction, as a vestige of that Oriental barbarity which confined woman to a seraglio. Let him trust her entirely, and give her every privilege already acquired for himself, — elective franchise, tenure of property, liberty to speak in public assemblies, &c.

‘Nature has pointed out her ordinary sphere by the circumstances of her physical existence. She cannot wander far. If here and there the gods send their missives through women, as through men, let them speak without remonstrance. In no age have men been able wholly to hinder them. A Deborah must always be a spiritual mother in Israel; a Corinna may be excluded from the Olympic games, yet all men will hear her song, and a Pindar sit at her feet. It is man’s fault that there ever were Aspasias and Ninons. These exquisite forms were intended for the shrines of virtue.

‘Neither need men fear to lose their domestic deities. Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it. Men should deserve her love as an inheritance, rather than seize and guard it like a prey. Were they noble, they would strive rather not to be loved too much, and to turn her from idolatry to the true, the only Love. Then, children of one Father, they could not err, nor misconceive one another.

‘Society is now so complex, that it is no longer possible to educate woman merely as woman; the tasks which come to her hand are so various, and so large a proportion of women are thrown entirely upon their own resources. I admit that this is not their state of perfect development; but it seems as if heaven, having so long issued its edict in poetry and religion, without securing intelligent obedience, now commanded the world in prose, to take a high and rational view. The lesson reads to me thus: —

‘Sex, like rank, wealth, beauty, or talent, is but an accident of birth. As you would not educate a soul to be an aristocrat, so do not to be a woman. A general regard to her usual sphere is dictated in the economy of nature. You need never enforce these provisions rigorously. Achilles had long plied the distaff as a princess, yet, at first sight of a sword, he seized it. So with woman, one hour of love would teach her more of her proper relations, than all your formulas and conventions. Express your views, men, of what you seek in woman: thus best do you give them laws. Learn, women, what you should demand of men: thus only can they become themselves. Turn both from the contemplation of what is merely phenomenal in your existence, to your permanent life as souls. Man, do not prescribe how the Divine shall display itself in woman. Woman, do not expect to see all of God in man. Fellow-pilgrims and helpmeets are ye, Apollo and Diana, twins of one heavenly birth, both beneficent, and both armed. Man, fear not to yield to woman’s hand both the quiver and the lyre; for if her urn be filled with light, she will use both to the glory of God. There is but one doctrine for ye both, and that is the doctrine of the SOUL.

Thus, in communion with the serene loveliness of mother-earth, and inspired with memories of Isis and Ceres, of Minerva and Freia, and all the commanding forms beneath which earlier ages symbolized their sense of the Divine Spirit in woman, Margaret cherished visions of the future, and responded with full heart to the poet’s prophecy: —

 ”Then comes the statelier Eden back to men;
  Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm;
  Then springs the crowning race of human-kind.”

It was but after the usual order of our discordant life, — where Purgatory lies so nigh to Paradise, — that she should thence be summoned to pass a Sunday with the prisoners at Sing-Sing. This was the period when, in fulfilment of the sagacious and humane counsels of Judge Edmonds, a system of kind discipline, combined with education, was in practice at that penitentiary, and when the female department was under the matronly charge of Mrs. E.W. Farnum, aided by Mrs. Johnson, Miss Bruce, and other ladies, who all united sisterly sympathy with energetic firmness. Margaret thus describes her impressions: —

‘We arrived on Saturday evening, in such resplendent moonlight, that we might have mistaken the prison for a palace, had we not known but too well what those massive walls contained.

‘Sunday morning we attended service in the chapel of the male convicts. They listened with earnest attention, and many were moved to tears. I never felt such sympathy with an audience as when, at the words “Men and brethren,” that sea of faces, marked with the scars of every ill, were upturned, and the shell of brutality burst apart at the touch of love. I knew that at least heavenly truth would not be kept out by self-complacence and dependence on good appearances.

‘After twelve at noon, all are confined in their cells, that the keepers may have rest from their weekly fatigue. But I was allowed to have some of the women out to talk with, and the interview was very pleasant. They showed the natural aptitude of the sex for refinement. These women were among the so-called worst, and all from the lowest haunts of vice. Yet nothing could have been more decorous than their conduct, while it was also frank; and they showed a sensibility and sense of propriety, which would not have disgraced any society. All passed, indeed, much as in one of my Boston classes. I told them I was writing about Woman; and, as my path had been a favored one, I wanted to gain information from those who had been tempted and afflicted. They seemed to reply in the same spirit in which I asked. Several, however, expressed a wish to see me alone, as they could then say all, which they could not bear to before one another. I shall go there again, and take time for this. It is very gratifying to see the influence these few months of gentle and intelligent treatment have had upon these women; indeed, it is wonderful.’

So much were her sympathies awakened by this visit, that she rejoiced in the opportunity, soon after offered, of passing Christmas with these outcasts, and gladly consented to address the women in their chapel. “There was,” says one present, “a most touching tenderness, blended with dignity, in her air and tone, as, seated in the desk, she looked round upon her fallen sisters, and begun: ‘To me the pleasant office has been given, of ‘wishing you a happy Christmas.’ A simultaneous movement of obeisance rippled over the audience, with a murmured ‘Thank you;’ and a smile was spread upon those sad countenances, like sunrise sparkling on a pool.” A few words from this discourse, — which was extemporaneous, but of which she afterward made an imperfect record, — will show the temper in which she spoke: —

‘I have passed other Christmas days happily, but never felt as now, how fitting it is that this festival should come among the snows and chills of winter; for, to many of you, I trust, it is the birth-day of a higher life, when the sun of good-will is beginning to return, and the evergreen of hope gives promise of the eternal year. * * *

‘Some months ago, we were told of the riot, the license, and defying spirit which made this place so wretched, and the conduct of some now here was such that the world said:— “Women once lost are far worse than abandoned men, and cannot be restored.” But, no! It is not so! I know my sex better. It is because women have so much feeling, and such a rooted respect for purity, that they seem so shameless and insolent, when they feel that they have erred and that others think ill of them. They know that even the worst of men would like to see women pure as angels, and when they meet man’s look of scorn, the desperate passion that rises is a perverted pride, which might have been their guardian angel. Might have been! Rather let me say, which may be; for the great improvement so rapidly wrought here gives us all warm hopes. * * *

‘Be not in haste to leave these walls. Yesterday, one of you, who was praised, replied, that “if she did well she hoped that efforts would be made to have her pardoned.” I can feel the monotony and dreariness of your confinement, but I entreat you to believe that for many of you it would be the greatest misfortune to be taken from here too soon. You know, better than I can, the temptations that await you in the world; and you must now perceive how dark is the gulf of sin and sorrow, towards which they would hurry you. Here, you have friends indeed; friends to your better selves; able and ready to help you. Born of unfortunate marriages, inheriting dangerous inclinations, neglected in childhood, with bad habits and bad associates, as certainly must be the case with some of you, how terrible will be the struggle when you leave this shelter! O, be sure that you are fitted to triumph over evil, before you again expose yourselves to it! And, instead of wasting your time and strength in vain wishes, use this opportunity to prepare yourselves for a better course of life, when you are set free. * * *

‘When I was here before, I was grieved by hearing several of you say, “I will tell you what you wish to know, if I can be alone with you; but not before the other prisoners; for, if they know my past faults, they will taunt me with them.” O, never do that! To taunt the fallen is the part of a fiend. And you! you were meant by Heaven to become angels of sympathy and love. It says in the Scripture: “Their angels do always behold in heaven the face of my Father.” So was it with you in your childhood; so is it now. Your angels stand forever there to intercede for you; and to you they call to be gentle and good. Nothing can so grieve and discourage those heavenly friends as when you mock the suffering. It was one of the highest praises of Jesus, “The bruised reed he will not break.” Remember that, and never insult, where you cannot aid, a companion. * * *

‘Let me warn you earnestly against acting insincerely, and appearing to wish to do right for the sake of approbation I know you must prize the good opinion of your friendly protectors; but do not buy it at the cost of truth. Try to be, not to seem. Only so far as you earnestly wish to do right for the sake of right, can you gain a principle that will sustain you hereafter; and that is what we wish, not fair appearances now. A career can never be happy that begins with falsehood. Be inwardly, outwardly true; then you will never be weakened or hardened by the consciousness of playing a part; and if, hereafter, the unfeeling or thoughtless give you pain, or take the dreadful risk of pushing back a soul emerging from darkness, you will feel the strong support of a good conscience. * * *

‘And never be discouraged; never despond; never say, “It is too late.” Fear not, even if you relapse again and again. Many of you have much to contend with. Some may be so faulty, by temperament or habit, that they can never on this earth lead a wholly fair and harmonious life, however much they strive. Yet do what you can. If in one act, — for one day, — you can do right, let that live like a point of light in your memory; for if you have done well once you can again. If you fall, do not lie grovelling; but rise upon your feet once more, and struggle bravely on. And if aroused conscience makes you suffer keenly, have patience to bear it. God will not let you suffer more than you need to fit you for his grace. At the very moment of your utmost pain, persist to seek his aid, and it will be given abundantly. Cultivate this spirit of prayer. I do not mean agitation and excitement, but a deep desire for truth, purity, and goodness, and you will daily learn how near He is to every one of ‘us.’’

These fragments, from a hasty report transcribed when the impressions of the hour had grown faint, give but a shadow of the broad good sense, hearty fellow-feeling, and pathetic hopefulness, which made so effective her truly womanly appeal.

This intercourse with the most unfortunate of her sex, and a desire to learn more of the causes of their degradation, and of the means of restoring them, led Margaret, immediately on reaching New York, to visit the various benevolent institutions, and especially the prisons on Blackwell’s Island. And it was while walking among the beds of the lazar-house, — mis-called “hospital,” — which then, to the disgrace of the city, was the cess-pool of its social filth, that an incident occurred, as touching as it was surprising to herself. A woman was pointed out who bore a very bad character, as hardened, sulky, and impenetrable. She was in bad health and rapidly failing. Margaret requested to be left alone with her; and to her question, ‘Are you ‘willing to die?’ the woman answered, “Yes;” adding, with her usual bitterness, “not on religious grounds, though.” ‘That is well, — to understand yourself,’ was Margaret’s rejoinder. She then began to talk with her about her health, and her few comforts, until the conversation deepened in interest. At length, as Margaret rose to go, she said: ‘Is there not anything I can do ‘for you?’ The woman replied: “I should be glad if you will pray with me.”

The condition of these wretched beings was brought the more home to her heart, as the buildings were directly in sight from Mr. Greeley’s house, at Turtle Bay, where Margaret, on her arrival, went to reside. ‘Seven hundred females,’ she writes,

‘are now confined in the Penitentiary opposite this point. We can pass over in a boat in a few minutes. I mean to visit, talk, and read with them. I have always felt great interest in those women who are trampled in the mud to gratify the brute appetites of men, and wished that I might be brought naturally into contact with them. Now I am.’

THE TRIBUNE AND HORACE GREELEY.

It was early in December of 1844 that Margaret took up her abode with Mr. and Mrs. Greeley, in a spacious old wooden mansion, somewhat ruinous, but delightfully situated on the East River, which she thus describes: —

‘This place is, to me, entirely charming; it is so completely in the country, and all around is so bold and free. It is two miles or more from the thickly settled parts of New York, but omnibuses and cars give me constant access to the city, and, while I can readily see what and whom I will, I can command time and retirement. Stopping on the Haarlem road, you enter a lane nearly a quarter of a mile long, and going by a small brook and pond that locks in the place, and ascending a slightly rising ground, get sight of the house, which, old-fashioned and of mellow tint, fronts on a flower-garden filled with shrubs, large vines, and trim box borders. On both sides of the house are beautiful trees, standing fair, full-grown, and clear. Passing through a wide hall, you come out upon a piazza, stretching the whole length of the house, where one can walk in all weathers; and thence by a step or two, on a lawn, with picturesque masses of rocks, shrubs and trees, overlooking the East River. Gravel paths lead, by several turns, down the steep bank to the water’s edge, where round the rocky point a small bay curves, in which boats are lying. And, owing to the currents, and the set of the tide, the sails glide sidelong, seeming to greet the house as they sweep by. The beauty here, seen by moonlight, is truly transporting. I enjoy it greatly, and the genius loci receives me as to a home.’

Here Margaret remained for a year and more, writing regularly for the Tribune. And how high an estimate this prolonged and near acquaintance led her to form for its Editor, will appear from a few passages in her letters: —

‘Mr. Greeley is a man of genuine excellence, honorable, benevolent, and of an uncorrupted disposition. He is sagacious, and, in his way, of even great abilities. In modes of life and manner he is a man of the people, and of the American people.’ And again: — Mr. Greeley is in many ways very interesting for me to know. He teaches me things, which my own influence on those, who have hitherto approached me, has prevented me from learning. In our business and friendly relations, we are on terms of solid good-will and mutual respect. With the exception of my own mother, I think him the most disinterestedly generous person I have ever known.’

And later she writes: —

‘You have heard that the Tribune Office was burned to the ground. For a day I thought it must make a difference, but it has served only to increase my admiration for Mr. Greeley’s smiling courage. He has really a strong character.’

On the other side, Mr. Greeley thus records his recollections of his friend: —

“My first acquaintance with Margaret Fuller was made through the pages of ‘The Dial.’ The lofty range and rare ability of that work, and its un-American richness of culture and ripeness of thought, naturally filled the ‘fit audience, though few,’ with a high estimate of those who were known as its conductors and principal writers. Yet I do not now remember that any article, which strongly impressed me, was recognized as from the pen of its female editor, prior to the appearance of ‘The Great Lawsuit,’ afterwards matured into the volume more distinctively, yet not quite accurately, entitled ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century.’ I think this can hardly have failed to make a deep impression on the mind of every thoughtful reader, as the production of an original, vigorous, and earnest mind. ‘Summer on the Lakes,’ which appeared some time after that essay, though before its expansion into a book, struck me as less ambitious in its aim, but more graceful and delicate in its execution; and as one of the clearest and most graphic delineations, ever given, of the Great Lakes, of the Prairies, and of the receding barbarism, and the rapidly advancing, but rude, repulsive semi-civilization, which were contending with most unequal forces for the possession of those rich lands. I still consider ‘Summer on the Lakes’ unequalled, especially in its pictures of the Prairies and of the sunnier aspects of Pioneer life.

“Yet, it was the suggestion of Mrs. Greeley, — who had spent some weeks of successive seasons in or near Boston, and who had there made the personal acquaintance of Miss Fuller, and formed a very high estimate and warm attachment for her, — that induced me, in the autumn of 1844, to offer her terms, which were accepted, for her assistance in the literary department of the Tribune. A home in my family was included in the stipulation. I was myself barely acquainted with her, when she thus came to reside with us, and I did not fully appreciate her nobler qualities for some months afterward. Though we were members of the same household, we scarcely met save at breakfast; and my time and thoughts were absorbed in duties and cares, which left me little leisure or inclination for the amenities of social intercourse. Fortune seemed to delight in placing us two in relations of friendly antagonism, — or rather, to develop all possible contrasts in our ideas and social habits. She was naturally inclined to luxury and a good appearance before the world. My pride, if I had any, delighted in bare walls and rugged fare. She was addicted to strong tea and coffee, both which I rejected and contemned, even in the most homoeopathic dilutions: while, my general health being sound, and hers sadly impaired, I could not fail to find in her dietetic habits the causes of her almost habitual illness; and once, while we were still barely acquainted, when she came to the breakfast-table with a very severe headache, I was tempted to attribute it to her strong potations of the Chinese leaf the night before. She told me quite frankly that she ‘declined being lectured on the food or beverage she saw fit to take;’ which was but reasonable in one who had arrived at her maturity of intellect and fixedness of habits. So the subject was thenceforth tacitly avoided between us; but, though words were suppressed, looks and involuntary gestures could not so well be; and an utter divergency of views on this and kindred themes created a perceptible distance between us.

“Her earlier contributions to the Tribune were not her best, and I did not at first prize her aid so highly as I afterwards learned to do. She wrote always freshly, vigorously, but not always clearly; for her full and intimate acquaintance with continental literature, especially German, seemed to have marred her felicity and readiness of expression in her mother tongue. While I never met another woman who conversed more freely or lucidly, the attempt to commit her thoughts to paper seemed to induce a singular embarrassment and hesitation. She could write only when in the vein; and this needed often to be waited for through several days, while the occasion sometimes required an immediate utterance. The new book must be reviewed before other journals had thoroughly dissected and discussed it, else the ablest critique would command no general attention, and perhaps be, by the greater number, unread. That the writer should wait the flow of inspiration, or at least the recurrence of elasticity of spirits and relative health of body, will not seem unreasonable to the general reader; but to the inveterate hack-horse of the daily press, accustomed to write at any time, on any subject, and with a rapidity limited only by the physical ability to form the requisite pen-strokes, the notion of waiting for a brighter day, or a happier frame of mind, appears fantastic and absurd. He would as soon think of waiting for a change in the moon. Hence, while I realized that her contributions evinced rare intellectual wealth and force, I did not value them as I should have done had they been written more fluently and promptly. They often seemed to make their appearance ‘a day after the fair.’

“One other point of tacit antagonism between us may as well be noted. Margaret was always a most earnest, devoted champion of the Emancipation of Women, from their past and present condition of inferiority, to an independence on Men. She demanded for them the fullest recognition of Social and Political Equality with the rougher sex; the freest access to all stations, professions, employments, which are open to any. To this demand I heartily acceded. It seemed to me, however, that her clear perceptions of abstract right were often overborne, in practice, by the influence of education and habit; that while she demanded absolute equality for Woman, she exacted a deference and courtesy from men to women, as women, which was entirely inconsistent with that requirement. In my view, the equalizing theory can be enforced only by ignoring the habitual discrimination of men and women, as forming separate classes, and regarding all alike as simply persons, — as human beings. So long as a lady shall deem herself in need of some gentleman’s arm to conduct her properly out of a dining or ball-room, — so long as she shall consider it dangerous or unbecoming to walk half a mile alone by night, — I cannot see how the ‘Woman’s Rights’ theory is ever to be anything more than a logically defensible abstraction. In this view Margaret did not at all concur, and the diversity was the incitement to much perfectly good-natured, but nevertheless sharpish sparring between us. Whenever she said or did anything implying the usual demand of Woman on the courtesy and protection of Manhood, I was apt, before complying, to look her in the face and exclaim with marked emphasis, — quoting from her ‘Woman in the Nineteenth Century,’— ‘LET THEM BE SEA-CAPTAINS IF THEY WILL!’ Of course, this was given and received as raillery, but it did not tend to ripen our intimacy or quicken my esteem into admiration. Though no unkind word ever passed between us, nor any approach to one, yet we two dwelt for months under the same roof, as scarcely more than acquaintances, meeting once a day at a common board, and having certain business relations with each other. Personally, I regarded her rather as my wife’s cherished friend than as my own, possessing many lofty qualities and some prominent weaknesses, and a good deal spoiled by the unmeasured flattery of her little circle of inordinate admirers. For myself, burning no incense on any human shrine, I half-consciously resolved to ‘keep my eye beam clear,’ and escape the fascination which she seemed to exert over the eminent and cultivated persons, mainly women, who came to our out-of-the-way dwelling to visit her, and who seemed generally to regard her with a strangely Oriental adoration.

“But as time wore on, and I became inevitably better and better acquainted with her, I found myself drawn, almost irresistibly, into the general current. I found that her faults and weaknesses were all superficial and obvious to the most casual, if undazzled, observer. They rather dwindled than expanded upon a fuller knowledge; or rather, took on new and brighter aspects in the light of her radiant and lofty soul. I learned to know her as a most fearless and unselfish champion of Truth and Human Good at all hazards, ready to be their standard-bearer through danger and obloquy, and, if need be, their martyr. I think few have more keenly appreciated the material goods of life, — Rank, Riches, Power, Luxury, Enjoyment; but I know none who would have more cheerfully surrendered them all, if the well-being of our Race could thereby have been promoted. I have never met another in whom the inspiring hope of Immortality was so strengthened into profoundest conviction. She did not believe in our future and unending existence, — she knew it, and lived ever in the broad glare of its morning twilight. With a limited income and liberal wants, she was yet generous beyond the bounds of reason. Had the gold of California been all her own, she would have disbursed nine tenths of it in eager and well-directed efforts to stay, or at least diminish, the flood of human misery. And it is but fair to state, that the liberality she evinced was fully paralleled by the liberality she experienced at the hands of others. Had she needed thousands, and made her wants known, she had friends who would have cheerfully supplied her. I think few persons, in their pecuniary dealings, have experienced and evinced more of the better qualities of human nature than Margaret Fuller. She seemed to inspire those who approached her with that generosity which was a part of her nature.

“Of her writings I do not purpose to speak critically. I think most of her contributions to the Tribune, while she remained with us, were characterized by a directness, terseness, and practicality, which are wanting in some of her earlier productions. Good judges have confirmed my own opinion, that, while her essays in the Dial are more elaborate and ambitious, her reviews in the Tribune are far better adapted to win the favor and sway the judgment of the great majority of readers. But, one characteristic of her writings I feel bound to commend, — their absolute truthfulness. She never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do, nor what would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, ‘Is it the truth? Is it such as the public should know?’ And if her judgment answered, ‘Yes,’ she uttered it; no matter what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down on her own head. Perfect conscientiousness was an unfailing characteristic of her literary efforts. Even the severest of her critiques, — that on Longfellow’s Poems, — for which an impulse in personal pique has been alleged, I happen with certainty to know had no such origin. When I first handed her the book to review, she excused herself, assigning the wide divergence of her views of Poetry from those of the author and his school, as her reason. She thus induced me to attempt the task of reviewing it myself. But day after day sped by, and I could find no hour that was not absolutely required for the performance of some duty that would not be put off, nor turned over to another. At length I carried the book back to her in utter despair of ever finding an hour in which even to look through it; and, at my renewed and earnest request, she reluctantly undertook its discussion. The statement of these facts is but an act of justice to her memory.

“Profoundly religious, — though her creed was, at once, very broad and very short, with a genuine love for inferiors in social position, whom she was habitually studying, by her counsel and teachings, to elevate and improve, — she won the confidence and affection of those who attracted her, by unbounded sympathy and trust. She probably knew the cherished secrets of more hearts than any one else, because she freely imparted her own. With a full share both of intellectual and of family pride, she preëminently recognized and responded to the essential brotherhood of all human kind, and needed but to know that a fellow-being required her counsel or assistance, to render her, riot merely willing, but eager to impart it. Loving ease, luxury, and the world’s good opinion, she stood ready to renounce them all, at the call of pity or of duty. I think no one, not radically averse to the whole system of domestic servitude, would have treated servants, of whatever class, with such uniform and thoughtful consideration, — a regard which wholly merged their factitious condition in their antecedent and permanent humanity. I think few servants ever lived weeks with her, who were not dignified and lastingly benefited by her influence and her counsels. They might be at first repelled, by what seemed her too stately manner and exacting disposition, but they soon learned to esteem and love her.

“I have known few women, and scarcely another maiden, who had the heart and the courage to speak with such frank compassion, in mixed circles, of the most degraded and outcast portion of the sex. The contemplation of their treatment, especially by the guilty authors of their ruin, moved her to a calm and mournful indignation, which she did not attempt to suppress nor control. Others were willing to pity and deplore; Margaret was more inclined to vindicate and to redeem. She did not hesitate to avow that on meeting some of these abused, unhappy sisters, she had been surprised to find them scarcely fallen morally below the ordinary standard of Womanhood, — realizing and loathing their debasement; anxious to escape it; and only repelled by the sad consciousness that for them sympathy and society remained only so long as they should persist in the ways of pollution. Those who have read her ‘Woman,’ may remember some daring comparisons therein suggested between these Pariahs of society and large classes of their respectable sisters; and that was no fitful expression, — no sudden outbreak, — but impelled by her most deliberate convictions. I think, if she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of Virtue, would have been one of her most cherished and first realized conceptions.

“Her love of children was one of her most prominent characteristics. The pleasure she enjoyed in their society was fully counterpoised by that she imparted. To them she was never lofty, nor reserved, nor mystical; for no one had ever a more perfect faculty for entering into their sports, their feelings, their enjoyments. She could narrate almost any story in language level to their capacities, and in a manner calculated to bring out their hearty and often boisterously expressed delight. She possessed marvellous powers of observation and imitation or mimicry; and, had she been attracted to the stage, would have been the first actress America has produced, whether in tragedy or comedy. Her faculty of mimicking was not needed to commend her to the hearts of children, but it had its effect in increasing the fascinations of her genial nature and heartfelt joy in their society. To amuse and instruct them was an achievement for which she would readily forego any personal object; and her intuitive perception of the toys, games, stories, rhymes, &c., best adapted to arrest and enchain their attention, was unsurpassed. Between her and my only child, then living, who was eight months old when she came to us, and something over two years when she sailed for Europe, tendrils of affection gradually intertwined themselves, which I trust Death has not severed, but rather multiplied and strengthened. She became his teacher, playmate, and monitor; and he requited her with a prodigality of love and admiration.

“I shall not soon forget their meeting in my office, after some weeks’ separation, just before she left us forever. His mother had brought him in from the country and left him asleep on my sofa, while she was absent making purchases, and he had rolled off and hurt himself in the fall, waking with the shock in a phrensy of anger, just before Margaret, hearing of his arrival, rushed into the office to find him. I was vainly attempting to soothe him as she entered; but he was running from one end to the other of the office, crying passionately, and refusing to be pacified. She hastened to him, in perfect confidence that her endearments would calm the current of his feelings, — that the sound of her well-remembered voice would banish all thought of his pain, — and that another moment would see him restored to gentleness; but, half-wakened, he did not heed her, and probably did not even realize who it was that caught him repeatedly in her arms and tenderly insisted that he should restrain himself. At last she desisted in despair; and, with the bitter tears streaming down her face, observed:— ‘Pickie, many friends have treated me unkindly, but no one had ever the power to cut me to the heart, as you have!’ Being thus let alone, he soon came to himself, and their mutual delight in the meeting was rather heightened by the momentary estrangement.

“They had one more meeting; their last on earth! ‘Aunty Margaret’ was to embark for Europe on a certain day, and ‘Pickie’ was brought into the city to bid her farewell. They met this time also at my office, and together we thence repaired to the ferry-boat, on which she was returning to her residence in Brooklyn to complete her preparations for the voyage. There they took a tender and affecting leave of each other. But soon his mother called at the office, on her way to the departing ship, and we were easily persuaded to accompany her thither, and say farewell once more, to the manifest satisfaction of both Margaret and the youngest of her devoted friends. Thus they parted, never to meet again in time. She sent him messages and presents repeatedly from Europe; and he, when somewhat older, dictated a letter in return, which was joyfully received and acknowledged. When the mother of our great-souled friend spent some days with us nearly two years afterward, ‘Pickie’ talked to her often and lovingly of ‘Aunty Margaret,’ proposing that they two should ‘take a boat and go over and see her,’ — for, to his infantile conception, the low coast of Long Island, visible just across the East River, was that Europe to which she had sailed, and where she was unaccountably detained so long. Alas! a far longer and more adventurous journey was required to reunite those loving souls! The 12th of July, 1849, saw him stricken down, from health to death, by the relentless cholera; and my letter, announcing that calamity, drew from her a burst of passionate sorrow, such as hardly any bereavement but the loss of a very near relative could have impelled. Another year had just ended, when a calamity, equally sudden, bereft a wide circle of her likewise, with her husband and infant son. Little did I fear, when I bade her a confident Good-by, on the deck of her outward-bound ship, that the sea would close over her earthly remains, ere we should meet again; far less that the light of my eyes and the cynosure of my hopes, who then bade her a tenderer and sadder farewell, would precede her on the dim pathway to that ‘Father’s house,’ whence is no returning! Ah, well! God is above all, and gracious alike in what he conceals and what he discloses; — benignant and bounteous, as well when he reclaims as when he bestows. In a few years, at farthest, our loved and lost ones will welcome us to their home.”

Favorably as Mr. Greeley speaks of Margaret’s articles in the Tribune, it is yet true that she never brought her full power to bear upon them; partly because she was too much exhausted by previous over-work, partly because it hindered her free action to aim at popular effect. Her own estimate of them is thus expressed: —

‘I go on very moderately, for my strength is not great, and I am connected with one who is anxious that I should not overtask it. Body and mind, I have long required rest and mere amusement, and now obey Nature as much as I can. If she pleases to restore me to an energetic state, she will by-and-by; if not, I can only hope this world will not turn me out of doors too abruptly. I value my present position very much, as enabling me to speak effectually some right words to a large circle; and, while I can do so, am content.’

Again she says, —

‘I am pleased with your sympathy about the Tribune, for I do not find much among my old friends. They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am satisfied to aid in the great work of popular education. I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but rather as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree helped, the thoughts of every day seem worth noting, though in a form that does not inspire me.’

The most valuable of her contributions, according to her own judgment, were the Criticisms on Contemporary Authors in Europe and America. A few of these were revised in the spring of 1846, and, in connection with some of her best articles selected from the Dial, Western Messenger, American Monthly, &c., appeared in two volumes of Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books, under the title of PAPERS ON ART AND LITERATURE.

SOCIETY.

Heralded by her reputation, as a scholar, writer, and talker, and brought continually before the public by her articles in the Tribune, Margaret found a circle of acquaintance opening before her, as wide, various, and rich, as time and inclination permitted her to know. Persons sought her in her country retreat, attracted alike by idle curiosity, desire for aid, and respectful sympathy. She visited freely in several interesting families in New York and Brooklyn: occasionally accepted invitations to evening parties, and often met, at the somewhat celebrated soirées of Miss Lynch, the assembled authors, artists, critics, wits, and dilettanti of New York. As was inevitable, also, for one of such powerful magnetic influence, liberal soul and broad judgment, she once again became, as elsewhere she had been, a confidant and counsellor of the tempted and troubled; and her geniality, lively conversation, and ever fresh love, gave her a home in many hearts. But the subdued tone of her spirits at this period led her to prefer seclusion.

Of her own social habits she writes: —

‘It is not well to keep entirely apart from the stream of common life; so, though I never go out when busy, nor keep late hours, I find it pleasanter and better to enter somewhat into society. I thus meet with many entertaining acquaintance, and some friends. I can never, indeed, expect, in America, or in this world, to form relations with nobler persons than I have already known; nor can I put my heart into these new ties as into the old ones, though probably it would still respond to commanding excellence. But my present circle satisfies my wants. As to what is called “good society,” I am wholly indifferent. I know several women, whom I like very much, and yet more men. I hear good music, which answers my social desires better than any other intercourse can; and I love four or five interesting children, in whom I always find more genuine sympathy than in their elders.’

Of the impression produced by Margaret on those who were but slightly acquainted with her, some notion may be formed from the following sketch: —

“In general society, she commanded respect rather than admiration All persons were curious to see her, and in full rooms her fine head and spiritual expression at once marked her out from the crowd; but the most were repelled by what seemed conceit, pedantry, and a harsh spirit of criticism, while, on her part, she appeared to regard those around her as frivolous, superficial, and conventional. Indeed, I must frankly confess, that we did not meet in pleasant relations, except now and then, when the lifting of a veil, as it were, revealed for a moment the true life of each. Yet I was fond of looking at her from a distance, and defending her when silly people were inclined to cavil at her want of feminine graces. Then I would say, ‘I would like to be an artist now, that I might paint, not the care-worn countenance and the uneasy air of one seemingly out of harmony with the scene about her, but the soul that sometimes looks out from under those large lids. Michel Angelo would have made her a Sibyl.’ I remember I was surprised to find her height no greater; for her writings had always given me an impression of magnitude. Thus I studied though I avoided her, admitting, the while, proudly and joyously, that she was a woman to reverence. A trifling incident, however, gave me the key to much in her character, of which, before, I had not dreamed. It was one evening, after a Valentine party, where Frances Osgood, Margaret Fuller, and other literary ladies, had attracted some attention, that, as we were in the dressing-room preparing to go home, I heard Margaret sigh deeply. Surprised and moved, I said, ‘Why?’— ‘Alone, as usual,’ was her pathetic answer, followed by a few sweet, womanly remarks, touching as they were beautiful. Often, after, I found myself recalling her look and tone, with tears in my eyes; for before I had regarded her as a being cold, and abstracted, if not scornful.”

Cold, abstracted, and scornful! About this very time it was that
Margaret wrote in her journal: —

‘Father, let me not injure my fellows during this period of repression. I feel that when we meet my tones are not so sweet as I would have them. O, let me not wound! I, who know so well how wounds can burn and ache, should not inflict them. Let my touch be light and gentle. Let me keep myself uninvaded, but let me not fail to be kind and tender, when need is. Yet I would not assume an overstrained poetic magnanimity. Help me to do just right, and no more. O, make truth profound and simple in me!’

Again: —

‘The heart bleeds, — faith almost gives way, to see man’s seventy years of chrysalis. Is it not too long? Enthusiasm must struggle fiercely to burn clear amid these fogs. In what little, low, dark cells of care and prejudice, without one soaring thought or melodious fancy, do poor mortals — well-intentioned enough, and with religious aspiration too — forever creep. And yet the sun sets to-day as gloriously bright as ever it did on the temples of Athens, and the evening star rises as heavenly pure as it rose on the eye of Dante. O, Father! help me to free my fellows from the conventional bonds whereby their sight is holden. By purity and freedom let me teach them justice.’

And yet again: —

‘There comes a consciousness that I have no real hold on life, — no real, permanent connection with any soul. I seem a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot, that I may learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge. This thought envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I ‘do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.’

Casual observers mistook Margaret’s lofty idealism for personal pride; but thus speaks one who really knew her:— “You come like one of the great powers of nature, harmonizing with all beauty of the soul or of the earth. You cannot be discordant with anything that is true and deep. I thank God for the noble privilege of being recognized by so large, tender, and radiant a soul as thine.”

EUROPE.

LETTERS

       ”I go to prove my soul.
  I see my way, as birds their trackless way.
  In some time, God’s good time, I shall arrive
  He guides me and the bird. In his good time!”

BROWNING.

 ”One, who, if He be called upon to face
  Some awful moment, to which Heaven has joined
  Great issues, good or bad for human kind,
  Is happy as a lover, and attired
  With sudden brightness, like a man inspired;
  And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
  In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw.”

WORDSWORTH.

 ”Italia! Italia! O tu cui feo la sorte
    Dono infelice di bellezza, ond’ hai
    Funesta dote d’ infiniti guai,
    Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte.
  Deh, fossi tu men bella, ò almen píù forte!”

FILICAJA.

    ”Oh, not to guess it at the first.
  But I did guess it, — that is, I divined,
  Felt by an instinct how it was; — why else
  Should I pronounce you free from all that heap
  Of sins, which had been irredeemable?
  I felt they were not yours.”

BROWNING.

    ”Nests there are many of this very year,
  Many the nests are, which the winds shall shake,
     The rains run through and other birds beat down
  Yours, O Aspasia! rests against the temple
     Of heavenly love, and, thence inviolate,
  It shall not fall this winter, nor the next.”

LANDOR.

 ”Lift up your heart upon the knees of God,
  Losing yourself, your smallness and your darkness
  In His great light, who fills and moves the world,
  Who hath alone the quiet of perfect motion.”

STERLING.

VIII. EUROPE

* * * * *

[It has been judged best to let Margaret herself tell the story of her travels. In the spring of 1846, her valued friends, Marcus Spring and lady, of New York, had decided to make a tour in Europe, with their son, and they invited Miss Fuller to accompany them. An arrangement was soon made on such terms as she could accept, and the party sailed from Boston in the “Cambria,” on the first of August. The following narrative is made up of letters addressed by her to various correspondents. Some extracts, describing distinguished persons whom she saw, have been borrowed from her letters to the New York Tribune.]

TO MRS. MARGARET FULLER.

Liverpool, Aug. 16, 1846.

My dear Mother: —

The last two days at sea passed well enough, as a number of agreeable persons were introduced to me, and there were several whom I knew before. I enjoyed nothing on the sea; the excessively bracing air so affected me that I could not bear to look at it. The sight of land delighted me. The tall crags, with their breakers and circling sea-birds; then the green fields, how glad! We had a very fine day to come ashore, and made the shortest passage ever known. The stewardess said, “Any one who complained this time tempted the Almighty.” I did not complain, but I could hardly have borne another day. I had no appetite; but am now making up for all deficiencies, and feel already a renovation beginning from the voyage; and, still more, from freedom and entire change of scene.

We came here Wednesday, at noon; next day we went to Manchester; the following day to Chester; returning here Saturday evening.

On Sunday we went to hear James Martineau; were introduced to him, and other leading persons. The next day and evening I passed in the society of very pleasant people, who have made every exertion to give me the means of seeing and learning; but they have used up all my strength.

LONDON.

TO C.S.

As soon as I reached England, I found how right we were in supposing there was elsewhere a greater range of interesting character among the men, than with us. I do not find, indeed, any so valuable as three or four among the most marked we have known; but many that are strongly individual, and have a fund of hidden life.

In Westmoreland, I knew, and have since been seeing in London, a man, such as would interest you a good deal; Mr. Atkinson. He is sometimes called the “prince of the English mesmerisers;” and he has the fine instinctive nature you may suppose from that. He is a man of about thirty; in the fulness of his powers; tall, and finely formed, with a head for Leonardo to paint; mild and composed, but powerful and sagacious; he does not think, but perceives and acts. He is intimate with artists, having studied architecture himself as a profession; but has some fortune on which he lives. Sometimes stationary and acting in the affairs of other men; sometimes wandering about the world and learning; he seems bound by no tie, yet looks as if he had relatives in every place.

I saw, also, a man, — an artist, — severe and antique in his spirit; he seemed burdened by the sorrows of aspiration; yet very calm, as secure in the justice of fate. What he does is bad, but full of a great desire. His name is David Scott. I saw another, — a pupil of De la Roche, — very handsome, and full of a voluptuous enjoyment of nature: him I liked a little in a different way.

By far the most beauteous person I have seen is Joseph Mazzini. If you ever see Saunders’ “People’s Journal,” you can read articles by him that will give you some notion of his mind, especially one on his friends, headed “Italian Martyrs.” He is one in whom holiness has purified, but somewhat dwarfed the man.

* * * * *

Our visit to Mr. Wordsworth was fortunate. He is seventy-six; but his is a florid, fair old age. He walked with us to all his haunts about the house. Its situation is beautiful, and the “Rydalian Laurels” are magnificent. Still, I saw abodes among the hills that I should have preferred for Wordsworth; more wild and still more romantic. The fresh and lovely Rydal Mount seems merely the retirement of a gentleman, rather than the haunt of a poet. He showed his benignity of disposition in several little things, especially in his attentions to a young boy we had with us. This boy had left the circus, exhibiting its feats of horsemanship, in Ambleside, “for that day only,” at his own desire to see Wordsworth; and I feared he would be dissatisfied, as I know I should have been at his age, if, when called to see a poet, I had found no Apollo flaming with youthful glory, laurel-crowned, and lyre in hand; but, instead, a reverend old man clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along the level garden-path. However, he was not disappointed; and Wordsworth, in his turn, seemed to feel and prize a congenial nature in this child.

Taking us into the house, he showed us the picture of his sister, repeating with much expression some lines of hers, and those so famous of his about her, beginning “Five years,” &c.; also, his own picture, by Inman, of whom he spoke with esteem. I had asked to see a picture in that room, which has been described in one of the finest of his later poems. A hundred times had I wished to see this picture, yet when seen was not disappointed by it. The light was unfavorable, but it had a light of its own, —

“whose mild gleam Of beauty never ceases to enrich The common light.”

Mr. Wordsworth is fond of the hollyhock; a partiality scarcely deserved by the flower, but which marks the simplicity of his tastes. He had made a long avenue of them, of all colors, from the crimson brown to rose, straw-color, and white, and pleased himself with having made proselytes to a liking for them, among his neighbors.

I never have seen such magnificent fuchsias as at Ambleside, and there was one to be seen in every cottage-yard. They are no longer here under the shelter of the green-house, as with us, and as they used to be in England. The plant, from its grace and finished elegance, being a great favorite of mine, I should like to see it as frequently and of as luxuriant growth at home, and asked their mode of culture, which I here mark down for the benefit of all who may be interested. Make a bed of bog-earth and sand; put down slips of the fuchsia, and give them a great deal of water; this is all they need. People leave them out here in winter, but perhaps they would not bear the cold of our Januaries.

Mr. Wordsworth spoke with more liberality than we expected of the recent measures about the Corn-laws, saying that “the principle was certainly right, though whether existing interests had been as carefully attended to as was right, he was not prepared to say,” &c. His neighbors were pleased to hear of his speaking thus mildly, and hailed it as a sign that he was opening his mind to more light on these subjects. They lament that his habits of seclusion keep him ignorant of the real wants of England and the world. Living in this region, which is cultivated by small proprietors, where there is little poverty, vice, or misery, he hears not the voice which cries so loudly from other parts of England, and will not be stilled by sweet, poetic suasion, or philosophy, for it is the cry of men in the jaws of destruction.

It was pleasant to find the reverence inspired by this great and pure mind warmest near home. Our landlady, in heaping praises upon him, added, constantly, “and Mrs. Wordsworth, too.” “Do the people here,” said I, “value Mr. Wordsworth most because he is a celebrated writer?” “Truly, madam,” said she, “I think it is because he is so kind a neighbor.”

“True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.”

EDINBURGH. —— DE QUINCEY.

At Edinburgh we were in the wrong season, and many persons we most wished to see were absent. We had, however, the good fortune to find Dr. Andrew Combe, who received us with great kindness. I was impressed with great and affectionate respect, by the benign and even temper of his mind, his extensive and accurate knowledge, accompanied by a large and intelligent liberality. Of our country he spoke very wisely and hopefully.

* * * * *

I had the satisfaction, not easily attainable now, of seeing De Quincey for some hours, and in the mood of conversation. As one belonging to the Wordsworth and Coleridge constellation (he, too, is now seventy years of age), the thoughts and knowledge of Mr. De Quincey lie in the past, and oftentimes he spoke of matters now become trite to one of a later culture. But to all that fell from his lips, his eloquence, subtle and forcible as the wind, full and gently falling as the evening dew, lent a peculiar charm. He is an admirable narrator; not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not absolutely required to give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon.

I admired, too, his urbanity; so opposite to the rapid, slang, Vivian-Greyish style, current in the literary conversation of the day. “Sixty years since,” men had time to do things better and more gracefully.

CHALMERS.

With Dr. Chalmers we passed a couple of hours. He is old now, but still full of vigor and fire. We had an opportunity of hearing a fine burst of indignant eloquence from him. “I shall blush to my very bones,” said he, “if the Chaarrch” (sound these two rrs with as much burr as possible, and you will get an idea of his mode of pronouncing that unweariable word,) “if the Chaarrch yield to the storm.” He alluded to the outcry now raised by the Abolitionists against the Free Church, whose motto is, “Send back the money;” i.e., the money taken from the American slaveholders. Dr. C. felt, that if they did not yield from conviction, they must not to assault. His manner in speaking of this gave me a hint of the nature of his eloquence. He seldom preaches now.

* * * * *

A Scottish gentleman told me the following story: — Burns, still only in the dawn of his celebrity, was invited to dine with one of the neighboring so-called gentry, unhappily quite void of true gentle blood. On arriving, he found his plate set in the servants’ room. After dinner, he was invited into a room where guests were assembled, and, a chair being placed for him at the lower end of the board, a glass of wine was offered, and he was requested to sing one of his songs for the entertainment, of the company. He drank off the wine, and thundered forth in reply his grand song “For a’ that and a’ that,” and having finished his prophecy and prayer, nature’s nobleman left his churlish entertainers to hide their heads in the home they had disgraced.

A NIGHT ON BEN LOMOND.

At Inversnaid, we took a boat to go down Loch Lomond, to the little inn of Rowardennan, from which the ascent is made of Ben Lomond. We found a day of ten thousand, for our purpose; but, unhappily, a large party had come with the sun, and engaged all the horses, so that if we went, it must be on foot. This was something of an enterprise for me, as the ascent is four miles, and toward the summit quite fatiguing. However, in the pride of newly-gained health and strength, I was ready, and set forth with Mr. S. alone. We took no guide, and the people of the house did not advise us to take one, as they ought.

On reaching the peak, the sight was one of beauty and grandeur such as imagination never painted. You see around you no plain ground, but on every side constellations, or groups of hills, exquisitely dressed in the soft purple of the heather, amid which gleam the lakes, like eyes that tell the secrets of the earth, and drink in those of the heavens. Peak beyond peak caught from the shifting light all the colors of the prism, and, on the furthest, angel companies seemed hovering in glorious white robes.

About four o’clock we began our descent. Near the summit, the traces of the path are not distinct, and I said to Mr. S., after a while, that we had lost it. He said he thought that was of no consequence; we could find our way down. I said I thought it was, as the ground was full of springs that were bridged over in the pathway. He accordingly went to look for it, and I stood still, because I was so tired I did not like to waste any labor.

Soon he called to me that he had found it, and I followed in the direction where he seemed to be. But I mistook, overshot it, and saw him no more. In about ten minutes I became alarmed, and called him many times. It seems, he on his side shouted also, but the brow of some hill was between us, and we neither saw nor heard one another. I then thought I would make the best of my way down, and I should find him when I arrived. But, in doing so, I found the justice of my apprehension about the springs, so soon as I got to the foot of the hills; for I would sink up to my knees in bog, and must go up the hills again, seeking better crossing places. Thus I lost much time. Nevertheless, in the twilight, I saw, at last, the lake, and the inn of Rowardennan on its shore.

Between me and it, lay, direct, a high heathery hill, which I afterwards found is called “The Tongue,” because hemmed in on three sides by a water-course. It looked as if, could I only get to the bottom of that, I should be on comparatively level ground. I then attempted to descend in the water-course, but, finding that impracticable, climbed on the hill again, and let myself down by the heather, for it was very steep, and full of deep holes. With great fatigue, I got to the bottom, but when I was about to cross the water-course there, I felt afraid, it looked so deep in the dim twilight. I got down as far as I could by the root of a tree, and threw down a stone. It sounded very hollow, and I was afraid to jump. The shepherds told me afterwards, if I had, I should probably have killed myself, it was so deep, and the bed of the torrent full of sharp stones.

I then tried to ascend the hill again, for there was no other way to get off it; but soon sank down utterly exhausted. When able to get up again, and look about me, it was completely dark. I saw, far below me, a light, that looked about as big as a pin’s head, that I knew to be from the inn at Rowardennan, but heard no sound except the rush of the waterfall, and the sighing of the night wind.

For the first few minutes after I perceived I had come to my night’s lodging, such as it was, the circumstance looked appalling. I was very lightly clad, my feet and dress were very wet, I had only a little shawl to throw round me, and the cold autumn wind had already come, and the night mist was to fall on me, all fevered and exhausted as I was. I thought I should not live through the night, or, if I did, I must be an invalid henceforward. I could not even keep myself warm by walking, for, now it was dark, it would be too dangerous to stir. My only chance, however, lay in motion, and my only help in myself; and so convinced was I of this, that I did keep in motion the whole of that long night, imprisoned as I was on such a little perch of that great mountain.

For about two hours, I saw the stars, and very cheery and companionable they looked; but then the mist fell, and I saw nothing more, except such apparitions as visited Ossian, on the hill-side, when he went out by night, and struck the bosky shield, and called to him the spirits of the heroes, and the white-armed maids, with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came those visionary shapes. Floating slowly and gracefully, their white robes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they had been engaged, and come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of death. Then the moon rose. I could not see her, but her silver light filled the mist. Now I knew it was two o’clock, and that, having weathered out so much of the night, I might the rest; and the hours hardly seemed long to me more.

It may give an idea of the extent of the mountain, that, though I called, every now and then, with all my force, in case by chance some aid might be near, and though no less than twenty men, with their dogs, were looking for me, I never heard a sound, except the rush of the waterfall and the sighing of the night wind, and once or twice the startling of the grouse in the heather. It was sublime indeed, — a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene realities. At last came the signs of day, — the gradual clearing and breaking up; some faint sounds from I know not what; the little flies, too, arose from their bed amid the purple heather, and bit me. Truly they were very welcome to do so. But what was my disappointment to find the mist so thick, that I could see neither lake nor inn, nor anything to guide me. I had to go by guess, and, as it happened, my Yankee method served me well. I ascended the hill, crossed the torrent, in the waterfall, first drinking some of the water, which was as good at that time as ambrosia. I crossed in that place, because the waterfall made steps, as it were, to the next hill. To be sure, they were covered with water, but I was already entirely wet with the mist, so that it did not matter. I kept on scrambling, as it happened, in the right direction, till, about seven, some of the shepherds found me. The moment they came, all my feverish strength departed, and they carried me home, where my arrival relieved my friends of distress far greater than I had undergone; for I had my grand solitude, my Ossianic visions, and the pleasure of sustaining myself; while they had only doubt, amounting to anguish, and a fruitless search through the night.

Entirely contrary to my forebodings, I only suffered for this a few days, and was able to take a parting look at my prison, as I went down the lake, with feelings of complacency. It was a majestic-looking hill, that Tongue, with the deep ravines on either side, and the richest robe of heather I have anywhere seen.

Mr. S. gave all the men who were looking for me a dinner in the barn, and he and Mrs. S. ministered to them; and they talked of Burns, — really the national writer, and known by them, apparently, as none other is, — and of hair-breadth ‘scapes by flood and fell. Afterwards they were all brought up to see me, and it was gratifying to note the good breeding and good feeling with which they deported themselves. Indeed, this adventure created quite an intimate feeling between us and the people there. I had been much pleased before, in attending one of their dances, at the genuine independence and politeness of their conduct. They were willing to dance their Highland flings and strathspeys, for our amusement, and did it as naturally and as freely as they would have offered the stranger the best chair.

JOANNA BAILLIE. — HOWITTS. — SMITH.

I have mentioned with satisfaction seeing some persons who illustrated the past dynasty in the progress of thought here: Wordsworth, Dr. Chalmers, De Quincey, Andrew Combe. With a still higher pleasure, because to one of my own sex, whom I have honored almost above any, I went to pay my court to Joanna Baillie. I found on her brow, not, indeed, a coronal of gold; but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts have received. We found her in her little calm retreat, at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character and their mutual relations she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline.

* * * * *

Mary and William Howitt are the main support of the People’s Journal. I saw them several times at their cheerful and elegant home. In Mary Howitt, I found the same engaging traits of character we are led to expect from her books for children. At their house, I became acquainted with Dr. Southwood Smith, the well-known philanthropist. He is at present engaged in the construction of good tenements, calculated to improve the condition of the working people.

TO R.W.E.

Paris, Nov. 16, 1846. — I meant to write on my arrival in London, six weeks ago; but as it was not what is technically called “the season,” I thought I had best send all my letters of introduction at once, that I might glean what few good people I could. But more than I expected were in town. These introduced others, and in three days I was engaged in such a crowd of acquaintance, that I had hardly time to dress, and none to sleep, during all the weeks I was in London.

I enjoyed the time extremely. I find myself much in my element in European society. It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal, but so many of the encumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water.

In Edinburgh, I met Dr. Brown. He is still quite a young man, but with a high ambition, and, I should think, commensurate powers. But all is yet in the bud with him. He has a friend, David Scott, a painter, full of imagination, and very earnest in his views of art. I had some pleasant hours with them, and the last night which they and I passed with De Quincey, a real grand conversazione, quite in the Landor style, which lasted, in full harmony, some hours.

CARLYLE.

Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. C. came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be passed at their house. That first time, I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet humor, — full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad. He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired. That evening, he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story of some poor farmer, or artisan, in the country, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading the Essays, and looking upon the sea.

I left him that night, intending to go out very often to their house. I assure you there never was anything so witty as Carlyle’s description of ——  —— . It was enough to kill one with laughing. I, on my side, contributed a story to his fund of anecdote on this subject, and it was fully appreciated. Carlyle is worth a thousand of you for that; — he is not ashamed to laugh, when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial human fashion.

The second time, Mr. C. had a dinner-party, at which was a witty, French, flippant sort of man, author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a Life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little, of which one was glad, for, that night, he was in his more acrid mood; and, though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he said.

For a couple of hours, he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind. Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmasters had taught him that it was great to do so, and had thus, unfortunately, been turned from the true path for a man. Burns had, in like manner, been turned from his vocation. Shakspeare had not had the good sense to see that it would have been better to write straight on in prose; — and such nonsense, which, though amusing enough at first, he ran to death after a while. The most amusing part is always when he comes back to some refrain, as in the French Revolution of the sea-green. In this instance, it was Petrarch and Laura, the last word pronounced with his ineffable sarcasm of drawl. Although he said this over fifty times, I could not ever help laughing when Laura would come, — Carlyle running his chin out, when he spoke it, and his eyes glancing till they looked like the eyes and beak of a bird of prey. Poor Laura! Lucky for her that her poet had already got her safely canonized beyond the reach of this Teufelsdrockh vulture.

The worst of hearing Carlyle is that you cannot interrupt him. I understand the habit and power of haranguing have increased very much upon him, so that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you. To interrupt him is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears you down. True, he does you no injustice, and, with his admirable penetration, sees the disclaimer in your mind, so that you are not morally delinquent; but it is not pleasant to be unable to utter it. The latter part of the evening, however, he paid us for this, by a series of sketches, in his finest style of railing and raillery, of modern French literature, not one of them, perhaps, perfectly just, but all drawn with the finest, boldest strokes, and, from his point of view, masterly. All were depreciating, except that of Béranger. Of him he spoke with perfect justice, because with hearty sympathy.

I had, afterward, some talk with Mrs. C., whom hitherto I had only seen, for who can speak while her husband is there? I like her very much; — she is full of grace, sweetness, and talent. Her eyes are sad and charming. * * *

After this, they went to stay at Lord Ashburton’s, and I only saw them once more, when they came to pass an evening with us. Unluckily, Mazzini was with us, whose society, when he was there alone, I enjoyed more than any. He is a beauteous and pure music; also, he is a dear friend of Mrs. C.; but his being there gave the conversation a turn to “progress” and ideal subjects, and C. was fluent in invectives on all our “rose-water imbecilities.” We all felt distant from him, and Mazzini, after some vain efforts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. C. said to me, “These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.”

All Carlyle’s talk, that evening, was a defence of mere force, — success the test of right; — if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks; — find a hero, and let them be his slaves, &c. It was very Titanic, and anti-celestial. I wish the last evening had been more melodious. However, I bid Carlyle farewell with feelings of the warmest friendship and admiration. We cannot feel otherwise to a great and noble nature, whether it harmonize with our own or not. I never appreciated the work he has done for his age till I saw England. I could not. You must stand in the shadow of that mountain of shams, to know how hard it is to cast light across it.

Honor to Carlyle! Hoch! Although in the wine with which we drink this health, I, for one, must mingle the despised “rose-water.”

And now, having to your eye shown the defects of my own mind, in the sketch of another, I will pass on more lowly, — more willing to be imperfect, — since Fate permits such noble creatures, after all, to be only this or that. It is much if one is not only a crow or magpie; — Carlyle is only a lion. Some time we may, all in full, be intelligent and humanly fair.

CARLYLE, AGAIN.

Paris, Dec, 1846. — Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse; — only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men, — happily not one invariable or inevitable, — that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, — raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought. But it is the habit of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase. Carlyle, indeed, is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness, — no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; — it is his nature, and the untamable energy that has given him power to crush the dragons. You do not love him, perhaps, nor revere; and perhaps, also, he would only laugh at you if you did; but you like him heartily, and like to see him the powerful smith, the Siegfried, melting all the old iron in his furnace till it glows to a sunset red, and burns you, if you senselessly go too near. He seems, to me, quite isolated, — lonely as the desert, — yet never was a man more fitted to prize a man, could he find one to match his mood. He finds them, but only in the past. He sings, rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally, near the beginning, hits upon some singular epithet, which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced, now and then, to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him seem to him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; — his works are true, to blame and praise him, — the Siegfried of England, — great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil, than legislate for good.

Of Dr. Wilkinson I saw a good deal, and found him a substantial person, — a sane, strong, and well-exercised mind, — but in the last degree unpoetical in its structure. He is very simple, natural, and good; excellent to see, though one cannot go far with him; and he would be worth more in writing, if he could get time to write, than in personal intercourse. He may yet find time; — he is scarcely more than thirty. Dr. W. wished to introduce me to Mr. Clissold, but I had not time; shall find it, if in London again. Tennyson was not in town.

Browning has just married Miss Barrett, and gone to Italy. I may meet them there. Bailey is helping his father with a newspaper! His wife and child (Philip Festus by name) came to see me. I am to make them a visit on my return. Marston I saw several times, and found him full of talent. That is all I want to say at present; — he is a delicate nature, that can only be known in its own way and time. I went to see his “Patrician’s Daughter.” It is an admirable play for the stage. At the house of W.J. Fox, I saw first himself, an eloquent man, of great practical ability, then Cooper, (of the “Purgatory of Suicides,”) and others.

My poor selection of miscellanies has been courteously greeted in the London journals. Openings were made for me to write, had I but leisure; it is for that I look to a second stay in London, since several topics came before me on which I wished to write and publish there.

* * * * *

I became acquainted with a gentleman who is intimate with all the English artists, especially Stanfield and Turner, but was only able to go to his house once, at this time. Pictures I found but little time for, yet enough to feel what they are now to be to me. I was only at the Dulwich and National Galleries and Hampton Court. Also, have seen the Vandykes, at Warwick; but all the precious private collections I was obliged to leave untouched, except one of Turner’s, to which I gave a day. For the British Museum, I had only one day, which I spent in the Greek and Egyptian Rooms, unable even to look at the vast collections of drawings, &c. But if I live there a few months, I shall go often. O, were life but longer, and my strength greater! Ever I am bewildered by the riches of existence, had I but more time to open the oysters, and get out the pearls. Yet some are mine, if only for a necklace or rosary.

PARIS.

TO HER MOTHER.

Paris, Dec. 26, 1846. — In Paris I have been obliged to give a great deal of time to French, in order to gain the power of speaking, without which I might as usefully be in a well as here. That has prevented my doing nearly as much as I would. Could I remain six months in this great focus of civilized life, the time would be all too short for my desires and needs.

My Essay on American Literature has been translated into French, and published in “La Revue Indépendante,” one of the leading journals of Paris; only, with that delight at manufacturing names for which the French are proverbial, they put, instead of Margaret, Elizabeth. Write to —— , that aunt Elizabeth has appeared unexpectedly before the French public! She will not enjoy her honors long, as a future number, which is to contain a notice of “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” will rectify the mistake.

I have been asked, also, to remain in correspondence with La Revue Indépendante, after my return to the United States, which will be very pleasant and advantageous to me.

I have some French acquaintance, and begin to take pleasure in them, now that we can hold intercourse more easily. Among others, a Madame Pauline Roland I find an interesting woman. She is an intimate friend of Béranger and of Pierre Leroux.

We occupy a charming suite of apartments, Hotel Rougement, Boulevard Poissonière. It is a new hotel, and has not the arched gateways and gloomy court-yard of the old mansions. My room, though small, is very pretty, with the thick, flowered carpet and marble slabs; the French clock, with Cupid, of course, over the fireplace, in which burns a bright little wood fire; the canopy bedstead, and inevitable large mirror; the curtains, too, are thick and rich, the closet, &c., excellent, the attendance good. But for all this, one pays dear. We do not find that one can live pleasantly at Paris for little money; and we prefer to economize by a briefer stay, if at all.

TO E.H.

Paris, Jan. 18, 1847, and Naples, March 17, 1847. — You wished to hear of George Sand, or, as they say in Paris, “Madame Sand.” I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I had supposed it might be exaggerated. She had every reason to leave her husband, — a stupid, brutal man, who insulted and neglected her. He afterwards gave up their child to her for a sum of money. But the love for which she left him lasted not well, and she has had a series of lovers, and I am told has one now, with whom she lives on the footing of combined means, independent friendship! But she takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts, and has just given her daughter in marriage. Her son is a grown-up young man, an artist. Many women visit her, and esteem it an honor. Even an American here, and with the feelings of our country on such subjects, Mrs. —— , thinks of her with high esteem. She has broken with La Mennais, of whom she was once a disciple.

I observed to Dr. François, who is an intimate of hers, and loves and admires her, that it did not seem a good sign that she breaks with her friends. He said it was not so with her early friends; that she has chosen to buy a chateau in the region where she passed her childhood, and that the people there love and have always loved her dearly. She is now at the chateau, and, I begin to fear, will not come to town before I go. Since I came, I have read two charming stories recently written by her. Another longer one she has just sold to La Presse for fifteen thousand francs. She does not receive nearly as much for her writings as Balzac, Dumas, or Sue. She has a much greater influence than they, but a less circulation.

She stays at the chateau, because the poor people there were suffering so much, and she could help them. She has subscribed twenty thousand francs for their relief, in the scarcity of the winter. It is a great deal to earn by one’s pen: a novel of several volumes sold for only fifteen thousand francs, as I mentioned before. * * *

At last, however, she came; and I went to see her at her house, Place d’Orleans. I found it a handsome modern residence. She had not answered my letter, written about a week before, and I felt a little anxious lest she should not receive me; for she is too much the mark of impertinent curiosity, as well as too busy, to be easily accessible to strangers. I am by no means timid, but I have suffered, for the first time in France, some of the torments of mauvaise honte, enough to see what they must be to many.

It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters, and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.

The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a peasant, and, as Madame Sand afterward told me, her god-daughter, whom she had brought from her province. She announced me as “Madame Salere,” and returned into the ante-room to tell me. “Madame says she does not know you” I began to think I was doomed to a rebuff, among the crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, “Ask if she has not received a letter from me.” As I spoke, Madame S. opened the door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her figure; she is large, but well-formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest taste, her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and lady-like dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower, strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head Spanish, (as, indeed, she was born at Madrid, and is only on one side of French blood.) All these details I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and power, that pervaded the whole, — the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, “C’est vous” and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment, then I said, “Il me fait de bien de vous voir” and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed a character, and everything that is good in it so really good. I loved, shall always love her.

She looked away, and said, “Ah! vous m’avez écrit une lettre charmante” This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went on as if we had always known one another. She told me, before I went away, that she was going that very day to write to me; that when the servant announced me she did not recognize the name, but after a minute it struck her that it might be La dame Americaine, as the foreigners very commonly call me, for they find my name hard to remember. She was very much pressed for time, as she was then preparing copy for the printer, and, having just returned, there were many applications to see her, but she wanted me to stay then, saying, “It is better to throw things aside, and seize the present moment.” I staid a good part of the day, and was very glad afterwards, for I did not see her again uninterrupted. Another day I was there, and saw her in her circle. Her daughter and another lady were present, and a number of gentlemen. Her position there was of an intellectual woman and good friend, — the same as my own in the circle of my acquaintance as distinguished from my intimates. Her daughter is just about to be married. It is said, there is no congeniality between her and her mother; but for her son she seems to have much love, and he loves and admires her extremely. I understand he has a good and free character, without conspicuous talent.

Her way of talking is just like her writing, — lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep feeling, and the same skill in striking the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.

We did not talk at all of personal or private matters. I saw, as one sees in her writings, the want of an independent, interior life, but I did not feel it as a fault, there is so much in her of her kind. I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better.

For the rest I do not care to write about it much, for I cannot, in the room and time I have to spend, express my thoughts as I would; but as near as I can express the sum total, it is this. S —— and others who admire her, are anxious to make a fancy picture of her, and represent her as a Helena (in the Seven Chords of the Lyre); all whose mistakes are the fault of the present state of society. But to me the truth seems to be this. She has that purity in her soul, for she knows well how to love and prize its beauty; but she herself is quite another sort of person. She needs no defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions. She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly a possibility of that, for such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the objects of her affection, and several times. Also, there may have been something of the Bacchante in her life, and of the love of night and storm, and the free raptures amid which roamed on the mountain-tops the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the great mother. But she was never coarse, never gross, and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of wine-press. When she has done with an intimacy, she likes to break it off suddenly, and this has happened often, both with men and women. Many calumnies upon her are traceable to this cause.

I forgot to mention, that, while talking, she does smoke all the time her little cigarette. This is now a common practice among ladies abroad, but I believe originated with her.

For the rest, she holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but she has also enjoyed and done much, and her expression is one of calmness and happiness. I was sorry to see her exploitant her talent so carelessly. She does too much, and this cannot last forever; but “Teverino” and the “Mare au Diable,” which she has lately published, are as original, as masterly in truth, and as free in invention, as anything she has done.

Afterwards I saw Chopin, not with her, although he lives with her, and has for the last twelve years. I went to see him in his room with one of his friends. He is always ill, and as frail as a snow-drop, but an exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked his talking scarcely less. Madame S. loved Liszt before him; she has thus been intimate with the two opposite sides of the musical world. Mickiewicz says, “Chopin talks with spirit, and gives us the Ariel view of the universe. Liszt is the eloquent tribune to the world of men, a little vulgar and showy certainly, but I like the tribune best.” It is said here, that Madame S. has long had only a friendship for Chopin, who, perhaps, on his side prefers to be a lover, and a jealous lover; but she does not leave him, because he needs her care so much, when sick and suffering. About all this, I do not know; you cannot know much about anything in France, except what you see with your two eyes. Lying is ingrained in “la grande nation” as they so plainly show no less in literature than life.

RACHEL.

In France the theatre is living; you see something really good, and good throughout. Not one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone, which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion, is tolerated here. For the first time in my life, I saw something represented in a style uniformly good, and should have found sufficient proof, if I had needed any, that all men will prefer what is good to what is bad, if only a fair opportunity for choice be allowed. When I came here, my first thought was to go and see Mademoiselle Rachel. I was sure that in her I should find a true genius. I went to see her seven or eight times, always in parts that required great force of soul, and purity of taste, even to conceive them, and only once had reason to find fault with her. On one single occasion, I saw her violate the harmony of the character, to produce effect at a particular moment; but, almost invariably, I found her a true artist, worthy Greece, and worthy at many moments to have her conceptions immortalized in marble.

Her range even in high tragedy is limited. She can only express the darker passions, and grief in its most desolate aspects. Nature has not gifted her with those softer and more flowery attributes, that lend to pathos its utmost tenderness. She does not melt to tears, or calm or elevate the heart by the presence of that tragic beauty that needs all the assaults of fate to make it show its immortal sweetness. Her noblest aspect is when sometimes she expresses truth in some severe shape, and rises, simple and austere, above the mixed elements around her. On the dark side, she is very great in hatred and revenge. I admired her more in Phèdre than in any other part in which I saw her; the guilty love inspired by the hatred of a goddess was expressed, in all its symptoms, with a force and terrible naturalness, that almost suffocated the beholder. After she had taken the poison, the exhaustion and paralysis of the system, — the sad, cold, calm submission to Fate, — were still more grand.

I had heard so much about the power of her eye in one fixed look, and the expression she could concentrate in a single word, that the utmost results could only satisfy my expectations. It is, indeed, something magnificent to see the dark cloud give out such sparks, each one fit to deal a separate death; but it was not that I admired most in her. It was the grandeur, truth, and depth of her conception of each part, and the sustained purity with which she represented it.

The French language from her lips is a divine dialect; it is stripped of its national and personal peculiarities, and becomes what any language must, moulded by such a genius, the pure music of the heart and soul. I never could remember her tone in speaking any word; it was too perfect; you had received the thought quite direct. Yet, had I never heard her speak a word, my mind would be filled by her attitudes. Nothing more graceful can be conceived, nor could the genius of sculpture surpass her management of the antique drapery.

She has no beauty, except in the intellectual severity of her outline, and she bears marks of race, that will grow stronger every year, and make her ugly at last. Still it will be a grandiose, gypsy, or rather Sibylline ugliness, well adapted to the expression of some tragic parts. Only it seems as if she could not live long; she expends force enough upon a part to furnish out a dozen common lives.

TO R.W.E.

Paris, Jan. 18, 1847. — I can hardly tell you what a fever consumes me, from sense of the brevity of my time and opportunity. Here I cannot sleep at night, because I have been able to do so little in the day. Constantly I try to calm my mind into content with small achievements, but it is difficult. You will say, it is not so mightily worth knowing, after all, this picture and natural history of Europe. Very true; but I am so constituted that it pains me to come away, having touched only the glass over the picture.

I am assiduous daily at the Academy lectures, picture galleries, Chamber of Deputies, — last week, at the court and court ball. So far as my previous preparation enabled me, I get something from all these brilliant shows, — thoughts, images, fresh impulse. But I need, to initiate me into various little secrets of the place and time, — necessary for me to look at things to my satisfaction, — some friend, such as I do not find here. My steps have not been fortunate in Paris, as they were in England. No doubt, the person exists here, whose aid I want; indeed, I feel that it is so; but we do not meet, and the time draws near for me to depart.

French people I find slippery, as they do not know exactly what to make of me, the rather as I have not the command of their language. I see them, their brilliancy, grace, and variety, the thousand slight refinements of their speech and manner, but cannot meet them in their way. My French teacher says, I speak and act like an Italian, and I hope, in Italy, I shall find myself more at home.

I had, the other day, the luck to be introduced to Béranger, who is the only person beside George Sand I cared very particularly to see here. I went to call on La Mennais, to whom I had a letter. I found him in a little study; his secretary was writing in a large room through which I passed. With him was a somewhat citizen-looking, but vivacious elderly man, whom I was, at first, sorry to see, having wished for half an hour’s undisturbed visit to the Apostle of Democracy. But those feelings were quickly displaced by joy, when he named to me the great national lyrist of France, the great Béranger. I had not expected to see him at all, for he is not to be seen in any show place; he lives in the hearts of the people, and needs no homage from their eyes. I was very happy, in that little study, in the presence of these two men, whose influence has been so real and so great. Béranger has been much to me, — his wit, his pathos, and exquisite lyric grace. I have not received influence from La Mennais, but I see well what he has been, and is, to Europe.

TO LA MENNAIS.

Monsieur: —

As my visit to you was cut short before I was quite satisfied, it was my intention to seek you again immediately; although I felt some scruples at occupying your valuable time, when I express myself so imperfectly in your language. But I have been almost constantly ill since, and now am not sure of finding time to pay you my respects before leaving Paris for Italy. In case this should be impossible, I take the liberty to write, and to present you two little volumes of mine. It is only as a tribute of respect. I regret that they do not contain some pieces of mine which might be more interesting to you, as illustrative of the state of affairs in our country. Some such will find their place in subsequent numbers. These, I hope, you will, if you do not read them, accept kindly as a salutation from our hemisphere. Many there delight to know you as a great apostle of the ideas which are to be our life, if Heaven intends us a great and permanent life. I count myself happy in having seen you, and in finding with you Béranger, the genuine poet, the genuine man of France. I have felt all the enchantment of the lyre of Béranger; have paid my warmest homage to the truth and wisdom adorned with such charms, such wit and pathos. It was a great pleasure to see himself. If your leisure permits, Monsieur, I will ask a few lines in reply. I should like to keep some words from your hand, in case I should not look upon you more here below; and am always, with gratitude for the light you have shed on so many darkened spirits,

Yours, most respectfully,

MARGARET FULLER.

* * * * *

Paris, Jan., 1847. — I missed hearing M. Guizot, (I am sorry for it,) in his speech on the Montpensier marriage. I saw the little Duchess, the innocent or ignorant topic of all this disturbance, when presented at court. She went round the circle on the arm of the queen. Though only fourteen, she looks twenty, but has something fresh, engaging, and girlish about her.

I attended not only at the presentation, but at the ball given at the Tuileries directly after. These are fine shows, as the suite of apartments is very handsome, brilliantly lighted, — the French ladies surpassing all others in the art of dress; indeed, it gave me much pleasure to see them. Certainly there are many ugly ones; but they are so well dressed, and have such an air of graceful vivacity, that the general effect was of a flower-garden. As often happens, several American women were among the most distinguished for positive beauty; one from Philadelphia, who is by many persons considered the prettiest ornament of the dress circle at the Italian opera, was especially marked by the attention of the king. However, these ladies, even if here a long time, do not attain the air and manner of French women. The magnetic fluid that envelops them is less brilliant and exhilarating in its attractions.

Among the crowd wandered Leverrier, in the costume of Academician, looking as if he had lost, not found, his planet. French savants are more generally men of the world, and even men of fashion, than those of other climates; but, in his case, he seemed not to find it easy to exchange the music of the spheres for the music of fiddles.

Speaking of Leverrier leads to another of my disappointments. I went to the Sorbonne to hear him lecture, not dreaming that the old pedantic and theological character of those halls was strictly kept up in these days of light. An old guardian of the inner temple seeing me approach, had his speech all ready, and, manning the entrance, said, with a disdainful air, before we had time to utter a word, “Monsieur may enter if he pleases, but madame must remain here” (i.e., in the court-yard). After some exclamations of surprise, I found an alternative in the Hotel de Clugny, where I passed an hour very delightfully, while waiting for my companion.

I was more fortunate in hearing Arago, and he justified all my expectations. Clear, rapid, full, and equal, his discourse is worthy its celebrity, and I felt repaid for the four hours one is obliged to spend in going, in waiting, and in hearing, for the lecture begins at half past one, and you must be there before twelve to get a seat, so constant and animated is his popularity.

I was present on one good occasion, at the Academy, — the day that M. Rémusat was received there, in the place of Royer Collard. I looked down, from one of the tribunes, upon the flower of the celebrities of France; that is to say, of the celebrities which are authentic, comme il faut. Among them were many marked faces, many fine heads; but, in reading the works of poets, we always fancy them about the age of Apollo himself, and I found with pain some of my favorites quite old, and very unlike the company on Parnassus, as represented by Raphael. Some, however, were venerable, even noble to behold.

The poorer classes have suffered from hunger this winter. All signs of this are kept out of sight in Paris. A pamphlet called “The Voice of Famine,” stating facts, though in a tone of vulgar and exaggerated declamation, was suppressed as soon as published. While Louis Philippe lives, the gases may not burst up to flame, but the need of radical measures of reform is strongly felt in France; and the time will come, before long, when such will be imperatively demanded.

FOURIER.

The doctrines of Fourier are making progress, and wherever they spread, the necessity of some practical application of the precepts of Christ, in lieu of the mummeries of a worn-out ritual, cannot fail to be felt. The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of these subjects, — such as is animated by the hope of prevention. Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its faults; in attempts to reorganize society, he commits the error of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the clothing of soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance with the population of London and Paris, could seek to hinder a study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes.

ROUSSEAU.

To the actually so-called Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the manuscripts of Rousseau treasured in their library. I saw them and touched them, — those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some detours through villanous places; but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of genius, — to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain.

TO R.W.E.

Naples, March 15, 1847. — Mickiewicz, the Polish poet, first introduced the Essays to acquaintance in Paris. I did not meet him anywhere, and, as I heard a great deal of him which charmed me, I sent him your poems, and asked him to come and see me. He came, and I found in him the man I had long wished to see, with the intellect and passions in due proportion for a full and healthy human being, with a soul constantly inspiring. Unhappily, it was a very short time before I came away. How much time had I wasted on others which I might have given to this real and important relation.

After hearing music from Chopin and Neukomm, I quitted Paris on the 25th February, and came, via Chalons, Lyons, Avignon, (where I waded through melting snow to Laura’s tomb,) Arles, to Marseilles; thence, by steamer, to Genoa, Leghorn, and Pisa. Seen through a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa, failed to charm. Only at Naples have I found my Italy. Between Leghorn and Naples, our boat was run into by another, and we only just escaped being drowned.

ROME.

Rome, May, 1847. — Of the fragments of the great time, I have now seen nearly all that are treasured up here. I have as yet nothing of consequence to say of them. Others have often given good hints as to how they look. As to what they are, it can only be known by approximating to the state of soul out of which they grew. They are many and precious; yet is there not so much of high excellence as I looked for. They will not float the heart on a boundless sea of feeling, like the starry night on our Western Prairies. Yet I love much to see the galleries of marbles, even where there are not many separately admirable, amid the cypresses and ilexes of Roman villas; and a picture that is good at all, looks best in one of these old palaces. I have heard owls hoot in the Colosseum by moonlight, and they spoke more to the purpose than I ever heard any other voice on that subject. I have seen all the pomps of Holy Week in St. Peter’s, and found them less imposing than an habitual acquaintance with the church itself, with processions of monks and nuns stealing in, now and then, or the swell of vespers from some side chapel. The ceremonies of the church have been numerous and splendid, during our stay, and they borrow unusual interest from the love and expectation inspired by the present pontiff. He is a man of noble and good aspect, who has set his heart on doing something solid for the benefit of man. A week or two ago, the Cardinal Secretary published a circular, inviting the departments to measures which would give the people a sort of representative council. Nothing could seem more limited than this improvement, but it was a great measure for Rome. At night, the Corso was illuminated, and many thousands passed through it in a torch-bearing procession, on their way to the Quirinal, to thank the Pope, upbearing a banner on which the edict was printed.

TO W.H.C.

Rome, May 7, 1847. — I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more. Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendently good, and even with that feel very familiar and calm. I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier’s future. But I like no Fourierites; they are terribly wearisome here in Europe; the tide of things does not wash through them as violently as with us, and they have time to run in the tread-mill of system. Still, they serve this great future which I shall not live to see. I must be born again.

TO R.W.E.

Florence, June 20, 1847. — I have just come hither from Rome. Every minute, day and night, there is something to be seen or done at Rome, which we cannot bear to lose. We lived on the Corso, and all night long, after the weather became fine, there was conversation or music before my window. I never seemed really to sleep while there, and now, at Florence, where there is less to excite, and I live in a more quiet quarter, I feel as if I needed to sleep all the time, and cannot rest as I ought, there is so much to do.

I now speak French fluently, though not correctly, yet well enough to make my thoughts avail in the cultivated society here, where it is much spoken. But to know the common people, and to feel truly in Italy, I ought to speak and understand the spoken Italian well, and I am now cultivating this sedulously. If I remain, I shall have, for many reasons, advantages for observation and enjoyment, such as are seldom permitted to a foreigner.

I forgot to mention one little thing rather interesting. At the Miserere of the Sistine chapel, I sat beside Goethe’s favorite daughter-in-law, Ottilia, to whom I was introduced by Mrs. Jameson.

TO R.F.F.

Florence, July 1, 1847. — I do not wish to go through Germany in a hurried way, and am equally unsatisfied to fly through Italy; and shall, therefore, leaving my companions in Switzerland, take a servant to accompany me, and return hither, and hence to Rome for the autumn, perhaps the winter. I should always suffer the pain of Tantalus thinking of Rome, if I could not see it more thoroughly than I have as yet even begun to; for it was all outside the two months, just finding out where objects were. I had only just begun to know them, when I was obliged to leave. The prospect of returning presents many charms, but it leaves me alone in the midst of a strange land.

I find myself happily situated here, in many respects. The Marchioness Arconati Visconti, to whom I brought a letter from a friend of hers in France, has been good to me as a sister, and introduced me to many interesting acquaintance. The sculptors, Powers and Greenough, I have seen much and well. Other acquaintance I possess, less known to fame, but not less attractive.

Florence is not like Rome. At first, I could not bear the change; yet, for the study of the fine arts, it is a still richer place. Worlds of thought have risen in my mind; some time you will have light from all.

* * * * *

Milan, Aug. 9, 1847. — Passing from Florence, I came to Bologna. A woman should love Bologna, for there has the intellect of woman been cherished. In their Certosa, they proudly show the monument to Matilda Tambreni, late Greek professor there. In their anatomical hall, is the bust of a woman, professor of anatomy. In art, they have had Properzia di Rossi, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and delight to give their works a conspicuous place. In other cities, the men alone have their Casino dei Nobili, where they give balls and conversazioni. Here, women have one, and are the soul of society. In Milan, also, I see, in the Ambrosian Library, the bust of a female mathematician.

TO HER MOTHER.

Lago di Garda, Aug. 1, 1847. — Do not let what I have written disturb you as to my health. I have rested now, and am as well as usual. This advantage I derive from being alone, that, if I feel the need of it, I can stop.

I left Venice four days ago; have seen well Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, and am reposing, for two nights and a day, in this tranquil room which overlooks the beautiful Lake of Garda. The air is sweet and pure, and I hear no noise except the waves breaking on the shore.

I think of you a great deal, especially when there are flowers. Florence was all flowers. I have many magnolias and jasmines. I always wish you could see them. The other day, on the island of San Lazaro, at the Armenian Convent, where Lord Byron used to go, I thought of you, seeing the garden full of immense oleanders in full bloom. One sees them everywhere at Venice.

TO HER TRAVELLING COMPANIONS AFTER PARTING.

Milan, Aug. 9, 1847. — I remained at Venice near a week after your departure, to get strong and tranquil again. Saw all the pictures, if not enough, yet pretty well. My journey here was very profitable. Vicenza, Verona, Mantua, I saw really well, and much there is to see. Certainly I had learned more than ever in any previous ten days of my existence, and have formed an idea of what is needed for the study of art in these regions. But, at Brescia, I was taken ill with fever. I cannot tell you how much I was alarmed when it seemed to me it was affecting my head. I had no medicine; nothing could I do except abstain entirely from food, and drink cold water. The second day, I had a bed made in a carriage, and came on here. I am now pretty well, only very weak.

TO R.W.E.

Milan, Aug. 10, 1847. — Since writing you from Florence, I have passed the mountains; two full, rich days at Bologna; one at Ravenna; more than a fortnight at Venice, intoxicated with the place, and with Venetian art, only to be really felt and known in its birth-place. I have passed some hours at Vicenza, seeing mainly the Palladian structures; a day at Verona, — a week had been better; seen Mantua, with great delight; several days in Lago di Garda, — truly happy days there; then, to Brescia, where I saw the Titians, the exquisite Raphael, the Scavi, and the Brescian Hills. I could charm you by pictures, had I time.

To-day, for the first time, I have seen Manzoni. Manzoni has spiritual efficacy in his looks; his eyes glow still with delicate tenderness, as when he first saw Lucia, or felt them fill at the image of Father Cristoforo. His manners are very engaging, frank, expansive; every word betokens the habitual elevation of his thoughts; and (what you care for so much) he says distinct, good things; but you must not expect me to note them down. He lives in the house of his fathers, in the simplest manner. He has taken the liberty to marry a new wife for his own pleasure and companionship, and the people around him do not like it, because she does not, to their fancy, make a good pendant to him. But I liked her very well, and saw why he married her. They asked me to return often, if I pleased, and I mean to go once or twice, for Manzoni seems to like to talk with me.

* * * * *

Rome, Oct., 1847. — Leaving Milan, I went on the Lago Maggiore, and afterward into Switzerland. Of this tour I shall not speak here; it was a little romance by itself.

Returning from Switzerland, I passed a fortnight on the Lake of Como, and afterward visited Lugano. There is no exaggeration in the enthusiastic feeling with which artists and poets have viewed these Italian lakes. The “Titan” of Richter, the “Wanderjahre” of Goethe, the Elena of Taylor, the pictures of Turner, had not prepared me for the visions of beauty that daily entranced the eyes and heart in those regions. To our country, Nature has been most bounteous, but we have nothing in the same class that can compare with these lakes, as seen under the Italian heaven. As to those persons who have pretended to discover that the effects of light and atmosphere were no finer than they found in our own lake scenery, I can only say that they must be exceedingly obtuse in organization, — a defect not uncommon among Americans.

Nature seems to have labored to express her full heart in as many ways as possible, when she made these lakes, moulded and planted their shores. Lago Maggiore is grandiose, resplendent in its beauty; the view of the Alps gives a sort of lyric exaltation to the scene. Lago di Garda is so soft and fair on one side, — the ruins of ancient palaces rise softly with the beauties of that shore; but at the other end, amid the Tyrol, it is so sublime, so calm, so concentrated in its meaning! Como cannot be better described in generals than in the words of Taylor: —

“Softly sublime, profusely fair”

Lugano is more savage, more free in its beauty. I was on it in a high gale; there was little danger, just enough to exhilarate; its waters wild, and clouds blowing across its peaks. I like the boatmen on these lakes; they have strong and prompt character; of simple features, they are more honest and manly than Italian men are found in the thoroughfares; their talk is not so witty as that of the Venetian gondoliers, but picturesque, and what the French call incisive. Very touching were some of their histories, as they told them to me, while pausing sometimes on the lake. Grossi gives a true picture of such a man in his family relations; the story may be found in “Marco Visconti.”

On this lake, I met Lady Franklin, wife of the celebrated navigator. She has been in the United States, and showed equal penetration and candor in remarks on what she had seen there. She gave me interesting particulars as to the state of things in Van Diemen’s Land, where she passed seven years, when her husband was in authority there.

TO C.S.

Lake of Como, Aug. 22, 1847. — Rome was much poisoned to me. But, after a time, its genius triumphed, and I became absorbed in its proper life. Again I suffered from parting, and have since resolved to return, and pass at least a part of the winter there. People may write and prate as they please of Rome, they cannot convey thus a portion of its spirit. The whole heart must be yielded up to it. It is something really transcendent, both spirit and body. Those last glorious nights, in which I wandered about amid the old walls and columns, or sat by the fountains in the Piazza del Popolo, or by the river, were worth an age of pain, — only one hates pain in Italy.

Tuscany I did not like as well. It is a great place to study the history of character and art. Indeed, there I did really begin to study, as well as gaze and feel. But I did not like it. Florence is more in its spirit like Boston, than like an Italian city. I knew a good many Italians, but they were busy and intellectual, not like those I had known before. But Florence is full of really good, great pictures. There first I saw some of the great masters. Andrea del Sarto, in particular, one sees only there, and he is worth much. His wife, whom he always paints, and for whom he was so infatuated, has some bad qualities, and in what is good a certain wild nature or diablerie.

Bologna is truly an Italian city, one in which I should like to live; full of hidden things, and its wonders of art are very grand. The Caracci and their friends had vast force; not much depth, but enough force to occupy one a good while, — and Domenichino, when good at all, is very great.

Venice was a dream of enchantment; there was no disappointment. Art and life are one. There is one glow of joy, one deep shade of passionate melancholy; Giorgione, as a man, I care more for now than any of the artists, though he had no ideas.

In the first week, floating about in a gondola, I seemed to find myself again.

I was not always alone in Venice, but have come through the fertile plains of Lombardy, seen the lakes Garda and Maggiore, and a part of Switzerland, alone, except for occasional episodes of companionship, sometimes romantic enough.

In Milan I stayed a while, and knew some radicals, young, and interested in ideas. Here, on the lake, I have fallen into contact with some of the higher society, — duchesses, marquises, and the like. My friend here is Madame Arconati, Marchioness Visconti. I have formed connection with a fair and brilliant Polish lady, born Princess Radzivill. It is rather pleasant to come a little on the traces of these famous histories; also, both these ladies take pleasure in telling me of spheres so unlike mine, and do it well.

The life here on the lake is precisely what we once imagined as being so pleasant. These people have charming villas and gardens on the lake, adorned with fine works of art. They go to see one another in boats. You can be all the time in a boat, if you like; if you want more excitement, or wild flowers, you climb the mountains. I have been here for some time, and shall stay a week longer. I have found soft repose here. Now, I am to return to Rome, seeing many things by the way.

TO R.F.F.

Florence, Sept. 25, 1847. — I hope not to want a further remittance for a long time. I shall not, if I can settle myself at Rome so as to avoid spoliation. That is very difficult in this country. I have suffered from it already. The haste, the fatigue, the frequent illness in travelling, have tormented me. At Rome I shall settle myself for five months, and make arrangements to the best of my judgment, and with counsel of experienced friends, and have some hope of economy while there; but am not sure, as much more vigilance than I can promise is needed against the treachery of servants and the cunning of landlords.

You are disappointed by my letter from Rome. But I did not feel equal then to speaking of the things of Rome, and shall not, till better acquaintance has steadied my mind. It is a matter of conscience with me not to make use of crude impressions, and what they call here “coffee-house intelligence,” as travellers generally do. I prefer skimming over the surface of things, till I feel solidly ready to write.

Milan I left with great regret, and hope to return. I knew there a circle of the aspiring youth, such as I have not in any other city. I formed many friendships, and learned a great deal. One of the young men, Guerrieri by name, (and of the famous Gonzaga family,) I really love. He has a noble soul, the quietest sensibility, and a brilliant and ardent, though not a great, mind. He is eight-and-twenty. After studying medicine for the culture, he has taken law as his profession. His mind and that of Hicks, an artist of our country now here, a little younger, are two that would interest you greatly. Guerrieri speaks no English; I speak French now as fluently as English, but incorrectly. To make use of it, I ought to have learned it earlier.

Arriving here, Mr. Mozier, an American, who from a prosperous merchant has turned sculptor, come hither to live, and promises much excellence in his profession, urged me so much to his house, that I came. At first, I was ill from fatigue, and staid several days in bed; but his wife took tender care of me, and the quiet of their house and regular simple diet have restored me. As soon as I have seen a few things here, I shall go to Rome. On my way, I stopped at Parma, — saw the works of Correggio and Parmegiano. I have now seen what Italy contains most important of the great past; I begin to hope for her also a great future, — the signs have improved so much since I came. I am most fortunate to be here at this time.

Interrupted, as always. How happy I should be if my abode at Rome would allow some chance for tranquil and continuous effort. But I dare not hope much, from the difficulty of making any domestic arrangements that can be relied on. The fruit of the moment is so precious, that I must not complain. I learn much; but to do anything with what I learn is, under such circumstances, impossible. Besides, I am in great need of repose; I am almost inert from fatigue of body and spirit.

TO E.H.

Florence, Sept., 1847. — I cannot even begin to speak of the magnificent scenes of nature, nor the works of art, that have raised and filled my mind since I wrote from Naples. Now I begin to be in Italy! but I wish to drink deep of this cup before I speak my enamored words. Enough to say, Italy receives me as a long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here, and if I ever tell anything about it, you will hear something real and domestic. Among strangers I wish most to speak to you of my friend the Marchioness A. Visconti, a Milanese. She is a specimen of the really high-bred lady, such as I have not known. Without any physical beauty, the grace and harmony of her manners produce all the impression of beauty. She has also a mind strong, clear, precise, and much cultivated. She has a modest nobleness that you would dearly love. She is intimate with many of the first men. She seems to love me much, and to wish I should have whatever is hers. I take great pleasure in her friendship.

TO R.W.E.

Rome, Oct. 28, 1847. — I am happily settled for the winter, quite by myself, in a neat, tranquil apartment in the Corso, where I see all the motions of Rome, — in a house of loving Italians, who treat me well, and do not interrupt me, except for service. I live alone, eat alone, walk alone, and enjoy unspeakably the stillness, after all the rush and excitement of the past year.

I shall make no acquaintance from whom I do not hope a good deal, as my time will be like pure gold to me this winter; and, just for happiness, Rome itself is sufficient.

To-day is the last of the October feasts of the Trasteverini. I have been, this afternoon, to see them dancing. This morning I was out, with half Rome, to see the Civic Guard manoeuvring in that great field near the tomb of Cecilia Metella, which is full of ruins. The effect was noble, as the band played the Bolognese march, and six thousand Romans passed in battle array amid these fragments of the great time.

TO R.F.F.

Rome, Oct. 29, 1847. — I am trying to economize, — anxious to keep the Roman expenses for six months within the limits of four hundred dollars. Rome is not as cheap a place as Florence, but then I would not give a pin to live in Florence.

We have just had glorious times with the October feasts, when all the Roman people were out. I am now truly happy here, quiet and familiar; no longer a staring, sight-seeing stranger, riding about finely dressed in a coach to see muses and sibyls. I see these forms now in the natural manner, and am contented.

Keep free from false ties; they are the curse of life. I find myself so happy here, alone and free.

TO M.S.

Rome, Oct. 1847. — I arrived in Rome again nearly a fortnight ago, and all mean things were forgotten in the joy that rushed over me like a flood. Now I saw the true Rome. I came with no false expectations, and I came to live in tranquil companionship, not in the restless impertinence of sight-seeing, so much more painful here than anywhere else.

I had made a good visit to Vicenza; a truly Italian town, with much to see and study. But all other places faded away, now that I again saw St. Peter’s, and heard the music of the fountains.

The Italian autumn is not as beautiful as I expected, neither in the vintage of Tuscany nor here. The country is really sere and brown; but the weather is fine, and these October feasts are charming. Two days I have been at the Villa Borghese. There are races, balloons, and, above all, the private gardens open, and good music on the little lake.

TO —— .

Rome, morning of the 17th Nov., 1847. — It seems great folly to send the enclosed letter. I have written it in my nightly fever. All day I dissipate my thoughts on outward beauty. I have many thoughts, happiest moments, but as yet I do not have even this part in a congenial way. I go about in a coach with several people; but English and Americans are not at home here. Since I have experienced the different atmosphere of the European mind, and been allied with it, nay, mingled in the bonds of love, I suffer more than ever from that which is peculiarly American or English. I should like to cease from hearing the language for a time. Perhaps I should return to it; but at present I am in a state of unnatural divorce from what I was most allied to.

There is a Polish countess here, who likes me much. She has been very handsome, still is, in the style of the full-blown rose. She is a widow, very rich, one of the emancipated women, naturally vivacious, and with talent. This woman envies me; she says, “How happy you are; so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!” I say not a word, but I do not look on myself as particularly enviable. A little money would have made me much more so; a little money would have enabled me to come here long ago, and find those that belong to me, or at least try my experiments; then my health would never have sunk, nor the best years of my life been wasted in useless friction. Had I money now, — could I only remain, take a faithful servant, and live alone, and still see those I love when it is best, that would suit me. It seems to me, very soon I shall be calmed, and begin to enjoy.

TO HER MOTHER.

Rome, Dec. 16, 1847. — My life at Rome is thus far all I hoped. I have not been so well since I was a child, nor so happy ever, as during the last six weeks. I wrote you about my home; it continues good, perfectly clean, food wholesome, service exact. For all this I pay, but not immoderately. I think the sum total of my expenses here, for six months, will not exceed four hundred and fifty dollars.

My marchesa, of whom I rent my rooms, is the greatest liar I ever knew, and the most interested, heartless creature. But she thinks it for her interest to please me, as she sees I have a good many persons who value me; and I have been able, without offending her, to make it understood that I do not wish her society. Thus I remain undisturbed.

Every Monday evening, I receive my acquaintance. I give no refreshment, but only light the saloon, and decorate it with fresh flowers, of which I have plenty still. How I wish you could see them!

Among the frequent guests are known to you Mr. and Mrs. Cranch, Mr. and Mrs. Story. Mr. S. has finally given up law, for the artist’s life. His plans are not matured, but he passes the winter at Rome.

On other evenings, I do not receive company, unless by appointment. I spend them chiefly in writing or study. I have now around me the books I need to know Italy and Rome. I study with delight, now that I can verify everything. The days are invariably fine, and each day I am out from eleven till five, exploring some new object of interest, often at a great distance.

TO R.W.E.

Rome, Dec. 20, 1847. — Nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source. Since Destiny will not grant me that, I hope she will not leave me long in the world, for I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim. I should like to go to sleep, and be born again into a state where my young life should not be prematurely taxed.

Italy has been glorious to me, and there have been hours in which I received the full benefit of the vision. In Rome, I have known some blessed, quiet days, when I could yield myself to be soothed and instructed by the great thoughts and memories of the place. But those days are swiftly passing. Soon I must begin to exert myself, for there is this incubus of the future, and none to help me, if I am not prudent to face it. So ridiculous, too, this mortal coil, — such small things!

I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil. However, it is a less failure than with most others, and not worth thinking twice about. Heaven has room enough, and good chances in store, and I can live a great deal in the years that remain.

TO R.W.E.

Rome, Dec. 20, 1847. — I don’t know whether you take an interest in the present state of things in Italy, but you would if you were here. It is a fine time to see the people. As to the Pope, it is as difficult here as elsewhere to put new wine into old bottles, and there is something false as well as ludicrous in the spectacle of the people first driving their princes to do a little justice, and then evviva-ing them at such a rate. This does not apply to the Pope; he is a real great heart, a generous man. The love for him is genuine, and I like to be within its influence. It was his heart that gave the impulse, and this people has shown, to the shame of English and other prejudice, how unspoiled they were at the core, how open, nay, how wondrous swift to answer a generous appeal!

They are also gaining some education by the present freedom of the press and of discussion. I should like to write a letter for England, giving my view of the present position of things here.

* * * * *

Rome, October 18, 1847. — In the spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust. Still doubts were always present whether this joy was not premature. From the people themselves the help must come, and not from the princes. Rome, to resume her glory, must cease to be an ecclesiastical capital. Whilst I sympathized with the warm love of the people, the adulation of leading writers, who were willing to take all from the prince of the Church as a gift and a bounty, instead of steadily implying that it was the right of the people, was very repulsive to me. Passing into Tuscany, I found the liberty of the press just established. The Grand Duke, a well-intentioned, though dull, man, had dared to declare himself an Italian prince. I arrived in Florence too late for the great fête of the 12th September, in honor of the grant of the National Guard, but the day was made memorable by the most generous feeling on all sides. Some days before were passed by reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and individuals. On that day they all embraced in sign of this; exchanged banners as a token that they would fight for one another.

AMERICANS IN ITALY.

The Americans took their share in this occasion, and Greenough, — one of the few Americans who, living in Italy, takes the pains to know whether it is alive or dead, who penetrates beyond the cheats of tradesmen, and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to know the real mind, the vital blood of Italy, — took a leading part. I am sorry to say that a large portion of my countrymen here take the same slothful and prejudiced view as the English, and, after many years’ sojourn, betray entire ignorance of Italian literature and Italian life beyond what is attainable in a month’s passage through the thoroughfares. However, they did show, this time, a becoming spirit, and erected the American Eagle where its cry ought to be heard from afar. Crawford, here in Rome, has had the just feeling to join the Guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an artist to spend time on the exercises; but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus. In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms, that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better. I will only add some words upon the happy augury I draw from the wise docility of the people. With what readiness they listened to wise counsel and the hopes of the Pope that they would give no advantage to his enemies at a time when they were so fevered by the knowledge that conspiracy was at work in their midst! That was a time of trial. On all these occasions of popular excitement their conduct is like music, in such order, and with such union of the melody of feeling with discretion where to stop; but what is wonderful is that they acted in the same manner on that difficult occasion. The influence of the Pope here is without bounds; he can always calm the crowd at once. But in Tuscany, where they have no such one idol, they listened in the same way on a very trying occasion. The first announcement of the regulation for the Tuscan National Guard terribly disappointed the people. They felt that the Grand Duke, after suffering them to demonstrate such trust and joy on this feast of the 12th, did not really trust, on his side; that he meant to limit them all he could; they felt baffled, cheated; hence young men in anger tore down at once the symbols of satisfaction and respect; but the leading men went among the people, begged them to be calm, and wait till a deputation had seen the Grand Duke. The people listened at once to men who, they were sure, had at heart their best good — waited; the Grand Duke became convinced, and all ended without disturbance. If the people continue to act thus, their hopes cannot be baffled.

The American in Europe would fain encourage the hearts of these long-oppressed nations, now daring to hope for a new era, by reciting triumphant testimony from the experience of his own country. But we must stammer and blush when we speak of many things. I take pride here, that I may really say the liberty of the press works well, and that checks and balances naturally evolve from it, which suffice to its government. I may say, that the minds of our people are alert, and that talent has a free chance to rise. It is much. But dare I say, that political ambition is not as darkly sullied as in other countries? Dare I say, that men of most influence in political life are those who represent most virtue, or even intellectual power? Can I say, our social laws are generally better, or show a nobler insight into the wants of man and woman? I do indeed say what I believe, that voluntary association for improvement in these particulars will be the grand means for my nation to grow, and give a nobler harmony to the coming age. Then there is this cancer of slavery, and this wicked war that has grown out of it. How dare I speak of these things here? I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico.

How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life; and, if it was not the only thing worth thinking of, it was really something worth living and dying for, to free a great nation from such a blot, such a plague. God strengthen them, and make them wise to achieve their purpose!

I please myself, too, with remembering some ardent souls among the American youth, who, I trust, will yet expand and help to give soul to the huge, over-fed, too-hastily-grown-up body. May they be constant! “Were man but constant, he were perfect.” It is to the youth that Hope addresses itself. But I dare not expect too much of them. I am not very old; yet of those who, in life’s morning, I saw touched by the light of a high hope, many have seceded. Some have become voluptuaries; some mere family men, who think it is quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people, and treat them decently; others are lost through indolence and vacillation. Yet some remain constant.

“I have witnessed many a shipwreck, yet still beat noble hearts.”

* * * * *

Rome, January, 1848. — As one becomes domesticated here, ancient and modern Rome, at first so jumbled together, begin to separate. You see where objects and limits anciently were. When this happens, one feels first truly at ease in Rome. Then the old kings, the consuls, the tribunes, the emperors, the warriors of eagle sight and remorseless beak, return for us, and the toga-clad procession finds room to sweep across the scene; the seven hills tower, the innumerable temples glitter, and the Via Sacra swarms with triumphal life once more.

* * * * *

Rome, Jan. 12, 1848. — In Rome, here, the new Council is inaugurated, and the elections have given tolerable satisfaction. Twenty-four carriages had been lent by the princes and nobles, at the request of the city, to convey the councillors. Each deputy was followed by his target and banner. In the evening, there was a ball given at the Argentine. Lord Minto was there, Prince Corsini, now senator, the Torlonias, in uniform of the Civic Guard, Princess Torlonia, in a sash of their colors given her by the Civic Guard, which she waved in answer to their greetings. But the beautiful show of the evening was the Trasteverini dancing the Saltarello in their most beautiful costume. I saw them thus to much greater advantage than ever before. Several were nobly handsome, and danced admirably. The saltarello enchants me; in this is really the Italian wine, the Italian sun.

The Pope, in receiving the councillors, made a speech, intimating that he meant only to improve, not to reform and should keep things safe locked with the keys of St. Peter.

I was happy the first two months of my stay here, seeing all the great things at my leisure. But now, after a month of continuous rain, Rome is no more Rome. The atmosphere is far worse than that of Paris. It is impossible to walk in the thick mud. The ruins, and other great objects, always solemn, appear terribly gloomy, steeped in black rain and cloud; and my apartment, in a street of high houses, is dark all day. The bad weather may continue all this month and all next. If I could use the time for work, I should not care; but this climate makes me so ill, I can do but little.

TO C.S.

Rome, Jan. 12, 1848. — My time in Lombardy and Switzerland was a series of beautiful pictures, dramatic episodes, not without some original life in myself. When I wrote to you from Como, I had a peaceful season. I floated on the lake with my graceful Polish countess, hearing her stories of heroic sorrow; or I walked in the delicious gardens of the villas, with many another summer friend. Red banners floated, children sang and shouted, the lakes of Venus and Diana glittered in the sun. The pretty girls of Bellaggio, with their coral necklaces, brought flowers to the “American countess,” and “hoped she would be as happy as she deserved.” Whether this cautious wish is fulfilled, I know not, but certainly I left all the glitter of life behind at Como.

My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy hours, but they all lead to sorrow; and not only the cups of wine, but of milk, seem drugged with poison for me. It does not seem to be my fault, this Destiny; I do not court these things, — they come. I am a poor magnet, with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract.

Leaving Milan, I had a brilliant day in Parma. I had not known Correggio before; he deserves all his fame. I stood in the parlor of the Abbess, the person for whom all was done, and Paradise seemed opened by the nymph, upon her car of light, and the divine children peeping through the vines. Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.

I had another good day, too, crossing the Apennines. The young crescent moon rose in orange twilight, just as I reached the highest peak. I was alone on foot; I heard no sound; I prayed.

At Florence, I was very ill. For three weeks, my life hung upon a thread. The effect of the Italian climate on my health is not favorable. I feel as if I had received a great injury. I am tired and woe-worn; often, in the bed, I wish I could weep my life away. However, they brought me gruel, I took it, and after a while rose up again. In the time of the vintage, I went alone to Sienna. This is a real untouched Italian place. This excursion, and the grapes, restored me at that time.

When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many circumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, childlike well-being. That is all over now, and, with this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death. It is useless to write of it; you are at a distance and cannot help me; — whether accident or angel will, I have no intimation. I have no reason to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark, sad enigma. The beautiful forms of art charm no more, and a love, in which there is all fondness, but no help, flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this. My numerous friendly acquaintances are troubled if they see me ill, and who so affectionate and kind as Mr. and Mrs. S.?

TO MADAME ARCONATI.

Rome, Jan. 14, 1848. — What black and foolish calumnies are these on Mazzini! It is as much for his interest as his honor to let things take their course, at present. To expect anything else, is to suppose him base. And on what act of his life dares any one found such an insinuation? I do not wonder that you were annoyed at his manner of addressing the Pope; but to me it seems that he speaks as he should, — near God and beyond the tomb; not from power to power, but from soul to soul, without regard to temporal dignities. It must be admitted that the etiquette, Most Holy Father, &c., jars with this.

TO R.W.E.

Rome, March 14, 1848. — Mickiewicz is with me here, and will remain some time; it was he I wanted to see, more than any other person, in going back to Paris, and I have him much better here. France itself I should like to see, but remain undecided, on account of my health, which has suffered so much, this winter, that I must make it the first object in moving for the summer. One physician thinks it will of itself revive, when once the rains have passed, which have now lasted from 16th December to this day. At present, I am not able to leave the fire, or exert myself at all.

* * * * *

In all the descriptions of the Roman Carnival, the fact has been omitted of daily rain. I felt, indeed, ashamed to perceive it, when no one else seemed to, whilst the open windows caused me convulsive cough and headache. The carriages, with their cargoes of happy women dressed in their ball dresses and costumes, drove up and down, even in the pouring rain. The two handsome contadine, who serve me, took off their woollen gowns, and sat five hours at a time, in the street, in white cambric dresses, and straw hats turned up with roses. I never saw anything like the merry good-humor of these people. I should always be ashamed to complain of anything here. But I had always looked forward to the Roman Carnival as a time when I could play too; and it even surpassed my expectations, with its exuberant gayety and innocent frolic, but I was unable to take much part. The others threw flowers all day, and went to masked balls all night; but I went out only once, in a carriage, and was more exhausted with the storm of flowers and sweet looks than I could be by a storm of hail. I went to the German Artists’ ball, where were some pretty costumes, and beautiful music; and to the Italian masked ball, where interest lies in intrigue.

I have scarcely gone to the galleries, damp and cold as tombs; or to the mouldy old splendor of churches, where, by the way, they are just wailing over the theft of St. Andrew’s head, for the sake of the jewels. It is quite a new era for this population to plunder the churches; but they are suffering terribly, and Pio’s municipality does, as yet, nothing.

TO W.H.C.

Rome, March 29, 1848. — I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur. It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see. I rejoice to be in Europe at this time, and shall return possessed of a great history. Perhaps I shall be called to act. At present, I know not where to go, what to do. War is everywhere. I cannot leave Rome, and the men of Rome are marching out every day into Lombardy. The citadel of Milan is in the hands of my friends, Guerriere, &c., but there may be need to spill much blood yet in Italy. France and Germany are riot in such a state that I can go there now. A glorious flame burns higher and higher in the heart of the nations.

* * * * *

The rain was constant through the Roman winter, falling in torrents from 16th December to 19th March. Now the Italian heavens wear again their deep blue, the sun is glorious, the melancholy lustres are stealing again over the Campagna, and hundreds of larks sing unwearied above its ruins. Nature seems in sympathy with the great events that are transpiring. How much has happened since I wrote! — the resistance of Sicily, and the revolution of Naples; now the fall of Louis Philippe; and Metternich is crushed in Austria. I saw the Austrian arms dragged through the streets here, and burned in the Piazza del Popolo. The Italians embraced one another, and cried, miracolo, Providenza! the Tribune Ciccronachio fed the flame with fagots; Adam Mickiewicz, the great poet of Poland, long exiled from his country, looked on; while Polish women brought little pieces that had been scattered in the street, and threw into the flames. When the double-headed eagle was pulled down from the lofty portal of the Palazzo di Venezia, the people placed there, in its stead, one of white and gold, inscribed with the name, ALTA ITALIA; and instantly the news followed, that Milan, Venice, Modena, and Parma, were driving out their tyrants. These news were received in Rome with indescribable rapture. Men danced, and women wept with joy along the street. The youths rushed to enrol themselves in regiments to go to the frontier. In the Colosseum, their names were received.

* * * * *

Rome, April 1, 1848.-Yesterday, on returning from Ostia, I find the official news, that the Viceroy Ranieri has capitulated at Verona; that Italy is free, independent, and one. I trust this will prove no April foolery. It seems too good, too speedy a realization of hope.

* * * * *

Rome, April 30, 1848. — It is a time such as I always dreamed of; and that fire burns in the hearts of men around me which can keep me warm. Have I something to do here? or am I only to cheer on the warriors, and after write the history of their deeds? The first is all I have done yet, but many have blessed me for my sympathy, and blest me by the action it impelled.

My private fortunes are dark and tangled; my strength to govern them (perhaps that I am enervated by this climate) much diminished. I have thrown myself on God, and perhaps he will make my temporal state very tragical. I am more of a child than ever, and hate suffering more than ever, but suppose I shall live with it, if it must come.

I did not get your letter, about having the rosary blessed for —— , before I left Rome, and now, I suppose, she would not wish it, as none can now attach any value to the blessing of Pius IX. Those who loved him can no longer defend him. It has become obvious, that those first acts of his in the papacy were merely the result of a kindly, good-natured temperament; that he had not thought to understand their bearing, nor force to abide by it. He seems quite destitute of moral courage. He is not resolute either on the wrong or right side. First, he abandoned the liberal party; then, yielding to the will of the people, and uniting, in appearance, with a liberal ministry, he let the cardinals betray it, and defeat the hopes of Italy. He cried peace, peace! but had not a word of blame for the sanguinary acts of the King of Naples, a word of sympathy for the victims of Lombardy. Seizing the moment of dejection in the nation, he put in this retrograde ministry; sanctioned their acts, daily more impudent: let them neutralize the constitution he himself had given; and when the people slew his minister, and assaulted him in his own palace, he yielded anew; he dared not die, or even run the slight risk, — for only by accident could he have perished. His person as a Pope is still respected, though his character as a man is despised. All the people compare him with Pius VII. saying to the French, “Slay me if you will; I cannot yield,” and feel the difference.

I was on Monte Cavallo yesterday. The common people were staring at the broken windows and burnt door of the palace where they have so often gone to receive a blessing, the children playing, “Sedia Papale. Morte ai Cardinali, e morte al Papa!”

The men of straw are going down in Italy everywhere; the real men rising into power. Montanelli, Guerazzi, Mazzini, are real men; their influence is of character. Had we only been born a little later! Mazzini has returned from his seventeen years’ exile, “to see what he foresaw.” He has a mind far in advance of his times, and yet Mazzini sees not all.

* * * * *

Rome, May 7, 1848. — Good and loving hearts will be unprepared, and for a time must suffer much from the final dereliction of Pius IX. to the cause of freedom. After the revolution opened in Lombardy, the troops of the line were sent thither; the volunteers rushed to accompany them, the priests preached the war as a crusade, the Pope blessed the banners. The report that the Austrians had taken and hung as a brigand one of the Roman Civic Guard, — a well-known artist engaged in the war of Lombardy, — roused the people; and they went to the Pope, to demand that he should declare war against the Austrians. The Pope summoned a consistory, and then declared in his speech that he had only intended local reforms; that he regretted the misuse that had been made of his name; and wound up by lamenting the war as offensive to the spirit of religion. A momentary stupefaction, followed by a passion of indignation, in which the words traitor and imbecile were heard, received this astounding speech. The Pope was besieged with deputations, and, after two days’ struggle, was obliged to place the power in the hands of persons most opposed to him, and nominally acquiesce in their proceedings.

TO R.W.E. (in London).

Rome, May 19, 1848. — I should like to return with you, but I have much to do and learn in Europe yet. I am deeply interested in this public drama, and wish to see it played out. Methinks I have my part therein, either as actor or historian.

I cannot marvel at your readiness to close the book of European society. The shifting scenes entertain poorly. The flux of thought and feeling leaves some fertilizing soil; but for me, few indeed are the persons I should wish to see again; nor do I care to push the inquiry further. The simplest and most retired life would now please me, only I would not like to be confined to it, in case I grew weary, and now and then craved variety, for exhilaration. I want some scenes of natural beauty, and, imperfect as love is, I want human beings to love, as I suffocate without. For intellectual stimulus, books would mainly supply it, when wanted.

Why did you not try to be in Paris at the opening of the Assembly?
There were elements worth scanning.

TO R.F.F.

Rome, May 20, 1848. — My health is much revived by the spring here, as gloriously beautiful as the winter was dreary. We know nothing of spring in our country. Here the soft and brilliant weather is unbroken, except now and then by a copious shower, which keeps everything fresh. The trees, the flowers, the bird-songs are in perfection. I have enjoyed greatly my walks in the villas, where the grounds are of three or four miles in extent, and like free nature in the wood-glades and still paths; while they have an added charm in the music of their many fountains, and the soft gleam, here and there, of sarcophagus or pillar.

I have been a few days at Albano, and explored its beautiful environs alone, to much greater advantage than I could last year, in the carriage with my friends.

I went, also, to Frascati and Ostia, with an English family, who had a good carriage, and were kindly, intelligent people, who could not disturb the Roman landscape.

Now I am going into the country, where I can live very cheaply, even keeping a servant of my own, without which guard I should not venture alone into the unknown and wilder regions.

I have been so disconcerted by my Roman winter, that I dare not plan decisively again. The enervating breath of Rome paralyzes my body, but I know and love her. The expression, “City of the Soul,” designates her, and her alone.

TO MADAME ARCONATI.

Rome, May 27, 1848. — This is my last day at Rome. I have been passing several days at Subiaco and Tivoli, and return again to the country to-morrow. These scenes of natural beauty have filled my heart, and increased, if possible, my desire that the people who have this rich inheritance may no longer be deprived of its benefits by bad institutions.

The people of Subiaco are poor, though very industrious, and cultivating every inch of ground, with even English care and neatness; — so ignorant and uncultivated, while so finely and strongly made by Nature. May God grant now, to this people, what they need!

An illumination took place last night, in honor of the “Illustrious Gioberti.” He is received here with great triumph, his carriage followed with shouts of “Viva Gioberti, morte ai Jesuiti!” which must be pain to the many Jesuits, who, it is said, still linger here in disguise. His triumphs are shared by Mamiani and Orioli, self-trumpeted celebrities, self-constituted rulers of the Roman states, — men of straw, to my mind, whom the fire already kindled will burn into a handful of ashes.

I sit in my obscure corner, and watch the progress of events. It is the position that pleases me best, and, I believe, the most favorable one. Everything confirms me in my radicalism; and, without any desire to hasten matters, indeed with surprise to see them rush so like a torrent, I seem to see them all tending to realize my own hopes.

My health and spirits now much restored, I am beginning to set down some of my impressions. I am going into the mountains, hoping there to find pure, strengthening air, and tranquillity for so many days as to allow me to do something.

TO R.F. F —— .

Rieti, July 1, 1848. — Italy is as beautiful as even I hoped, and I should wish to stay here several years, if I had a moderate fixed income. One wants but little money here, and can have with it many of the noblest enjoyments. I should have been very glad if fate would allow me a few years of congenial life, at the end of not a few of struggle and suffering. But I do not hope it; my fate will be the same to the close, — beautiful gifts shown, and then withdrawn, or offered on conditions that make acceptance impossible.

TO MADAME ARCONATI.

Corpus Domini, June 22, 1848. — I write such a great number of letters, having not less than a hundred correspondents, that it seems, every day, as if I had just written to each. There is no one, surely, this side of the salt sea, with whom I wish more to keep up the interchange of thought than with you.

I believe, if you could know my heart as God knows it, and see the causes that regulate my conduct, you would always love me. But already, in absence, I have lost, for the present, some of those who were dear to me, by failure of letters, or false report. After sorrowing much about a falsehood told me of a dearest friend, I found his letter at Torlonia’s, which had been there ten months, and, duly received, would have made all right. There is something fatal in my destiny about correspondence.

But I will say no more of this; only the loss of that letter to you, at such an unfortunate time, — just when I most wished to seem the loving and grateful friend I was, — made me fear it might be my destiny to lose you too. But if any cross event shall do me this ill turn on earth, we shall meet again in that clear state of intelligence which men call heaven.

I see by the journals that you have not lost Montanelli. That noble mind is still spared to Italy. The Pope’s heart is incapable of treason; but he has fallen short of the office fate assigned him.

I am no bigoted Republican, yet I think that form of government will eventually pervade the civilized world. Italy may not be ripe for it yet, but I doubt if she finds peace earlier; and this hasty annexation of Lombardy to the crown of Sardinia seems, to me, as well as I can judge, an act unworthy and unwise. Base, indeed, the monarch, if it was needed, and weak no less than base; for he was already too far engaged in the Italian cause to retire with honor or wisdom.

I am here, in a lonely mountain home, writing the narrative of my European experience. To this I devote great part of the day. Three or four hours I pass in the open air, on donkey or on foot. When I have exhausted this spot, perhaps I shall try another. Apply as I may, it will take three months, at least, to finish my book. It grows upon me.

TO R.W.E.

Rieti, July 11, 1848. — Once I had resolution to face my difficulties myself, and try to give only what was pleasant to others; but now that my courage has fairly given way, and the fatigue of life is beyond my strength, I do not prize myself, or expect others to prize me.

Some years ago, I thought you very unjust, because you did not lend full faith to my spiritual experiences; but I see you were quite right. I thought I had tasted of the true elixir, and that the want of daily bread, or the pangs of imprisonment, would never make me a complaining beggar. A widow, I expected still to have the cruse full for others. Those were glorious hours, and angels certainly visited me; but there must have been too much earth, — too much taint of weakness and folly, so that baptism did not suffice. I know now those same things, but at present they are words, not living spells.

I hear, at this moment, the clock of the Church del Purgatorio telling noon in this mountain solitude. Snow yet lingers on these mountain-tops, after forty days of hottest sunshine, last night broken by a few clouds, prefatory to a thunder storm this morning. It has been so hot here, that even the peasant in the field says, “Non porro píù resistere,” and slumbers in the shade, rather than the sun. I love to see their patriarchal ways of guarding the sheep and tilling the fields. They are a simple race. Remote from the corruptions of foreign travel, they do not ask for money, but smile upon and bless me as I pass, — for the Italians love me; they say I am so “simpatica.” I never see any English or Americans, and now think wholly in Italian: only the surgeon who bled me, the other day, was proud to speak a little French, which he had learned at Tunis! The ignorance of this people is amusing. I am to them a divine visitant, — an instructive Ceres, — telling them wonderful tales of foreign customs, and even legends of the lives of their own saints. They are people whom I could love and live with. Bread and grapes among them would suffice me.

TO HER MOTHER.

Rome, Nov. 16, 1848. — * * * Of other circumstances which complicate my position I cannot write. Were you here, I would confide in you fully, and have more than once, in the silence of the night, recited to you those most strange and romantic chapters in the story of my sad life. At one time when I thought I might die, I empowered a person, who has given me, as far as possible to him, the aid and sympathy of a brother, to communicate them to you, on his return to the United States. But now I think we shall meet again, and I am sure you will always love your daughter, and will know gladly that in all events she has tried to aid and striven never to injure her fellows. In earlier days, I dreamed of doing and being much, but now am content with the Magdalen to rest my plea hereon, “She has loved much.”

You, loved mother, keep me informed, as you have, of important facts, especially the worst. The thought of you, the knowledge of your angelic nature, is always one of my greatest supports. Happy those who have such a mother! Myriad instances of selfishness and corruption of heart cannot destroy the confidence in human nature.

I am again in Rome, situated for the first time entirely to my mind. I have but one room, but large; and everything about the bed so gracefully and adroitly disposed that it makes a beautiful parlor, and of course I pay much less. I have the sun all day, and an excellent chimney. It is very high and has pure air, and the most beautiful view all around imaginable. Add, that I am with the dearest, delightful old couple one can imagine, quick, prompt, and kind, sensible and contented. Having no children, they like to regard me and the Prussian sculptor, my neighbor, as such; yet are too delicate and too busy ever to intrude. In the attic, dwells a priest, who insists on making my fire when Antonia is away. To be sure, he pays himself for his trouble, by asking a great many questions. The stories below are occupied by a frightful Russian princess with moustaches, and a footman who ties her bonnet for her; and a fat English lady, with a fine carriage, who gives all her money to the church, and has made for the house a terrace of flowers that would delight you. Antonia has her flowers in a humble balcony, her birds, and an immense black cat; always addressed by both husband and wife as “Amoretto,” (little love!)

The house looks out on the Piazza Barberini, and I see both that palace and the Pope’s. The scene to-day has been one of terrible interest. The poor, weak Pope has fallen more and more under the dominion of the cardinals, till at last all truth was hidden from his eyes. He had suffered the minister, Rossi, to go on, tightening the reins, and, because the people preserved a sullen silence, he thought they would bear it. Yesterday, the Chamber of Deputies, illegally prorogued, was opened anew. Rossi, after two or three most unpopular measures, had the imprudence to call the troops of the line to defend him, instead of the National Guard. On the 14th, the Pope had invested him with the privileges of a Roman citizen: (he had renounced his country when an exile, and returned to it as ambassador of Louis Philippe.) This position he enjoyed but one day. Yesterday, as he descended from his carriage, to enter the Chamber, the crowd howled and hissed; then pushed him, and, as he turned his head in consequence, a sure hand stabbed him in the back. He said no word, but died almost instantly in the arms of a cardinal. The act was undoubtedly the result of the combination of many, from the dexterity with which it was accomplished, and the silence which ensued. Those who had not abetted beforehand seemed entirely to approve when done. The troops of the line, on whom he had relied, remained at their posts, and looked coolly on. In the evening, they walked the streets with the people, singing, “Happy the hand which rids the world of a tyrant!” Had Rossi lived to enter the Chamber, he would have seen the most terrible and imposing mark of denunciation known in the history of nations, — the whole house, without a single exception, seated on the benches of opposition. The news of his death was received by the deputies with the same cold silence as by the people. For me, I never thought to have heard of a violent death with satisfaction, but this act affected me as one of terrible justice.

To-day, all the troops and the people united and went to the Quirinal to demand a change of measures. They found the Swiss Guard drawn out, and the Pope dared not show himself. They attempted to force the door of his palace, to enter his presence, and the guard fired. I saw a man borne by wounded. The drum beat to call out the National Guard. The carriage of Prince Barberini has returned with its frightened inmates and liveried retinue, and they have suddenly barred up the court-yard gate. Antonia, seeing it, observes, “Thank Heaven, we are poor, we have nothing to fear!” This is the echo of a sentiment which will soon be universal in Europe.

Never feel any apprehensions for my safety from such causes. There are those who will protect me, if necessary, and, besides, I am on the conquering side. These events have, to me, the deepest interest. These days are what I always longed for, — were I only free from private care! But, when the best and noblest want bread to give to the cause of liberty, I can just not demand that of them; their blood they would give me.

You cannot conceive the enchantment of this place. So much I suffered here last January and February, I thought myself a little weaned; but, returning, my heart swelled even to tears with the cry of the poet: —

“O, Rome, my country, city of the soul!”

Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. Warned, however, by the last winter, I dared not rent my lodgings for the year. I hope I am acclimated. I have been through what is called the grape-cure, much more charming, certainly, than the water-cure. At present I am very well; but, alas! because I have gone to bed early, and done very little. I do not know if I can maintain any labor. As to my life, I think that it is not the will of Heaven it should terminate very soon. I have had another strange escape. I had taken passage in the diligence to come to Rome; two rivers were to be passed, — the Turano and the Tiber, — but passed by good bridges, and a road excellent when not broken unexpectedly by torrents from the mountains. The diligence sets out between three and four in the morning, long before light. The director sent me word that the Marchioness Crispoldi had taken for herself and family a coach extraordinary, which would start two hours later, and that I could have a place in that, if I liked; so I accepted. The weather had been beautiful, but, on the eve of the day fixed for my departure, the wind rose, and the rain fell in torrents. I observed that the river which passed my window was much swollen, and rushed with great violence. In the night, I heard its voice still stronger, and felt glad I had not to set out in the dark. I rose with twilight, and was expecting my carriage, and wondering at its delay, when I heard, that the great diligence, several miles below, had been seized by a torrent; the horses were up to their necks in water, before any one dreamed of the danger. The postilion called on all the saints, and threw himself into the water. The door of the diligence could not be opened, and the passengers forced themselves, one after another, into the cold water, — dark too. Had I been there I had fared ill; a pair of strong men were ill after it, though all escaped with life.

For several days, there was no going to Rome; but, at last, we set forth in two great diligences, with all the horses of the route. For many miles, the mountains and ravines were covered with snow; I seemed to have returned to my own country and climate. Few miles passed, before the conductor injured his leg under the wheel, and I had the pain of seeing him suffer all the way, while “Blood of Jesus,” “Souls of Purgatory,” was the mildest beginning of an answer to the jeers of the postilions upon his paleness. We stopped at a miserable osteria, in whose cellar we found a magnificent remain of Cyclopean architecture, — as indeed in Italy one is paid at every step, for discomfort or danger, by some precious subject of thought. We proceeded very slowly, and reached just at night a solitary little inn, which marks the site of the ancient home of the Sabine virgins, snatched away to become the mothers of Rome. We were there saluted with the news that the Tiber, also, had overflowed its banks, and it was very doubtful if we could pass. But what else to do? There were no accommodations in the house for thirty people, or even for three, and to sleep in the carriages, in that wet air of the marshes, was a more certain danger than to attempt the passage. So we set forth; the moon, almost at the full, smiling sadly on the ancient grandeurs, then half draped in mist, then drawing over her face a thin white veil. As we approached the Tiber, the towers and domes of Rome could be seen, like a cloud lying low on the horizon. The road and the meadows, alike under water, lay between us and it, one sheet of silver. The horses entered; they behaved nobly; we proceeded, every moment uncertain if the water would not become deep; but the scene was beautiful, and I enjoyed it highly. I have never yet felt afraid when really in the presence of danger, though sometimes in its apprehension.

At last we entered the gate; the diligence stopping to be examined, I walked to the gate of Villa Ludovisi, and saw its rich shrubberies of myrtle, and its statues so pale and eloquent in the moonlight.

Is it not cruel that I cannot earn six hundred dollars a year, living here? I could live on that well, now I know Italy. Where I have been, this summer, a great basket of grapes sells for one cent! — delicious salad, enough for three or four persons, one cent, — a pair of chickens, fifteen cents. Foreigners cannot live so, but I could, now that I speak the language fluently, and know the price of everything. Everybody loves, and wants to serve me, and I cannot earn this pitiful sum to learn and do what I want.

Of course, I wish to see America again; but in my own time, when I am ready, and not to weep over hopes destroyed and projects unfulfilled.

My dear friend, Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love; — a contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday, she came in her holiday dress, — beautiful corset of red silk richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, in the other a pair of live chickens, to be eaten by me for her sake, (“per amore mio,”) and wanted no present, no reward; it was, as she said, “for the honor and pleasure of her acquaintance.” The old father of the family never met me but he took off his hat and said, “Madame, it is to me a consolation to see you.” Are there not sweet flowers of affection in life, glorious moments, great thoughts? — why must they be so dearly paid for?

Many Americans have shown me great and thoughtful kindness, and none more so than W. S —— and his wife. They are now in Florence, but may return. I do not know whether I shall stay here or not; shall be guided much by the state of my health.

All is quieted now in Rome. Late at night the Pope had to yield, but not till the door of his palace was half burnt, and his confessor killed. This man, Parma, provoked his fate by firing on the people from a window. It seems the Pope never gave order to fire; his guard acted from a sudden impulse of their own. The new ministry chosen are little inclined to accept. It is almost impossible for any one to act, unless the Pope is stripped of his temporal power, and the hour for that is not yet quite ripe; though they talk more and more of proclaiming the Republic, and even of calling my friend Mazzini.

If I came home at this moment, I should feel as if forced to leave my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for. If I do come in this way, all I can promise is to plague other people as little as possible. My own plans and desires will be postponed to another world.

Do not feel anxious about me. Some higher power leads me through strange, dark, thorny paths, broken at times by glades opening down into prospects of sunny beauty, into which I am not permitted to enter. If God disposes for us, it is not for nothing. This I can say, my heart is in some respects better, it is kinder and more humble. Also, my mental acquisitions have certainly been great, however inadequate to my desires.

TO M.S.

Rome, Nov. 23, 1848. — Mazzini has stood alone in Italy, on a sunny height, far above the stature of other men. He has fought a great fight against folly, compromise, and treason; steadfast in his convictions, and of almost miraculous energy to sustain them, is he. He has foes; and at this moment, while he heads the insurrection in the Valtellina, the Roman people murmur his name, and long to call him here.

How often rings in my ear the consolatory word of Körner, after many struggles, many undeceptions, “Though the million suffer shipwreck, yet noble hearts survive!”

I grieve to say, the good-natured Pio has shown himself utterly derelict, alike without resolution to abide by the good or the ill. He is now abandoned and despised by both parties. The people do not trust his word, for they know he shrinks from the danger, and shuts the door to pray quietly in his closet, whilst he knows the cardinals are misusing his name to violate his pledges. The cardinals, chased from Rome, talk of electing an anti-Pope; because, when there was danger, he has always yielded to the people, and they say he has overstepped his prerogative, and broken his papal oath. No one abuses him, for it is felt that in a more private station he would have acted a kindly part; but he has failed of so high a vocation, and balked so noble a hope, that no one respects him either. Who would have believed, a year ago, that the people would assail his palace? I was on Monte Cavallo yesterday, and saw the broken windows, the burnt doors, the walls marked by shot, just beneath the loggia, on which we have seen him giving the benediction. But this would never have happened, if his guard had not fired first on the people. It is true it was without his order, but, under a different man, the Swiss would never have dared to incur such a responsibility.

Our old acquaintance, Sterbini, has risen to the ministry. He has a certain influence, from his consistency and independence, but has little talent.

Of me you wish to know; but there is little I can tell you at this distance. I have had happy hours, learned much, suffered much, and outward things have not gone fortunately with me. I have had glorious hopes, but they are overclouded now, and the future looks darker than ever, indeed, quite impossible to my steps. I have no hope, unless that God will show me some way I do not know of now; but I do not wish to trouble you with more of this.

TO W.S.

Rome, Dec. 9, 1848. — As to Florence itself, I do not like it, with the exception of the galleries and churches, and Michel Angelo’s marbles. I do not like it, for the reason you do, because it seems like home. It seems a kind of Boston to me, — the same good and the same ill; I have had enough of both. But I have so many dear friends in Boston, that I must always wish to go there sometimes; and there are so many precious objects of study in Florence, that a stay of several months could not fail to be full of interest. Still, the spring must be the time to be in Florence; there are so many charming spots to visit in the environs, much nearer than those you go to in Rome, within scope of an afternoon’s drive. I saw them only when parched with sun and covered with dust. In the spring they must be very beautiful.

* * * * *

December, 1848. — I felt much what you wrote, “if it were well with my heart.” How seldom it is that a mortal is permitted to enjoy a paradisaical scene, unhaunted by some painful vision from the past or the future! With me, too, dark clouds of care and sorrow have sometimes blotted out the sunshine. I have not lost from my side an only sister, but have been severed from some visions still so dear, they looked almost like hopes. The future seems too difficult for me. I have been as happy as I could, and I feel that this summer, as last, had I been with my country folks, the picture of Italy would not have been so lively to me. Now I have been quite off the beaten track of travel, have seen, thought, spoken, dreamed only what is Italian. I have learned much, received many strong and clear impressions. While among the mountains, I was for a good while quite alone, except for occasional chat with the contadine, who wanted to know if Pius IX. was not un gran carbonaro! — a reputation which he surely ought to have forfeited by this time. About me they were disturbed: “E sempre sola soletta,” they said, “eh perche?”

Later, I made one of those accidental acquaintances, such as I have spoken of to you in my life of Lombardy, which may be called romantic: two brothers, elderly men, the last of a very noble family, formerly lords of many castles, still of more than one; both unmarried, men of great polish and culture. None of the consequences ensued that would in romances: they did not any way adopt me, nor give me a casket of diamonds, nor any of their pictures, among which were originals by several of the greatest masters, nor their rich cabinets, nor miniatures on agate, nor carving in wood and ivory. They only showed me their things, and their family archives of more than a hundred volumes, (containing most interesting documents about Poland, where four of their ancestors were nuncios,) manuscript letters from Tasso, and the like. With comments on these, and legendary lore enough to furnish Cooper or Walter Scott with a thousand romances, they enriched me; unhappily, I shall never have the strength or talent to make due use of it. I was sorry to leave them, for now I have recrossed the frontier into the Roman States. I will not tell you where, — I know not that I shall ever tell where, — these months have been passed. The great Goethe hid thus in Italy; “Then,” said he, “I did indeed feel alone, — when no former friend could form an idea where I was.” Why should not —— and I enjoy this fantastic luxury of incognito also, when we can so much more easily?

I will not name the place, but I will describe it. The rooms are spacious and airy; the loggia of the sleeping room is rude, but it overhangs a lovely little river, with its hedge of willows. Opposite is a large and rich vineyard; on one side a ruined tower, on the other an old casino, with its avenues of cypress, give human interest to the scene. A cleft amid the mountains full of light leads on the eye to a soft blue peak, very distant. At night the young moon trembles in the river, and its soft murmur soothes me to sleep; it needs, for I have had lately a bad attack upon the nerves, and been obliged to stop writing for the present. I think I shall stay here some time, though I suppose there are such sweet places all over Italy, if one only looks for one’s self. Poor, beautiful Italy! how she has been injured of late! It is dreadful to see the incapacity and meanness of those to whom she had confided the care of her redemption.

I have thus far passed this past month of fine weather most delightfully in revisiting my haunts of the autumn before. Then, too, I was uncommonly well and strong; it was the golden period of my Roman life. The experience what long confinement may be expected after, from the winter rains, has decided me never to make my hay when the sun shines: i.e., to give no fine day to books and pens.

The places of interest I am nearest now are villas Albani and Ludovisi, and Santa Agnese, St. Lorenzo, and the vineyards near Porta Maggiore. I have passed one day in a visit to Torre dei Schiavi and the neighborhood, and another on Monte Mario, both Rome and the Campagna-day golden in the mellowest lustre of the Italian sun. * * * But to you I may tell, that I always go with Ossoli, the most congenial companion I ever had for jaunts of this kind. We go out in the morning, carrying the roast chestnuts from Rome; the bread and wine are found in some lonely little osteria; and so we dine; and reach Rome again, just in time to see it, from a little distance, gilded by the sunset.

This moon having been so clear, and the air so warm, we have visited, on successive evenings, all the places we fancied: Monte Cavallo, now so lonely and abandoned, — no lights there but moon and stars, — Trinità de’ Monti, Santa Maria Maggiore, and the Forum. So now, if the rain must come, or I be driven from Rome, I have all the images fair and fresh in my mind.

About public events, why remain ignorant? Take a daily paper in the house. The Italian press has recovered from the effervescence of childish spirits; — you can now approximate to the truth from its reports. There are many good papers now in Italy. Whatever represents the Montanelli ministry is best for you. That gives the lead now. I see good articles copied from the “Alba.”

TO MADAME ARCONATI.

Rome, Feb. 5, 1849. — I am so delighted to get your letter, that I must answer on the instant. I try with all my force to march straight onwards, — to answer the claims of the day; to act out my feeling as seems right at the time, and not heed the consequences; — but in my affections I am tender and weak; where I have really loved, a barrier, a break, causes me great suffering. I read in your letter that I am still dear to you as you to me. I always felt, that if we had passed more time together, — if the intimacy, for which there was ground in the inner nature, had become consolidated, — no after differences of opinion or conduct could have destroyed, though they might interrupt its pleasure. But it was of few days’ standing, — our interviews much interrupted. I felt as if I knew you much better than you could me, because I had occasion to see you amid your various and habitual relations. I was afraid you might change, or become indifferent; now I hope not.

True, I have written, shall write, about the affairs of Italy, what you will much dislike, if ever you see it. I have done, may do, many things that would be very unpleasing to you; yet there is a congeniality, I dare to say, pure, and strong, and good, at the bottom of the heart, far, far deeper than these differences, that would always, on a real meeting, keep us friends. For me, I could never have but one feeling towards you.

Now, for the first time, I enjoy a full communion with the spirit of Rome. Last winter, I had here many friends; now all are dispersed, and sometimes I long to exchange thoughts with a friendly circle; but generally I am better content to live thus: — the impression made by all the records of genius around is more unbroken; I begin to be very familiar with them. The sun shines always, when last winter it never shone. I feel strong; I can go everywhere on foot. I pass whole days abroad; sometimes I take a book, but seldom read it: — why should I, when every stone talks?

In spring, I shall go often out of town. I have read “La Rome Souterraine” of Didier, and it makes me wish to see Ardea and Nettuno. Ostia is the only one of those desolate sites that I know yet. I study sometimes Niebuhr, and other books about Rome, but not to any great profit.

In the circle of my friends, two have fallen. One a person of great wisdom, strength, and calmness. She was ever to me a most tender friend, and one whose sympathy I highly valued. Like you by nature and education conservative, she was through thought liberal. With no exuberance or passionate impulsiveness herself, she knew how to allow for these in others. The other was a woman of my years, of the most precious gifts in heart and genius. She had also beauty and fortune. She died at last of weariness and intellectual inanition. She never, to any of us, her friends, hinted her sufferings. But they were obvious in her poems, which, with great dignity, expressed a resolute but most mournful resignation.

TO R.F.F.

Rome, Feb. 23, 1849. — It is something if one can get free foot-hold on the earth, so as not to be jostled out of hearing the music, if there should be any spirits in the air to make such.

For my part, I have led rather too lonely a life of late. Before, it seemed as if too many voices of men startled away the inspirations; but having now lived eight months much alone, I doubt that good has come of it, and think to return, and go with others for a little. I have realized in these last days the thought of Goethe,— “He who would in loneliness live, ah! he is soon alone. Each one loves, each one lives, and leaves him to his pain.” I went away and hid, all summer. Not content with that, I said, on returning to Rome, I must be busy and receive people little. They have taken me at my word, and hardly one comes to see me. Now, if I want play and prattle, I shall have to run after them. It is fair enough that we all, in turn, should be made to feel our need of one another.

Never was such a winter as this. Ten weeks now of unbroken sunshine and the mildest breezes. Of course, its price is to be paid. The spring, usually divine here, with luxuriant foliage and multitudinous roses, will be all scorched and dusty. There is fear, too, of want of food for the poor Roman state.

I pass my days in writing, walking, occasional visits to the galleries. I read little, except the newspapers; these take up an hour or two of the day. I own, my thoughts are quite fixed on the daily bulletin of men and things. I expect to write the history, but because it is so much in my heart. If you were here, I rather think you would be impassive, like the two most esteemed Americans I see. They do not believe in the sentimental nations. Hungarians, Poles, Italians, are too demonstrative for them, too fiery, too impressible. They like better the loyal, slow-moving Germans: even the Russian, with his dog’s nose and gentlemanly servility, pleases them better than my people. There is an antagonism of race.

TO E.S.

Rome, June 6, 1849. — The help I needed was external, practical. I knew myself all the difficulties and pains of my position; they were beyond present relief; from sympathy I could struggle with them, but had not life enough left, afterwards, to be a companion of any worth. To be with persons generous and refined, who would not pain; who would sometimes lend a helping hand across the ditches of this strange insidious marsh, was all I could have now, and this you gave.

On Sunday, from our loggia, I witnessed a terrible, a real battle. It began at four in the morning: it lasted to the last gleam of light. The musket-fire was almost unintermitted; the roll of the cannon, especially from St. Angelo, most majestic. As all passed at Porta San Pancrazio and Villa Pamfili, I saw the smoke of every discharge, the flash of the bayonets; with a glass could see the men. Both French and Italians fought with the most obstinate valor. The French could not use their heavy cannon, being always driven away by the legions Garibaldi and —— , when trying to find positions for them. The loss on our side is about three hundred killed and wounded; theirs must be much greater. In one casino have been found seventy dead bodies of theirs. I find the wounded men at the hospital in a transport of indignation. The French soldiers fought so furiously, that they think them false as their general, and cannot endure the remembrance of their visits, during the armistice, and talk of brotherhood. You will have heard how all went: — how Lesseps, after appearing here fifteen days as plenipotentiary, signed a treaty not dishonorable to Rome; then Oudinot refused to ratify it, saying, the plenipotentiary had surpassed his powers: Lesseps runs back to Paris, and Oudinot attacks: — an affair alike infamous for the French from beginning to end. The cannonade on one side has continued day and night, (being full moon,) till this morning; they seeking to advance or take other positions, the Romans firing on them. The French throw rockets into the town: one burst in the court-yard of the hospital, just as I arrived there yesterday, agitating the poor sufferers very much; they said they did not want to die like mice in a trap.

TO M.S.

Rome, March 9, 1849. — Last night, Mazzini came to see me. You will have heard how he was called to Italy, and received at Leghorn like a prince, as he is; unhappily, in fact, the only one, the only great Italian. It is expected, that, if the republic lasts, he will be President. He has been made a Roman citizen, and elected to the Assembly; the labels bearing, in giant letters, “Giuseppe Mazzini, cittadino Romano,” are yet up all over Rome. He entered by night, on foot, to avoid demonstrations, no doubt, and enjoy the quiet of his own thoughts, at so great a moment. The people went under his windows the next night, and called him out to speak; but I did not know about it. Last night, I heard a ring; then somebody speak my name; the voice struck upon me at once. He looks more divine than ever, after all his new, strange sufferings. He asked after all of you. He stayed two hours, and we talked, though rapidly, of everything. He hopes to come often, but the crisis is tremendous, and all will come on him; since, if any one can save Italy from her foes, inward and outward, it will be he. But he is very doubtful whether this be possible; the foes are too many, too strong, too subtle. Yet Heaven helps sometimes. I only grieve I cannot aid him; freely would I give my life to aid him, only bargaining for a quick death. I don’t like slow torture. I fear that it is in reserve for him, to survive defeat. True, he can never be utterly defeated; but to see Italy bleeding, prostrate once more, will be very dreadful for him.

He has sent me tickets, twice, to hear him speak in the Assembly. It was a fine, commanding voice. But, when he finished, he looked very exhausted and melancholy. He looks as if the great battle he had fought had been too much for his strength, and that he was only sustained by the fire of the soul.

All this I write to you, because you said, when I was suffering at leaving Mazzini,— “You will meet him in heaven.” This I believe will be, despite all my faults.

[In April, 1849, Margaret was appointed, by the “Roman Commission for the succor of the wounded,” to the charge of the hospital of the Fate-Bene Fratetti; the Princess Belgioioso having charge of the one already opened. The following is a copy of the original letter from the Princess, which is written in English, announcing the appointment.]

Comitato di Soccorso Pei Feriti, } April 30, 1849. }

Dear Miss Fuller: —

You are named Regolatrice of the Hospital of the Fate-Rene Fratelli. Go there at twelve, if the alarm bell has not rung before. When you arrive there, you will receive all the women coming for the wounded, and give them your directions, so that you are sure to have a certain number of them night and day.

May God help us.
CHRISTINE TRIVULZE,
of Belgioioso.
Miss Fuller, Piazza Barberini, No. 60.

TO R.W.E.

Rome, June 10, 1849. — I received your letter amid the round of cannonade and musketry. It was a terrible battle fought here from the first till the last light of day. I could see all its progress from my balcony. The Italians fought like lions. It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honor and their rights, with little ground for hope that they can resist, now they are betrayed by France.

Since the 30th April, I go almost daily to the hospitals, and, though I have suffered, — for I had no idea before, how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are, — yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men; there is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of the Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books and flowers; they read, and we talk.

The palace of the Pope, on the Quirinal, is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens, I walk with them, — one with his sling, another with his crutch. The gardener plays off all his water-works for the defenders of the country, and gathers flowers for me, their friend.

A day or two since, we sat in the Pope’s little pavilion, where he used to give private audience. The sun was going gloriously down over Monte Mario, where gleamed the white tents of the French light-horse among the trees. The cannonade was heard at intervals. Two bright-eyed boys sat at our feet, and gathered up eagerly every word said by the heroes of the day. It was a beautiful hour, stolen from the midst of ruin and sorrow; and tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit, — with noble hope for man, with reverence for woman.

The young ladies of the family, very young girls, were filled with enthusiasm for the suffering, wounded patriots, and they wished to go to the hospital to give their services. Excepting the three superintendents, none but married ladies were permitted to serve there, but their services were accepted. Their governess then wished to go too, and, as she could speak several languages, she was admitted to the rooms of the wounded soldiers, to interpret for them, as the nurses knew nothing but Italian, and many of these poor men were suffering, because they could not make their wishes known. Some are French, some German, and many Poles. Indeed, I am afraid it is too true that there were comparatively but few Romans among them. This young lady passed several nights there.

Should I never return, — and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here, — if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself; the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp.

I feel profoundly for Mazzini; at moments I am tempted to say, “Cursed with every granted prayer,” — so cunning is the dæmon. He is become the inspiring soul of his people. He saw Rome, to which all his hopes through life tended, for the first time as a Roman citizen, and to become in a few days its ruler. He has animated, he sustains her to a glorious effort, which, if it fails, this time, will not in the age. His country will be free. Yet to me it would be so dreadful to cause all this bloodshed, to dig the graves of such martyrs.

Then Rome is being destroyed; her glorious oaks; her villas, haunts of sacred beauty, that seemed the possession of the world forever, — the villa of Raphael, the villa of Albani, home of Winkelmann, and the best expression of the ideal of modern Rome, and so many other sanctuaries of beauty, — all must perish, lest a foe should level his musket from their shelter. I could not, could not!

I know not, dear friend, whether I ever shall get home across that great ocean, but here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O, Rome, my country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head!

Speaking of the republic, you say, do not I wish Italy had a great man? Mazzini is a great man. In mind, a great poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; in action, decisive and full of resource as Cæsar. Dearly I love Mazzini. He came in, just as I had finished the first letter to you. His soft, radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life, that, like the Magdalen, I may, at the important hour, shed all the consecrated ointment on his head. There is one, Mazzini, who understands thee well; who knew thee no less when an object of popular fear, than now of idolatry; and who, if the pen be not held too feebly, will help posterity to know thee too.

TO W.H.C.

Rome, July 8, 1849. — I do not yet find myself tranquil and recruited from the painful excitements of these last days. But, amid the ruined hopes of Rome, the shameful oppressions she is beginning to suffer, amid these noble, bleeding martyrs, my brothers, I cannot fix my thoughts on anything else.

I write that you may assure mother of my safety, which in the last days began to be seriously imperilled. Say, that as soon as I can find means of conveyance, without an expense too enormous, I shall go again into the mountains. There I shall find pure, bracing air, and I hope stillness, for a time. Say, she need feel no anxiety, if she do not hear from me for some time. I may feel indisposed to write, as I do now; my heart is too full.

Private hopes of mine are fallen with the hopes of Italy. I have played for a new stake, and lost it. Life looks too difficult. But for the present I shall try to wave all thought of self and renew my strength.

After the attempt at revolution in France failed, could I have influenced Mazzini, I should have prayed him to capitulate, and yet I feel that no honorable terms can be made with such a foe, and that the only way is never to yield; but the sound of the musketry, the sense that men were perishing in a hopeless contest, had become too terrible for my nerves. I did not see Mazzini, the last two weeks of the republic. When the French entered, he walked about the streets, to see how the people bore themselves, and then went to the house of a friend. In the upper chamber of a poor house, with his life-long friends, — the Modenas, — I found him. Modena, who abandoned not only what other men hold dear, — home, fortune, peace, — but also endured, without the power of using the prime of his great artist-talent, a ten years’ exile in a foreign land; his wife every way worthy of him, — such a woman as I am not.

Mazzini had suffered millions more than I could; he had borne his fearful responsibility; he had let his dearest friends perish; he had passed all these nights without sleep; in two short months, he had grown old; all the vital juices seemed exhausted; his eyes were all blood-shot; his skin orange; flesh he had none; his hair was mixed with white: his hand was painful to the touch; but he had never flinched, never quailed; had protested in the last hour against surrender; sweet and calm, but full of a more fiery purpose than ever; in him I revered the hero, and owned myself not of that mould.

You say truly, I shall come home humbler. God grant it may be entirely humble! In future, while more than ever deeply penetrated with principles, and the need of the martyr spirit to sustain them, I will ever own that there are few worthy, and that I am one of the least.

A silken glove might be as good a gauntlet as one of steel, but I, infirm of mood, turn sick even now as I think of the past.

* * * * *

July, 1849. — I cannot tell you what I endured in leaving Rome; abandoning the wounded soldiers; knowing that there is no provision made for them, when they rise from the beds where they have been thrown by a noble courage, where they have suffered with a noble patience. Some of the poorer men, who rise bereft even of the right arm, — one having lost both the right arm and the right leg, — I could have provided for with a small sum. Could I have sold my hair, or blood from my arm, I would have done it. Had any of the rich Americans remained in Rome, they would have given it to me; they helped nobly at first, in the service of the hospitals, when there was far less need; but they had all gone. What would I have given that I could have spoken to one of the Lawrences, or the Phillipses; they could and would have saved the misery. These poor men are left helpless in the power of a mean and vindictive foe. You felt so oppressed in the slave-states; imagine what I felt at seeing all the noblest youth, all the genius of this dear land, again enslaved.

TO W.H.C.

Rieti, Aug. 28, 1849. — You say, you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles. Would it were so! I found myself inferior in courage and fortitude to the occasion. I knew not how to bear the havoc and anguish incident to the struggle for these principles. I rejoiced that it lay not with me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gardens, for the defence of Rome; I do not know that I could have done it. And the sight of these far nobler growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime, became too much for me. I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed. You say, I sustained them; often have they sustained my courage: one, kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them round his neck to be worn as the true relics of to-day; mementoes that he also had done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity. One fair young man, who is made a cripple for life, clasped my hand as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, “Viva l’Italia.” “Think only, cara bona donna” said a poor wounded soldier, “that I can always wear my uniform on festas, just as it is now, with the holes where the balls went through, for a memory.” “God is good; God knows,” they often said to me, when I had not a word to cheer them.

THE WIFE AND MOTHER.[A]

Beneath the ruins of the Roman Republic, how many private fortunes were buried! and among these victims was Margaret. In that catastrophe, were swallowed up hopes sacredly cherished by her through weary months, at the risk of all she most prized.

Soon after the entrance of the French, she wrote thus, to the resident
Envoy of the United States:

My dear Mr. Cass, — I beg you to come and see me, and give me your counsel, and, if need be, your aid, to get away from Rome. From what I hear this morning, I fear we may be once more shut up here; and I shall die, to be again separated from what I hold most dear. There are, as yet, no horses on the way we want to go, or we should post immediately.

You may feel, like me, sad, in these last moments, to leave this injured Rome. So many noble hearts I abandon here, whose woes I have known! I feel, if I could not aid, I might soothe. But for my child, I would not go, till some men, now sick, know whether they shall live or die.

* * * * *

Her child! Where was he? In RIETI, — at the foot of the Umbrian
Apennines, — a day’s journey to the north-east of Rome. Thither
Margaret escaped with her husband, and thence she wrote the following
letter:

Dearest Mother, — I received your letter a few hours before leaving Rome. Like all of yours, it refreshed me, and gave me as much satisfaction as anything could, at that sad time. Its spirit is of eternity, and befits an epoch when wickedness and perfidy so impudently triumph, and the best blood of the generous and honorable is poured out like water, seemingly in vain.

I cannot tell you what I suffered to abandon the wounded to the care of their mean foes; to see the young men, that were faithful to their vows, hunted from their homes, — hunted like wild beasts; denied a refuge in every civilized land. Many of those I loved are sunk to the bottom of the sea, by Austrian cannon, or will be shot. Others are in penury, grief, and exile. May God give due recompense for all that has been endured!

My mind still agitated, and my spirits worn out, I have not felt like writing to any one. Yet the magnificent summer does not smile quite in vain for me. Much exercise in the open air, living much on milk and fruit, have recruited my health, and I am regaining the habit of sleep, which a month of nightly cannonade in Rome had destroyed.

* * * * *

Receiving, a few days since, a packet of letters from America, I opened them with more feeling of hope and good cheer, than for a long time past. The first words that met my eye were these, in the hand of Mr. Greeley:— “Ah, Margaret, the world grows dark with us! You grieve, for Rome is fallen; — I mourn, for Pickie is dead.”

I have shed rivers of tears over the inexpressibly affecting letter thus begun. One would think I might have become familiar enough with images of death and destruction; yet somehow the image of Pickie’s little dancing figure, lying, stiff and stark, between his parents, has made me weep more than all else. There was little hope he could do justice to himself, or lead a happy life in so perplexed a world; but never was a character of richer capacity, — never a more charming child. To me he was most dear, and would always have been so. Had he become stained with earthly faults, I could never have forgotten what he was when fresh from the soul’s home, and what he was to me when my soul pined for sympathy, pure and unalloyed.

The three children I have seen who were fairest in my eyes, and gave most promise of the future, were Waldo, Pickie, Hermann Clarke; — all nipped in the bud. Endless thoughts has this given me, and a resolve to seek the realization of all hopes and plans elsewhere, which resolve will weigh with me as much as it can weigh before the silver cord is finally loosed. Till then, Earth, our mother, always finds strange, unexpected ways to draw us back to her bosom, — to make us seek anew a nutriment which has never failed to cause us frequent sickness.

* * * * *

This brings me to the main object of my present letter, — a piece of intelligence about myself, which I had hoped I might be able to communicate in such a way as to give you pleasure. That I cannot, — after suffering much in silence with that hope, — is like the rest of my earthly destiny.

The first moment, it may cause you a pang to know that your eldest child might long ago have been addressed by another name than yours, and has a little son a year old.

But, beloved mother, do not feel this long. I do assure you, that it was only great love for you that kept me silent. I have abstained a hundred times, when your sympathy, your counsel, would have been most precious, from a wish not to harass you with anxiety. Even now I would abstain, but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together; and we have no hope, in the present state of Italian affairs, that we can do it at any better advantage, for several years, than now.

My husband is a Roman, of a noble but now impoverished house. His mother died when he was an infant, his father is dead since we met, leaving some property, but encumbered with debts, and in the present state of Rome hardly available, except by living there. He has three older brothers, all provided for in the Papal service, — one as Secretary of the Privy Chamber, the other two as members of the Guard Noble. A similar career would have been opened to him, but he embraced liberal principles, and, with the fall of the Republic, has lost all, as well as the favor of his family, who all sided with the Pope. Meanwhile, having been an officer in the Republican service, it was best for him to leave Rome. He has taken what little money he had, and we plan to live in Florence for the winter. If he or I can get the means, we shall come together to the United States, in the summer; — earlier we could not, on account of the child.

He is not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with me. He had no instructor except an old priest, who entirely neglected his education; and of all that is contained in books he is absolutely ignorant, and he has no enthusiasm of character. On the other hand, he has excellent practical sense; has been a judicious observer of all that passed before his eyes; has a nice sense of duty, which, in its unfailing, minute activity, may put most enthusiasts to shame; a very sweet temper, and great native refinement. His love for me has been unswerving and most tender. I have never suffered a pain that he could relieve. His devotion, when I am ill, is to be compared only with yours. His delicacy in trifles, his sweet domestic graces, remind me of E —— . In him I have found a home, and one that interferes with no tie. Amid many ills and cares, we have had much joy together, in the sympathy with natural beauty, — with our child, — with all that is innocent and sweet.

I do not know whether he will always love me so well, for I am the elder, and the difference will become, in a few years, more perceptible than now. But life is so uncertain, and it is so necessary to take good things with their limitations, that I have not thought it worth while to calculate too curiously.

However my other friends may feel, I am sure that you will love him very much, and that he will love you no less. Could we all live together, on a moderate income, you would find peace with us. Heaven grant, that, on returning, I may gain means to effect this object. He, of course, can do nothing, while we are in the United States, but perhaps I can; and now that my health is better, I shall be able to exert myself, if sure that my child is watched by those who love him, and who are good and pure.

* * * * *

What shall I say of my child? All might seem hyperbole, even to my dearest mother. In him I find satisfaction, for the first time, to the deep wants of my heart. Yet, thinking of those other sweet ones fled, I must look upon him as a treasure only lent. He is a fair child, with blue eyes and light hair; very affectionate, graceful, and sportive. He was baptized, in the Roman Catholic Church, by the name of Angelo Eugene Philip, for his father, grandfather, and my brother. He inherits the title of marquis.

Write the name of my child in your Bible, ANGELO OSSOLI, born September 5, 1848. God grant he may live to see you, and may prove worthy of your love!

More I do not feel strength to say. You can hardly guess how all attempt to express something about the great struggles and experiences of my European life enfeebles me. When I get home, — if ever I do, — it will be told without this fatigue and excitement. I trust there will be a little repose, before entering anew on this wearisome conflict.

I had addressed you twice, — once under the impression that I should not survive the birth of my child; again during the siege of Rome, the father and I being both in danger. I took Mrs. Story, and, when she left Rome, Mr. Cass, into my confidence. Both were kind as sister and brother. Amid much pain and struggle, sweet, is the memory of the generous love I received from William and Emelyn Story, and their uncle. They helped me gently through a most difficult period. Mr. Cass, also, who did not know me at all, has done everything possible for me.

* * * * *

A letter to her sister fills out these portraits of her husband and child.

* * * * *

About Ossoli[B] I do not like to say much, as he is an exceedingly delicate person. He is not precisely reserved, but it is not natural to him to talk about the objects of strong affection. I am sure he would not try to describe me to his sister, but would rather she would take her own impression of me; and, as much as possible, I wish to do the same by him. I presume that, to many of my friends, he will be nothing, and they will not understand that I should have life in common with him. But I do not think he will care; — he has not the slightest tinge of self-love. He has, throughout our intercourse, been used to my having many such ties. He has no wish to be anything to persons with whom he does not feel spontaneously bound, and when I am occupied, is happy in himself. But some of my friends and my family, who will see him in the details of practical life, cannot fail to prize the purity and simple strength of his character; and, should he continue to love me as he has done, his companionship will be an inestimable blessing to me. I say if, because all human affections are frail, and I have experienced too great revulsions in my own, not to know it. Yet I feel great confidence in the permanence of his love. It has been unblemished so far, under many trials; especially as I have been more desponding and unreasonable, in many ways, than I ever was before, and more so, I hope, than I ever shall be again. But at all such times, he never had a thought except to sustain and cheer me. He is capable of the sacred love, — the love passing that of woman. He showed it to his father, to Rome, to me. Now he loves his child in the same way. I think he will be an excellent father, though he could not speculate about it, nor, indeed, about anything.

Our meeting was singular, — fateful, I may say. Very soon he offered me his hand through life, but I never dreamed I should take it. I loved him, and felt very unhappy to leave him; but the connection seemed so every way unfit, I did not hesitate a moment. He, however, thought I should return to him, as I did. I acted upon a strong impulse, and could not analyze at all what passed in my mind. I neither rejoice nor grieve; — for bad or for good, I acted out my character Had I never connected myself with any one, my path was clear; now it is all hid; but, in that case, my development must have been partial. As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life. Still, I do not find it burdensome. The friction that I have seen mar so much the domestic happiness of others does not occur with us, or, at least, has not occurred. Then, there is the pleasure of always being at hand to help one another.

Still, the great novelty, the immense gain, to me, is my relation with my child. I thought the mother’s heart lived in me before, but it did not; — I knew nothing about it. Yet, before his birth, I dreaded it. I thought I should not survive: but if I did, and my child did, was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world? I could not, at that time, get any other view. When he was born, that deep melancholy changed at once into rapture: but it did not last long. Then came the prudential motherhood. I grew a coward, a care-taker, not only for the morrow, but, impiously faithless, for twenty or thirty years ahead. It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves. I imagined everything; — he was to be in danger of every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the infants of Lombardy; — the house would be burned over his head; but, if he escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers? Then his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough, &c. &c.

During the siege of Rome, I could not see my little boy. What I endured at that time, in various ways, not many would survive. In the burning sun, I went, every day, to wait, in the crowd, for letters about him. Often they did not come. I saw blood that had streamed on the wall where Ossoli was. I have a piece of a bomb that burst close to him. I sought solace in tending the suffering men; but when I beheld the beautiful fair young men bleeding to death, or mutilated for life, I felt the woe of all the mothers who had nursed each to that full flower, to see them thus cut down. I felt the consolation, too, — for those youths died worthily. I was a Mater Dolorosa, and I remembered that she who helped Angelino into the world came from the sign of the Mater Dolorosa. I thought, even if he lives, if he comes into the world at this great troubled time, terrible with perplexed duties, it may be to die thus at twenty years, one of a glorious hecatomb, indeed, but still a sacrifice! It seemed then I was willing he should die.

* * * * *

Angelino’s birth-place is thus sketched:

My baby saw mountains when he first looked forward into the world. RIETI, — not only an old classic town of Italy, but one founded by what are now called the Aborigines, — is a hive of very ancient dwellings with red brown roofs, a citadel and several towers. It is in a plain, twelve miles in diameter one way, not much less the other, and entirely encircled with mountains of the noblest form. Casinos and hermitages gleam here and there on their lower slopes. This plain is almost the richest in Italy, and full of vineyards. Rieti is near the foot of the hills on one side, and the rapid Velino makes almost the circuit of its walls, on its way to Terni. I had my apartment shut out from the family, on the bank of this river, and saw the mountains, as I lay on my restless couch. There was a piazza, too, or, as they call it here, a loggia, which hung over the river, where I walked most of the night, for I could not sleep at all in those months. In the wild autumn storms, the stream became a roaring torrent, constantly lit up by lightning flashes, and the sound of its rush was very sublime. I see it yet, as it swept away on its dark green current the heaps of burning straw which the children let down from the bridge. Opposite my window was a vineyard, whose white and purple clusters were my food for three months. It was pretty to watch the vintage, — the asses and wagons loaded with this wealth of amber and rubies, — the naked boys, singing in the trees on which the vines are trained, as they cut the grapes, — the nut-brown maids and matrons, in their red corsets and white head-clothes, receiving them below, while the babies and little children were frolicking in the grass.

In Rieti, the ancient Umbrians were married thus. In presence of friends, the man and maid received together the gifts of fire and water; the bridegroom then conducted to his house the bride. At the door, he gave her the keys, and, entering, threw behind him nuts, as a sign that he renounced all the frivolities of boyhood.

I intend to write all that relates to the birth of Angelino, in a little book, which I shall, I hope, show you sometime. I have begun it, and then stopped; — it seemed to me he would die. If he lives, I shall finish it, before the details are at all faded in my mind. Rieti is a place where I should have liked to have him born, and where I should like to have him now, — but that the people are so wicked. They are the most ferocious and mercenary population of Italy. I did not know this, when I went there, and merely expected to be solitary and quiet among poor people. But they looked on the “Marchioness” as an ignorant Inglese, and they fancy all Inglesi have wealth untold. Me they were bent on plundering in every way. They made me suffer terribly in the first days.

[Footnote A: The first part of this chapter is edited by R.W.E.; the remainder by W.H.C.]

[Footnote B: Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.]

THE PRIVATE MARRIAGE.

The high-minded friend, spoken of with such grateful affection by Margaret, in her letter to her mother, thus gracefully narrates the romance of her marriage; and the narrative is a noble proof of the heroic disinterestedness with which, amidst her own engrossing trials, Margaret devoted herself to others. Mrs. Story writes as follows: —

“During the month of November, 1847, we arrived in Rome, purposing to spend the winter there. At that time, Margaret was living in the house of the Marchesa —— , in the Corso, Ultimo Piano. Her rooms were pleasant and cheerful, with a certain air of elegance and refinement, but they had not a sunny exposure, that all-essential requisite for health, during the damp Roman winter. Margaret suffered from ill health this winter, and she afterwards attributed it mainly to the fact, that she had not the sun. As soon as she heard of our arrival, she stretched forth a friendly, cordial hand, and greeted us most warmly. She gave us great assistance in our search for convenient lodgings, and we were soon happily established near her. Our intercourse was henceforth most frequent and intimate, and knew no cloud nor coldness. Daily we were much with her, and daily we felt more sensible of the worth and value of our friend. To me she seemed so unlike what I had thought her to be in America, that I continually said, ‘How have I misjudged you, — you are not at all such a person as I took you to be.’ To this she replied, ‘I am not the same person, but in many respects another; — my life has new channels now, and how thankful I am that I have been able to come out into larger interests, — but, partly, you did not know me at home in the true light.’ It was true, that I had not known her much personally, when in Boston; but through her friends, who were mine also, I had learned to think of her as a person on intellectual stilts, with a large share of arrogance, and little sweetness of temper. How unlike to this was she now! — so delicate, so simple, confiding, and affectionate; with a true womanly heart and soul, sensitive and generous, and, what was to me a still greater surprise, possessed of so broad a charity, that she could cover with its mantle the faults and defects of all about her.

“We soon became acquainted with the young Marquis Ossoli, and met him frequently at Margaret’s rooms. He appeared to be of a reserved and gentle nature, with quiet, gentleman-like manners, and there was something melancholy in the expression of his face, which made one desire to know more of him. In figure, he was tall, and of slender frame, with dark hair and eyes; we judged that he was about thirty years of age, possibly younger. Margaret spoke of him most frankly, and soon told us the history of her first acquaintance with him, which, as nearly as I can recall, was as follows: —

“She went to hear vespers, the evening of ‘Holy Thursday,’ soon after her first coming to Rome, in the spring of 1847, at St. Peter’s. She proposed to her companions that some place in the church should be designated, where, after the services, they should meet, — she being inclined, as was her custom always in St. Peter’s, to wander alone among the different chapels. When, at length, she saw that the crowd was dispersing, she returned to the place assigned, but could not find her party. In some perplexity, she walked about, with her glass carefully examining each group. Presently, a young man of gentlemanly address came up to her, and begged, if she were seeking any one, that he might be permitted to assist her; and together they continued the search through all parts of the church. At last, it became evident, beyond a doubt, that her party could no longer be there, and, as it was then quite late, the crowd all gone, they went out into the piazza to find a carriage, in which she might go home. In the piazza, in front of St. Peter’s, generally may be found many carriages; but, owing to the delay they had made, there were then none, and Margaret was compelled to walk, with her stranger friend, the long distance between the Vatican and the Corso. At this time, she had little command of the language for conversational purposes, and their words were few, though enough to create in each a desire for further knowledge and acquaintance. At her door, they parted, and Margaret, finding her friends already at home, related the adventure.”

This chance meeting at vesper service in St. Peter’s prepared the way for many interviews; and it was before Margaret’s departure for Venice, Milan, and Como, that Ossoli first offered her his hand, and was refused. Mrs. Story continues: —

“After her return to Rome, they met again, and he became her constant visitor; and as, in those days, Margaret watched with intense interest the tide of political events, his mind was also turned in the direction of liberty and better government. Whether Ossoli, unassisted, would have been able to emancipate himself from the influence of his family and early education, both eminently conservative and narrow, may be a question; but that he did throw off the shackles, and espouse the cause of Roman liberty with warm zeal, is most certain. Margaret had known Mazzini in London, had partaken of his schemes for the future of his country, and was taking every pains to inform herself in regard to the action of all parties, with a view to write a history of the period. Ossoli brought her every intelligence that might be of interest to her, and busied himself in learning the views of both parties, that she might be able to judge the matter impartially.

“Here I may say, that, in the estimation of most of those who were in Italy at this time, the loss of Margaret’s history and notes is a great and irreparable one. No one could have possessed so many avenues of direct information from both sides. While she was the friend and correspondent of Mazzini, and knew the springs of action of his party; through her husband’s family and connections, she knew the other view; so that, whatever might be the value of her deductions, her facts could not have been other than of highest worth. Together, Margaret and Ossoli went to the meetings of either side; and to her he carried all the flying reports of the day, such as he had heard in the café, or through his friends.

“In a short time, we went to Naples, and Margaret, in the course of a few months, to Aquila and Rieti. Meanwhile, we heard from her often by letter, and wrote to urge her to join us in our villa at Sorrento. During this summer, she wrote constantly upon her history of the Italian movement, for which she had collected materials through the past winter. We did not again meet, until the following spring, March, 1849, when we went from Florence back to Rome. Once more we were with her, then, in most familiar every-day intercourse, and as at this time a change of government had taken place, — the Pope having gone to Molo di Gaeta. — we watched with her the great movements of the day. Ossoli was now actively interested on the liberal side; he was holding the office of captain in the Guardia Civica, and enthusiastically looking forward to the success of the new measures.

“During the spring of 1849, Mazzini came to Rome. He went at once to see Margaret, and at her rooms met Ossoli. After this interview with Mazzini, it was quite evident that they had lost something of the faith and hopeful certainty with which they had regarded the issue, for Mazzini had discovered the want of singleness of purpose in the leaders of the Provisional Government. Still zealously Margaret and Ossoli aided in everything the progress of events; and when it was certain that the French had landed forces at Civita Vecchia, and would attack Rome, Ossoli took station with his men on the walls of the Vatican gardens, where he remained faithfully to the end of the attack. Margaret had, at the same time, the entire charge of one of the hospitals, and was the assistant of the Princess Belgioioso, in charge of ‘dei Pellegrini,’ where, during the first day, they received seventy wounded men, French and Romans.

“Night and day, Margaret was occupied, and, with the princess, so ordered and disposed the hospitals, that their conduct was truly admirable. All the work was skilfully divided, so that there was no confusion or hurry and, from the chaotic condition in which these places had been left by the priests, — who previously had charge of them, — they brought them to a state of perfect regularity and discipline. Of money they had very little, and they were obliged to give their time and thoughts, in its place. From the Americans in Rome, they raised a subscription for the aid of the wounded of either party; but, besides this, they had scarcely any means to use. I have walked through the wards with Margaret, and seen how comforting was her presence to the poor suffering men. ‘How long will the Signora stay?’ ‘When will the Signora come again?’ they eagerly asked. For each one’s peculiar tastes she had a care: to one she carried books; to another she told the news of the day; and listened to another’s oft-repeated tale of wrongs, as the best sympathy she could give. They raised themselves up on their elbows, to get the last glimpse of her as she was going away. There were some of the sturdy fellows of Garibaldi’s Legion there, and to them she listened, as they spoke with delight of their chief, of his courage and skill; for he seemed to have won the hearts of his men in a remarkable manner.

“One incident I may as well narrate in this connection. It happened, that, some time before the coming of the French, while Margaret was travelling quite by herself, on her return from a visit to her child, who was out at nurse in the country, she rested for an hour or two at a little wayside osteria. While there, she was startled by the padrone, who, with great alarm, rushed into the room, and said, ‘We are quite lost! here is the Legion Garibaldi! These men always pillage, and, if we do not give all up to them without pay, they will kill us.’ Margaret looked out upon the road, and saw that it was quite true, that the legion was coming thither with all speed. For a moment, she said, she felt uncomfortably; for such was the exaggerated account of the conduct of the men, that she thought it quite possible that they would take her horses, and so leave her without the means of proceeding on her journey. On they came, and she determined to offer them a lunch at her own expense; having faith that gentleness and courtesy was the best protection from injury. Accordingly, as soon as they arrived, and rushed boisterously into the osteria, she rose, and said to the padrone, ‘Give these good men wine and bread on my account; for, after their ride, they must need refreshment.’ Immediately, the noise and confusion subsided; with respectful bows to her, they seated themselves and partook of the lunch, giving her an account of their journey. When she was ready to go, and her vettura was at the door, they waited upon her, took down the steps, and assisted her with much gentleness and respectfulness of manner, and she drove off, wondering how men with such natures could have the reputation they had. And, so far as we could gather, except in this instance, their conduct was of a most disorderly kind.

“Again, on another occasion, she showed how great was her power over rude men. This was when two contadini at Rieti, being in a violent quarrel, had rushed upon each other with knives. Margaret was called by the women bystanders, as the Signora who could most influence them to peace. She went directly up to the men, whose rage was truly awful to behold, and, stepping between them, commanded them to separate. They parted, but with such a look of deadly revenge, that Margaret felt her work was but half accomplished. She therefore sought them out separately, and talked with each, urging forgiveness; it was long, however, before she could see any change of purpose, and only by repeated conversations was it, that she brought about her desire, and saw them meet as friends. After this, her reputation as peace-maker was great, and the women in the neighborhood came to her with long tales of trouble, urging her intervention. I have never known anything more extraordinary than this influence of hers over the passion and violence of the Italian character. Repeated instances come to my mind, when a look from her has had more power to quiet excitement, than any arguments and reasonings that could be brought to bear upon the subject. Something quite superior and apart from them, the people thought her, and yet knew her as the gentle and considerate judge of their vices.

“I may also mention here, that Margaret’s charities, according to her means, were larger than those of any other whom I ever knew. At one time, in Rome, while she lived upon the simplest, slenderest fare, spending only some ten or twelve cents a day for her dinner, she lent, unsolicited, her last fifty dollars to an artist, who was then in need. That it would ever be returned to her, she did not know; but the doubt did not restrain the hand from giving. In this instance, it was soon repaid her; but her charities were not always towards the most deserving. Repeated instances of the false pretences, under which demands for charity are made, were known to her after she had given to unworthy objects; but no experience of this sort ever checked her kindly impulse to give, and being once deceived taught her no lesson of distrust. She ever listened with ready ear to all who came to her in any form of distress. Indeed, to use the language of another friend, ‘the prevalent impression at Rome, among all who knew her, was, that she was a mild saint and a ministering angel.’

“I have, in order to bring in these instances of her influence on those about her, deviated from my track. We return to the life she led in Rome during the attack of the French, and her charge of the hospitals, where she spent daily some seven or eight hours, and, often, the entire night. Her feeble frame was a good deal shaken by so uncommon a demand upon her strength, while, at the same time, the anxiety of her mind was intense. I well remember how exhausted and weary she was; how pale and agitated she returned to us after her day’s and night’s watching; how eagerly she asked for news of Ossoli, and how seldom we had any to give her, for he was unable to send her a word for two or three days at a time. Letters from the country there were few or none, as the communication between Rieti and Rome was cut off.

“After one such day, she called me to her bedside, and said that I must consent, for her sake, to keep the SECRET she was about to confide. Then she told me of her marriage; where her child was, and where he was born; and gave me certain papers and parchment documents which I was to keep; and, in the event of her and her husband’s death, I was to take the boy to her mother in America, and confide him to her care, and that of her friend, Mrs. —— .

“The papers thus given me, I had perfect liberty to read; but after she had told me her story, I desired no confirmation of this fact, beyond what her words had given. One or two of the papers she opened, and we together read them. One was written on parchment, in Latin, and was a certificate, given by the priest who married them, saying that Angelo Eugene Ossoli was the legal heir of whatever title and fortune should come to his father. To this was affixed his seal, with those of the other witnesses, and the Ossoli crest was drawn in full upon the paper. There was also a book, in which Margaret had written the history of her acquaintance and marriage with Ossoli, and of the birth of her child. In giving that to me, she said, ‘If I do not survive to tell this myself to my family, this book will be to them invaluable. Therefore keep it for them. If I live, it will be of no use, for my word will be all that they will ask.’ I took the papers, and locked them up. Never feeling any desire to look into them, I never did; and as she gave them to me, I returned them to her, when I left Rome for Switzerland.

“After this, she often spoke to me of the necessity there had been, and still existed, for her keeping her marriage a secret. At the time, I argued in favor of her making it public, but subsequent events have shown me the wisdom of her decision. The explanation she gave me of the secret marriage was this:

“They were married in December, soon after, — as I think, though I am not positive, — the death of the old Marquis Ossoli. The estate he had left was undivided, and the two brothers, attached to the Papal household, were to be the executors. This patrimony was not large, but, when fairly divided, would bring to each a little property, — an income sufficient, with economy, for life in Rome. Everyone knows, that law is subject to ecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestant would be destructive to all prospects of favorable administration. And beside being of another religious faith, there was, in this case, the additional crime of having married a liberal, — one who had publicly interested herself in radical views. Taking the two facts together, there was good reason to suppose, that, if the marriage were known, Ossoli must be a beggar, and a banished man, under the then existing government; while, by waiting a little, there was a chance, — a fair one, too, — of an honorable post under the new government, whose formation every one was anticipating. Leaving Rome, too, at that time, was deserting the field wherein they might hope to work much good, and where they felt that they were needed. Ossoli’s brothers had long before begun to look jealously upon him. Knowing his acquaintance with Margaret, they feared the influence she might exert over his mind in favor of liberal sentiments, and had not hesitated to threaten him with the Papal displeasure. Ossoli’s education had been such, that it certainly argues an uncommon elevation of character, that he remained so firm and single in his political views, and was so indifferent to the pecuniary advantages which his former position offered, since, during many years, the Ossoli family had been high in favor and in office, in Rome, and the same vista opened for his own future, had he chosen to follow their lead. The Pope left for Molo di Gaeta, and then came a suspension of all legal procedure, so that the estate was never divided, before we left Italy, and I do not know that it has ever been.

“Ossoli had the feeling, that, while his own sister and family could not be informed of his marriage, no others should know of it; and from day to day they hoped on for the favorable change which should enable them to declare it. Their child was born; and, for his sake, in order to defend him, as Margaret said, from the stings of poverty, they were patient waiters for the restored law of the land. Margaret felt that she would, at any cost to herself, gladly secure for her child a condition above want; and, although it was a severe trial, — as her letters to us attest, — she resolved to wait, and hope, and keep her secret. At the time when she took me into her confidence, she was so full of anxiety and dread of some shock, from which she might not recover, that it was absolutely necessary to make it known to some friend. She was living with us at the time, and she gave it to me. Most sacredly, but timidly, did I keep her secret; for, all the while, I was tormented with a desire to be of active service to her, and I was incapacitated from any action by the position in which I was placed.

“Ossoli’s post was one of considerable danger, he being in one of the most exposed places; and, as Margaret saw his wounded and dying comrades, she felt that another shot might take him from her, or bring him to her care in the hospital. Eagerly she watched the carts, as they came up with their suffering loads, dreading that her worst fears might be confirmed. No argument of ours could persuade Ossoli to leave his post to take food or rest. Sometimes we went to him, and carried a concealed basket of provisions, but he shared it with so many of his fellows, that his own portion must have been almost nothing. Haggard, worn, and pale, he walked over the Vatican grounds with us, pointing out, now here, now there, where some poor fellow’s blood sprinkled the wall; Margaret was with us, and for a few moments they could have an anxious talk about their child.

“To get to the child, or to send to him, was quite impossible, and for days they were in complete ignorance about him. At length, a letter came; and in it the nurse declared that unless they should immediately send her, in advance-payment, a certain sum of money, she would altogether abandon Angelo. It seemed, at first, impossible to forward the money, the road was so insecure, and the bearer of any parcel was so likely to be seized by one party or the other, and to be treated as a spy. But finally, after much consideration, the sum was sent to the address of a physician, who had been charged with the care of the child. I think it did reach its destination, and for a while answered the purpose of keeping the wretched woman faithful to her charge.”

AQUILA AND RIETI.

Extracts from Margaret’s and Ossoli’s letters will guide us more into the heart of this home-tragedy, so sanctified with holy hope, sweet love, and patient heroism. They shall be introduced by a passage from a journal written many years before.

“My Child! O, Father, give me a bud on my tree of life, so scathed by the lightning and bound by the frost! Surely a being born wholly of my being, would not let me lie so still and cold in lonely sadness. This is a new sorrow; for always, before, I have wanted a superior or equal, but now it seems that only the feeling of a parent for a child could exhaust the richness of one’s soul. All powerful Nature, how dost thou lead me into thy heart and rebuke every factitious feeling, every thought of pride, which has severed me from the Universe! How did I aspire to be a pure flame, ever pointing upward on the altar! But these thoughts of consecration, though true to the time, are false to the whole. There needs no consecration to the wise heart for all is pervaded by One Spirit, and the Soul of all existence is the Holy of Holies. I thought ages would pass, before I had this parent feeling, and then, that the desire would rise from my fulness of being. But now it springs up in my poverty and sadness. I am well aware that I ought not to be so happy. I do not deserve to be well beloved in any way, far less as the mother by her child. I am too rough and blurred an image of the Creator, to become a bestower of life. Yet, if I refuse to be anything else than my highest self, the true beauty will finally glow out in fulness.”

At what cost, were bought the blessings so long pined for! Early in the summer of 1848, Margaret left Rome for Aquila, a small, old town, once a baronial residence, perched among the mountains of Abruzzi. She thus sketches her retreat: —

“I am in the midst of a theatre of glorious, snow-crowned mountains, whose pedestals are garlanded with the olive and mulberry, and along whose sides run bridle-paths, fringed with almond groves and vineyards. The valleys are yellow with saffron flowers; the grain fields enamelled with the brilliant blue corn-flower and red poppy. They are of intoxicating beauty, and like nothing in America. The old genius of Europe has so mellowed even the marbles here, that one cannot have the feeling of holy virgin loneliness, as in the New World. The spirits of the dead crowd me in most solitary places. Here and there, gleam churches or shrines. The little town, much ruined, lies on the slope of a hill, with the houses of the barons gone to decay, and unused churches, over whose arched portals are faded frescoes, with the open belfry, and stone wheel-windows, always so beautiful. Sweet little paths lead away through the fields to convents, — one of Passionists, another of Capuchins; and the draped figures of the monks, pacing up and down the hills, look very peaceful. In the churches still open, are pictures, not by great masters, but of quiet, domestic style, which please me much, especially one of the Virgin offering her breast to the child Jesus. There is often sweet music in these churches; they are dressed with fresh flowers, and the incense is not oppressive, so freely sweeps through them the mountain breeze.”

Here Margaret remained but a month, while Ossoli was kept fast by his guard duties in Rome. “Addio, tutto caro,” she writes; “I shall receive you with the greatest joy, when you can come. If it were only possible to be nearer to you! for, except the good air and the security, this place does not please me.” And again:— “How much I long to be near you! You write nothing of yourself, and this makes me anxious and sad. Dear and good! I pray for thee often, now that it is all I can do for thee. We must hope that Destiny will at last grow weary of persecuting. Ever thy affectionate.” Meantime Ossoli writes:— “Why do you not send me tidings of yourself, every post-day? since the post leaves Aquila three times a week. I send you journals or letters every time the post leaves Rome. You should do the same. Take courage, and thus you will make me happier also; and you can think how sad I must feel in not being near you, dearest, to care for all your wants.”

By the middle of July, Margaret could bear her loneliness no longer, and, passing the mountains, advanced to Rieti, within the frontier of the Papal States. Here Ossoli could sometimes visit her on a Sunday, by travelling in the night from Rome. “Do not fail to come,” writes Margaret. “I shall have your coffee warm. You will arrive early, and I can see the diligence pass the bridge from my window.” But now threatened a new trial, terrible under the circumstances, yet met with the loving heroism that characterized all her conduct. The civic guard was ordered to prepare for marching to Bologna. Under date of August 17th, Ossoli writes:— “Mia Cara! How deplorable is my state! I have suffered a most severe struggle. If your condition were other than it is, I could resolve more easily; but, in the present moment, I cannot leave you! Ah, how cruel is Destiny! I understand well how much you would sacrifice yourself for me, and am deeply grateful; but I cannot yet decide.” Margaret is alone, without a single friend, and not only among strangers, but surrounded by people so avaricious, cunning, and unscrupulous, that she has to be constantly on the watch to avoid being fleeced; she is very poor, and has no confidant, even in Rome, to consult with; she is ill, and fears death in the near crisis; yet thus, with true Roman greatness, she counsels her husband:— “It seems, indeed, a marvel how all things go contrary to us! That, just at this moment, you should be called upon to go away. But do what is for your honor. If honor requires it, go. I will try to sustain myself. I leave it to your judgment when to come, — if, indeed, you can ever come again! At least, we have had some hours of peace together, if now it is all over. Adieu, love; I embrace thee always, and pray for thy welfare. Most affectionately, adieu.”

* * * * *

From this trial, however, she was spared. Pio Nono hesitated to send the civic guard to the north of Italy. Then Margaret writes:— “On our own account, love, I shall be most grateful, if you are not obliged to go. But how unworthy, in the Pope! He seems now a man without a heart. And that traitor, Charles Albert! He will bear the curse of all future ages. Can you learn particulars from Milan? I feel sad for our poor friends there; how much they must suffer! * * * I shall be much more tranquil to have you at my side, for it would be sad to die alone, without the touch of one dear hand. Still, I repeat what I said in my last; if duty prevents you from coming, I will endeavor to take care of myself.” Again, two days later, she says:— “I feel, love, a profound sympathy with you, but am not able to give perfectly wise counsel. It seems to me, indeed, the worst possible moment to take up arms, except in the cause of duty, of honor; for, with the Pope so cold, and his ministers so undecided, nothing can be well or successfully done. If it is possible for you to wait for two or three weeks, the public state will be determined, — as will also mine, — and you can judge more calmly. Otherwise, it seems to me that I ought to say nothing. Only, if you go, come here first. I must see you once more. Adieu, dear. Our misfortunes are many and unlooked for. Not often does destiny demand a greater price for some happy moments. Yet never do I repent of our affection; and for thee, if not for me, I hope that life has still some good in store. Once again, adieu! May God give thee counsel and help, since they are not in the power of thy affectionate Margherita.”

On the 5th of September, Ossoli was “at her side,” and together, with glad and grateful hearts, they welcomed their boy; though the father was compelled to return the next day to Rome. Even then, however, a new chapter of sorrows was opening. By indiscreet treatment, Margaret was thrown into violent fever, and became unable to nurse her child. Her waiting maid, also, proved so treacherous, that she was forced to dismiss her, and wished “never to set eyes on her more;” and the family, with whom she was living, displayed most detestable meanness. Thus helpless, ill, and solitary, she could not even now enjoy the mother’s privilege. Yet she writes cheerfully:— “My present nurse is a very good one, and I feel relieved. We must have courage but it is a great care, alone and ignorant, to guard an infant in its first days of life. He is very pretty for his age; and, without knowing what name I intended giving him, the people in the house call him Angiolino, because he is so lovely.” Again:— “He is so dear! It seems to me, among all disasters and difficulties, that if he lives and is well, he will become a treasure for us two, that will compensate us for everything.” And yet again:— “This —— is faithless, like the rest. Spite of all his promises, he will not bring the matter to inoculate Nino, though, all about us, persons are dying with small-pox. I cannot sleep by night, and I weep by day, I am so disgusted; but you are too far off to help me. The baby is more beautiful every hour. He is worth all the trouble he causes me, — poor child that I am, — alone here, and abused by everybody.”

Yet new struggles; new sorrows! Ossoli writes: —

“Our affairs must be managed with the utmost caution imaginable, since my thought would be to keep the baby out of Rome for the sake of greater secrecy, if only we can find a good nurse who will take care of him like a mother.” To which Margaret replies:— “He is always so charming, how can I ever, ever leave him! I wake in the night, — I look at him. I think: Ah, it is impossible! He is so beautiful and good, I could die for him!” Once more:— “In seeking rooms, do not pledge me to remain in Rome, for it seems to me, often, I cannot stay long without seeing the boy. He is so dear, and life seems so uncertain. It is necessary that I should be in Rome a month, at least, to write, and also to be near you. But I must be free to return here, if I feel too anxious and suffering for him. O, love! how difficult is life! But thou art good! If it were only possible to make thee happy!” And, finally, “Signora speaks very highly of —— , the nurse of Angelo, and says that her aunt is an excellent woman, and that the brothers are all good. Her conduct pleases me well. This consoles me a little, in the prospect of leaving my child, if that is necessary.”

So, early in November, Ossoli came for her, and they returned together. In December, however, Margaret passed a week more with her darling, making two fatiguing and perilous journeys, as snows had fallen on the mountains, and the streams were much swollen by the rains. And then, from the combined motives of being near her husband, watching and taking part in the impending struggle of liberalism, earning support by her pen, preparing her book, and avoiding suspicion, she remained for three months in Rome. “How many nights I have passed,” she writes, “entirely in contriving possible means, by which, through resolution and effort on my part, that one sacrifice could be avoided. But it was impossible. I could not take the nurse from her family; I could not remove Angelo, without immense difficulty and risk. It is singular, how everything has worked to give me more and more sorrow. Could I but have remained in peace, cherishing the messenger dove, I should have asked no more, but should have felt overpaid for all the pains and bafflings of my sad and broken life.” In March, she flies back to Rieti, and finds “our treasure in the best of health, and plump, though small. When first I took him in my arms, he made no sound, but leaned his head against my bosom, and kept it there, as if he would say, How could you leave me? They told me, that all the day of my departure he would not be comforted, always looking toward the door. He has been a strangely precocious infant, I think, through sympathy with me, for I worked very hard before his birth, with the hope that all my spirit might be incarnated in him. In that regard, it may have been good for him to be with these more instinctively joyous natures. I see that he is more serene, is less sensitive, than when with me, and sleeps better. The most solid happiness I have known has been when he has gone to sleep in my arms. What cruel sacrifices have I made to guard my secret for the present, and to have the mode of disclosure at my own option! It will, indeed, be just like all the rest, if these sacrifices are made in vain.”

* * * * *

At Rieti, Margaret rested till the middle of April, when, returning once more to Rome, she was, as we have seen, shut up within the beleagured city.

The siege ended, the anxious mother was free to seek her child once more, in his nest among the mountains. Her fears had been but too prophetic. “Though the physician sent me reassuring letters,” she writes, “I yet often seemed to hear Angelino calling to me amid the roar of the cannon, and always his tone was of crying. And when I came, I found mine own fast waning to the tomb! His nurse, lovely and innocent as she appeared, had betrayed him, for lack of a few scudi! He was worn to a skeleton; his sweet, childish grace all gone! Everything I had endured seemed light to what I felt when I saw him too weak to smile, or lift his wasted little hand. Now, by incessant care, we have brought him back, — who knows if that be a deed of love? — into this hard world once more. But I could not let him go, unless I went with him; and I do hope that the cruel law of my life will, at least, not oblige us to be separated. When I saw his first returning smile, — that poor, wan, feeble smile! — and more than four weeks we watched him night and day, before we saw it, — new resolution dawned in my heart. I resolved to live, day by day, hour by hour, for his dear sake. So, if he is only treasure lent, — if he too must go, as sweet Waldo, Pickie, Hermann, did, — as all my children do! — I shall at least have these days and hours with him.”

How intolerable was this last blow to one stretched so long on the rack, is plain from Margaret’s letters. “I shall never again,” she writes, “be perfectly, be religiously generous, so terribly do I need for myself the love I have given to other sufferers. When you read this, I hope your heart will be happy; for I still like to know that others are happy, — it consoles me.” Again her agony wrung from her these bitter words, — the bitterest she ever uttered, — words of transient madness, yet most characteristic:— “Oh God! help me, is all my cry. Yet I have little faith in the Paternal love I need, so ruthless or so negligent seems the government of this earth. I feel calm, yet sternly, towards Fate. This last plot against me has been so cruelly, cunningly wrought, that I shall never acquiesce. I submit, because useless resistance is degrading, but I demand an explanation. I see that it is probable I shall never receive one, while I live here, and suppose I can bear the rest of the suspense, since I have comprehended all its difficulties in the first moments. Meanwhile, I live day by day, though not on manna.” But now comes a sweeter, gentler strain:— “I have been the object of great love from the noble and the humble; I have felt it towards both. Yet I am tired out, — tired of thinking and hoping, — tired of seeing men err and bleed. I take interest in some plans, — Socialism for instance, — but the interest is shallow as the plans. These are needed, are even good; but man will still blunder and weep, as he has done for so many thousand years. Coward and footsore, gladly would I creep into some green recess, where I might see a few not unfriendly faces, and where not more wretches should come than I could relieve. Yes! I am weary, and faith soars and sings no more. Nothing good of me is left except at the bottom of the heart, a melting tenderness:— ‘She loves much.’”

CALM AFTER STORM.

Morning rainbows usher in tempests, and certainly youth’s romantic visions had prefigured a stormy day of life for Margaret. But there was yet to be a serene and glowing hour before the sun went down. Angelo grew strong and lively once more; rest and peace restored her elasticity of spirit, and extracts from various letters will show in what tranquil blessedness, the autumn and winter glided by. After a few weeks’ residence at Rieti, the happy three journeyed on, by way of Perugia, to Florence, where they arrived at the end of September. Thence, Margaret writes: —

It was so pleasant at Perugia! The pure mountain air is such perfect elixir, the walks are so beautiful on every side, and there is so much to excite generous and consoling feelings! I think the works of the Umbrian school are never well seen except in their home; — they suffer by comparison with works more rich in coloring, more genial, more full of common life. The depth and tenderness of their expression is lost on an observer stimulated to a point out of their range. Now, I can prize them. We went every morning to some church rich in pictures, returning at noon for breakfast. After breakfast, we went into the country, or to sit and read under the trees near San Pietro. Thus I read Nicolo di’ Lapi, a book unenlivened by a spark of genius, but interesting, to me, as illustrative of Florence.

Our little boy gained strength rapidly there; — every day he was able to go out with us more. He is now full of life and gayety. We hope he will live, and grow into a stout man yet.

Our journey here was delightful; — it is the first time I have seen Tuscany when the purple grape hangs garlanded from tree to tree. We were in the early days of the vintage: the fields were animated by men and women, some of the latter with such pretty little bare feet, and shy, soft eyes, under the round straw hat. They were beginning to cut the vines, but had not done enough to spoil any of the beauty.

Here, too, I feel better pleased than ever before. Florence seems so cheerful and busy, after ruined Rome, I feel as if I could forget the disasters of the day, for a while, in looking on the treasures she inherits.

* * * * *

To-day we have been out in the country, and found a little chapel, full of contadine, their lovers waiting outside the door. They looked charming in their black veils, — the straw hat hanging on the arm, — with shy, glancing eyes, and cheeks pinched rosy by the cold; for it is cold here as in New England. On foot, we have explored a great part of the environs; and till now I had no conception of their beauty. When here before, I took only the regular drives, as prescribed for all lady and gentlemen travellers. This evening we returned by a path that led to the banks of the Arno. The Duomo, with the snowy mountains, were glorious in the rosy tint and haze, just before sunset. What a difference it makes to come home to a child! — how it fills up all the gaps of life, just in the way that is most consoling, most refreshing! Formerly, I used to feel sad at that hour; the day had not been nobly spent, I had not done my duty to myself and others, and I felt so lonely! Now I never feel lonely; for, even if my little boy dies, our souls will remain eternally united. And I feel infinite hope for him, — hope that he will serve God and man more loyally than I have done; and, seeing how full he is of life, — how much he can afford to throw away, — I feel the inexhaustibleness of nature, and console myself for my own incapacities.

* * * * *

Florence, Oct. 14, 1849. — Weary in spirit, with the deep disappointments of the last year, I wish to dwell little on these things for the moment, but seek some consolation in the affections. My little boy is quite well now, and I often am happy in seeing how joyous and full of activity he seems. Ossoli, too, feels happier here. The future is full of difficulties for us, but, having settled our plans for the present, we shall set it aside while we may. “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof;” and if the good be not always sufficient, in our case it is; so let us say grace to our dinner of herbs.

* * * * *

Florence, Nov. 7. — Dearest Mother, — Of all your endless acts and words of love, never was any so dear to me as your last letter; — so generous, so sweet, so holy! What on earth is so precious as a mother’s love; and who has a mother like mine!

I was thinking of you and my father, all that first day of October, wishing to write, only there was much to disturb me that day, as the police were threatening to send us away. It is only since I have had my own child that I have known how much I always failed to do what I might have done for the happiness of you both; only since I have seen so much of men and their trials, that I have learned to prize my father as he deserved; only since I have had a heart daily and hourly testifying to me its love, that I have understood, too late, what it was for you to be deprived of it. It seems to me as if I had never sympathized with you as I ought, or tried to embellish and sustain your life, as far as is possible, after such an irreparable wound.

It will be sad for me to leave Italy, uncertain of return. Yet when I think of you, beloved mother; of brothers and sisters, and many friends, I wish to come. Ossoli is perfectly willing. He leaves in Rome a sister, whom he dearly loves. His aunt is dying now. He will go among strangers; but to him, as to all the young Italians, America seems the land of liberty. He hopes, too, that a new revolution will favor return, after a number of years, and that then he may find really a home in Italy. All this is dark; — we can judge only for the present moment. The decision will rest with me, and I shall wait till the last moment, as I always do, that I may have all the reasons before me.

I thought, to-day, ah, if she could only be with us now! But who knows how long this interval of peace will last? I have learned to prize such, as the halcyon prelude to the storm. It is now about a fortnight, since the police gave us leave to stay, and we feel safe in our little apartment. We have no servant except the nurse, with occasional aid from the porter’s wife, and now live comfortably so, tormented by no one, helping ourselves. In the evenings, we have a little fire now; — the baby sits on his stool between us. He makes me think how I sat on mine, in the chaise, between you and father. He is exceedingly fond of flowers; — he has been enchanted, this evening, by this splendid Gardenia, and these many crimson flowers that were given me at Villa Correggi, where a friend took us in his carriage. It was a luxury, this ride, as we have entirely renounced the use of a carriage for ourselves. How enchanted you would have been with that villa! It seems now as if, with the certainty of a very limited income, we could be so happy! But I suppose, if we had it, one of us would die, or the baby. Do not you die, my beloved mother; — let us together have some halcyon moments, again, with God, with nature, with sweet childhood, with the remembrance of pure trust and good intent; away from perfidy and care, and the blight of noble designs.

Ossoli wishes you were here, almost as much as I. When there is anything really lovely and tranquil, he often says, “Would not ‘La Madre’ like that?” He wept when he heard your letter. I never saw him weep at any other time, except when his father died, and when the French entered Rome. He has, I think, even a more holy feeling about a mother, from having lost his own, when very small. It has been a life-long want with him. He often shows me a little scar on his face, made by a jealous dog, when his mother was caressing him as an infant. He prizes that blemish much.

* * * * *

Florence, December 1, 1849. — I do not know what to write about the baby, he changes so much, — has so many characters. He is like me in that, for his father’s character is simple and uniform, though not monotonous, any more than are the flowers of spring flowers of the valley. Angelino is now in the most perfect rosy health, — a very gay, impetuous, ardent, but sweet-tempered child. He seems to me to have nothing in common with his first babyhood, with its ecstatic smiles, its exquisite sensitiveness, and a distinction in the gesture and attitudes that struck everybody. His temperament is apparently changed by taking the milk of these robust women. He is now come to quite a knowing age, — fifteen months.

In the morning, as soon as dressed, he signs to come into our room; then draws our curtain with his little dimpled hand, kisses me rather violently, pats my face, laughs, crows, shows his teeth, blows like the bellows, stretches himself, and says “bravo.” Then, having shown off all his accomplishments, he expects, as a reward, to be tied in his chair, and have his playthings. These engage him busily, but still he calls to us to sing and drum, to enliven the scene. Sometimes he summons me to kiss his hand, and laughs very much at this. Enchanting is that baby-laugh, all dimples and glitter, — so strangely arch and innocent! Then I wash and dress him. That is his great time. He makes it last as long as he can, insisting to dress and wash me the while, kicking, throwing the water about, and full of all manner of tricks, such as, I think, girls never dream of. Then comes his walk; — we have beautiful walks here for him, protected by fine trees, always warm in mid-winter. The bands are playing in the distance, and children of all ages are moving about, and sitting with their nurses. His walk and sleep give me about three hours in the middle of the day.

I feel so refreshed by his young life, and Ossoli diffuses such a power and sweetness over every day, that I cannot endure to think yet of our future. Too much have we suffered already, trying to command it. I do not feel force to make any effort yet. I suppose that very soon now I must do something, and hope I shall feel able when the time comes. My constitution seems making an effort to rally, by dint of much sleep. I had slept so little, for a year and a half, and, after the birth of the child, I had such anxiety and anguish when separated from him, that I was consumed as by nightly fever. The last two months at Rome would have destroyed almost any woman. Then, when I went to him, he was so ill, and I was constantly up with him at night, carrying him about. Now, for two months, we have been tranquil. We have resolved to enjoy being together as much as we can, in this brief interval, — perhaps all we shall ever know of peace. It is very sad we have no money, we could be so quietly happy a while. I rejoice in all Ossoli did; but the results, in this our earthly state, are disastrous, especially as my strength is now so impaired. This much I hope, in life or death, to be no more separated from Angelino.

Last winter, I made the most vehement efforts at least to redeem the time, hoping thus good for the future. But, of at least two volumes written at that time, no line seems of any worth. I had suffered much constraint, — much that was uncongenial, harassing, even torturing, before; but this kind of pain found me unprepared; — the position of a mother separated from her only child is too frightfully unnatural.

* * * * *

The Christmas holidays interest me now, through my child, as they never did for myself. I like to go out to watch the young generation who will be his contemporaries. On Monday, we went to the Caseine. After we had taken the drive, we sat down on a stone seat in the sunny walk, to see the people pass; — the Grand Duke and his children; the elegant Austrian officers, who will be driven out of Italy when Angelino is a man; Princess Demidoff; Harry Lorrequer; an absurd brood of fops; many lovely children; many little frisking dogs, with their bells, &c. The sun shone brightly on the Arno; a barque moved gently by; all seemed good to the baby. He laid himself back in my arms, smiling, singing to himself, and dancing his feet. I hope he will retain some trace in his mind of the perpetual exhilarating picture of Italy. It cannot but be important in its influence while yet a child, to walk in these stately gardens, full of sculpture, and hear the untiring music of the fountains.

Christmas-eve we went to the Annunziata, for midnight mass. Though the service is not splendid here as in Rome, we yet enjoyed it; — sitting in one of the side chapels, at the foot of a monument, watching the rich crowds steal gently by, every eye gleaming, every gesture softened by the influence of the pealing choir, and the hundred silver lamps swinging their full light, in honor of the abused Emanuel.

But far finest was it to pass through the Duomo. No one was there. Only the altars were lit up, and the priests, who were singing, could not be seen by the faint light. The vast solemnity of the interior is thus really felt. The hour was worthy of Brunelleschi. I hope he walked there so. The Duomo is more divine than St. Peter’s, and worthy of genius pure and unbroken. St. Peter’s is, like Rome, a mixture of sublimest heaven with corruptest earth. I adore the Duomo, though no place can now be to me like St. Peter’s, where has been passed the splendidest part of my life. My feeling was always perfectly regal, on entering the piazza of St. Peter’s. No spot on earth is worthier the sunlight; — on none does it fall so fondly.

* * * * *

You ask me, how I employ myself here. I have been much engaged in writing out my impressions, which will be of worth so far as correct. I am anxious only to do historical justice to facts and persons; but there will not, so far as I am aware, be much thought, for I believe I have scarce expressed what lies deepest in my mind. I take no pains, but let the good genius guide my pen. I did long to lead a simple, natural life, at home, learning of my child, and writing only when imperatively urged by the need of utterance; but when we were forced to give up the hope of subsisting on a narrow independence, without tie to the public, we gave up the peculiar beauty of our lives, and I strive no more. I only hope to make good terms with the publishers.

Then, I have been occupied somewhat in reading Louis Blanc’s Ten Years, Lamartine’s Girondists, and other books of that class, which throw light on recent transactions.

I go into society, too, somewhat, and see several delightful persons, in an intimate way. The Americans meet twice a week, at the house of Messrs. Mozier and Chapman, and I am often present, on account of the friendly interest of those resident here. With our friends, the Greenoughs, I have twice gone to the opera. Then I see the Brownings often, and love and admire them both, more and more, as I know them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour I pass with him, and is a most cordial, true, and noble man. One of my most highly prized Italian friends, also, Marchioness Arconati Visconti, of Milan, is passing the winter here, and I see her almost every day.

* * * * *

My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except my mother or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does. To some, I have been obliged to make myself known; others have loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life. But Ossoli loves me from simple affinity; — he loves to be with me, and to serve and soothe me. Life will probably be a severe struggle, but I hope I shall be able to live through all that is before us, and not neglect my child or his father. He has suffered enough since we met; — it has ploughed furrows in his life. He has done all he could, and cannot blame himself. Our outward destiny looks dark, but we must brave it as we can. I trust we shall always feel mutual tenderness, and Ossoli has a simple, childlike piety, that will make it easier for him.

MARGARET AND HER PEERS.

Pure and peaceful as was the joy of Margaret’s Florence winter, it was ensured and perfected by the fidelity of friends, who hedged around with honor the garden of her home. She had been called to pass through a most trying ordeal, and the verdict of her peers was heightened esteem and love. With what dignified gratitude she accepted this well-earned proof of confidence, will appear from the following extracts.

TO MRS. E.S.

Thus far, my friends have received news that must have been an unpleasant surprise to them, in a way that, á moi, does them great honor. None have shown littleness or displeasure, at being denied my confidence while they were giving their own. Many have expressed the warmest sympathy, and only one has shown a disposition to transgress the limit I myself had marked, and to ask questions. With her, I think, this was because she was annoyed by what people said, and wished to be able to answer them. I replied to her, that I had communicated already all I intended, and should not go into detail; — that when unkind things were said about me, she should let them pass. Will you, dear E —— , do the same? I am sure your affection for me will prompt you to add, that you feel confident whatever I have done has been in a good spirit, and not contrary to my ideas of right. For the rest, you will not admit for me, — as I do not for myself, — the rights of the social inquisition of the United States to know all the details of my affairs. If my mother is content; if Ossoli and I are content; if our child, when grown up, shall be content; that is enough. You and I know enough of the United States to be sure that many persons there will blame whatever is peculiar. The lower-minded persons, everywhere, are sure to think that whatever is mysterious must be bad. But I think there will remain for me a sufficient number of friends to keep my heart warm, and to help me earn my bread; — that is all that is of any consequence. Ossoli seems to me more lovely and good every day; our darling child is well now, and every day more gay and playful. For his sake I shall have courage; and hope some good angel will show us the way out of our external difficulties.

TO W.W.S.

It was like you to receive with such kindness the news of my marriage. A less generous person would have been displeased, that, when we had been drawn so together, — when we had talked so freely, and you had shown towards me such sweet friendship, — I had not told you. Often did I long to do so, but I had, for reasons that seemed important, made a law to myself to keep this secret as rigidly as possible, up to a certain moment. That moment came. Its decisions were not such as I had hoped; but it left me, at least, without that painful burden, which I trust never to bear again. Nature keeps so many secrets, that I had supposed the moral writers exaggerated the dangers and plagues of keeping them; but they cannot exaggerate. All that can be said about mine is, that I at least acted out, with, to me, tragic thoroughness, “The wonder, a woman keeps a secret.” As to my not telling you, I can merely say, that I was keeping the information from my family and dearest friends at home; and, had you remained near me a very little later, you would have been the very first person to whom I should have spoken, as you would have been the first, on this side of the water, to whom I should have written, had I known where to address you. Yet I hardly hoped for your sympathy, dear W —— . I am very glad if I have it. May brotherly love ever be returned unto you in like measure. Ossoli desires his love and respect to be testified to you both.

TO THE MARCHIONESS VISCONTI ARCONATI.

Reading a book called “The Last Days of the Republic in Rome,” I see that my letter, giving my impressions of that period, may well have seemed to you strangely partial. If we can meet as once we did, and compare notes in the same spirit of candor, while making mutual allowance for our different points of view, your testimony and opinions would be invaluable to me. But will you have patience with my democracy, — my revolutionary spirit? Believe that in thought I am more radical than ever. The heart of Margaret you know, — it is always the same. Mazzini is immortally dear to me — a thousand times deafer for all the trial I saw made of him in Rome; — dearer for all he suffered. Many of his brave friends perished there. We who, less worthy, survive, would fain make up for the loss, by our increased devotion to him, the purest, the most disinterested of patriots, the most affectionate of brothers. You will not love me less that I am true to him.

Then, again, how will it affect you to know that I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man, — younger than myself; a person of no intellectual culture, and in whom, in short, you will see no reason for my choosing; yet more, that this union is of long standing; that we have with us our child, of a year old, and that it is only lately I acquainted my family with the fact?

If you decide to meet with me as before, and wish to say something about the matter to your friends, it will be true to declare that there have been pecuniary reasons for this concealment. But to you, in confidence, I add, this is only half the truth; and I cannot explain, or satisfy my dear friend further. I should wish to meet her independent of all relations, but, as we live in the midst of “society,” she would have to inquire for me now as Margaret Ossoli. That being done, I should like to say nothing more on the subject.

However you may feel about all this, dear Madame Arconati, you will always be the same in my eyes. I earnestly wish you may not feel estranged; but, if you do, I would prefer that you should act upon it. Let us meet as friends, or not at all. In all events, I remain ever yours,

MARGARET.

TO THE MARCHIONESS VISCONTI ARCONATI.

My loved friend, — I read your letter with greatest content. I did not know but that there might seem something offensively strange in the circumstances I mentioned to you. Goethe says, “There is nothing men pardon so little as singular conduct, for which no reason is given;” and, remembering this, I have been a little surprised at the even increased warmth of interest with which the little American society of Florence has received me, with the unexpected accessories of husband and child, — asking no questions, and seemingly satisfied to find me thus accompanied. With you, indeed, I thought it would be so, because you are above the world; only, as you have always walked in the beaten path, though with noble port, and feet undefiled, I thought you might not like your friends to be running about in these blind alleys. It glads my heart, indeed, that you do not care for this, and that we may meet in love.

You speak of our children. Ah! dear friend, I do, indeed, feel we shall have deep sympathy there. I do not believe mine will be a brilliant child, and, indeed, I see nothing peculiar about him. Yet he is to me a source of ineffable joys, — far purer, deeper, than anything I ever felt before, — like what Nature had sometimes given, but more intimate, more sweet. He loves me very much; his little heart clings to mine. I trust, if he lives, to sow there no seeds which are not good, to be always growing better for his sake. Ossoli, too, will be a good father. He has very little of what is called intellectual development, but unspoiled instincts, affections pure and constant, and a quiet sense of duty, which, to me, — who have seen much of the great faults in characters of enthusiasm and genius, — seems of highest value.

When you write by post, please direct “Marchesa Ossoli,” as all the letters come to that address. I did not explain myself on that point. The fact is, it looks to me silly for a radical like me to be carrying a title; and yet, while Ossoli is in his native land, it seems disjoining myself from him, not to bear it. It is a sort of thing that does not naturally belong to me, and, unsustained by fortune, is but a souvenir even for Ossoli. Yet it has appeared to me, that for him to drop an inherited title would be, in some sort, to acquiesce in his brothers’ disclaiming him, and to abandon a right he may passively wish to maintain for his child. How does it seem to you? I am not very clear about it. If Ossoli should drop the title, it would be a suitable moment to do so on becoming an inhabitant of Republican America.

TO MRS. C.T.

What you say of the meddling curiosity of people repels me, it is so different here. When I made my appearance with a husband and a child of a year old, nobody did the least act to annoy me. All were most cordial; none asked or implied questions. Yet there were not a few who might justly have complained, that, when they were confiding to me all their affairs, and doing much to serve me, I had observed absolute silence to them. Others might, for more than one reason, be displeased at the choice I made. All have acted in the kindliest and most refined manner. An Italian lady, with whom I was intimate, — who might be qualified in the Court Journal, as one of the highest rank, sustained by the most scrupulous decorum, — when I wrote, “Dear friend, I am married; I have a child. There are particulars, as to my reasons for keeping this secret, I do not wish to tell. This is rather an odd affair; will it make any difference in our relations?” — answered, “What difference can it make, except that I shall love you more, now that we can sympathize as mothers?” Her first visit here was to me: she adopted at once Ossoli and the child to her love.

 —— wrote me that —— was a little hurt, at first, that I did not tell him, even in the trying days of Rome, but left him to hear it, as he unluckily did, at the table d’hôte in Venice; but his second and prevailing thought was regret that he had not known it, so as to soothe and aid me, — to visit Ossoli at his post, — to go to the child in the country. Wholly in that spirit was the fine letter he wrote me, one of my treasures. The little American society have been most cordial and attentive; one lady, who has been most intimate with me, dropped a tear over the difficulties before me, but she said, “Since you have seen fit to take the step, all your friends have to do, now, is to make it as easy for you as they can.”

TO MRS. E.S.

I am glad to have people favorably impressed, because I feel lazy and weak, unequal to the trouble of friction, or the pain of conquest. Still, I feel a good deal of contempt for those so easily disconcerted or reässured. I was not a child; I had lived in the midst of that New England society, in a way that entitled me to esteem, and a favorable interpretation, where there was doubt about my motives or actions. I pity those who are inclined to think ill, when they might as well have inclined the other way. However, let them go; there are many in the world who stand the test, enough to keep us from shivering to death. I am, on the whole, fortunate in friends whom I can truly esteem, and in whom I know the kernel and substance of their being too well to be misled by seemings.

TO MRS. C.T.

I had a letter from my mother, last summer, speaking of the fact, that she had never been present at the marriage of one of her children. A pang of remorse came as I read it, and I thought, if Angelino dies,[A] I will not give her the pain of knowing that I have kept this secret from her; — she shall hear of this connection, as if it were something new. When I found he would live, I wrote to her and others. It half killed me to write those few letters, and yet, I know, many are wondering that I did not write more, and more particularly. My mother received my communication in the highest spirit. She said, she was sure a first object with me had been, now and always, to save her pain. She blessed us. She rejoiced that she should not die feeling there was no one left to love me with the devotion she thought I needed. She expressed no regret at our poverty, but offered her feeble means. Her letter was a noble crown to her life of disinterested, purifying love.

[Footnote A: This was when Margaret found Nino so ill at Rieti.]

FLORENCE.

The following notes respecting Margaret’s residence in Florence were furnished to the editors by Mr. W.H. Hurlbut.

I passed about six weeks in the city of Florence, during the months of March and April, 1850. During the whole of that time Madame Ossoli was residing in a house at the corner of the Via della Misericordia and the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. This house is one of those large, well built modern houses that show strangely in the streets of the stately Tuscan city. But if her rooms were less characteristically Italian, they were the more comfortable, and, though small, had a quiet, home-like air. Her windows opened upon a fine view of the beautiful Piazza; for such was their position, that while the card-board façade of the church of Sta. Maria Novella could only be seen at an angle, the exquisite Campanile rose fair and full against the sky. She enjoyed this most graceful tower very much, and, I think, preferred it even to Giotto’s noble work. Its quiet religious grace was grateful to her spirit, which seemed to be yearning for peace from the cares that had so vexed and heated the world about her for a year past.

I saw her frequently at these rooms, where, surrounded by her books and papers, she used to devote her mornings to her literary labors. Once or twice I called in the morning, and found her quite immersed in manuscripts and journals. Her evenings were passed usually in the society of her friends, at her own rooms, or at theirs. With the pleasant circle of Americans, then living in Florence, she was on the best terms, and though she seemed always to bring with her her own most intimate society, and never to be quite free from the company of busy thoughts, and the cares to which her life had introduced her, she was always cheerful, and her remarkable powers of conversation subserved on all occasions the kindliest, purposes of good-will in social intercourse.

The friends with whom she seemed to be on the terms of most sympathy, were an Italian lady, the Marchesa Arconati Visconti,[A] — the exquisite sweetness of whose voice interpreted, even to those who knew her only as a transient acquaintance, the harmony of her nature, — and some English residents in Florence, among whom I need only name Mr. and Mrs. Browning, to satisfy the most anxious friends of Madame Ossoli that the last months of her Italian life were cheered by all the light that communion with gifted and noble natures could afford.

The Marchesa Arconati used to persuade Madame Ossoli to occasional excursions with her into the environs of Florence, and she passed some days of the beautiful spring weather at the villa of that lady.

Her delight in nature seemed to be a source of great comfort and strength to her. I shall not easily forget the account she gave me, on the evening of one delicious Sunday in April, of a walk which she had taken with her husband in the afternoon of that day, to the hill of San Miniato. The amethystine beauty of the Apennines, — the cypress trees that sentinel the way up to the ancient and deserted church, — the church itself, standing high and lonely on its hill, begirt with the vine-clad, crumbling walls of Michel Angelo, — the repose of the dome-crowned city in the vale below, — seemed to have wrought their impression with peculiar force upon her mind that afternoon. On their way home, they had entered the conventual church that stands half way up the hill, just as the vesper service was beginning, and she spoke of the simple spirit of devotion that filled the place, and of the gentle wonder with which, to use her own words, the “peasant women turned their glances, the soft dark glances of the Tuscan peasant’s eyes,” upon the strangers, with a singular enthusiasm. She was in the habit of taking such walks with her husband, and she never returned from one of them, I believe, without some new impression of beauty and of lasting truth. While her judgment, intense in its sincerity, tested, like an aqua regia, the value of all facts that came within her notice, her sympathies seemed, by an instinctive and unerring action, to transmute all her experiences instantly into permanent treasures.

The economy of the house in which she lived afforded me occasions for observing the decisive power, both of control and of consolation, which she could exert over others. Her maid, — an impetuous girl of Rieti, a town which rivals Tivoli as a hot-bed of homicide, — was constantly involved in disputes with a young Jewess, who occupied the floor above Madame Ossoli. On one occasion, this Jewess offered the maid a deliberate and unprovoked insult. The girl of Rieti, snatching up a knife, ran up stairs to revenge herself after her national fashion. The porter’s little daughter followed her and, running into Madame Ossoli’s rooms, besought her interference. Madame Ossoli reached the apartment of the Jewess, just in time to interpose between that beetle-browed lady and her infuriated assailant. Those who know the insane license of spirit which distinguishes the Roman mountaineers, will understand that this was a position of no slight hazard. The Jewess aggravated the danger of the offence by the obstinate maliciousness of her aspect and words. Such, however, was Madame Ossoli’s entire self-possession and forbearance, that she was able to hold her ground, and to remonstrate with this difficult pair of antagonists so effectually, as to bring the maid to penitent tears, and the Jewess to a confession of her injustice, and a promise of future good behavior.

The porter of the house, who lived in a dark cavernous hole on the first floor, was slowly dying of a consumption, the sufferings of which were imbittered by the chill dampness of his abode. His hollow voice and hacking cough, however, could not veil the grateful accent with which he uttered any allusion to Madame Ossoli. He was so close a prisoner to his narrow, windowless chamber, that when I inquired for Madame Ossoli he was often obliged to call his little daughter, before he could tell me whether Madame was at home, or not; and he always tempered the official uniformity of the question with some word of tenderness. Indeed, he rarely pronounced her name; sufficiently indicating to the child whom it was that I was seeking, by the affectionate epithet he used, “Lita! e la cara Signora in casa?”

The composure and force of Madame Ossoli’s character would, indeed, have given her a strong influence for good over any person with whom she was brought into contact; but this influence must have been even extraordinary over the impulsive and ill-disciplined children of passion and of sorrow, among whom she was thrown in Italy.

Her husband related to me once, with a most reverent enthusiasm, some stories of the good she had done in Rieti, during her residence there. The Spanish troops were quartered in that town, and the dissipated habits of the officers, as well as the excesses of the soldiery, kept the place in a constant irritation. Though overwhelmed with cares and anxieties, Madame Ossoli found time and collectedness of mind enough to interest herself in the distresses of the towns-people, and to pour the soothing oil of a wise sympathy upon their wounded and indignant feelings. On one occasion, as the Marchese told me, she undoubtedly saved the lives of a family in Rieti, by inducing them to pass over in silence an insult offered to one of them by an intoxicated Spanish soldier, — and, on another, she interfered between two brothers, maddened by passion, and threatening to stain the family hearth with the guilt of fratricide.[B]

Such incidents, and the calm tenor of Madame Ossoli’s confident hopes. — the assured faith and unshaken bravery, with which she met and turned aside the complicated troubles, rising sometimes into absolute perils, of their last year in Italy, — seemed to have inspired her husband with a feeling of respect for her, amounting to reverence. This feeling, modifying the manifest tenderness with which he hung upon her every word and look, and sought to anticipate her simplest wishes, was luminously visible in the air and manner of his affectionate devotion to her.

The frank and simple recognition of his wife’s singular nobleness, which he always displayed, was the best evidence that his own nature was of a fine and noble strain. And those who knew him best, are, I believe, unanimous in testifying that his character did in no respect belie the evidence borne by his manly and truthful countenance, to its warmth and its sincerity. He seemed quite absorbed in his wife and child. I cannot remember ever to have found Madame Ossoli alone, on those evenings when she remained at home. Her husband was always with her. The picture of their room rises clearly on my memory. A small square room, sparingly, yet sufficiently furnished, with polished floor and frescoed ceiling, — and, drawn up closely before the cheerful fire, an oval table, on which stood a monkish lamp of brass, with depending chains that support quaint classic cups for the olive oil. There, seated beside his wife, I was sure to find the Marchese, reading from some patriotic book, and dressed in the dark brown, red-corded coat of the Guardia Civica, which it was his melancholy pleasure to wear at home. So long as the conversation could be carried on in Italian, he used to remain, though he rarely joined in it to any considerable degree; but if a number of English and American visitors came in, he used to take his leave and go to the Café d’Italia, being very unwilling, as Madame Ossoli told me, to impose any seeming restraint, by his presence, upon her friends, with whom he was unable to converse. For the same reason, he rarely remained with her at the houses of her English or American friends, though he always accompanied her thither, and returned to escort her home.

I conversed with him so little that I can hardly venture to make any remarks on the impression which I received from his conversation, with regard to the character of his mind. Notwithstanding his general reserve and curtness of speech, on two or three occasions he showed himself to possess quite a quick and vivid fancy, and even a certain share of humor. I have heard him tell stories remarkably well. One tale, especially, which related to a dream he had in early life, about a treasure concealed in his father’s house, which was thrice repeated, and made so strong an impression on his mind as to induce him to batter a certain panel in the library almost to pieces, in vain, but which received something like a confirmation from the fact, that a Roman attorney, who rented that and other rooms from the family, after his father’s death, grew suddenly and unaccountably rich, — I remember as being told with great felicity and vivacity of expression.

His recollections of the trouble and the dangers through which he had passed with his wife seemed to be overpoweringly painful. On one occasion, he began to tell me a story of their stay in the mountains: He had gone out to walk, and had unconsciously crossed the Neapolitan frontier. Suddenly meeting with a party of the Neapolitan gendarmerie, he was called to account for his trespass, and being unable to produce any papers testifying to his loyalty, or the legality of his existence, he was carried off, despite his protestations, and lodged for the night in a miserable guard-house, whence he-was taken, next morning, to the head-quarters of the officer commanding in the neighborhood. Here, matters might have gone badly with him, but for the accident that he had upon his person a business letter directed to himself as the Marchese Ossoli. A certain abbé, the regimental chaplain, having once spent some time in Rome, recognized the name as that of an officer in the Pope’s Guardia Nobile,[C] whereupon, the Neapolitan officers not only ordered him to be released, but sent him back, with many apologies, in a carriage, and under an armed escort, to the Roman territory. When he reached this part of his story, and came to his meeting with Madame Ossoli, the remembrance of her terrible distress during the period of his detention so overcame him, that he was quite unable to go on.

Towards their child he manifested an overflowing tenderness, and most affectionate care.

Notwithstanding the intense contempt and hatred which Signore Ossoli, in common with all the Italian liberals, cherished towards the ecclesiastical body, he seemed to be a very devout Catholic. He used to attend regularly the vesper service, in some of the older and quieter churches of Florence; and, though I presume Madame Ossoli never accepted in any degree the Roman Catholic forms of faith, she frequently accompanied him on these occasions. And I know that she enjoyed the devotional influences of the church ritual, as performed in the cathedral, and at Santa Croce, especially during the Easter-week.

Though condemned by her somewhat uncertain position at Florence,[D] as well as by the state of things in Tuscany at that time, to a comparative inaction, Madame Ossoli never seemed to lose in the least the warmth of her interest in the affairs of Italy, nor did she bate one jot of heart or hope for the future of that country. She was much depressed, however, I think, by the apparent apathy and prostration of the Liberals in Tuscany; and the presence of the Austrian troops in Florence was as painful and annoying to her, as it could have been to any Florentine patriot. When it was understood that Prince Lichtenstein had requested the Grand Duke to order a general illumination in honor of the anniversary of the battle of Novara, Madame Ossoli, I recollect, was more moved, than I remember on any other occasion to have seen her. And she used to speak very regretfully of the change which had come over the spirit of Florence, since her former residence there. Then all was gayety and hope. Bodies of artisans, gathering recruits as they passed along, used to form themselves into choral bands, as they returned from their work at the close of the day, and filled the air with the chants of liberty. Now, all was a sombre and desolate silence.

Her own various cares so occupied Madame Ossoli that she seemed to be very much withdrawn from the world of art. During the whole time of my stay in Florence, I do not think she once visited either of the Grand Ducal Galleries, and the only studio in which she seemed to feel any very strong interest, was that of Mademoiselle Favand, a lady whose independence of character, self-reliance, and courageous genius, could hardly have failed to attract her congenial sympathies.

But among all my remembrances of Madame Ossoli, there are none more beautiful or more enduring than those which recall to me another person, a young stranger, alone and in feeble health, who found, in her society, her sympathy, and her counsels, a constant atmosphere of comfort and of peace. Every morning, wild-flowers, freshly gathered, were laid upon her table by the grateful hands of this young man; every evening, beside her seat in her little room, his mild, pure face was to be seen, bright with a quiet happiness, that must have bound his heart by no weak ties to her with whose fate his own was so closely to be linked.

And the recollection of such benign and holy influences breathed upon the human hearts of those who came within her sphere, will not, I trust, be valueless to those friends, in whose love her memory is enshrined with more immortal honors than the world can give or take away.

[Footnote A: Just before I left Florence, Madame Ossoli showed me a small marble figure of a child, playing among flowers or vine leaves, which, she said, was a portrait of the child of Madame Arconati, presented to her by that lady. I mention this circumstance, because I have understood that a figure answering this description was recovered from the wreck of the Elizabeth.]

[Footnote B: The circumstances of this story, perhaps, deserve to be recorded. The brothers were two young men, the sons and the chief supports of Madame Ossoli’s landlord at Rieti. They were both married, — the younger one to a beautiful girl, who had brought him no dowry, and who, in the opinion of her husband’s family, had not shown a proper disposition to bear her share of the domestic burdens and duties. The bickerings and disputes which resulted from this state of affairs, on one unlucky day, took the form of an open and violent quarrel. The younger son, who was absent from home when the conflict began, returned to find it at its height, and was received by his wife with passionate tears, and by his relations with sharp recriminations. His brother, especially, took it upon himself to upbraid him, in the name of all his family, for bringing into their home-circle such a firebrand of discord. Charges and counter charges followed in rapid succession, and hasty words soon led to blows. From blows the appeal to the knife was swiftly made, and when Madame Ossoli, attracted by the unusual clamor, entered upon the scene of action, she found that blood had been already drawn, and that the younger brother was only restrained from following up the first assault by the united force of all the females, who hung about him, while the older brother, grasping a heavy billet of wood, and pale with rage, stood awaiting his antagonist. Passing through the group of weeping and terrified women, Madame Ossoli made her way up to the younger brother and, laying her hand upon his shoulder, asked him to put down his weapon and listen to her. It was in vain that he attempted to ignore her presence. Before the spell of her calm, firm, well-known voice, his fury melted away. She spoke to him again, and besought him to show himself a man, and to master his foolish and wicked rage. With a sudden impulse, he flung his knife upon the ground, turned to Madame Ossoli, clasped and kissed her hand, and then running towards his brother, the two met in a fraternal embrace, which brought the threatened tragedy to a joyful termination.]

[Footnote C: It will be understood, that this officer was the
Marchese’s older brother, who still adheres to the Papal cause.]

[Footnote D: She believed herself to be, and I suppose really was, under the surveillance of the police during her residence in Florence.]

HOMEWARD.

BY W.H. CHANNING

* * * * *

 Last, having thus revealed all I could love
  And having received all love bestowed on it,
  I would die: so preserving through my course
  God full on me, as I was full on men:
  And He would grant my prayer— “I have gone through
  All loveliness of life; make more for me,
  If not for men, — or take me to Thyself,
  Eternal, Infinite Love!”

BROWNING.

       Till another open for me
        In God’s Eden-land unknown,
        With an angel at the doorway,
        White with gazing at His Throne;
  And a saint’s voice in the palm-trees, singing,— “ALL IS LOST, and won.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT.

 La ne venimmo: e lo scaglión primaio
    Bianco marmo éra si pulito e terso,
    Ch’io mi specchiava in esso, qual io paio.
  Era ‘l secondo tinto, píù che pérso,
    D’una petrina ruvida ed arsiccia,
    Crepata per lo lungo e per traverso.
  Lo terzo, che di sopra s’ammassiccia,
    Pôrfido mi parea si fiammegiante,
    Come sangue che fuor di vena spiccia.
  Sopra questa teneva ambo le piante
    L’ angel di Dio, sedendo in su la soglia,
    Che mi sembiava pietra di diamante.
  Per li tre gradi su di buona voglia
    Mi trasse ‘l daca mio, dicendo, chiodi
    Umilmente che ‘l serráme scioglia.

DANTE.

 Che luce è questa, e qual nuova beltate?
    Dicean tra lor; perch’ abito si adorno
    Dal mondo errante a quest ‘alto soggiorno
    Non sail mai in tutta questa etàte.
  Ella contenta aver cangiato albergo,
    Si paragona pur coi più perfetti.

PETRARCA.

IX. HOMEWARD

SPRING-TIME.

Spring, bright prophet of God’s eternal youth, herald forever eloquent of heaven’s undying joy, has once more wrought its miracle of resurrection on the vineyards and olive-groves of Tuscany, and touched with gently-wakening fingers the myrtle and the orange in the gardens of Florence. The Apennines have put aside their snowy winding-sheet, and their untroubled faces salute with rosy gleams of promise the new day, while flowers smile upward to the serene sky amid the grass and grain fields, and fruit is swelling beneath the blossoms along the plains of Arno. “The Italian spring,” writes Margaret, “is as good as Paradise. Days come of glorious sunshine and gently-flowing airs, that expand the heart and uplift the whole nature. The birds are twittering their first notes of love; the ground is enamelled with anemones, cowslips, and crocuses; every old wall and ruin puts on its festoon and garland; and the heavens stoop daily nearer, till the earth is folded in an embrace of light, and her every pulse beats music.”

“This world is indeed a sad place, despite its sunshine, birds, and crocuses. But I never felt as happy as now, when I always find the glad eyes of my little boy to welcome me. I feel the tie between him and me so real and deep-rooted, that even death shall not part us. So sweet is this unimpassioned love, it knows no dark reactions, it does not idealize, and cannot be daunted by the faults of its object. Nothing but a child can take the worst bitterness out of life, and break the spell of loneliness. I shall not be alone in other worlds, whenever Eternity may call me.”

And now her face is turned homeward. “I am homesick,” she had written years before, “but where is that HOME?”

OMENS.

 ”My heart is very tired, — my strength is low, —
  My hands are full of blossoms plucked before,
  Held dead within them till myself shall die.”

ELIZABETH BARRETT.

Many motives drew Margaret to her native land: heart-weariness at the reaction in Europe; desire of publishing to best advantage the book whereby she hoped at once to do justice to great principles and brave men, and to earn bread for her dear ones and herself; and, above all, yearning to be again among her family and earliest associates. “I go back,” she writes, “prepared for difficulties; but it will be a consolation to be with my mother, brothers, sister, and old friends, and I find it imperatively necessary to be in the United States, for a while at least, to make such arrangements with the printers as may free me from immediate care. I did think, at one time, of coming alone with Angelino, and then writing for Ossoli to come later, or returning to Italy; knowing that it will be painful for him to go, and that there he must have many lonely hours. But he is separated from his old employments and natural companions, while no career is open for him at present. Then, I would not take his child away for several months; for his heart is fixed upon him as fervently as mine. And, again, it would not only be very strange and sad to be so long without his love and care, but I should be continually solicitous about his welfare. Ossoli, indeed, cannot but feel solitary at first, and I am much more anxious about his happiness than my own. Still, he will have our boy, and the love of my family, especially of my mother, to cheer him, and quiet communings with nature give him pleasure so simple and profound, that I hope he will make a new life for himself, in our unknown country, till changes favor our return to his own. I trust, that we shall find the means to come together, and to remain together.”

Considerations of economy determined them, spite of many misgivings, to take passage in a merchantman from Leghorn. “I am suffering,” she writes, “as never before, from the horrors of indecision. Happy the fowls of the air, who do not have to think so much about their arrangements! The barque Elizabeth will take us, and is said to be an uncommonly good vessel, nearly new, and well kept. We may be two months at sea, but to go by way of France would more than double the expense. Yet, now that I am on the point of deciding to come in her, people daily dissuade me, saying that I have no conception of what a voyage of sixty or seventy days will be in point of fatigue and suffering; that the insecurity, compared with packet-ships or steamers, is great; that the cabin, being on deck, will be terribly exposed, in case of a gale, &c., &c. I am well aware of the proneness of volunteer counsellors to frighten and excite one, and have generally disregarded them. But this time I feel a trembling solicitude on account of my child, and am doubtful, harassed, almost ill.” And again, under date of April 21, she says: “I had intended, if I went by way of France, to take the packet-ship ‘Argo,’ from Havre; and I had requested Mrs. —— to procure and forward to me some of my effects left at Paris, in charge of Miss F —— , when, taking up Galignani, my eye fell on these words: ‘Died, 4th of April, Miss F —— ; ‘and, turning the page, I read, ‘The wreck of the Argo,’ — a somewhat singular combination! There were notices, also, of the loss of the fine English steamer Adelaide, and of the American packet John Skiddy. Safety is not to be secured, then, by the wisest foresight. I shall embark more composedly in our merchant-ship, praying fervently, indeed, that it may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or, if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief.”

Their state-rooms were taken, their trunks packed, their preparations finished, they were just leaving Florence, when letters came, which, had they reached her a week earlier, would probably have induced them to remain in Italy. But Margaret had already by letter appointed a rendezvous for the scattered members of her family in July; and she would not break her engagements with the commander of the barque. It was destined that they were to sail, — to sail in the Elizabeth, to sail then. And, even in the hour of parting, clouds, whose tops were golden in the sunshine, whose base was gloomy on the waters, beckoned them onward. “Beware of the sea,” had been a singular prophecy, given to Ossoli when a boy, by a fortune-teller, and this was the first ship he had ever set his foot on. More than ordinary apprehensions of risk, too, hovered before Margaret. “I am absurdly fearful,” she writes, “and various omens have combined to give me a dark feeling. I am become indeed a miserable coward, for the sake of Angelino. I fear heat and cold, fear the voyage, fear biting poverty. I hope I shall not be forced to be as brave for him, as I have been for myself, and that, if I succeed to rear him, he will be neither a weak nor a bad man. But I love him too much! In case of mishap, however, I shall perish with my husband and my child, and we may be transferred to some happier state.” And again: “I feel perfectly willing to stay my threescore years and ten, if it be thought I need so much tuition from this planet; but it seems to me that my future upon earth will soon close. It may be terribly trying, but it will not be so very long, now. God will transplant the root, if he wills to rear it into fruit-bearing.” And, finally: “I have a vague expectation of some crisis, — I know not what. But it has long seemed, that, in the year 1850, I should stand on a plateau in the ascent of life, where I should be allowed to pause for a while, and take more clear and commanding views than ever before. Yet my life proceeds as regularly as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept the pages as they turn.” * *

* * * * *

These were her parting words: —

“Florence, May 14, 1850. — I will believe, I shall be welcome with my treasures, — my husband and child. For me, I long so much to see you! Should anything hinder our meeting upon earth, think of your daughter, as one who always wished, at least, to do her duty, and who always cherished you, according as her mind opened to discover excellence.

“Give dear love, too, to my brothers; and first to my eldest, faithful friend! Eugene; a sister’s love to Ellen; love to my kind and good aunts, and to my dear cousin. E., — God bless them!

“I hope we shall be able to pass some time together yet, in this world. But, if God decrees otherwise, — here and HEREAFTER, — my dearest mother,

“Your loving child, MARGARET.”

THE VOYAGE.[A]

The seventeenth of May, the day of sailing, came, and the Elizabeth lay waiting for her company. Yet, even then, dark presentiments so overshadowed Margaret, that she passed one anxious hour more in hesitation, before she could resolve to go on board. But Captain Hasty was so fine a model of the New England seaman, strong-minded, prompt, calm, decided, courteous; Mrs. Hasty was so refined, gentle, and hospitable; both had already formed so warm an attachment for the little family, in their few interviews at Florence and Leghorn; Celeste Paolini, a young Italian girl, who had engaged to render kindly services to Angelino, was so lady-like and pleasing; their only other fellow-passenger, Mr. Horace Sumner, of Boston, was so obliging and agreeable a friend; and the good ship herself looked so trim, substantial, and cheery, that it seemed weak and wrong to turn back. They embarked; and, for the first few days, all went prosperously, till fear was forgotten. Soft breezes sweep them tranquilly over the smooth bosom of the Mediterranean; Angelino sits among his heaps of toys, or listens to the seraphine, or leans his head with fondling hands upon the white goat, who is now to be his foster-parent, or in the captain’s arms moves to and fro, gazing curiously at spars and rigging, or watches with delight the swelling canvass; while, under the constant stars, above the unresting sea, Margaret and Ossoli pace the deck of their small ocean-home, and think of storms left behind, — perhaps of coming tempests.

But now Captain Hasty fell ill with fever, could hardly drag himself from his state-room to give necessary orders, and lay upon the bed or sofa, in fast-increased distress, though glad to bid Nino good-day, to kiss his cheek, and pat his hand. Still, the strong man grew weaker, till he could no longer draw from beneath the pillow his daily friend, the Bible, though his mind was yet clear to follow his wife’s voice, as she read aloud the morning and evening chapter. But alas for the brave, stout seaman! alas for the young wife, on almost her first voyage! alas for crew! alas for company! alas for the friends of Margaret! The fever proved to be confluent small-pox, in the most malignant form. The good commander had received his release from earthly duty. The Elizabeth must lose her guardian. With calm con-[Transcriber’s note: A word appears to be missing here.] authorities refused permission for any one to land, and directed that the burial should be made at sea. As the news spread through the port, the ships dropped their flags half-mast, and at sunset, towed by the boat of a neighboring frigate, the crew of the Elizabeth bore the body of their late chief, wrapped in the flag of his nation, to its rest in deep water. Golden twilight flooded the western sky, and shadows of high-piled clouds lay purple on the broad Atlantic. In that calm, summer sunset funeral, what eye foresaw the morning of horror, of which it was the sad forerunner?

At Gibraltar, they were detained a week by adverse winds, but, on the 9th of June, set sail again. The second day after, Angelino sickened with the dreadful malady, and soon became so ill, that his life was despaired of. His eyes were closed, his head and face swollen out of shape, his body covered with eruption. Though inexperienced in the disease, the parents wisely treated their boy with cooling drinks, and wet applications to the skin; under their incessant care, the fever abated, and, to their unspeakable joy, he rapidly recovered. Sobered and saddened, they could again hope, and enjoy the beauty of the calm sky and sea. Once more Nino laughs, as he splashes in his morning bath, and playfully prolongs the meal, which the careful father has prepared with his own hand, or, if he has been angered, rests his head upon his mother’s breast, while his palm is pressed against her cheek, as, bending down, she sings to him; once more, he sits among his toys, or fondles and plays with the white-haired goat, or walks up and down in the arms of the steward, who has a boy of just his age, at home, now waiting to embrace him; or among the sailors, with whom he is a universal favorite, prattles in baby dialect as he tries to imitate their cry, to work the pumps, and pull the ropes. Ossoli and Sumner, meanwhile, exchange alternate lessons in Italian and English. And Margaret, among her papers, gives the last touches to her book on Italy, or with words of hope and love comforts like a mother the heart-broken widow. Slowly, yet peacefully, pass the long summer days, the mellow moonlit nights; slowly, and with even flight, the good Elizabeth, under gentle airs from the tropics, bears them safely onward. Four thousand miles of ocean lie behind; they are nearly home.

THE WRECK.

 ”There are blind ways provided, the foredone
  Heart-weary player in this pageant world
  Drops out by, letting the main masque defile
  By the conspicuous portal: — I am through,
  Just through.”

BROWNING.

On Thursday, July 18th, at noon, the Elizabeth was off the Jersey coast, somewhere between Cape May and Barnegat; and, as the weather was thick, with a fresh breeze blowing from the east of south, the officer in command, desirous to secure a good offing, stood east-north-east. His purpose was, when daylight showed the highlands of Neversink, to take a pilot, and run before the wind past Sandy Hook. So confident, indeed, was he of safety, that he promised his passengers to land them early in the morning at New York. With this hope, their trunks were packed, the preparations made to greet their friends, the last good-night was spoken, and with grateful hearts Margaret and Ossoli put Nino to rest, for the last time, as they thought, on ship-board, — for the last time, as it was to be, on earth!

By nine o’clock, the breeze rose to a gale, which every hour increased in violence, till at midnight it became a hurricane. Yet, as the Elizabeth was new and strong, and as the commander, trusting to an occasional cast of the lead, assured them that they were not nearing the Jersey coast, — which alone he dreaded, — the passengers remained in their state-rooms, and caught such uneasy sleep as the howling storm and tossing ship permitted. Utterly unconscious, they were, even then, amidst perils, whence only by promptest energy was it possible to escape. Though under close-reefed sails, their vessel was making way far more swiftly than any one on board had dreamed of; and for hours, with the combined force of currents and the tempest, had been driving headlong towards the sand-bars of Long Island. About four o’clock, on Friday morning, July 19th, she struck, — first draggingly, then hard and harder, — on Fire Island beach.

The main and mizzen masts were at once cut away; but the heavy marble in her hold had broken through her bottom, and she bilged. Her bow held fast, her stern swung round, she careened inland, her broadside was bared to the shock of the billows, and the waves made a clear breach over her with every swell. The doom of the poor Elizabeth was sealed now, and no human power could save her. She lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean.

At the first jar, the passengers, knowing but too well its fatal import, sprang from their berths. Then came the cry of “Cut away,” followed by the crash of falling timbers, and the thunder of the seas, as they broke across the deck. In a moment more, the cabin skylight was dashed in pieces by the breakers, and the spray, pouring down like a cataract, put out the lights, while the cabin door was wrenched from its fastenings, and the waves swept in and out. One scream, one only, was heard from Margaret’s state-room; and Sumner and Mrs. Hasty, meeting in the cabin, clasped hands, with these few but touching words: “We must die.” “Let us die calmly, then.” “I hope so, Mrs. Hasty.” It was in the gray dusk, and amid the awful tumult, that the companions in misfortune met. The side of the cabin to the leeward had already settled under water; and furniture, trunks, and fragments of the skylight were floating to and fro; while the inclined position of the floor made it difficult to stand; and every sea, as it broke over the bulwarks, splashed in through the open roof. The windward cabin-walls, however, still yielded partial shelter, and against it, seated side by side, half leaning backwards, with feet braced upon the long table, they awaited what next should come. At first. Nino, alarmed at the uproar, the darkness, and the rushing water, while shivering with the wet, cried passionately; but soon his mother, wrapping him in such garments as were at hand and folding him to her bosom, sang him to sleep. Celeste too was in an agony of terror, till Ossoli, with soothing words and a long and fervent prayer, restored her to self-control and trust. Then calmly they rested, side by side, exchanging kindly partings and sending messages to friends, if any should survive to be their bearer. Meanwhile, the boats having been swamped or carried away, and the carpenter’s tools washed overboard, the crew had retreated to the top-gallant forecastle; but, as the passengers saw and heard nothing of them, they supposed that the officers and crew had deserted the ship, and that they were left alone. Thus passed three hours.

At length, about seven, as there were signs that the cabin would soon break up, and any death seemed preferable to that of being crushed among the ruins, Mrs. Hasty made her way to the door, and, looking out at intervals between the seas as they swept across the vessel amidships, saw some one standing by the foremast. His face was toward the shore. She screamed and beckoned, but her voice was lost amid the roar of the wind and breakers, and her gestures were unnoticed. Soon, however, Davis, the mate, through the door of the forecastle caught sight of her, and, at once comprehending the danger, summoned the men to go to the rescue. At first none dared to risk with him the perilous attempt; but, cool and resolute, he set forth by himself, and now holding to the bulwarks, now stooping as the waves combed over, he succeeded in reaching the cabin. Two sailors, emboldened by his example, followed. Preparations were instantly made to conduct the passengers to the forecastle, which, as being more strongly built and lying further up the sands, was the least exposed part of the ship. Mrs. Hasty volunteered to go the first. With one hand clasped by Davis, while with the other each grasped the rail, they started, a sailor moving close behind. But hardly had they taken three steps, when a sea broke loose her hold, and swept her into the hatch-way. “Let me go,” she cried, “your life is important to all on board.” But cheerily, and with a smile,[B] he answered, “Not quite yet;” and, seizing in his teeth her long hair, as it floated past him, he caught with both hands at some near support, and, aided by the seaman, set her once again upon her feet. A few moments more of struggle brought them safely through. In turn, each of the passengers was helped thus laboriously across the deck, though, as the broken rail and cordage had at one place fallen in the way, the passage was dangerous and difficult in the extreme. Angelino was borne in a canvas bag, slung round the neck of a sailor. Within the forecastle, which was comparatively dry and sheltered, they now seated themselves, and, wrapped in the loose overcoats of the seamen, regained some warmth. Three times more, however, the mate made his way to the cabin; once, to save her late husband’s watch, for Mrs. Hasty; again for some doubloons, money-drafts, and rings in Margaret’s desk; and, finally, to procure a bottle of wine and a drum of figs for their refreshment. It was after his last return, that Margaret said to Mrs. Hasty, “There still remains what, if I live, will be of more value to me than anything,” referring, probably, to her manuscript on Italy; but it seemed too selfish to ask their brave preserver to run the risk again.

There was opportunity now to learn their situation, and to discuss the chances of escape. At the distance of only a few hundred yards, appeared the shore, — a lonely waste of sand-hills, so far as could be seen through the spray and driving rain. But men had been early observed, gazing at the wreck, and, later, a wagon had been drawn upon the beach. There was no sign of a life-boat, however, or of any attempt at rescue; and, about nine o’clock, it was determined that some one should try to land by swimming, and, if possible, get help. Though it seemed almost sure death to trust one’s self to the surf, a sailor, with a life-preserver, jumped overboard, and, notwithstanding a current drifting him to leeward, was seen to reach the shore. A second, with the aid of a spar, followed in safety; and Sumner, encouraged by their success, sprang over also; but, either struck by some piece of the wreck, or unable to combat with the waves, he sank. Another hour or more passed by; but though persons were busy gathering into carts whatever spoil was stranded, no life-boat yet appeared; and, after much deliberation, the plan was proposed, — and, as it was then understood, agreed to, — that the passengers should attempt to land, each seated upon a plank, and grasping handles of rope, while a sailor swam behind. Here, too, Mrs. Hasty was the first to venture, under the guard of Davis. Once and again, during their passage, the plank was rolled wholly over, and once and again was righted, with its bearer, by the dauntless steersman; and when, at length, tossed by the surf upon the sands, the half-drowned woman still holding, as in a death-struggle, to the ropes, was about to be swept back by the undertow, he caught her in his arms, and, with the assistance of a bystander, placed her high upon the beach. Thus twice in one day had he perilled his own life to save that of the widow of his captain, and even over that dismal tragedy his devotedness casts one gleam of light.

Now came Margaret’s turn. But she steadily refused to be separated from Ossoli and Angelo. On a raft with them, she would have boldly encountered the surf, but alone she would not go. Probably, she had appeared to assent to the plan for escaping upon planks, with the view of inducing Mrs. Hasty to trust herself to the care of the best man on board; very possibly, also, she had never learned the result of their attempt, as, seated within the forecastle, she could not see the beach. She knew, too, that if a life-boat could be sent, Davis was one who would neglect no effort to expedite its coming. While she was yet declining all persuasions, word was given from the deck, that the life-boat had finally appeared. For a moment, the news lighted up again the flickering fire of hope. They might yet be saved, — be saved together! Alas! to the experienced eyes of the sailors it too soon became evident that there was no attempt to launch or man her. The last chance of aid from shore, then, was gone utterly. They must rely on their own strength, or perish. And if ever they were to escape, the time had come; for, at noon, the storm had somewhat lulled; but already the tide had turned, and it was plain that the wreck could not hold together through another flood. In this emergency, the commanding officer, who until now had remained at his post, once more appealed to Margaret to try to escape, — urging that the ship would inevitably break up soon; that it was mere suicide to remain longer; that he did not feel free to sacrifice the lives of the crew, or to throw away his own; finally, that he would himself take Angelo, and that sailors should go with Celeste, Ossoli, and herself. But, as before, Margaret decisively declared that she would not be parted from her husband or her child. The order was then given to “save themselves,” and all but four of the crew jumped over, several of whom, together with the commander, reached shore alive, though severely bruised and wounded by the drifting fragments. There is a sad consolation in believing that, if Margaret judged it to be impossible that the three should escape, she in all probability was right. It required a most rare, combination of courage, promptness and persistency, to do what Davis had done for Mrs. Hasty. We may not conjecture the crowd of thoughts which influenced the lovers, the parents, in this awful crisis; but doubtless one wish was ever uppermost, — that, God willing, the last hour might come for ALL, if it must come for one.

It was now past three o’clock, and as, with the rising tide, the gale swelled once more to its former violence, the remnants of the barque fast yielded to the resistless waves. The cabin went by the board, the after-parts broke up, and the stem settled out of sight. Soon, too, the forecastle was filled with water, and the helpless little band were driven to the deck, where they clustered round the foremast. Presently, even this frail support was loosened from the hull, and rose and fell with every billow. It was plain to all that the final moment drew swiftly nigh. Of the four seamen who still stood by the passengers, three were as efficient as any among the crew of the Elizabeth. These were the steward, carpenter, and cook. The fourth was an old sailor, who, broken down by hardships and sickness, was going home to die. These men were once again persuading Margaret, Ossoli and Celeste to try the planks, which they held ready in the lee of the ship, and the steward, by whom Nino was so much beloved, had just taken the little fellow in his arms, with the pledge that he would save him or die, when a sea struck the forecastle, and the foremast fell, carrying with it the deck, and all upon it. The steward and Angelino were washed upon the beach, both dead, though warm, some twenty minutes after. The cook and carpenter were thrown far upon the foremast, and saved themselves by swimming. Celeste and Ossoli caught for a moment by the rigging, but the next wave swallowed them up. Margaret sank at once. When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders. It was over, — that twelve hours’ communion, face to face, with Death! It was over! and the prayer was granted, “that Ossoli, Angelo, and I, may go together, and that the anguish may be brief!”

* * * * *

A passage from the journal of a friend of Margaret, whom the news of the wreck drew at once to the scene, shall close this mournful story: —

“The hull of the Elizabeth, with the foremast still bound to it by cordage, lies so near the shore, that it seems as if a dozen oar-strokes would carry a boat alongside. And as one looks at it glittering in the sunshine, and rocking gently in the swell, it is hard to feel reconciled to our loss. Seven resolute men might have saved every soul on board. I know how different was the prospect on that awful morning, when the most violent gale that had visited our coast for years, drove the billows up to the very foot of the sand-hills, and when the sea in foaming torrents swept across the beach into the bay behind. Yet I cannot but reluctantly declare my judgment, that this terrible tragedy is to be attributed, so far as human agency is looked at, to our wretched system, or no-system, of life-boats. The life-boat at Fire Island light-house, three miles distant only, was not brought to the beach till between twelve and one o’clock, more than eight hours after the Elizabeth was stranded, and more than six hours after the wreck could easily have been seen. When the life-boat did finally come, the beachmen could not be persuaded to launch or man her. And even the mortar, by which a rope could and should have been thrown on board, was not once fired. A single lesson like this might certainly suffice to teach the government, insurance companies, and humane societies, the urgent need, that to every life-boat should be attached ORGANIZED CREWS, stimulated to do their work faithfully, by ample pay for actual service, generous salvage-fees for cargoes and persons, and a pension to surviving friends where life is lost. * * *

“No trace has yet been found of Margaret’s manuscript on Italy, though the denials of the wreckers as to having seen it, are not in the least to be depended on. For, greedy after richer spoil, they might well have overlooked a mass of written paper; and, even had they kept it, they would be slow to give up what would so clearly prove their participation in the heartless robbery, that is now exciting such universal horror and indignation. Possibly it was washed away before reaching the shore, as several of the trunks, it is said, were open and empty, when thrown upon the beach. But it is sad to think, that very possibly the brutal hands of pirates may have tossed to the winds, or scattered on the sands, pages so rich with experience and life. The only papers of value saved, were the love-letters of Margaret and Ossoli.[C]

“It is a touching coincidence, that the only one of Margaret’s treasures which reached the shore, was the lifeless form of Angelino. When the body, stripped of every rag by the waves, was rescued from the surf, a sailor took it reverently in his arms, and, wrapping it in his neckcloth, bore it to the nearest house. There, when washed, and dressed in a child’s frock, found in Margaret’s trunk, it was laid upon a bed; and as the rescued seamen gathered round their late playfellow and pet, there were few dry eyes in the circle. Several of them mourned for Nino, as if he had been their own; and even the callous wreckers were softened, for the moment, by a sight so full of pathetic beauty. The next day, borne upon their shoulders in a chest, which one of the sailors gave for a coffin, it was buried in a hollow among the sand heaps. As I stood beside the lonely little mound, it seemed that never was seen a more affecting type of orphanage. Around, wiry and stiff, were scanty spires of beach-grass; near by, dwarf-cedars, blown flat by wintry winds, stood like grim guardians; only at the grave-head a stunted wild-rose, wilted and scraggy, was struggling for existence. Thoughts came of the desolate childhood of many a little one in this hard world; and there was joy in the assurance, that Angelo was neither motherless nor fatherless, and that Margaret and her husband were not childless in that New World, which so suddenly they had entered together.

“To-morrow, Margaret’s mother, sister, and brothers will remove Nino’s body to New England.”

* * * * *

Was this, then, thy welcome home? A howling hurricane, the pitiless sea, wreck on a sand-bar, an idle life-boat, beach-pirates, and not one friend! In those twelve hours of agony, did the last scene appear but as the fitting close for a life of storms, where no safe haven was ever in reach; where thy richest treasures were so often stranded; where even the dearest and nearest seemed always too far off, or just too late, to help.

Ah, no! not so. The clouds were gloomy on the waters, truly; but their tops were golden in the sun. It was in the Father’s House that welcome awaited thee.

 ”Glory to God! to God! he saith,
  Knowledge by suffering entereth,
  And Life is perfected by Death.”

ENGLISH TRAITS

CONTENTS

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.

LAND.

RACE.

ABILITY.

MANNERS.

TRUTH.

CHARACTER.

COCKAYNE.

WEALTH.

ARISTOCRACY.

UNIVERSITIES.

RELIGION.

LITERATURE.

THE “TIMES.”

STONEHENGE.

PERSONAL.

RESULT.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER.

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

I have been twice in England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne, and landed in London at the Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there were few people in the streets; and I remember the pleasure of that first walk on English ground, with my companion, an American artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and the Strand, to a house in Russell Square, whither we had been recommended to good chambers. For the first time for many months we were forced to check the saucy habit of travellers’ criticism, as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets without being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language; our country names were on the door-plates; and the public and private buildings wore a more native and wonted front.

Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, Playfair, and De Quincey; and my narrow and desultory reading had inspired the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the latest and strongest contributor to the critical journals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when I was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still living, I might have wandered into Germany also. Besides those I have named (for Scott was dead), there was not in Britain the man living whom I cared to behold, unless it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not leave that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief, that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a larger horizon.

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I find nothing to publish in my memoranda of visits to places. But I have copied the few notes I made of visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too good and too transparent to the whole world to make it needful to affect any prudery of suppression about a few hints of those bright personalities.

At Florence, chief among artists, I found Horatio Greenough, the American sculptor. His face was so handsome, and his person so well formed, that he might be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora, and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were idealizations of his own. Greenough was a superior man, ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation and magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had wrought in schools or fraternities, — the genius of the master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new hand, with equal heat, continued the work; and so by relays, until it was finished in every part with equal fire. This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone; and he thought art would never prosper until we left our shy jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was an accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture, published in 1843, announced in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on the morality in architecture, notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the history of art. I have a private letter from him, — later, but respecting the same period, — in which he roughly sketches his own theory. “Here is my theory of structure: A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to functions and to site; an emphasis of features proportioned to their gradated importance in function; color and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each decision; the entire and immediate banishment of all makeshift and make-believe.”

Greenough brought me, through a common friend, an invitation from Mr. Landor, who lived at San Domenica di Fiesole. On the 15th May I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence; he admired Washington; talked of Wordsworth, Byron, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well content to impress, if possible, his English whim upon the immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an exception; and Philip he calls the greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only. He prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michel Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and shares the growing taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek histories he thought the only good; and after them, Voltaire’s. I could not make him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends; Montaigne very cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He thought Degerando indebted to “Lucas on Happiness” and “Lucas on Holiness”! He pestered me with Southey; but who is Southey?

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I did not fail to go, and this time with Greenough. He entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Cæsar’s! — from Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as three of the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon; much as our pomologists, in their lists, select the three or the six best pears “for a small orchard”; and did not even omit to remark the similar termination of their names. “A great man,” he said, “should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen, without knowing whether they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them.” I had visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied. Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath, said, “the sublime was in a grain of dust.” I suppose I teased him about recent writers, but he professed never to have heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room was full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially one piece, standing before which, he said “he would give fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a Pomenichino.” I was more curious to see his library, but Mr. H —— , one of the guests, told me that Mr. Landor gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen at a time in his house.

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English appetite for action and heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures. Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored; and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews. The criticism may be right or wrong, and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant sentences, — for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unforgetable.

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to pay my respects to him. It was near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if I would call after one o’clock, he would see me. I returned at one, and he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning on his cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I knew Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when he knew him in Rome; what a master of the Titianesque he was, etc., etc. He spoke of Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune that he should have turned out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a declamation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, — its high unreasonableness; and taking up Bishop Waterland’s book, which lay on the table, he read with vehemence two or three pages written by himself in the fly-leaves, — passages, too, which, I believe, are printed in the “Aids to Reflection.” When he stopped to take breath, I interposed, that, “whilst I highly valued all his explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born and bred a Unitarian.” “Yes,” he said, “I supposed so”; and continued as before. “It was a wonder, that after so many ages of unquestioning acquiescence in the doctrine of St. Paul, — the doctrine of the Trinity, which was also, according to Philo Judæus, the doctrine of the Jews before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians should take on themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very sorry that Dr. Channing, — a man to whom he looked up, — no, to say that he looked up to him would be to speak falsely; but a man whom he looked at with so much interest, — should embrace such views. When he saw Dr. Channing, he had hinted to him that he was afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and excellent, — he loved the good in it, and not the true; and I tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved the good, for one person who loved the true; but it is a far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, than to love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He had been called “the rising star of Unitarianism.”’ He went on defining, or rather refining: ‘The Trinitarian doctrine was realism; the idea of God was not essential, but super-essential’; talked of trinism and tetrakism, and much more, of which I only caught this: ‘that the will was that by which a person is a person; because, if one should push me in the street, and so I should force the man next me into the kennel, I should at once exclaim, “I did not do it, sir,” meaning it was not my will.’ And this also: ‘that if you should insist on your faith here in England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of the fagot.’

I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many readers of all religious opinions in America, and I proceeded to inquire if the “extract” from the Independent’s pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, were a veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled “A Protest of one of the Independents,” or something to that effect. I told him how excellent I thought it, and how much I wished to see the entire work. “Yes,” he said, “the man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that God was a god of order. Yet the passage would no doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the original, for I have filtered it.”

When I rose to go, he said, “I do not know whether you care about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I lately made on my baptismal anniversary”; and he recited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines, beginning, —

Born unto God in Christ —

He inquired where I had been travelling; and on learning that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one island with the other, ‘repeating what he had said to the Bishop of London when he returned from that country, that Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted, and reverse that to know what ought to be done; it was the most felicitously opposite legislation to anything good and wise. There were only three things which the government had brought into that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine; whereas, in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen, in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen inhabitants the seat of population and plenty.’ Going out, he showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston’s, and told me ‘that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him, and, glancing towards this, said, “Well, you have got a picture!” thinking it the work of an old master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to the canvas, put up his hand and touched it, and exclaimed, “By Heaven! this picture is not ten years old”: — so delicate and skilful was that man’s touch.’

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse, which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his book, — perhaps the same, — so readily did he fall into certain commonplaces. As I might have foreseen, the visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him.

From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Cragenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor, which floated everything he looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, “not a person to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of Dunscore”; so that books inevitably made his topics.

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. “Blackwood’s” was the “sand magazine”; “Fraser’s” nearer approach to possibility of life was the “mud magazine”; a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was the “grave of the last sixpence.” When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death, “Qualis artifex pereo!” better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart’s book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson’s America an early favorite. Rousseau’s Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. ‘Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.’

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. There we sat down, and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. ‘Christ died on the tree: that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.’

He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker’s boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served.

On the 23th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay my respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called in their father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. He sat down, and talked with great simplicity. He had just returned from a journey. His health was good, but he had broken a tooth by a fall, when walking with two lawyers, and had said, that he was glad it did not happen forty years ago; whereupon they had praised his philosophy.

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favorite topic, — that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the education of circumstances than of tuition. ‘T is not a question whether there are offences of which the law takes cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the law does not take cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and how society is to escape without gravest mischiefs from this source — ? He has even said, what seemed a paradox, that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. ‘There may be,’ he said, ‘in America some vulgarity in manner, but that ‘s not important. That comes of the pioneer state of things. But I fear they are too much given to the making of money; and secondly, to politics; that they make political distinction the end, and not the means. And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, — in short, of gentlemen, — to give a tone of honor to the community. I am told that things are boasted of in the second class of society there, which, in England, — God knows, are done in England every day, — but would never be spoken of. In America I wish to know not how many churches or schools, but what newspapers? My friend, Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was a year in America, assures me that the newspapers are atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of stealing spoons!’ He was against taking off the tax on newspapers in England, which the reformers represent as a tax upon knowledge, for this reason, that they would be inundated with base prints. He said, he talked on political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc., etc., and never to call into action the physical strength of the people, as had just now been done in England in the Reform Bill, — a thing prophesied by Delolme. He alluded once or twice to his conversation with Dr. Channing, who had recently visited him (laying his hand on a particular chair in which the Doctor had sat).

The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he esteems a far higher poet than Virgil: not in his system, which is nothing, but in his power of illustration. Faith is necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures we had all been reading in Boston) he knew only the name.

I inquired if he had read Carlyle’s critical articles and translations. He said he thought him sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone further than the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. I deprecated this wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the book; and he courteously promised to look at it again. Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely. He was clever and deep, but he defied the sympathies of everybody. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had always wished Coleridge would write more to be understood. He led me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel-walk in which thousands of his lines were composed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no loss, except for reading, because he never writes prose, and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his head before writing them. He had just returned from a visit to Staffa, and within three days had made three sonnets on Fingal’s Cave, and was composing a fourth, when he was called in to see me. He said, “If you are interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines.” I gladly assented; and he recollected himself for a few moments, and then stood forth and repeated, one after the other, the three entire sonnets with great animation. I fancied the second and third more beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the ox-eye daisy, are very abundant on the top of the rock. The second alludes to the name of the cave, which is “Cave of Music”; the first to the circumstance of its being visited by the promiscuous company of the steamboat.

This recitation was so unlooked for and surprising, — he, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me in a garden-walk, like a school-boy declaiming, — that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him how much the few printed extracts had quickened the desire to possess his unpublished poems. He replied, he never was in haste to publish; partly, because he corrected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously received after printing; but what he had written would be printed, whether he lived or died. I said, “Tintern Abbey” appeared to be the favorite poem with the public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the “Excursion,” and the Sonnets. He said, “Yes, they are better.” He preferred such of his poems as touched the affections, to any others; for whatever is didactic — what theories of society, and so on — might perish quickly; but whatever combined a truth with an affection was [Greek: chtêma es aei], good to-day and good forever. He cited the sonnet “On the feelings of a high-minded Spaniard,” which he preferred to any other (I so understood him), and the “Two Voices”; and quoted, with evident pleasure, the verses addressed “To the Skylark.” In this connection, he said of the Newtonian theory, that it might yet be superseded and forgotten; and Dalton’s atomic theory.

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show me what a common person in England could do, and he led me into the enclosure of his clerk, a young man, to whom he had given this slip of ground, which was laid out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much taste. He then said he would show me a better way towards the inn; and he walked a good part of a mile, talking, and ever and anon stopping short to impress the word or the verse, and finally parted from me with great kindness, and returned across the fields.

Wordsworth honored himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not very rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who expiate their departure from the common in one direction, by their conformity in every other.

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.

The occasion of my second visit to England was an invitation from some Mechanics’ Institutes in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which separately are organized much in the same way as our New England Lyceums, but, in 1847, had been linked into a “Union,” which embraced twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended into the middle counties, and northward into Scotland. I was invited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures in them all. The request was urged with every kind suggestion, and every assurance of aid and comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel, amply redeemed their word. The remuneration was equivalent to the fees at that time paid in this country for the like services. At all events, it was sufficient to cover any travelling expenses, and the proposal offered an excellent opportunity of seeing the interior of England and Scotland, by means of a home, and a committee of intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town.

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good traveller, nor have I found that long journeys yield a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and when I was a little spent by some unusual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and England was proposed to me. Besides, there were, at least, the dread attraction and salutary influences of the sea. So I took my berth in the packet-ship Washington Irving, and sailed from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847.

On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred and thirty-four miles. A nimble Indian would have swum as far; but the captain affirmed that the ship would show us in time all her paces, and we crept along through the floating drift of boards, logs, and chips, which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour into the sea after a freshet.

At last, on Sunday night, after doing one day’s work in four, the storm came, the winds blew, and we flew before a northwester, which strained every rope and sail. The good ship darts through the water all day, all night, like a fish, quivering with speed, gliding through liquid leagues, sliding from horizon to horizon. She has passed Cape Sable; she has reached the Banks; the land-birds are left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and hover around; no fishermen; she has passed the Banks; left five sail behind her, far on the edge of the west at sundown, which were far east of us at morn, — though they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, — and still we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston to Liverpool is 2,850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never go in a shorter line than 3,000, and usually it is much longer. Our good master keeps his kites up to the last moment, studding-sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight steering, never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of the ship, — watch on watch, for advantage and for life. Since the ship was built, it seems, the master never slept but in his day-clothes whilst on board. “There are many advantages,” says Saadi, “in sea-voyaging, but security is not one of them.” Yet in hurrying over these abysses, whatever dangers we are running into, we are certainly running out of the risks of hundreds of miles every day, which have their own chances of squall, collision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder. Hour for hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater; but the speed is safety, or twelve days of danger, instead of twenty-four.

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed perhaps, with all her freight, 1,500 tons. The mainmast, from the deck to the top-button, measured 115 feet; the length of the deck, from stem to stern, 155. It is impossible not to personify a ship; everybody does in everything they say: — she behaves well; she minds her rudder; she swims like a duck; she runs her nose into the water; she looks into a port. Then that wonderful esprit du corps, by which we adopt into our self-love everything we touch, makes us all champions of her sailing-qualities.

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week she has made 1,467 miles, and now, at night, seems to hear the steamer behind her, which left Boston to-day at two, has mended her speed, and is flying before the gray south-wind eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea-fire shines in her wake, and far around wherever a wave breaks. I read the hour, 9h. 45’, on my watch by this light. Near the equator, you can read small print by it; and the mate describes the phosphoric insects, when taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina potato.

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for tomatoes and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise, and odor are not to be dispensed with. The floor of your room is sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief that some one was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis, and stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what eggshells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery? In our graveyards we scoop a pit, but this aggressive water opens mile-wide pits and chasms, and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To the geologist, the sea is the only firmament; the land is in perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor, now sunk in a chasm, and the registered observations of a few hundred years find it in a perpetual tilt, rising and falling. The sea keeps its old level; and ‘t is no wonder that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar of the ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea, such as has been observed, say an inch in a century, from east to west on the land, will bury all the towns, monuments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and insensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private and local damage; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such discomfort and such danger as the narratives of the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as the costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe; but the wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor. And here, on the second day of our voyage, stepped out a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, who had hid himself, whilst the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, having no money, and wishing to go to England. The sailors have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife in his belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them, “likes the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means now to come back again in the ship.” The mate avers that this is the history of all sailors; nine out of ten are runaway boys; and adds, that all of them are sick of the sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better with the mate, and not very much better with the captain. A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay. If sailors were contented, if they had not resolved again and again not to go to sea any more, I should respect them.

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea are not of any account to those whose minds are preoccupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain, the mine, only shatter cockneyism; every noble activity makes room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in disclosing inestimable secrets to a good naturalist.

’Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist. Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I remember that some of the happiest and most valuable hours I have owed to books, passed, many years ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment I have found at sea is the want of light in the cabin.

We found on board the usual cabin library; Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our sea-gods. Among the passengers, there was some variety of talent and profession; we exchanged our experiences, and all learned something. The busiest talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of a collector. But, under the best conditions, a voyage is one of the severest tests to try a man. A college examination is nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these lack-lustre, joyless days which whistled over us; but they were few, — only fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according to me. Reckoned from the time when we left soundings, our speed was such that the captain drew the line of his course in red ink on his chart, for the encouragement or envy of future navigators.

It has been said that the King of England would consult his dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassadors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the white path of an Atlantic ship the right avenue to the palace front of this sea-faring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, and exacted toll and the striking sail from the ships of all other peoples. When their privilege was disputed by the Dutch and other junior marines, on the plea that you could never anchor on the same wave, or hold property in what was always flowing, the English did not stick to claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. “As if,” said they, “we contended for the drops of the sea, and not for its situation, or the bed of those waters. The sea is bounded by his Majesty’s empire.”

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was inevitably the British side. In every man’s thought arises now a new system, English sentiments, English loves and fears, English history and social modes. Yesterday, every passenger had measured the speed of the ship by watching the bubbles over the ship’s bulwarks. To-day, instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork, Waterford, and Ardmore. There lay the green shore of Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns, towers, churches, harvests; but the curse of eight hundred years we could not discern.

LAND.

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries worth living in: the former, because there Nature vindicates her rights, and triumphs over the evils inflicted by the governments; the latter, because art conquers nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land into a paradise of comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Under an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough. The solidity of the structures that compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. Nothing is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea itself, feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of a powerful and ingenious race has turned every rood of land to its best use, has found all the capabilities, the arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the byways, the fords, the navigable waters; and the new arts of intercourse meet you everywhere; so that England is a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every manner, the traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and towns, through mountains, in tunnels of three or four miles, at near twice the speed of our trains; and reads quietly the Times newspaper, which, by its immense correspondence and reporting, seems to have machinized the rest of the world for his occasion.

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, Why England is England. What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations? If there be one test of national genius universally accepted, it is success; and if there be one successful country in the universe for the last millennium, that country is England.

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw him to Britain. In all that is done or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering. The culture of the day, the thoughts and aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English. The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward efforts to be English. The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind. The influence of France is a constituent of modern civility, but not enough opposed to the English for the most wholesome effect. The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read, every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners. So that a sensible Englishman once said to me, “As long as you do not grant us copyright, we shall have the teaching of you.”

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or moral estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause which has agitated the whole community, and on which everybody finds himself an interested party. Officers, jurors, judges, have all taken sides. England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence, and tastes; and, to resist the tyranny and prepossession of the British element, a serious man must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of the very impatience which English forms are sure to awaken in independent minds.

Besides, if we will visit London, the present time is the best time, as some signs portend that it has reached its highest point. It is observed that the English interest us a little less within a few years; and hence the impression that the British power has culminated, is in solstice, or already declining.

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is no larger than the State of Georgia,1 this little land stretches by an illusion to the dimensions of an empire. The innumerable details, the crowded succession of towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated estates, the number and power of the trades and guilds, the military strength and splendor, the multitudes of rich and of remarkable people, the servants and equipages, — all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to pause, hide all boundaries, by the impression of magnificence and endless wealth.

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and that object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, to see England well needs a hundred years; for, what they told me was the merit of Sir John Soane’s Museum, in London, — that it was well packed and well saved, — is the merit of England; — it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices, with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals, and charity-houses. In the history of art, it is a long way from a cromlech to York minster; yet all the intermediate steps may still be traced in this all-preserving island.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate is warmer by many degrees than it is entitled to by latitude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter, but such days as we have in Massachusetts in November, a temperature which makes no exhausting demand on human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest stature. Charles the Second said, “It invited men abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day than another country.” Then England has all the materials of a working country except wood. The constant rain — a rain with every tide, in some parts of the island — keeps its multitude of rivers full, and brings agricultural production up to the highest point. It has plenty of water, of stone, of potter’s clay, of coal, of salt, and of iron. The land naturally abounds with game, immense heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and woodcock, and the shores are animated by water-birds. The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish; there are salmon for the rich, and sprats and herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in innumerable shoals; at one season, the country people say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is the darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly of a color. It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add the coal-smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the fine soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color of black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments and buildings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky, and sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an English wit, “in a fine day, looking up a chimney; in a foul day, looking down one.” A gentleman in Liverpool told me that he found he could do without a fire in his parlor about one day in the year. It is however pretended, that the enormous consumption of coal in the island is also felt in modifying the general climate.

Factitious climate, factitious position. England resembles a ship in its shape, and, if it were one, its best admiral could not have worked it, or anchored it in a more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herschel said, “London was the centre of the terrene globs.” The shopkeeping nation, to use a shop word, has a good stand. The old Venetians pleased themselves with the flattery, that Venice was in 45°, midway between the poles and the line; as if that were an imperial centrality. Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the navel of the earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the earth to be an animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre. I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt, and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure, under his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street. But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.

But England is anchored at the side of Europe, and right in the heart of the modern world. The sea, which, according to Virgil’s famous line, divided the poor Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring of marriage with all nations. It is not down in the books, — it is written only in the geologic strata, — that fortunate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable sea-wall, cutting off an island of eight hundred miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching to three hundred miles; a territory large enough for independence enriched with every seed of national power, so near, that it can see the harvests of the continent; and so far, that who would cross the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia lie, these Britons have precisely the best commercial position in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the goods they can manufacture. And to make these advantages avail, the river Thames must dig its spacious outlet to the sea from the heart of the kingdom, giving road and landing to innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to trade, that a people so skilful and sufficient in economizing water-front by docks, warehouses, and lighters required. When James the First declared his purpose of punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord Mayor replied, “that, in removing his royal presence from his lieges, they hoped he would leave them the Thames.”

In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of Europe, having plain, forest, marsh, river, sea-shore; mines in Cornwall; caves in Matlock and Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales; and, in Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland, in which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale to fill the eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation conveniently small. Fontenelle thought, that nature had sometimes a little affectation; and there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers, as if there were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature held counsel with herself, and said, ‘My Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I will choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. I will not grudge a competition of the roughest males. Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest! For I have work that requires the best will and sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow, to keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars, sea-faring, sea-risks, and the stimulus of gain. An island, — but not so large, the people not so many as to glut the great markets and depress one another, but proportioned to the size of Europe and the continents.’

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil influence radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this geographic centrality, the spiritual centrality, which Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people. “For the English nation, the best of them are in the centre of all Christians, because they have interior intellectual light. This appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing, and thereby of thinking.”

RACE.

An ingenious anatomist has written a book2 to prove that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant political constructions, easily changed or destroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal or metaphysical necessity; nor did he, on the other hand, count with precision the existing races, and settle the true bounds; a point of nicety, and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as unlike as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer makes a different count. Blumenbach reckons five races; Humboldt, three; and Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all the kinds of men that can be on the planet, makes eleven.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 1848) 222,000,000 souls, — perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe; and to comprise a territory of 5,000,000 square miles. So far have British people predominated. Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock. Add the United States of America, which reckon (in the same year), exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a territory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimilated, and you have a population of English descent and language, of 60,000,000, and governing a population of 245,000,000 souls.

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a half millions in the home countries. What makes this census important is the quality of the units that compose it. They are free forcible men, in a country where life is safe, and has reached the greatest value. They give the bias to the current age; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by their character, and by the number of individuals among them of personal ability. It has been denied that the English have genius. Be it as it may, men of vast intellect have been born on their soil, and they have made or applied the principal inventions. They have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and in labor. The spawning force of the race has sufficed to the colonization of great parts of the world; yet it remains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus of millions from Great Britain, amounting, in 1852, to more than a thousand a day. They have assimilating force, since they are imitated by their foreign subjects; and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slavery does not exist under them. What oppression exists is incidental and temporary; their success is not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained constancy and self-equality for many ages.

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause? Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Everybody likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like that law of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the same part or organ may be found in or near the same place in its congener; and we look to find in the son every mental and moral property that existed in the ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders, or litheness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches as far as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown begin. Then first we care to examine the pedigree, and copy needfully the training, — what food they ate, what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton, William Shakspeare, George Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane, to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was it the air? was it the sea? was it the parentage? For it is certain that these men are samples of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is always found close to the speaking tongue; and no genius can long or often utter anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by men around him.

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus “on the Manners of the Germans,” not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep its own, it is resisted by other forces. Civilization is a re-agent, and eats away the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are the Arabs of Pharaoh; but the Briton of to-day is a very different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists have acquired a face; the Quakers, a face; the nuns, a face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his manners. Trades and professions carve their own lines on face and form. Certain circumstances of English life are not less effective: as, personal liberty; plenty of food; good ale and mutton; open market, or good wages for every kind of labor; high bribes to talent and skill; the island life, or the million opportunities and outlets for expanding and misplaced talent; readiness of combination among themselves for politics or for business; strikes; and sense of superiority founded on habit of victory in labor and in war; and the appetite for superiority grows by feeding.

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race. Credence is a main element. ‘T is said, that the views of nature held by any people determine all their institutions. Whatever influences add to mental or moral faculty, take men out of nationality, as out of other conditions, and make the national life a culpable compromise.

These limitations of the formidable doctrine of race suggest others which threaten to undermine it, as not sufficiently based. The fixity or inconvertibleness of races as we see them, is a weak argument for the eternity of these frail boundaries, since all our historical period is a point to the duration in which nature has wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in our natural history, such as the melioration of fruits and of animal stocks, has the worth of a power in the opportunity of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us everywhere. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and Itonian, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth, a jelly, or a straight worm. As the scale mounts, the organizations become complex. We are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child blends in his face the faces of both parents, and some feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the wall. The best nations are those most widely related; and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent advancer of nations.

The English composite character betrays a mixed origin. Everything English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed; the names of men are of different nations, — three languages, three or four nations; — the currents of thought are counter: contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; world-wide enterprise, and devoted use and wont; aggressive freedom and hospitable law, with bitter class legislation; a people scattered by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and homesick to a man; a country of extremes, — dukes and chartists, Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers; — nothing can be praised in it without damning exceptions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial praise.

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem; but collectively a better race than any from which they are derived. Nor is it easy to trace it home to its original seats. Who can call by right names what races are in Britain? Who can trace them historically? Who can discriminate them anatomically, or metaphysically?

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the historical question of race, and — come of whatever disputable ancestry — the indisputable Englishman before me, himself very well marked, and nowhere else to be found, — I fancied I could leave quite aside the choice of a tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath, “the Englishman was the mud of all races.” I incline to the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make mortar, so certain temperaments marry well, and, by well-managed contrarieties, develop as drastic a character as the English. On the whole, it is not so much a history of one or of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians, coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear-trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive, whilst all the unadapted temperaments die out.

The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities, that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids at one pole, and alkalies at the other. So England tends to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in her race still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead still.

Again, as if to intensate the influences that are not of race, what we think of when we talk of English traits really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and reduces itself at last to London, that is, to those who come and go thither. The portraits that hang on the walls in the Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch’s drawings of the public men, or of the club-houses, the prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English, and not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish: but ‘t is a very restricted nationality. As you go north into the manufacturing and agricultural districts, and to the population that never travels, as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter Scotland, the world’s Englishman is no longer found. In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien and manners; a provincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked, and a coarseness of manners; and, among the intellectual, is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland, are the same climate and soil as in England, but less food, no right relation to the land, political dependence, small tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may be well allowed, for there is no prosperity that seems more to depend on the kind of man than British prosperity. Only a hardy and wise people could have made this small territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that if the boats are anywhere nearly matched, it is the man that wins. Put the best sailing-master into either boat, and he will win.

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken traditions, though vague, and losing themselves in fable. The traditions have got footing, and refuse to be disturbed. The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the ruddy complexion fair and plump, robust men, with faces cut like a die, and a strong island speech and accent; a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to that constitution. Others, who might be Americans, for anything that appeared in their complexion or form: and their speech was much less marked, and their thought much less bound. We will call them Saxons. Then the Roman has implanted his dark complexion in the trinity or quaternity of bloods.

1. The sources from which tradition derives their stock are mainly three. And, first, they are of the oldest blood of the world, — the Celtic. Some peoples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the Greeks? where the Etrurians? where the Romans? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future; for they have endurance and productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate the pure voices of nature. They are favorably remembered in the oldest records of Europe. They had no violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture, and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious genius. They made the best popular literature of the Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and delicious mythology of Arthur.

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom the Romans found hard to conquer in two hundred and ten years, — say, impossible to conquer, — when one remembers the long sequel; a people about whom, in the old empire, the rumor ran, there was never any that meddled with them that repented it not.

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Narbonnese Gaul, looked out of a window, and saw a fleet of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. They even entered the port of the town where he was, causing no small alarm and sudden manning and arming of his galleys. As they put out to sea again, the emperor gazed long after them, his eyes bathed in tears. “I am tormented with sorrow,” he said, “when I foresee the evils they will bring on my posterity.” There was reason for these Xerxes’ tears. The men who have built a ship and invented the rig, — cordage, sail, compass, and pump, — the working in and out of port, have acquired much more than a ship. Now arm them, and every shore is at their mercy. For, if they have not numerical superiority where they anchor, they have only to sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte’s art of war, namely, of concentrating force on the point of attack, must always be theirs who have the choice of the battle-ground. Of course they come into the fight from a higher ground of power than the land-nations; and can engage them on shore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to make piracy a losing business, the same skill and courage are ready for the service of trade.

The Heimskringla,3 or Sagas of the Kings of Norway, collected by Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey of English history. Its portraits, like Homer’s, are strongly individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchical republic like Sparta. The government disappears before the importance of citizens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and perish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders or landholders, every one of whom is named and personally and patronymically described, as the king’s friend and companion. A sparse population gives this high worth to every man. Individuals are often noticed as very handsome persons, which trait only brings the story nearer to the English race. Then the solid material interest predominates, so dear to English understanding, wherein the association is logical, between merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas are not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing of France and Spain has corrupted them. They are substantial farmers, whom the rough times have forced to defend their properties. They have weapons which they use in a determined manner, by no means for chivalry, but for their acres. They are people considerably advanced in rural arts, living amphibiously on a rough coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, and half from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese. They fish in the fiord, and hunt the deer. A king among these farmers has a varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of a sheriff. A king was maintained much as, in some of our country districts, a winter-schoolmaster is quartered, a week here, a week there, and a fortnight on the next farm, — on all the farms in rotation. This the king calls going into guest-quarters; and it was the only way in which, in a poor country, a poor king, with many retainers, could be kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to collect his dues through the kingdom.

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main, with good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action. But they have a singular turn for homicide; their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered; oars, scythes, harpoons, crow-bars, peat-knives, and hay-forks are tools valued by them all the more for their charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his sword through the other’s body, as did Yngve and Alf. Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and, finding no weapon near, will take the bits out of their horses’ mouths, and crush each other’s heads with them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent-cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so much as a hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid of it, as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by a bull’s horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like the agricultural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden; but it was a proverb of ill condition, to die the death of old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes in battle, as long as he can stand, then orders his war-ship, loaded with his dead men and their weapons, to be taken out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails spread; being left alone, he sets fire to some tar-wood, and lies down contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship flew burning in clear flame, out between the islets into the ocean, and there was the right end of King Hake.

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later are of a noble strain. History rarely yields us better passages than the conversation between King Sigurd the Crusader, and King Eystein, his brother, on their respective merits, — one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of the arts of peace.

But the reader of the Norman history must steel himself by holding fast the remote compensations which result from animal vigor. As the old fossil world shows that the first steps of reducing the chaos were confided to saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so the foundations of the new civility were to be laid by the most savage men.

The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they went into it, one hundred and sixty years before. They had lost their own language, and learned the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls; and had acquired, with the language, all the vices it had names for. The conquest has obtained, in the chronicles, the name of the “memory of sorrow.” Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous population was poured. The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, to these piratical expeditions, exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated, and left Norway void. King Olaf said: “When King Harold, my father, went westward to England, the chosen men in Norway followed him; but Norway was so emptied then, that such men have not since been to find in the country, nor especially such a leader as King Harold was for wisdom and bravery.”

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801, the British government sent Nelson to bombard the Danish forts in the Sound; and, in 1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to England. Konghelle, the town where the kings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were wont to meet, is now rented to a private English gentleman for a hunting-ground.

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and perfume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into royal highnesses and most noble Knights of the Garter: but every sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat. There will be time enough to mellow this strength into civility and religion. It is a medical fact, that the children of the blind see; the children of felons have a healthy conscience. Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty, transformed into a serious and generous youth.

The mildness of the following ages has not quite effaced these traits of Odin; as the rudiment of a structure matured in the tiger is said to be still found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The nation has a tough, acrid, animal nature, which centuries of churching and civilizing have not been able to sweeten. Alfiori said, “the crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority of the stock”; and one may say of England, that this watch moves on a splinter of adamant. The English uncultured are a brutal nation. The crimes recorded in their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in the lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness for a set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all classes. The costermongers of London streets hold cowardice in loathing:— “we must work our fists well; we are all handy with our fists.” The public schools are charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley, relates, that, at a military school, they rolled up a young man in a snowball, and left him so in his room, while the other cadets went to church; — and crippled him for life. They have retained impressment, deck-flogging, army-flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging, sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to death. Flogging, banished from the armies of Western Europe, remains here by the sanction of the Duke of Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the wife has been retained down to our times. The Jews have been the favorite victims of royal and popular persecution. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews in the kingdom to his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money which he borrowed. The torture of criminals, and the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly disused. Of the criminal statutes, Sir Samuel Romilly said, “I have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi.” In the last session (18:18), the House of Commons was listening to details of flogging and torture practised in the jails.

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the sailors and factors of the globe. From childhood, they dabbled in water, they swum like fishes, their playthings were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges delivered it for law, that “England being an island, the very midland shires therein are all to be accounted maritime”: and Fuller adds, “the genius even of land-locked countries driving the natives with a maritime dexterity.” As early as the conquest, it is remarked in explanation of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all countries.

The English, at the present day, have great vigor of body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English taken at random out of the street would weigh a fourth more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and handsome; at least, the whole bust is well formed; and there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames. I remarked the stoutness, on my first landing at Liverpool; porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — what substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures, with costume and manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts, and grandsires. The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his nursery were pictures of these people. Here they are in the identical costumes and air, which so took him.

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky, and the women have that disadvantage, — few tall, slender figures of flowing shape, but stunted and thickset persons. The French say, that the Englishwomen have two left hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome race. The bronze monuments of crusaders lying cross-legged, in the Temple Church at London, and those in Worcester and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven hundred years old, are of the same type as the best youthful heads of men now in England; — please by beauty of the same character, an expression blending good-nature, valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by that uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily seen in the streets of London.

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distinguished for beauty. The anecdote of the handsome captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, A.D. 600, is matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five centuries later, who wondered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the young English captives. Meantime, the Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the personal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered what humanity, what resources of mental and moral power, the traits of the blond race betoken, — its accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity, and shall plough in its furrow henceforward. It is not a final race, once a crab always crab, but a race with a future.

On the English face are combined decision and nerve, with the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning, domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made. But he is moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and colonies.

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war is over, the mask falls from the affectionate and domestic tastes, which make them women in kindness. This union of qualities is fabled in their national legend of Beauty and the Beast, or long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes are co-present in the English mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and colonies, the words in which her latest novelist portrays his heroine: “She is as mild as she is game, and as game as she is mild.” The English delight in the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes of courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent school-boy that goes to bed, says, “Kiss me, Hardy,” and turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of a nature the most affectionate and domestic. Admiral Rodney’s figure approached to delicacy and effeminacy, and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he surmounted only by considerations of honor and public duty. Clarendon says, the Duke of Buckingham was so modest and gentle, that some courtiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they found that this modesty and effeminacy was only a mask for the most terrible determination. And Sir Edward Parry said of Sir John Franklin, that, “if he found Wellington Sound open, he explored it; for he was a man who never turned his back on a danger, yet of that tenderness, that he would not brush away a mosquito.” Even for their highwaymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood comes described to us as mitissimus prædonum, the gentlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie. Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and Wellington are not to be trifled with, and the brutal strength which lies at the bottom of society, the animal ferocity of the quays and cock-pits, the bullies of the costermongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields, they know how to wake up.

They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle and old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island. They use a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread, and malt-liquors are universal among the first-class laborers. Good feeding is a chief point of national pride among the vulgar, and, in their caricatures, they represent the Frenchman as a poor, starved body. It is curious that Tacitus found the English beer already in use among the Germans: “They make from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some resemblance to wine.” Lord Chief Justice Fortescue in Henry VI.’s time, says, “The inhabitants of England drink no water, unless at certain times, on a religious score, and by way of penance.” The extremes of poverty and ascetic penance, it would seem, never reach cold water in England. Wood, the antiquary, in describing the poverty and maceration of Father Lacey, an English Jesuit, does not deny him beer. He says, “his bed was under a thatching, and the way to it up a ladder; his fare was coarse; his drink, of a penny a gawn, or gallon.”

They have more constitutional energy than any other people. They think, with Henri Quatre, that manly exercises are the foundation of that elevation of mind which gives one nature ascendant over another; or, with the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase are not counted in the length of life. They box, run, shoot, ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat and drink, and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar of solid sleep between day and day. They walk and ride as fast as they can, their heads bent forward, as if urged on some pressing affair. The French say, that Englishmen in the street always walk straight before them like mad dogs. Men and women walk with infatuation. As soon as he can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of every Englishman of condition. They are the most voracious people of prey that ever existed. Every season turns out the aristocracy into the country, to shoot and fish. The more vigorous run out of the island to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa, and Australia, to hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with clog, with horse, with elephant, or with dromedary, all the game that is in nature. These men have written the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope, Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Gumming, and a host of travellers. The people at home are addicted to boxing, running, leaping, and rowing matches.

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the fact, that the men have muscles almost as tough and supple as their own. If in every efficient man, there is first a fine animal, in the English race it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on their instincts. The Englishman associates well with dogs and horses. His attachment to the horse arises from the courage and address required to manage it. The horse finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians like the company of horses better than the company of professors. I suppose, the horses are better company for them. The horse has more uses than Buffon noted. If you go into the streets, every driver in bus or dray is a bully, and, if I wanted a good troop of soldiers, I should recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree of refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and you obtain the precise quality which makes the men and women of polite society formidable.

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst and Horsa for their Saxon founders. The other branch of their race had been Tartar nomads. The horse was all their wealth. The children were fed on mares’ milk. The pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the tenacious practice of the Norsemen to eat horse-flesh at religious feasts. In the Danish invasions, the marauders seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once converted into a body of expert cavalry.

At one time, this skill seems to have declined. Two centuries ago, the English horse never performed any eminent service beyond the seas; and the reason assigned was, that the genius of the English hath always more inclined them to foot-service, as pure and proper manhood, without any mixture; whilst, in a victory on horseback, the credit ought to be divided betwixt the man and his horse. But in two hundred years, a change has taken place. Now, they boast that they understand horses better than any other people in the world, and that their horses are become their second selves.

“William the Conqueror being,” says Camden, “better affected to beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those that should meddle with his game.” The Saxon Chronicle says, “he loved the tall deer as if he were their father.” And rich Englishmen have followed his example, according to their ability, ever since, in encroaching on the tillage and commons with their game-preserves. It is a proverb in England, that it is safer to shoot a man than a hare. The severity of the game-laws certainly indicates an extravagant sympathy of the nation with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are always on horseback, and have brought horses to an ideal perfection, — the English racer is a factitious breed. A score or two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined with pictures of races; telegraphs communicate, every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot: and the House of Commons adjourns over the ‘Derby Day.’

ABILITY.

The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians. History does not allow us to fix the limits of the application of these names with any accuracy; but from the residence of a portion of these people in France, and from some effect of that powerful soil on their blood and manners, the Norman has come popularly to represent in England the aristocratic, and the Saxon the democratic principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles are of both tribes, and the workers of both, yet we are forced to use the names a little mythically, one to represent the worker, and the other the enjoyer.

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the dominant races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician, the Celt, and the Goth had already got in. The Roman came, but in the very day when his fortune culminated. He looked in the eyes of a new people that was to supplant his own. He disembarked his legions, erected his camps and towers, — presently he heard bad news from Italy, and worse and worse, every year: at last, he made a handsome compliment of roads and walls, and departed. But the Saxon seriously settled in the land, builded, tilled, fished, and traded, with German truth and adhesiveness. The Dane came, and divided with him. Last of all, the Norman, or French-Dane, arrived, and formally conquered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. A century later, it came out, that the Saxon had the most bottom and longevity, had managed to make the victor speak the language and accept the law and usage of the victim; forced the baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman kings; and, step by step, got all the essential securities of civil liberty invented and confirmed. The genius of the race and the genius of the place conspired to this effect. The island is lucrative to free labor, but not worth possession on other terms. The race was so intellectual, that a feudal or military tenure could not last longer than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes, so thoroughly beaten in the war, that the name of English and villein were synonymous, yet so vivacious as to extort charters from the kings, stood on the strong personality of these people. Sense and economy must rule in a world which is made of sense and economy, and the banker, with his seven per cent, drives the earl out of his castle. A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty of shrewd scientific persons. What signifies a pedigree of a hundred links, against a cotton-spinner with steam in his mill; or, against a company of broad-shouldered Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunel are contriving locomotives and a tubular bridge?

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have the taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose, and the telescopic appreciation of distant gain. They are the wealth-makers, — and by dint of mental faculty which has its own conditions. The Saxon works after liking, or, only for himself; and to set him at work, and to begin to draw his monstrous values out of barren Britain, all dishonor, fret, and barrier must be removed, and then his energies begin to play.

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls, — a kind of goblin men, with vast power of work and skilful production, — divine stevedores, carpenters, reapers, smiths, and masons, swift to reward every kindness done them, with gifts of gold and silver. In all English history, this dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls or working brains, under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton, Bracton, Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton, Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood, dwell in the troll-mounts of Britain, and turn the sweat of their face to power and renown.

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed on this spell-bound island with impunity. The enchantments of barren shingle and rough weather transformed every adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that arrived bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the air too tense for him. The strong survived, the weaker went to the ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots of England are of a tougher texture. A hard temperament had been formed by Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and such of these French or Normans as could reach it, were naturalized in every sense.

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in England must be looked at as growths or irresistible offshoots of the expanding mind of the race. A man of that brain thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being afflicted with the same kind of brain, though he is rich, and called a baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, and is ready to allow the justice of the thought and act in his retainer or tenant, though sorely against his baronial or ducal will.

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of mastiffs, so fierce, that when their teeth were set, you must cut their heads off to part them. The man was like his dog. The people have that nervous bilious temperament, which is known by medical men to resist every means employed to make its possessor subservient to the will of others. The English game is main force to main force, the planting of foot to foot, fair play and open field, — a rough tug without trick or dodging, till one or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald spoke the language of his race, when he planted himself at Wimborne, and said, ‘he would do one of two things, or there live, or there lie.’ They hate craft and subtlety. They neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate; and, when they have pounded each other to a poultice, they will shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their lives.

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at country fairs, at the hustings, and in parliament. No artifice, no breach of truth and plain dealing, — not so much as secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In parliament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every step of the government, by a pitiless attack; and in a bargain, no prospect of advantage is so dear to the merchant, as the thought of being tricked is mortifying.

Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and James, who won the sea-fight of Scanderoon, was a model Englishman in his day. “His person was handsome and gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and noble address, that, had he been dropt out of the clouds in any part of the world, he would have made himself respected: he was skilled in six tongues, and master of arts and arms.”4 Sir Kenelm wrote a book, “Of Bodies and of Souls,” in which he propounds, that “syllogisms do breed or rather are all the variety of man’s life. They are the steps by which we walk in all our businesses. Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work, lie doth as deficient from the nature of man: and, if he do aught beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the bounds, and the model of it.”5

There spoke the genius of the English people. There is a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly greet the good that did not logically fall, — as if it excluded their own merit, or shook their understandings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility of association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing many relations to their thought might impair this serial continuity and lucrative concentration. They are impatient of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation, and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought, however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism. For they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters, and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one on which words make no impression. Their mind is not dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson, a doctor in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism the instant his major proposition was in danger, to save that, at all hazards. Their practical vision is spacious, and they can hold many threads without entangling them. All the steps they orderly take; but with the high logic of never confounding the minor and major proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in all the complicity and delay incident to the several series of means they employ. There is room in their minds for this and that, — a science of degrees. In the courts, the independence of the judges and the loyalty of the suitors are equally excellent. In Parliament, they have hit on that capital invention of freedom, a constitutional opposition. And when courts and Parliament are both deaf, the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon of defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduction of the grievance, with calculations and estimates. But, meantime, he is drawing numbers and money to his opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolution is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are bound to see their measure carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat.

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not so apparent in other races, — a belief in the existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play. There is on every question an appeal from the assertion of the parties to the proof of what is asserted. They are impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a boxer in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, — the universe of Englishmen will suspend their judgment, until the trial can be had. They are not to be led by a phrase, they want a working plan, a working machine, a working constitution, and will sit out the trial, and abide by the issue, and reject all preconceived theories. In politics they put blunt questions, which must be answered; who is to pay the taxes? what will you do for trade? what for corn? what for the spinner?

This singular fairness and its results strike the French with surprise. Philip de Commines says: “Now, in my opinion, among all the sovereignties I know in the world, that in which the public good is best attended to, and the least violence exercised on the people, is that of England.” Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is freedom, without security? whilst, in France, ‘fraternity,’ ‘equality,’ and ‘indivisible unity’ are names for assassination. Montesquieu said: “England is the freest country in the world. If a man in England had as many enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would happen to him.”

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their realistic logic or coupling of means to ends, have given them the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu said, “No people have true common-sense but those who are born in England.” This common-sense is a perception of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of laws that can be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which allowance for friction is made. They are impious in their scepticism of theory, and in high departments they are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surrender to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends, are as admirable as with ants and bees.

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They love the lever, the screw, and pulley, the Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear their freight-ships. More than the diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown-jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. They are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse; not good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters, colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They apply themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting encroachments of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold and wet subsoil; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable staples, — salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery, and brick, — to bees and silk-worms; and by their steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on a sheep’s back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms, and pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat husbands for ordering all their tools pertaining to house and field. All are well kept. There is no want and no waste. They study use and fitness in their building, in the order of their dwellings, and in their dress. The Frenchman invented the ruffle, the Englishman added the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat buttoned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture. If he is a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner. They have diffused the taste for plain substantial hats, shoes, and coats through Europe. They think him the best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that you cannot notice or remember to describe it.

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts and manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its shape, thought and long experience of workmen. They put the expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steamers, in the solidity of the machinery and the strength of the boat. The admirable equipment of their arctic ships carries London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts, warm and ventilate houses. And they have impressed their directness and practical habit on modern civilization.

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks who ought not to break; and, that, if he do not make trade everything, it will make him nothing; and acts on this belief. The spirit of system, attention to details, and the subordination of details, or, the not driving things too finely (which is charged on the Germans), constitute that despatch of business, which makes the mercantile power of England.

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of the opinion of Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus reports as holding “that the gods are on the side of the strongest”; — a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously translated, when he said, “that he had noticed, that Providence always favored the heaviest battalion.” Their military science propounds that if the weight of the advancing column is greater than that of the resisting, the latter is destroyed. Therefore Wellington, when he came to the army in Spain, had every man weighed, first with accoutrements, and then without; believing that the force of an army depended on the weight and power of the individual soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons, that more care is taken of the health and comfort of English troops than of any other troops in the world; and that hence the English can put more men into the ranks, on the day of action, on the field of battle, than any other army. Before the bombardment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting service of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin’s celebrated manoeuvre of breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson’s feat of doubling, or stationing his ships one on the outer bow, and another on the outer quarter of each of the enemy’s, were only translations into naval tactics of Bonaparte’s rule of concentration. Lord Collingwood was accustomed to tell his men, that, if they could fire three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel could resist them; and, from constant practice, they came to do it in three minutes and a half.

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they rely most on the simplest means; and do not like ponderous and difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair hand to hand, where the victory lies with the strength, courage, and endurance of the individual combatants. They adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they fundamentally believe that the best stratagem in naval war is to lay your ship close alongside of the enemy’s ship, and bring all your guns to bear on him, until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old fashion, which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor out of England.

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sentiment, and never any whim that they will shed their blood for; but usually property, and right measured by property, that breeds revolution. They have no Indian taste for a tomahawk-dance, no French taste for a badge or a proclamation. The Englishman is peaceably minding his business and earning his day’s wages. But if you offer to lay hand on his day’s wages, on his cow, or his right in common, or his shop, he will fight to the Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, habeas-corpus, star-chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth colony, American Revolution, are all questions involving a yeoman’s right to his dinner, and, except as touching that, would not have lashed the British nation to rage and revolt.

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order, and of calculation, it must be owned they are capable of larger views; but the indulgence is expensive to them, costs great crises, or accumulations of mental power. In common, the horse works best with blinders. Nothing is more in the line of English thought, than our unvarnished Connecticut question, “Pray, sir, how do you get your living when you are at home?” The questions of freedom, of taxation, of privilege, are money questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and fleshpots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy minds need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics and persecution. They cannot well read a principle, except by the light of fagots and of burning towns.

Tacitus says of the Germans, “powerful only in sudden efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor.” This highly destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber of patience to its brain, would not have built London. I know not from which of the tribes and temperaments that went to the composition of the people this tenacity was supplied, but they clinch every nail they drive. They have no running for luck, and no immoderate speed. They spend largely on their fabric, and await the slow return. Their leather lies tanning seven years in the vat. At Rogers’s mills, in Sheffield, where I was shown the process of making a razor and a penknife, I was told there is no luck in making good steel; that they make no mistakes, every blade in the hundred and in the thousand is good. And that is characteristic of all their work, — no more is attempted than is done.

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he is told that “nobody is permitted to remain here, unless he understand some art, and excel in it all other men.” The same question is still put to the posterity of Thor. A nation of laborers, every man is trained to some one art or detail, and aims at perfection in that: not content unless he has something in which he thinks he surpasses all other men. He would rather not do anything at all, than not do it well. I suppose no people have such thoroughness: from the highest to the lowest, every man meaning to be master of his art.

“To show capacity,” a Frenchman described as the end of a speech in debate: “no,” said an Englishman, “but to set your shoulder at the wheel, — to advance the business.” Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in popular assemblies, confining himself to the House of Commons, where a measure can be carried by a speech. The business of the House of Commons is conducted by a few persons, but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel “knew the Blue Books by heart.” His colleagues and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. The high civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, but posts which exact frightful amounts of mental labor. Many of the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in England of a good worker, and when they find one, like Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry, Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or Russell, there is nothing too good or too high for him.

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public aim. Private persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian researches, the same pertinacity as the nation showed in the coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the Empire of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and still renewed, until the sixth hurled him from his seat.

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his father, who had made the catalogue of the stars of the northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern heaven, came home, and redacted it in eight years more; — a work whose value does not begin until thirty years have elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages of the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic expeditions year after year, in search of Sir John Franklin, until, at last, they have threaded their way through polar pack and Behring’s Straits, and solved the geographical problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five years’ labor to collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. The ship struck a rock, and went to the bottom. He had them all fished up, by divers, at a vast expense, and brought to London; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be his applauders. In the same spirit, were the excavation and research by Sir Charles Fellowes, for the Xanthian monument; and of Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures.

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended into every man’s mind, though he live in Van Dieman’s Land or Capetown. Faithful performance of what is undertaken to be performed, they honor in themselves, and exact in others, as certificate of equality with themselves. The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day. The commercial relations of the world are so intimately drawn to London, that every dollar on earth contributes to the strength of the English government. And if all the wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge, they know themselves competent to replace it.

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-going qualities; their descent from Odin’s smiths, by their hereditary skill in working in iron; their British birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests; and justified their occupancy of the centre of habitable land, by their supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They have tilled, builded, forged, spun, and woven. They have made the island a thoroughfare; and London a shop, a law-court, a record-office, and scientific bureau, inviting to strangers; a sanctuary to refugees of every political and religious opinion; and such a city, that almost every active man, in any nation, finds himself, at one time or other, forced to visit it.

In every path of practical activity, they have gone even with the best. There is no secret of war, in which they have not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt, the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts, perform the labor of the world. There is no department of literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they have not produced a first-rate book. It is England, whose opinion is waited for on the merit of a new invention, an improved science. And in the complications of the trade and politics of their vast empire, they have been equal to every exigency, with counsel and with conduct. Is it their luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain, — it is their commercial advantage, that whatever light appears in better method or happy invention, breaks out in their race. They are a family to which a destiny attaches, and the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall never be wanting. They have a wealth of men to fill important posts, and the vigilance of party criticism insures the selection of a competent person.

A proof of the energy of the British people is the highly artificial construction of the whole fabric. The climate and geography, I said, were factitious, as if the hands of man had arranged the conditions. The same character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon said, “Rome was a state not subject to paradoxes”; but England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions. The foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves; and, from first to last, it is a museum of anomalies. This foggy and rainy country furnishes the world with astronomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford water-power, but the land shakes under the thunder of the mills. There is no gold-mine of any importance, but there is more gold in England than in all other countries. It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the wines of all countries are in its docks. The French Comte de Lauraguais said, “no fruit ripens in England but a baked apple”; but oranges and pineapples are as cheap in London as in the Mediterranean. The Mark-Lane Express, or the Custom-House Returns bear out to the letter the vaunt of Pope, —

“Let India boast her palms, nor envy we

The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree,

While, by our oaks, those precious loads are borne,

And realms commanded which those trees adorn.”

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full of artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created sheep and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which everything was omitted but what is economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his surloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the stable to a chemical factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds, too much fished, or obstructed by factories, are artificially filled with the eggs of salmon, turbot, and herring.

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By cylindrical tiles, and gutta-percha tubes, five millions of acres of bad land have been drained and put on equality with the best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate too, which was already believed to have become, milder and drier by the enormous consumption of coal, is so far reached by this new action, that fogs and storms are said to disappear. In due course, all England will be drained, and rise a second time out of the waters. The latest step was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will send him to Parliament, next, to make laws. He weaves, forges, saws, pounds, fans, and now he must pump, grind, dig, and plough for the farmer. The markets created by the manufacturing population have erected agriculture into a great thriving and spending industry. The value of the houses in Britain is equal to the value of the soil. Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the natural resources. No man can afford to walk, when the parliamentary train carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in the cities. All the houses in London buy their water. The English trade does not exist for the exportation of native products, but on its manufactures, or the making well everything which is ill made elsewhere. They make ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese, beads for the Indian, laces for the Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings.

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece and Italy to be placed within the reach of every manufacturing population. They caused to be translated from foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings, the most approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris. They have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a grace to the products of their looms, their potteries, and their foundries.6

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social system. Their law is a network of fictions. Their property, a scrip or certificate of right to interest on money that no man ever saw. Their social classes are made by statute. Their ratios of power and representation are historical and legal. The last reform-bill took away political power from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst Birmingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the wars of Europe, had no representative. Purity in the elective Parliament is secured by the purchase of seats.7 Foreign power is kept by armed colonies; power at home, by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better than the free laborer; the thief better than the pauper; and the transported felon better than the one under imprisonment. The crimes are factitious, as smuggling, poaching, non-conformity, heresy, and treason. Better, they say in England, kill a man than a hare. The sovereignty of the seas is maintained by the impressment of seamen. “The impressment of seamen,” said Lord Eldon, “is the life of our navy.” Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, “if you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?” For the administration of justice, Sir Samuel Romilly’s expedient for clearing the arrears of business in Chancery, was, the chancellor’s staying away entirely from his court. Their system of education is factitious. The Universities galvanize dead languages into a semblance of life. Their church is artificial. The manners and customs of society are artificial; — made-up men with made-up manners; — and thus the whole is Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of art; — a cold, barren, almost arctic isle, being made the most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the whole earth.

Man in England submits to be a product of political economy. On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking-house is opened, and men come in, as water in a sluice-way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Birmingham button. The rapid doubling of the population dates from Watt’s steam-engine. A landlord, who owns a province, says, “the tenantry are unprofitable; let me have sheep.” He unroofs the houses, and ships the population to America. The nation is accustomed to the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their economists, “that the greater part in value of the wealth now existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months.” Meantime, three or four days’ rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London.

One secret of their power is their mutual good understanding. Not only good minds are born among them, but all the people have good minds. Every nation has yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes, only one. But the intellectual organization of the English admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas among them all. An electric touch by any of their national ideas, melts them into one family, and brings the hoards of power which their individuality is always hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness of the country, or is it the pride and affection of race, — they have solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each other.

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more lasting than the cloth. They embrace their cause with more tenacity than their life. Though not military, yet every common subject by the poll is fit to make a soldier of. These private reserved mute family-men can adopt a public end with all their heat, and this strength of affection makes the romance of their heroes. The difference of rank does not divide the national heart. The Danish poet Oehlenschlager complains, that who writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers. In Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another for the masses, to that extent, that, it is said, no sentiment or phrase from the works of any great German writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in England, the language of the noble is the language of the poor. In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, when the speakers rise to thought and passion, the language becomes idiomatic; the people in the street best understand the best words. And their language seems drawn from the Bible, the common law, and the works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and Scott. The island has produced two or three of the greatest men that ever existed, but they were not solitary in their own time. Men quickly embodied what Newton found out, in Greenwich observatories, and practical navigation. The boys knew all that Hutton knew of strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels; and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So what is invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or in war, or in art, or in literature, and antiquities. A great ability, not amassed on a few giants, but poured into the general mind, so that each of them could at a pinch stand in the shoes of the other; and they are more bound in character than differenced in ability or in rank. The laborer is a possible lord. The lord is a possible basket-maker. Every man carries the English system in his brain, knows what is confided to him, and does therein the best he can. The chancellor carries England on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the smith on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon; the postilion cracks his whip for England, and the sailor times his oars to “God save the King!” The very felons have their pride in each other’s English stanchness. In politics and in war, they hold together as by hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson’s history is, the unselfish greatness; the assurance of being supported to the uttermost by those whom he supports to the uttermost. Whilst they are some ages ahead of the rest of the world in the art of living; whilst in some directions they do not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it, — this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, ten thousand deep.

MANNERS.

I find the Englishman to be him of all men who stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. On the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in describing to me the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened to say, “Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, and will fight till he dies”; and, what I heard first I heard last, and the one thing the English value, is pluck. The word is not beautiful, but on the quality they signify by it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen have it; the merchants have it; the bishops have it; the women have it; the journals have it; the Times newspaper, they say, is the pluckiest thing in England, and Sidney Smith had made it a proverb, that little Lord John Russell, the minister, would take the command of the Channel fleet to-morrow.

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion, and they hate the practical cowards who cannot in affairs answer directly yes or no. They dare to displease, nay, they will let you break all the commandments, if you do it natively, and with spirit. You must be somebody; then you may do this or that, as you will.

Machinery has been applied to all work, and carried to such perfection, that little is left for the men but to mind the engines and feed the furnaces. But the machines require punctual service, and as they never tire, they prove too much for their tenders. Mines, forges, mills, breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, drill of regiments, drill of police, rule of court, and shop-rule, have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the habit and action of men. A terrible machine has possessed itself of the ground, the air, the men and women, and hardly even thought is free.

The mechanical might and organization require in the people constitution and answering spirits; and he who goes among them must have some weight of metal. At last, you take your hint from the fury of life you find, and say, one thing is plain, this is no country for faint-hearted people: don’t creep about diffidently; make up your mind; take your own course, and you shall find respect and furtherance.

It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel in Spain. I say as much of England, for other cause, simply on account of the vigor and brawn of the people. Nothing but the most serious business could give one any counterweight to these Baresarks, though they were only to order eggs and muffins for their breakfast. The Englishman speaks with all his body. His elocution is stomachic, — as the American’s is labial. The Englishman is very petulant and precise about his accommodation at inns, and on the roads; a quiddle about his toast and his chop, and every species of convenience, and loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in his manners, in his respiration, and the inarticulate noises he makes in clearing the throat, — all significant of burly strength. He has stamina; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He has that aplomb, which results from a good adjustment of the moral and physical nature, and the obedience of all the powers to the will; as if the axes of his eyes were united to his backbone, and only moved with the trunk.

This vigor appears in the incuriosity, and stony neglect, each of every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks, shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in every manner, acts, and suffers without reference to the bystanders, in his own fashion, only careful not to interfere with them, or annoy them; not that he is trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbors, — he is really occupied with his own affair, and does not think of them. Every man in this polished country consults only his convenience, as much as a solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I know not where any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walking-stick; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his head, and no remark is made. And as he has been doing this for several generations, it is now in the blood.

In short, every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of strangers, you would think him deaf; his eyes never wander from his table and newspaper. He is never betrayed into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion. They have all been trained in one severe school of manners, and never put off the harness. He does not give his hand. He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an affront to look a man in the face, without being introduced. In mixed or in select companies they do not introduce persons; so that a presentation is a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introductions are sacraments. He withholds his name. At the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-office. If he give you his private address on a card, it is like an avowal of friendship; and his bearing on being introduced is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaintance, and is studying how he shall serve you.

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy, that, in my lectures, I hesitated to read and threw out for its impertinence many a disparaging phrase, which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor, thin, unable mortals; so much had the fine physique and the personal vigor of this robust race worked on my imagination.

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of a commercial crisis. But it was evident that, let who will fail, England will not. These people have sat here a thousand years, and here will continue to sit. They will not break up, or arrive at any desperate revolution, like their neighbors; for they have as much energy, as much continence of character, as they ever had. The power and possession which surround them are their own creation, and they exert the same commanding industry at this moment.

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine, and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form. All the world praises the comfort and private appointments of an English inn, and of English households. You are sure of neatness and of personal decorum. A Frenchman may possibly be clean: an Englishman is conscientiously clean. A certain order and complete propriety is found in his dress and in his belongings.

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him in doors whenever he is at rest, and being of an affectionate and loyal temper, he dearly loves his house. If he is rich, he buys a demesne, and builds a hall; if he is in middle condition, he spares no expense on his house. Without, it is all planted; within, it is wainscoted, carved, curtained, hung with pictures, and filled with good furniture. ‘T is a passion which survives all others, to deck and improve it. Hither he brings all that is rare and costly, and with the national tendency to sit fast in the same spot for many generations, it comes to be, in the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts, and trophies of the adventures and exploits of the family. He is very fond of silver plate, and, though he have no gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he has of their punch-bowls and porringers. Incredible amounts of plate are found in good houses, and the poorest have some spoon or saucepan, gift of a godmother, saved out of better times.

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese. England produces under favorable conditions of ease and culture the finest women in the world. And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the women inspire and refine them. Nothing can be more delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 1596 says, “The wife of every Englishman is counted blest.” The sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from English nature; and not less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate Percy, and the Desdemona. The romance does not exceed the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, or in Lady Russell, or even as one discerns through the plain prose of Pepys’s Diary, the sacred habit of an English wife. Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear the death of his wife. Every class has its noble and tender examples.

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high. The motive and end of their trade and empire is to guard the independence and privacy of their homes. Nothing so much marks their manners as the concentration on their household ties. This domesticity is carried into court and camp. Wellington governed India and Spain and his own troops, and fought battles like a good family-man, paid his debts, and, though general of an army in Spain, could not stir abroad for fear of public creditors. This taste for house and parish merits has of course its doting and foolish side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popularity of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact that he was wont to go to church every Sunday, with a large quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, his wife hanging on the other, and followed by a long brood of children.

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. The Middle Ages still lurk in the streets of London. The Knights of the Bath take oath to defend injured ladies; the gold-stick-in-waiting survives. They repeated the ceremonies of the eleventh century in the coronation of the present Queen. A hereditary tenure is natural to them. Offices, farms, trades, and traditions descend so. Their leases run for a hundred and a thousand years. Terms of service and partnership are lifelong, or are inherited. “Holdship has been with me,” said Lord Eldon, “eight-and-twenty years, knows all my business and books.” Antiquity of usage is sanction enough. Wordsworth says of the small freeholders of Westmoreland, “Many of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land which they tilled had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of the same name and blood.” The ship-carpenter in the public yards, my lord’s gardener and porter, have been there for more than a hundred years, grandfather, father, and son.

The English power resides also in their dislike of change. They have difficulty in bringing their reason to act, and on all occasions use their memory first. As soon as they have rid themselves of some grievance, and settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as a finality, and never wish to hear of alteration more.

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor: his instinct is to search for a precedent. The favorite phrase of their law is, “a custom whereof the memory of man runneth not back to the contrary.” The barons say, “Nolumus mutari”; and the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the foreigner on the reason of any practice, with, “Lord, sir, it was always so.” They hate innovation. Bacon told them, Time was the right reformer; Chatham, that “confidence was a plant of slow growth”; Canning, to “advance with the times”; and Wellington, that “habit was ten times nature.” All their statesmen learn the irresistibility of the tide of custom, and have invented many fine phrases to cover this slowness of perception, and prehensility of tail.

A sea-shell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of the men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex. After the spire and the spines are formed, or, with the formation, a juice exudes, and a hard enamel varnishes every part. The keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean, linen. No merit quite countervails the want of this, whilst this sometimes stands in lieu of all. “‘T is in bad taste,” is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear. There is a prose in certain Englishmen, which exceeds in wooden deadness all rivalry with other countrymen. There is a knell in the conceit and externality of their voice, which seems to say, Leave all hope behind. In this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity gets intrenched, and consolidated, and founded in adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched with delicate engravings, on thick hot-pressed paper, fit for the hands of ladies and princes, but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering.

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. When Thalberg, the pianist, was one evening performing before the Queen, at Windsor, in a private party, the Queen accompanied him with her voice. The circumstance took air, and all England shuddered from sea to sea. The indecorum was never repeated. Cold, repressive manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted except at the opera. They avoid everything marked. They require a tone of voice that excites no attention in the room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of England, of whom Wotton said, “His wit was the measure of congruity.”

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They keep to the other extreme of low tone in dress and manners. They avoid pretension and go right to the heart of the thing. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and highflown expression; they use a studied plainness. Even Brummell their fop was marked by the severest simplicity in dress. They value themselves on the absence of everything theatrical in the public business, and on conciseness and going to the point, in private affairs.

In an aristocratical country, like England, not the Trial by Jury, but the dinner is the capital institution. It is the mode of doing honor to a stranger, to invite him to eat, — and has been for many hundred years. “And they think,” says the Venetian traveller of 1500, “no greater honor can be conferred or received, than to invite others to eat with them, or to be invited themselves, and they would sooner give five or six ducats to provide an entertainment for a person, than a groat to assist him in any distress.”8 It is reserved to the end of the day, the family-hour being generally six, in London, and, if any company is expected, one or two hours later. Every one dresses for dinner, in his own house, or in another man’s. The guests are expected to arrive within half an hour of the time fixed by card of invitation, and nothing but death or mutilation is permitted to detain them. The English dinner is precisely the model on which our own are constructed in the Atlantic cities. The company sit one or two hours, before the ladies leave the table. The gentlemen remain over their wine an hour longer, and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room, and take coffee. The dress dinner generates a talent of table-talk, which reaches great perfection: the stories are so good, that one is sure they must have been often told before, to have got such happy turns. Hither come all manner of clever projects, bits of popular science, of practical invention, of miscellaneous humor; political, literary, and personal news; railroads, horses, diamonds, agriculture, horticulture, pisciculture, and wine.

English stories, bon-mots, and the recorded table-talk of their wits, are as good as the best of the French. In America, we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained the same perfection: for the range of nations from which London draws, and the steep contrasts of condition, create the picturesque in society, as broken country makes picturesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because the usage of a dress-dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and produce to advantage everything good. Much attrition has worn every sentence into a bullet. Also one meets now and then with polished men, who know everything, have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite superior to letters and science. What could they not, if only they would?

TRUTH.

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart, which contrasts with the Latin races. The German name has a proverbial significance of sincerity and honest meaning. The arts bear testimony to it. The faces of clergy and laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are charged with earnest belief. Add to this hereditary rectitude, the punctuality and precise dealing which commerce creates, and you have the English truth and credit. The government strictly performs its engagements. The subjects do not understand trifling on its part. When any breach of promise occurred, in the old days of prerogative, it was resented by the people as an intolerable grievance. And, in modern times, any slipperiness in the government of political faith, or any repudiation or crookedness in matters of finance, would bring the whole nation to a committee of inquiry and reform. Private men keep their promises, never so trivial. Down goes the flying word on the tablets, and is indelible as Domesday Book.

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity. Veracity derives from instinct, and marks superiority in organization. Nature has endowed some animals with cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld; but it has provoked the malice of all others, as if avengers of public wrong. In the nobler kinds, where strength could be afforded, her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the foundation of the social state. Beasts that make no truce with man, do not break faith with each other. ‘T is said, that the wolf, who makes a cache of his prey, and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on digging it is not found, is instantly and unresistingly torn in pieces. English veracity seems to result on a sounder animal structure, as if they could afford it. They are blunt in saying what they think, sparing of promises, and they require plain dealing of others. We will not have to do with a man in a mask. Let us know the truth. Draw a straight line, hit whom and where it will. Alfred, whom the affection of the nation makes the type of their race, is called by a writer at the Norman Conquest, the truth-speaker; Alueredus veridicus. Geoffrey of Monmouth says of King Aurelius, uncle of Arthur, that “above all things he hated a lie.” The Northman Guttorm said to King Olaf, “It is royal work to fulfil royal words.” The mottoes of their families are monitory proverbs, as, Fare fac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes; Say and seal, of the house of Fiennes; Vero nil verius, of the De Veres. To be king of their word, is their pride. When they unmask cant, they say, “The English of this is,” etc.; and to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of the lowest of the people is “honor-bright,” and their vulgar praise, “his word is as good as his bond.” They hate shuffling and equivocation, and the cause is damaged in the public opinion, on which any paltering can be fixed. Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when he came to define a gentleman, declared that truth made his distinction; and nothing ever spoken by him would find so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke of Wellington, who had the best right to say so, advises the French General Kellermann, that he may rely on the parole of an English officer. The English, of all classes, value themselves on this trait, as distinguishing them from the French, who, in the popular belief, are more polite than true. An Englishman understates, avoids the superlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging, that in the French language, one cannot speak without lying.

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do not easily learn to make a show, and take the world as it goes. They are not fond of ornaments, and if they wear them, they must be gems. They read gladly in old Fuller, that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth, “would have as patiently digested a lie, as the wearing of false stones or pendants of counterfeit pearl.” They have the earth-hunger, or preference for property in land, which is said to mark the Teutonic nations. They build of stone; public and private buildings are massive and durable. In comparing their ships’ houses, and public offices with the American, it is commonly said, that they spend a pound, where we spend a dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich equipage, plain rich finish throughout their house and belongings, mark the English truth.

They confide in each other, — English believes in English. The French feel the superiority of this probity. The Englishman is not springing a trap for his admiration, but is honestly minding his business. The Frenchman is vain. Madame de Staël says, that the English irritated Napoleon, mainly, because they have found out how to unite success with honesty. She was not aware how wide an application her foreign readers would give to the remark. Wellington discovered the ruin of Bonaparte’s affairs, by his own probity. He augured ill of the empire, as soon as he saw that it was mendacious, and lived by war. If war do not bring in its sequel new trade, better agriculture and manufactures, but only games, fireworks, and spectacles, — no prosperity could support it; much less, a nation decimated for conscripts, and out of pocket, like France. So he drudged for years on his military works at Lisbon, and from this base at last extended his gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in his countrymen and their syllogisms above all the rhodomontade of Europe.

At a St. George’s festival, in Montreal, where I happened to be a guest, since my return home, I observed that the chairman complimented his compatriots, by saying, “they confided that wherever they met an Englishman, they found a man who would speak the truth.” And one cannot think this festival fruitless, if, all over the world, on the 23d of April, wherever two or three English are found, they meet to encourage each other in the nationality of veracity.

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the lion’s mouth, no men surpass them. On the king’s birthday, when each bishop was expected to offer the king a purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry VIII. a copy of the Vulgate, with a mark at the passage, “Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge”; and they so honor stoutness in each other, that the king passed it over. They are tenacious of their belief, and cannot easily change their opinions to suit the hour. They are like ships with too much head on to come quickly about, nor will prosperity or even adversity be allowed to shake their habitual view of conduct. Whilst I was in London, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape from Paris, in February, 1843. Many private friends called on him. His name was immediately proposed as an honorary member to the Athenæum. M. Guizot was blackballed. Certainly, they knew the distinction of his name. But the Englishman is not fickle. He had really made up his mind, now for years as he read his newspaper, to hate and despise M. Guizot; and the altered position of the man as an illustrious exile, and a guest in the country, makes no difference to him, as it would instantly, to an American.

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction and reality in public men. It is the want of character which makes the low reputation of the Irish members. “See them,” they said, “one hundred and twenty-seven all voting like sheep, never proposing anything, and all but four voting the income tax,” — which was an ill-judged concession of the government, relieving Irish property from the burdens charged on English.

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parliament. The ruling passion of Englishmen, in these days, is a terror of humbug. In the same proportion, they value honesty, stoutness, and adherence to your own. They like a man committed to his objects. They hate the French, as frivolous; they hate the Irish, as aimless; they hate the Germans, as professors. In February, 1848, they said, Look, the French king and his party fell for want of a shot; they had not conscience to shoot, so entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy eaten out.

They attack their own politicians every day, on the same grounds, as adventurers. They love stoutness in standing for your right, in declining money or promotion that costs any concession. The barrister refuses the silk gown of Queen’s Counsel, if his junior have it one day earlier. Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal for victory on 14th February, 1797, if he did not receive one for victory on 1st June, 1794; and the long-withholden medal was accorded. When Castlereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington from going to the king’s levee, until the unpopular Cintra business had been explained, he replied: “You furnish me a reason for going. I will go to this, or I will never go to a king’s levee.” The radical mob at Oxford cried after the tory Lord Eldon, “There’s old Eldon; cheer him; he never ratted.” They have given the parliamentary nickname of Trimmers to the time-servers, whom English character does not love.9

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary delusions, thus, to believe what stands recorded in the gravest books, that the movement of 10th April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners: which, to be sure, is paralleled by the democratic whimsey in this country, which I have noticed to be shared by men sane on other points, that the English are at the bottom of the agitation of slavery, in American politics: and then again to the French popular legends on the subject of perfidious Albion. But suspicion will make fools of nations as of citizens.

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready than other countrymen, and has given occasion to the observation that English wit comes afterwards, — which the French denote as esprit d’escalier. This dulness makes their attachment to home, and their adherence in all foreign countries to home habits. The Englishman who visits Mount Etna will carry his teakettle to the top. The old Italian author of the “Relation of England” (in 1500) says: “I have it on the best information, that, when the war is actually raging most furiously, they will seek for good eating, and all their other comforts, without thinking what harm might befall them.” Then their eyes seem to be set at the bottom of a tunnel, and they affirm the one small fact they know, with the best faith in the world that nothing else exists. And, as their own belief in guineas is perfect, they readily, on all occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as final. Thus when the Rochester rappings began to be heard of in England, a man deposited £100 in a sealed box in the Dublin Bank, and then advertised in the newspapers to all somnambulists, mesmerizers, and others, that whoever could tell him the number of his note should have the money. He let it lie there six months, the newspapers now and then, at his instance, stimulating the attention of the adepts; but none could ever tell him; and he said, “Now let me never be bothered more with this proven lie.” It is told of a good Sir John, that he heard a case stated by counsel, and made up his mind; then the counsel for the other side taking their turn to speak, he found himself so unsettled and perplexed, that he exclaimed, “So help me God! I will never listen to evidence again.” Any number of delightful examples of this English stolidity are the anecdotes of Europe. I knew a very worthy man, — a magistrate, I believe he was, in the town of Derby, — who went to the opera, to see Malibrau. In one scene, the heroine was to rush across a ruined bridge. Mr. B. arose, and mildly yet firmly called the attention of the audience and the performers to the fact that, in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe! This English stolidity contrasts with French wit and tact. The French, it is commonly said, have greatly more influence in Europe than the English. What influence the English have is by brute force of wealth and power; that of the French by affinity and talent. The Italian is subtle, the Spaniard treacherous: tortures, it was said, could never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a secret. None of these traits belong to the Englishman. His choler and conceit force everything out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says of them: —

“In close intrigue, their faculty ‘s but weak,

For generally whate’er they know, they speak,

And often their own counsels undermine

By mere infirmity without design;

From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed,

That English treasons never can succeed;

For they ‘re so open-hearted, you may know

Their own most secret thoughts, and others’ too.”

CHARACTER.

The English race are reputed morose. I do not know that they have sadder brows than their neighbors of northern climates. They are sad by comparison with the singing and dancing nations: not sadder, but slow and staid, as finding their joys at home. They, too, believe that where there is no enjoyment of life, there can be no vigor and art in speech or thought; that your merry heart goes all the way, your sad one tires in a mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed on them by French travellers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of the feuilletous, have spent their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors. The French say, gay conversation is unknown in their island: the Englishman finds no relief from reflection except in reflection: when he wishes for amusement, he goes to work: his hilarity is like an attack of fever. Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books of his country, all feed and increase his natural melancholy. The police does not interfere with public diversions. It thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and rare gayety of this inconsolable nation; and their well-known courage is entirely attributable to their disgust of life.

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few words have obtained this reputation. As compared with the Americans, I think them cheerful and contented. Young people, in our country, are much more prone to melancholy. The English have a mild aspect, and a ringing, cheerful voice. They are large-natured, and not so easily amused as the southerners, and are among them as grown people among children, requiring war, or trade, or engineering, or science, instead of frivolous games. They are proud and private, and, even if disposed to recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported sadly; ils s’amusaient tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays, said Froissart; and, I suppose, never nation built their party walls so thick, or their garden fences so high. Meat and wine produce no effect on them: they are just as cold, quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the beginning of dinner.

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six or seven hundred years; and a kind of pride in bad public speaking is noted in the House of Commons, as if they were willing to show that they did not live by their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentlemen. In mixed company, they shut their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me, he had ridden more than once all the way from London to Leeds, in the first-class carriage, with the same persons, and no word exchanged. The club-houses were established to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more than two eat together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was it then a stroke of humor in the serious Swedenborg, or was it only his pitiless logic, that made him shut up the English souls in a heaven by themselves?

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic, and stubborn, — and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The truth is, they have great range and variety of character. Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes. The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect behavior of the educated and dignified man of family. So is the burly farmer; so is the country ‘squire, with his narrow and violent life. In every inn, is the Commercial-Room, in which ‘travellers,’ or bagmen who carry patterns, and solicit orders, for the manufacturers, are wont to be entertained. It easily happens that this class should characterize England to the foreigner, who meets them on the road, and at every public house, whilst the gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves whilst in them.

But these classes are the right English stock, and may fairly show the national qualities, before yet art and education have dealt with them. They are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and, in all things, very much steeped in their temperament, like men hardly awaked from deep sleep, which they enjoy. Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are of the earth, earthy; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, attached to it for what it yields them, and not from any sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude exercise, butcher’s meat, and sound sleep; and suspect any poetic insinuation or any hint for the conduct of life which reflects on this animal existence, as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical cord and might stop their supplies. They doubt a man’s sound judgment, if he does not eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste. Take them as they come, you shall find in the common people a surly indifference, sometimes gruffness and ill temper; and, in minds of more power, magazines of inexhaustible war, challenging

“The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring

To frown upon the enraged Northumberland.”

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and not less resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a book against the Lord’s Prayer. And one can believe that Burton the Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted from the stars the hour of his death, slipped the knot himself round his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope.

Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness; they have extreme difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wellington said of the young coxcombs of the Life-Guards delicately brought up, “But the puppies fight well”; and Nelson said of his sailors, “They really mind shot no more than peas.” Of absolute stoutness no nation has more or better examples. They are good at storming redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight and honor in it; but not, I think, at enduring the rack, or any passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being both vascular and highly organized, so as to be very sensible of pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason and glory in a matter.

Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies of the day, they have the more than enough, the excess which creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects in youth. The young men have a rude health which runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted, no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases; swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius’s blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the “winking Virgin,” to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition, every Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies; translate and send to Bantley the arcanum bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause. These travellers are of every class, the best and the worst; and it may easily happen that those of rudest behavior are taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon melancholy in the vulgar rich and poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, which every check exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are multitudes of rude young English who have the self-sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with their disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad description of the Briton generically, what was said two hundred years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar: “He was a very bold man, uttered anything that came into his mind, not only among his companions, but in public coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind of particular persons then accidentally present, without examining the company he was in; for which he was often reprimanded, and several times threatened to be kicked and beaten.”

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room, or to put upon the company the loud statements of his crotchets or personalities.

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes of nations are written, and however derived, whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what circumstance, that mixed for them the golden mean of temperament, — here exists the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range, and equability, men of aplomb and reserves, great range and many moods, strong instincts, yet apt for culture; war-class as well as clerks; earls and tradesmen; wise minority, as well as foolish majority; abysmal temperament, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sunshine settles; alternated with a common-sense and humanity which hold them fast to every piece of cheerful duty; making this temperament a sea to which all storms are superficial; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if they alone had the elastic organization at once fine and robust enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpressive, now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon, which once made the island light with his fiery breath, had bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or “threshes the corn that ten day-laborers could not end,” but it is done in the dark, and with muttered maledictions. He is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a pinch. He says no, but serves you, and your thanks disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd and ugly, resembling in countenance the portrait of Punch, with the laugh left out; rich by his own industry; sulking in a lonely house; who never gave a dinner to any man, and disdained all courtesies; yet as true a worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed, and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his countrymen creations of grace and truth, removing the reproach of sterility from English art, catching from their savage climate every fine hint, and importing into their galleries every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies; making an era in painting; and, when he saw that the splendor of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival’s that hung next it, secretly took a brush and blackened his own.

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws to peck at. They have that phlegm or staidness, which it is a compliment to disturb. “Great men,” said Aristotle, “are always of a nature originally melancholy.” ‘T is the habit of a mind which attaches to abstractions with a passion which gives vast results. They dare to displease, they do not speak to expectation. They like the sayers of No, better than the sayers of Yes. Each of them has an opinion which he feels it becomes him to express all the more that it differs from yours. They are meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from minds of great resources.

There is an English hero superior to the French, the German, the Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer material possession, and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He is there with his own consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies. On deliberate choice, and from grounds of character, he has elected his part to live and die for, and dies with grandeur. This race has added new elements to humanity, and has a deeper root in the world.

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to exquisite refinement. With larger scale, they have great retrieving power. After running each tendency to an extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More intellectual than other races, when they live with other races, they do not take their language, but bestow their own. They subsidize other nations, and are not subsidized. They proselyte, and are not proselyted. They assimilate other races to themselves, and are not assimilated. The English did not calculate the conquest of the Indies. It fell to their character. So they administer in different parts of the world, the codes of every empire and race: in Canada, old French law; in the Mauritius, the Code Napoleon; in the West Indies, the edicts of the Spanish Cortes; in the East Indies, the Laws of Menu; in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing; at the Cape of Good Hope, of the Old Netherlands; and in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian.

They are very conscious of their advantageous position in history. England is the lawgiver, the patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare the tone of the French and of the English press: the first querulous, captious, sensitive, about English opinion; the English press is never timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous.

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias; churlish as men sometimes please to be who do not forget a debt, who ask no favors, and who will do what they like with their own. With education and intercourse these asperities wear off, and leave the good-will pure. If anatomy is reformed according to national tendencies, I suppose, the spleen will hereafter be found in the Englishman, not found in the American, and differencing the one from the other. I anticipate another anatomical discovery, that this organ will be found to be cortical and caducous, that they are superficially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differing from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage, nothing mean resides in the English heart. They are subject to panics of credulity and of rage, but the temper of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, as, in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever storms clears again, and serenity is its normal condition.

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle’s eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength. To understand the power of performance that is in their finest wits, in the patient Newton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one should see how English day-laborers hold out. High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. There is an adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil also for their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts of work without damaging themselves.

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and to which scholars and professional men conform, proves the tension of their muscle, when vast numbers are found who can each lift this enormous load. I might even add, their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.

No nation was ever so rich in able men: “Gentlemen,” as Charles I. said of Strafford, “whose abilities might make a prince rather afraid than ashamed in the greatest affairs of state”: men of such temper, that, like Baron Vere, “had one seen him returning from a victory, he would by his silence have suspected that he had lost the day; and, had he beheld him in a retreat, he would have collected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his spirit.”10

The following passage from the Heimskringla might almost stand as a portrait of the modern Englishman: “Haldor was very stout and strong, and remarkably handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened danger or pleasure; for, whatever turned up, he was never in higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor more on account of them, nor ate nor drank but according to his custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, and was obstinate and hard; and this could not please the king, who had many clever people about him, zealous in his service. Haldor remained a short time with the king, and then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced age.”[#]

[#] Heimskringla, Laing’s translation, Vol. III. p. 37.

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling. The slow, deep, English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.

Half their strength they put not forth. They are capable of a sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war of races, often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating castles, and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies.

The stability of England is the security of the modern world. If the English race were as mutable as the French, what reliance? But the English stand for liberty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty-loving; and so freedom is safe: for they have more personal force than other people. The nation always resist the immoral action of their government. They think humanely on the affairs of France, of Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein, though overborne by the statecraft of the rulers at last.

Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which, though not less potent, is masked, as the tribe spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters? The early history shows it, as the musician plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in a tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen, one may read the genius of the English society, namely, that private life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and ambition, words familiar to the longitude of Paris, are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson wrote from their hearts his homely telegraph, “England expects every man to do his duty.”

For actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or to appease diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy may be entered (the worst boys doing well in the navy); and the civil service, in departments where serious official work is done; and they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound, and most British Briton shrinks from public life, as charlatanism, and respects an economy founded on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures, or trade, which secures an independence through the creation of real values.

They wish neither to command or obey, but to be kings in their own houses. They are intellectual and deeply enjoy literature; they like well to have the world served up to them in books, maps, models, and every mode of exact information, and, though not creators in the art, they value its refinement. They are ready for leisure, can direct and fill their own day, nor need so much as others the constraint of a necessity. But the history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this original predilection for private independence, and, however this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes with which their vast colonial power has warped men out of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms and reforms the laws, letters, manners, and occupations. They choose that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth, knowing that such alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer investments in three per cents.

COCKAYNE.

The English are a nation of humorists. Individual right is pushed to the uttermost bound compatible with public order. Property is so perfect, that it seems the craft of that race, and not to exist elsewhere. The king cannot step on an acre which the peasant refuses to sell. A testator endows a dog or a rookery, and Europe cannot interfere with his absurdity. Every individual has his particular way of living, which he pushes to folly, and the decided sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to back up Mr. Crump’s whim by statutes, and chancellors, and horse-guards. There is no freak so ridiculous but some Englishman has attempted to immortalize by money and law. British citizenship is as omnipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cockayne is very sensible of this. The pursy man means by freedom the right to do as he pleases, and does wrong in order to feel his freedom, and makes a conscience of persisting in it.

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small. His confidence in the power and performance of his nation makes him provokingly incurious about other nations. He dislikes foreigners. Swedenborg, who lived much in England, notes “the similitude of minds among the English, in consequence of which they contract familiarity with friends who are of that nation, and seldom with others; and they regard foreigners, as one looking through a telescope from the top of a palace regards those who dwell or wander about out of the city.” A much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the “Relation of England,”11 in 1500, says: “The English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them. They think that there are no other men than themselves, and no other world but England; and, whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he looks like an Englishman, and it is a great pity he should not be an Englishman; and whenever they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner, they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country.” When he adds epithets of praise, his climax is “so English”; and when he wishes to pay you the highest compliment, he says, I should not know you from an Englishman. France is, by its natural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which English character draws its own traits in chalk. This arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions to the French. I suppose that all men of English blood in America, Europe, or Asia have a secret feeling of joy that they are not French natives. Mr. Coleridge is said to have given public thanks to God, at the close of a lecture, that he had defended him from being able to utter a single sentence in the French language. I have found that Englishmen have such a good opinion of England, that the ordinary phrases, in all good society, of postponing or disparaging one’s own things in talking with a stranger, are seriously mistaken by them for an insuppressible homage to the merits of their nation; and the New-Yorker or Pennsylvanian who modestly laments the disadvantage of a new country, log-huts, and savages, is surprised by the instant and unfeigned commiseration of the whole company, who plainly account all the world out of England a heap of rubbish.

The same insular limitation pinches his foreign politics. He sticks to his traditions and usages, and, so help him God! he will force his island by-laws down the throat of great countries, like India, China, Canada, Australia, and not only so, but impose Wapping on the Congress of Vienna, and trample down all nationalities with his taxed boots. Lord Chatham goes for liberty, and no taxation without representation; — for that is British law; but not a hobnail shall they dare make in America, but buy their nails in England, — for that also is British law; and the fact that British commerce was to be re-created by the independence of America, took them all by surprise.

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank and aggressive as to be a little incompatible with every other. The world is not wide enough for two.

But, beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the island offers a daily worship to the old Norse god Brage, celebrated among our Scandinavian forefathers, for his eloquence and majestic air. The English have a steady courage, that fits them for great attempts and endurance: they have also a petty courage, through which every man delights in showing himself for what he is, and in doing what he can; so that, in all companies, each of them has too good an opinion of himself to imitate anybody. He hides no defect of his form, features, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks every circumstance belonging to him comes recommended to you. If one of them have a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a squeaking or a raven voice, he has persuaded himself that there is something modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on him.

But nature makes nothing in vain, and this little superfluity of self-regard in the English brain is one of the secrets of their power and history. It sets every man on being and doing what he really is and can. It takes away a dodging, skulking, secondary air, and encourages a frank and manly bearing, so that each man makes the most of himself, and loses no opportunity for want of pushing. A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men. We all find in these a convenient meter of character, since a little man would be ruined by the vexation. I remember a shrewd politician, in one of our Western cities, told me “that he had known several successful statesmen made by their foible.” And another, an ex-governor of Illinois, said to me: “If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.”

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it. Their culture generally enables the travelled English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air. Then the natural disposition is fostered by the respect which they find entertained in the world for English ability. It was said of Louis XIV., that his gait and air were becoming enough in so great a monarch, yet would have been ridiculous in another man; so the prestige of the English name warrants a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone on the subject of English merits.

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed, “No, we are not foreigners; we are English: it is you that are foreigners.” They tell you daily, in London, the story of the Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to fight, but their companions put them up to it; at last, it was agreed, that they should fight alone, in the dark, and with pistols: the candles were put out, and the Englishman, to make sure not to hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and brought down the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about foreigners, and answer any information you may volunteer, with “Oh! Oh!” until the informant makes up his mind, that they shall die in their ignorance, for any help he will offer. There are really no limits to this conceit, though brighter men among them make painful efforts to be candid.

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the Times newspaper through politicians and poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to the boys of Eton. In the gravest treatise on political economy, in a philosophical essay, in books of science, one is surprised by the most innocent exhibition of unflinching nationality. In a tract on Corn, a most amiable and accomplished gentleman writes thus: “Though Britain, according to Bishop Berkeley’s idea, were surrounded by a wall of brass ten thousand cubits in height, still, she would as far excel the rest of the globe in riches, as she now does, both in this secondary quality, and in the more important ones of freedom, virtue, and science.”12

The English dislike the American structure of society, whilst yet trade, mills, public education, and chartism are doing what they can to create in England the same social condition. America is the paradise of the economists; is the favorable exception invariably quoted to the rules of ruin; but when he speaks directly of the Americans, the islander forgets his philosophy, and remembers his disparaging anecdotes.

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all narrowness. The English sway of their colonies has no root of kindness. They govern by their arts and ability; they are more just than kind; and, whenever an abatement of their power is felt, they have not conciliated the affection on which to rely.

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province, or town, are useful in the absence of real ones; but we must not insist on these accidental lines. Individual traits are always triumphing over national ones. There is no fence in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or English, or Spanish science. Æsop and Montaigne, Cervantes and Saadi, are men of the world; and to wave our own flag at the dinner-table or in the University, is to carry the boisterous dulness of a fire-club into a polite circle. Nature and destiny are always on the watch for our follies. Nature trips us up when we strut; and there are curious examples in history on this very point of national pride.

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cilicia, was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he got rich, and was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Julian came, A.D. 301, George was dragged to prison; the prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched, as he deserved. And this precious knave became, in good time, Saint George of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world.

Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should derive from an impostor. Strange, that the New World should have no better luck, — that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name. Thus nobody can throw stones. We are equally badly off in our founders; and the false pickle-dealer is an offset to the false bacon-seller.

WEALTH.

There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of large property, as if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls; — if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes, and coach, and horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine? Haydon says, “There is a fierce resolution to make every man live according to the means he possesses.” There is a mixture of religion in it. They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall be long in the land, they shall have sous and daughters, flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion is the reproach of poverty. They do not wish to be represented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart. The last term of insult is, “a beggar.” Nelson said, “The want of fortune is a crime which I can never get over.” Sydney Smith said, “Poverty is infamous in England.” And one of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of “the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer.” You shall find this sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet deeply implied, in the novels and romances of the present century, and not only in these, but in biography, and in the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preaching, and in the table-talk.

I was lately turning over Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses, and looking naturally for another standard in a chronicle of the scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. But I found the two disgraces in that, as in most English books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and, second, to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit of England is the brutal political economy. Malthus finds no cover laid at nature’s table for the laborer’s son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament expressed itself by the language of Mr. Fuller in the House of Commons, “If you do not like the country, damn you, you can leave it.” When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, “though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, ‘t was not so among the lower orders. Better take them away from those who might deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding to manufacturers, as it must raise the price of labor, and of manufactured goods.”

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only by the respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion for independence. The Englishman believes that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is their national point of honor. From the Exchequer and the East India House to the huckster’s shop, everything prospers, because it is solvent. The British armies are solvent, and pay for what they take. The British empire is solvent; for, in spite of the huge national debt, the valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst they complained that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, and, by dint of enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the continent against France, the English were growing rich every year faster than any people ever grew before. It is their maxim, that the weight of taxes must be calculated, not by what is taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in the ideas and mechanism of an Englishman. The Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it pays; no matter how much convenience, beauty, or éclat, it must be self-supporting. They are contented with slower steamers, as long as they know that swifter boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double method of labor and thrift. Every household exhibits an exact economy, and nothing of that uncalculated headlong expenditure which families use in America. If they cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have no presumption of better fortunes next year, as our people have; and they say without shame, I cannot afford it. Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in the second cabin. An economist, or a man who can proportion his means and his ambition, or bring the year round with expenditure which expresses his character, without embarrassing one day of his future, is already a master of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son, “that one ought never to devote more than two thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of life, since the extraordinary will be certain to absorb the other third.”

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability, government becomes a manufacturing corporation, and every house a mill. The headlong bias to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin, — if possible, will teach spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman, while he eats and drinks no more, or not much more than another man, labors three times as many hours in the course of a year, as an other European; or, his life as a workman is three lives. He works fast. Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have reinforced their own productivity, by the creation of that marvellous machinery which differences this age from any other age.

‘T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the machine-shop. Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform of the calendar; measured the length of the year, invented gunpowder; and announced (as if looking from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into ours) “that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do; nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be constructed to move with an incredible speed, without the aid of any animal. Finally, it would not be impossible to make machines, which, by means of a suit of wings, should fly in the air in the manner of birds.” But the secret slept with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet fulfilled his words. Two centuries ago, the sawing of timber was done by hand; the carriage-wheels ran on wooden axles; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it was to little purpose that they had pit-coal or that looms were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson had taught them to work force-pumps and power-looms by steam. The great strides were all taken within the last hundred years. The life of Sir Robert Peel, in his day the model Englishman, very properly has, for a frontispiece, a drawing of the spinning-jenny, which wove the web of his fortunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright improved the invention; and the machine dispensed with the work of ninety-nine men: that is, one spinner could do as much work as one hundred had done before. The loom was improved further. But the men would sometimes strike for wages, and combine against the masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear was felt, lest the trade would be drawn away by these interruptions, and the emigration of the spinners, to Belgium and the United States. Iron and steel are very obedient. Whether it were not possible to make a spinner that would not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor emigrate? At the solicitation of the masters, after a mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of Manchester undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of the quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few trials, he succeeded, and, in 1830, procured a patent for his self-acting mule; a creation, the delight of mill-owners, and “destined,” they said, “to restore order among the industrious classes”; a machine requiring only a child’s hand to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed the factory spinner. The power of machinery in Great Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one man being able by the aid of steam to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago. The production has been commensurate. England already had this laborious race, rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable climate. Eight hundred years ago, commerce had made it rich, and it was recorded, “England is the richest of all the northern nations.” The Norman historians recite, that “in 1067, William carried with him into Normandy, from England, more gold and silver than had ever before been seen in Gaul.” But when, to this labor and trade and these native resources was added this goblin of steam, with his myriad arms, never tired, working night and day everlastingly, the amassing of property has run out of all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety years. The steam-pipe has added to her population and wealth the equivalent of four or five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered in Lloyd’s lists. The yield of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand million pounds sterling are said to compose the floating money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell stated that the people of this country had laid out £300,000,000 of capital in railways, in the last four years. But a better measure than these sounding figures is the estimate, that there is wealth enough in England to support the entire population in idleness for one year.

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can clothe shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it can plant forests, and bring rain after three thousand years. Already it is ruddering the balloon, and the next war will be fought in the air. But another machine more potent in England than steam is the Bank.

It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, and cities rise; it refuses loans, and emigration empties the country; trade sinks; revolutions break out; kings are dethroned. By these new agents our social system is moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and commerce are changed. Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under. Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp-band that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now, that a telegraph line runs through France and Europe, from London, every message it transmits makes stronger by one thread the band which war will have to cut.

The introduction of these elements gives new resources to existing proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the state depends on the House of Lords, but the engineer sees, that every stroke of the steam-piston gives value to the duke’s land, fills it with tenants; doubles, quadruples, centuples the duke’s capital, and creates new measures and new necessities for the culture of his children. Of course, it draws the nobility into the competition as stockholders in the mine, the canal, the railway, in the application of steam to agriculture, and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces large classes into the same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms itself with these magnificent powers; new men prove an overmatch for the land-owner, and the mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once forged his bolts in icy Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords, in England, has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India House, and lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years is a main fact in modern history. The wealth of London determines prices all over the globe. All things precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are sucked into this commerce and floated to London. Some English private fortunes reach, and some exceed, a million of dollars a year. A hundred thousand palaces adorn the island. All that can feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the talent, or arm the hands of the intelligent middle class who never spare in what they buy for their own consumption; all that can aid science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market. Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture; in fountain, garden, or grounds; the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy at home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful generations; the gardens which Evelyn planted; the temples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren built; the wood that Gibbons carved; the taste of foreign and domestic artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, are in the vast auction, and the hereditary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit of ages of owners. The present possessors are to the full as absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing and procuring what they like. This comfort and splendor, the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture, and park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, — all consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions; no horse-guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian poissardes and barricades; no mob; but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, wine, and ale, and beer, and gin, and sleep.

With this power of creation, and this passion for independence, property has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national life-blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest heads in a profession which never admits a fool. The rights of property nothing but felony and treason can override. The house is a castle which the king cannot enter. The Bank is a strong-box to which the king has no key. Whatever surly sweetness possession can give, is tasted in England to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder identity of interest with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked garden gates announce the absolute will of the owner to be alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly deliberation and detail.

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to establish some claim to put her park paling a rod forward into his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his paling into stone masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or compound for an inch of the land. They delight in a freak as the proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a long barn, which had not a window on the prospect side. Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and Newstead Abbey became one in the hands of Lord Byron.

But the proudest result of this creation has been the great and refined forces it has put at the disposal of the private citizen. In the social world, an Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He goes with the most powerful protection, keeps the best company, is armed by the best education, is seconded by wealth; and his English name and accidents are like a flourish of trumpets announcing him. This, with his quiet style of manners, gives him the power of a sovereign, without the inconveniences which belong to that rank. I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in Europe, — whether for travel, or for opportunity of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.

Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a mighty mass, and made good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as themselves; each is a captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of men is represented again in the faculty of each individual, — that he has waste strength, power to spare. The English are so rich, and seem to have established a taproot in the bowels of the planet, because they are constitutionally fertile and creative.

But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world. But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making cloth, he loses in general power. There should be temperance in making cloth, as well as in eating. A man should not be a silkworm; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner, — far on the way to be spiders and needles. The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man, robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when, the fashion of shoestrings supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are enclosed by landlords. Then society is admonished of the mischief of the division of labor, and that the best political economy is care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new choice and the application of their talent to new labor. Then again come in new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her fraud in the adulteration of food, of drugs, and of almost every fabric in her mills and shops; finding that milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. In true England all is false and forged. This too is the reaction of machinery, but of the larger machinery of commerce. ‘T is not, I suppose, want of probity, so much as the tyranny of trade, which necessitates a perpetual competition of underselling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of the fabric.

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, and flies away with the aeronaut. Steam from the first hissed and screamed to warn him; it was dreadful with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The machinist has wrought and watched, engineers and firemen without number have been sacrificed in learning to tame and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Robinson, and their Parliaments, and their whole generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing. They congratulated each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who knows the mischief of paper-money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in the annexation of countries; building of ships, depots, towns; in the influx of tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it was found that bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman was forced to sell his cow and pig, his tools, and his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the solvent classes, and forcing an exodus of farmers and mechanics. What befalls from the violence of financial crises, befalls daily in the violence of artificial legislation.

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, and augmenting. But the question recurs, does she take the step beyond, namely, to the wise use, in view of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital. And, in view of these injuries, some compensation has been attempted in England. A part of the money earned returns to the brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, and artists with; and a part to repair the wrongs of this intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics’ Institutes, public grounds, and other charities and amenities. But the antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler social organization must supply. At present, she does not rule her wealth. She is simply a good England, but no divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She too is in the stream of fate, one victim more in a common catastrophe.

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness to be held as the chief offender. England must be held responsible for the despotism of expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so much manhood and talent and perseverance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and arts; when English success has grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the dedication to outsides. A civility of trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and the putting as many impediments as we can, between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence, it has come, that not the aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England, emerging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the young, that a source of expense is closed.

ARISTOCRACY.

The feudal character of the English state, now that it is getting obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the democratic tendencies. The inequality of power and property shocks republican nerves. Palaces, halls, villas, walled parks, all over England, rival the splendor of royal seats. Many of the halls, like Haddon, or Kedleston, are beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw them, or never lived in them. Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, it is the sentiment of every traveller, as it was mine, ‘T was well to come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of English property and institutions. Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and faces, affirm it.

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the people is loyal. The estates, names, and manners of the nobles flatter the fancy of the people, and conciliate the necessary support. In spite of broken faith, stolen charters, and the devastation of society by the profligacy of the court, we take sides as we read for the loyal England and King Charles’s “return to his right” with his Cavaliers, — knowing what a heartless trifler he is, and what a crew of God-forsaken robbers they are. The people of England knew as much. But the fair idea of a settled government connecting itself with heraldic names, with the written and oral history of Europe, and, at last, with the Hebrew religion, and the oldest traditions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be shattered by a few offensive realities, and the politics of shoemakers and costermongers. The hopes of the commoners take the same direction with the interest of the patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys land, and does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. Time and law have made the joining and moulding perfect in every part. The Cathedrals, the Universities, the national music, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the heraldry, which the current politics of the day are sapping. The taste of the people is conservative. They are proud of the castles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even the word “lord” is the luckiest style that is used in any language to designate a patrician. The superior education and manners of the nobles recommend them to the country.

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it for his eldest son. The Norman noble, who was the Norwegian pirate baptized, did likewise. There was this advantage of Western over Oriental nobility, that this was recruited from below. English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in. Of course, the terms of admission to this club are hard and high. The selfishness of the nobles comes in aid of the interest of the nation to require signal merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and letters; the war-lord to the law-lord; the law-lord to the merchant and the mill-owner; but the privilege was kept, whilst the means of obtaining it were changed.

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian exploits by sea, and Saxon sturdiness on land. All nobility in its beginnings was somebody’s natural superiority. The things these English have done were not done without peril of life, nor without wisdom and conduct; and the first hands, it may be presumed, were often challenged to show their right to their honors, or yield them to better men. “He that will be a head, let him be a bridge,” said the Welsh chief Benegridran, when he carried all his men over the river on his back. “He shall have the book,” said the mother of Alfred, “who can read it”; and Alfred won it by that title: and I make no doubt that feudal tenure was no sinecure, but baron, knight, and tenant often had their memories refreshed, in regard to the service by which they held their lands. The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantagenets were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor told Henry V. that no Christian king had such another knight for wisdom, nurture, and manhood, and caused him to be named, “Father of curtesie.” “Our success in France,” says the historian, “lived and died with him.”13

The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation of land was large, as long as it brought the duty of protecting it, hour by hour, against a terrible enemy. In France and in England, the nobles were, down to a late day, born and bred to war; and the duel, which in peace still held them to the risks of war, diminished the envy that, in trading and studious nations, would else have pried into their title. They were looked on as men who played high for a great stake.

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept great. A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence. In the same line of Warwick, the successor next but one to Beauchamp was the stout earl of Henry VI. and Edward IV. Few esteemed themselves in the mode, whose heads were not adorned with the black ragged staff, his badge. At his house in London, six oxen were daily eaten at a breakfast; and every tavern was full of his meat; and who had any acquaintance in his family, should have as much boiled and roast as he could carry on a long dagger.

The new age brings new qualities into request, the virtues of pirates gave way to those of planters, merchants, senators, and scholars. Comity, social talent, and fine manners, no doubt, have had their part also. I have met somewhere with a historiette, which, whether more or less true in its particulars, carries a general truth. “How came the Duke of Bedford by his great landed estates? His ancestor having travelled on the continent, a lively, pleasant man, became the companion of a foreign prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast, where Mr. Russell lived. The prince recommended him to Henry VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a large share of the plundered church lands.”

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent from the Norman, and has never worked for eight hundred years. But the fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun? where is De Vere? The lawyer, the farmer, the silk-mercer, lies perdu under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say nothing; especially skilful lawyers, nobody’s sons, who did some piece of work at a nice moment for government, and were rewarded with ermine.

The national tastes of the English do not lead them to the life of the courtier, but to secure the comfort and independence of their homes. The aristocracy are marked by their predilection for country-life. They are called the county-families. They have often no residence in London, and only go thither for a short time, during the season, to see the opera; but they concentrate the love and labor of many generations on the building, planting, and decoration of their homesteads. Some of them are too old and too proud to wear titles, or, as Sheridan said of Coke, “disdain to hide their head in a coronet”; and some curious examples are cited to show the stability of English families. Their proverb is, that, fifty miles from London, a family will last a hundred years; at a hundred miles, two hundred years; and so on; but I doubt that steam, the enemy of time, as well as of space, will disturb these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the first Duke of Buckingham: “He was born at Brookeby in Leicestershire, where his ancestors had chiefly continued about the space of four hundred years, rather without obscurity, than with any great lustre.”14 Wraxall says, that, in 1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, told him, that when the year 1783 should arrive, he meant to give a grand festival to all the descendants of the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when the dukedom should have remained three hundred years in their house, since its creation by Richard III. Pepys tells us, in writing of an Earl Oxford, in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that name and blood six hundred years.

This long descent of families and this cleaving through ages to the same spot of ground captivates the imagination. It has too a connection with the names of the towns and districts of the country.

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land. Older than all epics and histories, which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits close to the body. What history too, and what stores of primitive and savage observation, it infolds! Cambridge is the bridge of the Cam; Sheffield, the field of the river Sheaf; Leicester, the castra or camp of the Lear or Leir (now Soar); Rochdale, of the Roch; Exeter or Excester, the castra of the Ex; Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of the Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign Rivers. Waltham is strong town; Radcliffe is red cliff; and so on; — a sincerity and use in naming very striking to an American, whose country is whitewashed all over by unmeaning names, the cast-off clothes of the country from which its emigrants came; or, named at a pinch from a psalm-tune. But the English are those “barbarians” of Jamblichus, who “are stable in their manners, and firmly continue to employ the same words, which also are dear to the gods.”

‘T is an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their names from playbooks. The English lords do not call their lands after their own names, but call themselves after their lands; as if the man represented the country that bred him; and they rightly wear the token of the glebe that gave them birth; suggesting that the tie is not cut, but that there in London, — the crags of Argyle, the kail of Cornwall, the downs of Devon, the iron of Wales, the clays of Stafford, are neither forgetting nor forgotten, but know the man who was born by them, and who, like the long line of his fathers, has carried that crag, that shore, dale, fen, or woodland in his blood and manners. It has, too, the advantage of suggesting responsibleness. A susceptible man could not wear a name which represented in a strict sense a city or a county of England, without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor.

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the country, combined with the degree of liberty possessed by the peasant, makes the safety of the English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically from England, in 1784: “If revolution break out in France, I tremble for the aristocracy: their chaâeaux will be reduced to ashes, and their blood spilt in torrents. The English tenant would defend his lord to the last extremity.” The English go to their estates for grandeur. The French live at court, and exile themselves to their estates for economy. As they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do not conciliate them, but wring from them the last sous. Evelyn writes from Blois, in 1644: “The wolves are here in such numbers, that they often come and take children out of the streets; yet will not the Duke, who is sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed.”

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families, the traveller is shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burlington House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House in Berkshire Square, and, lower down in the city, a few noble houses which still withstand in all their amplitude the encroachment of streets. The Duke of Bedford includes or included a mile square in the heart of London, where the British Museum, once Montague House, now stands, and the land occupied by Woburn Square, Bedford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of Westminster built within a few years the series of squares called Belgravia. Stafford House is the noblest palace in London. Northumberland House holds its place by Charing Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Audley Street. Sion House and Holland House are in the suburbs. But most of the historical houses are masked or lost in the modern uses to which trade or charity has converted them. A multitude of town palaces contain inestimable galleries of art.

In the country, the size of private estates is more impressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on the highway twenty-three miles from High Force, a fall of the Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, through the estate of the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of Breadalbane rides out of his house a hundred miles in a straight line to the sea, on his own property. The Duke of Sutherland owns the county of Sutherland, stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke of Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000 acres in the county of Derby. The Duke of Richmond has 40,000 acres at Goodwood, and 300,000 at Gordon Castle. The Duke of Norfolk’s park in Sussex is fifteen miles in circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the island of Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres. The possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight seats in Parliament. This is the Heptarchy again; and before the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four persons sent three hundred and seven members to Parliament. The borough-mongers governed England.

These large domains are growing larger. The great estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England was owned by 250,000 corporations and proprietors; and, in 1822, by 32,000. These broad estates find room in this narrow island. All over England, scattered at short intervals among ship-yards, mills, mines, and forges, are the paradises of the nobles, where the livelong repose and refinement are heightened by the contrast with the roar of industry and necessity, out of which you have stepped aside.

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on ordinary days, only twenty or thirty. Where are they? I asked. “At home on their estates, devoured by ennui, or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains, or in Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts.” But, with such interests at stake, how can these men afford to neglect them? “O,” replied my friend, “why should they work for themselves, when every man in England works for them, and will suffer before they come to harm?” The hardest radical instantly uncovers, and changes his tone to a lord. It was remarked on the 10th April, 1848 (the day of the Chartist demonstration), that the upper classes were, for the first time, actively interesting themselves in their own defence, and men of rank were sworn special constables, with the rest. “Besides, why need they sit out the debate? Has not the Duke of Wellington, at this moment, their proxies, — the proxies of fifty peers in his pocket, to vote for them, if there be an emergency?”

It is however true, that the existence of the House of Peers as a branch of the government entitles them to fill half the Cabinet; and their weight of property and station gives them a virtual nomination of the other half; whilst they have their share in the subordinate offices, as a school of training. This monopoly of political power has given them their intellectual and social eminence in Europe. A few law lords and a few political lords take the brunt of public business. In the army, the nobility fill a large part of the high commissions, and give to these a tone of expense and splendor, and also of exclusiveness. They have borne their full share of duty and danger in this service; and there are few noble families which have not paid in some of their members, the debt of life or limb, in the sacrifices of the Russian war. For the rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of state, and of expense; in questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial and domestic hospitalities. In general, all that is required of them is to sit securely, to preside at public meetings, to countenance charities, and to give the example of that decorum so dear to the British heart.

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what service this class have rendered? — uses appear, or they would have perished long ago. Some of these are easily enumerated, others more subtle make a part of unconscious history. Their institution is one step in the progress of society. For a race yields a nobility in some form, however we name the lords, as surely as it yields women.

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through every country, and kept in every country the best company, have seen every secret of art and nature, and, when men of any ability or ambition, have been consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them, and when it happens that the spirit of the earl meets his rank and duties, we have the best examples of behavior. Power of any kind readily appears in the manners; and beneficent power, le talent de bien faire, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted.

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by their position. They survey society, as from the top of St. Paul’s, and if they never hear plain truth from men, they see the best of everything, in every kind, and they see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Their good behavior deserves all its fame, and they have that simplicity, and that air of repose, which are the finest ornament of greatness.

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here, and not thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and ‘t is wonderful, how much talent runs into manners: — nowhere and never so much as in England. They have the sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone of thought and feeling, and the power to command, among their other luxuries, the presence of the most accomplished men in their festive meetings.

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear the laws as ornaments, and walk by their faith in their painted May-Fair, as if among the forms of gods. The economist of 1855 who asks, of what use are the lords? may learn of Franklin to ask, of what use is a baby? They have been a social church proper to inspire sentiments mutually honoring the lover and the loved. Politeness is the ritual of society, as prayers are of the church; a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to the age in which it grew. ‘T is a romance adorning English life with a larger horizon; a midway heaven, fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales and poetry. This, just as far as the breeding of the nobleman, really made him brave, handsome, accomplished, and great-hearted.

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners, or to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has tasted the delight of friendship, will respect every social guard which our manners can establish, tending to secure from the intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people. The jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony to the reality they have found in life. When a man once knows that he has done justice to himself, let him dismiss all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as he is concerned. He who keeps the door of a mine, whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plumbago, securely knows that the world cannot do without him. Everybody who is real is open and ready for that which is also real.

Besides, these are they who make England that strongbox and museum it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither out of all the world. I look with respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, like Warwick Castle, nine hundred years old. I pardoned high park fences, when I saw, that, besides does and pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles, Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libraries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts, monastic architectures, millennial trees, and breeds of cattle elsewhere extinct. In these manors, after the frenzy of war and destruction subsides a little, the antiquary finds the frailest Roman jar, or crumbling Egyptian mummy-case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keeping the series of history unbroken, and waiting for its interpreter, who is sure to arrive. These lords are the treasurers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride and wealth to this function.

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do. George Loudon, Quintinye, Evelyn, had taught them to make gardens. Arthur Young, Bakewell, and Mechi have made them agricultural. Scotland was a camp until the day of Culloden. The Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh, and the Marquis of Breadalbane have introduced the rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, the plantation of forests, the artificial replenishment of lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of game-preserves. Against the cry of the old tenantry, and the sympathetic cry of the English press, they have rooted out and planted anew, and now six millions of people live, and live better on the same land that fed three millions.

The English barons, in every period, have been brave and great, after the estimate and opinion of their times. The grand old halls scattered up and down in England are dumb vouchers to the state and broad hospitality of their ancient lords. Shakspeare’s portraits of good Duke Humphrey, of Warwick, of Northumberland, of Talbot, were drawn in strict consonance with the traditions. A sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop Parker;15 Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s autobiography; the letters and essays of Sir Philip Sidney; the anecdotes preserved by the antiquaries Fuller and Collins; some glimpses at the interiors of noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and Evelyn; the details which Ben Jonson’s masques (performed at Kenilworth, Althorpe, Belvoir, and other noble houses) record or suggest; down to Aubrey’s passages of the life of Hobbes in the house of the Earl of Devon, are favorable pictures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst still shines for us, and its Christmas revels, “where logs not burn, but men.” At Wilton House, the “Arcadia” was written, amidst conversations with Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as his own poems declare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house, for which Milton’s “Comus” was written, and the company nobly bred which performed it with knowledge and sympathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, philosophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid virtues and of lofty sentiments; often they have been the friends and patrons of genius and learning, and especially of the fine arts; and at this moment, almost every great house has its sumptuous picture-gallery.

Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show. Every victory was the defeat of a party only less worthy. Castles are proud things, but ‘t is safest to be outside of them. War is a foul game, and yet war is not the worst part of aristocratic history. In later times, when the baron, educated only for war, with his brains paralyzed by his stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew fat and wanton, and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys, and Evelyn show the kennels to which the king and court went in quest of pleasure. Prostitutes taken from the theatres were made duchesses, their bastards dukes and earls. “The young men sat uppermost, the old serious lords were out of favor.” The discourse that the king’s companions had with him was “poor and frothy.” No man who valued his head might do what these pot-companions familiarly did with the king. In logical sequence of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell the beggarly shifts to which the king was reduced, who could not find paper at his council table, and “no handkerchers” in his wardrobe, “and but three bands to his neck,” and the linen-draper and the stationer were out of pocket, and refusing to trust him, and the baker will not bring bread any longer. Meantime, the English Channel was swept, and London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned too by English sailors, who, having been cheated of their pay for years by the king, enlisted with the enemy.

The Selwyn correspondence in the reign of George III. discloses a rottenness in the aristocracy, which threatened to decompose the state. The sycophancy and sale of votes and honor, for place and title; lewdness, gaming, smuggling, bribery, and cheating; the sneer at the childish indiscretion of quarrelling with ten thousand a year; the want of ideas; the splendor of the titles, and the apathy of the nation, are instructive, and make the reader pause and explore the firm bounds which confined these vices to a handful of rich men. In the reign of the Fourth George, things do not seem to have mended, and the rotten debauchee let down from a window by an inclined plane into his coach to take the air, was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame of his queen and of his family did nothing to retrieve.

Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the Court is thought to have put a check on the gross vices of the aristocracy; yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mistresses bring them down, and the democrat can still gather scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip of the last generation of dukes served by bailiffs, with all their plate in pawn; of great lords living by the showing of their houses; and of an old man wheeled in his chair from room to room, whilst his chambers are exhibited to the visitor for money: of ruined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords have gained no new lustre, and now and then darker scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters added under the Orleans dynasty to the “Causes Célèbres” in France. Even peers, who are men of worth and public spirit, are overtaken and embarrassed by their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, willing to be the Mecænas and Lucullus of his island, is reported to have said that he cannot live at Chatsworth but one month in the year. Their many houses eat them up. They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They will not let them, for pride’s sake, but keep them empty, aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is for a great part in servants, in many houses exceeding a hundred.

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which, because it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the mischief of crime. “They might be little Providences on earth,” said my friend, “and they are, for the most part, jockeys and fops.” Campbell says: “Acquaintance with the nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties.” I suppose, too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving cultivated men out of this society, as if the noble were slow to receive the lessons of the times, and had not learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of wit, who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion, confessed to his friend, that he could not enter their houses without being made to feel that they were great lords, and he a low plebeian. With the tribe of artistes, including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and other grandees, a ribbon was stretched between the singer and the company.

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully bred to great personal prowess. The education of a soldier is a simpler affair than that of an earl in the nineteenth century. And this was very seriously pursued; they were expert in every species of equitation, to the most dangerous practices, and this down to the accession of William of Orange. But graver men appear to have trained their sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended her thought to the future; and Sir Philip Sidney in his letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, gave plain and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English noble and squire were preparing for the career of the country-gentleman, and his peaceable expense. They went from city to city, learning receipts to make perfumes, sweet powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, coins, and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life thereafter, in which they should take pleasure in these recreations.

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician from intellectual labor are of course mistaken. “In the university, noblemen are exempted from the public exercises for the degree, etc., by which they attain a degree called honorary. At the same time the fees they must pay for matriculation, and on all other occasions, are much higher.”16 Fuller records “the observation of foreigners, that Englishmen, by making their children gentlemen, before they are men, cause they are so seldom wise men.” This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson’s bitter apology for primogeniture, “that it makes but one fool in a family.”

The revolution in society has reached this class. The great powers of industrial art have no exclusion of name or blood. The tools of our time, namely, steam, ships, printing, money, and popular education, belong to those who can handle them; and their effect has been, that advantages once confined to men of family are now open to the whole middle class. The road that grandeur levels for his coach, toil can travel in his cart.

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true throughout English history. English history, wisely read, is the vindication of the brain of that people. Here, at last, were climate and condition friendly to the working faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall rule. This is the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, and seas, and rains proclaimed, — that intellect and personal force should make the law; that industry and administrative talent should administer; that work should wear the crown. I know that not this, but something else is pretended. The fiction with which the noble and the bystander equally please themselves is, that the former is of unbroken descent from the Norman, and so has never worked for eight hundred years. All the families are new, but the name is old, and they have made a covenant with their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay and extinction of old families, the continual recruiting of these from new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously guarded, are really open, and hence the power of the bribe. All the barriers to rank only whet the thirst, and enhance the prize. “Now,” said Nelson, when clearing for battle, “a peerage, or Westminster Abbey!” “I have no illusion left,” said Sidney Smith, “but the Archbishop of Canterbury.” “The lawyers,” said Burke, “are only birds of passage in this House of Commons,” and then added, with a new figure, “they have their best bower anchor in the House of Lords.”

Another stride that has been taken, appears in the perishing of heraldry. Whilst the privileges of nobility are passing to the middle class, the badge is discredited, and the titles of lordship are getting musty and cumbersome. I wonder that sensible men have not been already impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and scarlet coats, to an earlier age, and may be advantageously consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the dignitaries of Australia and Polynesia.

A multitude of English, educated at the universities, bred into their society with manners, ability, and the gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in the race of honor and influence. That cultivated class is large and ever enlarging. It is computed that, with titles and without, there are seventy thousand of these people coming and going in London, who make up what is called high society. They cannot shut their eyes to the fact that an untitled nobility possess all the power without the inconveniences that belong to rank, and the rich Englishman goes over the world at the present day, drawing more than all the advantages which the strongest of his kings could command.

UNIVERSITIES.

Of British universities, Cambridge has the most illustrious names on its list. At the present day, too, it has the advantage of Oxford, counting in its alumni a greater number of distinguished scholars. I regret that I had but a single day wherein to see King’s College Chapel, the beautiful lawns and gardens of the colleges, and a few of its gownsmen.

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to Oxford, where I had introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Professor of Botany, and to the Regius Professor of Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a Fellow of Oriel, and went thither on the last day of March, 1848. I was the guest of my friend in Oriel, was housed close upon that college, and I lived on college hospitalities.

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian Library, the Randolph Gallery, Merton Hall, and the rest. I saw several faithful, high-minded young men, some of them in the mood of making sacrifices for peace of mind, — a topic, of course, on which I had no counsel to offer. Their affectionate and gregarious ways reminded me at once of the habits of our Cambridge men, though I imputed to these English an advantage in their secure and polished manners. The halls are rich with oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures of the founders hang from the walls; the tables glitter with plate. A youth came forward to the upper table, and pronounced the ancient form of grace before meals, which, I suppose, has been in use here for ages, Benedictus benedicat; benedicitur, benedicatur.

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or of their good-nature, that these young men are locked up every night at nine o’clock, and the porter at each hall is required to give the name of any belated student who is admitted after that hour. Still more descriptive is the fact, that out of twelve hundred young men, comprising the most spirited of the aristocracy, a duel has never occurred.

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its foundations date from Alfred, and even from Arthur, if, as is alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had a seminary here. In the reign of Edward I., it is pretended, here were thirty thousand students; and nineteen most noble foundations were then established. Chaucer found it as firm as if it had always stood; and it is in British story, rich with great names, the school of the island, and the link of England to the learned of Europe. Hither came Erasmus, with delight, in 1497. Albericus Gentilis, in 1580, was relieved and maintained by the university. Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who visited England to admire the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was entertained with stage-plays in the Refectory of Christ-church, in 1583. Isaac Casaubon, coming from Henri Quatre of France, by invitation of James I., was admitted to Christ’s College, in July, 1613. I saw the Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole, in 1682, sent twelve cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the Olympia of all Antony Wood’s and Aubrey’s games and heroes, and every inch of ground has its lustre. For Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses, or calendar of the writers of Oxford for two hundred years, is a lively record of English manners and merits, and as much a national monument as Purchas’s Pilgrims or Hansard’s Register. On every side, Oxford is redolent of age and authority. Its gates shut of themselves against modern innovation. It is still governed by the statutes of Archbishop Laud. The books in Merton Library are still chained to the wall. Here, on August 27, 1660, John Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Iconoclastes were committed to the flames. I saw the school-court or quadrangle, where, in 1683, the Convocation caused the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not know whether this learned body have yet heard of the Declaration of American Independence, or whether the Ptolemaic astronomy does not still hold its ground against the novelties of Copernicus.

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is usual for a nobleman, or indeed for almost every wealthy student, on quitting college, to leave behind him some article of plate; and gifts of all values, from a hall, or a fellowship, or a library, down to a picture or a spoon, are continually accruing, in the course of a century. My friend Doctor J. gave me the following anecdote. In Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection at London were the cartoons of Raphael and Michel Angelo. This inestimable prize was offered to Oxford University for seven thousand pounds. The offer was accepted, and the committee charged with the affair had collected three thousand pounds, when among other friends they called on Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred pounds, he surprised them by putting down his name for three thousand pounds. They told him, they should now very easily raise the remainder. “No,” he said, “your men have probably already contributed all they can spare; I can as well give the rest”: and he withdrew his check for three thousand, and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw the whole collection in April, 1848.

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me the manuscript Plato, of the date of A.D. 896, brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt; a manuscript Virgil, of the same century; the first Bible printed at Mentz (I believe in 1450); and a duplicate of the same, which had been deficient in about twenty leaves at the end. But, one day, being in Venice, he bought a room full of books and manuscripts — every scrap and fragment — for four thousand louis d’ors, and had the doors locked and sealed by the consul. On proceeding, afterwards, to examine his purchase, he found the twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order; brought them to Oxford, with the rest of his purchase, and placed them in the volume; but has too much awe for the Providence that appears in bibliography also, to suffer the reunited parts to be rebound. The oldest building here is two hundred years younger than the frail manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No candle or fire is ever lighted in the Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard catalogue on the desk of every library in Oxford. In each several college, they underscore in red ink on this catalogue the titles of books contained in the library of that college, — the theory being that the Bodleian has all books. This rich library spent during the last year (1847) for the purchase of books £1,668.

The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel. They know the use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the greatest amount of benefit out of both. The reading-men are kept by hard walking, hard riding, and measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condition, and two days before the examination, do no work, but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college doomsday. Seven years’ residence is the theoretic period for a master’s degree. In point of fact, it has long been three years’ residence, and four years more of standing. This “three years” is about twenty-one months in all.17

“The whole expense,” says Professor Sewel, “of ordinary college tuition at Oxford, is about sixteen guineas a year.” But this plausible statement may deceive a reader unacquainted with the fact, that the principal teaching relied on is private tuition. And the expenses of private tuition are reckoned at from £50 to £70 a year, or $1,000 for the whole course of three years and a half. At Cambridge $750 a year is economical, and $1,500 not extravagant.18

The number of students and of residents, the dignity of the authorities, the value of the foundations, the history and the architecture, the known sympathy of entire Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily be in America, where his college is half suspected by the Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous and dignified enough to rank with other estates in the realm; and where fame and secular promotion are to be had for study, and in a direction which has the unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses; fills places, as they fall vacant, from the body of students. The number of fellowships at Oxford is 540, averaging £200 a year, with lodging and diet at the college. If a young American, loving learning, and hindered by poverty, were offered a home, a table, the walks, and the library, in one of these academical palaces, and a thousand dollars a year as long as he chose to remain a bachelor, he would dance for joy. Yet these young men thus happily placed, and paid to read, are impatient of their few checks, and many of them preparing to resign their fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect of dying a Fellow, and they pointed out to me a paralytic old man, who was assisted into the hall. As the number of undergraduates at Oxford is only about 1,200 or 1,300, and many of these are never competitors, the chance of a fellowship is very great. The income of the nineteen colleges is conjectured at £150,000 a year.

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of Greek and Latin, and of mathematics, and the solidity and taste of English criticism. Whatever luck there may be in this or that award, an Eton captain can write Latin longs and shorts, can turn the Court-Guide into hexameters, and it is certain that a Senior Classic can quote correctly from the Corpus Poetarum, and is critically learned in all the humanities. Greek erudition exists on the Isis and Cam, whether the Maud man or the Brazen Nose man be properly ranked or not; the atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning; the whole river has reached a certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds, which this Castalian water kills. The English nature takes culture kindly. So Milton thought. It refines the Norseman. Access to the Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. He has enough to think of, and, unless of an impulsive nature, is indisposed from writing or speaking, by the fulness of his mind, and the new severity of his taste. The great silent crowd of thorough-bred Grecians always known to be around him, the English writer cannot ignore. They prune his orations, and point his pen. Hence, the style and tone of English journalism. The men have learned accuracy and comprehension, logic, and pace, or speed of working. They have bottom, endurance, wind. When born with good constitutions, they make those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the dura ilia, whose powers of performance compare with ours, as the steam-hammer with the music-box; — Cokes, Mansfields, Seldens, and Bentleys, and when it happens that a superior brain puts a rider on this admirable horse, we obtain those masters of the world who combine the highest energy in affairs, with a supreme culture.

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged; that an unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank and to the child of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

Again, at the universities, it is urged, that all goes to form what England values as the flower of its national life, — a well-educated gentleman. The German Huber, in describing to his countrymen the attributes of an English gentleman, frankly admits, that “in Germany, we have nothing of the kind. A gentleman must possess a political character, an independent and public position, or, at least, the right of assuming it. He must have average opulence, either of his own, or in his family. He should also have bodily activity and strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in public offices. The race of English gentlemen presents an appearance of manly vigor and form, not elsewhere to be found among an equal number of persons. No other nation produces the stock. And in England, it has deteriorated. The university is a decided presumption in any man’s favor. And so eminent are the members that a glance at the calendars will show that in all the world one cannot be in better company than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or Cambridge colleges.”19

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper classes, and not for the poor. The useful is exploded. The definition of a public school is “a school which excludes all that could fit a man for standing behind a counter.”20

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted. Oxford, which equals in wealth several of the smaller European states, shuts up the lectureships which were made “public for all men thereunto to have concourse”; misspends the revenues bestowed for such youths “as should be most meet for towardness, poverty, and painfulness”; there is gross favoritism; many chairs and many fellowships are made beds of ease; and ’tis likely that the university will know how to resist and make inoperative the terrors of parliamentary inquiry; no doubt, their learning is grown obsolete; but Oxford also has its merits, and I found here also proof of the national fidelity and thoroughness. Such knowledge as they prize they possess and impart. Whether in course or by indirection, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes and foundation scholarships, education according to the English notion of it is acquired. I looked over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland, and the University (copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek professor), containing the tasks which many competitors had victoriously performed, and I believed they would prove too severe tests for the candidates for a Bachelor’s degree in Yale or Harvard. And, in general, here was proof of a more searching study in the appointed directions, and the knowledge pretended to be conveyed was conveyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able men, and three or four hundred well-educated men.

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount of old Norse power. A fop will fight, and, in exigent circumstances, will play the manly part. In seeing these youths, I believed I saw already an advantage in vigor and color and general habit, over their contemporaries in the American colleges. No doubt much of the power and brilliancy of the reading-men is merely constitutional or hygienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gymnastics, with five miles more walking, or five ounces less eating, or with a saddle and gallop of twenty miles a day, with skating and rowing matches, the American would arrive at as robust exegesis, and cheery and hilarious tone. I should readily concede these advantages, which it would be easy to acquire, if I did not find also that they read better than we, and write better.

English wealth falling on their school and university training, makes a systematic reading of the best authors, and to the end of a knowledge how the things whereof they treat really stand: whilst pamphleteer or journalist reading for an argument for a party, or reading to write, or, at all events, for some by end imposed on them, must read meanly and fragmentarily. Charles I. said, that he understood English law as well as a gentleman ought to understand it.

Then they have access to books; the rich libraries collected at every one of many thousands of houses, give an advantage not to be attained by a youth in this country, when one thinks how much more and better may be learned by a scholar, who, immediately on hearing of a book, can consult it, than by one who is on the quest for years, and reads inferior books, because he cannot find the best.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and selection.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to college, and, though he be a genius, he must take his chance. The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is a library, and the professors must be librarians. And I should as soon think of quarrelling with the janitor for not magnifying his office by hostile sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch or Kinburn, as of quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the young neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and Aristotle, or for not attempting themselves to fill their vacant shelves as original writers.

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if we will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of the House of Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccentric, and darkling. England is the land of mixture and surprise, and when you have settled it that the universities are moribund, out comes a poetic influence from the heart of Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to build their houses as simply as birds their nests, to give veracity to art, and charm mankind, as an appeal to moral order always must. But besides this restorative genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in the old forms, comes from two graduates of Cambridge.

RELIGION.

No people, at the present day, can be explained by their national religion. They do not feel responsible for it; it lies far outside of them. Their loyalty to truth and their labor and expenditure rest on real foundations, and not on a national church. And English life, it is evident, does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, or the Articles, or the Eucharist. It is with religion as with marriage. A youth marries in haste; afterwards, when his mind is opened to the reason of the conduct of life, he is asked, what he thinks of the institution of marriage, and of the right relations of the sexes. ‘I should have much to say,’ he might reply, ‘if the question were open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is closed for me.’ In the barbarous days of a nation, some cultus is formed or imported; altars are built, tithes are paid, priests ordained. The education and expenditure of the country take that direction, and when wealth, refinement, great men, and ties to the world supervene, its prudent men say, why fight against Fate, or lift these absurdities which are now mountainous? Better find some niche or crevice in this mountain of stone which religious ages have quarried and carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than attempt anything ridiculously and dangerously above your strength, like removing it.

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say, as to-day, in front of Dundee Church tower, which is eight hundred years old, ‘this was built by another and a better race than any that now look on it.’ And, plainly, there has been great power of sentiment at work in this island, of which these buildings are the proofs: as volcanic basalts show the work of fire which has been extinguished for ages. England felt the full heat of the Christianity which fermented Europe, and drew, like the chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and culture. The power of the religious sentiment put an end to human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded liberty, created the religious architecture, — York, Newstead, Westminster, Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley, and Dundee, — works to which the key is lost, with the sentiment which created them; inspired the English Bible, the liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Richard of Devizes. The priest translated the Vulgate, and translated the sanctities of old hagiology into English virtues on English ground. It was a certain affirmative or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the Northern savages exasperated Christianity into power. It lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite from labor for the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festivals. “The lord who compelled his boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sunset on Sunday, forfeited him altogether.” The priest came out of the people, and sympathized with his class. The church was the mediator, check, and democratic principle in Europe. Latimer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan, are the democrats, as well as the saints of their times. The Catholic Church, thrown on this toiling, serious people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive system, close fitted to the manners and genius of the country, at once domestical and stately. In the long time, it has blended with everything in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of the year, every town and market and headland and monument, and has coupled itself with the almanac, that no court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod, without some leave from the church. All maxims of prudence or shop or farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence, its strength in the agricultural districts. The distribution of land into parishes enforces a church sanction to every civil privilege; and the gradation of the clergy, — prelates for the rich, and curates for the poor, — with the fact that a classical education has been secured to the clergyman, makes them “the link which unites the sequestered peasantry with the intellectual advancement of the age.”21

The English Church has many certificates to show, of humble effective service in humanizing the people, in cheering and refining men, feeding, healing, and educating. It has the seal of martyrs and confessors; the noblest books; a sublime architecture; a ritual marked by the same secular merits, nothing cheap or purchasable.

From this slow-grown church important reactions proceed; much for culture, much for giving a direction to the nation’s affection and will to-day. The carved and pictured chapel — its entire surface animated with image and emblem — made the parish-church a sort of book and Bible to the people’s eye.

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the vernacular tongue, it was the tutor and university of the people. In York minster, on the day of the enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the service of evening prayer read and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th January, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine; and listening with all the devotion of national pride. That was binding old and new to some purpose. The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world, been preserved, and is preserved. Here in England every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the Times.

Another part of the same service on this occasion was not insignificant. Handel’s coronation anthem, God save the King, was played by Dr. Camidge on the organ, with sublime effect. The minster and the music were made for each other. It was a hint of the part the church plays as a political engine. From his infancy, every Englishman is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the queen, for the royal family, and the Parliament, by name; and this lifelong consecration of these personages cannot be without influence on his opinions.

The universities, also, are parcel of the ecclesiastical system, and their first design is to form the clergy. Thus the clergy for a thousand years have been the scholars of the nation.

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken order and tradition of its church; the liturgy, ceremony, architecture; the sober grace, the good company, the connection with the throne, and with history, which adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of more taste than activity, the stability of the English nation is passionately enlisted to its support, from its inextricable connection with the cause of public order, with politics, and with the funds.

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in society. These minsters were neither built nor filled by atheists. No church has had more learned, industrious, or devoted men; plenty of “clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns, would turn their backs on no man.”22 Their architecture still glows with faith in immortality. Heats and genial periods arrive in history, or, shall we say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by which high tides are caused in the human spirit, and great virtues and talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the nation was full of genius and piety.

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beckets; of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers; of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts; of the Sherlocks, and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have made it impossible that men like these should return or find a place in their once sacred stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this church has glided away to animate other activities; and they who come to the old shrines find apes and players rustling the old garments.

The religion of England is part of good breeding. When you see on the Continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman. So far is he from attaching any meaning to the words, that he believes himself to have done almost the generous thing, and that it is very condescending in him to pray to God. A great duke said on the occasion of a victory, in the House of Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had not been well used by them, and that it would become their magnanimity, after so great successes, to take order that a proper acknowledgment be made. It is the church of the gentry; but it is not the church of the poor. The operatives do not own it, and gentlemen lately testified in the House of Commons that in their lives they never saw a poor man in a ragged coat inside a church.

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous English understanding shows how much wit and folly can agree in one brain. Their religion is a quotation; their church is a doll; and any examination is interdicted with screams of terror. In good company, you expect them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar; but they do not; they are the vulgar.

The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in the nineteenth century, do not respect power, but only performance; value ideas only for an economic result. Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can be an army chaplain: “Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good sense, got the better of Methodism, which had appeared among the soldiers, and once among the officers.” They value a philosopher as they value an apothecary who brings bark or a drench; and inspiration is only some blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid.

I suspect that there is in an Englishman’s brain a valve that can be closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off steam. The most sensible and well-informed men possess the power of thinking just so far as the bishop in religious matters, and as the chancellor of the exchequer in politics. They talk with courage and logic, and show you magnificent results; but the same men who have brought free-trade or geology to their present standing, look grave and lofty, and shut down their valve, as soon as the conversation approaches the English Church. After that, you talk with a box-turtle.

The action of the university, both in what is taught, and in the spirit of the place, is directed more on producing an English gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not know that there is more cabalism in the Anglican, than in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. They say, here, that, if you talk with a clergyman, you are sure to find him well bred, informed, and candid, he entertains your thought or your project with sympathy and praise. But if a second clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: two together are inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever it comes to action, the clergyman invariably sides with his church.

The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches is, ‘By taste are ye saved.’ It keeps the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in music and building; and in buying Pugin, and architectural literature. It has a general good name for amenity and mildness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church; it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly well bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper occasions. If you let it alone, it will let you alone. But its instinct is hostile to all change in politics, literature, or social arts. The church has not been the founder of the London University, of the Mechanics’ Institutes, of the Free School, or whatever aims at diffusion of knowledge. The Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against this heresy, as Thomas Taylor.

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion of England. The first leaf of the New Testament it does not open. It believes in a Providence which does not treat with levity a pound sterling. They are neither transcendentalists nor Christians. They put up no Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer for the queen’s mind; ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, “Grant her in health and wealth long to live.” And one traces this Jewish prayer in all English private history, from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of Devizes’ Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel Romilly, and of Haydon the painter. “Abroad with my wife,” writes Pepys piously, “the first time that ever I rode in my own coach; which do make my heart rejoice and praise God, and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it.” The bill for the naturalization of the Jews (in 1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of the kingdom, and by petition from the city of London, reprobating this bill, as “tending extremely to the dishonor of the Christian religion, and extremely injurious to the interests and commerce of the kingdom in general, and of the city of London in particular.”

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by act of Parliament. “The heavens journey still and sojourn not,” and arts, wars, discoveries, and opinion go onward at their own pace. The new age has new desires, new enemies, new trades, new charities, and reads the Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of French politics, the steam-whistle, the hum of the mill, and the noise of embarking emigrants, had quite put most of the old legends out of mind; so that when you came to read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was almost absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of old costumes.

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize a religion. It is endogenous, like the skin, and other vital organs. A new statement every day. The prophet and apostle knew this, and the non-conformist confutes the conformists, by quoting the texts they must allow. It is the condition of a religion, to require religion for its expositor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly understood by prophet and apostle. The statesman knows that the religious element will not fail, any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle; but it is in its nature constructive, and will organize such a church as it wants. The wise legislator will spend on temples, schools, libraries, colleges, but will shun the enriching of priests. If, in any manner, he can leave the election and paying of the priest to the people, he will do well. Like the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of priests, and create opportunity and expectation in the society, to run to meet natural endowment, in this kind. But, when wealth accrues to a chaplaincy, a bishopric, or rectorship, it requires moneyed men for its stewards, who will give it another direction than to the mystics of their day. Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed. The class certain to be excluded from all preferment are the religious, — and driven to other churches; — which is nature’s vis medicatrix.

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid. This abuse draws into the church the children of the nobility, and other unfit persons, who have a taste for expense. Thus a bishop is only a surpliced merchant. Through his lawn, I can see the bright buttons of the shopman’s coat glitter. A wealth like that of Durham makes almost a premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech in the House of Commons on the Irish elective franchise, said, “How will the reverend bishops of the other house be able to express their due abhorrence of the crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the presence of God, that when they are called upon to accept a living, perhaps of £4,000 a year, at that very instant, they are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and administration thereof, and for no other reason whatever?” The modes of initiation are more damaging than custom-house oaths. The bishop is elected by the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends these gentlemen a congé d’élire, or leave to elect; but also sends them the name of the person whom they are to elect. They go into the cathedral, chant and pray, and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in their choice; and, after these invocations, invariably find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommendations of the Queen.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are an honest man in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits. Besides, this succumbing has grave penalties. If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to it. England accepts this ornamented national church, and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives the voice a stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of the receivers.

The English Church, undermined by German criticism, had nothing left but tradition, and was led logically back to Romanism. But that was an element which only hot heads could breathe: in view of the educated class, generally, it was not a fact to front the sun; and the alienation of such men from the church became complete.

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious persons are driven out of the Established Church into sects, which instantly rise to credit, and hold the Establishment in check. Nature has sharper remedies, also. The English, abhorring change in all things, abhorring it most in matters of religion, cling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully given to cant. The English (and I wish it were confined to them, but ‘t is a taint in the Anglo-Saxon blood in both hemispheres), the English and the Americans cant beyond all other nations. The French relinquish all that industry to them. What is so odious as the polite bows to God, in our books and newspapers? The popular press is flagitious in the exact measure of its sanctimony, and the religion of the day is a theatrical Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property-man. The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch finds an inexhaustible material. Dickens writes novels on Exeter Hall humanity. Thackeray exposes the heartless high life. Nature revenges herself more summarily by the heathenism of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury calls the poor thieves together, and reads sermons to them, and they call it ‘gas.’ George Borrow summons the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles’ creed in Romany. “When I had concluded,” he says, “I looked around me. The features of the assembly were twisted, and the eyes of all turned upon me with a frightful squint: not an individual present but squinted; the genteel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami, all squinted: the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all.”

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him. False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a lower class of mind and character into the clergy; and, when the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but to quit a church which is no longer one.

But the religion of England, — is it the Established Church? no; is it the sects? no; they are only perpetuations of some private man’s dissent, and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really the same thing. Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought, or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them, and puts them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, souffrir de tout le monde et ne faire souffrir personne, that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.

LITERATURE.

A strong common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat or disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years; a rude strength newly applied to thought, as of sailors and soldiers who had lately learned to read. They have no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty word, such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, and was convertible into a fable not long after; but they delight in strong earthy expression, not mistakable, coarsely true to the human body, and, though spoken among princes, equally fit and welcome to the mob. This homeliness, veracity, and plain style appear in the earliest extant works, and in the latest. It imports into songs and ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of cattle, and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household charm, though by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional utility in verse. The kail and herrings are never out of sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself from every sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the farm-yard, the lane and market. She says, with De Staël, “I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes, whenever they would force me into the clouds.” For, the Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of things by the right end, and there is no slipperiness in his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade, the oar, the gun, the steam-pipe: he has built the engine he uses. He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be treated with sincerity and reality, with muffins and not the promise of muffins; and prefers his hot chop, with perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed paper. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a philosopher, he carries the same hard truth and the same keen machinery into the mental sphere. His mind must stand on a fact. He will not be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind must have a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron “liked something craggy to break his mind upon.” A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English. It is in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes was perfect in the “noble vulgar speech.” Donne, Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton, and the translators, wrote it. How realistic or materialistic in treatment of his subject is Swift. He describes his fictitious persons as if for the police. Defoe has no insecurity or choice, Hudibras has the same hard mentality, — keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to the intellect.

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer’s hard painting of his Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This mental materialism makes the value of English transcendental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism and narrowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect, makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Milton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its elevations, materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired; or iron raised to white heat.

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech. It is a tacit rule of the language to make the frame or skeleton of Saxon words, and, when elevation or ornament is sought, to interweave Roman; but sparingly; nor is a sentence made of Roman words alone, without loss of strength. The children and laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges and Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English island; and, in their dialect, the male principle is the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and they are combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste to chasten and nerve his period by English monosyllables.

When the Gothic nations came into Europe, they found it lighted with the sun and moon of Hebrew and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, long kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To the images from this twin source (of Christianity and art), the mind became fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty. The common-sense was surprised and inspired. For two centuries, England was philosophic, religious, poetic. The mental furniture seemed of larger scale; the memory capacious like the storehouse of the rains. The ardor and endurance of study; the boldness and facility of their mental construction; their fancy, and imagination, and easy spanning of vast distances of thought; the enterprise or accosting of new subjects; and, generally, the easy exertion of power, astonish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries. I find not only the great masters out of all rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time charged with a masculine force and freedom.

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and closeness to the matter in hand, even in the second and third class of writers; and, I think, in the common style of the people, as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters, and public documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech. The more hearty and sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness of the Norseman was not all gone. Their dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the seventeenth century sentences and phrases of edge not to be matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by simple force of mind equalized themselves with the accumulated science of ours. The country gentlemen had a posset or drink they called October; and the poets, as if by this hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their autumnal verses: and, as nature, to pique the more, sometimes works up deformities into beauty, in some rare Aspasia, or Cleopatra; and, as the Greek art wrought many a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe, or nodes, or pits and flaws, are made a beauty of; so these were so quick and vital, that they could charm and enrich by mean and vulgar objects.

A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which masques and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly style, were received with favor. The unique fact in literary history, the unsurprised reception of Shakspeare, — the reception proved by his making his fortune; and the apathy proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric, — seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people. Judge of the splendor of a nation, by the insignificance of great individuals in it. The manner in which they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facilities were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed by their own searchings, — required a more robust memory, and cooperation of all the faculties; and their scholars, Camden, Usher, Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity and method of engineers.

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius. Their minds loved analogy; were cognizant of resemblances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. ‘T is a very old strife between those who elect to see identity, and those who elect to see discrepancies; and it renews itself in Britain. The poets, of course, are of one part; the men of the world, of the other. But Britain had many disciples of Plato, — More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chapman, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jeremy Taylor.

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations, on useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules of its genesis or its diffusion are not known. That knowledge, if we had it, would supersede all we call science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-chemistry; — the vital point being, — how far the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances predominated. For, wherever the mind takes a step, it is, to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class with which it has been conversant. Hence, all poetry, and all affirmative action comes.

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the analogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example) Platonists. Whoever discredits analogy, and requires heaps of facts, before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the Platonists, of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. ‘T is quite certain, that Spenser, Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists; and that the dull men will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb from the educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because such have no resistance.

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required in his map of the mind, first of all, universality, or prima philosophia, the receptacle for all such profitable observations and axioms as fall not within the compass of any of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common, and of a higher stage. He held this element essential: it is never out of mind: he never spares rebukes for such as neglect it; believing that no perfect discovery can be made in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a higher science. “If any man thinketh philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he does not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied; and this I take to be a great cause that has hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage.” He explained himself by giving various quaint examples of the summary or common laws, of which each science has its own illustration. He complains, that “he finds this part of learning very deficient, the profounder sort of wits drawing a bucket now and then for their own use, but the spring-head unvisited. This was the dry light which did scorch and offend most men’s watery natures.” Plato had signified the same sense, when he said: “All the great arts require a subtle and speculative research into the law of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect mastery over every subject seem to be derived from some such source as this. This Pericles had, in addition to a great natural genius. For, meeting with Anaxagoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached himself to him, and nourished himself with sublime speculations on the absolute intelligence; and imported thence into the oratorical art whatever could be useful to it.”

A few generalizations always circulate in the world, whose authors we do not rightly know, which astonish, and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of thought, and these are in the world constants, like the Copernican and Newtonian theories in physics. In England, these may be traced usually to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or Hooker, even to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do all have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks. Of this kind is Lord Bacon’s sentence, that “Nature is commanded by obeying her”; his doctrine of poetry, which “accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind”; or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, “apparent pictures of unapparent natures”; Spenser’s creed, that “soul is form, and doth the body make”; the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain assurance of the existence of matter; Doctor Samuel Clarke’s argument for theism from the nature of space and time; Harrington’s political rule, that power must rest on land, — a rule which requires to be liberally interpreted; the theory of Swedenborg, so cosmically applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and hell; Hegel’s study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and the victory of the deeper thought; the identity-philosophy of Schelling, couched in the statement that “all difference is quantitative.” So the very announcement of the theory of gravitation, of Kepler’s three harmonic laws, and even of Dalton’s doctrine of definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the mind, which remains a superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite these generalizations, some of which are more recent, merely to indicate a class. Not these particulars, but the mental plane or the atmosphere from which they emanate, was the home and element of the writers and readers in what we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say in literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson’s remark on Lord Bacon: “About his time, and within his view, were born all the wits that could honor a nation, or help study.”

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before. These heights could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, and have received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed races became effete. So it fared with English genius. These heights were followed by a meanness, and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his “understanding” the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later English want the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an insight of general laws, so deep, that the rule is deduced with equal precision from few subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives. Shakspeare is supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The German’s generalize: the English cannot interpret the German mind. German science comprehends the English. The absence of the faculty in England is shown by the timidity which accumulates mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of men and miles of redoubts, to compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.

The English shrink from a generalization. “They do not look abroad into universality, or they draw only a bucketful at the fountain of the First Philosophy for their occasion, and do not go to the spring-head.” Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his countrymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers. Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakspeare, used this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose. For a long interval afterwards, it is not found. Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line; as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass. Hume’s abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his fame to one keen observation, that no copula had been detected between any cause and effect, either in physics or in thought; that the term cause and effect was loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know only as consecutive, not at all as causal. Dr. Johnson’s written abstractions have little value: the tone of feeling in them makes their chief worth.

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written the history of European literature for three centuries, — a performance of great ambition, inasmuch as a judgment was to be attempted on every book. But his eye does not reach to the ideal standards; the verdicts are all dated from London: all new thought must be cast into the old moulds. The expansive element which creates literature is steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school. Hallam is uniformly polite, but with deficient sympathy; writes with resolute generosity, but is unconscious of the deep worth which lies in the mystics, and which often outvalues as a seed of power and a source of revolution all the correct writers and shining reputations of their day. He passes in silence, or dismisses with a kind of contempt, the profounder masters: a lover of ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam inspires respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his manifest love of good books, and he lifts himself to own better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hallam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one still finds the same type of English genius. It is wise and rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retrospective. How can it discern and hail the new forms that are looming up on the horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts which cannot dress themselves out of any old wardrobe of the past?

The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have the like municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural apprehension of the language of manners, and the varieties of street life, with pathos and laughter, with patriotic and still enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He is a painter of English details, like Hogarth; local and temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims. Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional ability, is distinguished for his reverence of intellect as a temporality, and appeals to the worldly ambition of the student. His romances tend to fan these low flames. Their novelists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe; — more ‘s the pity, he thinks; — but ‘t is not for us to be wiser: we must renounce ideals, and accept London.

The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on “fruit”; to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick-chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; — this not ironically, but in good faith; — that, “solid advantage,” as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years ends in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a saucepan. The critic hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical. To convince the reason, to touch the conscience, is romantic pretension. The fine arts fall to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist. It is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had been only the sensualist his critic pretends, he would never have acquired the fame which now entitles him to this patronage. It is because he had imagination, the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an element of contemplation out of all modern English atmospheric gauges, that he is impressive to the imaginations of men, and has become a potentate not to be ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any tutoring more or less of Newton, etc., but an effect of the same cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards in Hooke, Boyle, and Halley.

Coleridge, a catholic mind, with a hunger for ideas, with eyes looking before and after to the highest bards and sages, and who wrote and spoke the only high criticism in his time, is one of those who save England from the reproach of no longer possessing the capacity to appreciate what rarest wit the island has yielded. Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most inadequate performings, failing to accomplish any one masterpiece, seems to mark the closing of an era. Even in him, the traditional Englishman was too strong for the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations: and, as Burke had striven to idealize the English State, so Coleridge ‘narrowed his mind’ in the attempt to reconcile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church, with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking taciturn minority, uttering itself in occasional criticism, oftener in private discourse, one would say, that in Germany and in America is the best mind in England rightly respected. It is the surest sign of national decay, when the Bramins can no longer read or understand the Braminical philosophy.

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all this materialism, Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the pettiness and the cant, into the preaching of Fate. In comparison with all this rottenness, any check, any cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little difference in the gladiators, or the “causes” for which they combated; the one comfort was, that they were all going speedily into the abyss together. And his imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of the laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure force all minds into a few categories, and where impatience of the tricks of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds altars to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil is to heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat of will against fate.

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Halmeman, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place.

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone of English thought, and much more easy to adduce examples of excellence in particular veins; and if, going out of the region of dogma, we pass into that of general culture, there is no end to the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility, and erudition, of the learned class. But the artificial succor which marks all English performance, appears in letters also: much of their æsthetic production is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary reputations have been achieved by forcible men, whose relation to literature was purely accidental, but who were driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue into their several careers. So, at this moment, every ambitious young man studies geology; so members of Parliament are made, and churchmen.

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the national mind. They are incapable of an inutility, and respect the five mechanic powers even in their song. The voice of their modern muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, and the poem is created as an ornament and finish of their monarchy, and by no means as the bird of a new morning which forgets the past world in the full enjoyment of that which is forming. They are with difficulty ideal; they are the most conditioned men, as if, having the best conditions, they could not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one of them is a thousand years old, and lives by his memory; and when you say this, they accept it as praise.

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics, tabulation, and engineering, and even what is called philosophy and letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more. The tone of colleges and of scholars and of literary society has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert every variety of talent on a lower ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths of his mind, and confines himself to one fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labor, and logic: but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes; a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and Milton, and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they have known how to make it repulsive, and bereave nature of its charm; — though perhaps the complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many more than to British physicists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope like nature itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart as well as to the logic of creation. But English science puts humanity to the door. It wants the connection which is the test of genius. The science is false by not being poetic. It isolates the reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain; whilst reptile or mollusk only exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it as an inevitable step in the path of the Creator. But, in England, one hermit finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives and dies ignorant of its value. There are great exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas; perhaps of Robert Brown, the botanist; and of Richard Owen, who has imported into Britain the German homologies, and enriched science with contributions of his own, adding sometimes the divination of the old masters to the unbroken power of labor in the English mind. But for the most part, the natural science in England is out of its loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of imagination and free play of thought, as conveyancing. It stands in strong contrast with the genius of the Germans, those semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of their height of view, preserve their enthusiasm, and think for Europe.

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no secure striding from experiment onward to a foreseen law, but only a casual dipping here and there, like diggers in California “prospecting for a placer” that will pay. A horizon of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts down around his senses. Squalid contentment with conventions, satire at the names of philosophy and religion, parochial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample on nationalities to reproduce London and Londoners in Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of poetry, of religion, — ghosts which they cannot lay; and, having attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will sweep their system away. The artists say, “Nature puts us out”; the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry earnest speech with banter and levity; they laugh you down, or they change the subject. “The fact is,” say they over their wine, “all that about liberty, and so forth, is gone by; it won’t do any longer.” The practical and comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims, and the smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry. No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a Providence which does not respect English utility. The island is a roaring volcano of fate, of material values, of tariffs, and laws of repression, glutted markets and low prices.

In the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of knowledge, and the surrender to nature, there is the suppression of the imagination, the priapism of the senses and the understanding; we have the factitious instead of the natural; tasteless expense, arts of comfort, and the rewarding as an illustrious inventor whosoever will contrive one impediment more to interpose between the man and his objects.

Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses they print have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed! We want the miraculous; the beauty which we can manufacture at no mill, — can give no account of; the beauty of which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. The poetry of course is low and prosaic; only now and then, as in Wordsworth, conscientious; or in Byron, passional; or in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count the poets who have contributed to the Bible of existing England sentences of guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective, — how few! Shall I find my heavenly bread in the reigning poets? Where is great design in modern English poetry? The English have lost sight of the fact that poetry exists to speak the spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or of fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the limits of prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore the grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their designs, and less considered the finish. It was their office to lead to the divine sources, out of which all this, and much more, readily springs; and, if this religion is in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can well afford some staidness; or hardness, or want of popular tune in the verses.

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of Wordsworth. He had no master but nature and solitude. “He wrote a poem,” says Landor, “without the aid of war.” His verse is the voice of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. One regrets that his temperament was not more liquid and musical. He has written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest, he has no competitor.

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear than Tennyson’s, nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss the central form. Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the public, — a certificate of good sense and general power, since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as large as London, not in the same kind as London, but in his own kind. But he wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry, and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it is only a first success, when the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets has been to show how low and uninspired was their general style, and that only once or twice they have struck the high chord.

That expansiveness which is the essence of the poetic element, they have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, who said: “Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms.” A stanza of the song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he does not value the salient and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of truth, without a by-end.

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistible taste for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish life, made up of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no remedy like the Oriental largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts English decorum. For once there is thunder it never heard, light it never saw, and power which trifles with time and space. I am not surprised, then, to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings, who had been struck with the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings, deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen, while offering them a translation of the Bhagvat. “Might I,” he says, “an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimating the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references to such sentiments or manners as are become the standards of propriety for opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally, all appeals to our revealed tenets, of religion and moral duty.” [#] He goes on to bespeak indulgence to “ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into which our habits of judgment will find it difficult to pursue them.”

[#] Preface to Wilkins’s Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta.

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in the English race, which seems to make any recoil possible; in other words, there is at all times a minority of profound minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciating every soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency. While the constructive talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the criticism is often in the noblest tone, and suggests the presence of the invisible gods. I can well believe what I have often heard, that there are two nations in England; but it is not the Poor and the Rich; nor is it the Normans and Saxons; nor the Celt and the Goth. These are each always becoming the other; for Robert Owen does not exaggerate the power of circumstance. But the two complexions, or two styles of mind, — the perceptive class, and the practical finality class, — are ever in counterpoise, interacting mutually; one, in hopeless minorities; the other, in huge masses; one studious, contemplative, experimenting; the other, the ungrateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself of the knowledge for gain; these two nations, of genius and of animal force, though the first consist of only a dozen souls, and the second of twenty millions, forever by their discord and their accord yield the power of the English State.

THE “TIMES.”

The power of the newspaper is familiar in America, and in accordance with our political system. In England, it stands in antagonism with the feudal institutions, and it is all the more beneficent succor against the secretive tendencies of a monarchy. The celebrated Lord Somers “knew of no good law proposed and passed in his time, to which the public papers had not directed his attention.” There is no corner and no night. A relentless inquisition drags every secret to the day, turns the glare of this solar microscope on every malfaisance, so as to make the public a more terrible spy than any foreigner; and no weakness can be taken advantage of by an enemy, since the whole people are already forewarned. Thus England rids herself of those incrustations which have been the ruin of old states. Of course, this inspection is feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable monopoly, but sees surely that its days are counted; the people are familiarized with the reason of reform, and, one by one, take away every argument of the obstructives. “So your Grace likes the comfort of reading the newspapers,” said Lord Mansfield to the Duke of Northumberland; “mark my words; you and I shall not live to see it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or it may be a little later; but a little sooner or later, these newspapers will most assuredly write the dukes of Northumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the country out of its king.” The tendency in England towards social and political institutions like those of America, is inevitable, and the ability of its journals is the driving force.

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who possess the talent of writing off-hand pungent paragraphs, expressing with clearness and courage their opinion on any person or performance. Valuable or not, it is a skill that is rarely found, out of the English journals. The English do this, as they write poetry, as they ride and box, by being educated to it. Hundreds of clever Praeds, and Freres, and Froudes, and Hoods, and Hooks, and Maginns, and Mills, and Macaulays, make poems, or short essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Parliament and on the hustings, or, as they shoot and ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their general ability. Rude health and spirits, an Oxford education, and the habits of society are implied, but not a ray of genius. It comes of the crowded state of the professions, the violent interest which all men take in politics, the facility of experimenting in the journals, and high pay.

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the “Times” newspaper. No power in England is more felt, more feared, or more obeyed. What you read in the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the evening in all society. It has ears everywhere, and its information is earliest, completest, and surest. It has risen, year by year, and victory by victory, to its present authority. I asked one of its old contributors, whether it had once been abler than it is now. “Never,” he said; “these are its palmiest days.” It has shown those qualities which are dear to Englishmen, unflinching adherence to its objects, prodigal intellectual ability, and a towering assurance, backed by the perfect organization in its printing-house, and its world-wide network of correspondence and reports. It has its own history and famous trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of Queen Caroline, and carried it against the king. It adopted a poor-law system, and almost alone lifted it through. When Lord Brougham was in power, it decided against him, and pulled him down. It declared war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted the League against the Corn Laws, and, when Cobden had begun to despair, it announced his triumph. It denounced and discredited the French Republic of 1848, and checked every sympathy with it in England, until it had enrolled 200,000 special constables to watch the Chartists, and make them ridiculous on the 10th April. It first denounced and then adopted the new French Empire, and urged the French Alliance and its results. It has entered into each municipal, literary, and social question, almost with a controlling voice. It has done bold and seasonable service in exposing frauds which threatened the commercial community. Meantime, it attacks its rivals by perfecting its printing machinery, and will drive them out of circulation; for the only limit to the circulation of the “Times” is the impossibility of printing copies fast enough; since a daily paper can only be new and seasonable for a few hours. It will kill all but that paper which is diametrically in opposition; since many papers, first and last, have lived by their attacks on the leading journal.

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the “Times,” and had gradually arranged the whole materiel of it in perfect system. It is told, that when he demanded a small share in the proprietary, and was refused, he said, “As you please, gentlemen; and you may take away the ‘Times’ from this office when you will; I shall publish the ‘New Times’ next Monday morning.” The proprietors, who had already complained that his charges for printing were excessive, found that they were in his power, and gave him whatever he wished.

I went one day with a good friend to the “Times”: office, which was entered through a pretty garden-yard, in Printing-House Square. We walked with some circumspection, as if we were entering a powder-mill; but the door was opened by a mild old woman, and, by dint of some transmission of cards, we were at last conducted into the parlor of Mr. Morris, a very gentle person, with no hostile appearances. The statistics are now quite out of date, but I remember he told us that the daily printing was then 35,000 copies; that on the 1st March, 1848, the greatest number ever printed, — 54,000 were issued; that, since February, the daily circulation had increased by 8,000 copies. The old press they were then using printed five or six thousand sheets per hour; the new machine, for which they were then building an engine, would print twelve thousand per hour. Our entertainer confided us to a courteous assistant to show us the establishment, in which, I think, they employed a hundred and twenty men. I remember, I saw the reporters’ room, in which they redact their hasty stenographs, but the editor’s room, and who is in it, I did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind respecting it.

The staff of the “Times” has always been made up of able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Alsiger, Horace Twiss, Jones Loyd, John Oxenford, Mr. Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to its renown in their special departments. But it has never wanted the first pens for occasional assistance. Its private information is inexplicable, and recalls the stories of Fouché’s police, whose omniscience made it believed that the Empress Josephine must be in his pay. It has mercantile and political correspondents in every foreign city; and its expresses outrun the despatches of the government. One hears anecdotes of the rise of its servants, as of the functionaries of the India House. I was told of the dexterity of one of its reporters, who, finding himself, on one occasion, where the magistrates had strictly forbidden reporters, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with pencil in one hand, and tablet in the other, did his work.

The influence of this journal is a recognized power in Europe, and, of course, none is more conscious of it than its conductors. The tone of its articles has often been the occasion of comment from the official organs of the continental courts, and sometimes the ground of diplomatic complaint. What would the “Times” say? is a terror in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen, and in Nepaul. Its consummate discretion and success exhibit the English skill of combination. The daily paper is the work of many hands, chiefly, it is said, of young men recently from the University, and perhaps reading law in chambers in London. Hence the academic elegance, and classic allusion, which adorn its columns. Hence, too, the heat and gallantry of its onset. But the steadiness of the aim suggests the belief that this fire is directed and fed by older engineers; as if persons of exact information, and with settled views of policy, supplied the writers with the basis of fact, and the object to be attained, and availed themselves of their younger energy and eloquence to plead the cause. Both the council and the executive departments gain by this division. Of two men of equal ability, the one who does not write, but keeps his eye on the course of public affairs, will have the higher judicial wisdom. But the parts are kept in concert; all the articles appear to proceed from a single will. The “Times” never disapproves of what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology for the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him who held the pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sticks to what it says. It draws from any number of learned and skilful contributors; but a more learned and skilful person supervises, corrects, and co-ordinates. Of this closet, the secret does not transpire. No writer is suffered to claim the authorship of any paper; everything good, from whatever quarter, comes out editorially; and thus, by making the paper everything, and those who write it nothing, the character and the awe of the journal gain.

The English like it for its complete information. A statement of fact in the “Times” is as reliable as a citation from Hansard. Then, they like its independence; they do not know, when they take it up, what their paper is going to say; but, above all, for the nationality and confidence of its tone. It thinks for them all; it is their understanding and day’s ideal daguerreotyped. When I see them reading its columns, they seem to me becoming every moment more British. It has the national courage, not rash and petulant, but considerate and determined. No dignity or wealth is a shield from its assault. It attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, and with the most provoking airs of condescension. It makes rude work with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench of Bishops is still less safe. One bishop fares badly for his rapacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third for his courtliness. It addresses occasionally a hint to majesty itself, and sometimes a hint which is taken. There is an air of freedom even in their advertising columns, which speaks well for England to a foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London in 1847, I read among the daily announcements, one offering a reward of fifty pounds to any person who would put a nobleman, described by name and title, late a member of Parliament, into any county jail in England, he having been convicted of obtaining money under false pretences.

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper. Every slip of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian who writes his first leader assumes that we subdued the earth before we sat down to write this particular “Times.” One would think the world was on its knees to the “Times” Office, for its daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calculated. Who would care for it, if it “surmised,” or “dared to confess,” or “ventured to predict,” etc.? No; it is so, and so it shall be.

The morality and patriotism of the “Times” claims only to be representative, and by no means ideal. It gives the argument, not of the majority, but of the commanding class. Its editors know better than to defend Russia, or Austria, or English vested rights, on abstract grounds. But they give a voice to the class who, at the moment, take the lead; and they have an instinct for finding where the power now lies, which is eternally shifting its banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking for the class that rules the hour, yet, being apprised of every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, every Church squabble, every strike in the mills, they detect the first tremblings of change. They watch the hard and bitter struggles of the authors of each liberal movement, year by year, — watching them only to taunt and obstruct them, — until, at last, when they see that these have established their fact, that power is on the point of passing to them, they strike in, with the voice of a monarch, astonish those whom they succor, as much as those whom they desert, and make victory sure. Of course, the aspirants see that the “Times” is one of the goods of fortune, not to be won but by winning their cause.

“Punch” is equally an expression of English good sense, as the “London Times.” It is the comic version of the same sense. Many of its caricatures are equal to the best pamphlets, and will convey to the eye in an instant the popular view which was taken of each turn of public affairs. Its sketches are usually made by masterly hands, and sometimes with genius; the delight of every class, because uniformly guided by that taste which is tyrannical in England. It is a new trait of the nineteenth century, that the wit and humor of England, as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray, Hood, have taken the direction of humanity and freedom.

The “Times,” like every important institution, shows the way to a better. It is a living index of the colossal British power. Its existence honors the people who dare to print all they know, dare to know all the facts, and do not wish to be flattered by hiding the extent of the public disaster. There is always safety in valor. I wish I could add, that this journal aspired to deserve the power it wields, by guidance of the public sentiment to the right. It is usually pretended, in Parliament and elsewhere, that the English press has a high tone, — which it has not. It has an imperial tone, as of a powerful and independent nation. But as with other empires, its tone is prone to be official, and even officinal. The “Times” shares all the limitations of the governing classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. If only it dared to cleave to the right, to show the right to be the only expedient, and feed its batteries from the central heart of humanity, it might not have so many men of rank among its contributors, but genius would be its cordial and invincible ally; it might now and then bear the brunt of formidable combinations, but no journal is ruined by wise courage. It would be the natural leader of British reform; its proud function, that of being the voice of Europe, the defender of the exile and patriot against despots, would be more effectually discharged; it would have the authority which is claimed for that dream of good men not yet come to pass, an International Congress; and the least of its victories would be to give to England a new millennium of beneficent power.

STONEHENGE.

It had been agreed between my friend Mr. C. and me, that before I left England we should make an excursion together to Stonehenge, which neither of us had seen; and the project pleased my fancy with the double attraction of the monument and the companion. It seemed a bringing together of extreme points, to visit the oldest religious monument in Britain in company with her latest thinker, and one whose influence may be traced in every contemporary book. I was glad to sum up a little my experiences, and to exchange a few reasonable words on the aspects of England, with a man on whose genius I set a very high value, and who had as much penetration, and as severe a theory of duty as any person in it. On Friday, 7th July, we took the South-western Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, where we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The fine weather and my friend’s local knowledge of Hampshire, in which he is wont to spend a part of every summer, made the way short. There was much to say, too, of the travelling Americans, and their usual objects in London. I thought it natural that they should give some time to works of art collected here, which they cannot find at home, and a little to scientific clubs and museums, which, at this moment, make London very attractive. But my philosopher was not contented. Art and ‘high art’ is a favorite target for his wit. “Yes, Kunst is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted a great deal of good time on it”: — and he thinks he discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, in his later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin to talk of art, architecture, and antiquities, nothing good comes of it. He wishes to go through the British Museum in silence, and thinks a sincere man will see something, and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it would become an architect to consult only the grim necessity, and say, ‘I can build you a coffin for such dead persons as you are, and for such dead purposes as you have, but you shall have no ornament.’ For the science, he had, if possible, even less tolerance, and compared the savans of Somerset House to the boy who asked Confucius “how many stars in the sky?” Confucius replied, “he minded things near him”; then said the boy, “how many hairs are there in your eyebrows?” Confucius said, “he didn’t know and didn’t care.”

Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that they dislike the coldness and exclusiveness of the English, and run away to France, and go with their countrymen, and are amused, instead of manfully staying in London, and confronting Englishmen, and acquiring their culture, who really have much to teach them.

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accustomed to concede readily all that an Englishman would ask; I saw everywhere in the country proofs of sense and spirit, and success of every sort: I like the people: they are as good as they are handsome; they have everything, and can do everything: but meantime, I surely know, that, as soon as I return to Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into the feeling, which the geography of America inevitably inspires, that we play the game with immense advantage; that there and not here is the seat and centre of the British race; and that no skill or activity can long compete with the prodigious natural advantages of that country, in the hands of the same race; and that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children. But this was a proposition which no Englishman of whatever condition can easily entertain.

We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage to Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare, treeless hill, once containing the town which sent two members to Parliament, — now, not a hut, — and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner, we walked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs in the wide expanse, — Stonehenge and the barrows, which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few hay-ricks. On the top of a mountain, the old temple would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a bagman drove along the road. It looked as if the wide margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple were accorded by the veneration of the British race to the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures and history had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings, and found a nook sheltered from the wind among them, where C. lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see, that just this simplest of all simple structures — two upright stones and a lintel laid across — had long outstood all later churches, and all history, and were like what is most permanent on the face of the planet: these, and the barrows, — mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge), like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still makes good to the passing mariner on Hellespont, the vaunt of Homer and the fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, wild thyme, daisy, meadow-sweet, golden-rod, thistle, and the carpeting grass. Over us, larks were soaring and singing, — as my friend said: “the larks which were hatched last year, and the wind which was hatched many thousand years ago.” We counted and measured by paces the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are ninety-four stones, and there were once probably one hundred and sixty. The temple is circular, and uncovered, and the situation fixed astronomically; — the grand entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly north-east, “as all the gates of the old cavern temples are.” How came the stones here? for these sarsens or Druidical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood. The sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these blocks, that can resist the action of fire, and as I read in the books, must have been brought one hundred and fifty miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the mineralogist’s hammer and chisel. The nineteen smaller stones of the inner circle are of granite. I, who had just come from Professor Sedgwick’s Cambridge Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off and laid these rocks one on another. Only the good beasts must have known how to cut a well-wrought tenon and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the stones. The chief mystery is, that any mystery should have been allowed to settle on so remarkable a monument, in a country on which all the muses have kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not yet too late to learn much more than is known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncovers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age for the accurate history it will yet eliminate. We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones. The old sphinx put our petty differences of nationality out of sight. To these conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike known and near. We could equally well revere their old British meaning. My philosopher was subdued and gentle. In this quiet house of destiny, he happened to say, “I plant cypresses wherever I go, and if I am in search of pain, I cannot go wrong.” The spot, the gray blocks, and their rude order, which refuses to be disposed of, suggested to him the flight of ages, and the succession of religious. The old times of England impress C. much; he reads little, he says, in these last years, but “Acta Sanctorum,” the fifty-three volumes of which are in the “London Library.” He finds all English history therein. He can see, as he reads, the old saint of Iona sitting there, and writing, a man to men. The Acta Sanctorum show plainly that the men of those times believed in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as their abbeys and cathedrals testify: now, even the puritanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied that greater men had lived in England than any of her writers; and, in fact, about the time when those writers appeared, the last of these were already gone.

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to return the next morning, and coming back two miles to our inn, we were met by little showers, and late as it was, men and women were out attempting to protect their spread windrows. The grass grows rank and dark in the showery England. At the inn, there was only milk for one cup of tea. When we called for more, the girl brought us three drops. My friend was annoyed who stood for the credit of an English inn, and still more, the next morning, by the dog-cart, sole procurable vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. I engaged the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go with us to Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew of the “astronomical” and “sacrificial” stones. I stood on the last, and he pointed to the upright, or rather, inclined stone, called the “astronomical,” and bade me notice that its top ranged with the sky-line. “Yes.” Very well. Now, at the summer solstice, the sun rises exactly over the top of that stone, and, at the Druidical temple at Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, in the same relative positions.

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science becomes an important clew; but we were content to leave the problem, with the rocks. Was this the “Giants’ Dance” which Merlin brought from Killaraus, in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon’s monument to the British nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates? or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained to King James; or identical in design and style with the East Indian temples of the sun; as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains? Of all the writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic antiquary, charmed with the geometric perfections of his ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments and religion of the world, and, with the courage of his tribe, does not stick to say, “the Deity who made the world by the scheme of Stonehenge.” He finds that the cursus23 on Salisbury Plain stretches across the downs, like a line of latitude upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stonehenge passes exactly through the middle of this cursus. But here is the high point of the theory: the Druids had the magnet; laid their courses by it; their cardinal points in Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true east and west, followed the variations of the compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The name of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, and Hercules was the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box? This cup or little boat, in which the magnet was made to float on water, and so show the north, was probably its first form, before it was suspended on a pin. But science was an arcanum, and, as Britain was a Phoenician secret, so they kept their compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian commerce. The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the compass, — a bit of loadstone, easily supposed to be the only one in the world, and therefore naturally awakening the cupidity and ambition of the young heroes of a maritime nation to join in an expedition to obtain possession of this wise stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo was loquacious and oracular. There is also some curious coincidence in the names. Apollodorus makes Magnes the son of Æolus, who married Nais. On hints like these, Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade into historic harmony, and computing backward by the known variations of the compass, bravely assigns the year 406 before Christ for the date of the temple.

For the difficulty of handling and carrying stones of this size, the like is done in all cities, every day, with no other aid than horse-power. I chanced to see a year ago men at work on the substructure of a house in Bowdoin Square, in Boston, swinging a block of granite of the size of the largest of the Stonehenge columns with an ordinary derrick. The men were common masons, with paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing anything remarkable. I suppose there were as good men a thousand years ago. And we wonder how Stonehenge was built and forgotten. After spending half an hour on the spot, we set forth in our dog-cart over the downs for Wilton, C. not suppressing some threats and evil omens on the proprietors, for keeping these broad plains a wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of Englishmen were hungry and wanted labor. But I heard afterwards that it is not an economy to cultivate this land, which only yields one crop on being broken up, and is then spoiled.

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall, — the renowned seat of the Earls of Pembroke, a house known to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia; where he conversed with Lord Brooke, a man of deep thought, and a poet, who caused to be engraved on his tombstone, “Here lies Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney.” It is now the property of the Earl of Pembroke, and the residence of his brother, Sidney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble specimen of the English manor-hall. My friend had a letter from Mr. Herbert to his housekeeper, and the house was shown. The state drawing-room is a double cube, thirty feet high, by thirty wide, by sixty feet long: the adjoining room is a single cube, of thirty feet every way. Although these apartments and the long library were full of good family portraits, Vandykes and other; and though there were some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full of antique and modern statuary, — to which C., catalogue in hand, did all too much justice, — yet the eye was still drawn to the windows, to a magnificent lawn, on which grew the finest cedars in England. I had not seen more charming grounds. We went out, and walked over the estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones over a stream, of which the gardener did not know the name, (Qu. Alph?) watched the deer; climbed to the lonely sculptured summer-house, on a hill backed by a wood; came down into the Italian garden, and into a French pavilion, garnished with French busts; and so, again to the house, where we found a table laid for us with bread, meats, peaches, grapes, and wine.

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury. The Cathedral which was finished six hundred years ago has even a spruce and modern air, and its spire is the highest in England. I know not why, but I had been more struck with one of no fame at Coventry, which rises three hundred feet from the ground, with the lightness of a mullein-plant, and not at all implicated with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the culmination of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses are fully unmasked, and honestly detailed from the sides of the pile. The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed by the organ in the middle, acting like a screen. I know not why in real architecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified. The rule of art is that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and that ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom so long that it need be divided by a screen.

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst service was said. Whilst we listened to the organ, my friend remarked, the music is good and yet not quite religious, but somewhat as if a monk were panting to some fine Queen of Heaven. C. was unwilling, and we did not ask to have the choir shown us, but returned to our inn, after seeing another old church of the place. We passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could see little but the edge of a wood, though C. had wished to pay closer attention to the birthplace of the Decrees of Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we stopped, and found Mr. H., who received us in his carriage, and took us to his house at Bishops Waltham.

On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very rainy day. My friends ask, whether there were any Americans? — any with an American idea, — any theory of the right future of that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe. I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, ‘Certainly yes; but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the only true.’ So I opened the dogma of no government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-worship, — though great men be musket-worshippers; and ‘t is certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on C., and I insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinage in London or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, “Monsieur, je n’en vois pas la nécessité.”24 As I had thus taken in the conversation the saint’s part, when dinner was announced, C. refused to go out before me,— “he was altogether too wicked.” I planted my back against the wall, and our host wittily rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he was the wickedest, and would walk out first, then C. followed, and I went last.

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accompanied us in the afternoon, my friends asked many questions respecting American landscape, forests, houses, — my house, for example. It is not easy to answer these queries well. There I thought, in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves; and on it man seems not able to make much impression. There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany pastures, in the sea-wide, sky-skirted prairie, still sleeps and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since driven away from the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite too sensible of this. Every one is on his good behavior, and must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put off my friends with very inadequate details, as best I could.

Just before entering Winchester, we stopped at the Church of Saint Cross, and, after looking through the quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a draught of beer, which the founder, Henry de Blois, in 1136, commanded should be given to every one who should ask it at the gate. We had both, from the old couple who take care of the church. Some twenty people, every day, they said, make the same demand. This hospitality of seven hundred years’ standing did not hinder C. from pronouncing a malediction on the priest who receives £2,000 a year, that were meant for the poor, and spends a pittance on this small-beer and crumbs.

In the Cathedral, I was gratified, at least by the ample dimensions. The length of line exceeds that of any other English church; being 556 feet by 250 in breadth of transept. I think I prefer this church to all I have seen, except Westminster and York. Here was Canute buried, and here Alfred the Great was crowned and buried, and here the Saxon kings: and, later, in his own church, William of Wykeham. It is very old: part of the crypt into which we went down and saw the Saxon and Norman arches of the old church on which the present stands, was built fourteen or fifteen hundred years ago. Sharon Turner says: “Alfred was buried at Winchester, in the Abbey he had founded there, but his remains were removed by Henry I. to the new Abbey in the meadows at Hyde, on the northern quarter of the city, and laid under the high altar. The building was destroyed at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred’s body now lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in the ruins of the old.”25 William of Wykeham’s shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and C. took hold of the recumbent statue’s marble hands, and patted them affectionately, for he rightly values the brave man who built Windsor, and this Cathedral, and the School here, and New College at Oxford. But it was growing late in the afternoon. Slowly we left the old house, and parting with our host, we took the train for London.

PERSONAL.

In these comments on an old journey now revised after seven busy years have much changed men and things in England, I have abstained from reference to persons, except in the last chapter, and in one or two cases where the fame of the parties seemed to have given the public a property in all that concerned them. I must further allow myself a few notices, if only as an acknowledgment of debts that cannot be paid. My journeys were cheered by so much kindness from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable memories both of public societies and of households; and, what is nowhere better found than in England, a cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy home, “with honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,” is of all institutions the best. At the landing in Liverpool, I found my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gentleman whose kind reception was followed by a train of friendly and effective attentions which never rested whilst I remained in the country. A man of sense and of letters, the editor of a powerful local journal, he added to solid virtues an infinite sweetness and bonhommie. There seemed a pool of honey about his heart which lubricated all his speech and action with fine jets of mead. An equal good-fortune attended many later accidents of my journey, until the sincerity of English kindness ceased to surprise. My visit fell in the fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was the American Minister in London, and at his house, or through his good offices, I had easy access to excellent persons and to privileged places. At the house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in society and in letters. The privileges of the Athenæum and of the Reform Clubs were hospitably opened to me, and I found much advantage in the circles of the “Geologic,” the “Antiquarian,” and the “Royal Societies.” Every day in London gave me new opportunities of meeting men and women who give splendor to society. I saw Rogers, Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Leigh Hunt, D’Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey, Kenyon, and Forster: the younger poets, Clough, Arnold, and Patmore; and, among the men of science, Robert Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker, Carpenter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. It was my privilege also to converse with Miss Baillie, with Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson, and Mrs. Somerville. A finer hospitality made many private houses not less known and dear. It is not in distinguished circles that wisdom and elevated characters are usually found, or, if found, not confined thereto; and my recollections of the best hours go back to private conversations in different parts of the kingdom, with persons little known. Nor am I insensible to the courtesy which frankly opened to me some noble mansions, if I do not adorn my page with their names. Among the privileges of London, I recall with pleasure two or three signal days, one at Kew, where Sir William Hooker showed me all the riches of the vast botanic garden; one at the Museum, where Sir Charles Fellowes explained in detail the history of his Ionic trophy-monument; and still another, on which Mr. Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and myself through the Hunterian Museum.

The like frank hospitality, bent on real service, I found among the great and the humble, wherever I went; in Birmingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, in Sheffield, in Manchester, in Liverpool. At Edinburgh, through the kindness of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the acquaintance of De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson, of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of high character and genius, the short-lived painter David Scott.

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for a couple of days the guest of Miss Martineau, then newly returned from her Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon, I accompanied her to Rydal Mount. And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth, many years before, I must not forget this second interview. We found Mr. Wordsworth asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed, as an old man, suddenly waked, before he had ended his nap; but soon became full of talk on the French news. He was nationally bitter on the French: bitter on Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English. He detailed the two models, on one or the other of which all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed. Nor could Jeffrey, nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write English, nor can .... who is a pest to the English tongue. Incidentally he added, Gibbon cannot write English. The Edinburgh Review wrote what would tell and what would sell. It had however changed the tone of its literary criticism from the time when a certain letter was written to the editor by Coleridge. Mrs. W. had the Editor’s answer in her possession. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic genius, though with some affectation. He had thought an elder brother of Tennyson at first the better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one..... In speaking of I know not what style, he said, “To be sure it was the manner, but then you know the matter always comes out of the manner.” .... He thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for a great capital city..... We talked of English national character. I told him it was not creditable that no one in all the country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in every American library his translations are found. I said, if Plato’s Republic were published in England as a new book to-day, do you think it would find any readers? — he confessed, it would not: “And yet,” he added after a pause, with that complacency which never deserts a true-born Englishman,— “and yet we have embodied it all.”

His opinions of French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed rashly formulized from little anecdotes of what had befallen himself and members of his family, in a diligence or stage-coach. His face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special force or elevation. Yet perhaps it is a high compliment to the cultivation of the English generally, when we find such a man not distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a weather-beaten face, his face corrugated, especially the large nose.

Miss Martineau, who lived near him, praised him to me, not for his poetry, but for thrift and economy; for having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household, where comfort and culture were secured without any display. She said, that, in his early housekeeping at the cottage where he first lived, he was accustomed to offer his friends bread and plainest fare: if they wanted anything more, they must pay him for their board. It was the rule of the house. I replied, that it evinced English pluck more than any anecdote I knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood told the story of Walter Scott’s once staying a week with Wordsworth, and slipping out every day under pretence of a walk, to the Swan Inn, for a cold cut and porter; and one day passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by the landlord’s asking him if he had come for his porter. Of course, this trait would have another look in London, and there you will hear from different literary men, that Wordsworth had no personal friend, that he was not amiable, that he was parsimonious, etc. Landor, always generous, says that he never praised anybody. A gentleman in London showed me a watch that once belonged to Milton, whose initials are engraved on its face. He said, he once showed this to Wordsworth, who took it in one hand, then drew out his own watch, and held it up with the other, before the company, but no one making the expected remark, he put back his own in silence. I do not attach much importance to the disparagement of Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads him well will know, that in following the strong bent of his genius, he was careless of the many, careless also of the few, self-assured that he should “create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” He lived long enough to witness the revolution he had wrought, and “to see what he foresaw.” There are torpid places in his mind, there is something hard and sterile in his poetry, want of grace and variety, want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan scope: he had conformities to English politics and traditions; he had egotistic puerilities in the choice and treatment of his subjects; but let us say of him, that, alone in his time, he treated the human mind well, and with an absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic creed rested on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the high-water mark which the intellect has reached in this age. New means were employed, and new realms added to the empire of the muse, by his courage.

RESULT.

England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal framework, it is an old pile built in different ages, with repairs, additions, and makeshifts; but you see the poor best you have got. London is the epitome of our times, and the Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand in solid phalanx foursquare to the points of compass; they constitute the modern world, they have earned their vantage-ground, and held it through ages of adverse possession. They are well marked and differing from other leading races. England is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so public in its bias; private life is its place of honor. Truth in private life, untruth in public, marks these home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal and family interest. They cannot readily see beyond England. The history of Rome and Greece, when written by their scholars, degenerates into English party pamphlets. They cannot see beyond England, nor in England can they transcend the interests of the governing classes. “English principles” mean a primary regard to the interests of property. England, Scotland, and Ireland combine to check the colonies. England and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures and trade. England rallies at home to check Scotland. In England, the strong classes check the weaker. In the home population of near thirty millions, there are but one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, punishes education. Down to a late day, marriages performed by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The game-laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism incrusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted. Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities, the children are trained to beg, until they shall be old enough to rob. Men and women were convicted of poisoning scores of children for burial fees. In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape. The nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form. During the Australian emigration, multitudes were rejected by the commissioners as being too emaciated for useful colonists. During the Russian war, few of those that offered as recruits were found up to the medical standard, though it had been reduced.

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and lavish of money, has not often been generous or just. It has a principal regard to the interest of trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which usually puts him in sympathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary.

Some public regards they have. They have abolished slavery in the West Indies, and put an end to human sacrifices in the East. At home they have a certain statute hospitality. England keeps open doors, as a trading country must, to all nations. It is one of their fixed ideas, and wrathfully supported by their laws in unbroken sequence for a thousand years. In Magna Charta it was ordained, that all “merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out and come into England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs, without any evil toll, except in time of war, or when they shall be of any nation at war with us.” It is a statute and obliged hospitality, and peremptorily maintained. But this shop-rule had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold unalterable courtesy to political exiles of every opinion, and is a fact which might give additional light to that portion of the planet seen from the farthest star. But this perfunctory hospitality puts no sweetness into their unaccommodating manners, no check on that puissant nationality which makes their existence incompatible with all that is not English.

What we must say about a nation is a superficial dealing with symptoms. We cannot go deep enough into the biography of the spirit who never throws himself entire into one hero, but delegates his energy in parts or spasms to vicious and defective individuals. But the wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English nature. What variety of power and talent; what facility and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty, loyalty; what a proud chivalry is indicated in “Collins’s Peerage,” through eight hundred years! What dignity resting on what reality and stoutness! What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning workmen, what inventors and engineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks and scholars! No one man and no few men can represent them. It is a people of myriad personalities. Their many-headedness is owing to the advantageous position of the middle class, who are always the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty of their æsthetic production. As they are many-headed, so they are many-nationed; their colonization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and their speech seems destined to be the universal language of men. I have noted the reserve of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the length of all the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the time of Mahomet, or like that which intoxicated France in 1789. But who would see the uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates, mainly following the belt of empire, the temperate zones, carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought, — acquiring under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows, — to the conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy, obeying the necessities of a vast empire, has become liberal. Canada and Australia have been contented with substantial independence. They are expiating the wrongs of India, by benefits: first, in works for the irrigation of the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs; and secondly, in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self-government, when the British power shall be finally called home.

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, — a divine cripple like Vulcan; a blind savant like Huber and Sanderson. They do not occupy themselves on matters of general and lasting import, but on a corporeal civilization, on goods that perish in the using. But they read with good intent, and what they learn they incarnate. The English mind turns every abstraction it can receive into a portable utensil, or a working institution. Such is their tenacity, and such their practical turn, that they hold all they gain. Hence we say, that only the English race can be trusted with freedom, — freedom which is double-edged and dangerous to any but the wise and robust. The English designate the kingdoms emulous of free institutions as the sentimental nations. Their own culture is not an outside varnish, but is thorough and secular in families and the race. They are oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that they are refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with my countrymen, when I was forced to allow them every advantage, and their companions seemed bags of bones. There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought, sleepy routine, and a tortoise’s instinct to hold hard to the ground with his claws, lest he should be thrown on his back. There is a drag of inertia which resists reform in every shape; law-reform, army-reform, extension of suffrage, Jewish franchise, Catholic emancipation, — the abolition of slavery, of impressment, penal code, and entails. They praise this drag, under the formula, that it is the excellence of the British constitution, that no law can anticipate the public opinion. These poor tortoises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprouting at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their heart, and waits a happier hour. It hides in their sturdy will. “Will,” said the old philosophy, “is the measure of power,” and personality is the token of this race. Quid vult valde vult. What they do they do with a will. You cannot account for their success by their Christianity, commerce, charter, common law, Parliament, or letters, but by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy of English naturel, with a poise impossible to disturb, which makes all these its instruments. They are slow and reticent, and are like a dull good horse which lets every nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run down every racer in the field. They are right in their feeling, though wrong in their speculation.

The feudal system survives in the steep inequality of property and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the social barriers which confine patronage and promotion to a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas pervading these people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none from those above him; any forbearance from his superiors surprises him, and they suffer in his good opinion. But the feudal system can be seen with less pain on large historical grounds. It was pleaded in mitigation of the rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial justice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan, Romilly, or whatever national men, were by this means sent to Parliament, when their return by large constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say, that the right measures of England are the men it bred; that it has yielded more able men in five hundred years than any other nation; and, though we must not play Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten great men against the comfort of ten thousand mean men, yet retrospectively we may strike the balance, and prefer one Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one Raleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats.

The American system is more democratic, more humane; yet the American people do not yield better or more able men, or more inventions or books or benefits, than the English. Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament. France has abolished its suffocating old régime, but is not recently marked by any more wisdom or virtue.

The power of performance has not been exceeded, — the creation of value. The English have given importance to individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society. Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is, and is guarded in the indulgence of his whim. “Magna Charta,” said Rushworth, “is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.” By this general activity, and by this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hundred years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it will be remembered as an island famous for immortal laws, for the announcements of original right which make the stone tables of liberty.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER.

A few days after my arrival at Manchester, in November, 1847, the Manchester Athenæum gave its annual Banquet in the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, I was invited to be present, and to address the company. In looking over recently a newspaper report of my remarks, I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing the feeling with which I entered England, and which agrees well enough with the more deliberate results of better acquaintance recorded in the foregoing pages. Sir Archibald Alison, the historian, presided, and opened the meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr. Cobden, Lord Brackley, and others, among whom was Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to “Punch.” Mr. Dickens’s letter of apology for his absence was read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been announced, did not appear. On being introduced to the meeting I said: —

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: It is pleasant to me to meet this great and brilliant company, and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so many distinguished persons on this platform. But I have known all these persons already. When I was at home, they were as near to me as they are to you. The arguments of the League and its leader are known to all the friends of free trade. The gayeties and genius, the political, the social, the parietal wit of “Punch” go duly every fortnight to every boy and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when I came to sea, I found the “History of Europe”26 on the ship’s cabin table, the property of the captain; — a sort of programme or play-bill to tell the seafaring New-Englander what he shall find on his landing here. And as for Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to print on, where it is not found; no man who can read, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he finds some charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears it.

But these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though true, would better come from one who felt and understood these merits more. I am not here to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of that which I am sure interests these gentlemen more than their own praises; of that which is good in holidays and working-days, the same in one century and in another century. That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race, — its commanding sense of right and wrong, — the love and devotion to that, — this is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre of the globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of that aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight of, but which, if it should lose this, would find itself paralyzed; and in trade, and in the mechanic’s shop, gives that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solidity of work, which is a national characteristic. This conscience is one element, and the other is that loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that homage of man to man, running through all classes, — the electing of worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kindness and warm and stanch support, from year to year, from youth to age, — which is alike lovely and honorable to those who render and those who receive it; — which stands in strong contrast with the superficial attachments of other races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived connection.

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holiday though it be, I have not the smallest interest in any holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended joys; and I think it just, in this time of gloom and commercial disaster, of affliction and beggary in these districts, that on these very accounts I speak of, you should not fail to keep your literary anniversary. I seem to hear you say, that, for all that is come and gone yet, we will not reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the braveries of our annual feast. For I must tell you, I was given to understand in my childhood, that the British island from which my forefathers came, was no lotus-garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses and music and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold, foggy, mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open air, but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until they quarrelled: they did not strike twelve the first time; good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about them till you had seen them long, and little good of them till you had seen them in action; that in prosperity they were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were grand. Is it not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not praise the ship parting with flying colors from the port, but only that brave sailer which came back with torn sheets and battered sides, stript of her banners, but having ridden out the storm? And so, gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England, with the possessions, honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably committed as she now is to many old customs which cannot be suddenly changed; pressed upon by the transitions of trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts, machines, and competing populations, — I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before; indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with strength still equal to the time; still wise to entertain and swift to execute the policy which the mind and heart of mankind require in the present hour, and thus only hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to the thoughtful and generous who are born in the soil. So be it! so let it be! If it be not so, if the courage of England goes with the chances of a commercial crisis, I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, the old race are all gone, and the elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghauy ranges, or nowhere.

THE END

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

This collection was published in 1860 and is composed of nine essays, each preceded by a poem. These nine essays are largely based on lectures Emerson gave throughout the United States, including speeches for a young, mercantile audience in the lyceums of the Midwestern boomtowns of the 1850s. Three years after publishing his English Traits, Boston’s Ticknor & Fields announced on 27 December 1859, an “early appearance” of a new book by Emerson titled The Conduct of Life. Confirmed as “completed” on 10 November 1860, Emerson’s seventh major work came out on 12 December of the same year — simultaneously in America and in Great Britain. The book was advertised as “matured philosophy of the transatlantic sage” and sold as a collector’s item “uniform in size and style with Mr. Emerson’s previous works.”

Though hailed by Thomas Carlyle as “the writer’s best book” and despite its commercial success, initial critical reactions to The Conduct of Life were mixed at best. The Knickerbocker praised it for its “healthy tone” and called it “the most practical of Mr. Emerson’s works,” while The Atlantic Monthly attested that “literary ease and flexibility do not always advance with an author’s years” and thought the essays inferior to Emerson’s earlier work. Yale’s The New Englander while complimenting Emerson’s abilities, criticised the book as depicting “a universe bereft of its God” and described its author as writing “with the air of a man who is accustomed to be looked up to with admiring and unquestioning deference.” Littell’s Living Age found the book to contain the “weakest kind of commonplace elaborately thrown into unintelligible shapes” and claimed it to read in parts like an “emasculate passage of Walt Whitman.”

In this book, Emerson sets out to answer, what he calls, “the question of the times: ‘How shall I live?’” In the first essay, Fate, Emerson introduces the basic idealist principles of The Conduct of Life and seeks to reconcile the seemingly contradicting ideas of freedom and fate through a unifying Weltgeist-approach. He claims that even though the “bulk of mankind believe in two gods” — namely free will and Providence — these concepts are really “under one dominion” and expressions of the same beneficial force. “A breath of will blows eternally,” he writes “through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary.” Historical and societal events are therefore not merely an expression of individual actions and thought but result of “the will of all mind” and necessitated by nature: “When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done.”

The original title page

CONTENTS

FATE.

POWER.

WEALTH.

CULTURE

BEHAVIOR.

WORSHIP.

CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.

BEAUTY.

ILLUSIONS.

FATE.

Delicate omens traced in air

To the lone bard true witness bare;

Birds with auguries on their wings

Chanted undeceiving things

Him to beckon, him to warn;

Well might then the poet scorn

To learn of scribe or courier

Hints writ in vaster character;

And on his mind, at dawn of day,

Soft shadows of the evening lay.

For the prevision is allied

Unto the thing so signified;

Or say, the foresight that awaits

Is the same Genius that creates.

It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. It so happened that the subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals issued in London in the same season. To me, however, the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition. We can only obey our own polarity. ’Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation.

In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable limitations. We are fired with the hope to reform men. After many experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, — at school. But the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them. We decide that they are not of good stock. We must begin our reform earlier still, — at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or laws of the world.

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, and that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, and reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution. If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would be made.

But let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his religion in his country, dies before its majesty without a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when he entered the world, rushes on the enemy’s sabre with undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained fate.

“On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,

The appointed, and the unappointed day;

On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,

Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay.”

The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our Calvinists, in the last generation, had something of the same dignity. They felt that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place. What could they do? Wise men feel that there is something which cannot be talked or voted away, — a strap or belt which girds the world.

“The Destiny, minister general,

That executeth in the world o’er all,

The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,

So strong it is, that tho’ the world had sworn

The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,

Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day

That falleth not oft in a thousand year;

For, certainly, our appetites here,

Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,

All this is ruled by the sight above.”

CHAUCER: The Knight’s Tale.

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: “Whatever is fated, that will take place. The great immense mind of Jove is not to be transgressed.”

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar. But Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, — these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, — expensive races, — race living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre. Our western prairie shakes with fever and ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the temperature of one night. Without uncovering what does not concern us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the obscurities of alternate generation; — the forms of the shark, the labrus, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, — are hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every day? Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily. An expense of ends to means is fate; — organization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so is climate; so is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

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

Jesus said, “When he looketh on her, he hath committed adultery.” But he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitution. Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, sees that they are ripe to be each other’s victim.

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all the ancestors are gladly forgotten. Most men and most women are merely one couple more. Now and then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened in his brain, — an architectural, a musical, or a philological knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide journeying, &c. — which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a new centre. The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly enough for health; so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear, the health is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force impaired.

People are born with the moral or with the material bias; — uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that a Free-soiler.

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos to say, “Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.” I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, “there is in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all eternity, and by no means became such in time.” To say it less sublimely, — in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now and then, a man of wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In England, there is always some man of wealth and large connection planting himself, during all his years of health, on the side of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them.

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations, in the healthiest and strongest. Probably, the election goes by avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict with certainty which party would carry it. On the whole, it would be rather the speediest way of deciding the vote, to put the selectmen or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.

In science, we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. All we know of the egg, from each successive discovery, is, another vesicle; and if, after five hundred years, you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the last observed another. In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes, — but the tyrannical Circumstance! A vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken thought, became animal; in light, a plant. Lodged in the parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circumstance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There is much you may not. We have two things, — the circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool, like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the ice, but fetters on the ground.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, — leaf after leaf, — never re-turning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians, — rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.

The population of the world is a conditional population; not the best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know in history what weight belongs to race. We see the English, French, and Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family. We follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his “Fragment of Races,” — a rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and unforgetable truths. “Nature respects race, and not hybrids.” “Every race has its own habitat.” “Detach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to the crab.” See the shades of the picture. The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie. One more fagot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new science of Statistics. It is a rule, that the most casual and extraordinary events — if the basis of population is broad enough — become matter of fixed calculation. It would not be safe to say when a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be had.1

“Everything which pertains to the human species, considered as a whole, belongs to the order of physical facts. The greater the number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of general facts dependent on causes by which society exists, and is preserved.” — QUETELET.

’Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular inventions. They have all been invented over and over fifty times. Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy models. He helps himself on each emergency by copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is. ’Tis hard to find the right Homer, Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are scores and centuries of them. “The air is full of men.” This kind of talent so abounds, this constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts.

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. No one can read the history of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, Œnopides, had anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the same vigorous computation and logic, a mind parallel to the movement of the world. The Roman mile probably rested on a measure of a degree of the meridian. Mahometan and Chinese know what we know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every barrel of cowries, brought to New Bedford, there shall be one orangia, so there will, in a dozen millions of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls. In a large city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker’s muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one capital joke a week; and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every day.

And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of violated functions. Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events.

The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of millions. I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each other, but ’twas little they could do for one another; ’twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. As we refine, our checks become finer. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes, from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and goddess, and he a man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of mountains, — the one he snapped and the other he spurned with his heel, — they put round his foot a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew. So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this limp band. For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in opposition to its fundamental essence.

And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. What is useful will last; what is hurtful will sink. “The doer must suffer,” said the Greeks: “you would soothe a Deity not to be soothed.” “God himself cannot procure good for the wicked,” said the Welsh triad. “God may consent, but only for a time,” said the bard of Spain. The limitation is impassable by any insight of man. In its last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members. But we must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other elements as well.

Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals, — in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well. It is everywhere bound or limitation. But Fate has its lord; limitation its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within and from without. For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is the other fact in the dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We must respect Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. For who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter? Man is not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation to what is below him, — thick-skulled, small-brained, fishy, quadrumanous, — quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature, — here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.

Nor can he blink the freewill. To hazard the contradiction, — freedom is necessary. If you please to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free. And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a “Declaration of Independence,” or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other way: the practical view is the other. His sound relation to these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them. “Look not on nature, for her name is fatal,” said the oracle. The too much contemplation of these limits induces meanness. They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in Destiny. They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes a different impression, when it is held by the weak and lazy. ’Tis weak and vicious people who cast the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. Rude and invincible except by themselves are the elements. So let man be. Let him empty his breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the scale of nature. Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make him give up his point. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of these.

’Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend’s house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance. We should be crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the body. A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the same water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.

1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative forces. The revelation of Thought takes man out of servitude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many times. We have successive experiences so important, that the new forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine heavens. The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law; — sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is the best. This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die. If the light come to our eyes, we see; else not. And if truth come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.

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

Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power. He who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that which must be. We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will come to pass. Our thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be separated from will. They must always have coexisted. It apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead, which refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, but the will of all mind. It is poured into the souls of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them men. I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with it all atoms which rise to that height, but I see, that when souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.

Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic. Of two men, each obeying his own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest character. Always one man more than another represents the will of Divine Providence to the period.

2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. All great force is real and elemental. There is no manufacturing a strong will. There must be a pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a truth, or their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe possible for any finite will. But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most High. I know not what the word sublime means, if it be not the intimations in this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of freedom. One of these is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, “’Tis written on the gate of Heaven, ‘Wo unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate!’” Does the reading of history make us fatalists? What courage does not the opposite opinion show! A little whim of will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of chemistry.

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, ’tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; “un des plus grands malheurs des honnêtes gens c’est qu’ils sont des lâches.” There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will. There can be no driving force, except through the conversion of the man into his will, making him the will, and the will him. And one may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviours and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His approbation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the meter of the growing man. We stand against Fate, as children stand up against the wall in their father’s house, and notch their height from year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger. ’Tis only a question of time. Every brave youth is in training to ride and rule this dragon. His science is to make weapons and wings of these passions and retarding forces. Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity? The bulk of mankind believe in two gods. They are under one dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other. What good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on change! What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates at the polls! To a certain point, they believe themselves the care of a Providence. But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a malignant energy rules.

But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always. The divine order does not stop where their sight stops. The friendly power works on the same rules, in the next farm, and the next planet. But, where they have not experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; — for causes which are impenetrated.

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man like a dew-drop. But learn to skate, and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The cold will brace your limbs and brain to genius, and make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England, gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, — the secrets of water and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but right drainage destroys typhus. The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or procurable: the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and effect, and may be fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some benefit from the vanquished enemy. The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge for man: the wild beasts he makes useful for food, or dress, or labor; the chemic explosions are controlled like his watch. These are now the steeds on which he rides. Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in his own element. There’s nothing he will not make his carrier.

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he lift pots and roofs and houses so handily? he was the workman they were in search of. He could be used to lift away, chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous, namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of water, machinery, and the labors of all men in the world; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten space.

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam. The opinion of the million was the terror of the world, and it was attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with strata of society, — a layer of soldiers; over that, a layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police. But, sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive every mountain laid on top of it. The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing in unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice satisfies everybody,) through a different disposition of society, — grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, — they have contrived to make of this terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State.

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down, — with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired, — into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? A learned physician tells us, the fact is invariable with the Neapolitan, that, when mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel. That is a little overstated, — but may pass.

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man must thank his defects, and stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side. The sufferance, which is the badge of the Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means, — we are reconciled.

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of the Universe can have any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in proportion to the health. Behind every individual, closes organization: before him, opens liberty, — the Better, the Best. The first and worst races are dead. The second and imperfect races are dying out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the latest race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and where his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The whole circle of animal life, — tooth against tooth, — devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until, at last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and refined for higher use, — pleases at a sufficient perspective.

But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate, observe how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can, a point where there is no thread of connection. Our life is consentaneous and far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied, that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful King’s College chapel, “that, if anybody would tell him where to lay the first stone, he would build such another.” But where shall we find the first atom in this house of man, which is all consent, inosculation, and balance of parts?

The web of relation is shown in habitat, shown in hybernation. When hybernation was observed, it was found, that, whilst some animals became torpid in winter, others were torpid in summer: hybernation then was a false name. The long sleep is not an effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply of food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid when the fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, and regains its activity when its food is ready.

Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land; fins in water; wings in air; and, each creature where it was meant to be, with a mutual fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna. There is adjustment between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy. Balances are kept. It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. The like adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked, when he arrives; his coal in the pit; the house ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his companions arrived at the same hour, and awaiting him with love, concert, laughter, and tears. These are coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less. There are more belongings to every creature than his air and his food. His instincts must be met, and he has predisposing power that bends and fits what is near him to his use. He is not possible until the invisible things are right for him, as well as the visible. Of what changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does the appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise us!

How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, “if you want a fort, build a fort,” so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its living, — is it planet, animal, or tree. The planet makes itself. The animal cell makes itself; — then, what it wants. Every creature, — wren or dragon, — shall make its own lair. As soon as there is life, there is self-direction, and absorbing and using of material. Life is freedom, — life in the direct ratio of its amount. You may be sure, the new-born man is not inert. Life works both voluntarily and supernaturally in its neighborhood. Do you suppose, he can be estimated by his weight in pounds, or, that he is contained in his skin, — this reaching, radiating, jaculating fellow? The smallest candle fills a mile with its rays, and the papillæ of a man run out to every star.

When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get it done. The vegetable eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need is; the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, nose, or nail, according to the want: the world throws its life into a hero or a shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were Italians, in their time: they would be Russians or Americans to-day. Things ripen, new men come. The adaptation is not capricious. The ulterior aim, the purpose beyond itself, the correlation by which planets subside and crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work into finer particulars, and from finer to finest.

The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. The “times,” “the age,” what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times? — Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the rest. The same fitness must be presumed between a man and the time and event, as between the sexes, or between a race of animals and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses. He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. The event is the print of your form. It fits you like your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events are the children of his body and mind. We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings,

Alas! till now I had not known,

My guide and fortune’s guide are one.

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for, — houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, are the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid. And of all the drums and rattles by which men are made willing to have their heads broke, and are led out solemnly every morning to parade, — the most admirable is this by which we are brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and independent of actions. At the conjuror’s, we detect the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character. Ducks take to the water, eagles to the sky, waders to the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to counting-rooms, soldiers to the frontier. Thus events grow on the same stem with persons; are sub-persons. The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place. Life is an ecstasy. We know what madness belongs to love, — what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven. As insane persons are indifferent to their dress, diet, and other accommodations, and, as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most absurd acts, so, a drop more of wine in our cup of life will reconcile us to strange company and work. Each creature puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell. In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of perspiration, — gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. A man’s friends are his magnetisms. We go to Herodotus and Plutarch for examples of Fate; but we are examples. “Quisque suos patimur manes.” The tendency of every man to enact all that is in his constitution is expressed in the old belief, that the efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it: and I have noticed, a man likes better to be complimented on his position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his merits.

A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to meet, but which exude from and accompany him. Events expand with the character. As once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a part in colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition, his companions, and his performance. He looks like a piece of luck, but is a piece of causation; — the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into the gap he fills. Hence in each town there is some man who is, in his brain and performance, an explanation of the tillage, production, factories, banks, churches, ways of living, and society, of that town. If you do not chance to meet him, all that you see will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it will become plain. We know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and many another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were transparent, would seem to you not so much men, as walking cities, and, wherever you put them, they would build one.

History is the action and reaction of these two, — Nature and Thought; — two boys pushing each other on the curb-stone of the pavement. Everything is pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in perpetual tilt and balance, so. Whilst the man is weak, the earth takes up him. He plants his brain and affections. By and by he will take up the earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the beautiful order and productiveness of his thought. Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind. If the wall remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought. To a subtler force, it will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the mind. What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man? The granite was reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came. Iron was deep in the ground, and well combined with stone; but could not hide from his fires. Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over the earth and sea, in vain. Here they are, within reach of every man’s day-labor, — what he wants of them. The whole world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the poles or points where it would build. The races of men rise out of the ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into parties ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction. The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American. The men who come on the stage at one period are all found to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express them. This explains the curious contemporaneousness of inventions and discoveries. The truth is in the air, and the most impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man, — of a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He feels the infinitesimal attractions. His mind is righter than others, because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.

The correlation is shown in defects. Möller, in his Essay on Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been intended. I find the like unity in human structures rather virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in the argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen. If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as every man is hunted by his own dæmon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms: a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

This correlation really existing can be divined. If the threads are there, thought can follow and show them. Especially when a soul is quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,

“Or if the soul of proper kind

Be so perfect as men find,

That it wot what is to come,

And that he warneth all and some

Of every of their aventures,

By previsions or figures;

But that our flesh hath not might

It to understand aright

For it is warned too darkly.” —

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen, periodicity, and presage: they meet the person they seek; what their companion prepares to say to them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs apprise them of what is about to befall.

Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the design this vagabond life admits. We wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet year after year we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other. And the moral is, that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, “what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,” too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the dæmon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.

To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down, learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay. A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an universal end. I do not wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial; that the rainbow, and the curve of the horizon, and the arch of the blue vault are only results from the organism of the eye. There is no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look without seeing splendor and grace. How idle to choose a random sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention of Nature to be harmony and joy.

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all one as if a child’s hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least particular, one could derange the order of nature, — who would accept the gift of life?

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day. Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no other than “philosophy and theology embodied”? Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements? Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but intelligence, — not personal nor impersonal, — it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its omnipotence.

POWER.

His tongue was framed to music,

And his hand was armed with skill,

His face was the mould of beauty,

And his heart the throne of will.

There is not yet any inventory of a man’s faculties, any more than a bible of his opinions. Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them. Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so saturated, — there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged, — that no honest seeking goes unrewarded. A man should prize events and possessions as the ore in which this fine mineral is found; and he can well afford to let events and possessions, and the breath of the body go, if their value has been added to him in the shape of power. If he have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy.

All successful men have agreed in one thing, — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for nothing, — characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. “All the great captains,” said Bonaparte, “have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of the art, — by adjusting efforts to obstacles.”

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; — the key to all ages is — Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. This gives force to the strong, — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. Courage, — the old physicians taught, (and their meaning holds, if their physiology is a little mythical,) — courage, or the degree of life, is as the degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries. “During passion, anger, fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount of blood is collected in the arteries, the maintenance of bodily strength requiring it, and but little is sent into the veins. This condition is constant with intrepid persons.” Where the arteries hold their blood, is courage and adventure possible. Where they pour it unrestrained into the veins, the spirit is low and feeble. For performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary health. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and put in a stronger and bolder man, — Biorn, or Thorfin, — and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles further, and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results. With adults, as with children, one class enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the whirling world; the others have cold hands, and remain bystanders; or are only dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those who can carry a dead weight. The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its resources to live. But health or fulness answers its own ends, and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men’s necessities.

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world. The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength. One man is made of the same stuff of which events are made; is in sympathy with the course of things; can predict it. Whatever befalls, befalls him first; so that he is equal to whatever shall happen. A man who knows men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, war, religion. For, everywhere, men are led in the same manners.

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any labor, art, or concert. It is like the climate, which easily rears a crop, which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can elsewhere rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New York, or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or genius or labor to it. They come of themselves, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, healthy, massive understanding seems to lie on the shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered with barks, that, night and day, are drifted to this point. That is poured into its lap, which other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody’s secret; anticipates everybody’s discovery; and if it do not command every fact of the genius and the scholar, it is because it is large and sluggish, and does not think them worth the exertion which you do.

This affirmative force is in one, and is not in another, as one horse has the spring in him, and another in the whip. “On the neck of the young man,” said Hafiz, “sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.” Import into any stationary district, as into an old Dutch population in New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads full of steam-hammer, pulley, crank, and toothed wheel, — and everything begins to shine with values. What enhancement to all the water and land in England, is the arrival of James Watt or Brunel! In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but, in both men and women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. Each plus man represents his set, and, if he have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency, — which implies neither more nor less of talent, but merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoolmaster, (which one has, and one has not, as one has a black moustache and one a blond,) then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them. The merchant works by book-keeper and cashier; the lawyer’s authorities are hunted up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his subalterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the results of all the naturalists attached to the Expedition; Thorwaldsen’s statue is finished by stone-cutters; Dumas has journeymen; and Shakspeare was theatre-manager, and used the labor of many young men, as well as the playbooks.

There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for many. Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them take the best places. A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.

When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels, and encounters strangers every day, or, when into any old club a new comer is domesticated, that happens which befalls, when a strange ox is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at once a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new comer, and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader. So now, there is a measuring of strength, very courteous, but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet. Each reads his fate in the other’s eyes. The weaker party finds, that none of his information or wit quite fits the occasion. He thought he knew this or that: he finds that he omitted to learn the end of it. Nothing that he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all the rival’s arrows are good, and well thrown. But if he knew all the facts in the encyclopædia, it would not help him: for this is an affair of presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has the sun and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of weapon and mark; and, when he himself is matched with some other antagonist, his own shafts fly well and hit. ’Tis a question of stomach and constitution. The second man is as good as the first, — perhaps better; but has not stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so his wit seems over-fine or under-fine.

Health is good, — power, life, that resists disease, poison, and all enemies, and is conservative, as well as creative. Here is question, every spring, whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay; whether to whitewash or to potash, or to prune; but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments. Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we will make bread, we must have contagion, yeast, emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the dough: as the torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine. And we have a certain instinct, that where is great amount of life, though gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be found at last in harmony with moral laws.

We watch in children with pathetic interest, the degree in which they possess recuperative force. When they are hurt by us, or by each other, or go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual prizes, or are beaten in the game, — if they lose heart, and remember the mischance in their chamber at home, they have a serious check. But if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies them with new interest in the new moment, — the wounds cicatrize, and the fibre is the tougher for the hurt.

One comes to value this plus health, when he sees that all difficulties vanish before it. A timid man listening to the alarmists in Congress, and in the newspapers, and observing the profligacy of party, — sectional interests urged with a fury which shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made up to desperate extremities, ballot in one hand, and rifle in the other, — might easily believe that he and his country have seen their best days, and he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin. But, after this has been foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and government six per cents have not declined a quarter of a mill, he discovers that the enormous elements of strength which are here in play, make our politics unimportant. Personal power, freedom, and the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. We prosper with such vigor, that, like thrifty trees, which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not suffer from the profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury. The huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution. The same energy in the Greek Demos drew the remark, that the evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit and energy it awakens. The rough and ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. Power educates the potentate. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were a penal offence to bring an English law-book into a court in this country, so pernicious had he found in his experience our deference to English precedent. The very word ‘commerce’ has only an English meaning, and is pinched to the cramp exigencies of English experience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of air-balloons, must add an American extension to the pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people quote English standards, they will miss the sovereignty of power; but let these rough riders, — legislators in shirt-sleeves, — Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger, — or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington, — let these drive as they may; and the disposition of territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners. The instinct of the people is right. Men expect from good whigs, put into office by the respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members, than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first conquers his own government, and then uses the same genius to conquer the foreigner. The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk’s Mexican war, were not those who knew better, but those who, from political position, could afford it; not Webster, but Benton and Calhoun.

This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. ’Tis the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal. But it brings its own antidote; and here is my point, — that all kinds of power usually emerge at the same time; good energy, and bad; power of mind, with physical health; the ecstasies of devotion, with the exasperations of debauchery. The same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day background, — what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis. The longer the drought lasts, the more is the atmosphere surcharged with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented. And, in morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism, in the father, is a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

Those who have most of this coarse energy, — the ‘bruisers,’ who have run the gauntlet of caucus and tavern through the county or the state, have their own vices, but they have the good nature of strength and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually frank and direct, and above falsehood. Our politics fall into bad hands, and churchmen and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to send to Congress. Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose, — and if it be only a question between the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of a bold and manly cast. They see, against the unanimous declarations of the people, how much crime the people will bear; they proceed from step to step, and they have calculated but too justly upon their Excellencies, the New England governors, and upon their Honors, the New England legislators. The messages of the governors and the resolutions of the legislatures, are a proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, is sure to be belied.

In trade, also, this energy usually carries a trace of ferocity. Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of saints. The communities hitherto founded by Socialists, — the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the American communities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only possible, by installing Judas as steward. The rest of the offices may be filled by good burgesses. The pious and charitable proprietor has a foreman not quite so pious and charitable. The most amiable of country gentlemen has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bull-dog which guards his orchard. Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to market. And in representations of the Deity, painting, poetry, and popular religion have ever drawn the wrath from Hell. It is an esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs, as if poor decayed formalists of law and order cannot run like wild goats, wolves, and conies; that, as there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues; that public spirit and the ready hand are as well found among the malignants. ’Tis not very rare, the coincidence of sharp private and political practice, with public spirit, and good neighborhood.

I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept a public-house in one of our rural capitals. He was a knave whom the town could ill spare. He was a social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There was no crime which he did not or could not commit. But he made good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best chop, when they supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge, he was very cordial, grasping his hand. He introduced all the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united in his person the functions of bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and burglar. He girdled the trees, and cut off the horses’ tails of the temperance people, in the night. He led the rummies’ and radicals in town-meeting with a speech. Meantime, he was civil, fat, and easy, in his house, and precisely the most public-spirited citizen. He was active in getting the roads repaired and planted with shade-trees; he subscribed for the fountains, the gas, and the telegraph; he introduced the new horse-rake, the new scraper, the baby-jumper, and what not, that Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did this the easier, that the peddler stopped at his house, and paid his keeping, by setting up his new trap on the landlord’s premises.

Whilst thus the energy for originating and executing work, deforms itself by excess, and so our axe chops off our own fingers, — this evil is not without remedy. All the elements whose aid man calls in, will sometimes become his masters, especially those of most subtle force. Shall he, then, renounce steam, fire, and electricity, or, shall he learn to deal with them? The rule for this whole class of agencies is, — all plus is good; only put it in the right place.

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels, and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture, or the Boston Athenæum. They pine for adventure, and must go to Pike’s Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee, than sit all day and every day at a counting-room desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing; for hair-breadth adventures, huge risks, and the joy of eventful living. Some men cannot endure an hour of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain his joy; “Blow!” he cried, “me do tell you, blow!” Their friends and governors must see that some vent for their explosive complexion is provided. The roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent to Mexico, will “cover you with glory,” and come back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Californias, and Exploring Expeditions enough appertaining to America, to find them in files to gnaw, and in crocodiles to eat. The young English are fine animals, full of blood, and when they have no wars to breathe their riotous valors in, they seek for travels as dangerous as war, diving into Maelstroms; swimming Hellesponts; wading up the snowy Himmaleh; hunting lion, rhinoceros, elephant, in South Africa; gypsying with Borrow in Spain and Algiers; riding alligators in South America with Waterton; utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, and Pacha, with Layard; yachting among the icebergs of Lancaster Sound; peeping into craters on the equator; or running on the creases of Malays in Borneo.

The excess of virility has the same importance in general history, as in private and industrial life. Strong race or strong individual rests at last on natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, like the beasts around him, is still in reception of the milk from the teats of Nature. Cut off the connection between any of our works, and this aboriginal source, and the work is shallow. The people lean on this, and the mob is not quite so bad an argument as we sometimes say, for it has this good side. “March without the people,” said a French deputy from the tribune, “and you march into night: their instincts are a finger-pointing of Providence, always turned toward real benefit. But when you espouse an Orleans party, or a Bourbon, or a Montalembert party, or any other but an organic party, though you mean well, you have a personality instead of a principle, which will inevitably drag you into a corner.”

The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from savage life, in explorers, soldiers, and buccaneers. But who cares for fallings-out of assassins, and fights of bears, or grindings of icebergs? Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth: and of electricity, not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.

In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty: — and you have Pericles and Phidias, — not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage: that it is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and, though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supersaturate or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.

The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind. They originate and execute all the great feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of Napoleon! Of the sixty thousand men making his army at Eylau, it seems some thirty thousand were thieves and burglars. The men whom, in peaceful communities, we hold if we can, with iron at their legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, this man dealt with, hand to hand, dragged them to their duty, and won his victories by their bayonets.

This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure when it appears under conditions of supreme refinement, as in the proficients in high art. When Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the Pope’s gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands, and having, after many trials, at last suited himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the sibyls and prophets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first in skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly to drape them. “Ah!” said a brave painter to me, thinking on these things, “if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.”

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight. And, though a man cannot return into his mother’s womb, and be born with new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two economies, which are the best succedanea which the case admits. The first is, the stopping off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.

“Enlarge not thy destiny,” said the oracle: “endeavor not to do more than is given thee in charge.” The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes, — all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible. You must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop all the rest. Only so, can that amount of vital force accumulate, which can make the step from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken. ’Tis a stop out of a chalk circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist lacking this, lacks all: he sees the masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair. He, too, is up to Nature and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm to collect and swing his whole being into one act, he has not. The poet Campbell said, that “a man accustomed to work was equal to any achievement he resolved on, and, that, for himself, necessity not inspiration was the prompter of his muse.”

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, “how he had been able to achieve his discoveries?”— “By always intending my mind.” Or if you will have a text from politics, take this from Plutarch: “There was, in the whole city, but one street in which Pericles was ever seen, the street which led to the market-place and the council house. He declined all invitations to banquets, and all gay assemblies and company. During the whole period of his administration, he never dined at the table of a friend.” Or if we seek an example from trade,— “I hope,” said a good man to Rothschild, “your children are not too fond of money and business: I am sure you would not wish that.”— “I am sure I should wish that: I wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and body to business, — that is the way to be happy. It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution, to make a great fortune, and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very soon. Stick to one business, young man. Stick to your brewery, (he said this to young Buxton,) and you will be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette.”

Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive and tenacious, but they do not rush to a decision. But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made, — the best, if you can; but any is better than none. There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. A man who has that presence of mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring it to light slowly. The good Speaker in the House is not the man who knows the theory of parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides off-hand. The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something intelligible for the guidance of suitors. The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of his flowing sentences, “Miserable beyond all names of wretchedness is that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce beforehand to the principles of abstract reason all the details of each domestic day. There are cases where little can be said, and much must be done.”

The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of use and routine. The hack is a better roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, is equal in power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent. So in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the continuity of drill. We spread the same amount of force over much time, instead of condensing it into a moment. ’Tis the same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. At West Point, Col. Buford, the chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of a cannon, until he broke them off. He fired a piece of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trunnion? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece? Every blast. “Diligence passe sens” Henry VIII. was wont to say, or, great is drill. John Kemble said, that the worst provincial company of actors would go through a play better than the best amateur company. Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular troops will beat the best volunteers. Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years, made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven, trained Wendell Phillips. The way to learn German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart. No genius can recite a ballad at first reading, so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or twentieth reading. The rule for hospitality and Irish ‘help,’ is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks, that the reason why Nature is so perfect in her art, and gets up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the same thing so very often. Cannot one converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than on one which is new? Men whose opinion is valued on ’Change, are only such as have a special experience, and off that ground their opinion is not valuable, “More are made good by exercitation, than by nature,” said Democritus. The friction in nature is so enormous that we cannot spare any power. It is not question to express our thought, to elect our way, but to overcome resistances of the medium and material in everything we do. Hence the use of drill, and the worthlessness of amateurs to cope with practitioners. Six hours every day at the piano, only to give facility of touch; six hours a day at painting, only to give command of the odious materials, oil, ochres, and brushes. The masters say, that they know a master in music, only by seeing the pose of the hands on the keys; — so difficult and vital an act is the command of the instrument. To have learned the use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations; to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless adding and dividing, is the power of the mechanic and the clerk. I remarked in England, in confirmation of a frequent experience at home, that, in literary circles, the men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New England.

I have not forgotten that there are sublime considerations which limit the value of talent and superficial success. We can easily overpraise the vulgar hero. There are sources on which we have not drawn. I know what I abstain from. I adjourn what I have to say on this topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship. But this force or spirit, being the means relied on by Nature for bringing the work of the day about, — as far as we attach importance to household life, and the prizes of the world, we must respect that. And I hold, that an economy may be applied to it; it is as much a subject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and gases are; it may be husbanded, or wasted; every man is efficient only as he is a container or vessel of this force, and never was any signal act or achievement in history, but by this expenditure. This is not gold, but the gold-maker; not the fame, but the exploit.

If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our will, and the laws of them can be read, we infer that all success, and all conceivable benefit for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, and has its own sublime economies by which it may be attained. The world is mathematical, and has no casualty, in all its vast and flowing curve. Success has no more eccentricity, than the gingham and muslin we weave in our mills. I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of the factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image. But in these, he is forced to leave out his follies and hindrances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine is more moral than we. Let a man dare go to a loom, and see if he be equal to it. Let machine confront machine, and see how they come out. The world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and the architect stooped less. In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the girl that wove it, and lessens her wages. The stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands with delight. Are you so cunning, Mr. Profitless, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in the web you weave? A day is a more magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the web.

WEALTH.

Who shall tell what did befall,

Far away in time, when once,

Over the lifeless ball,

Hung idle stars and suns?

What god the element obeyed?

Wings of what wind the lichen bore,

Wafting the puny seeds of power,

Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?

And well the primal pioneer

Knew the strong task to it assigned

Patient through Heaven’s enormous year

To build in matter home for mind.

From air the creeping centuries drew

The matted thicket low and wide,

This must the leaves of ages strew

The granite slab to clothe and hide,

Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.

What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled

(In dizzy æons dim and mute

The reeling brain can ill compute)

Copper and iron, lead, and gold?

What oldest star the fame can save

Of races perishing to pave

The planet with a floor of lime?

Dust is their pyramid and mole:

Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed

Under the tumbling mountain’s breast,

In the safe herbal of the coal?

But when the quarried means were piled,

All is waste and worthless, till

Arrives the wise selecting will,

And, out of slime and chaos, Wit

Draws the threads of fair and fit.

Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,

The shop of toil, the hall of arts;

Then flew the sail across the seas

To feed the North from tropic trees;

The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,

Where they were bid the rivers ran;

New slaves fulfilled the poet’s dream,

Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.

Then docks were built, and crops were stored,

And ingots added to the hoard.

But, though light-headed man forget,

Remembering Matter pays her debt:

Still, through her motes and masses, draw

Electric thrills and ties of Law,

Which bind the strengths of Nature wild

To the conscience of a child.

As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows how to earn a blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous, until every industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in the world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius, without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the rudest strokes of spade and axe, up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production; because a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor. The forces and the resistances are Nature’s, but the mind acts in bringing things from where they abound to where they are wanted; in wise combining; in directing the practice of the useful arts, and in the creation of finer values, by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the reproductions of memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature, and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has stronger arms, or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams, and growth of markets, where land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to sleep, and wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now, than it was a hundred years ago; but is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted with the expansive force of steam; he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam! The steam puffs and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry England. Coal lay in ledges under the ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings it to the surface. We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle: and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

When the farmer’s peaches are taken from under the tree, and carried into town, they have a new look, and a hundredfold value over the fruit which grew on the same bough, and lies fulsomely on the ground. The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing from where it abounds, to where it is costly.

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good-will.

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. And here we must recite the iron law which Nature thunders in these northern climates. First, she requires that each man should feed himself. If, happily, his fathers have left him no inheritance, he must go to work, and by making his wants less, or his gains more, he must draw himself out of that state of pain and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She gives him no rest until this is done: she starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends, and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily, but still with sting enough, she urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to him. Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, every thought of every hour, opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and dignity to gratify. It is of no use to argue the wants down: the philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants few; but will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried pease? He is born to be rich. He is thoroughly related; and is tempted out by his appetites and fancies to the conquest of this and that piece of nature, until he finds his well-being in the use of his planet, and of more planets than his own. Wealth requires, besides the crust of bread and the roof, — the freedom of the city, the freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, the benefits of science, music, and fine arts, the best culture, and the best company. He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men’s faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past times. The same correspondence that is between thirst in the stomach, and water in the spring, exists between the whole of man and the whole of nature. The elements offer their service to him. The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it, — day by day to his craft and audacity. “Beware of me,” it says, “but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.” Fire offers, on its side, an equal power. Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead, quicksilver, tin, and gold; forests of all woods; fruits of all climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the fabrics of his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught of his locomotive, the talismans of the machine-shop; all grand and subtile things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade, government, are his natural playmates, and, according to the excellence of the machinery in each human being, is his attraction for the instruments he is to employ. The world is his tool-chest, and he is successful, or his education is carried on just so far, as is the marriage of his faculties with nature, or, the degree in which he takes up things into himself.

The strong race is strong on these terms. The Saxons are the merchants of the world; now, for a thousand years, the leading race, and by nothing more than their quality of personal independence, and, in its special modification, pecuniary independence. No reliance for bread and games on the government, no clanship, no patriarchal style of living by the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on, — no system of clientship suits them; but every man must pay his scot. The English are prosperous and peaceable, with their habit of considering that every man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he do not maintain and improve his position in society.

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it is a peremptory point of virtue that a man’s independence be secured. Poverty demoralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave; and Wall-street thinks it easy for a millionaire to be a man of his word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his integrity. And when one observes in the hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals, the habit of expense, the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, fellow-feeling of any kind, he feels, that, when a man or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of integrity are frightfully diminished, as if virtue were coming to be a luxury which few could afford, or, as Burke said, “at a market almost too high for humanity.” He may fix his inventory of necessities and of enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the power and privilege of thought, the chalking out his own career, and having society on his own terms, he must bring his wants within his proper power to satisfy.

The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do. The world is full of fops who never did anything, and who have persuaded beauties and men of genius to wear their fop livery, and these will deliver the fop opinion, that it is not respectable to be seen earning a living; that it is much more respectable to spend without earning; and this doctrine of the snake will come also from the elect sons of light; for wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason. The brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it in his manners, if he do not succumb in his practice, must replace the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit of the work done. No matter whether he make shoes, or statues, or laws. It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him. The mechanic at his bench carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even terms with men of any condition. The artist has made his picture so true, that it disconcerts criticism. The statue is so beautiful, that it contracts no stain from the market, but makes the market a silent gallery for itself. The case of the young lawyer was pitiful to disgust, — a paltry matter of buttons or tweezer-cases; but the determined youth saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous wedges, made the insignificance of the thing forgotten, and gave fame by his sense and energy to the name and affairs of the Tittleton snuffbox factory.

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy. The life of pleasure is so ostentatious, that a shallow observer must believe that this is the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is pretended, it ends in cosseting. But, if this were the main use of surplus capital, it would bring us to barricades, burned towns, and tomahawks, presently. Men of sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their design. Power is what they want, — not candy; — power to execute their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to their thought, which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the Universe exists, and all its resources might be well applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem for practical navigation, as well as for closet geometry, and looks on all kings and peoples as cowardly landsmen, until they dare fit him out. Few men on the planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was forced to leave much of his map blank. His successors inherited his map, and inherited his fury to complete it.

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey, — the monomaniacs, who talk up their project in marts, and offices, and entreat men to subscribe: — how did our factories get built? how did North America get netted with iron rails, except by the importunity of these orators, who dragged all the prudent men in? Is party the madness of many for the gain of a few? This speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. Each of these idealists, working after his thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met and antagonized by other speculators, as hot as he. The equilibrium is preserved by these counteractions, as one tree keeps down another in the forest, that it may not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the supply in nature of railroad presidents, copper-miners, grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-annihilators, &c., is limited by the same law which keeps the proportion in the supply of carbon, of alum, and of hydrogen.

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works and chief men of each race. It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories. The reader of Humboldt’s “Cosmos” follows the marches of a man whose eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have any where accumulated, and who is using these to add to the stock. So is it with Denon, Beckford, Belzoni, Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, Lepsius, and Livingston. “The rich man,” says Saadi, “is everywhere expected and at home.” The rich take up something more of the world into man’s life. They include the country as well as the town, the ocean-side, the White Hills, the Far West, and the old European homesteads of man, in their notion of available material. The world is his, who has money to go over it. He arrives at the sea-shore, and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and made it a luxurious hotel, amid the horrors of tempests. The Persians say, “’Tis the same to him who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were covered with leather.”

Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have long arms, and should pluck his living, his instruments, his power, and his knowing, from the sun, moon, and stars. Is not then the demand to be rich legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be, or, with an adequate command of nature. The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone. Men are urged by their ideas to acquire the command over nature. Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman Cæsars, Leo Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire, Townleys, Vernons, and Peels, in England; or whatever great proprietors. It is the interest of all men, that there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of noble works of art; British Museums, and French Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries. It is the interest of all that there should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses, Franklins, Richardsons, and Kanes, to find the magnetic and the geographic poles. We are all richer for the measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth’s surface. Our navigation is safer for the chart. How intimately our knowledge of the system of the Universe rests on that! — and a true economy in a state or an individual will forget its frugality in behalf of claims like these.

Whilst it is each man’s interest, that, not only ease and convenience of living, but also wealth or surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. Goethe said well, “nobody should be rich but those who understand it.” Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends. They should own who can administer; not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor: and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism of our day has done good service in setting men on thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all. For example, the providing to each man the means and apparatus of science, and of the arts. There are many articles good for occasional use, which few men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and craters in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of those, scarcely one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the like things. Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does not care to possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, tables, charts, maps, and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.

There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a prepared mind, which is as positive as that of music, and not to be supplied from any other source. But pictures, engravings, statues, and casts, beside their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries and keepers for the exhibition; and the use which any man can make of them is rare, and their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can share their enjoyment. In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it. I think sometimes, — could I only have music on my own terms; — could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, — that were a bath and a medicine.

If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns, and lyceums, they would draw the bonds of neighborhood closer. A town would exist to an intellectual purpose. In Europe, where the feudal forms secure the permanence of wealth in certain families, those families buy and preserve those things, and lay them open to the public. But in America, where democratic institutions divide every estate into small portions, after a few years, the public should step into the place of these proprietors, and provide this culture and inspiration for the citizen.

Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich by the use of his faculties; by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor. An infinite number of shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth of our world to-day.

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which few men can play well. The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so, in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts of life. He knows, that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, — for every effect a perfect cause, — and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in every transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity and closeness to the facts are the basis, but the masters of the art add a certain long arithmetic. The problem is, to combine many and remote operations, with the accuracy and adherence to the facts, which is easy in near and small transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results, without any compromise of safety. Napoleon was fond of telling the story of the Marseilles banker, who said to his visitor, surprised at the contrast between the splendor of the banker’s chateau and hospitality, and the meanness of the counting-room in which he had seen him,— “Young man, you are too young to understand how masses are formed, — the true and only power, — whether composed of money, water, or men, it is all alike, — a mass is an immense centre of motion, but it must be begun, it must be kept up:” — and he might have added, that the way in which it must be begun and kept up, is, by obedience to the law of particles.

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world, and, since those laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.

Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes of labor it represents. His bones ache with the day’s work that earned it. He knows how much land it represents; — how much rain, frost, and sunshine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing, and threshing. Try to lift his dollar; you must lift all that weight. In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen, or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only for real bread; force for force.

The farmer’s dollar is heavy, and the clerk’s is light and nimble; leaps out of his pocket; jumps on to cards and faro-tables: but still more curious is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the finest barometer of social storms, and announces revolutions.

Every step of civil advancement makes every man’s dollar worth more. In California, the country where it grew, — what would it buy? A few years since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger, bad company, and crime. There are wide countries, like Siberia, where it would buy little else to-day, than some petty mitigation of suffering. In Rome, it will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty years ago, a dollar would not buy much in Boston. Now it will buy a great deal more in our old town, thanks to railroads, telegraphs, steamers, and the contemporaneous growth of New York, and the whole country. Yet there are many goods appertaining to a capital city, which are not yet purchasable here, no, not with a mountain of dollars. A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in Massachusetts. A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to speak strictly, not for the corn or house-room, but for Athenian corn, and Roman house-room, — for the wit, probity, and power, which we eat bread and dwell in houses to share and exert. Wealth is mental; wealth is moral. The value of a dollar is, to buy just things: a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius, and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university, is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community, than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic, are in constant play.

The “Bank-Note Detector” is a useful publication. But the current dollar, silver or paper, is itself the detector of the right and wrong where it circulates. Is it not instantly enhanced by the increase of equity? If a trader refuses to sell his vote, or adheres to some odious right, he makes so much more equity in Massachusetts; and every acre in the State is more worth, in the hour of his action. If you take out of State-street the ten honestest merchants, and put in ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of capital, — the rates of insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will show it: the highways will be less secure: the schools will feel it; the children will bring home their little dose of the poison: the judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his decisions be less upright; he has lost so much support and constraint, — which all need; and the pulpit will betray it, in a laxer rule of life. An apple-tree, if you take out every day for a number of days, a load of loam, and put in a load of sand about its roots, — will find it out. An apple-tree is a stupid kind of creature, but if this treatment be pursued for a short time, I think it would begin to mistrust something. And if you should take out of the powerful class engaged in trade a hundred good men, and put in a hundred bad, or, what is just the same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, would not the dollar, which is not much stupider than an apple-tree, presently find it out? The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society. Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable talent or skill in him, gives to every man’s labor in the city, a new worth. If a talent is anywhere born into the world, the community of nations is enriched; and, much more, with a new degree of probity. The expense of crime, one of the principal charges of every nation, is so far stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to increase or abate with the price of bread. If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham, are forced into the highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland. The police records attest it. The vibrations are presently felt in New York, New Orleans, and Chicago. Not much otherwise, the economical power touches the masses through the political lords. Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and there is peace, and the harvests are saved. He takes it, and there is war, and an agitation through a large portion of mankind, with every hideous result, ending in revolution, and a new order.

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. The basis of political economy is non-interference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and persevering.

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy-battery exhibits the effects of electricity. The level of the sea is not more surely kept, than is the equilibrium of value in society, by the demand and supply: and artifice or legislation punishes itself, by reactions, gluts, and bankruptcies. The sublime laws play indifferently through atoms and galaxies. Whoever knows what happens in the getting and spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of beer; that no wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny loaves; that, for all that is consumed, so much less remains in the basket and pot; but what is gone out of these is not wasted, but well spent, if it nourish his body, and enable him to finish his task; — knows all of political economy that the budgets of empires can teach him. The interest of petty economy is this symbolization of the great economy; the way in which a house, and a private man’s methods, tally with the solar system, and the laws of give and take, throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the falsehoods and petty tricks which we suicidally play off on each other, every man has a certain satisfaction, whenever his dealing touches on the inevitable facts; when he sees that things themselves dictate the price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are seen to do. Your paper is not fine or coarse enough, — is too heavy, or too thin. The manufacturer says, he will furnish you with just that thickness or thinness you want; the pattern is quite indifferent to him; here is his schedule; — any variety of paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed. A pound of paper costs so much, and you may have it made up in any pattern you fancy.

There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that supersedes chaffering. You will rent a house, but must have it cheap. The owner can reduce the rent, but so he incapacitates himself from making proper repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he would have, but a worse one; besides, that a relation a little injurious is established between landlord and tenant. You dismiss your laborer, saying, “Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I cannot do without you.” Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the weeds will grow with the potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week, and, however unwilling you may be, the cantelopes, crook-necks, and cucumbers will send for him. Who but must wish that all labor and value should stand on the same simple and surly market? If it is the best of its kind, it will. We must have joiner, locksmith, planter, priest, poet, doctor, cook, weaver, ostler; each in turn, through the year.

If a St. Michael’s pear sells for a shilling, it costs a shilling to raise it. If, in Boston, the best securities offer twelve per cent. for money, they have just six per cent. of insecurity. You may not see that the fine pear costs you a shilling, but it costs the community so much. The shilling represents the number of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk in ripening it. The price of coal shows the narrowness of the coal-field, and a compulsory confinement of the miners to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned on contingent, as well as on actual services. “If the wind were always southwest by west,” said the skipper, “women might take ships to sea.” One might say, that all things are of one price; that nothing is cheap or dear; and that the apparent disparities that strike us, are only a shopman’s trick of concealing the damage in your bargain. A youth coming into the city from his native New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his remembrance, boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a better dinner, by the loss of some of the richest social and educational advantages. He has lost what guards! what incentives! He will perhaps find by and by, that he left the Muses at the door of the hotel, and found the Furies inside. Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap. The ancient poet said, “the gods sell all things at a fair price.”

There is an example of the compensations in the commercial history of this country. When the European wars threw the carrying-trade of the world, from 1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, a seizure was now and then made of an American ship. Of course, the loss was serious to the owner, but the country was indemnified; for we charged threepence a pound for carrying cotton, sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which paid for the risk and loss, and brought into the country an immense prosperity, early marriages, private wealth, the building of cities, and of states: and, after the war was over, we received compensation over and above, by treaty, for all the seizures. Well, the Americans grew rich and great. But the pay-day comes round. Britain, France, and Germany, which our extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then their millions, of poor people, to share the crop. At first, we employ them, and increase our prosperity: but, in the artificial system of society and of protected labor, which we also have adopted and enlarged, there come presently checks and stoppages. Then we refuse to employ these poor men. But they will not so be answered. They go into the poor rates, and, though we refuse wages, we must now pay the same amount in the form of taxes. Again, it turns out that the largest proportion of crimes are committed by foreigners. The cost of the crime, and the expense of courts, and of prisons, we must bear, and the standing army of preventive police we must pay. The cost of education of the posterity of this great colony, I will not compute. But the gross amount of these costs will begin to pay back what we thought was a net gain from our transatlantic customers of 1800. It is vain to refuse this payment. We cannot get rid of these people, and we cannot get rid of their will to be supported. That has become an inevitable element of our politics; and, for their votes, each of the dominant parties courts and assists them to get it executed. Moreover, we have to pay, not what would have contented them at home, but what they have learned to think necessary here; so that opinion, fancy, and all manner of moral considerations complicate the problem.

There are a few measures of economy which will bear to be named without disgust; for the subject is tender, and we may easily have too much of it; and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of which our bodies are built up, — which, offensive in the particular, yet compose valuable and effective masses. Our nature and genius force us to respect ends, whilst we use means. We must use the means, and yet, in our most accurate using, somehow screen and cloak them, as we can only give them any beauty, by a reflection of the glory of the end. That is the good head, which serves the end, and commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by their means: the means are too strong for them, and they desert their end.

1. The first of these measures is that each man’s expense must proceed from his character. As long as your genius buys, the investment is safe, though you spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society. This native determination guides his labor and his spending. He wants an equipment of means and tools proper to his talent. And to save on this point, were to neutralize the special strength and helpfulness of each mind. Do your work, respecting the excellence of the work, and not its acceptableness. This is so much economy, that, rightly read, it is the sum of economy. Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or chests of money, — but in spending them off the line of your career. The crime which bankrupts men and states, is, job-work; — declining from your main design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line, and say, that society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt, until every man does that which he was created to do.

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not yours. Allston, the painter, was wont to say, that he built a plain house, and filled it with plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe to any to visit him, who had not similar tastes to his own. We are sympathetic, and, like children, want everything we see. But it is a large stride to independence, — when a man, in the discovery of his proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false expenses. As the betrothed maiden, by one secure affection, is relieved from a system of slaveries, — the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all, — so the man who has found what he can do, can spend on that, and leave all other spending. Montaigne said, “When he was a younger brother, he went brave in dress and equipage, but afterward his chateau and farms might answer for him.” Let a man who belongs to the class of nobles, those, namely, who have found out that they can do something, relieve himself of all vague squandering on objects not his. Let the realist not mind appearances. Let him delegate to others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life. The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride is handsome, economical: pride eradicates so many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well-contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health, and peace, and is still nothing at last, a long way leading nowhere. — Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil him for his proper work. We had in this region, twenty years ago, among our educated men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate desire to go upon the land, and unite farming to intellectual pursuits. Many effected their purpose, and made the experiment, and some became downright ploughmen; but all were cured of their faith that scholarship and practical farming, (I mean, with one’s own hands,) could be united.

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, and get a juster statement of his thought, in the garden-walk. He stoops to pull up a purslain, or a dock, that is choking the young corn, and finds there are two: close behind the last, is a third; he reaches out his hand to a fourth; behind that, are four thousand and one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and by, wakes up from his idiot dream of chickweed and red-root, to remember his morning thought, and to find, that, with his adamantine purposes, he has been duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those pernicious machineries we read of, every month, in the newspapers, which catch a man’s coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction. In an evil hour he pulled down his wall, and added a field to his homestead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he has done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like duns, when he would go out of his gate. The devotion to these vines and trees he finds poisonous. Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free his brain, and serve his body. Long marches are no hardship to him. He believes he composes easily on the hills. But this pottering in a few square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of the plants has drugged him, and robbed him of energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. He grows peevish and poor-spirited. The genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative in sparks and shocks: the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman for the other’s duties.

An engraver whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of stroke, should not lay stone walls. Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions for microscopic observation:— “Lie down on your back, and hold the single lens and object over your eye,” &c. &c. How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of the body to think!

2. Spend after your genius, and by system. Nature goes by rule, not by sallies and saltations. There must be system in the economies. Saving and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending safe. The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but in the relation of income to outgo; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills of income, though never so small, being added, wealth begins. But in ordinary, as means increase, spending increases faster, so that, large incomes, in England and elsewhere, are found not to help matters; — the eating quality of debt does not relax its voracity. When the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of planting larger crops? In England, the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd observers, that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to give away than other people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as immediately famous a virtue as it is here. Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover. I remember in Warwickshire, to have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name as in Shakspeare’s time. The rent-roll, I was told, is some fourteen thousand pounds a year: but, when the second son of the late proprietor was born, the father was perplexed how to provide for him. The eldest son must inherit the manor; what to do with this supernumerary? He was advised to breed him for the Church, and to settle him in the rectorship, which was in the gift of the family; which was done. It is a general rule in that country, that bigger incomes do not help anybody. It is commonly observed, that a sudden wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the rapid wealth, come rapid claims: which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is quickly dissipated.

A system must be in every economy, or the best single expedients are of no avail. A farm is a good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke it out. Thus, the cattle are a main link in the chain-ring. If the non-conformist or æsthetic farmer leaves out the cattle, and does not also leave out the want which the cattle must supply, he must fill the gap by begging or stealing. When men now alive were born, the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid: each gave a day’s work; or a half day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and kept his work even: hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye; well knowing that no man could afford to hire labor, without selling his land. In autumn, a farmer could sell an ox or a hog, and get a little money to pay taxes withal. Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes, — tin-ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad-tickets, and newspapers.

A master in each art is required, because the practice is never with still or dead subjects, but they change in your hands. You think farm-buildings and broad acres a solid property: but its value is flowing like water. It requires as much watching as if you were decanting wine from a cask. The farmer knows what to do with it, stops every leak, turns all the streamlets to one reservoir, and decants wine: but a blunderhead comes out of Cornhill, tries his hand, and it all leaks away. So is it with granite streets, or timber townships, as with fruit or flowers. Nor is any investment so permanent, that it can be allowed to remain without incessant watching, as the history of each attempt to lock up an inheritance through two generations for an unborn inheritor may show.

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep his cow, he thinks a cow is a creature that is fed on hay, and gives a pail of milk twice a day. But the cow that he buys gives milk for three months; then her bag dries up. What to do with a dry cow? who will buy her? Perhaps he bought also a yoke of oxen to do his work; but they get blown and lame. What to do with blown and lame oxen? The farmer fats his, after the spring-work is done, and kills them in the fall. But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his cottage daily in the cars, at business hours, be pothered with fatting and killing oxen? He plants trees; but there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed land. What shall be the crops? He will have nothing to do with trees, but will have grass. After a year or two, the grass must be turned up and ploughed: now what crops? Credulous Cockayne!

3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of Impera parendo. The rule is not to dictate, nor to insist on carrying out each of your schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn practically the secret spoken from all nature, that things themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show to the watchful their own law. Nobody need stir hand or foot. The custom of the country will do it all. I know not how to build or to plant; neither how to buy wood, nor what to do with the house-lot, the field, or the wood-lot, when bought. Never fear: it is all settled how it shall be, long beforehand, in the custom of the country, whether to sand, or whether to clay it, when to plough, and how to dress, whether to grass, or to corn; and you cannot help or hinder it. Nature has her own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers. How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of railways in England, Mr. Brunel went straight from terminus to terminus, through mountains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting ducal estates in two, and shooting through this man’s cellar, and that man’s attic window, and so arriving at his end, at great pleasure to geometers, but with cost to his company. Mr. Stephenson, on the contrary, believing that the river knows the way, followed his valley, as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows the Westfield River, and turned out to be the safest and cheapest engineer. We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. Every pedestrian in our pastures has frequent occasion to thank the cows for cutting the best path through the thicket, and over the hills: and travellers and Indians know the value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure to be the easiest possible pass through the ridge.

When a citizen, fresh from Dock-square, or Milk-street, comes out and buys land in the country, his first thought is to a fine outlook from his windows: his library must command a western view: a sunset every day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc. What, thirty acres, and all this magnificence for fifteen hundred dollars! It would be cheap at fifty thousand. He proceeds at once, his eyes dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for his corner-stone. But the man who is to level the ground, thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill the hollow to the road. The stonemason who should build the well thinks he shall have to dig forty feet: the baker doubts he shall never like to drive up to the door: the practical neighbor cavils at the position of the barn; and the citizen comes to know that his predecessor the farmer built the house in the right spot for the sun and wind, the spring, and water-drainage, and the convenience to the pasture, the garden, the field, and the road. So Dock-square yields the point, and things have their own way. Use has made the farmer wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take his counsel. From step to step he comes at last to surrender at discretion. The farmer affects to take his orders; but the citizen says, You may ask me as often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, for an opinion concerning the mode of building my wall, or sinking my well, or laying out my acre, but the ball will rebound to you. These are matters on which I neither know, nor need to know anything. These are questions which you and not I shall answer.

Not less, within doors, a system settles itself paramount and tyrannical over master and mistress, servant and child, cousin and acquaintance. ’Tis in vain that genius or virtue or energy of character strive and cry against it. This is fate. And ’tis very well that the poor husband reads in a book of a new way of living, and resolves to adopt it at home: let him go home and try it, if he dare.

4. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow: and not to hope to buy one kind with another kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success. Good husbandry finds wife, children, and household. The good merchant large gains, ships, stocks, and money. The good poet fame, and literary credit; but not either, the ether. Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment; praises himself for it; and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur, of course, is poor; and Furlong a good provider. The odd circumstance is, that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong’s lands.

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

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money is another kind of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or, the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is no maxim of the merchant, e.g., “Best use of money is to pay debts;” “Every business by itself;” “Best time is present time;” “The right investment is in tools of your trade;” or the like, which does not admit of an extended sense. The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to take up particulars into generals; days into integral eras, — literary, emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its investment. The merchant has but one rule, absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: the scraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to increase expense, but to capital again. Well, the man must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest? His body and every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar, in which the liquor of life is stored. Will he spend for pleasure? The way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend, but hoard for power? It passes through the sacred fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits: it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power.

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation, nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures, he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good, to be already on the way to the highest.

CULTURE

Can rules or tutors educate

The semigod whom we await?

He must be musical,

Tremulous, impressional,

Alive to gentle influence

Of landscape and of sky,

And tender to the spirit-touch

Of man’s or maiden’s eye:

But, to his native centre fast,

Shall into Future fuse the Past,

And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. For performance, Nature has no mercy, and sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a tympany of him. If she wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect in a contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature usually in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power. It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she creates a policeman like Fouché, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them. “The air,” said Fouché, “is full of poniards.” The physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman’s Tale illustrates the statute Hen. V. Chap. 4, against alchemy. I saw a man who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success of General Washington, was, the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism, by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. ’Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms, is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent, — of artists, inventors, and philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing it is. Beware of the man who says, “I am on the eve of a revelation.” It is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it, and by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and exclude him from the great world of God’s cheerful fallible men and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable. Religious literature has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and order. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the basis of it. Every valuable nature is there in its own right, and the student we speak to must have a motherwit invincible by his culture, which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who has a good determination. And the end of culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have a style and determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having this, he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his family, or a few companions, — perhaps with half a dozen personalities that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, — two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers? New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which make up our American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up! The “causes” to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whigism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism, would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was, now gray and nerveless, was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

’Tis not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers, Thor’s house had five hundred and forty floors; and man’s house has five hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation and of transition through many related points, to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit of his village or his city. We must leave our pets at home, when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. No performance is worth loss of geniality. ’Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of Mimir’s spring, (the fountain of wisdom,) until he left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation do not fit his impertinency, — here is he to afflict us with his personalities. ’Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir’s spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy man, merry and wise, he is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of adaptation.

The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or, who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all wild beasts;” and, in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, “a boy is better unborn than untaught.” The city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different style; the sea, another; the army, a fourth. We know that an army which can be confided in, may be formed by discipline; that, by systematic discipline all men may be made heroes: Marshal Lannes said to a French officer, “Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he never was afraid.” A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be strong which are used. Robert Owen said, “Give me a tiger, and I will educate him.” ’Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education, since to meliorate, is the law of nature; and men are valued precisely as they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same advantage over the novice, as if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred years. And I think it the part of good sense to provide every fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, “This which I might do is made hopeless through my want of weapons.”

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect; that all success is hazardous and rare; that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or, that as much good would not have accrued from a different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Cæsar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or, in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. Good criticism is very rare, and always precious. I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but of his choosing. He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and, — provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain, — these will not serve him less than the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The father observes that another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. But the first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them. He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find out, as you did, that when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience. These minor skills and accomplishments, for example, dancing, are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much, on which, otherwise, he would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, “I have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.” Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn; — riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, “a good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the world can make him.” Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse, constitute, among all who use them, secret freemasonries. They are as if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the youth, is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to remain to him occasions of heart-burn. We are full of superstitions. Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not; the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on an education at the university, and missed it, could never quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him this imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards, pass to a poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which argues want of character. All educated Americans, first or last, go to Europe; — perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, “the idea of a girl’s education, is, whatever qualifies them for going to Europe.” Can we never extract this tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen? One sees very well what their fate must be. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose, there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers and working-men. And if the man is of a light and social turn, and Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding which gives currency, as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its full effect. The boy grown up on the farm, which he has never left, is said in the country to have had no chance, and boys and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad, or drudgery in a city, as opportunity. Poor country boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had, to their peddling trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast is now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. ‘To have some chance’ is their word. And the phrase ‘to know the world,’ or to travel, is synonymous with all men’s ideas of advantage and superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers advantages. As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own. One use of travel, is, to recommend the books and works of home; [we go to Europe to be Americanized;] and another, to find men. For, as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens, that one or two of them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required some foreign force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stagnation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson’s benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, ‘If I should be driven from my own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and accumulate.’

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the æsthetic value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the year. In town, he can find the swimming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the chemist’s shop, the museum of natural history; the gallery of fine arts; the national orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club. In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly labor, cheap living, and his old shoes; moors for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, “I have heard Thomas Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon’s house, in Derbyshire, there was a good library and books enough for him, and his lordship stored the library with what books he thought fit to be bought. But the want of good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good conversation, one’s understanding and invention contract a moss on them, like an old paling in an orchard.”

Cities give us collision. ’Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and superior people, show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says, that “William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain, every time he put off his hat.” You cannot have one well-bred man, without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women; — it requires a great many cultivated women, — saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you should have one Madame de Staël. The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician is brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and those too the driving-wheels, the business men of each section, and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson, — of quiet manners. It is the foible especially of American youth, — pretension. The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in gray clothes, — of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, “who never says anything, but will listen eternally;” of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more capricious than he was. There are advantages in the old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth; but dress makes a little restraint: men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet says,

“Go far and go sparing,

For you’ll find it certain,

The poorer and the baser you appear,

The more you’ll look through still.”2

Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the “Lay of the Humble,”

“To me men are for what they are,

They wear no masks with me.”

’Tis odd that our people should have — not water on the brain, — but a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that, “whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.” Yet one of the traits down in the books as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is, a trick of self-disparagement. To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you find humorists. In an English party, a man with no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out, — the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel? The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The English have a plain taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of Mister good against any king in Europe. They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the House of Commons sat in, before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chophouse, a barber’s shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:

“Mirmidons, race féconde,

Mirmidons,

Enfin nous commandons;

Jupiter livre le monde

Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons.”3

’Tis heavy odds

Against the gods,

When they will match with myrmidons.

We spawning, spawning myrmidons,

Our turn to-day! we take command,

Jove gives the globe into the hand

Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

Béranger.

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail? people whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out of the draught. Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts. To a man at work, the frost is but a color: the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in. Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated. Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. ’Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country neighbors an example of a modest household where comfort and culture were secured, without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure the coveted place in college, and the right in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet cautiously, and haughtily, — and will yield their best values to him who best can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. “In the morning, — solitude;” said Pythagoras; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. ’Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul in the disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits of solitude. The high advantage of university-life is often the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and fire, — which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two or more than two, it is happier, and not less noble. “We four,” wrote Neander to his sacred friends, “will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a civitas Dei, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions. Their very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of all existence.”

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities that more catholic and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in his private quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in the journals, and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is only interested in the praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just. And the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet cultivated becomes a stockholder in both companies, — say Mr. Curfew, — in the Curfew stock, and in the humanity stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew, as his interest in the former gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For, the depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course: but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men. Bonaparte, like Cæsar, was intellectual, and could look at every object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist à l’outrance, he could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds, and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill; as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long Parliament’s general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to ornithology. So, if in travelling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him. In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, and civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if only through a certain gentleness when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say, that culture opens the sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession. I suffer, every day, from the want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know the charm with which all moments and objects can be embellished, the charm of manners, of self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman, — repose in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect; as we say of Niagara, that it falls without speed. A cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable movements. It is noticed, that the consideration of the great periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an indifference to death. The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us manners, and abolish hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade, and the useful arts. There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an insight of their whole connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order, will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness of being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from that of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good footing with the heads of parties at Washington, reads the rumors of the newspapers, and the guesses of provincial politicians, with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end. Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine, at a glance, and judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only what Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he deals with, to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would influence human affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave. We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse: —

“Get him the time’s long grudge, the court’s ill-will,

And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,

Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,

Almost all ways to any better course;

With me thou leav’st a better Muse than thee,

And which thou brought’st me, blessed Poverty.”

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude, that belong to truth-speaking. Try the rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don’t be so tender at making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The finished man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm’s length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for dolls. “Steep and craggy,” said Porphyry, “is the path of the gods.” Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none of the social goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe’s mother, who chides her disregard of dress,— “If I cannot do as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things far.” And the youth must rate at its true mark the inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

“All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues,” said Burke, “are almost too costly for humanity.” Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor, and low, and impolite? and who that dares do it, can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits? The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the chance for appreciation is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel a habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it; — so, a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that secular melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex, as fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place; and that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his cannonade; if Christianity with its charity; if Trade with its money; if Art with its portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of space and time; can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls, and let the new creature emerge erect and free, — make way, and sing pæan! The age of the quadruped is to go out, — the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man’s culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into benefit.

BEHAVIOR.

Grace, Beauty, and Caprice

Build this golden portal;

Graceful women, chosen men

Dazzle every mortal:

Their sweet and lofty countenance

His enchanting food;

He need not go to them, their forms

Beset his solitude.

He looketh seldom in their face,

His eyes explore the ground,

The green grass is a looking-glass

Whereon their traits are found.

Little he says to them,

So dances his heart in his breast,

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him

Of wit, of words, of rest.

Too weak to win, too fond to shun

The tyrants of his doom,

The much deceived Endymion

Slips behind a tomb.

The soul which animates Nature is not less significantly published in the figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulate speech. This silent and subtile language is Manners; not what, but how. Life expresses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we call manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behavior?

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable: men catch them from each other. Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons she had given the nobles in manners, on the stage; and, in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the arts of behavior. Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode.

The power of manners is incessant, — an element as unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy, than in a kingdom. No man can resist their influence. There are certain manners which are learned in good society, of that force, that, if a person have them, he or she must be considered, and is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or genius. Give a boy address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble of earning or owning them; they solicit him to enter and possess. We send girls of a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-school, to the riding-school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can come into acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where they might learn address, and see it near at hand. The power of a woman of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and repel, derives from their belief that she knows resources and behaviors not known to them; but when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront her, and recover their self-possession.

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. The mediocre circle learns to demand that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your manners are always under examination, and by committees little suspected, — a police in citizens’ clothes, — but are awarding or denying you very high prizes when you least think of it.

We talk much of utilities, — but ’tis our manners that associate us. In hours of business, we go to him who knows, or has, or does this or that which we want, and we do not let our taste or feeling stand in the way. But this activity over, we return to the indolent state, and wish for those we can be at ease with: those who will go where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with ours. When we reflect on their persuasive and cheering force; how they recommend, prepare, and draw people together; how, in all clubs, manners make the members; how manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that, for the most part, his manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what divination is required in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph, we see what range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and beauty.

Their first service is very low, — when they are the minor morals: but ’tis the beginning of civility, — to make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize them for their rough-plastic, abstergent force; to get people out of the quadruped state; to get them washed, clothed, and set up on end; to slough their animal husks and habits; compel them to be clean; overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle the base, and choose the generous expression, and make them know how much happier the generous behaviors are.

Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is infested with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom, a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach: — the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight: — I have seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say something which they do not understand: — then the overbold, who make their own invitation to your hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large, saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves, — a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity; — these are social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from, and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and proverbs, and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in their school-days.

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or used to print, among the rules of the house, that “no gentleman can be permitted to come to the public table without his coat;” and in the same country, in the pews of the churches, little placards plead with the worshipper against the fury of expectoration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the book had its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading-room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look over fine engravings, that they should be handled like cobwebs and butterflies’ wings; nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with canes. But, even in the perfect civilization of this city, such cautions are not quite needless in the Athenæum and City Library.

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstance as well as out of character. If you look at the pictures of patricians and of peasants, of different periods and countries, you will see how well they match the same classes in our towns. The modern aristocrat not only is well drawn in Titian’s Venetian doges, and in Roman coins and statues, but also in the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home of dignitaries in Japan. Broad lands and great interests not only arrive to such heads as can manage them, but form manners of power. A keen eye, too, will see nice gradations of rank, or see in the manners the degree of homage the party is wont to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day to be courted and deferred to by the highest grandees, acquires a corresponding expectation, and a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this homage.

There are always exceptional people and modes. English grandees affect to be farmers. Claverhouse is a fop, and, under the finish of dress, and levity of behavior, hides the terror of his war. But Nature and Destiny are honest, and never fail to leave their mark, to hang out a sign for each and for every quality. It is much to conquer one’s face, and perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the whole secret when he has learned, that disengaged manners are commanding. Don’t be deceived by a facile exterior. Tender men sometimes have strong wills. We had, in Massachusetts, an old statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs of state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of face, voice, and bearing: when he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it cracked, it broke, it wheezed, it piped; — little cared he; he knew that it had got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argument and his indignation. When he sat down, after speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and held on to his chair with both hands: but underneath all this irritability, was a puissant will, firm, and advancing, and a memory in which lay in order and method like geologic strata every fact of his history, and under the control of his will.

Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and monarchical fabrics of the old world, has some reason in common experience. Every man, — mathematician, artist, soldier, or merchant, — looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his own child, which he would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. “Take a thorn-bush,” said the emir Abdel-Kader, “and sprinkle it for a whole year with water; — it will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, leave it without culture, and it will always produce dates. Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab populace is a bush of thorns.”

A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful expressiveness of the human body. If it were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could not publish more truly its meaning than now. Wise men read very sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior. The whole economy of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces which expose the whole movement. They carry the liquor of life flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the curious how it is with them. The face and eyes reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul, or, through how many forms it has already ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the breath here, what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street passenger.

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect. In Siberia, a late traveller found men who could see the satellites of Jupiter with their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals excel us. The birds have a longer sight, beside the advantage by their wings of a higher observatory. A cow can bid her calf by secret signal, probably of the eye, to run away, or to lie down and hide itself. The jockeys say of certain horses, that “they look over the whole ground.” The outdoor life, and hunting, and labor, give equal vigor to the human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as the horse; his eye-beam is like the stroke of a staff. An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or can insult like hissing or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart dance with joy.

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance; in enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name. There is no nicety of learning sought by the mind, which the eyes do not vie in acquiring. “An artist,” said Michel Angelo, “must have his measuring tools not in the hand, but in the eye;” and there is no end to the catalogue of its performances, whether in indolent vision, (that of health and beauty,) or in strained vision, (that of art and labor.)

Eyes are bold as lions, — roving, running, leaping, here and there, far and near. They speak all languages. They wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age, or rank; they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and through you, in a moment of time. What inundation of life and thought is discharged from one soul into another, through them! The glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. We look into the eyes to know if this other form is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful confession what inhabitant is there. The revelations are sometimes terrific. The confession of a low, usurping devil is there made, and the observer shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and bats, and horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and simplicity. ’Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own, to the mind of the beholder.

The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first. If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it. You can read in the eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his tongue will not confess it. There is a look by which a man shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it. Vain and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no holiday in the eye. How many furtive inclinations avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips! One comes away from a company, in which, it may easily happen, he has said nothing, and no important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing into him, and out from him, through the eyes. There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission into the man than blueberries. Others are liquid and deep, — wells that a man might fall into; — others are aggressive and devouring, seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and require crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to protect individuals against them. The military eye I meet, now darkly sparkling under clerical, now under rustic brows. ’Tis the city of Lacedæmon; ’tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate, — some of good, and some of sinister omen. The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a victory achieved in the will, before it can be signified in the eye. ’Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked on him would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were generous and universal. The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the other features have their own. A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants. The sculptor, and Winckelmann, and Lavater, will tell you how significant a feature is the nose; how its forms express strength or weakness of will, and good or bad temper. The nose of Julius Cæsar, of Dante, and of Pitt, suggest “the terrors of the beak.” What refinement, and what limitations, the teeth betray! “Beware you don’t laugh,” said the wise mother, “for then you show all your faults.”

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called “Théorie de la démarche” in which he says: “The look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not been given to man, the power to stand guard, at once, over these four different simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that one which speaks out the truth, and you will know the whole man.”

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of manners, which, in the idle and expensive society dwelling in them, are raised to a high art. The maxim of courts is, that manner is power. A calm and resolute bearing, a polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and the art of hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential to the courtier: and Saint Simon, and Cardinal de Retz, and Roederer, and an encyclopædia of Mémoires, will instruct you, if you wish, in those potent secrets. Thus, it is a point of pride with kings, to remember faces and names. It is reported of one prince, that his head had the air of leaning downwards, in order not to humble the crowd. There are people who come in ever like a child with a piece of good news. It was said of the late Lord Holland, that he always came down to breakfast with the air of a man who had just met with some signal good-fortune. In “Notre Dame,” the grandee took his place on the dais, with the look of one who is thinking of something else. But we must not peep and eavesdrop at palace-doors.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. A scholar may be a well-bred man, or he may not. The enthusiast is introduced to polished scholars in society, and is chilled and silenced by finding himself not in their element. They all have somewhat which he has not, and, it seems, ought to have. But if he finds the scholar apart from his companions, it is then the enthusiast’s turn, and the scholar has no defence, but must deal on his terms. Now they must fight the battle out on their private strengths. What is the talent of that character so common, — the successful man of the world, — in all marts, senates, and drawing-rooms? Manners: manners of power; sense to see his advantage, and manners up to it. See him approach his man. He knows that troops behave as they are handled at first; — that is his cheap secret; just what happens to every two persons who meet on any affair, — one instantly perceives that he has the key of the situation, that his will comprehends the other’s will, as the cat does the mouse; and he has only to use courtesy, and furnish good-natured reasons to his victim to cover up the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance.

The theatre in which this science of manners has a formal importance is not with us a court, but dress-circles, wherein, after the close of the day’s business, men and women meet at leisure, for mutual entertainment, in ornamented drawing-rooms. Of course, it has every variety of attraction and merit; but, to earnest persons, to youths or maidens who have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A well-dressed, talkative company, where each is bent to amuse the other. — yet the high-born Turk who came hither fancied that every woman seemed to be suffering for a chair; that all the talkers were brained and exhausted by the deoxygenated air: it spoiled the best persons: it put all on stilts. Yet here are the secret biographies written and read. The aspect of that man is repulsive: I do not wish to deal with him. The other is irritable, shy, and on his guard. The youth looks humble and manly: I choose him. Look on this woman. There is not beauty, nor brilliant sayings, nor distinguished power to serve you; but all see her gladly; her whole air and impression are healthful. Here come the sentimentalists, and the invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in coming into the world, and has always increased it since. Here are creep-mouse manners; and thievish manners. “Look at Northcote,” said Fuseli; “he looks like a rat that has seen a cat.” In the shallow company, easily excited, easily tired, here is the columnar Bernard: the Alleghanies do not express more repose than his behavior. Here are the sweet following eyes of Cecile: it seemed always that she demanded the heart. Nothing can be more excellent in kind than the Corinthian grace of Gertrude’s manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has better manners than she; for the movements of Blanche are the sallies of a spirit which is sufficient for the moment, and she can afford to express every thought by instant action.

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and, if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you; or quietly drops you. The first weapon enrages the party attacked; the second is still more effective, but is not to be resisted, as the date of the transaction is not easily found. People grow up and grow old under this infliction, and never suspect the truth, ascribing the solitude which acts on them very injuriously, to any cause but the right one.

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Necessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed. Those who are not self-possessed, obtrude, and pain us. Some men appear to feel that they belong to a Pariah caste. They fear to offend, they bend and apologize, and walk through life with a timid step. As we sometimes dream that we are in a well-dressed company without any coat, so Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from some mortifying circumstance. The hero should find himself at home, wherever he is; should impart comfort by his own security and good-nature to all beholders. The hero is suffered to be himself. A person of strong mind comes to perceive that for him an immunity is secured so long as he renders to society that service which is native and proper to him, — an immunity from all the observances, yea, and duties, which society so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file of its members. “Euripides,” says Aspasia, “has not the fine manners of Sophocles; but,” — she adds good-humoredly, “the movers and masters of our souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as they please, on the world that belongs to them, and before the creatures they have animated.”4

Landor: Pericles and Aspasia.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste. Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into corners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command. Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. ’Tis a great destitution to both that this should not be entertained with large leisures, but contrariwise should be balked by importunate affairs.

But through this lustrous varnish, the reality is ever shining. ’Tis hard to keep the what from breaking through this pretty painting of the how. The core will come to the surface. Strong will and keen perception overpower old manners, and create new; and the thought of the present moment has a greater value than all the past. In persons of character, we do not remark manners, because of their instantaneousness. We are surprised by the thing done, out of all power to watch the way of it. Yet nothing is more charming than to recognize the great style which runs through the actions of such. People masquerade before us in their fortunes, titles, offices, and connections, as academic or civil presidents, or senators, or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these fames. At least, it is a point of prudent good manners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they were merited. But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance, and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and make themselves as inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating look as they pass. “I had received,” said a sibyl, “I had received at birth the fatal gift of penetration:” — and these Cassandras are always born.

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and contented expression, which everybody reads. And you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner is the natural expression. Nature forever puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done for love, is felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection and honor, because he was not lying in wait for these. The things of a man for which we visit him, were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity is better than any career. So deep are the sources of this surface-action, that even the size of your companion seems to vary with his freedom of thought. Not only is he larger, when at ease, and his thoughts generous, but everything around him becomes variable with expression. No carpenter’s rule, no rod and chain, will measure the dimensions of any house or house-lot: go into the house: if the proprietor is constrained and deferring, ’tis of no importance how large his house, how beautiful his grounds, — you quickly come to the end of all: but if the man is self-possessed, happy, and at home, his house is deep-founded, indefinitely large and interesting, the roof and dome buoyant as the sky. Under the humblest roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there massive, cheerful, yet formidable like the Egyptian colossi.

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set down the grammar-rules of this dialect, older than Sanscrit; but they who cannot yet read English, can read this. Men take each other’s measure, when they meet for the first time, — and every time they meet. How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before they speak, of each other’s power and dispositions? One would say, that the persuasion of their speech is not in what they say, — or, that men do not convince by their argument, — but by their personality, by who they are, and what they said and did heretofore. A man already strong is listened to, and everything he says is applauded. Another opposes him with sound argument, but the argument is scouted, until by and by it gets into the mind of some weighty person; then it begins to tell on the community.

Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too much demonstration. In this country, where school education is universal, we have a superficial culture, and a profusion of reading and writing and expression. We parade our nobilities in poems and orations, instead of working them up into happiness. There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can understand it,— ‘whatever is known to thyself alone, has always very great value.’ There is some reason to believe, that, when a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses. Jacobi said, that “when a man has fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it.” One would say, the rule is, — What a man is irresistibly urged to say, helps him and us. In explaining his thought to others, he explains it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him.

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are their literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. The novels used to be all alike, and had a quite vulgar tone. The novels used to lead us on to a foolish interest in the fortunes of the boy and girl they described. The boy was to be raised from a humble to a high position. He was in want of a wife and a castle, and the object of the story was to supply him with one or both. We watched sympathetically, step by step, his climbing, until, at last, the point is gained, the wedding day is fixed, and we follow the gala procession home to the castle, when the doors are slammed in our face, and the poor reader is left outside in the cold, not enriched by so much as an idea, or a virtuous impulse.

But the victories of character are instant, and victories for all. Its greatness enlarges all. We are fortified by every heroic anecdote. The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people. ’Tis a French definition of friendship, rien que s’entendre, good understanding. The highest compact we can make with our fellow, is,— ‘Let there be truth between us two for evermore.’ That is the charm in all good novels, as it is the charm in all good histories, that the heroes mutually understand, from the first, and deal loyally, and with a profound trust in each other. It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance: I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus or thus, I know it was right.

In all the superior people I have met, I notice directness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away. What have they to conceal? What have they to exhibit? Between simple and noble persons, there is always a quick intelligence: they recognize at sight, and meet on a better ground than the talents and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on sincerity and uprightness. For, it is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also. It is related of the monk Basle, that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his death, sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of suffering in hell; but, such was the eloquence and good-humor of the monk, that, wherever he went he was received gladly, and civilly treated, even by the most uncivil angels: and, when he came to discourse with them, instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and adopted his manners: and even good angels came from far, to see him, and take up their abode with him. The angel that was sent to find a place of torment for him, attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with no better success; for such was the contented spirit of the monk, that he found something to praise in every place and company, though in hell, and made a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel returned with his prisoner to them that sent him, saying, that no phlegethon could be found that would burn him; for that, in whatever condition, Basle remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says, his sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into heaven, and was canonized as a saint.

There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspondence of Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, when the latter was King of Spain, and complained that he missed in Napoleon’s letters the affectionate tone which had marked their childish correspondence. “I am sorry,” replies Napoleon, “you think you shall find your brother again only in the Elysian Fields. It is natural, that at forty, he should not feel towards you as he did at twelve. But his feelings towards you have greater truth and strength. His friendship has the features of his mind.”

How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, of arts, and even of the gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them! Here is a lesson which I brought along with me in boyhood from the Latin School, and which ranks with the best of Roman anecdotes. Marcus Scaurus was accused by Quintus Varius Hispanus, that he had excited the allies to take arms against the Republic. But he, full of firmness and gravity, defended himself in this manner: “Quintus Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, excited the allies to arms: Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. There is no witness. Which do you believe, Romans?” “Utri creditis, Quirites?” When he had said these words, he was absolved by the assembly of the people.

I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly. But they must be marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty. They must always show self-control: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall indicate power at rest. Then they must be inspired by the good heart. There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.

’Tis good to give a stranger a meal, or a night’s lodging. ’Tis better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a companion. We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light. Special precepts are not to be thought of: the talent of well-doing contains them all. Every hour will show a duty as paramount as that of my whim just now; and yet I will write it, — that there is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans. Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not leave the sky out of your landscape. The oldest and the most deserving person should come very modestly into any newly awaked company, respecting the divine communications, out of which all must be presumed to have newly come. An old man who added an elevating culture to a large experience of life, said to me, “When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make humanity beautiful to you.”

As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any other than negative rules can be laid down. For positive rules, for suggestion, Nature alone inspires it. Who dare assume to guide a youth, a maid, to perfect manners? — the golden mean is so delicate, difficult, — say frankly, unattainable. What finest hands would not be clumsy to sketch the genial precepts of the young girl’s demeanor? The chances seem infinite against success; and yet success is continually attained. There must not be secondariness, and ’tis a thousand to one that her air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary, but that there is some other one or many of her class, to whom she habitually postpones herself. But Nature lifts her easily, and without knowing it, over these impossibilities, and we are continually surprised with graces and felicities not only unteachable, but undescribable.

WORSHIP.

This is he, who, felled by foes,

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows

He to captivity was sold,

But him no prison-bars would hold:

Though they sealed him in a rock,

Mountain chains he can unlock:

Thrown to lions for their meat,

The crouching lion kissed his feet:

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,

But arched o’er him an honoring vault.

This is he men miscall Fate,

Threading dark ways, arriving late,

But ever coming in time to crown

The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down.

He is the oldest, and best known,

More near than aught thou call’st thy own,

Yet, greeted in another’s eyes,

Disconcerts with glad surprise.

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,

Floods with blessings unawares.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,

Severing rightly his from thine,

Which is human, which divine.

Some of my friends have complained, when the preceding papers were read, that we discussed Fate, Power, and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave too much line to the evil spirit of the times; too many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth’s risk of making, by excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that he could not answer it. I have no fears of being forced in my own despite to play, as we say, the devil’s attorney. I have no infirmity of faith; no belief that it is of much importance what I or any man may say: I am sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or though I should try to say the reverse. Nor do I fear skepticism for any good soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his skepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. I have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who, when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look at his razor. We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs. If the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease, nor deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts, — let us not be so nice that we cannot write these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt but there is a counter-statement as ponderous, which we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make all square. The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh. The strength of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line as we can. The spirit will return, and fill us. It drives the drivers. It counterbalances any accumulations of power.

“Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow.”

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster, and whether your community is made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it coheres in a perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they were more refined, it would be less formal, it would be nervous, like that of the Shakers, who, from long habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said, are affected in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and as they go with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, and the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken to the door.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears apples. A self-poise belongs to every particle; and a rectitude to every mind, and is the Nemesis and protector of every society. I and my neighbors have been bred in the notion, that, unless we came soon to some good church, — Calvinism, or Behmenism, or Romanism, or Mormonism, — there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. No Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can exceed the anarchy that has followed in our skies. The stern old faiths have all pulverized. ’Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of religions. ’Tis as flat anarchy in our ecclesiastic realms, as that which existed in Massachusetts, in the Revolution, or which prevails now on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike’s Peak. Yet we make shift to live. Men are loyal. Nature has self-poise in all her works; certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, not less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in the spring and the regulator.

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or Wesley, or Channing, need give us no uneasiness. The builder of heaven has not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is, the public nature, should fall out: the public and the private element, like north and south, like inside and outside, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be subdued, except the soul is dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the question of culture. But the whole state of man is a state of culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion, or Worship. There is always some religion, some hope and fear extended into the invisible, — from the blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the mast or the threshold, up to the song of the Elders in the Apocalypse. But the religion cannot rise above the state of the votary. Heaven always bears some proportion to earth. The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant. In all ages, souls out of time, extraordinary, prophetic, are born, who are rather related to the system of the world, than to their particular age and locality. These announce absolute truths, which, with whatever reverence received, are speedily dragged down into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of our Indians, and some of the Pacific islanders, flog their gods, when things take an unfavorable turn. The Greek poets did not hesitate to let loose their petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in his anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had built Troy for him, and demanded their price, does not hesitate to menace them that he will cut their ears off.5 Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf’s mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. “Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ?” asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

Iliad, Book xxi. 1. 455.

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture, — the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest. And to marry a pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a step backwards towards the baboon.

“Hengist had verament

A daughter both fair and gent,

But she was heathen Sarazine,

And Vortigern for love fine

Her took to fere and to wife,

And was cursed in all his life;

For he let Christian wed heathen,

And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen.”6

Moths or worms

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan sources, Richard of Devizes’s chronicle of Richard I.’s crusade, in the twelfth century, may show. King Richard taunts God with forsaking him: “O fie! O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art mine. In sooth, my standards will in future be despised, not through my fault, but through thine: in sooth, not through any cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal.” The religion of the early English poets is anomalous, so devout and so blasphemous, in the same breath. Such is Chaucer’s extraordinary confusion of heaven and earth in the picture of Dido.

“She was so fair,

So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad,

That if that God that heaven and earthe made

Would have a love for beauty and goodness,

And womanhede, truth, and seemliness,

Whom should he loven but this lady sweet?

There n’ is no woman to him half so meet.”

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste and decorum. We think and speak with more temperance and gradation, — but is not indifferentism as bad as superstition?

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which comforted nations, and not only so, but made nations, seem to have spent their force. I do not find the religions of men at this moment very creditable to them, but either childish and insignificant, or unmanly and effeminating. The fatal trait is the divorce between religion and morality. Here are know-nothing religions, or churches that proscribe intellect; scortatory religions; slave-holding and slave-trading religions; and, even in the decent populations, idolatries wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet indulgence. The lover of the old religion complains that our contemporaries, scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a great despair, — have corrupted into a timorous conservatism, and believe in nothing. In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized, — no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on, — so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose. There is no faith in the intellectual, none in the moral universe. There is faith in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, sewing machines, and in public opinion, but not in divine causes. A silent revolution has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, and, in place of the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance. In creeds never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in Christianity, the periodic “revivals,” the Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and black art. The architecture, the music, the prayer, partake of the madness: the arts sink into shift and make-believe. Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages. By the irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions have lost their hold. The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, ’tis impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws. From this change, and in the momentary absence of any religious genius that could offset the immense material activity, there is a feeling that religion is gone. When Paul Leroux offered his article “Dieu” to the conductor of a leading French journal, he replied, “La question de Dieu manque d’actualité.” In Italy, Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, “it has been a proverb, that he has erected the negation of God into a system of government.” In this country, the like stupefaction was in the air, and the phrase “higher law” became a political jibe. What proof of infidelity, like the toleration and propagandism of slavery? What, like the direction of education? What, like the facility of conversion? What, like the externality of churches that once sucked the roots of right and wrong, and now have perished away till they are a speck of whitewash on the wall? What proof of skepticism like the base rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are held? Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him to save his board.

Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human virtue. It is believed by well-dressed proprietors that there is no more virtue than they possess; that the solid portion of society exist for the arts of comfort: that life is an affair to put somewhat between the upper and lower mandibles. How prompt the suggestion of a low motive! Certain patriots in England devoted themselves for years to creating a public opinion that should break down the corn-laws and establish free trade. ‘Well,’ says the man in the street, ‘Cobden got a stipend out of it.’ Kossuth fled hither across the ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to a sympathy with European liberty. ‘Aye,’ says New York, ‘he made a handsome thing of it, enough to make him comfortable for life.’

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and well-conditioned class. If a pickpocket intrude into the society of gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he finds himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of trust, as of senator, or president, — though by the same arts as we detest in the house-thief, — the same gentlemen who agree to discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show civilities and marks of respect to the public one: and no amount of evidence of his crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding themselves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived by the professions of the private adventurer, — the louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of the messages and proclamations of the public sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It must be that they who pay this homage have said to themselves, On the whole, we don’t know about this that you call honesty; a bird in the hand is better.

Even well-disposed, good sort of people are touched with the same infidelity, and for brave, straightforward action, use half-measures and compromises. Forgetful that a little measure is a great error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a sharp tool, they go on choosing the dead men of routine. But the official men can in nowise help you in any question of to-day, they deriving entirely from the old dead things. Only those can help in counsel or conduct who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were appointed by God Almighty, before they came into the world, to stand for this which they uphold.

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men is a vice general throughout American society. But the multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health. In spite of our imbecility and terrors, and “universal decay of religion,” &c. &c., the moral sense reappears to-day with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say, there is no religion now. ’Tis like saying in rainy weather, there is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his superlative effects. The religion of the cultivated class now, to be sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements which it was once their religion to assume. But this avoidance will yield spontaneous forms in their due hour. There is a principle which is the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do, but to let do; not to work, but to be worked upon; and to this homage there is a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and conditions. To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlargements of power. ’Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total inexperience of it. It is the order of the world to educate with accuracy the senses and the understanding; and the enginery at work to draw out these powers in priority, no doubt, has its office. But we are never without a hint that these powers are mediate and servile, and that we are one day to deal with real being, — essences with essences. Even the fury of material activity has some results friendly to moral health. The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles. The Spirit saith to the man, ‘How is it with thee? thee personally? is it well? is it ill?’ For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a religious training, — religion of character is so apt to be invaded. Religion must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep its wild beauty. “I have seen,” said a traveller who had known the extremes of society, “I have seen human nature in all its forms, it is everywhere the same, but the wilder it is, the more virtuous.”

We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism devastates the community. I do not think it can be cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic discipline. The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour. That which is signified by the words “moral” and “spiritual,” is a lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we have loaded them, will certainly bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient meaning. I know no words that mean so much. In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing. Men talk of “mere morality,” — which is much as if one should say, ‘poor God, with nobody to help him.’ I find the omnipresence and the almightiness in the reaction of every atom in Nature. I can best indicate by examples those reactions by which every part of Nature replies to the purpose of the actor, — beneficently to the good, penally to the bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun. What a day dawns, when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to doing; being to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year to the day; the life to the year; character to performance; — and have come to know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is slow, the term will be long.

’Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to the health of man, and to his highest powers, so as to be, in some manner, the source of intellect. All the great ages have been ages of belief. I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of performance, when great national movements began, when arts appeared, when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in earnest, and had fixed its thoughts on spiritual verities, with as strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet, are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. Thus, I think, we very slowly admit in another man a higher degree of moral sentiment than our own, — a finer conscience, more impressionable, or, which marks minuter degrees; an ear to hear acuter notes of right and wrong, than we can. I think we listen suspiciously and very slowly to any evidence to that point. But, once satisfied of such superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of his genius. For such persons are nearer to the secret of God than others; are bathed by sweeter waters; they hear notices, they see visions, where others are vacant. We believe that holiness confers a certain insight, because not by our private, but by our public force, can we share and know the nature of things.

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals. Given the equality of two intellects, — which will form the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted? “The heart has its arguments, with which the understanding is not acquainted.” For the heart is at once aware of the state of health or disease, which is the controlling state, that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course, to all question of the ingenuity of arguments, the amount of facts, or the elegance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias of errors of principle carries away men into perilous courses, as soon as their will does not control their passion or talent. Hence the extraordinary blunders, and final wrong head, into which men spoiled by ambition usually fall. Hence the remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love. “As much love, so much mind,” said the Latin proverb. The superiority that has no superior; the redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal essence, is love.

The moral must be the measure of health. If your eye is on the eternal, your intellect will grow, and your opinions and actions will have a beauty which no learning or combined advantages of other men can rival. The moment of your loss of faith, and acceptance of the lucrative standard, will be marked in the pause, or solstice of genius, the sequent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction to other minds. The vulgar are sensible of the change in you, and of your descent, though they clap you on the back, and congratulate you on your increased common sense.

Our recent culture has been in natural science. We have learned the manners of the sun and of the moon, of the rivers and the rains, of the mineral and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals. Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight neither loses nor gains. The path of a star, the moment of an eclipse, can be determined to the fraction of a second. Well, to him the book of History, the book of love, the lures of passion, and the commandments of duty are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation of the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and of thought; that, if, in sidereal ages, gravity and projection keep their craft, and the ball never loses its way in its wild path through space, — a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection, rule not less tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance of power from age to age unbroken. For, though the new element of freedom and an individual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search of justice, and ultimate right is done. Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see that, against all appearances, the nature of things works for truth and right forever.

’Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, look where we will, in a boy’s game, or in the strifes of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a class of facts which concerns all men, within and above their creeds.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry. The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all things go by number, rule, and weight.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he appears; he does not see, that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, — but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in. As we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In us, it is inspiration; out there in Nature, we see its fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment.

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which compares well with any in our Western books. “Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is smallest of the least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things; which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes without hands.”

If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional phrases, let me suggest to him, by a few examples, what kind of a trust this is, and how real. Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that the colors are fast, because they are the native colors of the fleece; that the globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that the police and sincerity of the Universe are secured by God’s delegating his divinity to every particle; that there is no room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice.

The countryman leaving his native village, for the first time, and going abroad, finds all his habits broken up. In a new nation and language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost. What! it is not then necessary to the order and existence of society? He misses this, and the commanding eye of his neighborhood, which held him to decorum. This is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London, of Paris, to young men. But after a little experience, he makes the discovery that there are no large cities, — none large enough to hide in; that the censors of action are as numerous and as near in Paris, as in Littleton or Portland; that the gossip is as prompt and vengeful. There is no concealment, and, for each offence, a several vengeance; that, reaction, or nothing for nothing, or, things are as broad as they are long, is not a rule for Littleton or Portland, but for the Universe.

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. We are disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in their proprieties. The smallest fly will draw blood, and gossip is a weapon impossible to exclude from the privatest, highest, selectest. Nature created a police of many ranks. God has delegated himself to a million deputies. From these low external penalties, the scale ascends. Next come the resentments, the fears, which injustice calls out; then, the false relations in which the offender is put to other men; and the reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and devastation of his mind.

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succor his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder in that state of mind you had, when you made it. If you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective. If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house. There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized world. Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. If a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if there be some belief or some purpose he would bury in his breast? ’Tis as hard to hide as fire. He is a strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. We can only see what we are, and if we misbehave we suspect others. The fame of Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas à Kempis, or of Bonaparte, characterizes those who give it. As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

Each must be armed — not necessarily with musket and pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that he has better muskets and pikes in his energy and constancy. To every creature is his own weapon, however skilfully concealed from himself, a good while. His work is sword and shield. Let him accuse none, let him injure none. The way to mend the bad world, is to create the right world. Here is a low political economy plotting to cut the throat of foreign competition, and establish our own; — excluding others by force, or making war on them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to worse wares of ours. But the real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the foreign artisan, is, not to kill him, but to beat his work. And the Crystal Palaces and World Fairs, with their committees and prizes on all kinds of industry, are the result of this feeling. The American workman who strikes ten blows with his hammer, whilst the foreign workman only strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows were aimed at and told on his person. I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage. In every variety of human employment, in the mechanical and in the fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in legislating, there are among the numbers who do their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, and as badly as they dare, — there are the working-men, on whom the burden of the business falls, — those who love work, and love to see it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake; and the state and the world is happy, that has the most of such finishers. The world will always do justice at last to such finishers: it cannot otherwise. He who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not loiter. Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work is done, victory is obtained. There is no chance, and no blanks. You want but one verdict: if you have your own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if witnesses are wanted, witnesses are near. There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone, and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life, — now under one disguise, now under another, — like a police in citizens’ clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all the kingdom of time.

This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things. To make our word or act sublime, we must make it real. It is our system that counts, not the single word or unsupported action. Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are. What I am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my efforts to hold it back. What I am has been secretly conveyed from me to another, whilst I was vainly making up my mind to tell him it. He has heard from me what I never spoke.

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused. In the progress of the character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a decreasing faith in propositions. Young people admire talents, and particular excellences. As we grow older, we value total powers and effects, as the spirit, or quality of the man. We have another sight, and a new standard; an insight which disregards what is done for the eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not what men say, but hears what they do not say.

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many anecdotes touching his discernment and benevolence are told at Naples and Rome. Among the nuns in a convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who laid claim to certain rare gifts of inspiration and prophecy, and the abbess advised the Holy Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by her novice. The Pope did not well know what to make of these new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one day, he consulted him. Philip undertook to visit the nun, and ascertain her character. He threw himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he was, and hastened through the mud and mire to the distant convent. He told the abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her to summon the nun without delay. The nun was sent for, and, as soon as she came into the apartment, Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with mud, and desired her to draw off his boots. The young nun, who had become the object of much attention and respect, drew back with anger, and refused the office: Philip ran out of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly to the Pope; “Give yourself no uneasiness, Holy Father, any longer: here is no miracle, for here is no humility.”

We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they must say; what their natures say, though their busy, artful, Yankee understandings try to hold back, and choke that word, and to articulate something different. If we will sit quietly, — what they ought to say is said, with their will, or against their will. We do not care for you, let us pretend what we will: — we are always looking through you to the dim dictator behind you. Whilst your habit or whim chatters, we civilly and impatiently wait until that wise superior shall speak again. Even children are not deceived by the false reasons which their parents give in answer to their questions, whether touching natural facts, or religion, or persons. When the parent, instead of thinking how it really is, puts them off with a traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children perceive that it is traditional or hypocritical. To a sound constitution the defect of another is at once manifest: and the marks of it are only concealed from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical observer remarks, that the sympathies of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on the face, and on all its features. Not only does our beauty waste, but it leaves word how it went to waste. Physiognomy and phrenology are not new sciences, but declarations of the soul that it is aware of certain new sources of information. And now sciences of broader scope are starting up behind these. And so for ourselves, it is really of little importance what blunders in statement we make, so only we make no wilful departures from the truth. How a man’s truth comes to mind, long after we have forgotten all his words! How it comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our only armor in all passages of life and death! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap; but if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the other party, cleave to the truth against me, against thee, and you gain a station from which you cannot be dislodged. The other party will forget the words that you spoke, but the part you took continues to plead for you.

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me? I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring the answers also in due time. Very rich, very potent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have it all his own way, for me. Why should I give up my thought, because I cannot answer an objection to it? Consider only, whether it remains in my life the same it was. That only which we have within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. He only is rightly immortal, to whom all things are immortal. I have read somewhere, that none is accomplished, so long as any are incomplete; that the happiness of one cannot consist with the misery of any other.

The Buddhists say, “No seed will die:” every seed will grow. Where is the service which can escape its remuneration? What is vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward? ’Tis the difference of artisan and artist, of talent and genius, of sinner and saint. The man whose eyes are nailed not on the nature of his act, but on the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, — is almost equally low. He is great, whose eyes are opened to see that the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because he is transformed into his action, and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, like every other tree. A great man cannot be hindered of the effect of his act, because it is immediate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, and in the dark brings them friends from far. Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.

Thus man is made equal to every event. He can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide. He feels the insurance of a just employment. I am not afraid of accident, as long as I am in my place. It is strange that superior persons should not feel that they have some better resistance against cholera, than avoiding green peas and salads. Life is hardly respectable, — is it? if it has no generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that constitute a necessity of existing. Every man’s task is his life-preserver. The conviction that his work is dear to God and cannot be spared, defends him. The lightning-rod that disarms the cloud of its threat is his body in its duty. A high aim reacts on the means, on the days, on the organs of the body. A high aim is curative, as well as arnica. “Napoleon,” says Goethe, “visited those sick of the plague, in order to prove that the man who could vanquish fear, could vanquish the plague also; and he was right. ’Tis incredible what force the will has in such cases: it penetrates the body, and puts it in a state of activity, which repels all hurtful influences; whilst fear invites them.”

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was besieging a town on the continent, a gentleman sent to him on public business came to his camp, and, learning that the King was before the walls, he ventured to go where he was. He found him directing the operation of his gunners, and, having explained his errand, and received his answer, the King said, “Do you not know, sir, that every moment you spend here is at the risk of your life?” “I run no more risk,” replied the gentleman, “than your Majesty.” “Yes,” said the King, “but my duty brings me here, and yours does not.” In a few minutes, a cannon-ball fell on the spot, and the gentleman was killed.

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great. He learns the greatness of humility. He shall work in the dark, work against failure, pain, and ill-will. If he is insulted, he can be insulted; all his affair is not to insult. Hafiz writes,

At the last day, men shall wear

On their heads the dust,

As ensign and as ornament

Of their lowly trust.

The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all. It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises man with a feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and discourse betrayed many inspirations of this sentiment. Benedict was always great in the present time. He had hoarded nothing from the past, neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory. He had no designs on the future, neither for what he should do to men, nor for what men should do for him. He said, ‘I am never beaten until I know that I am beaten. I meet powerful brutal people to whom I have no skill to reply. They think they have defeated me. It is so published in society, in the journals; I am defeated in this fashion, in all men’s sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines. My ledger may show that I am in debt, cannot yet make my ends meet, and vanquish the enemy so. My race may not be prospering: we are sick, ugly, obscure, unpopular. My children may be worsted. I seem to fail in my friends and clients, too. That is to say, in all the encounters that have yet chanced, I have not been weaponed for that particular occasion, and have been historically beaten; and yet, I know, all the time, that I have never been beaten; have never yet fought, shall certainly fight, when my hour comes, and shall beat.’ “A man,” says the Vishnu Sarma, “who having well compared his own strength or weakness with that of others, after all doth not know the difference, is easily overcome by his enemies.”

‘I spent,’ he said, ‘ten months in the country. Thick-starred Orion was my only companion. Wherever a squirrel or a bee can go with security, I can go. I ate whatever was set before me; I touched ivy and dogwood. When I went abroad, I kept company with every man on the road, for I knew that my evil and my good did not come from these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was. For I could not stoop to be a circumstance, as they did, who put their life into their fortune and their company. I would not degrade myself by casting about in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting for one. If the thought come, I would give it entertainment. It should, as it ought, go into my hands and feet; but if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly at all. If it can spare me, I am sure I can spare it. It shall be the same with my friends. I will never woo the loveliest. I will not ask any friendship or favor. When I come to my own, we shall both know it. Nothing will be to be asked or to be granted.’ Benedict went out to seek his friend, and met him on the way; but he expressed no surprise at any coincidences. On the other hand, if he called at the door of his friend, and he was not at home, he did not go again; concluding that he had misinterpreted the intimations.

He had the whim not to make an apology to the same individual whom he had wronged. For this, he said, was a piece of personal vanity; but he would correct his conduct in that respect in which he had faulted, to the next person he should meet. Thus, he said, universal justice was satisfied.

Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Genesee woman who had hired herself to work for her, at a shilling a day, and, now sickening, was like to be bedridden on her hands. Should she keep her, or should she dismiss her? But Benedict said, ‘Why ask? One thing will clear itself as the thing to be done, and not another, when the hour comes. Is it a question, whether to put her into the street? Just as much whether to thrust the little Jenny on your arm into the street. The milk and meal you give the beggar, will fatten Jenny. Thrust the woman out, and you thrust your babe out of doors, whether it so seem to you or not.’

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the doctrine which they faithfully hold, that encourages them to open their doors to every wayfaring man who proposes to come among them; for, they say, the Spirit will presently manifest to the man himself, and to the society, what manner of person he is, and whether he belongs among them. They do not receive him, they do not reject him. And not in vain have they worn their clay coat, and drudged in their fields, and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if they have truly learned thus much wisdom.

Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by sympathy with the invisible and real, finds support in labor, instead of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not. With eyes open, he makes the choice of virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of religion, which churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate; for the highest virtue is always against the law.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but moderately. The great class, they who affect our imagination, the men who could not make their hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas, — they suggest what they cannot execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard from afar. The Spirit does not love cripples and malformations. If there ever was a good man, be certain, there was another, and will be more.

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed with beauty at our curtain by night, at our table by day, — the apprehension, the assurance of a coming change. The race of mankind have always offered at least this implied thanks for the gift of existence, — namely, the terror of its being taken away; the insatiable curiosity and appetite for its continuation. The whole revelation that is vouchsafed us, is, the gentle trust, which, in our experience we find, will cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm.

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious. It is so well, that it is sure it will be well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. The son of Antiochus asked his father, when he would join battle? “Dost thou fear,” replied the King, “that thou only in all the army wilt not hear the trumpet?” ’Tis a higher thing to confide, that, if it is best we should live, we shall live,— ’tis higher to have this conviction, than to have the lease of indefinite centuries and millenniums and æons. Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man’s experience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, from our own activity and designs, which imply an interminable future for their play.

What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes. Such as you are, the gods themselves could not help you. Men are too often unfit to live, from their obvious inequality to their own necessities, or, they suffer from politics, or bad neighbors, or from sickness, and they would gladly know that they were to be dismissed from the duties of life. But the wise instinct asks, ‘How will death help them?’ These are not dismissed when they die. You shall not wish for death out of pusillanimity. The weight of the Universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance. You must do your work, before you shall be released. And as far as it is a question of fact respecting the government of the Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a word, “It is pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there be none.”

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song which rises from all elements and all angels, is, a voluntary obedience, a necessitated freedom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. “There are two things,” said Mahomet, “which I abhor, the learned in his infidelities, and the fool in his devotions.” Our times are impatient of both, and specially of the last. Let us have nothing now which is not its own evidence. There is surely enough for the heart and imagination in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered with assertions and half-truths, with emotions and snuffle.

There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no coöperation, he shall walk with no companion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, — he shall repose alone on that. He needs only his own verdict. No good fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The Laws are his consolers, the good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty, and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.

Hear what British Merlin sung,

Of keenest eye and truest tongue.

Say not, the chiefs who first arrive

Usurp the seats for which all strive;

The forefathers this land who found

Failed to plant the vantage-ground;

Ever from one who comes to-morrow

Men wait their good and truth to borrow.

But wilt thou measure all thy road,

See thou lift the lightest load.

Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,

And thou, Cyndyllan’s son! beware

Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,

To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, —

Only the light-armed climb the hill.

The richest of all lords is Use,

And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,

Drink the wild air’s salubrity:

Where the star Canope shines in May,

Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay.

The music that can deepest reach,

And cure all ill, is cordial speech:

Mask thy wisdom with delight,

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.

Of all wit’s uses, the main one

Is to live well with who has none.

Cleave to thine acre; the round year

Will fetch all fruits and virtues here:

Fool and foe may harmless roam,

Loved and lovers bide at home,

A day for toil, an hour for sport,

But for a friend is life too short.

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown inspiration enters into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of our own experience whereby to help each other. All the professions are timid and expectant agencies. The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet the condition of any soul; if of two, if of ten, ’tis a signal success. But he walked to the church without any assurance that he knew the distemper, or could heal it. The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few resources, the same tonic or sedative to this new and peculiar constitution, which he has applied with various success to a hundred men before. If the patient mends, he is glad and surprised. The lawyer advises the client, and tells his story to the jury, and leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much relieved as the client, if it turns out that he has a verdict. The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a brave face on the matter, and, since there must be a decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done justice, and given satisfaction to the community; but is only an advocate after all. And so is all life a timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we must, and call it by the best names. We like very well to be praised for our action, but our conscience says, “Not unto us.” ’Tis little we can do for each other. We accompany the youth with sympathy, and manifold old sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, but ’tis certain that not by strength of ours, or of the old sayings, but only on strength of his own, unknown to us or to any, he must stand or fall. That by which a man conquers in any passage, is a profound secret to every other being in the world, and it is only as he turns his back on us and on all men, and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good can come to him. What we have, therefore, to say of life, is rather description, or, if you please, celebration, than available rules.

Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or feel strongly, adds to our power, and enlarges our field of action. We have a debt to every great heart, to every fine genius; to those who have put life and fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to those who have added new sciences; to those who have refined life by elegant pursuits. ’Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. Fine society, in the common acceptation, has neither ideas nor aims. It renders the service of a perfumery, or a laundry, not of a farm or factory. ’Tis an exclusion and a precinct. Sidney Smith said, “A few yards in London cement or dissolve friendship.” It is an unprincipled decorum; an affair of clean linen and coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance in trifles. There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day. Society wishes to be amused. I do not wish to be amused. I wish that life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste. Is all we have to do to draw the breath in, and blow it out again? Porphyry’s definition is better; “Life is that which holds matter together.” The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason, visibly stream. See what a cometary train of auxiliaries man carries with him, of animals, plants, stones, gases, and imponderable elements. Let us infer his ends from this pomp of means. Mirabeau said, “Why should we feel ourselves to be men, unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere. You must say of nothing, That is beneath me, nor feel that anything can be out of your power. Nothing is impossible to the man who can will. Is that necessary? That shall be: — this is the only law of success.” Whoever said it, this is in the right key. But this is not the tone and genius of the men in the street. In the streets, we grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and torpid. The finest wits have their sediment. What quantities of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures, antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers of both sexes, might be advantageously spared! Mankind divides itself into two classes, — benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die: — quantities of poor lives; of distressing invalids; of cases for a gun. Franklin said, “Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged: but they have capacities, if they would employ them.” Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ’Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. The worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving. Masses! the calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all. If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of single men spoken on their honor and their conscience. In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much under-estimated. “Clay and clay differ in dignity,” as we discover by our preferences every day. What a vicious practice is this of our politicians at Washington pairing off! as if one man who votes wrong, going away, could excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going away; or, as if your presence did not tell in more ways than in your vote. Suppose the three hundred heroes at Thermopylæ had paired off with three hundred Persians: would it have been all the same to Greece, and to history? Napoleon was called by his men Cent Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might have called him Hundred Million.

Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes down a tree full of gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians, and nations of clothed Christians, with two or three good heads among them. Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a million throws. In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master in a century. The more difficulty there is in creating good men, the more they are used when they come. I once counted in a little neighborhood, and found that every able-bodied man had, say from twelve to fifteen persons dependent on him for material aid, — to whom he is to be for spoon and jug, for backer and sponsor, for nursery and hospital, and many functions beside: nor does it seem to make much difference whether he is bachelor or patriarch; if he do not violently decline the duties that fall to him, this amount of helpfulness will in one way or another be brought home to him. This is the tax which his abilities pay. The good men are employed for private centres of use, and for larger influence. All revelations, whether of mechanical or intellectual or moral science, are made not to communities, but to single persons. All the marked events of our day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced back to their origin in a private brain. All the feats which make our civility were the thoughts of a few good heads.

Meantime, this spawning productivity is not noxious or needless. You would say, this rabble of nations might be spared. But no, they are all counted and depended on. Fate keeps everything alive so long as the smallest thread of public necessity holds it on to the tree. The coxcomb and bully and thief class are allowed as proletaries, every one of their vices being the excess or acridity of a virtue. The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee. But the units, whereof this mass is composed are neuters, every one of which may be grown to a queen-bee. The rule is, we are used as brute atoms, until we think: then, we use all the rest. Nature turns all malfaisance to good. Nature provided for real needs. No sane man at last distrusts himself. His existence is a perfect answer to all sentimental cavils. If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise properties that are required. That we are here, is proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, and the same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there.

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply, that the majority are unripe, and have not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion. That, if they knew it, is an oracle for them and for all. But in the passing moment, the quadruped interest is very prone to prevail: and this beast-force, whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the school of heroes, the glory of martyrs, has provoked, in every age, the satire of wits, and the tears of good men. They find the journals, the clubs, the governments, the churches, to be in the interest, and the pay of the devil. And wise men have met this obstruction in their times, like Socrates, with his famous irony; like Bacon, with life-long dissimulation; like Erasmus, with his book “The Praise of Folly;” like Rabelais, with his satire rending the nations. “They were the fools who cried against me, you will say,” wrote the Chevalier de Boufflers to Grimm; “aye, but the fools have the advantage of numbers, and ’tis that which decides. ’Tis of no use for us to make war with them; we shall not weaken them; they will always be the masters. There will not be a practice or an usage introduced, of which they are not the authors.”

In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. ’Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he could get. It was necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways, — and the House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign, he decreed, “that no tax should be levied without consent of Lords and Commons;” — which is the basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years’ War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots serve men immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the Pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and natural order. The sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and distempers of men, self-limiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We acquire the strength we have overcome. Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero. The sun were insipid, if the universe were not opaque. And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity, to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night. What would painter do, or what would poet or saint, but for crucifixions and hells? And evermore in the world is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats. Not Antoninus, but a poor washer-woman said, “The more trouble, the more lion; that’s my principle.” I do not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings of the people who went to California, in 1849. It was a rush and a scramble of needy adventurers, and, in the western country, a general jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers. Some of them went with honest purposes, some with very bad ones, and all of them with the very commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth. But Nature watches over all, and turns this malfaisance to good. California gets peopled and subdued, — civilized in this immoral way, — and, on this fiction, a real prosperity is rooted and grown. ’Tis a decoy-duck; ’tis tubs thrown to amuse the whale: but real ducks, and whales that yield oil, are caught. And, out of Sabine rapes, and out of robbers’ forays, real Romes and their heroisms come in fulness of time.

In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of. The agencies by which events so grand as the opening of California, of Texas, of Oregon, and the junction of the two oceans, are effected, are paltry, — coarse selfishness, fraud, and conspiracy: and most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great West, from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional philanthropy on record. What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, or by a Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared with the involuntary blessing wrought on nations by the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois, Michigan, and the network of the Mississippi valley roads, which have evoked not only all the wealth of the soil, but the energy of millions of men. ’Tis a sentence of ancient wisdom, “that God hangs the greatest weights on the smallest wires.”

What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in private houses. When the friends of a gentleman brought to his notice the follies of his sons with many hints of their danger, he replied, that he knew so much mischief when he was a boy, and had turned out on the whole so successfully, that he was not alarmed by the dissipation of boys; ’twas dangerous water, but, he thought, they would soon touch bottom, and then swim to the top. This is bold practice, and there are many failures to a good escape. Yet one would say, that a good understanding would suffice as well as moral sensibility to keep one erect; the gratifications of the passions are so quickly seen to be damaging, and, — what men like least, — seriously lowering them in social rank. Then all talent sinks with character.

“Croyez moi, l’erreur aussi a son mérite,” said Voltaire. We see those who surmount, by dint of some egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady narrow man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls among other narrow men, or on objects which have a brief importance, as some trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it to the universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter, and carry a point. Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring into society, quite clear of their vices. But who dares draw out the linchpin from the wagon-wheel? ’Tis so manifest, that there is no moral deformity, but is a good passion out of place; that there is no man who is not indebted to his foibles; that, according to the old oracle, “the Furies are the bonds of men;” that the poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life. In the high prophetic phrase, He causes the wrath of man to praise him, and twists and wrenches our evil to our good. Shakspeare wrote, —

“’Tis said, best men are moulded of their faults;”

and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this stuff, and esteem men of irregular and passional force the best timber. A man of sense and energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston harbor, said to me, “I want none of your good boys, — give me the bad ones.” And this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers are scared, and think they are going to die. Mirabeau said, “There are none but men of strong passions capable of going to greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude.” Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of every day: ’tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when once it is begun. In short, there is no man who is not at some time indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from manures. We only insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow upward, and convert the base into the better nature.

The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude which brought out his working talents. The youth is charmed with the fine air and accomplishments of the children of fortune. But all great men come out of the middle classes. ’Tis better for the head; ’tis better for the heart. Marcus Antoninus says, that Fronto told him, “that the so-called high-born are for the most part heartless;” whilst nothing is so indicative of deepest culture as a tender consideration of the ignorant. Charles James Fox said of England, “The history of this country proves, that we are not to expect from men in affluent circumstances the vigilance, energy, and exertion without which the House of Commons would lose its greatest force and weight. Human nature is prone to indulgence, and the most meritorious public services have always been performed by persons in a condition of life removed from opulence.” And yet what we ask daily, is to be conventional. Supply, most kind gods! this defect in my address, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of the ring: supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms with them. But the wise gods say, No, we have better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentleman. A Fifth-Avenue landlord, a West-End householder, is not the highest style of man: and, though good hearts and sound minds are of no condition, yet he who is to be wise for many, must not be protected. He must know the huts where poor men lie, and the chores which poor men do. The first-class minds, Æsop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Franklin, had the poor man’s feeling and mortification. A rich man was never insulted in his life: but this man must be stung. A rich man was never in danger from cold, or hunger, or war, or ruffians, and you can see he was not, from the moderation of his ideas. ’Tis a fatal disadvantage to be cockered, and to eat too much cake. What tests of manhood could he stand? Take him out of his protections. He is a good book-keeper; or he is a shrewd adviser in the insurance office: perhaps he could pass a college examination, and take his degrees: perhaps he can give wise counsel in a court of law. Now plant him down among farmers, firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a dog on him: set a highwayman on him: try him with a course of mobs: send him to Kansas, to Pike’s Peak, to Oregon: and, if he have true faculty, this may be the element he wants, and he will come out of it with broader wisdom and manly power. Æsop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken by corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of human life.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. As we go gladly to Faneuil Hall, to be played upon by the stormy winds and strong fingers of enraged patriotism, so is a fanatical persecution, civil war, national bankruptcy, or revolution, more rich in the central tones than languid years of prosperity. What had been, ever since our memory, solid continent, yawns apart, and discloses its composition and genesis. We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

In our life and culture, everything is worked up, and comes in use, — passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and not less, folly and blunders, insult, ennui, and bad company. Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar. Life is a boundless privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have no guess what good company you shall find there. You buy much that is not rendered in the bill. Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on laying down the first obvious rules of life, I will not here repeat the first rule of economy, already propounded once and again, that every man shall maintain himself, — but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles. Dr. Johnson said severely, “Every man is a rascal as soon as he is sick.” Drop the cant, and treat it sanely. In dealing with the drunken, we do not affect to be drunk. We must treat the sick with the same firmness, giving them, of course, every aid, — but withholding ourselves. I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who were his companions? what men of ability he saw? he replied, that he spent his time with the sick and the dying. I said, he seemed to me to need quite other company, and all the more that he had this: for if people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would leave all and go to them, but, as far as I had observed, they were as frivolous as the rest, and sometimes much more frivolous. Let us engage our companions not to spare us. I knew a wise woman who said to her friends, “When I am old, rule me.” And the best part of health is fine disposition. It is more essential than talent, even in the works of talent. Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason, that whoever sees the law which distributes things, does not despond, but is animated to great desires and endeavors. He who desponds betrays that he has not seen it.

’Tis a Dutch proverb, that “paint costs nothing,” such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more of it remains. The latent heat of an ounce of wood or stone is inexhaustible. You may rub the same chip of pine to the point of kindling, a hundred times; and the power of happiness of any soul is not to be computed or drained. It is observed that a depression of spirits develops the germs of a plague in individuals and nations.

It is an old commendation of right behavior, “Aliis lœtus, sapiens sibi,” which our English proverb translates, “Be merry and wise.” I know how easy it is to men of the world to look grave and sneer at your sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams. But I find the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for use, than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discontented people. I know those miserable fellows, and I hate them, who see a black star always riding through the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead: waves of light pass over and hide it for a moment, but the black star keeps fast in the zenith. But power dwells with cheerfulness; hope puts us in a working mood, whilst despair is no muse, and untunes the active powers. A man should make life and Nature happier to us, or he had better never been born. When the political economist reckons up the unproductive classes, he should put at the head this class of pitiers of themselves, cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters. An old French verse runs, in my translation: —

Some of your griefs you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived;

But what torments of pain you endured

From evils that never arrived!

There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveller, who says, ‘Anywhere but here.’ The Turkish cadi said to Layard, “After the fashion of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy and content in none.” My countrymen are not less infatuated with the rococo toy of Italy. All America seems on the point of embarking for Europe. But we shall not always traverse seas and lands with light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say. One day we shall cast out the passion for Europe, by the passion for America. Culture will give gravity and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not knowing how else to spend money. Already, who provoke pity like that excellent family party just arriving in their well-appointed carriage, as far from home and any honest end as ever? Each nation has asked successively, ‘What are they here for?’ until at last the party are shamefaced, and anticipate the question at the gates of each town.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not, by distant travel, we should reach the baths of the descending sun and stars. On experiment, the horizon flies before us, and leaves us on an endless common, sheltered by no glass bell. Yet ’tis strange how tenaciously we cling to that bell-astronomy, of a protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion in the search after happiness, which I observe, every summer, recommenced in this neighborhood, soon after the pairing of the birds. The young people do not like the town, do not like the sea-shore, they will go inland; find a dear cottage deep in the mountains, secret as their hearts. They set forth on their travels in search of a home: they reach Berkshire; they reach Vermont; they look at the farms; — good farms, high mountain-sides: but where is the seclusion? The farm is near this; ’tis near that; they have got far from Boston, but ’tis near Albany, or near Burlington, or near Montreal. They explore a farm, but the house is small, old, thin; discontented people lived there, and are gone: — there’s too much sky, too much out-doors; too public. The youth aches for solitude. When he comes to the house, he passes through the house. That does not make the deep recess he sought. ‘Ah! now, I perceive,’ he says, ‘it must be deep with persons; friends only can give depth.’ Yes, but there is a great dearth, this year, of friends; hard to find, and hard to have when found: they are just going away: they too are in the whirl of the flitting world, and have engagements and necessities. They are just starting for Wisconsin; have letters from Bremen: — see you again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson, that there is but one depth, but one interior, and that is — his purpose. When joy or calamity or genius shall show him it, then woods, then farms, then city shopmen and cab-drivers, indifferently with prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its unfathomable heaven, its populous solitude.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life. What a difference in the hospitality of minds! Inestimable is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Others are involuntarily hurtful to us, and bereave us of the power of thought, impound and imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, there needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, — so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this brother. When he comes into the office or public room, the society dissolves; one after another slips out, and the apartment is at his disposal. What is incurable but a frivolous habit?

A fly is as untamable as a hyena. Yet folly in the sense of fun, fooling, or dawdling can easily be borne; as Talleyrand said, “I find nonsense singularly refreshing;” but a virulent, aggressive fool taints the reason of a household. I have seen a whole family of quiet, sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, victims of such a rogue. For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity. But resistance only exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature and gravitation are quite wrong, and he only is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues and industries they have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of this one malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run away with, — not only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is forced to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For remedy, whilst the case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth: let all the truth that is spoken or done be at the zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly. But, when the case is seated and malignant, the only safety is in amputation; as seamen say, you shall cut and run. How to live with unfit companions? — for, with such, life is for the most part spent: and experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of self-defence, namely, not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with them; but let their madness spend itself unopposed; — you are you, and I am I.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live. Our habit of thought, — take men as they rise, — is not satisfying; in the common experience, I fear, it is poor and squalid. The success which will content them, is, a bargain, a lucrative employment, an advantage gained over a competitor, a marriage, a patrimony, a legacy, and the like. With these objects, their conversation deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects, exaggerated bad news, and the rain. This is forlorn, and they feel sore and sensitive. Now, if one comes who can illuminate this dark house with thoughts, show them their native riches, what gifts they have, how indispensable each is, what magical powers over nature and men; what access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute character; he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences, — then we come out of our egg-shell existence into the great dome, and see the zenith over and the nadir under us. Instead of the tanks and buckets of knowledge to which we are daily confined, we come down to the shore of the sea, and dip our hands in its miraculous waves. ’Tis wonderful the effect on the company. They are not the men they were. They have all been to California, and all have come back millionnaires. There is no book and no pleasure in life comparable to it. Ask what is best in our experience, and we shall say, a few pieces of plain-dealing with wise people. Our conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong to better circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us, whose generalizations are more worth for joy and for effect than anything that is now called philosophy or literature. In excited conversation, we have glimpses of the Universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.

Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the covenant of friendship. Our chief want in life, is, somebody who shall make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. With him we are easily great. There is a sublime attraction in him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide the doors of existence! What questions we ask of him! what an understanding we have! how few words are needed! It is the only real society. An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —

“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,

And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.”

But few writers have said anything better to this point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the test of mental health: “Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.” Neither is life long enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, and not a postilion’s dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a pudency about friendship, as about love, and though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name it. With the first class of men our friendship or good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, of reputation. And yet we do not provide for the greatest good of life. We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all, — friends? We know that all our training is to fit us for this, and we do not take the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait for these benefactors?

It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you have been dieted or dressed; whether you have been lodged on the first floor or the attic; whether you have had gardens and baths, good cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a ridiculous truck: these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave no effect. But it counts much whether we have had good companions, in that time; — almost as much as what we have been doing. And see the overpowering importance of neighborhood in all association. As it is marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, so it is who lives near us of equal social degree, — a few people at convenient distance, no matter how bad company, — these, and these only, shall be your life’s companions: and all those who are native, congenial, and by many an oath of the heart, sacramented to you, are gradually and totally lost. You cannot deal systematically with this fine element of society, and one may take a good deal of pains to bring people together, and to organize clubs and debating societies, and yet no result come of it. But it is certain that there is a great deal of good in us that does not know itself, and that a habit of union and competition brings people up and keeps them up to their highest point; that life would be twice or ten times life, if spent with wise and fruitful companions. The obvious inference is, a little useful deliberation and preconcert, when one goes to buy house and land.

But we live with people on other platforms; we live with dependents, not only with the young whom we are to teach all we know, and clothe with the advantages we have earned, but also with those who serve us directly, and for money. Yet the old rules hold good. Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured by money. Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any. This point is acquiring new importance in American social life. Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of unreasonable demand on one side, and shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, in the train, what was his errand in the city? He replied, “I have been sent to procure an angel to do cooking.” A lady complained to me, that, of her two maidens, one was absent-minded, and the other was absent-bodied. And the evil increases from the ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of the immigrant population swarming into houses and farms. Few people discern that it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes from the man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in one house, and a haridan in the other. All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If you are proposing only your own, the other party must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal generously, the other, though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and deal truly with you. When I asked an iron-master about the slag and cinder in railroad iron,— “O,” he said, “there’s always good iron to be had: if there’s cinder in the iron, ’tis because there was cinder in the pay.”

But why multiply these topics, and their illustrations, which are endless? Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics, — all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms, of selecting that for which you are apt; — begin at the beginning, proceed in order, step by step. ’Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck, some step omitted, which Nature never pardons. The happy conditions of life may be had on the same terms. Their attraction for you is the pledge that they are within your reach. Our prayers are prophets. There must be fidelity, and there must be adherence. How respectable the life that clings to its objects! Youthful aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life are fair and commendable: — but will you stick? Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and, when you tax them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they have forgotten that they made a vow. The individuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible. The race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. The hero is he who is immovably centred. The main difference between people seems to be, that one man can come under obligations on which you can rely, — is obligable; and another is not. As he has not a law within him, there’s nothing to tie him to.

’Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of condition, and to exaggerate them. But all rests at last on that integrity which dwarfs talent, and can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests, superficial success is of no account. The man, — it is his attitude, — not feats, but forces, — not on set days and public occasions, but, at all hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still formidable, and not to be disposed of. The populace says, with Horne Tooke, “If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.” I prefer to say, with the old prophet, “Seekest thou great things? seek them not:” — or, what was said of a Spanish prince, “The more you took from him, the greater he looked.” Plus on lui ôte, plus il est grand.

The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded, — the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these are the essentials, — these, and the wish to serve, — to add somewhat to the well-being of men.

BEAUTY.

Was never form and never face

So sweet to SEYD as only grace

Which did not slumber like a stone

But hovered gleaming and was gone.

Beauty chased he everywhere,

In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.

He smote the lake to feed his eye

With the beryl beam of the broken wave

He flung in pebbles well to hear

The moment’s music which they gave.

Oft pealed for him a lofty tone

From nodding pole and belting zone.

He heard a voice none else could hear

From centred and from errant sphere.

The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,

Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.

In dens of passion, and pits of wo,

He saw strong Eros struggling through,

To sun the dark and solve the curse,

And beam to the bounds of the universe.

While thus to love he gave his days

In loyal worship, scorning praise,

How spread their lures for him, in vain,

Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!

He thought it happier to be dead,

To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm’s length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul’s avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

We are just so frivolous and skeptical. Men hold themselves cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of his blood: they are the extension of his personality. His duties are measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would be felt to the centre of the Copernican system. ’Tis curious that we only believe as deep as we live. We do not think heroes can exert any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil eye can wither, that the heart’s blessing can heal; that love can exalt talent; can overcome all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his money value, — his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, and wine.

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us where they found us. The invention is of use to the inventor, of questionable help to any other. The formulas of science are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There’s a revenge for this inhumanity. What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is. The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and humor. He has got all snakes and lizards in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting. “See how happy,” he said, “these browsing elks are! Why should not priests, lodged and fed comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?” Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the king. The king, on the next day, conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, “Prince, administer this empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put thee to death.” At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired, “From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?” He answered, “From the horror of death.” The monarch rejoined: “Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased to take recreation, saying to thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death. These priests in the temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into healthful diversions?” But the men of science or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own details, and do not come out men of more force. Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, of the chicane?

No object really interests us but man, and in man only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it is rooted in the mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, post mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the other. Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose teachers and subjects are always near us.

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life, — we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world. All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they governed; — on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man, mixed with his substance. They thought the same genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment. We measure our friends so. We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed, but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with the air of free agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy, could we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain their freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought, and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said, “The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been forever concealed from us.” And the working of this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of it superficial and absurd enough — about works of art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, above his possessions. The most useful man in the most useful world, so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality. We say, love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his eyes. Blind: — yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot of the young soul.

Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to us. ’Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism, any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research, — namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside embellishment is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye. ’Tis the adjustment of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. The cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. The dancing-master can never teach a badly built man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with its existence. Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters and columns that support nothing, and allows the real supporters of the house honestly to show themselves. Every necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it is done to be seen, it is mean. How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships in the theatre, — or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a penny an hour! — What a difference in effect between a battalion of troops marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a holiday! In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe the most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated procession by this startling beauty.

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or endeavor to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a palace or a temple gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms. Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one feature, — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back, — is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by gradual and curving movements. I have been told by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offensively sudden. I suppose, the Parisian milliner who dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without question, if this rule be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the world, if only it come by degrees. To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the immortality.

One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, — Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with the least weight. “It is the purgation of superfluities,” said Michel Angelo. There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omission is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

Veracity first of all, and forever. Rien de beau que le vrai. In all design, art lies in making your object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects that are prominent. The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the nations that created them.

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In a house that I know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall not perish.

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced without end. How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of Vesta? These are objects of tenderness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms, whilst the ugly ones die out.

The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in the human form. All men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It reaches its height in woman. “To Eve,” say the Mahometans, “God gave two thirds of all beauty.” A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, in all whom she approaches. Some favors of condition must go with it, since a certain serenity is essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, ‘Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.’ French mémoires of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week, and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Walpole says, “the concourse was so great, when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on chairs and tables to look at her. There are mobs at their doors to see them get into their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres, when it is known they will be there.” “Such crowds,” he adds, elsewhere, “flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see her get into her post-chaise next morning.”

But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton? We all know this magic very well, or can divine it. It does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long. Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind; teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into habit of style.

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau had an ugly face on a handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type, but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a schoolmaster “so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox.” Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another; the hair unequally distributed, etc. The man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world. And yet — it is not beauty that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, without expression, tires. Abbé Ménage said of the President Le Bailleul, “that he was fit for nothing but to sit for his portrait.” A Greek epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is ill-favored. And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, — affirm, that the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, “With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an eagle.” It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, “he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in England.” “Since I am so ugly,” said Du Guesclin, “it behooves that I be bold.” Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, “was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long.” Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge knowledge, ’tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all: whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the whole. This is the triumph of expression, degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has been disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. Still, “it was for beauty that the world was made.” The lives of the Italian artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own. If a man can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable meaning: — if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet; causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence. And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but also in the world of manners.

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. Proclus says, “it swims on the light of forms.” It is properly not in the form, but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Wordsworth rightly speaks of “a light that never was on sea or land,” meaning, that it was supplied by the observer, and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

— “half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die.”

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, — sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the sky. They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.

The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning, What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom! I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.

The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized light showed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, “vis superba formæ” which the poets praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

ILLUSIONS.

Flow, flow the waves hated,

Accursed, adored,

The waves of mutation:

No anchorage is.

Sleep is not, death is not;

Who seem to die live.

House you were born in,

Friends of your spring-time,

Old man and young maid,

Day’s toil and its guerdon,

They are all vanishing,

Fleeing to fables,

Cannot be moored.

See the stars through them,

Through treacherous marbles.

Know, the stars yonder,

The stars everlasting,

Are fugitive also,

And emulate, vaulted,

The lambent heat-lightning,

And fire-fly’s flight.

When thou dost return

On the wave’s circulation,

Beholding the shimmer,

The wild dissipation,

And, out of endeavor

To change and to flow,

The gas become solid,

And phantoms and nothings

Return to be things,

And endless imbroglio

Is law and the world, —

Then first shalt thou know,

That in the wild turmoil,

Horsed on the Proteus,

Thou ridest to power,

And to endurance.

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, I spent a long summer day in exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town and county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit, — a niche or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena’s Bower. I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams “Lethe” and “Styx;” plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers, — icicle, orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and snowball. We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the dark.

The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, and which shames the fine things to which we foppishly compare them. I remarked, especially, the mimetic habit, with which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing which the cave had to offer was an illusion. On arriving at what is called the “Star-Chamber,” our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among them. All the party were touched with astonishment and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song, “The stars are in the quiet sky,” &c., and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect.

I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But I have had many experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud-rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our organization plays in them is too large. The senses interfere everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of. Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary. In admiring the sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating, pictorial powers of the eye.

The same interference from our organization creates the most of our pleasure and pain. Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their employment, which they themselves give it. Health and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers.

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy! how dear the story of barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What a debt is his to imaginative books! He has no better friend or influence, than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch, and Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who dare affirm that they are more real? Even the prose of the streets is full of refractions. In the life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all details, and colors them with rosy hue. He imitates the air and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes. He pays a debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. He wishes the bow and compliment of some leader in the state, or in society; weighs what he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at last better contented for this amusement of his eyes and his fancy.

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. It was wittily, if somewhat bitterly, said by D’Alembert, “qu’un état de vapeur était un état trés fâchieux, parcequ’il nous faisait voir les choses comme elles sont.” I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or another. Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or Gylfi’s Mocking, — for the Power has many names, — is stronger than the Titans, stronger than Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or surprised their secret. Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now and then a sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one root. Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine complained that all the varieties of fancy pears in our orchards seem to have been selected by somebody who had a whim for a particular kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that perfume; they were all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another youth with the confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could only find three flavors, or two. What then? Pears and cakes are good for something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them? I knew a humorist, who, in a good deal of rattle, had a grain or two of sense. He shocked the company by maintaining that the attributes of God were two, — power and risibility; and that it was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great stake in the community, but whose sympathies were cold, — presidents of colleges, and governors, and senators, — who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and missions, and peace-makers, and cry Hist-a-boy! to every good dog. We must not carry comity too far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into Nature’s game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of “the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.” Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate. They see through Claude-Lorraines. And how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always liable to mirage.

We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children, that makes the heart too big for the body. In the worst-assorted connections there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague and his jade get some just relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if they were now to begin.

’Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if there were any exempts. The scholar in his library is none. I, who have all my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems and miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the victim of any new page; and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had not thought of. Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it will not stick. ’Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when he is gone.

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a certain fate in their constitution, which they know how to use. But they never deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, or betray never so slightly their penetration of what is behind it. ’Tis the charm of practical men, that outside of their practicality are a certain poetry and play, as if they led the good horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, though they can ride so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as Cæsar; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a gentleness, when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We stigmatize the cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as “dragon-ridden,” “thunder-stricken,” and fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed.

Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, ’tis well to know that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the phantasms. We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and beautiful. The red men told Columbus, “they had an herb which took away fatigue;” but he found the illusion of “arriving from the east at the Indies” more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in Orion, “the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor,” must come down and be dealt with in your household thought. What if you shall come to discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams? What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay, with the human mind itself. ’Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series? The intellect sees that every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis is entire, so that the soul doth not know itself in its own act, when that act is perfected. There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect. There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle. Though he make his body, he denies that he makes it. Though the world exist from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after the other we accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow, which however must be accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to new profusion. And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

With such volatile elements to work in, ’tis no wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher’s meat, sugar, milk, and coal. ‘Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will show my spirit.’ ‘Not so,’ says the good Heaven; ‘plod and plough, vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and the best wine by and by.’ Well, ’tis all phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and nothing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in; we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alternations are not without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune. If life seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. The visions of good men are good; it is the undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of such castaways, — wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, — lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the éclat in the universe. This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune.

One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within doors, has any advantage of them. The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life — the life of all of us — identical. For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend and act with one another. But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be “The notions, ‘I am,’ and ‘This is mine,’ which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance.” And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature. It would be hard to put more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence: —

“Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:

Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.”

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, — they alone with him alone.

THE END

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

CONTENTS

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

CIVILIZATION.

ART.

ELOQUENCE.

DOMESTIC LIFE.

FARMING

WORKS AND DAYS.

BOOKS.

CLUBS.

COURAGE.

SUCCESS.

OLD AGE.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

I fell in with a humorist on my travels, who had in his chamber a cast of the Rondanini Me dusa, and who assured me that the name which that fine work of art bore in the catalogues was a misnomer, as he was convinced that the sculptor who carved it intended it for Memory, the mother of the Muses. In the conversation that followed, my new friend made some extraordinary confessions. “Do you not see,” he said, “the penalty of learning, and that each of these scholars whom you have met at S — , though he were to be the last man, would, like the executioner in Hood’s poem, guillotine the last but one?” He added many lively remarks, but his evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks that followed we became better acquainted. He had good abilities, a genial temper, and no vices; but he had one defect, — he could not speak in the tone of the people. There was some paralysis on his will, such that when he met men on common terms he spoke weakly and from the point, like a flighty girl. His consciousness of the fault made it worse. He envied every drover and lumberman in the tavern their manly speech. He coveted Mirabeau’s don terrible de la familiarité, believing that he whose sympathy goes lowest is the man from whom kings have the most to fear. For himself he declared that he could not get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. He left the city; he hid himself in pastures. The solitary river was not solitary enough; the sun and moon put him out. When he bought a house, the first thing he did was to plant trees. He could not enough conceal himself. Set a hedge here; set oaks there, — trees behind trees; above all, set evergreens, for they will keep a secret all the year round. The most agreeable compliment you could pay him was to imply that you had not observed him in a house or a street where you had met him. Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not. An he wished of his tailor was to provide that sober mean of color and cut which would never detain the eye for a moment. He went to Vienna, to Smyrna, to London. In all the variety of costumes, a carnival, a kaleidoscope of clothes, to his horror he could never discover a man in the street who wore anything like his own dress. He would have given his soul for the ring of Gyges. His dismay at his visibility had blunted the fears of mortality. “Do you think,” he said, “I am in such great terror of being shot, — I, who am only waiting to shuffle off my corporeal jacket to slip away into the back stars, and put diameters of the solar system and sidereal orbits between me and all souls, — there to wear out ages in solitude, and forget memory itself, if it be possible?” He had a remorse running to despair of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitchings out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his arms and shoulders. God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. He admired in Newton not so much his theory of the moon as his letter to Collins, in which he forbade him to insert his name with the solution of the problem in the “Philosophical Transactions”: “It would perhaps increase my acquaintance, the thing which I chiefly study to decline.”

These conversations led me somewhat later to the knowledge of similar cases, and to the discovery that they are not of very infrequent occurrence. Few substances are found pure in nature. Those constitutions which can bear in open day the rough dealing of the world must be of that mean and average structure such as iron and salt, atmospheric air, and water. But there are metals, like potassium and sodium, which, to be kept pure, must be kept under naphtha. Such are the talents determined on some specialty, which a culminating civilization fosters in the heart of great cities and in royal chambers. Nature protects her own work. To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity. If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port, and clubs, we should have had no “Theory of the Sphere” and no “Principia.” They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels. Each must stand on his glass tripod if he would keep his electricity. Even Swedenborg, whose theory of the universe is based on affection, and who reprobates to weariness the danger and vice of pure intellect, is constrained to make an extraordinary exception: “There are also angels who do not live consociated, but separate, house and house; these dwell in the midst of heaven, because they are the best of angels.”

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

We pray to be conventional. But the wary Heaven takes care you shall not be, if there is anything good in you. Dante was very bad company, and was never invited to dinner. Michel Angelo had a sad, sour time of it. The ministers of beauty are rarely beautiful in coaches and saloons. Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself. Yet each of these potentates saw well the reason of his exclusion. Solitary was he? Why, yes; but his society was limited only by the amount of brain Nature appropriated in that age to carry on the government of the world. “If I stay,” said Dante, when there was question of going to Rome, “who will go? and if I go, who will stay?”

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

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

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

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

’Tis hard to mesmerize ourselves, to whip our own top; but through sympathy we are capable of energy and endurance. Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone. Here is the use of society: it is so easy with the great to be great; so easy to come up to an existing standard; — as easy as it is to the lover to swim to his maiden though waves so grim before. The benefits of affection are immense; and the one event which never loses its romance is the encounter with superior persons on terms allowing the happiest intercourse.

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

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

But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar. In society, high advantages are set down to the individual as disqualifications. We sink as easily as we rise, through sympathy. So many men whom I know are degraded by their sympathies; their native aims being high enough, but their relation all too tender to the gross people about them. Men cannot afford to live together on their merits, and they adjust themselves by their demerits, — by their love of gossip, or by sheer tolerance and animal good-nature. They untune and dissipate the brave aspirant.

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

Put any company of people together with freedom for conversation, and a rapid self-distribution takes place into sets and pairs. The best are accused of exclusiveness. It would be more true to say they separate as oil from water, as children from old people, without love or hatred in the matter, each seeking his like; and any interference with the affinities would produce constraint and suffocation. All conversation is a magnetic experiment, I know that my friend can talk eloquently; you know that he cannot articulate a sentence: we have seen him in different company. Assort your party, or invite none. Put Stubbs and Coleridge, Quintilian and Aunt Miriam, into pairs, and you make them all wretched. ’Tis an extempore Sing-Sing built in a parlor. Leave them to seek their own mates, and they will be as merry as sparrows.

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

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

CIVILIZATION.

A certain degree of progress from the rudest state in which man is found, — a dweller in caves, or on trees, like an ape, — a cannibal, and eater of pounded snails, worms, and offal, — a certain degree of progress from this extreme is called Civilization. It is a vague, complex name, of many degrees. Nobody has attempted a definition. Mr. Guizot, writing a book on the subject, does not. It implies the evolution of a highly organized man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honor, and taste. In the hesitation to define what it is, we usually suggest it by negations. A nation that has no clothing, no iron, no alphabet, no marriage, no arts of peace, no abstract thought, we call barbarous. And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them civilized.

Each nation grows after its own genius, and has a civiliztion of its own. The Chinese and Japanese, though each complete in his way, is different from the man of Madrid or the man of New York. The term imports a mysterious progress. In the brutes is none; and in mankind to-day the savage tribes are gradually extinguished rather than civilized. The Indians of this country have not learned the white man’s work; and in Africa the negro of to-day is the negro of Herodotus. In other races the growth is not arrested, but the like progress that is made by a boy “when he cuts his eye-teeth,” as we say, — childish illusions passing daily away and he seeing things really and comprehensively, — is made by tribes. It is the learning the secret of cumulative power, of advancing on one’s self. It implies a facility of association, power to compare, the ceasing from fixed ideas. The Indian is gloomy and distressed when urged to depart from his habits and traditions. He is overpowered by the gaze of the white, and his eye sinks. The occasion of one of these starts of growth is always some novelty that astounds the mind and provokes it to dare to change. Thus there is a Cadmus, a Pytheas, a Manco Capac at the beginning of each improvement, — some superior foreigner importing new and wonderful arts, and teaching them. Of course he must not know too much, but must have the sympathy, language, and gods of those he would inform. But chiefly the sea-shore has been the point of departure, to knowledge, as to commerce. The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most. The power which the sea requires in the sailor makes a man of him very fast, and the change of shores and population clears his head of much nonsense of his wigwam.

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

When the Indian trail gets widened, graded and bridged to a good road, there is a benefactor, there is a missionary, a pacificator, a wealth-bringer, a maker of markets, a vent for industry. Another step in civility is the change from war, hunting, and pasturage, to agriculture. Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step. “There was once a giantess who had a daughter, and the child saw a husbandman ploughing in the field. Then she ran and picked him up with her finger and thumb, and put him and his plough and his oxen into her apron, and carried them to her mother, and said, ‘ Mother, what sort of a beetle is this that I found wriggling in the sand?’ But the mother said,’ Put it away, my child; we must begone out of this land, for these people will dwell in it.’” Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.

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

The skilful combinations of civil government, though they usually follow natural leadings, as the lines of race, language, religion, and territory, yet require wisdom and conduct in the rullers, and in their result delight the imagination. “We see insurmountable multitudes obeying, in opposition to their strongest passions, the restraints of a power which they scarcely perceive, and the crimes of a single individual marked and punished at the distance of half the earth.” [Dr. Thomas Brown.]

Right position of woman in the State is another index. Poverty and industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and love them: place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate; so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

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

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

“The pulses of her iron heart

Go beating through the storm.”

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

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

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

Climate has much to do with this melioration. The highest civility has never loved the hot zones. Wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom. Where the banana grows the animal system is indolent and pampered at the cost of higher qualities: the man is sensual and cruel. But this scale is not invariable. High degrees of moral sentiment control the unfavorable influences of climate; and some of our grandest examples of men and of races come from the equatorial regions, — as the genius of Egypt, of India, and of Arabia.

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

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

Civilization depends on morality. Everything good in man leans on what is higher. This rule holds in small as in great. Thus all our strength and success in the work of our hands depend on our borrowing the aid of the elements. You have seen a carpenter on a ladder with a broad-axe chopping upward chips from a beam. How awkward! at what disadvantage he works! But see him on the ground, dressing his timber under him. Now, not his feeble muscles but the force of gravity brings down the axe; that is to say, the planet itself splits his stick. The farmer had much ill-temper, laziness and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers, until one day he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall; and the river never tires of turning his wheel; the river is good natured, and never hints an objection.

We had letters to send: couriers could not go fast enough nor far enough; broke their wagons, foundered their horses; bad roads in spring, snowdrifts in winter, heats in summer; could not get the horses out of a walk. But we found out that the air and earth were full of Electricity, and always going our way, — just the way we wanted to send. Would he take a message? Just as lief as not; had nothing else to do; would carry it in no time. Only one doubt occurred, one staggering objection, — he had no carpet-bag, no visible pockets, no hands, not so much as a mouth, to carry a letter. But after much thought and many experiments we managed to meet the conditions, and to fold up the letter in such invisible compact form as he could carry in those invisible pockets of his, never wrought by needle and thread, — and it went like a charm.

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

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

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

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

And as our handiworks borrow the elements, so all our social and political action leans on principles. To accomplish anything excellent the will must work for catholic and universal ends. A puny creature, walled in on every side, as Daniel wrote, —

“ Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how poor a thing is man!”

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

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

These are traits and measures and modes; and the true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops, — no, but the kind of man the country turns out. I see the vast advantages of this country, spanning the breadth of the temperate zone. I see the immense material prosperity, — towns on towns, states on states, and wealth piled in the massive architecture of cities; California quartz-mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along-shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence westward to California again. But it is not New York streets, built by the confluence of workmen and wealth of all nations, though stretching out towards Philadelphia until they touch it, and northward until they touch New Haven, Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, and Boston, — not these that make the real estimation. But when I look over this constellation of cities which animate and illustrate the land, and see how little the government has to do with their daily life, how self-helped and self-directed all families are, — knots of men in purely natural societies, societies of trade, of kindred blood, of habitual hospitality, house and house, man acting on man by weight of opinion, of longer or better-directed industry; the refining influence of women, the invitation which experience and permanent causes open to youth and labor: — when I see how much each virtuous and gifted person, whom all men consider, lives affectionately with scores of excellent people who are not known far from home, and perhaps with great reason reckons these people his superiors in virtue and in the symmetry and force of their qualities, — I see what cubic values America has, and in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous wealth.

In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral and intellectual steps. The appearance of the Hebrew Moses, of the Indian Buddh; in Greece, of the Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates, and of the stoic Zeno; in Judaea, the advent of Jesus, and, in modern Christendom, of the realists Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, — are causal facts which carry forward races to new convictions and elevate the rule of life. In the presence of these agencies it is frivolous to insist on the invention of printing or gunpowder, of steam-power or gas-light, percussion-caps and rubber-shoes, which are toys thrown off from that security, freedom, and exhilaration which a healthy morality creates in society. These arts add a comfort and smoothness to house and street life; but a purer morality, which kindles genius, civilizes civilization, casts backward all that we held sacred into the profane, as the flame of oil throws a shadow when shined upon by the flame of the Bude-light. Not the less the popular measares of progress will ever be the arts and the laws.

But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests, — a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law and statute-law; where speech is not free; where the post-office is violated, mail-bags opened, and letters tampered with; where public debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated; where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of social life; where the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of the black woman; where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no indigenous life; where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hands; where suffrage is not free or equal; — that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous; and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.

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

ART.

All departments of life at the present day, — Trade, Politics, Letters, Science, or Religion, seem to feel, and to labor to express, the identity of their law. They are rays of one sun; they translate each into a new language the sense of the other. They are sublime when seen as emanations of a Necessity contradistinguished from the vulgar Fate by being instant and alive, and dissolving man as well as his works in its flowing beneficence. This influence is conspicuously visible in the principles and history of Art.

On one side in primary communication with absolute truth through thought and instinct, the human mind on the other side tends, by an equal necessity, to the publication and embodiment of its thought, modified and dwarfed by the impurity and untruth which in all our experience injure the individuality through which it passes. The child not only suffers, but cries; not only hungers, but eats. The man not only thinks, but speaks and acts. Every thought that arises in the mind, in its rising aims to pass out of the mind into act; just as every plant, in the moment of germination, struggles up to light. Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first. It rises in thought, to the end that it may be uttered and acted. The more profound the thought, the more burdensome. Always in proportion to the depth of its sense does it knock importunately at the gates of the soul, to be spoken, to be done. What is in, will out. It struggles to the birth. Speech is a great pleasure, and action a great pleasure; they cannot be foreborne.

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

The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is Art. From the first imitative babble of a child to the despotism of eloquence; from his first pile of toys or chip bridge to the masonry of Minor Rock Lighthouse or the Pacific Railroad; from the tattooing of the Owhyhees to the Vatican Gallery; from the simplest expedient of private prudence to the American Constitution; from its first to its last works, Art is the spirit’s voluntary use and combination of things to serve its end. The Will distinguishes it as spiritual action. Relatively to themselves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have no art; for what they do they do instinctively; but relatively to the Supreme Being, they have. And the same is true of all unconscious action: relatively to the doer, it is instinct; relatively to the First Cause, it is Art. In this sense, recognizing the Spirit which informs Nature, Plato rightly said, “Those things which are said to be done by Nature are indeed done by Divine Art.” Art, universally, is the spirit creative. It was defined by Aristotle, “The reason of the thing, without the matter.”

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

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

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

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

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

The first and last lesson of the useful arts is that Nature tyrannizes over our works. They must be conformed to her law, or they will be ground to powder by her omnipresent activity. Nothing droll, nothing whimsical will endure. Nature is ever interfering with Art. You cannot build your house or pagoda as you will, but as you must. There is a quick bound set to your captice. The leaning tower can only lean so far. The verandah or pagoda roof can curve upward only to a certain point. The slope of your roof is determined by the weight of snow. It is only within narrow limits that the discretion of the architect may range: gravity, wind, sun, rain, the size of men and animals, and such like, have more to say than he. It is the law of fluids that prescribes the shape of the boat, — keel, rudder, and bows, — and, in the finer fluid above, the form and tackle of the sails. Man seems to have no option about his tools, but merely the necessity to learn from Nature what will fit best, as if he were fitting a screw or a door. Beneath a necessity thus almighty, what is artificial in man’s life seems insignificant. He seems to take his task so minutely from intimations of Nature, that his works become as it were hers, and he is no longer free.

But if we work within this limit, she yields us all her strength. All powerful action is performed by bringing the forces of nature to bear upon our objects. We do not grind corn or lift the loom by our own strength, but we build a mill in such position as to set the north wind to play upon our instrument, or the elastic force of steam, or the ebb and flow of the sea. So in our handiwork, we do few things by muscular force, but we place ourselves in such attitudes as to bring the force of gravity, that is, the weight of the planet, to bear upon the spade or the axe we wield. In short, in all our operations we seek not to use our own, but to bring a quite infinite force to bear.

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

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

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

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

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

In painting, bright colors stimulate the eye before yet they are harmonized into a landscape. In sculpture and in architecture the material, as marble or granite, and in architecture the mass, are sources of great pleasure quite independent of the artificial arrangement. The art resides in the model, in the plan; for it is on that the genius of the artist is expended, not on the statue or the temple. Just as much better as is the polished statue of dazzling marble than the clay model, or as much more impressive as is the granite cathedral or pyramid than the ground-plan or profile of them on paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature than to Art.

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

A jumble of musical sounds on a viol or a flute, in which the rhythm of the tune is played without one of the notes being right, gives pleasure to the unskilful ear. A very coarse imitation of the human form on canvas, or in wax-work; a coarse sketch in colors of a landscape, in which imitation is all that is attempted, — these things give to unpractised eyes, to the uncultured, who do not ask a fine spiritual delight, almost as much pleasure as a statue of Canova or a picture of Titian. And in the statue of Canova or the picture of Titian, these give the great part of the pleasure; they are the basis on which the fine spirit rears a higher delight, but to which these are indispensable.

Another deduction from the genius of the artist is what is conventional in his art, of which there is much in every work of art. Thus how much is there that is not original in every particular buiding, in every statue, in every tune, painting, poem, or harangue! — whatever is national or usual; as the usage of building all Roman churches in the form of a cross, the prescribed distribution of parts of a theatre, the custom of draping a statue in classical costume. Yet who will deny that the merely conventional part of the performance contributes much to its effect?

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

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

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

It is a curious proof of our conviction that the artist does not feel himself to be the parent of his work, and is as much surprised at the effect as we, that we are so unwilling to impute our best sense of any work of art to the author. The highest praise we can attribute to any writer, painter, sculptor, builder, is, that he actually possessed the thought or feeling with which he has inspired us. We hesitate at doing Spenser so great an honor as to think that he intended by his allegory the sense we affix to it. We grudge to Homer the wide human circumspection his commentators ascribe to him.

Even Shakspeare, of whom we can believe every thing, we think indebted to Goethe and to Coleridge for the wisdom they detect in his Hamlet and Antony. Especially have we this infirmity of faith in contemporary genius. We fear that Allston and Greenough did not foresee and design all the effect they produce on us. Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows, or like a traveller surprised by a mountain echo, whose trivial word returns to him in romantic thunders.

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

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

As, in useful art, so far as it is useful, the work must be strictly subordinated to the laws of Nature, so as to become a sort of continuation and in no wise a contradiction of Nature; so in art that aims at beauty must the parts be Subordinated to Ideal Nature, and everything individual abstracted, so that it shall be the production of the universal soul. The artist who is to produce a work which is to be admired, not by his friends or his townspeople or his contemporaries but by all men, and which is to be more beautiful to the eye in proportion to its culture, must disindividualize himself, and be a man of no party and no manner and no age, but one through whom the soul of all men circulates as the common air through his lungs. He must work in the spirit in which we conceive a prophet to speak, or an angel of the Lord to act; that is, he is not to speak his own words, or do his own works, or think his own thoughts, but he is to be an organ through which the universal mind acts.

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

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

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

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

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

There is but one Reason. The mind that made the world is not one mind, but the mind. And every work of art is a more or less pure manifestation of the same. Therefore we arrive at this conclusion, which I offer as a conformation of the whole view, that the delight which a work of art affords, seems to arise from our recognizing in it the mind that formed Nature, again in active operation. It differs from the works of Nature in this, that they are organically reproductive. This is not, but spiritually it is prolific by its powerful action on the intellects of men.

Hence it follows that a study of admirable works of art sharpens our perceptions of the beauty of Nature; that a certain analogy reigns throughout the wonders of both; that the contemplation of a work of great art draws us into a state of mind which may be called religious. It conspires with all exalted sentiments.

Proceeding from absolute mind, whose nature is goodness as much as truth, the great works are always attuned to moral nature. If the earth and sea conspire with virtue more than vice, — so do the masterpieces of art. The galleries of ancient sculpture in Naples and Rome strike no deeper conviction into the mind than the contrast of the purity, the severity expressed in these fine old heads, with the frivolity and grossness of the mob that exhibits and the mob that gazes at them. These are the coautenances of the first-born, — the face of man in the morning of the world. No mark is on these lofty features of sloth, or luxury, or meanness, and they surprise you with a moral admonition, as they speak of nothing around you, but remind you of the fragrant thoughts and the purest resolutions of your youth.

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

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

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

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

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

It would be easy to show of many fine things in the world, — in the customs of nations, the etiquette of courts, the constitution of governments, — the origin in quite simple local necessities. Heraldry for example, and the ceremonies of a coronation, are a dignified repetition of the occurrences that might befall a dragoon and his footboy. The College of Cardinals were originally the parish priests of Rome. The leaning towers originated from the civil discords which induced every lord to build a tower. Then it became a point of family pride, — and for more pride the novelty of a leaning tower was built.

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

The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone. The Madonnas of Raphael and Titian were made to be worshipped. Tragedy was instituted for the like purpose, and the miracles of music: all sprang out of some genuine enthusiasm, and never out of dilettanteism and holidays. Now they languish, because their purpose is merely exhibition. Who cares, who knows what works of art our government have ordered to be made for the Capitol? They are a mere flourish to please the eye of persons who have associations with books and galleries. But in Greece, the Demos of Athens divided into political factions upon the merits of Phidias.

In this country, at this time, other interests than religion and patriotism are predominant, and the arts, the daughters of enthusiasm, do not flourish. The genuine offspring of our ruling passions we behold. Popular institutions, the school, the reading-room, the telegraph, the post-office, the exchange, the insurance-company, and the immense harvest of economical inventions, are the fruit of the equality and the boundless liberty of lucrative callings. These are superficial wants; and their fruits are these superficial institutions. But, as far as they accelerate the end of political freedom and national education, they are preparing the soil of man for fairer flowers and fruits in another age. For beauty, truth, and goodness are not obsolete; they spring eternal in the breast of man; they are as indigenous in Massachusetts as in Tuscany or the Isles of Greece. And that Eternal Spirit whose triple face they are, moulds from them forever, for his mortal child, images to remind him of the Infinite and Fair.

ELOQUENCE.

It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing. So probably every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or, we boil at different degrees. One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor. The waters, of course, are not very deep. He has a two-inch enthusiasm, a patty-pan ebullition. Another requires the additional caloric of a multitude and a public debate; a third needs an antagonist, or a hot indignation; a fourth needs a revolution; and a fifth, nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas, the splendors and shades of Heaven and Hell.

But, because every man is an orator, how long soever he may have been a mute, an assembly of men is so much more susceptible. The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return to the fireside.

The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those who prematurely boil, and who impatiently break silence before their time. Our county conventions often exhibit a small-pot-soon-hot style of eloquence. We are too much reminded of a medical experiment where a series of patients are taking nitrous-oxide gas. Each patient in turn exhibits similar symptoms, — redness in the face, volubility, violent gesticulation, delirious attitudes, occasional stamping, an alarming loss of perception of the passage of time, a selfish enjoyment of his sensations, and loss of perception of the sufferings of the audience.

Plato says that the punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is, to live under the government of worse men; and the like regret is suggested to all the auditors, as the penalty of abstaining to speak, — that they shall hear worse orators than themselves.

But this lust to speak marks the universal feeling of the energy of the engine, and the curiosity men feel to touch the springs. Of all the musical instruments on which men play, a popular assembly is that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn. An audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as a jar in a battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate. How many orators sit mute there below! They come to get justice done to that ear and intuition which no Chatham and no Demosthenes has begun to satisfy.

The Welsh Triads say, “Many are the friends of the golden tongue.” Who can wonder at the attractiveness of Parliament, or of Congress, or the bar, for our ambitions young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator? He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his. He is the true potentate; for they are not kings who sit on thrones, but they who know how to govern. The definitions of eloquence describe its attraction for young men. Antiphon the Rhamnusian, one of Plutarch’s ten orators, advertised in Athens “that he would cure distempers of the mind with words.” No man has a prosperity so high or firm but two or three words can dishearten it. There is no calamity which right words will not begin to redress. Isocrates described his art as “the power of magnifying what was small and diminishing what was great,” — an acute but partial definition. Among the Spartans, the art assumed a Spartan shape, namely, of the sharpest weapon. Socrates says: “If any one wishes to converse with the meanest of the Lacedæmonians, he will at first find him despicable in conversation, but when a proper opportunity offers, this same person, like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a sentence worthy of attention, short and contorted, so that he who converses with him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy.” Plato’s definition of rhetoric is, “the art of ruling the minds of men.” The Koran says, “A mountain may change its place, but a man will not change his disposition;” yet the end of eloquence is, — is it not? — to alter in a pair of hours, perhaps in a half-hour’s discourse, the convictions and habits of years. Young men, too, are eager to enjoy this sense of added power and enlarged sympathetic existence. The orator sees himself the organ of a multitude, and concentrating their valors and powers: —

“But now the blood of twenty thousand men

Blushed in my face.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

But eloquence must be attractive, or it is none. The virtue of books is to be readable, and of orators to be interesting; and this is a gift of Nature; as Demosthenes, the most laborious student in that kind, signified his sense of this necessity when he wrote, “Good Fortune,” as his motto on his shield. As we know, the power of discourse of certain individuals amounts to fascination, though it may have no lasting effect. Some portion of this sugar must intermingle. The right eloquence needs no bell to call the people together, and no constable to keep them. It draws the children from their play, the old from their arm-chairs, the invalid from his warm chamber: it holds the hearer fast; steals away his feet, that he shall not depart; his memory, that he shall not remember the most pressing affairs; his belief, that he shall not admit any opposing considerations. The pictures we have of it in semi-barbarous ages, when it has some advantages in the simpler habit of the people, show what it aims at. It is said that the Khans or story-tellers in Ispahan and other cities of the East, attain a controlling Power over their audience, keeping them for many hours attentive to the most fanciful and extravagant adventures. The whole world knows pretty well the style of these improvisators, and how fascinating they are, in our translations of the “Arabian Nights.” Scheherezade tells these stories to save her life, and the delight of young Europe and young America in them proves that she fairly earned it. And who does not remember in childhood some white or black or yellow Scheherezade, who, by that talent of telling endless feats of fairies and magicians and kings and queens, was more dear and wonderful to a circle of children than any orator in England or America is now? The more indolent and imaginative complexion of the Eastern nations makes them much more impressible by these appeals to the fancy.

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

“harpit a fish out o’ saut-water,

Or water out of a stone,

Or milk out of a maiden’s breast

Who bairn had never none.”

Homer specially delighted in drawing the same figure. For what is the Odyssey but a history of the orator, in the largest style, carried through a series of adventures furnishing brilliant opportunities to his talent? See with what care and pleasure the poet brings him on the stage. Helen is pointing out to Priam, from a tower, the different Grecian chiefs. “The old man asked: ‘Tell me, dear child, who is that man, shorter by a head than Agamemnon, yet he looks broader in his shoulders and breast. His arms lie on the ground, but he, like a leader, walks about the bands of the men. He seems to me like a stately ram, who goes as a master of the flock.’ Him answered Helen, daughter of Jove, ‘this is the wise Ulysses, son of Laertes, who was reared in the state of craggy Ithaca, knowing all wiles and wise counsels.’ To her the prudent Antenor replied again: ‘ O woman, you have spoken truly. For once the wise Ulysses came hither on an embassy, with Menelaus, beloved by Mars. I received them and entertained them at my house. I became acquainted with the genius and the prudent judgments of both. When they mixed with the assembled Trojans, and stood, the broad shoulders of Menalaus rose above the other; but, both sitting, Ulysses was more majestic. When they conversed, and interweaved stories and opinions with all, Menelaus spoke succinctly, — few but very sweet words, since he was not talkative nor superfluous in speech, and was the younger. But when the wise Ulysses arose and stood and looked down, fixing his eyes on the ground, and neither moved his sceptre backward nor forward, but held it still, like an awkward person, you would say it was some angry or foolish man; but when he sent his great voice forth out of his breast, and his words fell like the winter snows, not then would any mortal contend with Ulysses; and we, beholding, wondered not afterwards so much at his aspeet.’” [Iliad, III. 191.] Thus he does not fail to arm Ulysses at first with this power of overcoming all opposition by the blandishments of speech. Plutarch tells us that Thucydides, when Archidamus, king of Sparta, asked him which was the best wrestler, Pericles or he, replied, “When I throw him, he says he was never down, and he persuades the very spectators to believe him.” Philip of Macedon said of Demosthenes, on hearing the report of one of his orations, “Had I been there, he would have persuaded me to take up arms against myself;” and Warren Hastings said of Burke’s speech on his impeachment, “As I listened to the orator, I felt for more than half an hour as if I were the most culpable being on earth.”

In these examples, higher qualities have already entered, but the power of detaining the ear by pleasing speech, and addressing the fancy and imagination, often exists without higher merits. Thus separated, as this fascination of discourse aims only at amusement, though it be decisive in its momentary effect, it is yet a juggle, and of no lasting power. It is heard like a band of music passing through the streets, which converts all the passengers into poets, but is forgotten as soon as it has turned the next corner; and unless this oiled tongue could, in Oriental phrase, lick the sun and moon away, it must take its place with opium and brandy. I know no remedy against it but cotton wool, or the wax which Ulysses stuffed into the ears of his sailors to pass the Sirens safely.

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

One of our statesmen said, “The curse of this country is eloquent men.” And one cannot wonder at the uneasiness sometimes manifested by trained statesmen, with large experience of public affairs, when they observe the disproportionate advantage suddenly given to oratory over the most solid and accumulated public service. In a Senate or other business committee, the solid result depends on a few men with working-talent. They know how to deal with the facts before them, to put things into a practical shape, and they value men only as they can forward the work. But a new man comes there who has no capacity for helping them at all, is insignificant, and nobody in the committee, but has a talent for speaking. In the debate with open doors, this precious person makes a speech which is printed and read all over the Union, and he at once becomes famous, and takes the lead in the public mind over all these executive men, who, of course, are full of indignation to find one who has no tact or skill and knows he has none, put over them by means of this talking-power which they despise.

Leaving behind us these pretensions, better or worse, to come a little nearer to the verity, — eloquence is attractive as an example of the magic of personal ascendency, — a total and resultant power, rare, because it requires a rich coincidence of powers, intellect, will, sympathy, organs, and, over all, good fortune in the cause. We have a half-belief that the person is possible who can counterpoise all other persons. We believe that there may be a man who is a match for events, one who never found his match, against whom other men being dashed are broken, — one of inexhaustible personal resources, who can give you any odds and beat you. What we really wish for is a mind equal to any exigency. You are safe in your rural district, or in the city, in broad daylight, amidst the police, and under the eyes of a hundred thousand people. But how is it on the Atlantic, in a storm, — do you understand how to infuse your reason into men disabled by terror, and to bring yourself off safe then? — how among thieves, or among an infuriated populace, or among cannibals? Face to face with a highwayman who has every temptation and opportunity for violence and plunder, can you bring yourself off safe by your wit exercised through speech? — a problem easy enough to Cæsar or Napoleon. Whenever a man of that stamp arrives, the highwayman has found a master. What a difference between men in power of face! A man succeeds because he has more power of eye than another, and so coaxes or confounds him. The newspapers, every week, report the adventures of some impudent swindler, who, by steadiness of carriage, duped those who should have known better. Yet any swindlers we have known are novices and bunglers, as is attested by their ill name. A greater power of face would accomplish anything, and, with the rest of their takings, take away the bad name. A greater power of carrying the thing loftily and with perfect assurance, would confound merchant, banker, judge, men of influence and power, poet and president, and might head any party, unseat any sovereign, and abrogate any constitution in Europe and America. It was said that a man has at one step attained vast power, who has renounced his moral sentiment, and settled it with himself that he will no longer stick at anything. It was said of Sir William Pepperel, one of the worthies of New England, that, “put him where you might, he commanded, and saw what he willed come to pass.” Julius Cæsar said to Metellus, when that tribune interfered to hinder him from entering the Roman treasury, “Young man, it is easier for me to put you to death than to say that I will; “and the youth yielded. In earlier days, he was taken by pirates. What then? He threw himself into their ship, established the most extraordinary intimacies, told them stories, declaimed to them; if they did not applaud his speeches, he threatened them with hanging, — which he performed afterwards, — and, in a short time, was master of all on board. A man this is who cannot be disconcerted, and so can never play his last card, but has a reserve of power when he has hit his mark. With a serene face, he subverts a kingdom. What is told of him is miraculous; it affects men so. The confidence of men in him is lavish, and he changes the face of the world, and histories, poems, and new philosophies arise to account for him. A supreme commander over all his passions and affections; but the secret of his ruling is higher than that. It is the power of Na-ture running without impediment from the brain and will into the hands. Men and women are his game. Where they are, he cannot be without resource. “Whoso can speak well,” said Luther, “is a man.” It was men of this stamp that the Grecian States used to ask of Sparta for generals. They did not send to Lacedæmon for troops, but they said, “Send us a commander;” and Pausanias, or Gylippus, or Brasidas, or Agis, was despatched by the Ephors.

It is easy to illustrate this overpowering personality by these examples of soldiers and kings; but there are men of the most peaceful way of life and peaceful principle, who are felt wherever they go, as sensibly as a July sun or a December frost, — men who, if they speak, are heard, though they speak in a whisper, — who, when they act, act effectually, and what they do is imitated; and these examples may be found on very humble platforms as well as on high ones.

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

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

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

Thus it is not powers of speech that we primarily consider under this word eloquence, but the power that being present, gives them their perfection, and being absent, leaves them a merely superficial value. Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy. Personal ascendency may exist with or without adequate talent for its expression. It is as surely felt as a mountain or a planet; but when it is weaponed with a power of speech, it seems first to become truly human, works actively in all directions, and supplies the imagination with fine materials.

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

This balance between the orator and the audience is expressed in what is called the pertinence of the speaker. There is always a rivalry between the orator and the occasion, between the demands of the hour and the prepossession of the individual. The emergency which has convened the meeting is usually of more importance than anything the debaters have in their minds, and therefore becomes imperative to them. But if one of them have anything of commanding necessity in his heart, how speedily he will find vent for it, and with the applause of the assembly! This balance is observed in the privatest intercourse. Poor Tom never knew the time when the present occurrence was so trivial that he could tell what was passing in his mind without being checked for unseasonable speech; but let Bacon speak and wise men would rather listen though the revolution of kingdoms was on foot. I have heard it reported of an eloquent preacher, whose voice is not yet forgotten in this city, that, on occasions of death or tragic disaster which overspread the congregation with gloom, he ascended the pulpit with more than his usual alacrity, and turning to his favorite lessons of devout and jubilant thankfulness,— “Let us praise the Lord,” — carried audience, mourners, and mourning along with him, and swept away all the impertinence of private sorrow with his hosannas and songs of praise. Pepys says of Lord Clarendon (with whom “he is mad in love”) on his return from a conference, “I did never observe how much easier a man do speak when he knows all the company to be below him, than in him; for, though he spoke indeed excellent well, yet his manner and freedom of doing it, as if he played with it, and was informing only all the rest of the company, was mighty pretty.” [Diary, I. 169.]

This rivalry between the orator and the occasion is inevitable, and the occasion always yields to the eminence of the speaker; for a great man is the greatest of occasions. Of course the interest of the audience and of the orator conspire. It is well with them only when his influence is complete; then only they are well pleased. Especially he consults his power by making instead of taking his theme. If he should attempt to instruct the people in that which they already know, he would fail; but by making them wise in that which he knows, he has the advantage of the assembly every moment. Napoleon’s tactics of marching on the angle of an army, and always presenting a superiority of numbers, is the orator’s secret also.

The several talents which the orator employs, the splendid weapons which went to the equipment of Demosthenes, of Æschines, of Demades the natural orator, of Fox, of Pitt, of Patrick Henry, of Adams, of Mirabeau, deserve a special enumeration. We must not quite omit to name the principal pieces.

The orator, as we have seen, must be a substantial personality. Then, first, he must have power of statement, — must have the fact, and know how to tell it. In any knot of men conversing on any subject, the person who knows most about it will have the ear of the company if he wishes it, and lead the conversation, no matter what genius or distinction other men there present may have; and in any public assembly, him who has the facts and can and will state them, people will listen to, though he is otherwise ignorant, though he is hoarse and ungraceful, though he stutters and screams.

In a court of justice the audience are impartial; they really wish to sift the statements and know what the truth is. And in the examination of witnesses there usually leap out, quite unexpectedly, three or four stubborn words or phrases which are the pith and fate of the business, which sink into the ear of all parties, and stick there, and determine the cause. All the rest is repetition and qualifying; and the court and the county have really come together to arrive at these three or four memorable expressions which betrayed the mind and meaning of somebody.

In every company the man with the fact is like the guide you hire to lead your party up a mountain, or through a difficult country. He may not compare with any of the party in mind, or breeding, or courage, or possessions, but he is much more important to the present need than any of them. That is what we go to the court-house for, — the statement of the fact, and of a general fact, the real relation of all the parties; and it is the certainty with which, indifferently in any affair that is well handled, the truth stares us in the face through all the disguises that are put upon it, — a piece of the well-known human life, — that makes the interest of a court-room to the intelligent spectator.

I remember long ago being attracted, by the distinction of the counsel and the local importance of the cause, into the court-room. The prisoner’s counsel were the strongest and cunningest lawyers in the Commonwealth. They drove the attorney for the State from corner to corner, taking his reasons from under him, and reducing him to silence, but not to submission. When hard pressed, he revenged himself, in his turn, on the judge, by requiring the court to define what salvage was. The court, thus pushed, tried words, and said every thing it could think of to fill the time, supposing cases, and describing duties of insurers, captains, pilots, and miscellaneous sea-officers that are or might be, — like a schoolmaster puzzled by a hard sum, who reads the context with emphasis. But all this flood not serving the cuttle-fish to get away in, the horrible shark of the district-attorney being still there, grimly awaiting with his “The court must define,” — the poor court pleaded its inferiority. The superior court must establish the law for this, and it read away piteously the decisions of the Supreme Court, but read to those who had no pity. The judge was forced at last to rule something, and the lawyers saved their rogue under the fog of a definition. The parts were so well cast and discriminated that it was an interesting game to watch. The government was well enough represented. It was stupid, but it had a strong will and possession, and stood on that to the last. The judge had a task beyond his preparation, yet his position remained real: he was there to represent a great reality, — the justice of states, which we could well enough see beetling over his head, and which his trifling talk nowise affected, and did not impede, since he was entirely well-meaning.

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

Next to the knowledge of the fact and its law is method, which constitutes the genius and efficiency of all remarkable men. A crowd of men go up to Faneuil Hall; they are all pretty well acquainted with the object of the meeting; they have all read the facts in the same newspapers. The orator possesses no information which his hearers have not, yet he teaches them to see the thing with his eyes. By the new placing, the circumstances acquire new solidity and worth. Every fact gains consequence by his naming it, and trifles become important. His expressions fix themselves in men’s memories, and fly from mouth to mouth. His mind has some new principle of order. Where he looks, all things fly into their places. What will he say next? Let this man speak, and this man only. By applying the habits of a higher style of thought to the common affairs of this world, he introduces beauty and magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was Burke’s, and of this genius we have had some brilliant examples in our own political and legal men.

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

Statement, method, imagery, selection, tenacity of memory, power of dealing with facts, of illuminating them, of sinking them by ridicule or by diversion of the mind, rapid generalization, humor, pathos, are keys which the orator holds; and yet these fine gifts are not eloquence, and do often hinder a man’s attainment of it. And if we come to the heart of the mystery, perhaps we should say that the truly eloquent man is a sane man with power to communicate his sanity. If you arm the man with the extraordinary weapons of this art, give him a grasp of facts, learning, quick fancy, sarcasm, splendid allusion, interminable illustration, — all these talents, so potent and charming, have an equal power to insnare and mislead the audience and the orator. His talents are too much for him, his horses run away with him; and people always Perceive whether you drive or whether the horses take the bits in their teeth and run. But these talents are quite something else when they are subordinated and serve him; and we go to Washington, or to Westminster Hall, or might well go round the world, to see a man who drives, and is not run away with, — a man who, in prosecuting great designs, has an absolute command of the means of representing his ideas, and uses them only to express these; placing facts, placing men; amid the inconceivable levity of human beings, never for an instant warped from his crectness. There is for every man a statement possible of that truth which he is most unwilling to receive, — a statement possible, so broad and so pungent that he cannot get away from it, but must either bend to it or die of it. Else there would be no such word as eloquence, which means this. The listener cannot hide from himself that something has been shown him and the whole world which he did not wish to see; and as he cannot dispose of it, it disposes of him. The history of public men and affairs in America will readily furnish tragic examples of this fatal force.

For the triumphs of the art somewhat more must still be required, namely a reinforcing of man from events, so as to give the double force of reason and destiny. In transcendent eloquence, there was ever some crisis in affairs, such as could deeply engage the man to the cause he pleads, and draw all this wide power to a point. For the explosions and eruptions, there must be accumulations of heat somewhere, beds of ignited anthracite at the centre. And in cases where profound conviction has been wrought, the eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly drunk with a certain belief. It agitates and tears him, and perhaps almost bereaves him of the power of articulation. Then it rushes from him as in short, abrupt screams, in torrents of meaning. The possession the subject has of his mind is so entire that it insures an order of expression which is the order of Nature itself, and so the order of greatest force, and inimitable by any art. And the main distinction between him and other well-graced actors is the conviction, communicated by every word, that his mind is contemplating a whole, and inflamed by the contemplation of the whole, and that the words and sentences uttered by him, however admirable, fall from him as unregarded parts of that terrible whole which he sees and which he means that you shall see. Add to this concentration a certain regnant calmness, which, in all the tumult, never utters a premature syllable, but keeps the secret of its means and method; and the orator stands before the people as a demoniacal power to whose miracles they have no key. This terrible earnestness makes good the ancient superstition of the hunter, that the bullet will hit its mark, which is first dipped in the marksman’s blood.

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

The power of Chatham, of Pericles, of Luther, rested on this strength of character, which, because it did not and could not fear anybody, made nothing of their antagonists, and became sometimes exquisitely provoking and sometimes terrific to these.

We are slenderly furnished with anecdotes of these men, nor can we help ourselves by those heavy books in which their discourses are reported. Some of them were writers, like Burke; but most of them were not, and no record at all adequate to their fame remains. Besides, what is best is lost, — the fiery Iife of the moment. But the conditlons for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from the woods and mountains. Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commercial capitals. They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they, — one who mobs the mob, — some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make any impression. He is fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more: he is a graduate of the plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bushwhacker; knows all the secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty or the rough of farming. His hard head went through, in childhood, the drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and flings his sarcasms right and left. He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils and to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head. This man scornfully renounces your civil organizations, — county, or city, or governor, or army; — is his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive. He has learned his lessons in a bitter school. Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight. Let him see that his speech is not differenced from action; that when he has spoken he has not done nothing, nor done wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome exertion. Let him look on opposition as opportunity. He cannot be defeated or put down. There is a principle of resurrection in him, an immortality of purpose. Men are averse and hostile, to give value to their suffrages. It is not the people that are in fault for not being convinced, but he that cannot convince them. He should mould them, armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of their nature. He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.

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

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

All the chief orators of the world have been grave men, relying on this reality. One thought the philosophers of Demosthenes’s own time found running through all his orations, — this namely, that “virtue secures its own success.” “To stand on one’s own feet” Heeren finds the key-note to the discourses of Demosthenes, as of Chatham.

Eloquence, like every other art, rests on laws the most exact and determinate. It is the best speech of the best soul. It may well stand as the exponent of all that is grand and immortal in the mind. If it do not so become an instrument, but aspires to be somewhat of itself, and to glitter for show, it is false and weak. In its right exercise, it is an elastic, unexhausted power, — who has sounded, who has estimated it? — expanding with the expansion of our interests and affections. Its great masters, whilst they valued every help to its attainment, and thought no pains too great which contributed in any manner to further it, — resembling the Arabian warrior of fame, who wore seventeen weapons in his belt, and in personal combat used them all occasionally, — yet subordinated all means; never permitted any talent — neither voice, rhythm, poetie power, anecdote, sarcasm — to appear for show; but were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world, and themselves also.

DOMESTIC LIFE.

The perfection of the providence for childhood is easily acknowledged. The care which covers the seed of the tree under tough husks and stony cases provides for the human plant the mother’s breast and the father’s house. The size of the nestler is comic, and its tiny beseeching weakness is compensated perfectly by the happy patronizing look of the mother, who is a sort of high reposing Providence toward it. Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child, — the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation, — soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. “Infancy,” said Coleridge, “presents body and spirit in unity: the body is all animated.” All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him. By lamplight he delights in shadows on the wall; by daylight, in yellow and scarlet. Carry him out of doors, — he is overpowered by the light and by the extent of natural objects, and is silent. Then presently begins his use of his fingers, and he studies power, the lesson of his race. First it appears in no great harm, in architectural tastes. Out of blocks, thread-spools, cards, and checkers, he will build his pyramid with the gravity of Palladio. With an acoustic apparatus of whistle and rattle he explores the laws of sound. But chiefly, like his senior countrymen, the young American studies new and speedier modes of transportation. Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, he wishes to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh. The small enchanter nothing can withstand, — no seniority of age, no gravity of character; uncles, aunts, grandsires, grandams, fall an easy prey: he conforms to nobody, all conform to him; all caper and make mouths and babble and chirrup to him. On the strongest shoulders he rides, and pulls the hair of laurelled heads.

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

Fast — almost too fast for the wistful curiosity of the parents, studious of the witchcraft of curls and dimples and broken words — the little talker grows to a boy. He walks daily among wonders: fire, light, darkness, the moon, the stars, the furniture of the house, the red tin horse, the domestics, who like rude foster-mothers befriend and feed him, the faces that claim his kisses, are all in turn absorbing; yet warm, cheerful, and with good appetite the little sovereign subdues them without knowing it; the new knowledge is taken up into the life of to-day and becomes the means of more. The blowing rose is a new event; the garden full of flowers is Eden over again to the small Adam; the rain, the ice, the frost, make epochs in his life. What a holiday is the first snow in which Twoshoes can be trusted abroad!

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

The household is the home of the man, as well as of the child. The events that occur therein are more near and affecting to us than those which are sought in senates and academies. Domestic events are certainly our affair. What are called public events may or may not be ours. If a man wishes to acquaint himself with the real history of the world, with the spirit of the age, he must not go first to the state-house or the court-room. The subtle spirit of life must be sought in facts nearer. It is what is done and suffered in the house, in the constitution, in the temperament, in the personal history, that has the profoundest interest for us. Fact is better than fiction, if only we could get pure fact. Do you think any rhetoric or any romance would get your ear from the wise gypsy who could tell straight on the real fortunes of the man; who could reconcile your moral character and your natural history; who could explain your misfortunes, your fevers, your debts, your temperament, your habits of thought, your tastes, and, in every explanation, not sever you from the whole, but unite you to it? Is it not plain that not in senates, or courts, or chambers of commerce, but in the dwelling-house must the true character and hope of the time be consulted? These facts are, to be sure, harder to read. It is easier to count the census, or compute the square extent of a territory, to criticise its polity, books, art, than to come to the persons and dwellings of men and read their character and hope in their way of life. Yet we are always hovering round this better divination. In one form on another we are always returning to it. The physiognomy and phrenology of to-day are rash and mechanical systems enough, but they rest on everlasting foundations. We are sure that the sacred form of man is not seen in these whimsical, pitiful, and sinister masks (masks which we wear and which we meet), these bloated and shrivelled bodies, bald heads, bead eyes, short winds, puny and precarious healths, and early deaths. We live ruins amidst ruins. The great facts are the near ones. The account of the body is to be sought in the mind. The history of your fortunes is written first in your life.

Let us come then out of the public square and enter the domestic precinct. Let us go to the sitting-room, the table-talk and the expenditure of our contemporaries. An increased consciousness of the soul, you say, characterizes the period. Let us see if it has not only arranged the atoms at the circumference, but the atoms at the core. Does the household obey an idea? Do you see the man, — his form, genius, and aspiration, — in his economy? Is that translucent, thorough-lighted? There should be nothing confounding and conventional in economy, but the genius and love of the man so conspicuously marked in all his estate that the eye that knew him should read his character in his property, in his grounds, in his ornaments, in every expense. A man’s money should not follow the direction of his neighbor’s money, but should represent to him the things he would willingliest do with it. I am not one thing and my expenditure another. My expenditure is me. That our expenditure and our character are twain, is the vice of society.

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

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

I am afraid that, so considered, our houses will not be found to have unity and to express the best thought. The household, the calling, the friendships, of the citizen are not homogeneous. His house ought to show us his honest opinion of what makes his well-being when he rests among his kindred, and forgets all affectation, compliance, and even exertion of will. He brings home whatever commodities and ornaments have for years allured his pursuit, and his character must be seen in them. But what idea predominates in our houses? Thrift first, then convenience and pleasure. Take off all the roofs, from street to street, and we shall seldom find the temple of any higher god than Prudence. The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. They are arranged for low benefits. The houses of the rich are confectioners’ shops, where we get sweetmeats and wine; the houses of the poor are imitations of these to the extent of their ability. With these ends housekeeping is not beautiful; it cheers and raises neither the husband, the wife, nor the child; neither the host nor the guest; it oppresses women. A house kept to the end of prudence is laborious without joy; a house kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

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

The difficulties to be overcome must be freely admitted; they are many and great. Nor are they to be disposed of by any criticism or amendment of particulars taken one at a time, but only by the arrangement of the household to a higher end than those to which our dwellings are usually built and furnished. And is there any calamity more grave, or that more invokes the best good-will to remove it, than this? — to go from chamber to chamber and see no beauty; to find in the housemates no aim; to hear an endless chatter and blast; to be compelled to criticise; to hear only to dissent and to be disgusted; to find no invitation to what is good in us, and no receptacle for what is wise: — this is a great price to pay for sweet bread and warm lodging, — being defrauded of affinity, of repose, of genial culture, and the inmost presence of beauty.

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

Give us wealth, and the home shall exist. But that is a very imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no solution. “Give us wealth.” You ask too much. Few have wealth, but all must have a home. Men are not born rich; and in getting wealth the man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring wealth at last. Besides, that cannot be the right answer; — there are objections to wealth. Wealth is a shift. The wise man angles with himself only, and with no meaner bait. Our whole use of wealth needs revision and reform. Generosity does not consist in giving money or money’s worth. These so-called goods are only the shadow of good. To give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence, a credit-system in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to man man. If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden from him. He should be visited in this his prison with rebuke to the evil demons, with manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited offer of condolence because you have not money, or mean offer of money as the utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your purity, and your faith. You are to bring with you that spirit which is understanding, health and self-help. To offer him money in lieu of these is to do him the same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum of money to release him from his engagements. The great depend on their heart, not on their purse. Genius and virtue, like diamonds, are best plain-set, — set in lead, set in poverty. The greatest man in history was the poorest. How was it with the captains and sages of Greece and Rome, with Socrates, with Epaminondas? Aristides was made general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute which each state was to furnish against the barbarian. “Poor,” says Plutarch, “when he set about it, poorer when he had finished it.” How was it with Æmilius and Cato? What kind of a house was kept by Paul and John, by Milton and Marvell, by Samuel Johnson, by Samuel Adams in Boston, and Jean Paul Richter at Baireuth?

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

Nor is this redress so hopeless as it seems. Certainly, if we begin by reforming particulars of our present system, correcting a few evils and letting the rest stand, we shall soon give up in despair. For our social forms are very far from truth and equity. But the way to set the axe at the root of the tree is to raise our aim. Let us understand then that a house should bear witness in all its economy that human culture is the end to which it is built and garnished. It stands there under the sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble than theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep: but the pine and the oak shall gladly descend from the mountains to uphold the roof of men as faithful and necessary as themselves; to be the shelter always open to good and true persons; — a hall which shines with sincerity, brows ever tranquil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert; whose inmates know what they want; who do not ask your house how theirs should be kept. They have aims; they cannot pause for trifles. The diet of the house does not create its order, but knowledge, character, action, absorb so much life and yield so much entertainment that the refectory has ceased to be so curiously studied. With a change of aim has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, — in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.

Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the county, for the culture of the county; — an eating-house and sleeping-house for travellers it shall be, but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready at too great a cost. These things, if they are curious in them, they can get for a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village or city; and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love, honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.

There was never a country in the world which could so easily exhibit this heroism as ours; never any where the State has made such efficient provision for popular education, where intellectual entertainment is so within reach of youthful ambition. The poor man’s son is educated. There is many a humble house in every city, in every town, where talent and taste and sometimes genius dwell with poverty and labor. Who has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager, blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother, — atoning for the same by some pages of Plutarch or Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with which they kindle each other in school-yard or in barn or wood-shed with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration, or mimicry of the orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the sermons; the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration of sisters; the first solitary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme has been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house; the cautious comparison of the attractive advertisement of the arrival of Macready, Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with the expense of the entertainment; the affectionate delight with which they greet the return of each one after the early separations which school or business require; the foresight with which, during such absences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the ear and imagination of the others; and the unrestrained glee with which they disburden themselves of their early mental treasures when the holidays bring them again together? What is the hoop that holds them stanch? It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which, excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too early old, has directed their activity in safe and right channels, and made them, despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful, and the good. Ah! short-sighted students of books, of Nature, and of man! too happy, could they know their advantages. They pine for freedom from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides, for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissipation, which others possess. Woe to them if their wishes were crowned! The angels that dwell with them and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful brows, are Toil and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.

In many parts of true economy a cheering lesson may be learned from the mode of life and manners of the later Romans, as described to us in the letters of the younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the temptation of quoting so trite an instance as the noble housekeeping of Lord Falkland in Clarendon: “His house being within little more than ten miles from Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite and accurate men of that University, who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university in a less volume, whither they came, not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosset propositions which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation.”

I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win laurels in the state or the army, not to be a jurist or a naturalist, not to he a poet or a commander, but to be a master of living well, and to administer the offices of master or servant, of husband, father, and friend. But it requires as much breadth of power for this as for those other functions, — as much, or more, — and the reason for the failure is the same. I think the vice of our housekeeping is that it does not hold man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of religion, is one with that of private life.

In the old fables we used to read of a cloak brought from fairy-land as a gift for the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s court. It was to be her prize whom it would fit. Every one was eager to try it on, but it would fit nobody: for one it was a world too wide, for the next it dragged on the ground, and for the third it shrunk to a scarf. They, of course, said that the devil was in the mantle, for really the truth was in the mantle, and was exposing the ugliness which each would fain conceal. All drew back with terror from the garment. The innocent Genelas alone could wear it. In like manner, every man is provided in his thought with a measure of man which he applies to every passenger. Unhappily, not one in many thousands comes up to the stature and proportions of the model. Neither does the measurer himself; neither do the people in the street; neither do the select individuals whom he admires, — the heroes of the race. When he inspects them critically, he discovers that their aims are low, that they are too quickly satisfied. He observes the swiftness with which life culminates, and the huminity of the expectations of the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon after the age of puberty, some event or society or way of living, which becomes the crisis of life and the chief fact in their history. In woman, it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable); and yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an unfolding life from such a youthful and generally inconsiderate period as the age of courtship and marriage. In men, it is their place of education, choice of an employment, settlement in a town, or removal to the East or to the West, or some other magnified trifle which makes the meridian moment, and all the after years and actions only derive interest from their relation to that. Hence it comes that we soon catch the trick of each man’s conversation, and knowing his two or three main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the uneducated. I have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, ten, twenty years after they had left the halls, returning, as it seemed, the same boys who went away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return seemed mere ornamental masks; underneath they were boys yet. We never come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think that every thing in their petty town is a little superior to the same thing anywhere else. In each the circumstance signalized differs, but in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was his going to sea; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to college; in a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to Canton; in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society; in a fifth, his new diet and regimen; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition organizations; and in a seventh, his going into them. It is a life of toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.

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

Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners, which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a divine building, if the soul will build thereon. There is no face, no form, which one cannot in fancy associate with great power of intellect or with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be sure, beauty is not, as it ought to be, the dower of man and of woman as invariably as sensation. Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional, — or, as one has said, culminating and perfect only a single moment, before which it is unripe, and after which it is on the wane. But beauty is never quite absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, suggests its own right and sound estate. Our friends are not their own highest form. But let the hearts they have agitated witness what power has lurked in the traits of these structures of clay that pass and repass us! The secret power of form over the imagination and affections transcends all our philosophy. The first glance we meet may satisfy us that matter is the vehicle of higher powers than its own, and that no laws of line or surface can ever account for the inexhaustible expressiveness of form. We see heads that turn on the pivot of the spine, — no more; and we see heads that seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the world, — so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. We see on the lip of our companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought and poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many years, that he is where we left him, or that he has made great strides.

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

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

“Not on the store of sprightly wine,

Nor plenty of delicious meats,

Though generous Nature did design

To court us with perpetual treats, —

‘T is not on these we for content depend,

So much as on the shadow of a Friend.”

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

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

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

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

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

2. Certainly, not aloof from this homage to beauty, but in strict connection therewith, the house will come to be esteemed a Sanctuary. The language of a ruder age has given to common law the maxim that every man’s house is his castle: the progress of truth will make every house a shrine. Will not man one day open his eyes and see how dear he is to the soul of Nature, — how near it is to him? Will he not see, through all he miscalls accident, that Law prevails for ever and ever; that his private being is a part of it; that its home is in his own unsounded heart; that his economy, his labor, his good and bad fortune, his health and manners are all a curious and exact demonstration in miniature of the Genius of the Eternal Providence? When he perceives the Law, he ceases to despond. Whilst he sees it, every thought and act is raised, and becomes an act of religion. Does the consecration of Sunday confess the desecration of the entire week? Does the consecration of the church confess the profanation of the house? Let us read the incantation backward. Let the man stand on his feet. Let religion cease to be occasional; and the pulses of thought that go to the borders of the universe, let them proceed from the bosom of the Household.

These are the consolations, — these are the ends to which the household is instituted and the rooftree stands. If these are sought and in any good degree attained, can the State, can commerce, can climate, can the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good? Beside these aims, Society is weak and the State an intrusion. I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome, and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor, and make his own name dear to all history.

FARMING

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

Then the beauty of nature, the tranquillity and innocence of the countryman, his independence, and his pleasing arts, — the care of bees, of poultry, of sheep, of cows, the dairy, the care of hay, of fruits, of orchards and forests, and the reaction of these on the workman, in giving him a strength and plain dignity like the face and manners of nature, — all men acknowledge. All men keep the farm in reserve as an asylum where, in ease of mischance, to hide their poverty, — or a solitude, if they do not succeed in society. And who knows how many glances of remorse are turned this way from the bankrupts of trade, from mortified pleaders in courts and senates, or from the victims of idleness and pleasure? Poisoned by town life and town vices, the sufferer resolves: ‘ Well, my children, whom I have injured, shall go back to the land, to be recruited and cured by that which should have been my nursery, and now shall be their hospital.’

The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is. He represents the necessities. It is the beauty of the great economy of the world that makes his comeliness. He bends to the order of the seasons, the weather, the soils and crops, as the sails of a ship bend to the wind. He represents continuous hard labor, year in, year out, and small gains. He is a slow person, timed to nature, and not to city watches. He takes the pace of seasons, plants, and chemistry. Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns in fishing, yachting, hunting, or planting, is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water, — patience with the slowness of our feet, with the parsimony of our strength, with the largeness of sea and land we must traverse, etc. The farmer times himself to Nature, and acquires that livelong patience which belongs to her. Slow, narrow man, his rule is that the earth shall feed and clothe him; and he must wait for his crop to grow. His entertainments, his liberties and his spending must be on a farmer’s scale, and not on a merchant’s. It were as false for farmers to use a wholesale and massy expense, as for states to use a minute economy. But if thus pinched on one side, he has compensatory advantages. He is permanent, clings to his land as the rocks do. In the town where I live, farms remain in the same families for seven and eight generations; and most of the first settlers (in 1635), should they reappear on the farms to-day, would find their own blood and names still in possession. And the like fact holds in the surrounding towns.

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

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

He is the continuous benefactor. He who digs a well, constructs a stone fountain, plants a grove of trees by the roadside, plants an orchard, builds a durable house, reclaims a swamp, or so much as puts a stone seat by the wayside, makes the land so far lovely and desirable, makes a fortune which he cannot carry away with him, but which is useful to his country long afterwards. The man that works at home helps society at large with somewhat more of certainty than he who devotes himself to charities. If it be true that, not by votes of political parties but by the eternal laws of political economy, slaves are driven out of a slave State as fast as it is surrounded by free States, then the true abolitionist is the farmer, who, heedless of laws and constitutions, stands all day in the field, investing his labor in the land, and making a product with which no forced labor can compete.

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

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

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

Science has shown the great circles in which nature works; the manner in which marine plants balance the marine animals, as the land plants supply the oxygen which the animals consume, and the animals the carbon which the plants absorb. These activities are incessant. Nature works on a method of all for each and each for all. The strain that is made on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the structure. There is a perfect solidarity. You cannot detach an atom from its holdings, or strip off from it the electricity, gravitation, chemic affinity, or the relation to light and heat, and leave the atom bare. No, it brings with it its universal ties.

Nature, like a cautious testator, ties up her estate so as not to bestow it all on one generation, but has a forelooking tenderness and equal regard to the next and the next, and the fourth and the fortieth age. There lie the inexhaustible magazines. The eternal rocks, as we call them, have held their oxygen or lime undiminished, entire, as it was. No particle of oxygen can rust or wear, but has the same energy as on the first morning. The good rocks, those patient waiters, say to him: ‘ We have the sacred power as we received it. We have not failed of our trust, and now, — when in our immense day the hour is at last struck — take the gas we have hoarded, mingle it with water, and let it he free to grow in plants and animals and obey the thought of man.’

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

The air works for him. The atmosphere, a sharp solvent, drinks the essence and spirit of every solid on the globe, — a menstruum which melts the mountains into it. Air is matter subdued by heat. As the sea is the grand receptacle of all rivers, so the air is the receptacle from which all things spring, and into which they all return. The invisible and creeping air takes form and solid mass. Our senses are skeptics, and believe only the impression of the moment, and do not believe the chemical fact that these huge mountain-chains are made up of gases and rolling wind. But Nature is as subtle as she is strong. She turns her capital day by day; deals never with dead, but ever with quick subjects. All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materials which they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly. It is almost inevitable to push the generalization up into higher parts of nature, rank over rank into sentient beings. Nations burn with internal fire of thought and affection, which wastes while it works. We shall find finer combustion and finer fuel. Intellect is a fire: rash and pitiless it melts this wonderful bone-house which is called man. Genius even, as it is the greatest good, is the greatest harm. Whilst all thus burns, — the universe in a blaze kindled from the torch of the sun, — it needs a perpetual tempering, a phlegm, a sleep, atmospheres of azote, deluges of water, to check the fury of the conflagration; a hoarding to check the spending, a centripetence equal to the centrifugence; and this is invariably supplied.

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

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

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

“Enclosing in the garden square

A dead and standing pool of air,”

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

The chemist comes to his aid every year by following out some new hint drawn from nature, and now affirms that this dreary space occupied by the farmer is needless; he will concentrate his kitchen-garden into a box of one or two rods square, will take the roots into his laboratory; the vines and stalks and stems may go sprawling about in the fields outside, he will attend to the roots in his tub, gorge them with food that is good for them. The smaller his garden, the better he can feed it, and the larger the crop. As he nursed his Thanksgiving turkeys on bread and milk, so he will pamper his peaches and grapes on the viands they like best. If they have an appetite for potash, or salt, or iron, or ground bones, or even now and then for a dead hog, he will indulge them. They keep the secret well, and never tell on your table whence they drew their sunset complexion or their delicate flavors.

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

There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen among landlords and loomlords, namely, the dogma that men breed too fast for the powers of the soil; that men multiply in a geometrical ratio, whilst corn multiplies only in an arithmetical; and hence that, the more prosperous we are, the faster we approach these frightful limits: nay, the plight of every new generation is worse than of the foregoing, because the first comers take up the best lands; the next, the second best; and each succeeding wave of population is driven to poorer, so that the land is ever yielding less returns to enlarging hosts of eaters. Henry Carey of Philadelphia replied: “Not so, Mr. Malthus, but just the opposite of so is the fact.”

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

Meantime we cannot enumerate the incidents and agents of the farm without reverting to their influence on the farmer. He carries out this cumulative preparation of means to their last effect. This crust of soil which ages have refined he refines again for the feeding of a civil and instructed people. The great elements with which he deals cannot leave him unaffected, or unconscious of his ministry; but their influence somewhat resembles that which the same Nature has on the child, — of subduing and silencing him. We see the farmer with pleasure and respect when we think what powers and utilities are so meekly worn. He knows every secret of labor; he changes the face of the landscape. Put him on a new planet and he would know where to begin; yet there is no arrogance in his bearing, but a perfect gentleness. The farmer stands well on the world. Plain in manners as in dress, he would not shine in palaces; he is absolutely unknown and inadmissible therein; living or dying, he never shall be heard of in them; yet the drawing-room heroes put down beside him would shrivel in his presence; he solid and unexpressive, they expressed to gold-leaf. But he stands well on the world, — as Adam did, as an Indian does, as Homer’s heroes, Agamemnon or Achilles, do. He is a person whom a poet of any clime — Milton, Firdusi, or Cervantes — would appreciate as being really a piece of the old Nature, comparable to sun and moon, rainbow and flood; because he is, as all natural persons are, representative of Nature as much as these.

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

WORKS AND DAYS.

Our nineteenth century is the age of tools. They grow out of our structure. “Man is the meter of all things,” said Aristotle; “the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.” The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. One definition of man is “an intelligence served by organs.” Machines can only second, not supply, his unaided senses. The body is a meter. The eye appreciates finer differences than art can expose. The apprentice clings to his foot-rule; a practised mechanic will measure by his thumb and his arm with equal precision; and a good surveyor will pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man can measure them by tape. The sympathy of eye and hand by which an Indian or a practised slinger hits his mark with a stone, or a wood-chopper or a carpenter swings his axe to a hair-line on his log, are examples; and there is no sense or organ which is not capable of exquisite performance.

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

Our century to be sure had inherited a tolerable apparatus. We had the compass, the printing-press, watches, the spiral spring, the barometer, the telescope. Yet so many inventions have been added that life seems almost made over new; and as Leibnitz said of Newton, that “if he reckoned all that had been done by mathematicians from the beginning of the world down to Newton, and what had been done by him, his would be the better half,” so one might say that the inventions of the last fifty years counterpoise those of the fifty centuries before them. For the vast production and manifold application of iron is new; and our common and indispensable utensils of house and farm are new; the sewing-machine, the power-loom, the McCormick reaper, the mowing-machines, gas-light, lucifer matches, and the immense productions of the laboratory, are new in this century, and one frane’s worth of coal does the work of a laborer for twenty days.

Why need I speak of steam, the enemy of space and time, with its enormous strength and delicate applicability, which is made in hospitals to bring a bowl of gruel to a sick man’s bed, and can twist beams of iron like candy-braids, and vies with the forces which upheaved and doubled over the geologic strata? Steam is an apt scholar and a strong-shouldered fellow, but it has not yet done all its work. It already walks about the field like a man, and will do anything required of it. It irrigates crops, and drags away a mountain. It must sew our shirts, it must drive our gigs; taught by Mr. Babbage, it must calculate interest and logarithms. Lord Chancellor Thurlow thought it might be made to draw bills and answers in chancery. If that were satire, it is yet coming to render many higher services of a mechanico-intellectual kind, and will leave the satire short of the fact.

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

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

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

There does not seem any limit to these new informations of the same Spirit that made the elements at first, and now, through man, works them. Art and power will go on as they have done, — will make day out of night, time out of space, and space out of time.

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

Another result of our arts is the new intercourse which is surprising us with new solutions of the embarrassing political problems. The intercourse is not new, but the scale is new. Our selfishness would have held slaves or would have excluded from a quarter of the planet all that are not born on the soil of that quarter. Our politics are disgusting; but what can they help or hinder when from time to time the primal instincts are impressed on masses of mankind, when the nations are in exodus and flux? Nature loves to cross her stocks, — and German, Chinese, Turk, Russ, and Kanaka were putting out to sea, and intermarrying race with race; and commerce took the hint, and ships were built capacious enough to carry the people of a county.

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

Yes, we have a pretty artillery of tools now in our social arrangements: we ride four times as fast as our fathers did; travel, grind, weave, forge, plant, till, and excavate better. We have new shoes, gloves, glasses, and gimlets; we have the calculus; we have the newspaper, which does its best to make every square acre of land and sea give an account of itself at your breakfast-table; we have money, and paper money; we have language, — the finest tool of all, and nearest to the mind. Much will have more. Man flatters himself that his command over nature must increase. Things begin to obey him. We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air. We may yet find a rose-water that will wash the negro white. He sees the skull of the English race changing from its Saxon type under the exigencies of American life.

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

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

Then the political economist thinks “’Tis doubtful if all the mechanical inventions that ever existed have lightened the day’s toil of one human being.” The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. Every new step in improving the engine restricts one more act of the engineer, — unteaches him. Once it took Archimedes; now it only needs a fireman, and a boy to know the coppers, to pull up the handles or mind the water-tank. But when the engine breaks, they can do nothing.

What sickening details in the daily journals! I believe they have ceased to publish the “Newgate Calendar “and the “Pirate’s Own Book” since the family newspapers, namely the “New York Tribune” and the “London Times” have quite superseded them in the freshness as well as the horror of their records of crime. Politics were never more corrupt and brutal; and Trade, that pride and darling of our ocean, that educator of nations, that benefactor in spite of itself, ends in shameful defaulting, bubble, and bankruptcy, all over the world.

Of course we resort to the enumeration of his arts and inventions as a measure of the worth of man. But if, with all his arts, he is a felon, we cannot assume the mechanical skill or chemical resources as the measure of worth. Let us try another gauge.

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

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

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

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

How the day fits itself to the mind, winds itself round it like a fine drapery, clothing all its fancies! Any holiday communicates to us its color. We wear its cockade and favors in our humor. Remember what boys think in the morning of “Election day,” of the Fourth of July, of Thanksgiving or Christmas. The very stars in their courses wink to them of nuts and cakes, bonbons, presents, and fire-works. Cannot memory still descry the old school-house and its porch, somewhat hacked by jack-knives, where you spun tops and snapped marbles; and do you not recall that life was then calendared by moments, threw itself into nervous knots of glittering hours, even as now, and not spread itself abroad an equable felicity? In college terms, and in years that followed, the young graduate, when the Commencement anniversary returned, though he were in a swamp, would see a festive light and find the air faintly echoing with plausive academic thunders. In solitude and in the country, what dignity distinguishes the holy time! The old Sabbath, or Seventh Day, white with the religions of unknown thousands of years, when this hallowed hour dawns out of the deep, — a clean page, which the wise may inscribe with truth, whilst the savage scrawls it with fetishes, — the cathedral music of history breathes through it a psalm to our solitude.

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

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

The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web. ‘T is pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor, — a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more or less stone, or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass, — the secular, refined, composite anatomy of man, which all strata go to form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to ripen; the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its invitations; the heaven deep with worlds; and the answering brain and nervous structure replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again look back to the eye, abyss to abyss; — these, not like a glass bead, or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all.

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

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

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

This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of present time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing something less than his best task? “What are you doing?” “O, nothing; I have been doing thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only— “ Ah! poor dupe, will you never slip out of the web of the master juggler, — never learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glory between to-day and us these passing hours shall glitter and draw us as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry? How difficult to deal erect with them! The events they bring, their trade, entertainments, and gossip, their urgent work, all throw dust in the eyes and distract attention. He is a strong man who can look them in the eye, see through this juggle, feel their identity, and keep his own; who can know surely that one will be like another to the end of the world, nor permit love, or death, or polities, or money, war, or pleasure, to draw him from his task.

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

History of ancient art, excavated cities, recovery of books and inscriptions, — yes, the works were beautiful, and the history worth knowing; and academies convene to settle the claims of the old schools. What journeys and measurements, — Niebuhr and Müller and Layard, — to identify the plain of Troy and Nimroud town! And your homage to Dante costs you so much sailing; and to ascertain the discoverers of America needs as much voyaging as the discovery cost. Poor child! that flexile clay of which these old brothers moulded their admirable symbols was not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was common lime and silex and water and sunlight, the heat of the blood and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in sepulchres, mummy-pits, and old book-shops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and England. It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude which men quit for the tattle of towns. He lurks, he hides, — he who is success, reality, joy, and power. One of the illusions is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday. ‘T is the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises. ’Tis the vulgar great who come dizened with gold and jewels. Real kings hide away their crowns in their wardrobes, and affect a plain and poor exterior. In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher’s hut and patches a boat. In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants. In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus, and Jove liked to rusticate among the poor Ethiopians. So, in our history, Jesus is born in a barn, and his twelve peers are fishermen. ’Tis the very principle of science that Nature shows herself best in leasts; it was the maxim of Aristotle and Lucretius; and, in modern times, of Swedenborg and of Hahnemann. The order of changes in the egg determines the age of fossil strata. So it was the rule of our poets, in the legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least in size. In the Christian graces, humility stands highest of all, in the form of the Madonna; and in life, this is the secret of the wise. We owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing us that divinities are sitting disguised in the seeming gang of gypsies and pedlers. In daily life, what distinguishes the master is the using those materials he has, instead of looking about for what are more renowned, or what others have used well. “A general,” said Bonaparte, “always has troops enough, if he only knows how to employ those he has, and bivouacs with them.” Do not refuse the employment which the hour brings you, for one more ambitious. The highest heaven of wisdom is alike near from every point, and thou must find it, if at all, by methods native to thyself alone.

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

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

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

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

A third illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments,”— “En peu d’heure Dieu labeure.” We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life, or grand moments, that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance, — what ample borrowers of eternity they are! Life culminates and concentrates; and Homer said, “The gods ever give to mortals their apportioned share of reason only on one day.”

I am of the opinion of the poet Wordsworth, that “there is no real happiness in this life but in intellect and virtue.” I am of the opinion of Pliny, that “whilst we are musing on these things, we are adding to the length of our lives.” I am of the opinion of Glauco, who said, “The measure of life, O Socrates, is, with the wise, the speaking and hearing such discourses as yours.”

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

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

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

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

“Forms that men spy

With the half-shut eye

In the beams of the setting sun, am I.”

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

The same rule holds in science. The savant is often an amateur. His performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders’ legs; he observes as other academicians observe; he is on stilts at a microscope, and his memoir finished and read and printed, he retreats into his routinary existence, which is quite separate from his scientific. But in Newton, science was as easy as breathing; he used the same wit to weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes; and all his life was simple, wise, and majestic. So was it in Archimedes, — always self-same, like the sky. In Linnæus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and equality, — no stilts, no tiptoe; and their results are wholesome and memorable to all men.

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

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

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

It is a fine fable for the advantage of character over talent, the Greek legend of the strife of Jove and Phœbus. Phœbus challenged the gods, and said, “Who will outshoot the far-darting Apollo?” Zeus said, “I will.” Mars shook the lots in his helmet, and that of Apollo leaped out first. Apollo stretched his bow and shot his arrow into the extreme west. Then Zeus arose, and with one stride cleared the whole distance, and said, “Where shall I shoot? there is no space left.” So the bowman’s prize was adjudged to him who drew no bow.

And this is the progress of every earnest mind; from the works of man and the activity of the hands to a delight in the faculties which rule them; from a respect to the works to a wise wonder at this mystic element of time in which he is conditioned; from local skills and the economy which reckons the amount of production per hour to the finer economy which respects the quality of what is done, and the right we have to the work, or the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves; then to the depth of thought it betrays, looking to its universality, or that its roots axe in eternity, not in time. Then it flows from character, that sublime health which values one moment as another, and makes us great in all conditions, and as the only definition we have of freedom and power.

BOOKS.

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

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

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.

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

Meantime the colleges, whilst they provide us with libraries, furnish no professor of books; and I think no chair is so much wanted. In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us, — some of them, — and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination, — not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike. But it happens in our experience that in this lottery there are at least fifty or a hundred blanks to a prize. It seems then as if some charitable soul, after losing a great deal of time among the false books and alighting upon a few true ones which made him happy and wise, would do a right act in naming those which have been bridges or ships to carry him safely over dark morasses and barren oceans, into the heart of sacred cities, into palaces and temples. This would be best done by those great masters of books who from time to time appear, — the Fabricii, the Seldens, Magliabecchis, Scaligers, Mirandolas, Bayles, Johnsons, whose eyes sweep the whole horizon of learning. But private readers, reading purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving each the shortest note of what he found.

There are books; and it is practicable to read them, because they are so few. We look over with a sigh the monumental libraries of Paris, of the Vatican, and the British Museum. In 1858, the number of printed books in the Imperial Library at Paris was estimated at eight hundred thousand volumes, with an annual increase of twelve thousand volumes; so that the number of printed books extant to-day may easily exceed a million. It is easy to count the number of pages which a diligent man can read in a day, and the number of years which human life in favorable circumstances allows to reading; and to demonstrate that though he should read from dawn till dark, for sixty years, he must die in the first alcoves. But nothing can be more deceptive than this arithmetic, where none but a natural method is really pertinent. I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. The inspection of the catalogue brings me continually back to the few standard writers who are on every private shelf; and to these it can afford only the most slight and casual additions. The crowds and centuries of books are only commentary and elucidation, echoes and weakeners of these few great voices of time.

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

Nature is much our friend in this matter. Nature is always clarifying her water and her wine. No filtration can be so perfect. She does the same thing by books as by her gases and plants. There is always a selection in writers, and then a selection from the selection. In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say. There has already been a scrutiny and choice from many hundreds of young pens before the pamphlet or political chapter which you read in a fugitive journal comes to your eye. All these are young adventurers, who produce their performance to the wise ear of Time, who sits and weighs, and, ten years hence, out of a million of pages reprints one. Again it is judged, it is winnowed by all the winds of opinion, and what terrific selection has not passed on it before it can be reprinted after twenty years; — and reprinted after a century! — it is as if Minos and Rhadamanthus had indorsed the writing. ’Tis therefore an economy of time to read old and famed books. Nothing can be preserved which is not good; and I know beforehand that Pindar, Martial, Terence, Galen, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Erasmus, More, will be superior to the average intellect. In contemporaries, it is not so easy to distinguish betwixt notoriety and fame.

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

The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, — 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakspeare’s phrase, —

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

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

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

Of the old Greek books, I think there are five which we cannot spare: 1. Homer, who in spite of Pope and all the learned uproar of centuries, has really the true fire and is good for simple minds, is the true and adequate germ of Greece, and occupies that place as history which nothing can supply. It holds through all literature that our best history is still poetry. It is so in Hebrew, in Sanskrit, and in Greek. English history is best known through Shakspeare; how much through Merlin, Robin Hood, and the Scottish ballads! — the German, through the Nibelungenlied; — the Spanish, through the Cid. Of Homer, George Chapman’s is the heroic translation, though the most literal prose version is the best of all. 2. Herodotus, whose history contains inestimable anecdotes, which brought it with the learned into a sort of disesteem; but in these days, when it is found that what is most memorable of history is a few anecdotes, and that we need not be alarmed though we should find it not dull, it is regaining credit. 3. Æschylus, the grandest of the three tragedians, who has given us under a thin veil the first plantation of Europe. The “Prometheus” is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda. 4. Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find in him that which you have already found in Homer, now ripened to thought, — the poet converted to a philosopher, with loftier strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached; as if Homer were the youth and Plato the finished man; yet with no less security of bold and perfect song, when he cares to use it, and with some harpstrings fetched from a higher heaven. He contains the future, as he came out of the past. In Plato you explore modern Europe in its causes and seed, — all that in thought, which the history of Europe embodies or has yet to embody. The well-informed man finds himself anticipated. Plato is up with him too. Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh suggestion of modern humanity, is there. If the student wish to see both sides, and justice done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the supremacy of truth and the religious sentiment, he shall be contented also. Why should not young men be educated on this book? It would suffice for the tuition of the race; to test their understanding, and to express their reason. Here is that which is so attractive to all men, — the literature of aristocracy shall I call it? — the picture of the best persons, sentiments, and manners, by the first master, in the best times; portraits of Pericles, Alcibiades, Crito, Prodicus, Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and Socrates, with the lovely background of the Athenian and suburban landscape. Or who can overestimate the images with which Plato has enriched the minds of men, and which pass like bullion in the currency ofall nations? Read the “Phædo,” the “Protagoras,” the “Phædrus,” the “Timæus,” the “Republic,” and the “Apology of Socrates.” 5. Plutarch cannot be spared from the smallest library; first because he is so readable, which is much; then that he is medicinal and invigorating. The lives of Cimon, Lycurgus, Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Marcellus, and the rest, are what history has of best. But this book has taken care of itself, and the opinion of the world is expressed in the innumerable cheap editions, which make it as accessible as a newspaper. But Plutarch’ “Morals” is less known, and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it as the “Lives.” He will read in it the essays “On the Dæmon of Socrates,” “On Isis and Osiris,” “On Progress in Virtue,” “On Garrulity,” “On Love;” and thank anew the art of printing and the cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his book, you find yourself at the Olympian tables. His memory is like the Isthmian Games, where all that was excellent in Greece was assembled; and you are stimulated and recruited by lyric verses, by philosophic sentiments, by the forms and behavior of heroes, by the worship of the gods, and by the passing of fillets, parsley and laurel wreaths, chariots, armor, sacred cups, and utensils of sacrifice. An inestimable trilogy of ancient social pictures are the three “Banquets” respectively of Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch. Plutarch’s has the least approach to historical accuracy; but the meeting of the Seven Wise Masters is a charming portraiture of ancient manners and discourse, and is as clear as the voice of a fife, and entertaining as a French novel. Xenophon’s delineation of Athenian manners is an accessory to Plato, and supplies traits of Socrates; whilst Plato’s has merits of every kind, — being a repertory of the wisdom of the ancients on the subject of love; a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes; and, lastly, containing that ironical eulogy of Socrates which is the source from which all the portraits of that philosopher current in Europe have been drawn.

Of course a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but the shortest is the best, and if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote’s voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or of Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles and the next generation. And here we must read the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, and what more of that master we gain appetite for, to learn our way in the streets of Athens, and to know the tyranny of Aristophanes, requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to the official commanders. Aristophanes is now very accessible, with much valuable commentary, through the labors of Mitchell and Cartwright. An excellent popular book is J. A. St. John’s “Ancient Greece;” the “Life and Letters” of Niebuhr, even more than his Lectures, furnish leading views; and Winckelmann, a Greek born out of due time, has become essential to an intimate knowledge of the Attic genius. The secret of the recent histories in German and in English is the discovery, owed first to Wolff and later to Boeckh, that the sincere Greek history of that period must be drawn from Demosthenes, especially from the business orations; and from the comic poets.

If we come down a little by natural steps from the master to the disciples, we have, six or seven centuries later, the Platonists, who also cannot be skipped, — Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Synesius, Jamblichus. Of Jamblichus the Emperor Julian said that “he was posterior to Plato in time, not in genius.” Of Plotinus, we have eulogies by Porphyry and Longinus, and the favor of the Emperor Gallienus, indicating the respect he inspired among his contemporaries. If any one who had read with interest the “Isis and Osiris” of Plutarch should then read a chapter called “Providence,” by Synesius, translated into English by Thomas Taylor, he will find it one of the majestic remains of literature, and, like one walking in the noblest of temples, will conceive new gratitude to his fellow-men, and a new estimate of their nobility. The imaginative scholar will find few stimulants to his brain like these writers. He has entered the Elysian Fields; and the grand and pleasing figures of gods and dæmons and dæmoniacal men, of the “azonic” and the “aquatic gods,” dæmons with fulgid eyes, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric, exalted a little under the African sun, sail before his eyes. The acolyte has mounted the tripod over the cave at Delphi; his heart dances, his sight is quickened. These guides speak of the gods with such depth and with such pictorial details, as if they had been bodily present at the Olympian feasts. The reader of these books makes new acquaintance with his own mind; new regions of thought are opened. Jamblichus’s “Life of Pythagoras” works more directly on the will than the others; since Pythagoras was eminently a practical person, the founder of a school of ascetics and socialists, a planter of colonies, and nowise a man of abstract studies alone.

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

For history there is great choice of ways to bring the student through early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used, that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners, — and some very bad ones, — in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read, if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who will take him in charge and convey him with abundant entertainment down — with notice of all remarkable objects on the way — through fourteen hundred years of time. He cannot spare Gibbon, with his vast reading, with such wit and continuity of mind, that, though never profound, his book is one of the conveniences of civilization, like the new railroad from ocean to ocean, — and, I think, will be sure to send the reader to his “Memoirs of Himself,” and the “Extracts from my Journal,” and “Abstracts of my Readings,” which will spur the laziest scholar to emulation of his prodigious performance.

Now having our idler safe down as far as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, he is in very good courses; for here are trusty hands waiting for him. The cardinal facts of European history are soon learned. There is Dante’s poem, to open the Italian Republics of the Middle Age; Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” to explain Dante and Beatrice; and Boccaccio’s “Life of Dante,” a great man to describe a greater. To help us, perhaps a volume or two of M. Sismondi’s “Italian Republics” will be as good as the entire sixteen. When we come to Michael Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by Herman Grimm. For the Church and the Feudal Institution, Mr. Hallam’s “Middle Ages” will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and conceivable outlines.

The “Life of the Emperor Charles V.,” by the useful Robertson, is still the key of the following age. Ximenes, Columbus, Loyola, Luther, Erasmus, Melanchthon, Francis I., Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and Henry IV. of France, are his contemporaries. It is a time of seeds and expansions, whereof our recent civilization is the fruit.

If now the relations of England to European affairs bring him to British ground, he is arrived at the very moment when modern history takes new proportions. He can look back for the legends and mythology to the “Younger Edda” and the “Heimskringla” of Snorro Sturleson, to Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” to Ellis’s “Metrical Romances,” to Asser’s “Life of Alfred” and Venerable Bede, and to the researches of Sharon Turner and Palgrave. Hume will serve him for an intelligent guide, and in the Elizabethan era he is at the richest period of the English mind, with the chief men of action and of thought which that nation has produced, and with a pregnant future before him. Here he has Shakspeare, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Chapman, Jonson, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, Herbert, Donne, Herrick; and Milton, Marvell, and Dryden, not long after.

In reading history, he is to prefer the history of individuals. He will not repent the time he gives to Bacon, — not if he read the “Advancement of Learning,” the “Essays,” the “Novum Organum,” the “History of Henry VII.,” and then all the “Letters” (especially those to the Earl of Devonshire, explaining the Essex business), and all but his “Apophthegms.”

The task is aided by the strong mutual light which these men shed on each other. Thus, the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all these fine persons together, and to the land to which they belong. He has written verses to or on all his notable contemporaries; and what with so many occasional poems, and the portrait sketches in his “Discoveries,” and the gossiping record of his opinions in his conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, he has really illustrated the England of his time, if not to the same extent yet much in the same way, as Walter Scott has celebrated the persons and places of Scotland. Walton, Chapman, Herrick, and Sir Henry Wotton write also to the times.

Among the best books are certain Autobiographies; as, St. Augustine’s Confessions; Benvenuto Cellini’s Life; Montaigne’s Essays; Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Memoirs; Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz; Rousseau’s Confessions; Linnæus’s Diary; Gibbon’s, Hume’s, Franklin’s, Burns’s, Alfieri’s, Goethe’s, and Haydon’s Autobiographies.

Another class of books closely allied to these, and of like interest, are those which may be called Table-Talks: of which the best are Saadi’s Gulistan; Luther’s Table - Talk; Aubrey’s Lives; Spence’s anecdotes; Selden’s Table-Talk; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe; Coleridge’s Table - Talk; and Hazlitt’s Life of Northcote.

There is a class whose value I should designate as Favorites: such as Froissart’s Chronicles; Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid; Cervantes; Sully’s Memoirs; Rabelais; Montaigne; Izaak Walton; Evelyn; Sir Thomas Browne; Aubrey; Sterne; Horace Walpole; Lord Clarendon; Doctor Johnson; Burke, shedding floods of light on his times; Lamb; Landor; and De Quincey; — a list, of course, that may easily be swelled, as dependent on individual caprice. Many men are as tender and irritable as lovers in reference to these predilections. Indeed, a man’s library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.

The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript. This mania reached its height about the beginning of the present century. For an autograph of Shakspeare one hundred and fifty-five guineas were given. In May, 1812, the library of the Duke of Roxburgh was sold. The sale lasted forty-two days, — we abridge the story from Dibdin, — and among the many curiosities was a copy of Boccaccio published by Valdarfer, at Venice, in 1471; the only perfect copy of this edition. Among the distinguished company which attended the sale were the Duke of Devonshire, Earl Spencer, and the Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford. The bid stood at five hundred guineas. “A thousand guineas,” said Earl Spencer: “And ten,” added the Marquis. You might near a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders. Now they talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet, but without the least thought of yielding one to the other. But to pass over some details, — the contest proceeded until the Marquis said, “Two thousand pounds.” Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder, and had paused a quarter of a minute, when Lord Althorp with long steps came to his side, as if to bring his father a fresh lance to renew the fight. Father and son whispered together, and Earl Spencer exclaimed, “Two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds!” An electric shock went through the assembly. “And ten,” quietly added the Marquis. There ended the strife. Ere Evans let the hammer fall, he paused; the ivory instrument swept the air; the spectators stood dumb, when the hammer fell. The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five hundred years, mad M. Van Praet groped in vain among the royal alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.

Another class I distinguish by the term Vocabularies. Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” is a book of great learning. To read it is like reading in a dictionary. ’Tis an inventory to remind us how many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into what strange and multiplex byways learning has strayed, to infer our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, — the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa “On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences” is a specimen of that scribatiousness which grew to be the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern Germans, they read a literature while other mortals read a few books. They read voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they take any general topic, as Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or Praise of Folly, and write and quote without method or end. Now and then out of that affluence of their learning comes a fine sentence from Theophrastus, or Seneca, or Boëthius, but no high method, no inspiring efflux. But one cannot afford to read for a few sentences; they are good only as strings of suggestive words.

There is another class, more needful to the present age, because the currents of custom run now in another direction and leave us dry on this side; — I mean the Imaginative. A right metaphysics should do justice to the co-ordinate powers of Imagination, Insight, Understanding, and Will. Poetry, with its aids of Mythology and Romance, must be well allowed for an imaginative creature. Men are ever lapsing into a beggarly habit, wherein everything that is not ciphering, that is, which does not serve the tyrannical animal, is hustled out of sight. Our orators and writers are of the same poverty, and in this rag-fair neither the Imagination, the great awakening power, nor the Morals, creative of genius and of men, are addressed. But though orator and poet be of this hunger party, the capacities remain. We must have symbols. The child asks you for a story, and is thankful for the poorest. It is not poor to him, but radiant with meaning. The man asks for a novel, — that is, asks leave for a few hours to be a poet, and to paint things as they ought to be. The youth asks for a poem. The very dunces wish to go to the theatre. What private heavens can we not open, by yielding to all the suggestion of rich music! We must have idolatries, mythologies, — some swing and verge for the creative power lying coiled and cramped here, driving ardent natures to insanity and crime if it do not find vent. Without the great arts which speak to the sense of beauty, a man seems to me a poor, naked, shivering creature. These are his becoming draperies, which warm and adorn him. Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected; but the circulating-library and the theatre, as well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondack country, the tour to Mont Blanc, to the White Hills and the Ghauts, make such amends as they can.

The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets; and once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America and Europe but after the laws of right reason, and with as daring a freedom as we use in dreams, put us on our feet again, enable us to form an original judgment of our duties, and suggest new thoughts for to-morrow.

“Lucrezia Floriani,” “Le Péché de M. Antoine,” “Jeanne,” and “Consuelo,” of George Sand, are great steps from the novel of one termination, which we all read twenty years ago. Yet how far off from life and manners and motives the novel still is! Life lies about us dumb; the day, as we know it, has not yet found a tongue. These stories are to the plots of real life what the figures in “La Belle Assemblée,” which represent the fashion of the month, are to portraits. But the novel will find the way to our interiors one day, and will not always be the novel of costume merely. I do not think it inoperative now. So much novel-reading cannot leave the young men and maidens untouched; and doubtless it gives some ideal dignity to the day. The young study noble behavior; and as the player in “Consuelo” insists that he and his colleagues on the boards have taught princes the fine etiquette and strokes of grace and dignity which they practise with so much effect in their villas and among their dependents, so I often see traces of the Scotch or the French novel in the courtesy and brilliancy of young midshipmen, collegians, and clerks. Indeed, when one observes how ill and ugly people make their loves and quarrels, ’tis pity they should not read novels a little more, to import the fine generosities and the clear, firm conduct, which are as becoming in the unions and separations which love effects under shingle roofs as in palaces and among illustrious personages.

In novels the most serious questions are beginning to be discussed. What made the popularity of “Jane Eyre,” but that a central question was answered in some sort? The question there answered in regard to a vicious marriage will always be treated according to the habit of the party. A person of commanding individualism will answer it as Rochester does, — as Cleopatra, as Milton, as George Sand do, — magnifying the exception into a rule, dwarfing the world into an exception. A person of less courage, that is of less constitution, will answer as the heroine does, — giving way to fate, to conventionalism, to the actual state and doings of men and women.

For the most part, our novel-reading is a passion for results. We admire parks, and high-born beauties, and the homage of drawing-rooms and parliaments. They make us skeptical, by giving prominence to wealth and social position.

I remember when some peering eyes of boys discovered that the oranges hanging on the boughs of an orange-tree in a gay piazza were tied to the twigs by thread. I fear ’tis so with the novelist’s prosperities. Nature has a magic by which she fits the man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character. But the novelist plucks this event here and that fortune there, and ties them rashly to his figures, to tickle the fancy of his readers with a cloying success or scare them with shocks of tragedy. And so, on the whole, ’tis a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only oddly combine acts that we do every day. There is no new element, no power, no furtherance. ’Tis only confectionery, not the raising of new corn. Great is the poverty of their inventions. She was beautiful and he fell in love. Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another, these are the main-springs; new names, but no new qualities in the men and women. Hence the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A thousand thoughts awoke; great rainbows seemed to span the sky, a morning among the mountains; but we close the book and not a ray remains in the memory of evening. But this passion for romance, and this disappointment, show how much we need real elevations and pure poetry: that which shall show us, in morning and night, in stars and mountains and in all the plight and circumstance of men, the analogons of our own thoughts, and a like impression made by a just book and by the face of Nature.

If our times are sterile in genius, we must cheer us with books of rich and believing men who had atmosphere and amplitude about them. Every good fable, every mythology, every biography from a religious age, every passage of love, and even philosophy and science, when they proceed from an intellectual integrity and are not detached and critical, have the imaginative element. The Greek fables, the Persian history (Firdusi), the “Younger Edda” of the Scandinavians, the “Chronicle of the Cid,” the poem of Dante, the Sonnets of Michel Angelo, the English drama of Shakspeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford, and even the prose of Bacon and Milton, — in our time the Ode of Wordsworth, and the poems and the prose of Goethe, have this enlargement, and inspire hope and generous attempts.

There is no room left, — and yet I might as well not have begun as to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles of the world, or the sacred books of each nation, which express for each the supreme result of their experience. After the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, which constitute the sacred books of Christendom, these are, the Desatir of the Persians, and the Zoroastrian Oracles; the Vedas and Laws of Menu; the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos; the books of the Buddhists; the “Chinese Classic,” of four books, containing the wisdom of Confucius and Mencius. Also such other books as have acquired a semi-canonical authority in the world, as expressing the highest sentiment and hope of nations. Such are the “Hermes Trismegistus,” pretending to be Egyptian remains; the “Sentences” of Epictetus; of Marcus Antoninus; the “Vishnu Sarma “of the Hindoos; the “Gulistan” of Saadi; the “Imitation of Christ,” of Thomas à Kempis; and the “Thoughts” of Pascal.

All these books are the majestic expressions of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year’s almanac or this day’s newspaper. But they are for the closet, and to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart. Friendship should give and take, solitude and time brood and ripen, heroes absorb and enact them. They are not to be held by letters printed on a page, but are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. I read them on lichens and bark; I watch them on waves on the beach; they fly in birds, they creep in worms; I detect them in laughter and blushes and eye-sparkles of men and women. These are Scriptures which the missionary might wen carry over prairie, desert, and ocean, to Siberia, Japan, Timbuctoo. Yet he will find that the spirit which is in them journeys faster than he, and greets him on his arrival, — was there already long before him. The missionary must be carried by it, and find it there, or he goes in vain. Is there any geography in these things? We call them Asiatic, we call them primeval; but perhaps that is only optical, for Nature is always equal to herself, and there are as good eyes and ears now in the planet as ever were. Only these ejaculations of the soul are uttered one or a few at a time, at long intervals, and it takes millenniums to make a Bible.

These are a few of the books which the old and the later times have yielded us, which will reward the time spent on them. In comparing the number of good books with the shortness of life, many might well be read by proxy, if we had good proxies; and it would be well for sincere young men to borrow a hint from the French Institute and the British Association, and as they divide the whole body into sections, each of which sits upon and reports of certain matters confided to it, so let each scholar associate himself to such persons as he can rely on, in a literary club, in which each shall undertake a single work or series for which he is qualified. For example, how attractive is the whole literature of the “Roman de la Rose,” the “Fabliaux,” and the gaie science of the French Troubadours! Yet who in Boston has time for that? But one of our company shall undertake it, shall study and master it, and shall report on it as under oath; shall give us the sincere result as it lies in his mind, adding nothing, keeping nothing back. Another member meantime shall as honestly search, sift, and as truly report, on British mythology, the Round Table, the histories of Brut, Merlin, and Welsh poetry; a third on the Saxon Chronicles, Robert of Gloucester, and William of Malmesbury; a fourth, on Mysteries, Early Drama, “Gesta Romanorum,” Collier, and Dyce, and the Camden Society. Each shall give us his grains of gold, after the washing; and every other shall then decide whether this is a book indispensable to him also.

CLUBS.

We are delicate machines, and require nice treatment to get from us the maximum of power and pleasure. We need tonics, but must have those that cost little or no reaction. The flame of life burns too fast in pure oxygen, and nature has tempered the air with nitrogen. So thought is the native air of the mind, yet pure it is a poison to our mixed constitution, and soon burns up the bone-house of man, unless tempered with affection and coarse practice in the material world. Varied foods, climates, beautiful objects, — and especially the alternation of a large variety of objects, — are the necessity of this exigent system of ours. But our tonics, our luxuries, are force-pumps which exhaust the strength they pretend to supply; and of all the cordials known to us, the best, safest, and most exhilarating, with the least harm, is society; and every healthy and efficient mind passes a large part of life in the company most easy to him.

We seek society with very different aims, and the staple of conversation is widely unlike in its circles. Sometimes it is facts, — running from those of daily necessity, to the last results of science, — and has all degrees of importance; sometimes it is love, and makes the balm of our early and of our latest days; sometimes it is thought, as from a person who is a mind only; sometimes a singing, as if the heart poured out all like a bird; sometimes experience. With some men it is a debate; at the approach of a dispute they neigh like horses. Unless there be an argument, they think nothing is doing. Some talkers excel in the precision with which they formulate their thoughts, so that you get from them somewhat to remember; others lay criticism asleep by a charm. Especially women use words that are not words, — as steps in a dance are not steps, — but reproduce the genius of that they speak of; as the sound of some bells makes us think of the bell merely, whilst the church-chimes in the distance bring the church and its serious memories before us. Opinions are accidental in people, — have a poverty-stricken air. A man valuing himself as the organ of this or that dogma is a dull companion enough; but opinion native to the speaker is sweet and refreshing, and inseparable from his image. Neither do we by any means always go to people for conversation. How often to say nothing, — and yet must go; as a child will long for his companions, but among them plays by himself. ’Tis only presence which we want. But one thing is certain, — at some rate, intercourse we must have. The experience of retired men is positive, — that we lose our days and are barren of thought for want of some person to talk with. The understanding can no more empty itself by its own action than can a deal box.

The clergyman walks from house to house all day all the year to give people the comfort of good talk. The physician helps them mainly in the same way, by healthy talk giving a right tone to the patient’s mind. The dinner, the walk, the fireside, all have that for their main end.

See how Nature has secured the communication of knowledge. ’Tis certain that money does not more burn in a boy’s pocket than a piece of news burns in our memory until we can tell it. And in higher activity of mind, every new perception is attended with a thrill of pleasure, and the imparting of it to others is also attended with pleasure. Thought is the child of the intellect, and this child is conceived with joy and born with joy.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student. The affection or sympathy helps. The wish to speak to the want of another mind assists to clear your own. A certain truth possesses us which we in all ways strive to utter. Every time we say a thing in conversation, we get a mechanical advantage in detaching it well and deliverly. I prize the mechanics of conversation. ’Tis pulley and lever and screw. To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good boulder, — a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the useful arts of life, — is a wonderful relief.

What are the best days in memory? Those in which we met a companion who was truly such. How sweet those hours when the day was not long enough to communicate and compare our intellectual jewels, — the favorite passages of each book, the proud anecdotes of our heroes, the delicious verses we had hoarded! What a motive had then our solitary days! How the countenance of our friend still left some light after he had gone! We remember the time when the best gift we could ask of fortune was to fall in with a valuable companion in a ship’s cabin, or on a long journey in the old stage-coach, where, each passenger being forced to know every other, and other employments being out of question, conversation naturally flowed, people became rapidly acquainted, and, if well adapted, more intimate in a day than if they had been neighbors for years.

In youth, in the fury of curiosity and acquisition, the day is too short for books and the crowd of thoughts, and we are impatient of interruption. Later, when books tire, thought has a more languid flow; and the days come when we are alarmed, and say there are no thoughts. ‘ What a barren-witted pate is mine!’ the student says; ‘ I will go and learn whether I have lost my reason.’ He seeks intelligent persons, whether more wise or less wise than he, who give him provocation, and at once and easily the old motion begins in his brain: thoughts, fancies, humors flow; the cloud lifts; the horizon broadens; and the infinite opulence of things is again shown him. But the right conditions must be observed. Mainly he must have leave to be himself. Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep. So I prize the good invention whereby everybody is provided with somebody who is glad to see him.

If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in some respects enlarged. They kindle each other; and such is the power of suggestion that each sprightly story calls out more; and sometimes a fact that had long slept in the recesses of memory hears the voice, is welcomed to daylight, and proves of rare value. Every metaphysician must have observed, not only that no thought is alone, but that thoughts commonly go in pairs; though the related thoughts first appeared in his mind at long distances of time. Things are in pairs: a natural fact has only half its value until a fact in moral nature, its counterpart, is stated. Then they confirm and adorn each other; a story is matched by another story. And that may be the reason why, when a gentleman has told a good thing, he immediately tells it again.

Nothing seems so cheap as the benefit of conversation; nothing is more rare. ’Tis wonderful how you are balked and baffled. There is plenty of intelligence, reading, curiosity; but serious, happy discourse, avoiding personalities, dealing with results, is rare: and I seldom meet with a reading and thoughtful person but he tells me, as if it were his exceptional mishap, that he has no companion.

Suppose such a one to go out exploring different circles in search of this wise and genial counterpart, — he might inquire far and wide. Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet. Amidst all the gay banter, sentiment cannot profane itself and venture out. The reply of old Isocrates comes so often to mind,— “The things which are now seasonable I cannot say; and for the things which I can say it is not now the time.” Besides, who can resist the charm of talent? The lover of letters loves power too. Among the men of wit and learning, he could not withhold his homage from the gayety, grasp of memory, luck, splendor, and speed; such exploits of discourse, such feats of society! What new powers, what mines of wealth! But when he came home, his brave sequins were dry leave. He found either that the fact they had thus dizened and adorned was of no value, or that he already knew all and more than all they had told him. He could not find that he was helped by so much as one thought or principle, one solid fact, one commanding impulse: great was the dazzle, but the gain was small. He uses his occasions; he seeks the company of those who have convivial talent. But the moment they meet, to be sure they begin to be something else than they were; they play pranks, dance jigs, run on each other, pun, tell stories, try many fantastic tricks, under some superstition that there must be excitement and elevation; — and they kill conversation at once. I know well the rusticity of the shy hermit. No doubt he does not make allowance enough for men of more active blood and habit. But it is only on natural ground that conversation can be rich. It must not begin with uproar and violence. Let it keep the ground, let it feel the connection with the battery. Men must not be off their centres.

Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go to school-girls, or to boys, or into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear to any one. On these terms they give information and please themselves by sallies and chat which are admired by the idlers; and the talker is at his ease and jolly, for he can walk out without ceremony when he pleases. They go rarely to their equals, and then as for their own convenience simply, making too much haste to introduce and impart their new whim or discovery; listen badly or do not listen to the comment or to the thought by which the company strive to repay them; rather, as soon as their own speech is done, they take their hats. Then there are the gladiators, to whom it is always a battle; ’tis no matter on which side, they fight for victory; then the heady men, the egotists, the monotones, the steriles, and the impracticables.

It does not help that you find as good or a better man than yourself, if he is not timed and fitted to you. The greatest sufferers are often those who have the most to say, — men of a delicate sympathy, who are dumb in mixed company. Able people, if they do not know how to make allowance for them, paralyze them. One of those conceited prigs who value nature only as it feeds and exhibits them is equally a pest with the roysterers. There must be large reception as well as giving. How delightful after these disturbers is the radiant, playful wit of — one whom I need not name, — for in every society there is his representative. Good-nature is stronger than tomahawks. His conversation is all pictures: he can reproduce whatever he has seen; he tells the best story in the county, and is of such genial temper that he disposes all others irresistibly to good-humor and discourse. Diderot said of the Abbé Galiani: “He was a treasure in rainy days; and if the cabinet-makers made such things, everybody would have one in the country.”

One lesson we learn early, — that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion. We know beforehand that yonder man must think as we do. Has he not two hands, — two feet, — hair and nails? Does he not eat, — bleed, — laugh, — cry? His dissent from me is the veriest affectation. This conclusion is at once the logic of persecution and of love. And the ground of our indignation is our conviction that his dissent is some wilfulness he practises on himself. He checks the flow of his opinion, as the cross cow holds up her milk. Yes, and we look into his eye, and see that he knows it and hides his eye from ours.

But to come a little nearer to my mark, I am to say that there may easily be obstacles in the way of finding the pure article we are in search of, but when we find it it is worth the pursuit, for beside its comfort as medicine and cordial, once in the right company, new and vast values do not fail to appear. All that man can do for man is to be found in that market. There are great prizes in this game. Our fortunes in the world are as our mental equipment for this competition is. Yonder is a man who can answer the questions which I cannot. Is it so? Hence comes to me boundless curiosity to know his experiences and his wit. Hence competition for the stakes dearest to man. What is a match at whist, or draughts, or billiards, or chess, to a match of mother-wit, of knowledge, and of resources? However courteously we conceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that are compared; whether in the parlor, the courts, the caucus, the senate, or the chamber of science, — which are only less or larger theatres for this competition.

He that can define, he that can answer a question so as to admit of no further answer, is the best man. This was the meaning of the story of the Sphinx. In the old time conundrums were sent from king to king by ambassadors. The seven wise masters at Periander’s banquet spent their time in answering them. The life of Socrates is a propounding and a solution of these. So, in the hagiology of each nation, the lawgiver was in each case some man of eloquent tongue, whose sympathy brought him face to face with the extremes of society. Jesus, Menu, the first Buddhist, Mahomet, Zertusht, Pythagoras, are examples.

Jesus spent his life in discoursing with humble people on life and duty, in giving wise answers, showing that he saw at a larger angle of vision, and at least silencing those who were not generous enough to accept his thoughts. Luther spent his life so; and it is not his theologic works, — his “Commentary on the Galatians,” and the rest, but his “Table-Talk,” which is still read by men. Dr. Johnson was a man of no profound mind, — full of English limitations, English politics, English Church, Oxford philosophy; yet, having a large heart, mother-wit, and good sense which impatiently overleaped his customary bounds, his conversation as reported by Boswell has a lasting charm. Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought; and Dr. Johnson impresses his company, not only by the point of the remark, but also, when the point fails, because he makes it. His obvious religion or superstition, his deep wish that they should think so or so, weighs with them, — so rare is depth of feeling, or a constitutional value for a thought or opinion, among the light-minded men and women who make up society; and though they know that there is in the speaker a degree of shortcoming, of insincerity, and of talking for victory, yet the existence of character, and habitual reverence for principles over talent or learning, is felt by the frivolous.

One of the best records of the great German master who towered over all his contemporaries in the first thirty years of this century, is his conversations as recorded by Eckermann; and the “Table-Talk” of Coleridge is one of the best remains of his genius.

In the Norse legends, the gods of Valhalla, when they meet the Jotuns, converse on the perilous terms that he who cannot answer the other’s questions forfeits his own life. Odin comes to the threshold of the Jotun Waftrhudnir in disguise, calling himself Gangrader; is invited into the hall, and told that he cannot go out thence unless he can answer every question Wafthrudnir shall put. Wafthrudnir asks him the name of the god of the sun, and of the god who brings the night; what river separates the dwellings of the sons of the giants from those of the gods; what plain lies between the gods and Surtur, their adversary, etc.; all which the disguised Odin answers satisfactorily. Then it is his turn to interrogate, and he is answered well for a time by the Jotun. At last he puts a question which none but himself could answer: “What did Odin whisper in the ear of his son Balder, when Balder mounted the funeral pile?” The startled giant replies: “None of the gods knows what in the old time THOU saidst in the ear of thy son: with death on my mouth have I spoken the fate-words of the generation of the Æsir; with Odin contended I in wise words. Thou must ever the wisest be.”

And still the gods and giants are so known, and still they play the same game in all the million mansions of heaven and of earth; at all tables, clubs, and tête-à-têtes, the lawyers in the court-house, the senators in the capitol, the doctors in the academy, the wits in the hotel. Best is he who gives an answer that cannot be answered again. Omnis definitio periculosa est, and only wit has the secret. The same thing took place when Leibnitz came to visit Newton; when Schiller came to Goethe; when France, in the person of Madame de Staël visited Goethe and Schiller; when Hegel was the guest of Victor Cousin in Paris; when Linnæus was the guest of Jussieu. It happened many years ago that an American chemist carried a letter of introduction to Dr. Dalton of Manchester, England, the author of the theory of atomic proportions, and was coolly enough received by the Doctor in the laboratory where he was engaged. Only Dr. Dalton scratched a formula on a scrap of paper and pushed it towards the guest,— “Had he seen that?” The visitor scratched on another paper a formula describing some results of his own with sulphuric acid, and pushed it across the table,— “Had he seen that?” The attention of the English chemist was instantly arrested, and they became rapidly acquainted.

To answer a question so as to admit of no reply, is the test of a man, — to touch bottom every time. Hyde, Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper Guilford, “Do you not think I could understand any business in England in a month?” “Yes, my lord,” replied the other, “but I think you would understand it better in two months.” When Edward I. claimed to be acknowledged by the Scotch (1292) as lord paramount, the nobles of Scotland replied, “No answer can be made while the throne is vacant.” When Henry III. (1217) plead duress against his people demanding confirmation and execution of the Charter, the reply was: “If this were admitted, civil wars could never close but by the extirpation of one of the contending parties.”

What can you do with one of these sharp respondents? What can you do with an eloquent man? No rules of debate, no contempt of court, no exclusions, no gag-laws can be contrived that his first syllable will not set aside or overstep and annul. You can shut out the light, it may be, but can you shut out gravitation? You may condemn his book, but can you fight against his thought? That is always too nimble for you, anticipates you, and breaks out victorious in some other quarter. Can you stop the motions of good sense? What can you do with Beaumarchais, who converts the censor whom the court has appointed to stifle his play into an ardent advocate? The court appoints another censor, who shall crush it this time. Beaumarchais persuades him to defend it. The court successively appoints three more severe inquisitors; Bcaumarchais converts them all into triumphant vindicators of the play which is to bring in the Revolution. Who can stop the mouth of Luther, — of Newton? — of Franklin, — of Mirabeau, — of Talleyrand?

These masters can make good their own place, and need no patron. Every variety of gift — science, religion, politics, letters, art, prudence, war, or love — has its vent and exchange in conversation. Conversation is the Olympic games whither every superior gift resorts to assert and approve itself, — and, of course, the inspirations of powerful and public men, with the rest. But it is not this class, whom the splendor of their accomplishment almost inevitably guides into the vortex of ambition, makes them chancellors and commanders of council and of action, and makes them at last fatalists, — not these whom we now consider. We consider those who are interested in thoughts, their own and other men’s, and who delight in comparing them; who think it the highest compliment they can pay a man to deal with him as an intellect, to expose to him the grand and cheerful secrets perhaps never opened to their daily companions, to share with him the sphere of freedom and the simplicity of truth.

But the best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

It is possible that the best conversation is between two persons who can talk only to each other. Even Montesquieu confessed that in conversation, if he perceived he was listened to by a third person, it seemed to him from that moment the whole question vanished from his mind. I have known persons of rare ability who were heavy company to good social men who knew well enough how to draw out others of retiring habit; and, moreover, were heavy to intellectual men who ought to have known them. And does it never occur that we perhaps live with people too superior to be seen, — as there are musical notes too high for the scale of most ears?There are men who are great only to one or two companions of more opportunity, or more adapted.

It was to meet these wants that in all civil nations attempts have been made to organize conversation by bringing together cultivated people under the most favorable conditions. ’Tis certain there was liberal and refined conversation in the Greek, in the Roman, and in the Middle Age. There was a time when in France a revolution occurred in domestic architecture; when the houses of the nobility, which, up to that time, had been constructed on feudal necessities, in a hollow square, — the ground-floor being resigned to offices and stables, and the floors above to rooms of state and to lodging-rooms, — were rebuilt with new purpose. It was the Marchioness of Rambouillet who first got the horses out of and the scholars into the palaces, having constructed her hôtel with a view to society, with superb suites of drawing-rooms on the same floor, and broke through the morgue of etiquette by inviting to her house men of wit and learning as well as men of rank, and piqued the emulation of Cardinal Richelieu to rival assemblies, and so to the founding of the French Academy. The history of the Hôtel Rambouillet and its brilliant circles makes an important date in French civilization. And a history of clubs from early antiquity, tracing the efforts to secure liberal and refined conversation, through the Greek and Roman to the Middle Age, and thence down through French, English, and German memoirs, tracing the clubs and coteries in each country, would be an important chapter in history. We know well the Mermaid Club, in London, of Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Chapman, Herrick, Selden, Beaumont and Fletcher; its “Rules” are preserved, and many allusions to their suppers are found in Jonson, Herrick, and in Aubrey. Anthony Wood has many details of Harrington’s Club. Dr. Bentley’s Club held Newton, Wren, Evelyn, and Locke; and we owe to Boswell our knowledge of the club of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, Garrick, Beauclerk and Percy. And we have records of the brilliant society that Edinburgh boasted in the first decade of this century. Such societies are possible only in great cities, and are the compensation which these can make to their dwellers for depriving them of the free intercourse with Nature. Every scholar is surrounded by wiser men than he — if they cannot write as well. Cannot they meet and exchange results to their mutual benefit and delight? It was a pathetic experience when a genial and accomplished person said to me, looking from his country home to the capital of New England, “There is a town of two hundred thousand people, and not a chair in it for me.” If he were sure to find at No. 2000 Tremont Street what scholars were abroad after the morning studies were ended, Boston would shine as the New Jerusalem to his eyes.

Now this want of adapted society is mutual. The man of thought, the man of letters, the man of science, the administrator skilful in affairs, the man of manners and culture, whom you so much wish to find, — each of these is wishing to be found. Each wishes to open his thought, his knowledge, his social skill to the daylight in your company and affection, and to exchange his gifts for yours; and the first hint of a select and intelligent company is welcome.

But the club must be self-protecting, and obstacles arise at the outset. There are people who cannot well be cultivated; whom you must keep down and quiet if you can. There are those who have the instinct of a bat to fly against any lighted candle and put it out, — marplots and contradictors. There are those who go only to talk, and those who go only to hear: both are bad. A right rule for a club would be, — Admit no man whose presence excludes any one topic. It requires people who are not surprised and shocked, who do and let do and let be, who sink trifles and know solid values, and who take a great deal for granted.

It is always a practical difficulty with clubs to regulate the laws of election so as to exclude peremptorily every social nuisance. Nobody wishes bad manners. We must have loyalty and character. The poet Marvell was wont to say that he “would not drink wine with any one with whom he could not trust his life.” But neither can we afford to be superfine. A man of irreproachable behavior and excellent sense preferred on his travels taking his chance at a hotel for company, to the charging himself with too many select letters of introduction. He confessed he liked low company. He said the fact was incontestable that the society of gypsies was more attractive than that of bishops. The girl deserts the parlor for the kitchen; the boy, for the wharf. Tutors and parents cannot interest him like the uproarious conversation he finds in the market or the dock. I knew a scholar, of some experience in camps, who said that he liked, in a bar-room, to tell a few coon stories and put himself on a good footing with the company; then he could be as silent as he chose. A scholar does not wish to be always pumping his brains; he wants gossips. The black-coats are good company only for black-coats; but when the manufacturers, merchants, and shipmasters meet, see how much they have to say, and how long the conversation lasts! They have come from many zones; they have traversed wide countries; they know each his own arts, and the cunning artisans of his craft; they have seen the best and the worst of men. Their knowledge contradicts the popular opinion and your own on many points. Things which you fancy wrong they know to be right and profitable; things which you reckon superstitious they know to be true. They have found virtue in the strangest homes; and in the rich store of their adventures are instances and examples which you have been seeking in vain for years, and which they suddenly and unwittingly offer you.

I remember a social experiment in this direction, wherein it appeared that each of the members fancied he was in need of society, but himself unpresentable. On trial they all found that they could be tolerated by, and could tolerate, each other. Nay, the tendency to extreme self-respect which hesitated to join in a club was running rapidly down to abject admiration of each other, when the club was broken up by new combinations.

The use of the hospitality of the club hardly needs explanation. Men are unbent and social at table; and I remember it was explained to me, in a Southern city, that it was impossible to set any public charity on foot unless through a tavern dinner. I do not think our metropolitan charities would plead the same necessity; but to a club met for conversation a supper is a good basis, as it disarms all parties and puts pedantry and business to the door. All are in good humor and at leisure, which are the first conditions of discourse; the ordinary reserves are thrown off, experienced men meet with the freedom of boys, and, sooner or later, impart all that is singular in their experience.

The hospitalities of clubs are easily exaggerated. No doubt the suppers of wits and philosophers acquire much lustre by time and renown. Plutarch, Xenophon, and Plato, who have celebrated each a banquet of their set, have given us next to no data of the viands; and it is to be believed that an indifferent tavern dinner in such society was more relished by the convives than a much better one in worse company. Herrick’s verses to Ben Jonson no doubt paint the fact: —

“When we such clusters had

As made us nobly wild, not mad;

And yet, each verse of thine

Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”

Such friends make the feast satisfying; and I notice that it was when things went prosperously, and the company was full of honor, at the banquet of the Cid, that “the guests all were joyful, and agreed in one thing, — that they had not eaten better for three years.”

I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public questions of education and politics. It is agreed that in the sections of the British Association more information is mutually and effectually communicated, in a few hours, than in many months of ordinary correspondence and the printing and transmission of ponderous reports. We know that l’homme de lettres is a little wary, and not fond of giving away his seed-corn; but there is an infallible way to draw him out, namely, by having as good as he. If you have Tuscaroora and he Canada, he may exchange kernel for kernel. If his discretion is incurable, and he dare not speak of fairy gold, he will yet tell what new books he has found, what old ones recovered, what men write and read abroad. A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage.

Every man brings into society some partial thought and local culture. We need range and alternation of topics and variety of minds. One likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a triumph to disturb, and, not less, to make in an old acquaintance unexpected discoveries of scope and power through the advantage of an inspiring subject. Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while. But while we look complacently at these obvious pleasures and values of good companions, I do not forget that Nature is always very much in earnest, and that her great gifts have something serious and stern. When we look for the highest benefits of conversation, the Spartan rule of one to one is usually enforced. Discourse, when it rises highest and searches deepest, when it lifts us into that mood out of which thoughts come that remain as stars in our firmament, is between two.

COURAGE.

I observe that there are three qualities which conspicuously attract the wonder and reverence of mankind: —

1. Disinterestedness, as shown in indifference to the ordinary bribes and influences of conduct, — a purpose so sincere and generous that it cannot be tempted aside by any prospects of wealth or other private advantage. Self-love is, in almost all men, such an over-weight, that they are incredulous of a man’s habitual preference of the general good to his own; but when they see it proved by sacrifices of ease, wealth, rank, and of life itself, there is no limit to their admiration. This has made the power of the saints of the East and West, who have led the religion of great nations. Self-sacrifice is the real miracle out of which all the reported miracles grew. This makes the renown of the heroes of Greece and Rome, — of Socrates, Aristides, and Phocion; of Quintus Curtius, Cato, and Regulus; of Hatem Tai’s hospitality; of Chatham, whose scornful magnanimity gave him immense popularity; of Washington, giving his service to the public without salary or reward.

2. Practical power. Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass, — the man who can build the boat, who has the impiety to make the rivers run the way he wants them; who can lead his telegraph through the ocean from shore to shore; who, sitting in his closet, can lay out the plans of a campaign, sea-war and land-war, such that the best generals and admirals, when all is done, see that they must thank him for success; the power of better combination and foresight, however exhibited, whether it only plays a game of chess, or whether, more loftily, a cunning mathematician, penetrating the cubic weights of stars, predicts the planet which eyes had never seen; or whether, exploring the chemical elements whereof we and the world are made, and seeing their secret, Franklin draws off the lightning in his hand; suggesting that one day a wiser geology shall make the earthquake harmless and the volcano an agricultural resource. Or here is one who, seeing the wishes of men, knows how to come at their end; whispers to this friend, argues down that adversary, moulds society to his purpose, and looks at all men as wax for his hands; takes command of them as the wind does of clouds, as the mother does of the child, or the man that knows more does of the man that knows less, and leads them in glad surprise to the very point where they would be: this man is followed with acclamation.

3. The third excellence is courage, the perfect will, which no terrors can shake, which is attracted by frowns or threats or hostile armies, nay, needs these to awake and fan its reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never quite itself until the hazard is extreme; then it is serene and fertile, and all its powers play well. There is a Hercules, an Achilles, a Rustem, an Arthur or a Cid in the mythology of every nation; and in authentic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio, a Cæsar, a Richard Cœur de Lion, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Great Condé, a Bertrand du Guesclin, a Doge Dandolo, a Napoleon, a Massena, and Ney. ’Tis said courage is common, but the immense esteem in which it is held proves it to be rare. Animal resistance, the instinct of the male animal when cornered, is no doubt common; but the pure article, courage with eyes, courage with conduct, self-possession at the cannon’s mouth, cheerfulness in lonely adherence to the right, is the endowment of elevated characters. I need not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. What an ado we make through two thousand years about Thermopylæ and Salamis! What a memory of Poitiers and Crecy, and Bunker Hill, and Washington’s endurance! And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men. The very nursery-books, the ballads which delight boys, the romances which delight men, the favorite topics of eloquence, the thunderous emphasis which orators give to every martial defiance and passage of arms, and which the people greet, may testify. How short a time since this whole nation rose every morning to read or to hear the traits of courage of its sons and brothers in the field, and was never weary of the theme! We have had examples of men who, for showing effective courage on a single occasion, have become a favorite spectacle to nations, and must be brought in chariots to every mass meeting.

Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles, and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations. But the animals have great advantage of us in precocity. Touch the snapping-turtle with a stick, and he seizes it with his teeth. Cut off his head, and the teeth will not let go the stick. Break the egg of the young, and the little embryo, before yet the eyes are open, bites fiercely; these vivacious creatures contriving, — shall we say? — not only to bite after they are dead, but also to bite before they are born.

But man begins life helpless. The babe is in paroxysms of fear the moment its nurse leaves it alone, and it comes so slowly to any power of self-protection that mothers say the salvation of the life and health of a young child is a perpetual miracle. The terrors of the child are quite reasonable, and add to his loveliness; for his utter ignorance and weakness, and his enchanting indignation on such a small basis of capital compel every by-stander to take his part. Every moment as long as he is awake he studies the use of his eyes, ears, hands, and feet, learning how to meet and avoid his dangers, and thus every hour loses one terror more. But this education stops too soon. A large majority of men being bred in families and beginning early to be occupied day by day with some routine of safe industry, never come to the rough experiences that make the Indian, the soldier, or the frontiersman self-subsistent and fearless. Hence the high price of courage indicates the general timidity. “Mankind,” said Franklin, “are dastardly when they meet with opposition.” In war even generals are seldom found eager to give battle. Lord Wellington said, “Uniforms were often masks;” and again, “When my journal appears, many statues must come down.” The Norse Sagas relate that when Bishop Magne reproved King Sigurd for his wicked divorce, the priest who attended the bishop, expecting every moment when the savage king would burst with rage and slay his superior, said that he “saw the sky no bigger than a calf-skin.” And I remember when a pair of Irish girls who had been run away with in a wagon by a skittish horse, said that when he began to rear, they were so frightened that they could not see the horse.

Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin; shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart. Fear is cruel and mean. The political reigns of terror have been reigns of madness and malignity, — a total perversion of opinion; society is upside down, and its best men are thought too bad to live. Then the protection which a house, a family, neighborhood and property, even the first accumulation of savings gives, go in all times to generate this taint of the respectable classes. Those political parties which gather-in the well-disposed portion of the community, — how infirm and ignoble! what white lips they have! always on the defensive, as if the lead were intrusted to the journals, often written in great part by women and boys, who, without strength, wish to keep up the appearance of strength. They can do the hurras, the placarding, the flags, — and the voting, if it is a fair day; but the aggressive attitude of men who will have right done, will no longer be bothered with burglars and ruffians in the streets, counterfeiters in public offices, and thieves on the bench; that part, the part of the leader and soul of the vigilance committee, must be taken by stout and sincere men who are really angry and determined. In ordinary, we have a snappish criticism which watches and contradicts the opposite party. We want the will which advances and dictates. When we get an advantage, as in Congress the other day, it is because our adversary has committed a fault, not that we have taken the initiative and given the law. Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended. Complaining never so loud and with never so much reason is of no use. One heard much cant of peace-parties long ago in Kansas and elsewhere, that their strength lay in the greatness of their wrongs, and dissuading all resistance, as if to make this strength greater. But were their wrongs greater than the negro’s? And what kind of strength did they ever give him? It was always invitation to the tyrant, and bred disgust in those who would protect the victim. What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No; ’tis no use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will stay so.” Nature has charged every one with his own defence as with his own support, and the only title I can have to your help is when I have manfully put forth all the means I possess to keep me, and being overborne by odds, the by-standers have a natural wish to interfere and see fair play.

But with this pacific education we have no readiness for bad times. I am much mistaken if every man who went to the army in the late war had not a lively curiosity to know how he should behave in action. Tender, amiable boys, who had never encountered any rougher play than a base-ball match or a fishing excursion, were suddenly drawn up to face a bayonet charge or capture a battery. Of course they must each go into that action with a certain despair. Each whispers to himself: “My exertions must be of small account to the result; only will the benignant Heaven save me from disgracing myself and my friends and my State. Die! O yes, I can well die; but I cannot afford to misbehave; and I do not know how I shall feel.” So great a soldier as the old French Marshal Montlue acknowledges that he has often trembled with fear, and recovered courage when he had said a prayer for the occasion. I knew a young soldier who died in the early campaign, who confided to his sister that he had made up his mind to volunteer for the war. “I have not,” he said, “any proper courage, but I shall never let any one find it out.” And he had accustomed himself always to go into whatever place of danger, and do whatever he was afraid to do, setting a dogged resolution to resist this natural infirmity. Coleridge has preserved an anecdote of an officer in the British Navy who told him that when he, in his first boat expedition, a midshipman in his fourteenth year, accompanied Sir Alexander Ball, “as we were rowing up to the vessel we were to attack, amid a discharge of musketry, I was overpowered with fear, my knees shook and I was ready to faint away. Lieutenant Ball seeing me, placed himself close beside me, took hold of my hand and whispered, ‘Courage, my dear boy! you will recover in a minute or so; I was just the same when I first went out in this way.’ It was as if an angel spoke to me. From that moment I was as fearless and as forward as the oldest of the boat’s crew. But I dare not think what would have become of me, if, at that moment, he had scoffed and exposed me.”

Knowledge is the antidote to fear, — Knowledge, Use, and Reason, with its higher aids. The child is as much in danger from a staircase, or the firegrate, or a bath-tub, or a cat, as the soldier from a cannon or an ambush. Each surmounts the fear as fast as he precisely understands the peril and learns the means of resistance. Each is liable to panic, which is, exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting it again. It is the groom who knows the jumping horse well who can safely ride him. It is the veteran soldier, who, seeing the flash of the cannon, can step aside from the path of the ball. Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty, — familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe’s rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

The sailor loses fear as fast as he acquires command of sails and spars and steam; the frontiersman, when he has a perfect rifle and has acquired a sure aim. To the sailor’s experience every new circumstance suggests what he must do. The terrific chances which make the hours and the minutes long to the passenger, he whiles away by incessant application of expedients and repairs. To him a leak, a hurricane, or a water-spout is so much work, — no more. The hunter is not alarmed by bears, catamounts, or wolves, nor the grazier by his bull, nor the dog-breeder by his bloodhound, nor an Arab by the simoon, nor a farmer by a fire in the woods. The forest on fire looks discouraging enough to a citizen: the farmer is skilful to fight it. The neighbors run together; with pine boughs they can mop out the flame, and by raking with the hoe a long but little trench, confine to a patch the fire which would easily spread over a hundred acres.

In short, courage consists in equality to the problem before us. The school-boy is daunted before his tutor by a question of arithmetic, because he does not yet command the simple steps of the solution which the boy beside him has mastered. These once seen, he is as cool as Archimedes, and cheerily proceeds a step farther. Courage is equality to the problem, in affairs, in science, in trade, in council, or in action; consists in the conviction that the agents with whom you contend are not superior in strength of resources or spirit to you. The general must stimulate the mind of his soldiers to the perception that they are men, and the enemy is no more. Knowledge, yes; for the danger of dangers is illusion. The eye is easily daunted; and the drums, flags, shining helmets, beard, and moustache of the soldier have conquered you long before his sword or bayonet reaches you.

But we do not exhaust the subject in the slight analysis; we must not forget the variety of temperaments, each of which qualifies this power of resistance. It is observed that men with little imagination are less fearful; they wait till they feel pain, whilst others of more sensibility anticipate it, and suffer in the fear of the pang more acutely than in the pang. ’Tis certain that the threat is sometimes more formidable than the stroke, and ‘t is possible that the beholders suffer more keenly than the victims. Bodily pain is superficial, seated usually in the skin and the extremities, for the sake of giving us warning to put us on our guard; not in the vitals, where the rupture that produces death is perhaps not felt, and the victim never knew what hurt him. Pain is superficial, and therefore fear is. The torments of martyrdoms are probably most keenly felt by the by-standers. The torments are illusory. The first suffering is the last suffering the later hurts being lost on insensibility. Our affections and wishes for the external welfare of the hero tumultuously rush to expression in tears and outcries; but we, like him, subside into indifferency and defiance when we perceive how short is the longest arm of malice, how serene is the sufferer.

It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do. It is directness, — the instant performing of that which he ought. The thoughtful man says, You differ from me in opinion and methods, but do you not see that I cannot think or act otherwise than I do? that my way of living is organic? And to be really strong we must adhere to our own means. On organic action all strength depends. Hear what women say of doing a task by sheer force of will : it costs them a fit of sickness. Plutarch relates that the Pythoness who tried to prophesy without command in the Temple at Delphi, though she performed the usual rites, and inhaled the air of the cavern standing on the tripod, fell into convulsions and died. Undoubtedly there is a temperamental courage, a warlike blood, which loves a fight, does not feel itself except in a quarrel, as one sees in wasps, or ants, or cocks, or cats. The like vein appears in certain races of men and in individuals of every race. In every school there are certain fighting boys; in every society, the contradicting men; in every town, bravoes and bullies, better or worse dressed, fancy-men, patrons of the cock-pit and the ring. Courage is temperamental, scientific, ideal. Swedenborg has left this record of his king: “Charles XII. of Sweden did not know what that was which others called fear, nor what that spurious valor and daring that is excited by inebriating draughts, for he never tasted any liquid but pure water. Of him we may say that he led a life more remote from death, and in fact lived more, than any other man.” It was told of the Prince of Condé that “there not being a more furious man in the world, danger in fight never disturbs him more than just to make him civil, and to command in words of great obligation to his officers and men, and without any the least disturbance to his judgment or spirit.” Each has his own courage, as his own talent; but the courage of the tiger is one, and of the horse another. The dog that scorns to fight, will fight for his master: The llama that will carry a load if you caress him, will refuse food and die if he is scourged. The fury of onset is one, and of calm endurance another. There is a courage of the cabinet as well as a courage of the field; a courage of manners in private assemblies, and another in public assemblies; a courage which enables one man to speak masterly to a hostile company, whilst another man who can easily face a cannon’s mouth dares not open his own.

There is a courage of a merchant in dealing with his trade, by which dangerous turns of affairs are met and prevailed over. Merchants recognize as much gallantry, well judged too, in the conduct of a wise and upright man of business in difficult times, as soldiers in a soldier.

There is a courage in the treatment of every art by a master in architecture, in sculpture, in painting, or in poetry, each cheering the mind of the spectator or receiver as by true strokes of genius, which yet nowise implies the presence of physical valor in the artist. This is the courage of genius, in every kind. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. The beautiful voice at church goes sounding on, and covers up in its volume, as in a cloak, all the defects of the choir. The singers, I observe, all yield to it, and so the fair singer indulges her instinct, and dares, and dares, because she knows she can.

It gives the cutting edge to every profession. The judge puts his mind to the tangle of contradictions in the case, squarely accosts the question, and by not being afraid of it, by dealing with it as business which must be disposed of, he sees presently that common arithmetic and common methods apply to this affair. Perseverance strips it of all peculiarity, and ranges it on the same ground as other business. Morphy played a daring game in chess: the daring was only an illusion of the spectator, for the player sees his move to be well fortified and safe. You may see the same dealing in criticism; a new book astonishes for a few days, takes itself out of common jurisdiction, and nobody knows what to say of it: but the scholar is not deceived. The old principles which books exist to express are more beautiful than any book; and out of love of the reality he is an expert judge how far the book has approached it and where it has come short. In all applications it is the same power, — the habit of reference to one’s own mind, as the home of all truth and counsel, and which can easily dispose of any book because it can very well do without all books. When a confident man comes into a company magnifying this or that author he has freshly read, the company grow silent and ashamed of their ignorance. But I remember the old professor, whose searching mind engraved every word he spoke on the memory of the class, when we asked if he had read this or that shining novelty, “No, I have never read that book;” instantly the book lost credit, and was not to be heard of again.

Every creature has a courage of his constitution fit for his duties: — Archimedes, the courage of a geometer to stick to his diagram, heedless of the siege and sack of the city; and the Roman soldier his faculty to strike at Archimedes. Each is strong, relying on his own, and each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.

Captain John Brown, the hero of Kansas, said to me in conversation, that “for a settler in a new country, one good, believing, strong-minded man is worth a hundred, nay, a thousand men without character; and that the right men will give a permanent direction to the fortunes of a state. As for the bullying drunkards of which armies are usually made up, he thought cholera, small-pox, and consumption as valuable recruits.” He held the belief that courage and chastity are silent concerning themselves. He said, “As soon as I hear one of my men say, ‘ Ah, let me only get my eye on such a man, I ‘ll bring him down,’ I don’t expect much aid in the fight from that talker. ’Tis the quiet, peaceable men, the men of principle, that make the best soldiers.”

“’Tis still observed those men most valiant are

Who are most modest ere they came to war.”

True courage is not ostentatious; men who wish to inspire terror seem thereby to confess themselves cowards. Why do they rely on it, but because they know how potent it is with themselves?

The true temper has genial influences. It makes a bond of union between enemies. Governor Wise of Virginia, in the record of his first interviews with his prisoner, appeared to great advantage. If Governor Wise is a superior man, or inasmuch as he is a superior man, he distinguishes John Brown. As they confer, they understand each other swiftly; each respects the other. If opportunity allowed, they would prefer each other’s society and desert their former companions. Enemies would become affectionate. Hector and Achilles, Richard and Saladin, Wellington and Soult, General Daumas and Abdel Kader, become aware that they are nearer and more alike than any other two, and, if their nation and circumstance did not keep them apart, would run into each other’s arms.

See too what good contagion belongs to it. Everywhere it finds its own with magnetic affinity. Courage of the soldier awakes the courage of woman. Florence Nightingale brings lint and the blessing of her shadow. Heroic women offer themselves as nurses of the brave veteran. The troop of Virginian infantry that had marched to guard the prison of John Brown ask leave to pay their respects to the prisoner. Poetry and eloquence catch the hint, and soar to a pitch unknown before. Everything feels the new breath except the old doting nigh-dead politicians, whose heart the trumpet of resurrection could not wake.

The charm of the best courages is that they are inventions, inspirations, flashes of genius. The hero could not have done the feat at another hour, in a lower mood. The best act of the marvellous genius of Greece was its first act; not in the statue or the Parthenon, but in the instinct which, at Thermopylæ, held Asia at bay, kept Asia out of Europe, — Asia with its antiquities and organic slavery, — from corrupting the hope and new morning of the West. The statue, the architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain prophetic instinct, better than wisdom. Napoleon said well, “My hand is immediately connected with my head;” hut the sacred courage is connected with the heart. The head is a half, a fraction, until it is enlarged and inspired by the moral sentiment. For it is not the means on which we draw, as health or wealth, practical skill or dexterous talent, or multitudes of followers, that count, but the aims only. The aim reacts back on the means. A great aim aggrandizes the means. The meal and water that are the commissariat of the forlorn hope that stake their lives to defend the pass are sacred as the Holy Grail, or as if one had eyes to see in chemistry the fuel that is rushing to feed the sun.

There is a persuasion in the soul of man that he is here for cause, that he was put down in this place by the Creator to do the work for which he inspires him, that thus he is an overmatch for all antagonists that could combine against him. The pious Mrs. Hutchinson says of some passages in the defence of Nottingham against the Cavaliers, “It was a great instruction that the best and highest courages are beams of the Almighty.” And whenever the religious sentiment is adequately affirmed, it must be with dazzling courage. As long as it is cowardly insinuated, as with the wish to succor some partial and temporary interest, or to make it affirm some pragmatical tenet which our parish church receives to-day, it is not imparted, and cannot inspire or create. For it is always new, leads and surprises, and practice never comes up with it. There are ever appearing in the world men who, almost as soon as they are born, take a bee-line to the rack of the inquisitor, the axe of the tyrant, like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Huss, Paul, Jesus, and Socrates. Look at Fox’s Lives of the Martyrs, Sewel’s History of the Quakers, Southey’s Book of the Church, at the folios of the Brothers Bollandi, who collected the lives of twenty-five thousand martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and self-tormentors. There is much of fable, but a broad basis of fact. The tender skin does not shrink from bayonets, the timid woman is not scared by fagots; the rack is not frightful, nor the rope ignominious. The poor Puritan, Antony Parsons, at the stake, tied straw on his head when the fire approached him, and said, “This is God’s hat.” Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world; that he is aiming neither at pelf or comfort, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought in his mind. He is everywhere a liberator, but of a freedom that is ideal; not seeking to have land or money or conveniences, but to have no other limitation than that which his own constitution imposes. He is free to speak truth; he is not free to lie. He wishes to break every yoke all over the world which hinders his brother from acting after his thought.

There are degrees of courage, and each step upward makes us acquainted with a higher virtue. Let us say then frankly that the education of the will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the rack, the fire, the hatred and execrations of our fellow-men, appear trials beyond the endurance of common humanity; but to the hero whose intellect is aggrandized by the soul, and so measures these penalties against the good which his thought surveys, these terrors vanish as darkness at sunrise.

We have little right in piping times of peace to pronounce on these rare heights of character; but there is no assurance of security. In the most private life, difficult duty is never far off. Therefore we must think with courage. Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history, — persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Cæsar Borgia, Marat, Lopez; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, parricides, matricides, and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes. Wolf, snake, and crocodile are not inharmonious in nature, but are made useful as checks, scavengers, and pioneers; and we must have a scope as large as Nature’s to deal with beast-like men, detect what scullion function is assigned them, and foresee in the secular melioration of the planet how these will become unnecessary and will die out.

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear. I do not wish to put myself or any man into a theatrical position, or urge him to ape the courage of his comrade. Have the courage not to adopt another’s courage. There is scope and cause and resistance enough for us in our proper work and circumstance. And there is no creed of an honest man, be he Christian, Turk, or Gentoo, which does not equally preach it. If you have no faith in beneficent power above you, but see only an adamantine fate coiling its folds about nature and man, then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us courage, if only because baseness cannot change the appointed event. If you accept your thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe difficult duties, because they come only so long as they are used; or, if your skepticism reaches to the last verge, and you have no confidence in any foreign mind, then be brave, because there is one good opinion which must always be of consequence to you, namely, your own.

I am permitted to enrich my chapter by adding an anecdote of pure courage from real life, as narrated in a ballad by a lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known.

GEORGE NIDIVER.

Men have done brave deeds, And bards have sung them well: I of good George Nidiver Now the tale will tell.

In Californian mountains A hunter bold was he : Keen his eye and sure his aim As any you should see.

A little Indian boy Followed him everywhere, Eager to share the hunter’s joy, The hunter’s meal to share.

And when the bird or deer Fell by the hunter’s skill, The boy was always near To help with right good-will.

One day as through the cleft Between two mountains steep, Shut in both right and left, Their questing way they keep,

They see two grizzly bears With hunger fierce and fell Rush at them unawares Right down the narrow dell.

The boy turned round with screams, And ran with terror wild; One of the pair of savage beasts Pursued the shrieking child.

The hunter raised his gun, — He knew one charge was all, — And through the boy’s pursuing foe He sent his only ball.

The other on George Nidiver Came on with dreadful pace: The hunter stood unarmed, And met him face to face.

I say unarmed he stood. Against those frightful paws The rifle butt, or club of wood, Could stand no more than Straws.

George Nidiver stood still And looked him in the face; The wild beast stopped amazed, Then came with slackening pace.

Still firm the hunter stood, Although his heart beat high; Again the creature stopped, And gazed with wondering eye.

The hunter met his gaze, Nor yet an inch gave way; The bear turned slowly round, And slowly moved away.

What thoughts were in his mind It would be hard to spell: What thoughts were in George Nidiver I rather guess than tell.

But sure that rifle’s aim, Swift choice of generous part, Showed in its passing gleam The depths of a brave heart.

SUCCESS.

Our American people cannot be taxed with slowness in performance or in praising their performance. The earth is shaken by our engineries. We are feeling our youth and nerve and bone. We have the power of territory and of sea-coast, and know the use of these. We count our census, we read our growing valuations, we survey our map, which becomes old in a year or two. Our eyes run approvingly along the lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph. We have gone nearest to the Pole. We have discovered the Antarctic continent. We interfere in Central and South America, at Canton, and in Japan; we are adding to an already enormous territory. Our political constitution is the hope of the world, and we value ourselves on all these feats.

’Tis the way of the world; ’tis the law of youth, and of unfolding strength. Men are made each with some triumphant superiority, which, through some adaptation of fingers or ear or eye or ciphering or pugilistic or musical or literary craft, enriches the community with a new art; and not only we, but all men of European stock, value these certificates. Giotto could draw a perfect circle: Erwin of Steinbach could build a minster; Olaf, king of Norway, could run round his galley on the blades of the oars of the rowers when the ship was in motion; Ojeda could run out swiftly on a plank projected from the top of a tower, turn round swiftly and come back; Evelyn writes from Rome: “Bernini, the Florentine sculptor, architect, painter and poet, a little before my coming to Rome, gave a public opera, wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy and built the theatre.”

“There is nothing in war,” said Napoleon, “which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. The gun-carriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you know.”

It is recorded of Linnæus, among many proofs of his beneficent skill, that when the timber in the ship-yards of Sweden was ruined by rot, Linnæus was desired by the government to find a remedy. He studied the insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs in the logs within certain days in April, and he directed that during ten days at that season the logs should be immersed under water in the docks; which being done, the timber was found to be uninjured.

Columbus at Veragua found plenty of gold; but leaving the coast, the ship full of one hundred and fifty skilful seamen, — some of them old pilots, and with too much experience of their craft and treachery to him, — the wise admiral kept his private record of his homeward path. And when he reached Spain he told the King and Queen that “they may ask all the pilots who came with him where is Veragua. Let them answer and say if they know where Veragua lies. I assert that they can give no other account than that they went to lands where there was abundance of gold, but they do not know the way to return thither, but would be obliged to go on a voyage of discovery as much as if they had never been there before. There is a mode of reckoning,” he proudly adds, “derived from astronomy, which is sure and safe to any one who understands it.”

Hippocrates in Greece knew how to stay the devouring plague which ravaged Athens in his time, and his skill died with him. Dr. Benjamin Rush, in Philadelphia, carried that city heroically through the yellow fever of the year 1793. Leverrier carried the Copernican system in his head, and knew where to look for the new planet. We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold, in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house. We have seen women who could institute hospitals and schools in armies. We have seen a woman who by pure song could melt the souls of whole populations. And there is no limit to these varieties of talent.

These are arts to be thankful for, — each one as it is a new direction of human power. We cannot choose but respect them. Our civilization is made up of a million contributions of this kind. For success, to be sure we esteem it a test in other people, since we do first in ourselves. We respect ourselves more if we have succeeded. Neither do we grudge to each of these benefactors the praise or the profit which accrues from his industry.

Here are already quite different degrees of moral merit in these examples. I don’t know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value on wealth, victory, and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other men, — have less tranquillity of mind, are less easily contented. The Saxon is taught from his infancy to wish to be first. The Norseman was a restless rider, fighter, freebooter. The ancient Norse ballads describe him as afflicted with this inextinguishable thirst of victory. The mother says to her son: —

“Success shall be in thy courser tall,

Success in thyself, which is best of all,

Success in thy hand, success in thy foot,

In struggle with man, in battle with brute: —

The holy God and Saint Drothin dear

Shall never shut eyes on thy career;

Look out, look out, Svend Vonved!”

These feats that we extol do not signify so much as we say. These boasted arts are of very recent origin. They are local conveniences, but do not really add to our stature. The greatest men of the world have managed not to want them. Newton was a great man, without telegraph, or gas, or steam-coach, or rubber shoes, or lucifer-matches, or ether for his pain; so was Shakspeare, and Alfred, and Scipio, and Socrates. These are local conveniences, but how easy to go now to parts of the world where not only all these arts are wanting, but where they are despised. The Arabian sheiks, the most dignified people in the planet, do not want them; yet have as much self-respect as the English, and are easily able to impress the Frenchman or the American who visits them with the respect due to a brave and sufficient man.

These feats have to be sure great difference of merit, and some of them involve power of a high kind. But the public values the invention more than the inventor does. The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from. The public sees in it a lucrative secret. Men see the reward which the inventor enjoys, and they think, ‘How shall we win that?’ Cause and effect are a little tedious; how to leap to the result by short or by false means? We are not scrupulous. What we ask is victory, without regard to the cause; after the Rob Roy rule, after the Napoleon rule, to be the strongest to-day, — the way of the Talleyrands, prudent people, whose watches go faster than their neighbors’, and who detect the first moment of decline and throw themselves on the instant on the winning side. I have heard that Nelson used to say, “Never mind the justice or the impudence, only let me succeed.” Lord Brougham’s single duty of counsel is, “to get the prisoner clear.” Fuller says ’tis a maxim of lawyers that “a crown once worn cleareth all defects of the wearer thereof.” Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès. And we Americans are tainted with this insanity, as our bankruptcies and our reckless politics may show. We are great by exclusion, grasping, and egotism. Our success takes from all what it gives to one. ’Tis a haggard, malignant, careworn running for luck.

Egotism is a kind of buckram that gives momentary strength and concentration to men, and seems to be much used in nature for fabrics in which local and spasmodic energy is required. I could point to men in this country, of indispensable importance to the carrying on of American life, of this humor, whom we could ill spare; any one of them would be a national loss. But it spoils conversation. They will not try conclusions with you. They are ever thrusting this pampered self between you and them. It is plain they have a long education to undergo to reach simplicity and plain-dealing, which are what a wise man mainly cares for in his companion. Nature knows how to convert evil to good; Nature utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to accomplish her ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that. The passion for sudden success is rude and puerile, just as war, cannons, and executions are used to clear the ground of bad, lumpish, irreclaimable savages, but always to the damage of the conquerors.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery, without apprenticeship, or the sale of goods through pretending that they sell, or power through making believe you are powerful, or through a packed jury or caucus, bribery and “repeating” votes, or wealth by fraud. They think they have got it, but they have got something else, — a crime which calls for another crime, and another devil behind that; these are steps to suicide, infamy, and the harming of mankind. We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing, advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.

There was a wise man, an Italian artist, Michel Angelo, who writes thus of himself: “Meanwhile the Cardinal Ippolito, in whom all my best hopes were placed, being dead, I began to understand that the promises of this world are for the most part vain phantoms, and that to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value, is the best and safest course.” Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for success, — that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement, and take Michel Angelo’s course, “to confide in one’s self, and be something of worth and value.”

Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work. I have to say this often, but nature says it oftener. ’Tis clownish to insist on doing all with one’s own hands, as if every man should build his own clumsy house, forge his hammer, and bake his dough; but he is to dare to do what he can do best; not help others as they would direct him, but as he knows his helpful power to be. To do otherwise is to neutralize all those extraordinary special talents distributed among men. Yet whilst this self-truth is essential to the exhibition of the world and to the growth and glory of each mind, it is rare to find a man who believes his own thought or who speaks that which he was created to say. As nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing, so nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own. Any work looks wonderful to him, except that which he can do. We do not believe our own thought; we must serve somebody; we must quote somebody; we dote on the old and the distant; we are tickled by great names; we import the religion of other nations; we quote their opinions; we cite their laws. The gravest and learnedest courts in this country shudder to face a new question, and will wait months and years for a case to occur that can be tortured into a precedent, and thus throw on a bolder party the onus of an initiative. Thus we do not carry a counsel in our breasts, or do not know it; and because we cannot shake off from our shoes this dust of Europe and Asia, the world seems to be born old, society is under a spell, every man is a borrower and a mimic, life is theatrical and literature a quotation; and hence that depression of spirits, that furrow of care, said to mark every American brow.

Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful. It by no means consists in rushing prematurely to a showy feat that shall catch the eye and satisfy spectators. It is enough if you work in the right direction. So far from the performance being the real success, it is clear that the success was much earlier than that, namely, when all the feats that make our civility were the thoughts of good heads. The fame of each discovery rightly attaches to the mind that made the formula which contains all the details, and not to the manufacturers who now make their gain by it; although the mob uniformly cheers the publisher, and not the inventor. It is the dulness of the multitude that they cannot see the house in the ground-plan; the working, in the model of the projector. Whilst it is a thought, though it were a new fuel, or a new food, or the creation of agriculture, it is cried down, it is a chimera; but when it is a fact, and comes in the shape of eight per cent, ten per cent, a hundred per cent, they cry, ‘ It is the voice of God.’ Horatio Greenough the sculptor said to me of Robert Fulton’s visit to Paris: “Fulton knocked at the door of Napoleon with steam, and was rejected; and Napoleon lived long enough to know that he had excluded a greater power than his own.”

Is there no loving of knowledge, and of art, and of our design, for itself alone? Cannot we please ourselves with performing our work, or gaining truth and power, without being praised for it? I gain my point, I gain all points, if I can reach my companion with any statement which teaches him his own worth. The sum of wisdom is, that the time is never lost that is devoted to work. The good workman never says, ‘ There, that will do;’ but, ‘There, that is it: try it, and come again, it will last always.’ If the artist, in whatever art, is well at work on his own design, it signifies little that he does not yet find orders or customers. I pronounce that young man happy who is content with having acquired the skill which he had aimed at, and waits willingly when the occasion of making it appreciated shall arrive, knowing well that it will not loiter. The time your rival spends in dressing up his work for effect, hastily, and for the market, you spend in study and experiments towards real knowledge and efficiency. He has thereby sold his picture or machine, or won the prize, or got the appointment; but you have raised yourself into a higher school of art, and a few years will show the advantage of the real master over the short popularity of the showman. I know it is a nice point to discriminate this self-trust, which is the pledge of all mental vigor and performance, from the disease to which it is allied, — the exaggeration of the part which we can play; — yet they are two things. But it is sanity to know that, over my talent or knack, and a million times better than any talent, is the central intelligence which subordinates and uses all talents; and it is only as a door into this, that any talent or the knowledge it gives is of value. He only who comes into this central intelligence, in which no egotism or exaggeration can be, comes into self-possession.

My next point is that in the scale of powers it is not talent but sensibility which is best: talent confines, but the central life puts us in relation to all. How often it seems the chief good to be born with a cheerful temper and well adjusted to the tone of the human race. Such a man feels himself in harmony, and conscious by his receptivity of an infinite strength. Like Alfred, “good fortune accompanies him like a gift of God.” Feel yourself, and be not daunted by things. ’Tis the fulness of man that runs over into objects, and makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great. The joyful reader borrows of his own ideas to fill their faulty outline, and knows not that he borrows and gives.

There is something of poverty in our criticism. We assume that there are few great men, all the rest are little; that there is but one Homer, but one Shakspeare, one Newton, one Socrates. But the soul in her beaming hour does not acknowledge these usurpations. We should know how to praise Socrates, or Plato, or Saint John, without impoverishing us. In good hours we do not find Shakspeare or Homer over-great, only to have been translators of the happy present, and every man and woman divine possibilities. ’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss, in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.

The light by which we see in this world comes out from the soul of the observer. Wherever any noble sentiment dwelt, it made the faces and houses around to shine. Nay, the powers of this busy brain are miraculous and illimitable. Therein are the rules and formulas by which the whole empire of matter is worked. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Is all life a surface affair? ’Tis curious, but our difference of wit appears to be only a difference of impressionability, or power to appreciate faint, fainter, and infinitely faintest voices and visions. When the scholar or the writer has pumped his brain for thoughts and verses, and then comes abroad into Nature, has he never found that there is a better poetry hinted in a boy’s whistle of a tune, or in the piping of a sparrow, than in all his literary results? We call it health. What is so admirable as the health of youth? — with his long days because his eyes are good, and brisk circulations keep him warm in cold rooms, and he loves books that speak to the imagination; and he can read Plato, covered to his chin with a cloak in a cold upper chamber, though he should associate the Dialogues ever after with a woollen smell. ’Tis the bane of life that natural effects are continually crowded out, and artificial arrangements substituted. We remember when in early youth the earth spoke and the heavens glowed; when an evening, any evening, grim and wintry, sleet and snow, was enough for us; the houses were in the air. Now it costs a rare combination of clouds and lights to overcome the common and mean. What is it we look for in the landscape, in sunsets and sunrises, in the sea and the firmament? what but a compensation for the cramp and pettiness of human performances? We bask in the day, and the mind finds somewhat as great as itself. In Nature all is large massive repose. Remember what befalls a city boy who goes for the first time into the October woods. He is suddenly initiated into a pomp and glory that brings to pass for him the dreams of romance. He is the king he dreamed he was; he walks through tents of gold, through bowers of crimson, porphyry and topaz, pavilion on pavilion, garlanded with vines, flowers and sunbeams, with incense and music, with so many hints to his astonished senses; the leaves twinkle and pique and flatter him, and his eye and step are tempted on by what hazy distances to happier solitudes. All this happiness he owes only to his finer perception. The owner of the wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says, ‘ They ought to come down; they are n’t growing any better; they should be cut and corded before spring.’

Wordsworth writes of the delights of the boy in Nature: —

“For never will come back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

But I have just seen a man, well knowing what he spoke of, who told me that the verse was not true for him; that his eyes opened as he grew older, and that every spring was more beautiful to him than the last.

We live among gods of our own creation. Does that deep-toned bell, which has shortened many a night of ill nerves, render to you nothing but acoustic vibrations? Is the old church which gave you the first lessons of religious life, or the village school, or the college where you first knew the dreams of fancy and joys of thought, only boards or brick and mortar? Is the house in which you were born, or the house in which your dearest friend lived, only a piece of real estate whose value is covered by the Hartford insurance? You walk on the beach and enjoy the animation of the picture. Scoop up a little water in the hollow of your palm, take up a handful of shore sand; well, these are the elements. What is the beach but acres of sand? what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing. No, it is that this brute matter is part of somewhat not brute. It is that the sand floor is held by spheral gravity, and bent to be a part of the round globe, under the optical sky, — part of the astonishing astronomy, and existing at last to moral ends and from moral causes.

The world is not made up to the eye of figures, that is, only half; it is also made of color. How that element washes the universe with its enchanting waves! The sculptor had ended his work, and behold a new world of dream-like glory. ‘T is the last stroke of Nature; beyond color she cannot go. In like manner, life is made up, not of knowledge only, but of love also. If thought is form, sentiment is color. It clothes the skeleton world with space, variety, and glow. The hues of sunset make life great; so the affections make some little web of cottage and fireside populous, important, and filling the main space in our history.

The fundamental fact in our metaphysic constitution is the correspondence of man to the world, so that every change in that writes a record in the mind. The mind yields sympathetically to the tendencies or law which stream through things and make the order of nature; and in the perfection of this correspondence or expressiveness, the health and force of man consist. If we follow this hint into our intellectual education, we shall find that it is not propositions, not new dogmas and a logical exposition of the world that are our first need; bat to watch and tenderly cherish the intellectual and moral sensibilities, those fountains of right thought, and woo them to stay and make their home with us. Whilst they abide with us we shall not think amiss. Our perception far outruns our talent. We bring a welcome to the highest lessons of religion and of poetry out of all proportion beyond our skill to teach. And, further, the great hearing and sympathy of men is more true and wise than their speaking is wont to be. A deep sympathy is what we require for any student of the mind; for the difference between man and man is a difference of impressionability. Aristotle or Bacon or Kant propound some maxim which is the key-note of philosophy thenceforward. But I am more interested to know that when at last they have hurled out their grand word, it is only some familiar experience of every man in the street. If it be not, it will never be heard of again.

Ah! if one could keep this sensibility, and live in the happy sufficing present, and find the day and its cheap means contenting, which only ask receptivity in you, and no strained exertion and cankering ambition, overstimulating to be at the head of your class and the head of society, and to have distinction and laurels and consumption! We are not strong by our power to penetrate, but by our relatedness. The world is enlarged for us, not by new objects, but by finding more affinities and potencies in those we have.

This sensibility appears in the homage to beauty which exalts the faculties of youth; in the power which form and color exert upon the soul; when we see eyes that are a compliment to the human race, features that explain the Phidian sculpture. Fontenelle said: “There are three things about which I have curiosity, though I know nothing of them, — music, poetry, and love.” The great doctors of this science are the greatest men, — Dante, Petrarch, Michel Angelo and Shakspeare. The wise Socrates treats this matter with a certain archness, yet with very marked expressions. “I am always,” he says, “asserting that I happen to know, I may say, nothing but a mere trifle relating to matters of love; yet in that kind of learning I lay claim to being more skilled than any one man of the past or present time.” They may well speak in this uncertain manner of their knowledge, and in this confident manner of their will, for the secret of it is hard to detect, so deep it is; and yet genius is measured by its skill in this science.

Who is he in youth or in maturity or even in old age, who does not like to hear of those sensibilities which turn curled heads round at church, and send wonderful eye-beams across assemblies, from one to one, never missing in the thickest crowd? The keen statist reckons by tens and hundreds; the genial man is interested in every slipper that comes into the assembly. The passion, alike everywhere, creeps under the snows of Scandinavia, under the fires of the equator, and swims in the seas of Polynesia. Lofn is as puissant a divinity in the Norse Edda as Camadeva in the red vault of India, Eros in the Greek, or Cupid in the Latin heaven. And what is specially true of love is that it is a state of extreme impressionability; the lover has more senses and finer senses than others; his eye and ear are telegraphs; he reads omens on the flower, and cloud, and face, and form, and gesture, and reads them aright. In his surprise at the sudden and entire understanding that is between him and the beloved person, it occurs to him that they might somehow meet independently of time and place. How delicious the belief that he could elude all guards, precautions, ceremonies, means, and delays, and hold instant and sempiternal communication! In solitude, in banishment, the hope returned, and the experiment was eagerly tried. The supernal powers seem to take his part. What was on his lips to say is uttered by his friend. When he went abroad, he met, by wonderful casualties, the one person he sought. If in his walk he chanced to look back, his friend was walking behind him. And it has happened that the artist has often drawn in his pictures the face of the future wife whom he had not yet seen.

But also in complacencies nowise so strict as this of the passion, the man of sensibility counts it a delight only to hear a child’s voice fully addressed to him, or to see the beautiful manners of the youth of either sex. When the event is past and remote, how insignificant the greatest compared with the piquancy of the present! To-day at the school examination the professor interrogates Sylvina in the history class about Odoacer and Alaric. Sylvina can’t remember, but suggests that Odoacer was defeated; and the professor tartly replies, “No, he defeated the Romans.” But ‘t is plain to the visitor that ’tis of no importance at all about Odoacer and ’tis a great deal of importance about Sylvina, and if she says he was defeated, why he had better a great deal have been defeated than give her a moment’s annoy. Odoacer, if there was a particle of the gentleman in him, would have said, Let me be defeated a thousand times.

And as our tenderness for youth and beauty gives a new and just importance to their fresh and manifold claims, so the like sensibility gives welcome to all excellence, has eyes and hospitality for merit in corners. An Englishman of marked character and talent, who had brought with him hither one or two friends and a library of mystics, assured me that nobody and nothing of possible interest was left in England, — he had brought all that was alive away. I was forced to reply: “No, next door to you probably, on the other side of the partition in the same house, was a greater man than any you had seen.” Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him. Character and wit have their own magnetism. Send a deep man into any town, and he will find another deep man there, unknown hitherto to his neighbors. That is the great happiness of life, — to add to our high acquaintances. The very law of averages might have assured you that there will be in every hundred heads, say ten or five good heads. Morals are generated as the atmosphere is. ’Tis a secret, the genesis of either; but the springs of justice and courage do not fail any more than salt or sulphur springs.

The world is always opulent, the oracles are never silent; but the receiver must by a happy temperance be brought to that top of condition, that frolic health, that he can easily take and give these fine communications. Health is the condition of wisdom, and the sign is cheerfulness, — an open and noble temper. There was never poet who had not the heart in the right place. The old trouveur, Pons Capdueil, wrote, —

“Oft have I heard, and deem the witness true,

Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”

All beauty warms the heart, is a sign of health, prosperity, and the favor of God. Everything lasting and fit for men the Divine Power has marked with this stamp. What delights, what emancipates, not what scares and pains us is wise and good in speech and in the arts. For, truly, the heart at the centre of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein, and veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. The plenty of the poorest place is too great: the harvest cannot be gathered. Every sound ends in music. The edge of every surface is tinged with prismatic rays.

One more trait of true success. The good mind chooses what is positive, what is advancing, — embraces the affirmative. Our system is one of poverty. ’Tis presumed, as I said, there is but one Shakspeare, one Homer, one Jesus, — not that all are or shall be inspired. But we must begin by affirming. Truth and goodness subsist forevermore. It is true there is evil and good, night and day: but these are not equal. The day is great and final. The night is for the day, but the day is not for the night. What is this immortal demand for more, which belongs to our constitution? this enormous ideal? There is no such critic and beggar as this terrible Soul. No historical person begins to content us. We know the satisfactoriness of justice, the sufficiency of truth. We know the answer that leaves nothing to ask. We know the Spirit by its victorious tone. The searching tests to apply to every new pretender are amount and quality, — what does he add? and what is the state of mind he leaves me in? Your theory is unimportant; but what new stock you can add to humanity, or how high you can carry life? A man is a man only as he makes life and nature happier to us.

I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind.

We may apply this affirmative law to letters, to manners, to art, to the decorations of our houses, etc. I do not find executions or tortures or lazar-houses, or grisly photographs of the field on the day after the battle, fit subjects for cabinet pictures. I think that some so-called “sacred subjects” must be treated with more genius than I have seen in the masters of Italian or Spanish art to be right pictures for houses and churches. Nature does not invite such exhibition. Nature lays the ground-plan of each creature accurately, sternly fit for all his functions; then veils it scrupulously. See how carefully she covers up the skeleton. The eye shall not see it; the sun shall not shine on it. She weaves her tissues and integuments of flesh and skin and hair and beautiful colors of the day over it, and forces death down underground, and makes haste to cover it up with leaves and vines, and wipes carefully out every trace by new creation. Who and what are you that would lay the ghastly anatomy bare?

Don’t hang a dismal picture on the wall, and do not daub with sables and glooms in your conversation. Don’t be a cynic and disconsolate preacher. Don’t bewail and bemoan. Omit the negative propositions. Nerve us with incessant affirmatives. Don’t waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. When that is spoken which has a right to be spoken, the chatter and the criticism will stop. Set down nothing that will not help somebody; —

“For every gift of noble origin

Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath.”

The affirmative of affirmatives is love. As much love, so much perception. As caloric to matter, so is love to mind; so it enlarges, and so it empowers it. Good-will makes insight, as one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river. I have seen scores of people who can silence me, but I seek one who shall make me forget or overcome the frigidities and imbecilities into which I fall. The painter Giotto, Vasari tells us, renewed art because he put more goodness into his heads. To awake in man and to raise the sense of worth, to educate his feeling and judgment so that he shall scorn himself for a bad action, that is the only aim.

’Tis cheap and easy to destroy. There is not a joyful boy or an innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine. The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation, and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where they most wished it? or blundered where they were most ambitious of success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study, thought, or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes their little hope less with satire and skepticism, and slackens the springs of endeavor. Yes, this is easy; but to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the work of divine men.

We live on different planes or platforms. There is an external life, which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade; taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward, to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer and possess.

But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of it as now; is just the same now in maturity and hereafter in age, it was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers, connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun and broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”

OLD AGE.

On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge in 1861, the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with peculair demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and, aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary on Cicero’s chapter “De Senectute.” The character of the speaker, the transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the naïveté of his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity, honoring him who spoke and those who heard.

The speech led me to look over at home — an easy task — Cicero’s famous easy, charming by its, uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical precepts, with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest perhaps in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject; rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our broader modern life.

Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of military men, said, “What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!” I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded pelisse, wig, spectacles and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young and our mates are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such imposters. Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.

For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the eyes of the youngest person we sometimes discover that here is one who knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him; there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, “He that can discriminate is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Bound Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.

Time is indeed the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century and dwarfs an age to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of a hundred and fifty years, who was dying, and was saying to himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘ I will enjoy myself for a few moments.’ Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘ Enough! ‘“ That which does not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his father and not his brother whom they knew!

But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature, which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under an aspect more conformed to the common-sense, if the question be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets, and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain decay in his faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to him that it was time to retire; but he now replied that he thought his judgment as robust and all his faculties as good as ever they were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state and ceremony, in council-chambers, in courts of justice and historical societies. Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway, if you look into the faces of the passengers there is dejection or indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury, and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.

This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative; and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves to he heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men should be held eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments, the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or patres, senate or senes, seigneurs or seniors, gerousia, the senate of Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply old men.

The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature and justified by all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander, in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power. Béranger said, “Almost all the good workmen live long.” And if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old, — namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at “My Cid, with the fleecy beard,” in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men;” of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose blindness Castelli said, “The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever made, — an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him;” of Newton, who made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years; of Bacon, who “took all knowledge to be his province;” of Fontenelle, “that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years;” of Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopædia of science.

Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were strange if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the old wife says, ‘Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it is cancerous,’ — he replies, ‘I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’ The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia of the cows raged, the butchers said that though the acute degree was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent, and we die without developing them; such is the affirmative force of the constitution; but if you are enfeebled by any cause, some of these sleeping seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage we lose a foe. At fifty years, ’tis said, afflicted citizens lose their sick-headaches. I hope this hegira is not as movable a feast as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me that the rose-bugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July; they stay a fortnight later in mine. But be it as it may with the sick-headache,— ’tis certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are lulled once for all as we come up with certain goals of time. The passions have answered their purpose: that slight but dread overweight with which in each instance Nature secures the execution of her aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror of death. To perfect the commissariat, she implants in each a certain rapacity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of his wants. To insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct, at the risk of disorder, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office, and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions, quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal compensations that wait on every act. Then, one after another, this riotous time-destroying crew disappear.

I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing. Little by little it has amassed such a fund of merit that it can very well afford to go on its credit when it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three years old, he told me that “he had just had a fall and lost a tooth, and when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had replied that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.” Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from one or a dozen new performances. If he should on a new occasion rise quite beyond his mark and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary, that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark with impunity, and people will say, ‘ O, he had headache,’ or ‘He lost his sleep for two nights.’ What a lust of appearance, what a load of anxieties that once degraded him he is thus rid of! Every one is sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps.

A third felicity of age is that it has found expression. The youth suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and from a picture in his mind of a career which has as yet no outward reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things and thoughts. Michel Angelo’s head is full of masculine and gigantic figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born. Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into doleful deserts until it finds proper vent. All the functions of human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power, house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one, day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his calling, homestead, social connection and personal power, and thus, at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose condition, In particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and behavior.

The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors with complacency, but as one who having long ago known these games, has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, “But the sixties have all the twenties and forties in them.”

For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts. We leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for it, — not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes. His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with delight the little white Trientalis, the only plant with seven petals and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in conformity with his system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for species: all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all clew to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties, omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs; and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios, possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly stroking his leg and assuring himself “he should retire from the University and read the authors.” In Goethe’s Romance, Makaria, the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence. Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point. Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore, — long enough to read everything that was worth reading,— “Et tunc magna mei sub terris ibit imago.” Much wider is spread the pleasure which old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his inventions, the agrliculturist his experiments, and all old men in finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles, reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his life: there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.

America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old note-book a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect and worthy of his fame.

 — , Feb., 1825. To-day at Quincy, with my brother, by invitation of Mr. Adams’s family. The old President sat in a large stuffed arm-chair, dressed in a blue coat, black small-clothes, white stockings; a cotton cap covered his bald head. We made our compliment, told him he must let us join our congratulations to those of the nation on the happiness of his house. He thanked us, and said: “I am rejoiced, because the nation is happy. The time of gratulation and congratulations is nearly over with me; I am astonished that I have lived to see and know of this event. I have lived now nearly a century; [he was ninety in the following October;] a long, harassed, and distracted life.” I said, “The world thinks a good deal of joy has been mixed with it.”— “The world does not know,” he replied, “how much toil, anxiety, and sorrow I have suffered.” — I asked if Mr. Adams’s letter of acceptance had been read to him.— “Yes,” he said, and added, “My son has more political prudence than any man that I know who has existed in my time; he never was put off his guard; and I hope he will continue such: but what effect age may work in diminishing the power of his mind, I do not know; it has been very much on the stretch, ever since he was born. He has always been laborious, child and man, from infancy.” — When Mr. J. Q. Adams’s age was mentioned, he said, “He is now fifty-eight, or will be in July;” and remarked that “all the Presidents were of the same age: General Washington was about fifty-eight, and I was about fifty-eight, and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Madison, and Mr. Monroe.” — We inquired when he expected to see Mr. Adams — He said: “Never: Mr. Adams will not come to Quincy but to my funeral. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see him, but I don’t wish him to come on my account.” He spoke of Mr. Lechmere, whom he “well remembered to have seen come down daily, at a great age, to walk in the old town-house,” adding, “And I wish I could walk as well as he did. He was Collector of the Customs for many years under the Royal Government.” — E. said: “I suppose, sir, you would not have taken his place, even to walk as well as he.”— “No,” he replied, “that was not what I wanted.” — He talked of Whitefield, and remembered when he was a Freshman in College to have come into town to the Old South church, [I think,] to hear him, but could not get into the house;— “I however, saw him,” he said, “through a window, and distinctly heard all. He had a voice such as I never heard before or since. He cast it out so that you might hear it at the meeting-house,” [pointing towards the Quincy meeting-house,] “and he had the grace of a dancing-master, of an actor of plays. His voice and manner helped him more than his sermons. I went with Jonathan Sewall.”— “And you were pleased with him, sir?”— “Pleased! I was delighted beyond measure.” — We asked if at whitefield’s return the same popularity continued.— “Not the same fury,” he said, “not the same wild enthusiasm as before, but a greater esteem, as he became more known. He did not terrify, but was admired.”

We spent about an hour in his room. He speaks very distinctly for so old a man, enters bravely into long sentences, which are interrupted by want of breath, but carries them invariably to a conclusion, without correcting a word.

He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and “Peep at the Pilgrims,” and “Saratoga,” with praise, and named with accuracy the characters in them. He likes to have a person always reading to him, or company talking in his room, and is better the next day after having visitors in his chamber from morning to night.

He received a premature report of his son’s election, on Sunday afternoon, without any excitement, and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was not yet time for any news to arrive. The informer, something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing to the meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the congregation, who were so overjoyed that they rose in their seats and cheered thrice. The Reverend Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.

When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare, — muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill — at the end of life just ready to be born, affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.

LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS

CONTENTS

POETRY AND IMAGINATION.

SOCIAL AIMS.

ELOQUENCE.

RESOURCES.

THE COMIC.

QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.

PROGRESS OF CULTURE.

PERSIAN POETRY

INSPIRATION.

GREATNESS.

IMMORTALITY.

Emerson, 1868

POETRY AND IMAGINATION.

The perception of matter is made the common sense, and for cause. This was the cradle, this the go-cart, of the human child. We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common-sense. The intellect, yielded up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity. The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark of all the valid minds, — of Æsop, Aristotle, Alfred, Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, Napoleon. The common-sense which does not meddle with the absolute, but takes things at their word, — things as they appear, — believes in the existence of matter, not because we can touch it or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest, is the house of health and life. In spite of all the joys of poets and the joys of saints, the most imaginative and abstracted person never makes with impunity the least mistake in this particular, — never tries to kindle his oven with water, nor carries a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes his wild charger by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in another, nor endure it in ourselves.

But whilst we deal with this as finality, early hints are given that we are not to stay here; that we must be making ready to go; — a warning that this magnificent hotel and conveniency we call Nature is not final. First innuendoes, then broad hints, then smart taps are given, suggesting that nothing stands still in nature but death; that the creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into something else, streaming into something higher; that matter is not what it appears; — that chemistry can blow it all into gas. Faraday, the most exact of natural philosophers, taught that when we should arrive at the monads, or primordial elements (the supposed little cubes or prisms of which all matter was built up), we should not find cubes, or prisms, or atoms, at all, but spherules of force. It was whispered that the globes of the universe were precipitates of something more subtle; nay, somewhat was murmured in our ear that dwindled astronomy into a toy; — that too was no finality; only provisional, a makeshift; that under chemistry was power and purpose: power and purpose ride on matter to the last atom. It was steeped in thought, did everywhere express thought; that, as great conquerors have burned their ships when once they were landed on the wished-for shore, so the noble house of Nature we inhabit has temporary uses, and we can afford to leave it one day. The ends of all are moral, and therefore the beginnings are such. Thin or solid, everything is in flight. I believe this conviction makes the charm of chemistry, — that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation not less, as in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man; everything undressing and stealing away from its old into new form, and nothing fast but those invisible cords which we call laws, on which all is strung. Then we see that things wear different names and faces, but belong to one family; that the secret cords or laws show their well-known virtue through every variety, be it animal, or plant, or planet, and the interest is gradually transferred from the forms to the lurking method.

This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, trade, customs, marriages, nay, the common-sense side of religion and literature, which are all founded on low nature, — on the clearest and most economical mode of administering the material world, considered as final. The admission, never so covertly, that this is a makeshift, sets the dullest brain in ferment: our little sir, from his first tottering steps, as soon as he can crow, does not like to be practised upon, suspects that some one is “doing” him, and at this alarm everything is compromised; gunpowder is laid under every man’s breakfast-table.

But whilst the man is startled by this closer inspection of the laws of matter, his attention is called to the independent action of the mind; its strange suggestions and laws; a certain tyranny which springs up in his own thoughts, which have an order, method, and beliefs of their own, very different from the order which this common-sense uses.

Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong currents which drove a ship, caught in them, with a force that no skill of sailing with the best wind, and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could make any head against, any more than against the current of Niagara. Such currents, so tyrannical, exist in thoughts, those finest and subtilest of all waters, that as soon as once thought begins, it refuses to remember whose brain it belongs to; what country, tradition, or religion; and goes whirling off — swim we merrily — in a direction self-chosen, by law of thought and not by law of kitchen clock or county committee. It has its own polarity. One of these vortices or self-directions of thought is the impulse to search resemblance, affinity, identity, in all its objects, and hence our science, from its rudest to its most refined theories.

The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a hundred years ago, arrested and progressive development , indicating the way upward from the invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms, gave the poetic key to Natural Science, of which the theories of Geoffroy St. Hilaire, of Oken, of Goethe, of Agassiz and Owen and Darwin in zoölogy and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and perfect order in physics.

The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scornful of all but dryest fact, is forced to keep the poetic curve of nature, and his result is like a myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit arrested or progressive ascent in each kind; the lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from radiate, mollusk, articulate, vertebrate, up to man; as if the whole animal world were only a Hun-terian museum to exhibit the genesis of mankind.

Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of thought exist. In botany we have the like, the poetic perception of metamorphosis, — that the same vegetable point or eye which is the unit of the plant can be transformed at pleasure into every part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or seed.

In geology, what a useful hint was given to the early inquirers on seeing in the possession of Professor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree which was perfect wood at one end and perfect mineral coal at the other. Natural objects, if individually described and out of connection, are not yet known, since they are really parts of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a Bible. Each animal or vegetable form remembers the next inferior and predicts the next higher.

There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one force. The laws of light and of heat translate each other; — so do the laws of sound and of color; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism are varied forms of the selfsame energy. While the student ponders this immense unity, he observes that all things in Nature, the animals, the mountain, the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his life; their growths, decays, quality and use so curiously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, that he is compelled to speak by means of them. His words and his thoughts are framed by their help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him, sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in caricature, a copy of every humor and shade in his character and mind. The world is an immense picture-book of every passage in human life. Every object he beholds is the mask of a man.

“The privates of man’s heart

They speken and sound in his ear

As tho’ they loud winds were;”

for the universe is full of their echoes.

Every correspondence we observe in mind and matter suggests a substance older and deeper than either of these old nobilities. We see the law gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated ode of Hafiz. The poet who plays with it with most boldness best justifies himself; is most profound and most devout. Passion adds eyes; is a magnifying-glass. Sonnets of lovers are mad enough, but are valuable to the philosopher, as are prayers of saints, for their potent symbolism.

Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or mollusk, and isolated it, — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, the boy with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of these than the savant. We use semblances of logic until experience puts us in possession of real logic. The poet knows the missing link by the joy it gives. The poet gives us the eminent experiences only, — a god stepping from peak to peak, nor planting his foot but on a mountain.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From this vision he gave brave hints to the zoölogist, the botanist, and the optician.

Poetry. — The primary use of a fact is low; the secondary use, as it is a figure or illustration of my thought, is the real worth. First the fact; second its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature was called “a kind of adulterated reason.” Seas, forests, metals, diamonds and fossils interest the eye, but ‘t is only with some preparatory or predicting charm. Their value to the intellect appears only when I hear their meaning made plain in the spiritual truth they cover. The mind, penetrated with its sentiment or its thought, projects it outward on whatever it beholds. The lover sees re-minders of his mistress in every beautiful object; the saint, an argument for devotion in every natural process; and the facility with which Nature lends itself to the thoughts of man, the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day or night, can express his fortunes, is as if the world were only a disguised man, and, with a change of form, rendered to him all his experience. We cannot utter a sentence in sprightly conversation without a similitude. Note our incessant use of the word like , — like fire, like a rock, like thunder, like a bee, “like a year without a spring.” Conversation is not permitted without tropes; nothing but great weight in things can afford a quite literal speech. It is ever enlivened by inversion and trope. God himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark resemblances in objects lying all around us.

Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expressions. A figurative statement arrests attention, and is remembered and repeated. How often has a phrase of this kind made a reputation. Pythago-ras’s Golden Sayings were such, and Socrates’s, and Mirabeau’s, and Burke’s, and Bonaparte’s. Genius thus makes the transfer from one part of Nature to a remote part, and betrays the rhymes and echoes that pole makes with pole. Imaginative minds cling to their images, and do not wish them rashly rendered into prose reality, as children resent your showing them that their doll Cinderella is nothing but pine wood and rags; and my young scholar does not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia, signify in Dante’s Inferno, but prefers to keep their veils on. Mark the deligh of an audience in an image. When some familiar truth or fact appears in a new dress, mounted as on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of ballooning wings, we cannot enough testify our surprise and pleasure. It is like the new virtue shown in some unprized old property, as when a boy finds that his pocket-knife will attract steel filings and take up a needle; or when the old horse-block in the yard is found to be a Torso Hercules of the Phidian age. Vivacity of expression may indicate this high gift, even when the thought is of no great scope, as when Michel Angelo, praising the terra cottas , said, “If this earth were to become marble, woe to the antiques!”. A happy symbol is a sort of evidence that your thought is just. I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. If you agree with me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm-tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal, if crystals, if alkalies, in their several fashions say what I say, it must be true. Thus a good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the Koran, are each remembered by their happiest figure. There is no more welcome gift to men than a new symbol. That satiates, transports, converts them. They assimilate themselves to it, deal with it in all ways, and it will last a hundred years. Then comes a new genius, and brings another. Thus the Greek mythology called the sea “the tear of Saturn.” The return of the soul to God was described as “a flask of water broken in the sea.” Saint John gave us the Christian figure of “souls washed in the blood of Christ.” The aged Michel Angelo indicates his perpetual study as in boyhood,— “I carry my satchel still.” Machiavel described the papacy as “a stone inserted in the body of Italy to keep the wound open.” To the Parliament debating how to tax America, Burke exclaimed, “Shear the wolf.” Our Kentuckian orator said of his dissent from his companion, “I showed him the back of my hand.” And our proverb of the courteous soldier reads: “An iron hand in a velvet glove.”

This belief that the higher use of the material world is to furnish us types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind, is carried to its logical extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, have made it the central doctrine of their religion that what we call Nature, the external world, has no real existence, — is only phenomenal. Youth, age, property, condition, events, persons, — self, even, — are successive maias (deceptions) through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul. I think Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind, as showing treatment. All European libraries might almost be read without the swing of this gigantic arm being suspected. But these Orientals deal with worlds and pebbles freely.

For the value of a trope is that the hearer is one: and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all particular natures are tropes. As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form. All thinking is analogizing, and it is the use of life to learn metonymy. The endless passing of one element into new forms, the incessant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental powers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them representatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great days of life: the book, the landscape, or the personality which did not stay on the surface of the eye or ear but penetrated to the inward sense, agitates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, or talking, the sole question is how many strokes vibrate on this mystic string, — how many diameters are drawn quite through from matter to spirit; for whenever you enunciate a natural law you discover that you have enunciated a law of the mind. Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are secondary science. The atomic theory is only an interior process produced , as geometers say, or the effect of a foregone metaphysical theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the irresistible attractions of affection and faith. Mountains and oceans we think we understand; — yes, so long as they are contented to be such, and are safe with the geologist, — but when they are melted in Promethean alembics and come out men, and then, melted again, come out words, without any abatement, but with an exaltation of power!

In poetry we say we require the miracle. The bee flies among the flowers, and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product, which is not mint and marjoram, but honey; the chemist mixes hydrogen and oxygen to yield a new product, which is not these, but water; and the poet listens to conversation and beholds all objects in nature, to give back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole.

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist; — to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image, in preternatural quickness or perception of relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him.

The term “genius,” when used with emphasis, implies imagination; use of symbols, figurative speech. A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a principle and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, waters, skies, offer to clothe his thoughts in images. Then all men understand him; Parthian, Mede, Chinese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. For he can now find symbols of universal significance, which are readily rendered into any dialect; as a painter, a sculptor, a musician, can in their several ways express the same sentiment of anger, or love, or religion.

The thoughts are few, the forms many; the large vocabulary or many-colored coat of the indigent unity. The savans are chatty and vain, but hold them hard to principle and definition, and they become mute and near-sighted. What is motion? what is beauty? what is matter? what is life? what is force? Push them hard and they will not be loquacious. They will come to Plato, Proclus, and Swedenborg. The invisible and imponderable is the sole fact. “Why changes not the violet earth into musk?” What is the term of the everflowing metamorphosis? I do not know what are the stoppages, but I see that a devouring unity changes all into that which changes not.

The act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight. It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication into all nature. It has a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeterminate size is a delicious secret which it reveals to us. The mountains begin to dislimn, and float in the air. In the presence and conversation of a true poet, teeming with images to express his enlarging thought, his person, his form, grows larger to our fascinated eyes. And thus begins that deification which all nations have made of their heroes in every kind, — saints, poets, lawgivers, and warriors.

Imagination , — Whilst common-sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim of modern times, and quite too refined? On the contrary, it is as old as the human mind. Our best definition of poetry is one of the oldest sentences, and claims to come down to us from the Chaldáan Zoroaster, who wrote it thus: “Poets are standing transporters, whose employment consists in speaking to the Father and to matter; in producing apparent imitations of unapparent natures, and inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world;” in other words, the world exists for thought: it is to make appear things which hide: mountains, crystals, plants, animals, are seen; that which makes them is not seen: these, then, are “apparent copies of unapparent natures.” Bacon expressed the same sense in his definition, “Poetry accommodates the shows of things to the desires of the mind;” and Swedenborg, when he said, “There is nothing existing in human thought, even though relating to the most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined with it a natural and sensuous image.” And again: “Names, countries, nations, and the like are not at all known to those who are in heaven; they have no idea of such things, but of the realities signified thereby.” A symbol always stimulates the intellect; therefore is poetry ever the best reading. The very design of imagination is to domesticate us in another, in a celestial nature.

This power is in the image because this power is in nature. It so affects, because it so is. All that is wondrous in Swedenborg is not his invention, but his extraordinary perception; — that he was necessitated so to see. The world realizes the mind. Better than images is seen through them. The selection of the image is no more arbitrary than the power and significance of the image. The selection must follow fate. Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the real, and not after the apparent.

Or shall we say that the imagination exists by sharing the ethereal currents? The poet contemplates the central identity, sees it undulate and roll this way and that, with divine Flowings, through remotest things; and, following it, can detect essential resemblances in natures never before compared. He can class them so audaciously because he is sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from which nothing is exempt. His own body is a fleeing apparition, — his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body. I think the use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, and all but itself. But this second sight does not necessarily impair the primary or common sense. Pindar, and Dante, yes, and the gray and timeworn sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed, though we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though it be subtile. He observes higher laws than he transgresses. “Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better.”

This union of first and second sight reads nature to the end of delight and of moral use. Men are imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the extent of confounding its suggestions with external facts. We live in both spheres, and must not mix them. Genius certifies its entire possession of its thought, by translating it into a fact which perfectly represents it, and is hereby education. Charles James Fox thought “Poetry the great refreshment of the human mind, — the only thing, after all; that men first found out they had minds, by making and tasting poetry.”

Man runs about restless and in pain when his condition or the objects about him do not fully match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be old, to be young, that things may obey him. In the ocean, in fire, in the sky, in the forest, he finds facts adequate and as large as he. As his thoughts are deeper than he can fathom, so also are these. It is easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher the arrowhead character, than to interpret these familiar sights. It is even much to name them. Thus Thomson’s “Seasons” and the best parts of many old and many new poets are simply enumerations by a person who felt the beauty of the common sights and sounds, without any attempt to draw a moral or affix a meaning.

The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man’s action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things, — marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy.

The senses imprison us, and we help them with metres as limitary, — with a pair of scales and a foot-rule and a clock. How long it took to find out what a day was, or what this sun, that makes days! It cost thousands of years only to make the motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by comparing thousands of observations, there dawned on some mind a theory of the sun, — and we found the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in the mind: the senses affirm that the earth stands still and the sun moves. The senses collect the surface facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute reports, and obtains from them results which are the essence or intellectual form of the experiences. It compares, distributes, generalizes and uplifts them into its own sphere. It knows that these transfigured results are not the brute experiences, just as souls in heaven are not the red bodies they once animated. Many transfigurations have befallen them. The atoms of the body were once nebulá, then rock, then loam, then corn, then chyme, then chyle, then blood; and now the beholding and co-energizing mind sees the same refining and ascent to the third, the seventh, or the tenth power of the daily accidents which the senses report, and which make the raw material of knowledge. It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

This metonymy, or seeing the same sense in things so diverse, gives a pure pleasure. Every one of a million times we find a charm in the metamorphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All men are so far poets. When people tell me they do not relish poetry, and bring me Shelley, or Aikin’s Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind. But this dislike of the books only proves their liking of poetry. For they relish Æsop, — cannot forget him, or not use him; bring them Homer’s Iliad, and they like that; or the Cid, and that rings well; read to them from Chaucer, and they reckon him an honest fellow. Lear and Macbeth and Richard III. they know pretty well without guide. Give them Robin Hood’s ballads or Griselda, or Sir Andrew Barton, or Sir Patrick Spense, or Chevy Chase, or Tam O’Shanter, and they like these well enough. They like to see statues; they like to name the stars; they like to talk and hear of Jove, Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Nine. See how tenacious we are of the old names. They like poetry without knowing it as such. They like to go to the theatre and be made to weep; to Faneuil Hall, and be taught by Otis, Webster, or Kossuth, or Phillips, what great hearts they have, what tears, what new possible enlargements to their narrow horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or on a lake shore. Now a cow does not gaze at the rainbow, or show or affect any interest in the landscape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes.

Nature is the true idealist. When she serves us best, when, on rare days, she speaks to the imagination, we feel that the huge heaven and earth are but a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the soul. Who has heard our hymn in the churches without accepting the truth, —

“As o’er our heads the seasons roll,

And soothe with change of bliss the soul”?

Of course, when we describe man as poet, and credit him with the triumphs of the art, we speak of the potential or ideal man, — not found now in any one person. You must go through a city or a nation, and find one faculty here, one there, to build the true poet withal. Yet all men know the portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion to believe its possible incarnation.

He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the manly man, seer of the secret; against all the appearance he sees and reports the truth, namely that the soul generates matter. And poetry is the only verity, — the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal, and not after the apparent. As a power it is the perception of the symbolic character of things, and the treating them as representative: as a talent it is a magnetic tenaciousness of an image, and by the treatment demonstrating that this pigment of thought is as palpable and objective to the poet as is the ground on which he stands, or the walls of houses about him. And this power appears in Dante and Shakspeare. In some individuals this insight or second sight has an extraordinary reach which compels our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William Blake the painter.

William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Wordsworth said, interested him more than the conversation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus: “He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye. … I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance, and not action. I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.”

It is a problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and Imagination. The words are often used, and the things confounded. Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all nature of that which it is driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types, for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. Lear, mad with his affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have the like cause with his own. “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass? “But when, his attention being diverted, his mind rests from this thought, he becomes fanciful with Tom, playing with the superficial resemblances of objects. Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress;” Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote “Emblems.”

Imagination is central; fancy, superficial. Fancy relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, imagination a spontaneous act; fancy, a play as with dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and women; imagination, a perception and affirming of a real relation between a thought and some material fact. Fancy amuses; imagination expands and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic classification. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the presence of great passion and action. Fancy aggregates; imagination animates. Fancy is related to color; imagination, to form. Fancy paints; imagination sculptures.

Veracity. — I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet is not partaker of the feast he spreads, or that he would kindle or amuse me with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, are heartily enamored of their sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper than they can penetrate, — defying adequate expression; that it is elemental, or in the core of things. Veracity therefore is that which we require in poets, — that they shall say how it was with them, and not what might be said. And the fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere.

“What news?” asks man of man everywhere. The only teller of news is the poet. When he sings, the world listens with the assurance that now a secret of God is to be spoken. The right poetic mood is or makes a more complete sensibility, piercing the outward fact to the meaning of the fact; shows a sharper insight: and the perception creates the strong expression of it, as the man who sees his way walks in it.

It is a rule in eloquence, that the moment the orator loses command of his audience, the audience commands him. So in poetry, the master rushes to deliver his thought, and the words and images fly to him to express it; whilst colder moods are forced to respect the ways of saying it, and insinuate, or, as it were, muffle the fact to suit the poverty or caprice of their expression, so that they only hint the matter, or allude to it, being unable to fuse and mould their words and images to fluid obedience. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with the main problem of the tragedy, as in Lear and Macbeth, and the opening of the Merchant of Venice.

All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written to a human should or would , instead of to the fatal is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go partly where he would, and partly where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added that high poetry exceeds the fact, or nature itself, just as skates allow the good skater far more grace than his best walking would show, or sails more than riding. The poet writes from a real experience, the amateur feigns one. Of course one draws the bow with his fingers and the other with the strength of his body; one speaks with his lips and the other with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your verse has not a necessary and autobiographic basis, though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not waste my time.

For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is virgin soil; all is practicable; the men are ready for virtue; it is always time to do right. He is a true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. He affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this moment and the present knot of affairs. Parties, lawyers and men of the world will invariably dispute such an application, as romantic and dangerous: they admit the general truth, but they and their affair always constitute a case in bar of the statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a principle, but it is never quite the time for its adoption without prejudicing actual interests. Chastity, they admit, is very well, — but then think of Mirabeau’s passion and temperament! Eternal laws are very well, which admit no violation, — but so extreme were the times and manners of mankind, that you must admit miracles, for the times constituted a case. Of course, we know what you say, that legends are found in all tribes, — but this legend is different. And so throughout; the poet affirms the laws, prose busies itself with exceptions, — with the local and individual.

I require that the poem should impress me so that after I have shut the book it shall recall me to itself, or that passages should. And inestimable is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words and brilliancy of color, which occupy the fancy and deceive the judgment. But all this is easily forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image which expressed it and which was a true experience of the poet, recurs to mind, and sends me back in search of the book. And I wish that the poet should foresee this habit of readers, and omit all but the important passages. Shakspeare is made up of important passages, like Damascus steel made up of old nails. Homer has his own, —

“One omen is best, to fight for one’s country;”

and again, —

“They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the noble.”

Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you, as your eyes do. We detect at once by it whether the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or thought, — exists at the moment for that alone, or whether he has one eye apologizing, deprecatory, turned on his reader. In proportion always to his possession of his thought is his defiance of his readers. There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word.

Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill of execution, — but how rare! I find it in the poems of Wordsworth, — Laodamia, and the Ode to Dion, and the plan of The Recluse. We want design, and do not forgive the bards if they have only the art of enamelling. We want an architect, and they bring us an upholsterer.

If your subject do not appear to you the flower of the world at this moment, you have not rightly chosen it. No matter what it is, grand or gay, national or private, if it has a natural prominence to you, work away until you come to the heart of it: then it will, though it were a sparrow or a spider-web, as fully represent the central law and draw all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were the book of Genesis or the book of Doom. The subject — we must so often say it — is indifferent. Any word, every word in language, every circumstance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher thought.

The test or measure of poetic genius is the power to read the poetry of affairs, — to fuse the circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott’s antique superstitions, or Shakspeare’s, but to convert those of the nineteenth century and of the existing nations into universal symbols. ‘T is easy to repaint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the Catholic Church, the feudal castle, the crusade, the martyrdoms of mediával Europe; but to point out where the same creative force is now working in our own houses and public assemblies; to convert the vivid energies acting at this hour in New York and Chicago and San Francisco, into universal symbols, requires a subtile and commanding thought. ‘T is boyish in Swedenborg to cumber himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as if the Divine creative energy had fainted in his own century. American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols; and every man would be a poet if his intellectual digestion were perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to be related to astronomy and history and the eternal order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in his hand. He is calmed and elevated.

The use of “occasional poems” is to give leave to originality. Every one delights in the felicity frequently shown in our drawing-rooms. In a game-party or picnic poem each writer is released from the solemn rhythmic traditions which alarm and suffocate his fancy, and the result is that one of the partners offers a poem in a new style that hints at a new literature. Yet the writer holds it cheap, and could do the like all day. On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, and do not understand the tragedy. The writer in the parlor has more presence of mind, more wit and fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that occur at table or about the house, than in the politics of Germany or Rome. Many of the fine poems of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had this casual origin.

I know there is entertainment and room for talent in the artist’s selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India, or to Rome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe nobody knows better than he that herein he consults his ease rather than his strength or his desire. He is very well convinced that the great moments of life are those in which his own house, his own body, the tritest and nearest ways and words and things have been illuminated into prophets and teachers. What else is it to be a poet? What are his garland and singing-robes? What but a sensibility so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pismires is event enough for him, — all emblems and personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe is to do what he enjoys; emancipation from other men’s questions, and glad study of his own; escape from the gossip and routine of society, and the allowed right and practice of making better. He does not give his hand, but in sign of giving his heart; he is not affable with all, but silent, uncommitted, or in love, as his heart leads him. There is no subject that does not belong to him, — politics, economy, manufactures and stock-brokerage, as much as sunsets and souls; only, these things, placed in their true order, are poetry; displaced, or put in kitchen order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right organ of the English proprietors; but we shall never understand political economy until Burns or Béranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and he will not teach Malthusianism.

Poetry is the gai science. The trait and test of the poet is that he builds, adds, and affirms. The critic destroys: the poet says nothing but what helps somebody; let others be distracted with cares, he is exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with pain. All his pains are edged with pleasure. The gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the old Minnesingers sung, —

“Oft have I heard, and now believe it true,

Whom man delights in, God delights in too.”

Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They live cabined, cribbed, confined in a narrow and trivial lot, — in wants, pains, anxieties and superstitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosities, in mean employments, — and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried, unknown. A poet comes who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the laws of the universe; shows them the circumstance as illusion; shows that nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; — and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities. Socrates, the Indian teachers of the Maia, the Bibles of the nations, Shakspeare, Milton, Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards; — these all deal with nature and history as means and symbols, and not as ends. With such guides they begin to see that what they had called pictures are realities, and the mean life is pictures. And this is achieved by words; for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men that are the texts on which religions and states are founded. And this perception has at once its moral sequence. Ben Jonson said, “The principal end of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of living.”

Creation. — But there is a third step which poetry takes, and which seems higher than the others, namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of their own, — when the poet invents the fable, and invents the language which his heroes speak. He reads in the word or action of the man its yet untold results. His inspiration is power to carry out and complete the metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds arrested for ages, in the perfecter proceeds rapidly in the same individual. For poetry is science, and the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in the street think themselves logical and the poet whimsical. Do they think there is chance or wilfulness in what he sees and tells? To be sure, we demand of him what he demands of himself, — veracity, first of all. But with that, he is the lawgiver, as being an exact reporter of the essential law. He knows that he did not make his thought, — no, his thought made him, and made the sun and the stars. Is the solar system good art and architecture? the same wise achievement is in the human brain also, can you only wile it from interference and marring. We cannot look at works of art but they teach us how near man is to creating. Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man! In him and the like perfecter brains the instruct is resistless, knows the right way, is melodious, and at all points divine. The reason we set so high a value on any poetry, — as often on a line or a phrase as on a poem, — is that it is a new work of Nature, as a man is. It must be as new as foam and as old as the rock. But a new verse comes once in a hundred years; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, Dante, speak so proudly of what seems to the clown a jingle.

The writer, like the priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. In that prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a perception of means and materials, of feats and fine arts, of fairy machineries and funds of power hitherto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can transfer his visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them into iambic or trochaic, into lyric or heroic rhyme. These successes are not less admirable and astonishing to the poet than they are to his audience. He has seen something which all the mathematics and the best industry could never bring him unto. Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he has come into new circulations, the marrow of the world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean and the eternal sky were painted.

These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and sentiment, when once their hour is struck, and the world is ripe for them, know as well as coarser how to feed and replenish themselves, and maintain their stock alive, and multiply; for roses and violets renew their race like oaks, and flights of painted moths are as old as the Alleghanies. The balance of the world is kept, and dewdrop and haze and the pencil of light are as long-lived as chaos and darkness.

Our science is always abreast of our self-knowledge. Poetry begins, or all becomes poetry, when we look from the centre outward, and are using all as if the mind made it. That only can we see which we are, and which we make. The weaver sees gingham; the broker sees the stock-list; the politician, the ward and county votes; the poet sees the horizon, and the shores of matter lying on the sky, the interaction of the elements, — the large effect of laws which correspond to the inward laws which he knows, and so are but a kind of extension of himself. “The attractions are proportional to the destinies.” Events or things are only the fulfilment of the prediction of the faculties. Better men saw heavens and earths; saw noble instruments of noble souls. We see railroads, mills, and banks, and we pity the poverty of these dreaming Buddhists. There was as much creative force then as now, but it made globes and astronomic heavens, instead of broadcloth and wine-glasses.

The poet is enamored of thoughts and laws. These know their way, and, guided by them, he is ascending from an interest invisible things to an interest in that which they signify, and from the part of a spectator to the part of a maker. And as everything streams and advances, as every faculty and every desire is procreant, and every pereeption is a destiny, there is no limit to his hope. “Anything, child, that the mind covets, from the milk of a cocoa to the throne of the three worlds, thou mayest obtain, by keeping the law of thy members and the law of thy mind.” It suggests that there is higher poetry than we write or read.

Rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing, but only by taking a central position in the universe and living in its forms. We sink to rise: —

“None any work can frame,

Unless himself become the same.”

All the parts and forms of nature are the expression or production of divine faculties, and the same are in us. And the fascination of genius for us is this awful nearness to Nature’s creations.

I have heard that the Germans think the creator of Trim and Uncle Toby, though he never wrote a verse, a greater poet than Cowper, and that Goldsmith’s title to the name is not from his Deserted Village, but derived from the Vicar of Wakefield. Better examples are Shakspeare’s Ariel, his Caliban, and. his fairies in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barthold Niebuhr said well, “There is little merit in inventing a happy idea or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received existence acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and say. Such creation is poetry, in the literal sense of the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fulness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.” [Niebuhr, Letters, etc., vol. iii. p. 196.]

This force of representation so plants his figures before him that he treats them as real; talks to them as if they were bodily there; puts words in their mouth such as they should have spoken, and is affected by them as by persons. Vast is the difference between writing clean verses for magazines, and creating these new persons and situations, — new language with emphasis and reality. The humor of Falstaff, the terror of Macbeth, have each their swarm of fit thoughts and images, as if Shakspeare had known and reported the men, instead of inventing them at his desk. This power appears not only in the outline or portrait of his actors, but also in the bearing and behavior and style of each individual. Ben Joii-son told Drummond that “Sidney did not keep a decorum in making every one speak as well as himself.”

We all have one key to this miracle of the poet, and the dunce has experiences that may explain Shakspeare to him, — one key, namely, dreams. In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama; we give them appropriate figures, faces, costume; they are perfect in their organs, attitude, manners: moreover they speak after their own characters, ours; — they speak to us, and we listen with surprise to what they say. Indeed, I doubt if the best poet has ye written any five-act play that can compare in thoroughness of invention with this unwritten play in fifty acts, composed by the dullest snorer on the floor of the watch-house.

Melody, Rhyme, Fory — Music and rhyme are among the earliest pleasures of the child, and, in the history of literature, poetry precedes prose. Every one may see, as he rides on the highway through an uninteresting landscape, how a little water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter what objects are near it, — a gray rock, a grass-patch, an alder-bush, or a stake, — they become beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. Shadows please us as still finer rhymes. Architecture gives the like pleasure by the repetition of equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows, or in wings; gardens by the symmetric contrasts of the beds and walks. In society you have this figure in a bridal company, where a choir of white-robed maidens give the charm of living statues; in a funeral procession, where all wear black; in a regiment of soldiers in uniform.

The universality of this taste is proved by our habit of casting our facts into rhyme to remember them better, as so many proverbs may show. Who would hold the order of the almanac so fast but foi the ding-dong,

“Thirty days hath September,” etc.;

or of the Zodiac, but for

“The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins,” etc.?

We are lovers of rhyme and return, period and musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by the nurse’s song. Sailors can work better for their yo-heaue-o . Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the rhythm of the common English metres, — of the decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alternate sexisyllabic, or other rhythms, — you can easily believe these metres to be organic, derived from the human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one nation, but to mankind. I think you will also find a charm heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these cadences, and be at once set on searching for the words that can rightly fill these vacant beats. Young people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things in pairs and alternatives; and, in higher degrees, we know the instant power of music upon our temperaments to change our mood, and give us its own; and human passion, seizing these constitutional tunes, aims to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music to thought, believing, as we believe of all marriage, that matches are made in heaven, and that for every thought its proper melody or rhyme exists, though the odds are immense against our finding it, and only genius can rightly say the banns.

Another form of rhyme is iterations of phrase, as the record of the death of Sisera: —

“At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.”

The fact is made conspicuous, nay, colossal, by this simple rhetoric: —

“They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.”

Milton delights in these iterations: —

“Though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues.”

“Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night? I did not err, there does a sable cloud Turn forth its silver lining on the night.” Comus.

“A little onward lend thy guiding hand, To these dark steps a little farther on.” Samson.

So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully used, and deriving some novelty or better sense in each of many verses: —

“Busk thee, busk thee, my bonny bonny bride,

Busk thee, busk thee, my winsome marrow.” Hamilton.

Of course rhyme soars and refines with the growth of the mind. The boy liked the drum, the people liked an overpowering jewsharp tune. Later they like to transfer that rhyme to life, and to detect a melody as prompt and perfect in their daily affairs. Omen and coincidence show the rhythmical structure of man; hence the taste for signs, sortilege, prophecy and fulfilment, anniversaries, etc. By and by, when they apprehend real rhymes, namely, the correspondence of parts in nature, — acid and alkali, body and mind, man and maid, character and history, action and reaction, — they do not longer value rattles and ding-dongs, or barbaric word-jingle. Astronomy, Botany, Chemistry, Hydraulics and the elemental forces have their own periods and returns, their own grand strains of harmony not less exact, up to the primeval apothegm that “there is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.” They furnish the poet with grander pairs and alternations, and will require an equal expansion in his metres.

There is under the seeming poverty of metres an infinite variety, as every artist knows. A right ode (however nearly it may adopt conventional metre, as the Spenserian, or the heroic blank-verse, or one of the fixed lyric metres) will by any sprightliness be at once lifted out of conventionality, and will modify the metre. Every good poem that I know I recall by its rhythm also. Rhyme is a pretty good measure of the latitude and opulence of a writer. If unskilful, he is at once detected by the poverty of his chimes. A small, well-worn, sprucely brushed vocabulary serves him. Now try Spenser, Marlow, Chapman, and see how wide they fly for weapons, and how rich and lavish their profusion. In their rhythm is no manufacture, but a vortex, or musical tornado, which falling on words and the experience of a learned mind, whirls these materials into the same grand order as planets and moons obey, and seasons, and monsoons.

There are also prose poets. Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I should say a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the magnanimity to say, “If Burke and Bacon were not poets (measured lines not being necessary to constitute one), he did not know what poetry meant.” And every good reader will easily recall expressions or passages in works of pure science which have given him the same pleasure which he seeks in professed poets. Richard Owen, the eminent paleon tologist, said: —

“All hitherto observed causes of extirpation point either to continuous slowly operating geologic changes, or to no greater sudden cause than the. so to speak, spectral appearance of mankind on a limited tract of land not before inhabited.”

St. Augustine complains to God of his friends offering him. the books of the philosophers: —

“And these were the dishes in which they brought to me, being hungry, the Sun and the Moon instead of Thee.”

It would not be easy to refuse to Sir Thomas Browne’s “Fragment on Mummies” the claim of poetry: —

“Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and. planting thereon lasting bases, defied the crumbling touches of time, and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant and sitteth upon a Sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth through those deserts asketh of her, Who builded them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.”

Bhyme, being a kind of music, shares this advantage with music, that it has a privilege of speaking truth which all Philistia is unable to challenge. Music is the poor man’s Parnassus. With the first note of the flute or horn, or the first strain of a song, we quit the world of common-sense and launch on the sea of ideas and emotions: we pour contempt on the prose you so magnify; yet the sturdiest Philistine is silent. The like allowance is the prescriptive right of poetry. You shall not speak ideal truth in prose uncontradicted: you may in verse. The best thoughts run into the best words; imaginative and affectionate thoughts into music and metre. We ask for food and fire, we talk of our work, our tools and material necessities, in prose; that is, without any elevation or aim at beauty; but when we rise into the world of thought, and think of these things only for what they signify, speech refines into order and harmony. I know what you say of mediaeval barbarism and sleighbell-rhyme, but we have not done with music, no, nor with rhyme, nor must console ourselves with prose poets so long as boys whistle and girls sing.

Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. Victor Hugo says well, “An idea steeped in verse becomes suddenly more incisive and more brilliant: the iron becomes steel.” Lord Bacon, we are told, “loved not to see poesy go on other feet than poetical dactyls and spondees; “and Ben Jonson said that “Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.”

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common-sense, — as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, — but the beauty and soul in his aspect as it shines to fancy and feeling; and so of all other objects in nature; runs into fable, personifies every fact:— “the clouds clapped their hands,”— “the hills skipped,”— “the sky spoke.” This is the substance, and this treatment always attempts a metrical grace. Outside of the nursery the beginning of literature is the prayers of a people, and they are always hymns, poetic, — the mind allowing itself range, and therewith is ever a corresponding freedom in the style, which becomes lyrical. The prayers of nations are rhythmic, have iterations and alliterations like the marriage-service and burial-service in our liturgies.

Poetry will never be a simple means, as when history or philosophy is rhymed, or laureate odes on state occasions are written. Itself must be its own end, or it is nothing. The difference between poetry and stock poetry is this, that in the latter the rhythm is given and the sense adapted to it; while in the former the sense dictates the rhythm. I might even say that the rhyme is there in the theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case: the verse must be alive, and inseparable from its contents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the body, and we measure the inspiration by the music. In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expression mounts. T is cumulative also; the poem is made up of lines each of which fill the ear of the poet in its turn, so that mere synthesis produces a work quite superhuman.

Indeed, the masters sometimes rise above themselves to strains which charm their readers, and which neither any competitor could outdo, nor the bard himself again equal. Try this strain of Beaumont and Fletcher: —

“Hence, all ye vain delights,

As short as are the nights

In which you spend your folly?

There’s naught in this life sweet,

If men were wise to see ‘t,

But only melancholy.

Oh! sweetest melancholy!

Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes,

A sigh that piercing mortifies,

A look that’s fastened to the ground,

A tongue chained up without a sound;

Foutain-heads and pathless groves,

Pleces which pale Passion loves,

Midnight walks, when all the fowls

Are warmly housed, save bats and owls;

A midnight bell, a passing groan,

Tese are the sounds we feed upon,

Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley.

Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”

Keats disclosed by certain lines in his “Hyperion” this inward skill; and Coleridge showed at least his love and appetency for it. It appears in Ben Jonson’s songs, including certainly “The faery beam upon you,” etc., Waller’s “Go, lovely rose!” Herbert’s “Virtue” and “Easter,” and Lovelace’s lines “To Althea” and “To Lucasta,” and Collins’s “Ode to Evening,” all but the last verse, which is academical. Perhaps this dainty style of poetry is not producible to-day, any more than a right Gothic cathedral. It belonged to a time and taste which is not in the world.

As the imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man, so also is this joy of musical expression. I know the pride of mathematicians and materialists, but they cannot conceal from me their capital want. The critic, the philosopher, is a failed poet. Gray avows that “he thinks even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made on it.” I honor the naturalist; I honor the geometer, but he has before him higher power and happiness than he knows. Yet we will leave to the masters their own forms. Newton may be permitted to call Terence a play-book, and to wonder at the frivolous taste for rhymers; he only predicts, one would say, a grander poetry: he only shows that he is not yet reached; that the poetry which satisfies more youthful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed to grander harmonies; — this being a child’s whistle to his ear; that the music must rise to a loftier strain, up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up to the thorough-base of the sea-shore, up to the largeness of astronomy: at last that great heart will hear in the music beats like its own; the waves of melody will wash and float him also, and set him into concert and harmony.

Bards and Trouveurs. — The metallic force of primitive words makes the superiority of the remains of the rude ages. It costs the early bard little talent to chant more impressively than the later, more cultivated poets. His advantage is that his words are things, each the lucky sound which described the fact, and we listen to him as we do to the Indian, or the hunter, or miner, each of whom represents his facts as accurately as the cry of the wolf or the eagle tells of the forest or the air they inhabit. The original force, the direct smell of the earth or the sea, is in these ancient poems, the Sagas of the North, the Nibelungen Lied, the songs and ballads of the English and Scotch.

I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the vast and the ideal, in the Welsh and bardic fragments of Taliessin and his successors, than in many volumes of British Classics. An intrepid magniloquence appears in all the bards, as: —

“The whole ocean flamed as one wound.” King Regnar Lodbrok.

“God himself cannot procure good for the wicked.” Welsh Triad.

A favorable specimen is Taliessin’s “Invocation of the Wind” at the door of Castle Teganwy: —

“Discover thou what it is, —

The strong creature from before the flood,

Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet,

It will neither be younger nor older than at the beginning;

It has no fear, nor the rude wants of created things.

Great God! how the sea whitens when it comes!

It is in the field, it is in the wood,

Without hand, without foot,

Without age, without season,

It is always of the same age with the ages of ages,

And of equal breadth with the surface of the earth.

It was not born, it sees not,

And is not seen; it does not come when desired;

It has no form, it bears no burden,

For it is void of sin.

It makes no perturbation in the place where God wills it,

On the sea, on the land.”

In one of his poems he asks: —

“Is there but one course to the wind?

But one to the water of the sea?

Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy?”

He says of his hero, Cunedda, —

“He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow.”

To another, —

“When I lapse to a sinful word,

May neither you, nor others hear.”

Of an enemy, —

“The cauldron of the sea was bordered round by his land, but it would not boil the food of a coward.”

To an exile on an island he says, —

“The heavy blue chain of the sea didst thou, O just man, endure.”

Another bard in like tone says, —

“I am possessed of songs such as no son of man can repeat; one of them is called the ‘Helper;’ it will help thee at thy need in sickness, grief, and all adversities. I know a song which I need only to sing when men have loaded me with bonds: when I sing it, my chains fall in pieces and I walk forth at liberty.”

The Norsemen have no less faith in poetry and its power, when they describe it thus: —

“Odin spoke everything in rhyme. He and his temple-gods were called song-smiths. He could make his enemies in battle blind or deaf, and their weapons so blunt that they could no more cut than a willow-twig. Odin taught these arts in runes or songs, which are called incantations.” [Heimskringla, Vol. I. p. 221.]

The Crusades brought out the genius of France, in the twelfth century, when Pierre d’Auvergne said, —

“I will sing a new song which resounds in my breast: never was a song good or beautiful which resembled any other.”

And Pons de Capdeuil declares, —

“Since the air renews itself and softens, so must my heart renew itself, and what buds in it buds and grows outside of it.”

There is in every poem a height which attracts more than other parts, and is best remembered. Thus, in “Morte d’Arthur,” I remember nothing so well as Sir Gawain’s parley with Merlin in his Wonderful prison: —

“After the disappearance of Merlin from King Athur’s court he was seriously missed, and many knighta set out in search of him. Among others was Sir Gawain, who pursued his search till it was time to return to the court. He came into the forest of Broceliande, lamenting as he went along. Presently he heard the voice of one groaning on his right hand; looking that way, he could see nothing save a kind of smoke which seemed like air, and through which he could not pass; and this impediment made him so wrathful that it deprived him of speech. Presently he heard a voice which said, ‘Gawain, Gawain, be not out of heart, for everything which must happen will come to pass.’ And when he heard the voice which thus called him by his right name, he replied, ‘Who can this be who hath spoken to me?’ ‘How,’ said the voice, ‘Sir Gawain, know you me not? You were wont to know me well, but thus things are interwoven and thus the proverb says true, “Leave the court and the court will leave you.” So is it with me. Whilst I served King Arthur, I was well known by you and by other barons, but because I have left the court, I am known no longer, and put in forgetfulness, which I ought not to be if faith reigned in the world. When Sir Gawain heard the voice which spoke to him thus, he thought it was Merlin, and he answered, ‘Sir, certes I ought to know you well, for many times I have heard your words. I pray you appear before me so that I may be able to recognize you.’; ‘Ah, sir,’ said Merlin, ‘you will never see me more, and that grieves me, but I cannot remedy it, and when you shall have departed from this place, I shall nevermore speak to you nor to any other person, save only my mistress; for never other person will be able to discover this place for anything which may befall; neither shall I ever go out from hence, for in the world there is no such strong tower as this wherein I am confined; and it is neither of wood, nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything else; and made by enchantment so strong that it can never be demolished while the world lasts; neither can I go out, nor can any one come in, save she who hath enclosed me here and who. keeps me company when it pleaseth her: she cometh when she listeth, for her will is here.’ ‘How, Merlin, my good friend,’ said Sir Gawain, ‘are you restrained so strongly that you cannot deliver yourself nor make yourself visible unto me; how can this happen, seeing that you are the wisest man in the world?’ Rather,’ said Merlin, ‘the greatest fool; for I well knew that all this would befall me, and I have been fool enough to love another more than myself, for I taught my mistress that whereby she hath imprisoned me in such a manner that none can set me free.’ ‘Certes, Merlin,’ replied Sir Gawain, ‘of that I am right sorrowful, and so will King Arthur, my uncle, be, when he shall know it, as one who is making search after you throughout all countries.’ ‘Well,’ said Merlin, ‘it must be borne, for never will he see me, nor I him; neither will any one speak with me again after you, it would be vain to attempt it; for you yourself, when you have turned away, will never be able to find the place: but salute for me the king and the queen and all the barons, and tell them of my condition, You will find the king at Carduel in Wales; and when you arrive there you will find there all the companions who departed with you, and who at this day will return. Now then go in the name of God, who will protect and save the King Arthur, and the realm of Logres, and you also, as the best knights who are in the world.’ With that Sir Gawain departed joyful and sorrowful; joyful because of what Merlin had assured him should happen to him, and sorrowful that Merlin had thus been lost.”

Morals. — We are sometimes apprised that there is a mental power and creation more excellent than anything which is commonly called philosophy and literature; that the high poets, that Homer, Milton, Shakspeare, do not fully content us. How rarely they offer us the heavenly bread! The most they have done is to intoxicate us once and again with its taste. They have touched this heaven and retain afterwards some sparkle of it: they betray their belief that such discourse is possible. There is something — our brothers on this or that side of the sea do not know it or own it; the eminent scholars of England, historians and reviewers, romancers and poets included, might deny and blaspheme it, — which is setting us and them aside and the whole world also, and planting itself. To true poetry we shall sit down as the result and justification of the age in which it appears, and think lightly of histories and statutes. None of your parlor or piano verse, none of your carpet poets, who are content to amuse, will satisfy us. Power, new power, is the good which the soul seeks. The poetic gift we want, as the health and supremacy of man, — not rhymes and sonneteering, not book-making and bookselling; surely not cold spying and authorship.

Is not poetry the little chamber in the brain where is generated the explosive force which, by gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world? Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making poets; poetry which, like the verses inscribed on Balder’s columns in Breidablik, is capable of restoring the dead to life; — poetry like that verse of Saadi, which the angels testified “met the approbation of Allah in Heaven;” — poetry which finds its rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and symbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into religions and mythologies, and impart its quality to centuries; — poetry which tastes the world and reports of it, upbuilding the world again in the thought; —

“Not with tickling rhymes,

But high and noble matter, such as flies

From brains entranced, and filled with ecstasies.”

Poetry must be affirmative. It is the piety of the intellect. “Thus saith the Lord,” should begin the song. The poet who shall use nature as his hieroglyphic must have an adequate message to convey thereby. Therefore when we speak of the Poet in any high sense, we are driven to such exam ples as Zoroaster and Plato, St. John and Menu, with their moral burdens. The Muse shall be the counterpart of Nature, and equally rich. I find her not often in books. We know Nature and figure her exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility, coherent; so that every creation is omen of every other. She is not proud of the sea, of the stars, of space or time, or man or woman. All her kinds share the attributes of the selectest extremes. But in current literature I do not find her. Literature warps away from life, though at first it seems to bind it. In the world of letters how few commanding oracles! Homer did what he could; Pindar, Æschylus, and the Greek Gnomic poets and the tragedians. Dante was faithful when not carried away by his fierce hatreds. But in so many alcoves of English poetry I can count only nine or ten authors who are still inspirers and lawgivers to their race.

The supreme value of poetry is to educate us to a height beyond itself, or which it rarely reaches; — the subduing mankind to order and virtue. He is the true Orpheus who writes his ode, not with syllables, but men. “In poetry,” said Goethe, “only the really great and pure advances us, and this exists as a second nature, either elevating us to itself, or rejecting us.” The poet must let Humanity sit with the Muse in his head, as the charioteer sits with the hero in the Iliad. “Show me,” said Sarona in the novel, “one wicked man who has written poetry, and I will show you where his poetry is not poetry; or rather, I will show you in his poetry no poetry at all.” [“Counterparts.” Vol. I. p. 67.]

I have heard that there is a hope which precedes and must precede all science of the visible or the invisible world; and that science is the realization of that hope in either region. I count the genius of Swedenborg and Wordsworth as the agents of a reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to nature, — to the marrying of nature and mind, undoing the old divorce in which poetry had been famished and false, and nature had been suspected and pagan. The philosophy which a nation receives, rules its religion, poetry, politics, arts, trades, and whole history. A good poem — say Shakspeare’s Macbeth, or Hamlet, or the Tempest — goes about the world offering itself to reasonable men, who read it with joy and carry it to their reasonable neighbors. Thus it draws to it the wise and generous souls, confirming their secret thoughts, and, through their sympathy, really publishing itself. It affects the characters of its readers by formulating their opinions and feelings, and inevitably prompting their daily action. If they build ships, they write “Ariel” or “Prospero” or “Ophelia” on the ship’s stern, and impart a tenderness and mystery to matters of fact. The ballad and romance work on the hearts of boys, who recite the rhymes to their hoops or their skates if alone, and these heroic songs or lines are remembered and determine many practical choices which they make later. Do you think Burns has had no influence on the life of men and women in Scotland, — has opened no eyes and ears to the face of nature and the dignity of man and the charm and excellence of woman?

We are a little civil, it must be owned, to Homer and Æschylus, to Dante and Shakspeare, and give them the benefit of the largest interpretation. We must be a little strict also, and ask whether, if we sit down at home, and do not go to Hamlet, Hamlet will come to us? whether we shall find our tragedy written in his, — our hopes, wants, pains, disgraces, described to the life, — and the way opened to the paradise which ever in the best hour beckons us? But our overpraise and idealization of famous masters is not in its origin a poor Boswellism, but an impatience of mediocrity. The praise we now give to our heroes we shall unsay when we make larger demands. How fast we outgrow the books of the nursery, — then those that satisfied our youth. What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet. Better not to be easily pleased. The poet should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his song; if he has so moved us as to lift us, — to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better.

In proportion as a man’s life comes into union with truth, his thoughts approach to a parallelism with the currents of natural laws, so that he easily expresses his meaning by natural symbols, or uses the ecstatic or poetic speech. By successive states of mind all the facts of nature are for the first time interpreted. In proportion as his life departs from this simplicity, he uses circumlocution, — by many words hoping to suggest what he cannot say. Vexatious to find poets, who are by excellence the thinking and feeling of the world, deficient in truth of intellect and of affection. Then is conscience unfaithful, and thought unwise. To know the merit of Shakspeare, read Faust. I find Faust a little too modern and intelligible. We can find such a fabric at several mills, though a little inferior. Faust abounds in the disagreeable. The vice is prurient, learned, Parisian. In the presence of Jove, Priapus may be allowed as an offset, but here he is an equal hero. The egotism, the wit, is calculated. The book is undeniably written by a master, and stands unhappily related to the whole modern world; but it is a very disagreeable chapter of literature, and accuses the author as well as the times. Shakspeare could no doubt have been disagreeable, had he less genius, and if ugliness had attracted him. In short, our English nature and genius has made us the worst critics of Goethe, —

“We, who speak the tongue

That Shakspeare spake, the faith and manners hold

Which Milton held.”

It is not style or rhymes, or a new image more or less that imports, but sanity; that life should not be mean; that life should be an image in every part beautiful; that the old forgotten splendors of the universe should glow again for us; — that we should lose our wit, but gain our reason. And when life is true to the poles of nature, the streams of truth will roll through us in song.

Transcendency. — In a cotillon some persons dance and others await their turn when the music and the figure come to them. In the dance of God there is not one of the chorus but can and will begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, whenever the music and figure reach his place and duty. O celestial Bacchus! drive them mad, — this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money.

Every man may be, and at some time a man is, lifted to a platform whence he looks beyond sense to moral and spiritual truth, and in that mood deals sovereignly with matter, and strings worlds like beads upon his thought. The success with which this is done can alone determine how genuine is the inspiration. The poet is rare because he must be exquisitely vital and sympathetic, and, at the same time, immovably centred. In good society, nay, among the angels in heaven, is not everything spoken in fine parable, and not so servilely as it befell to the sense? All is symbolized. Facts are not foreign, as they seem, but related. Wait a little and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic curve. The solid men complain that the idealist leaves out the fundamental facts; the poet complains that the solid men leave out the sky. To every plant there are two powers; one shoots down as rootlet, and one upward as tree. You must have eyes of science to see in the seed its nodes; you must have the vivacity of the poet to perceive in the thought its futurities. The poet is representative, — whole man, diamond-merchant, symbolizer, emancipator; in him the world projects a scribe’s hand and writes the adequate genesis. The nature of things is flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with the power or possible forms; but for obvious municipal or parietal uses God has given us a bias or a rest on to-day’s forms. Hence the shudder of joy with which in each clear moment we recognize the metamorphosis, because it is always a conquest, a surprise from the heart of things. One would say of the force in the works of nature, all depends on the battery. If it give one shock, we shall get to the fish form, and stop; if two shocks, to the bird; if three, to the quadruped; if four, to the man. Power of generalizing differences men. The number of successive saltations the nimble thought can make, measures the difference between the highest and lowest of mankind. The habit of saliency, of not pausing but going on, is a sort of importation or domestication of the Divine effort in a man. After the largest circle has been drawn, a larger can be drawn around it. The problem of the poet is to unite freedom with precision; to give the pleasure of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculptors. Music seems to you sufficient, or the subtle and delicate scent of lavender; but Dante was free imagination, — all wings, — yet he wrote like Euclid. And mark the equality of Shakspeare to the eomic, the tender and sweet, and to the grand and terrible. A little more or less skill in whistling is of no account. See those weary pentameter tales of Dryden and others. Turnpike is one thing and blue sky another. Let the poet, of all men, stop with his inspiration. The inexorable rule in the muses’ court, either inspiration or silence , compels the bard to report only his supreme moments. It teaches the enormous force of a few words, and in proportion to the inspiration checks loquacity. Much that we call poetry is but polite verse. The high poetry which shall thrill and agitate mankind, restore youth and health, dissipate the dreams under which men reel and stagger, and bring in the new thoughts, the sanity and heroic aims of nations, is deeper hid and longer postponed than was America or Australia, or the finding of steam or of the galvanic battery. We must not conclude against poetry from the defects of poets. They are, in our experience, men of every degree of skill, — some of them only once or twice receivers of an inspiration, and presently falling back on a low life. The drop of ichor that tingles in their veins has not yet refined their blood and cannot lift the whole man to the digestion and function of ichor, — that is, to godlike nature. Time will be when ichor shall be their blood, when what are now glimpses and aspirations shall be the routine of the day. Yet even partial ascents to poetry and ideas are forerunners, and announce the dawn. In the mire of the sensual life, their religion, their poets, their admiration of heroes and benefactors, even their novel and newspaper, nay, their superstitions also, are hosts of ideals, — a cordage of ropes that hold them up out of the slough. Poetry is inestimable as a lonely faith, a lonely protest in the uproar of atheism.

But so many men are ill-born or ill-bred, — the brains are so marred, so imperfectly formed, unhe-roically, brains of the sons of fallen men, that the doctrine is imperfectly received. One man sees a spark or shimmer of the truth and reports it, and his saying becomes a legend or golden proverb for ages, and other men report as much, but none wholly and well. Poems! — we have no poem. Whenever that angel shall be organized and appear on earth, the Iliad will be reckoned a poor ballad-grinding. I doubt never the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion, of our own. We too shall know how to take up all this industry and empire, this Western civilization, into thought, as easily as men did when arts were few; but not by holding it high, but by holding it low. The intellect uses and is not used, — uses London and Paris and Berlin, East and West, to its end. The only heart that can help us is one that draws, not from our society, but from itself, a counterpoise to society. What if we find partiality and meanness in us? The grandeur of our life exists in spite of us, — all over and under and within us, in what of us is inevitable and above our control. Men are facts as well as persons, and the involuntary part of their life is so much as to fill the mind and leave them no countenance to say aught of what is so trivial as their selfish thinking and doing. Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.

SOCIAL AIMS.

Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on American manners. I do not think it is to be resented. Rather, if we are wise, we shall listen and mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, though they did not mean it. But in every sense the subject of manners has a constant interest to thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine manners? Their charm cannot be predicted or overstated. ‘T is perpetual promise of more than can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and picture to many who do not pretend to appreciation of those arts. It is even true that grace is more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible to overcome the obstacle of an unlucky temperament and acquire good manners, unless by living with the well-bred from the start; and this makes the value of wise forethought to give ourselves and our children as much as possible the habit of cultivated society.

‘T is an inestimable hint that I owe to a few persons of fine manners, that they make behavior the very first sign of force, — behavior, and not performance, or talent, or, much leas, wealth. Whilst almost everybody has a supplicating eye turned on events and things and other persons, a few natures are central and forever unfold, and these alone charm us. He whose word or deed you cannot predict, who answers you without any supplication in his eye, who draws his determination from within, and draws it instantly, — that man rules.

The staple figure in novels is the man of aplomb , who sits, among the young aspirants and desperates, quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries his points. They may scream or applaud, he is never engaged or heated. Napoleon is the type of this class in modern history; Byron’s heroes in poetry. But we for the most part are all drawn into the charivari; we chide, lament, cavil, and recriminate.

I think Hans Andersen’s story of the cobweb cloth woven so fine that it was invisible, — woven for the king’s garment, — must mean manners, which do really clothe a princely nature. Such a one can well go in a blanket, if he would. In the gymnasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does not leave him. But he who has not this fine garment of behavior is studious of dress, and then not less of house and furniture and pictures and gardens, in all which he hopes to lie perdu , and not be exposed.

“Manners are stronger than laws.” Their vast convenience I must always admire. The perfect defence and isolation which they effect makes an insuperable protection. Though the person so clothed wrestle with you, or swim with you, lodge in the same chamber, eat at the same table, he is yet a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. Manners seem to say, You are you, and I am I. In the most delicate natures, fine temperament and culture build this impassable wall. Balzac finely said: “Kings themselves cannot force the exquisite politeness of distance to capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze.”

Nature values manners. See how she has prepared for them. Who teaches manners of majesty, of frankness, of grace, of humility, — who but the adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young child? The babe meets such courting and flattery as only kings receive when adult; and, trying experiments, and at perfect leisure with these posture-masters and flatterers all day, he throws himself into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs. Are they humble? he is composed. Are they eager? he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching? he is dignified and inexorable. And this scene is daily repeated in hovels as well as in high houses.

Nature is the best posture-master. An awkward man is graceful when asleep, or when hard at work, or agreeably amused. The attitudes of children are gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games and in their house-talk and in the street, before they have learned to cringe. ’Tis impossible but thought disposes the limbs and the walk, and is masterly or secondary. No art can contravene it or conceal it. Give me a thought, and my hands and legs and voice and face will all go right. And we are awkward for want of thought. The inspiration is scanty, and does not arrive at the extremities.

It is a commonplace of romances to show the ungainly manners of the pedant who has lived too long in college. Intellectual men pass for vulgar, and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But if the elegant are also intellectual, instantly the hesitating scholar is inspired, transformed, and exhibits the best style of manners. An intellectual man, though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by being put into the company of scholars, and, to the surprise of everybody, becomes a lawgiver. We think a man unable and desponding. It is only that he is misplaced. Put him with new companions, and they will find in him excellent qualities, unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of life. ’Tis a great point in a gallery, how you hang pictures; and not less in society, how you seat your party. The circumstance of circumstance is timing and placing. When a man meets his accurate mate, society begins, and life is delicious.

What happiness they give, — what ties they form! Whilst one man by his manners pins me to the wall, with another I walk among the stars. One man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a regiment; another will have no following. Nature made us all intelligent of these signs, for our safety and our happiness. Whilst certain faces are illumined with intelligence, decorated with invitation, others are marked with warnings: certain voices are hoarse and truculent; sometimes they even bark. There is the same difference between heavy and genial manners as between the perceptions of octogenarians and those of young girls who see everything in the twinkling of an eye.

Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betrayers of any disproportion or want of symmetry in mind and character. It is the law of our constitution that every change in our experience instantly indicates itself on our countenance and carriage, as the lapse of time tells itself on the face of a clock. We may be too obtuse to read it, but the record is there. Some men may be obtuse to read it, but some men are not obtuse and do read it. In Borrow’s “Lavengro,” the gypsy instantly detects, by his companion’s face and behavior, that some good fortune has befallen him, and that he has money. We say, in these days, that credit is to be abolished in trade: is it? When a stranger comes to buy goods of you, do you not look in his face and answer according to what you read there? Credit is to be abolished? Can’t you abolish faces and character, of which credit is the reflection? As long as men are born babes they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eighteen years of their life. Every innocent man has in his countenance a promise to pay, and hence credit. Less credit will there be? You are mistaken. There will always be more and more. Character must be trusted; and just in proportion to the morality of a people will be the expansion of the credit system.

There is even a little rule of prudence for the young experimenter which Dr. Franklin omitted to set down, yet which the youth may find useful, — Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a debt on the day when you have no other resource. He will learn by your air and tone how it is with you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work and starve a little longer. Wait till your affairs go better and you have other means at hand; you will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat your claim with entire respect.

Now we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to ourselves by our manners; but youth in America is wont to be poor and hurried, not at ease, or not in society where high behavior could be taught. But the sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make all our pains superfluous. Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. Self-command is the main elegance. “Keep cool, and you command everybody,” said St. Just; and the wily old Talleyrand would still say, Surtout, messieurs, pas de zêle ,— “Above all, gentlemen, no heat.”

Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach you that, when the door-bell rings, you shall sit like them. “Eat at your table as you would eat at the table of the king,” said Confucius. It is an excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a school of manners, — the silent prayer before meals. It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume their usual intercourse from a vantage-ground. What a check to the violent manners which sometimes come to the table, — of wrath, and whining, and heat in trifles!

‘T is a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A lady loses as soon as she admires too easily and too much. In man or woman, the face and the person lose power when they are on the strain to express admiration. A man makes his inferiors his superiors by heat. Why need you, who are not a gossip, talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors or the journals say? State your opinion without apology. The attitude is the main point, assuring your companion that, come good news or come bad, you remain in good heart and good mind, which is the best news you can possibly communicate. Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a noisy, sensual savage, which you are to keep down, and turn all his strength to beauty. For example, what a seneschal and detective is laughter! It seems to require several generations of education to train a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a man. Sometimes, when in almost all expressions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his contemptible squeals of joy. It is necessary for the purification of drawing-rooms that these entertaining explosions should be under strict control. Lord Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he says, “I am sure that since I had the use of my reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh.” I know that there go two to this game, and, in the presence of certain formidable wits, savage nature must sometimes rush out in some disorder.

To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in regard to dress, in which our civilization instantly shows itself. No nation is dressed with more good sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral benefit in it. When the young European emigrant, after a summer’s labor, puts on for the first time a new coat, he puts on much more. His good and becoming clothes put him on thinking that he must behave like people who are so dressed; and silently and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another class of our own youth I should remind, of dress in general, that some people need it and others need it not. Thus a king or a general does not need a fine coat, and a commanding person may save himself all solicitude on that point. There are always slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who are not less considered. If a man have manners and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. It is only when mind and character slumber that the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be admired and imitated. Remember George Herbert’s maxim, “This coat with my discretion will be brave.” If, however, a man has not firm nerves and has keen sensibility, it is perhaps a wise economy to go to a good shop and dress himself irreproachably. He can then dismiss all care from his mind, and may easily find that performance an addition of confidence, a fortification that turns the scale in social encounters, and allows him to go gayly into conversations where else he had been dry and embarrassed. I am not ignorant, — I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that “the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.”

Thus much for manners: but we are not content with pantomime; we say, This is only for the eyes. We want real relations of the mind and the heart; we want friendship; we want knowledge; we want virtue; a more inward existence to read the history of each other. Welfare requires one or two companions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear out life with, — persons with whom we can speak a few reasonable words every day, by whom we can measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to good sense and virtue; and these we are always in search of. He must be inestimable to us to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet now and then we say things to our mates, or hear things from them, which seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers again. “Either death or a friend,” is a Persian proverb. I suppose I give the experience of many when I give my own. A few times in my life it has happened to me to meet persons of so good a nature and so good breeding that every topic was open and discussed without possibility of offence, — persons who could not be shocked. One of my friends said in speaking of certain associates, “There is not one of them but I can offend at any moment.” But to the company I am now considering, were no terrors, no vulgarity. All topics were broached, — life, love, marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, and whatever else, with a security and vivacity which belonged to the nobility of the parties and to their brave truth. The life of these persons was conducted in the same calm and affirmative manner as their discourse. Life with them was an experiment continually varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by no means the hot and hurried business which passes in the world. The delight in good company, in pure, brilliant, social atmosphere; the incomparable satisfaction of a society in which everything can be safely said, in which every member returns a true echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of sense, simplicity, knowledge, and thorough good-meaning abide, — doubles the value of life. It is this that justifies to each the jealousy with which the doors are kept. Do not look sourly at the set or the club which does not choose you. Every highly-organized person knows the value of the social barriers, since the best society has often been spoiled to him by the intrusion of bad companions. He of all men would keep the right of choice sacred, and feel that the exclusions are in the interest of the admissions, though they happen at this moment to thwart his wishes.

The hunger for company is keen, but it must be discriminating, and must be economized. ’Tis a defect in our manners that they have not yet reached the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well-dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a moment should not be allowed without explicit leave granted on request of either the giver or receiver of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strictness, but vast inconvenience in the want of it. To trespass on a public servant is to trespass on a nation’s time. Yet presidents of the United States are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips (I hope it is only by them) until the gossip’s immeasurable legs are tired of sitting; then he strides out and the nation is relieved.

It is very certain that sincere and happy conversation doubles our powers; that in the effort to unfold our thought to a friend we make it clearer to ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that help and delight us. It may happen that each hears from the other a better wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either. But these ties are taken care of by Providence to each of us. A wise man once said to me that “all whom he knew, met:” — meaning that he need not take pains to introduce the persons whom he valued to each other: they were sure to be drawn together as by gravitation. The soul of a man must be the servant of another. The true friend must have an attraction to whatever virtue is in us. Our chief want in life, — is it not somebody who can make us do what we can? And we are easily great with the loved and honored associate. We come out of our eggshell existence and see the great dome arching over us; see the zenith above and the nadir under us.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. You are to be missionary and carrier of all that is good and noble. Virtues speak to virtues, vices to vices, — each to their own kind in the people with whom we deal. If you are suspiciously and dryly on your guard, so is he or she. If you rise to frankness and generosity, they will respect it now or later.

In this art of conversation, Woman, if not the queen and victor, is the lawgiver. If every one recalled his experiences, he might find the best in the speech of superior women; — which was better than song, and carried ingenuity, character, wise counsel and affection, as easily as the wit with which it was adorned. They are not only wise themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a master in conversation who has not learned much from women; their presence and inspiration are essential to its success. Steele said of his mistress, that “to have loved her was a liberal education.” Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in his description of the French woman: “There is a quality in which no woman in the world can compete with her, — it is the power of intellectual irritation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She strikes with such address the chords of self-love, that she gives unexpected vigor and agility to fancy, and electrifies a body that appeared non-electric.” Coleridge esteems cultivated women as the depositaries and guardians of “English undefiled;” and Luther commends that accomplishment of “pure German speech” of his wife.

Madame de Staël, by the unanimous consent of all who knew her, was the most extraordinary converser that was known in her time, and it was a time full of eminent men and women; she knew all distinguished persons in letters or society in England, Germany, and Italy, as well as in France; though she said, with characteristic nationality, “Conversation, like talent, exists only in France.” Madame de Stael valued nothing but conversation, When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, she exclaimed, “O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac!.” the street in Paris in which her house stood. And she said one day, seriously, to M. Molé, “If it were not for respect to human opinions, I would not open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen.” Sainte-Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, that after making an excursion one day, the party returned in two coaches from Chambéry to Aix, on the way to Coppet. The first coach had many rueful accidents to relate, — a terrific thunder-storm, shocking roads, and danger and gloom to the whole company. The party in the second coach, on arriving, heard this story with surprise; — of thunder-storm, of steeps, of mud, of danger, they knew nothing; no, they had forgotten earth, and breathed a purer air: such a conversation between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier and Benjamin Constant and Schlegel! they were all in a state of delight. The intoxication of the conversation had made them insensible to all notice of weather or rough roads. Madame de Tessé said, “If I were Queen, I should command Madame de Staël to talk to me every day.” Conversation fills all gaps, supplies all deficiencies. What a good trait is that recorded of Madame de Maintenon, that, during dinner, the servant slipped to her side, “Please, madame, one anecdote more, for there is no roast to-day.”

Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are all asses with loaded panniers to serve the kitchen of Intellect, the king. There is nothing that does not pass into lever or weapon.

And yet there are trials enough of nerve and character, brave choices enough of taking the part of truth and of the oppressed against the oppressor, in privatest circles. A right speech is not well to be distinguished from action. Courage to ask questions; courage to expose our ignorance. The great gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your companion, — then you learn nothing but conceit, — but to find a companion who knows what you do not; to tilt with him and be overthrown, horse and foot, with utter destruction of all your logic and learning. There is a defeat that is useful. Then you can see the real and the counterfeit, and will never accept the counterfeit again. You will adopt the art of war that has defeated you. You will ride to battle horsed on the very logic which you found irresistible. You will accept the fertile truth, instead of the solemn customary lie.

Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don’t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady of my acquaintance said, “I don’t care so much for what they say as I do for what makes them say it.”

The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, and say, with Newton, “There’s no contending against facts.” When Molyneux fancied that the observations of the nutation of the earth’s axis destroyed Newton’s theory of gravitation, he tried to break it softly to Sir Isaac, who only answered, “It may be so, there’s no arguing against facts and experiments.”

But there are people who cannot be cultivated, — people on whom speech makes no impression; swainish, morose people, who must be kept down and quieted as you would those who are a little tipsy; others, who are not only swainish, but are prompt to take oath that swainishness is the only culture; and though their odd wit may have some salt for you, your friends would not relish it. Bolt these out. And I have seen a man of genius who made me think that if other men were like him cooperation were impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? Here is centrality and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts, the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude which belongs to it: but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me in every experiment that I make to hold intercourse with his mind; always some weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted. And beware of jokes; too much temperance cannot be used: inestimable for sauce, but corrupting for food, we go away hollow and ashamed. As soon as the company give in to this enjoyment, we shall have no Olympus. True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet seems to have borrowed by anticipation of several centuries a leaf from the mind of Swedenborg, when he wrote in the Koran: —

“On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, on their turning back, they will be called to another door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against them; and so on, ad infinitum , without end.”

Shun the negative side. Never worry people with your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness: even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will soon give you your fill of it.

The law of the table is Beauty, — a respect to the common soul of all the guests. Everything is unseasonable which is private to two or three or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses and haters from insults whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends.

Stay at home in you mind Don’t recite other people’s opinions. See how it lies there in you; and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we want is not your activity or interference with your mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the simple truth. The way to have large occasional views, as in a political or social crisis, is to have large habitual views. When men consult you, it is not that they wish you to stand tip toe and pump your brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wisdom, to the present question, forbearing all pedantries and the very name of argument; for in good conversation parties don’t speak to the words, but to the meanings of each other.

Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see that as life was not in manners, so it is not in talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional; these require certain material conditions, human labor for food, clothes, house, tools, and, in short, plenty and ease, — since only so can certain finer and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole nation of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable man, — valuable out of his tribe. In every million of Europeans or of Americans there shall be thousands who would be valuable on any spot on the globe.

The consideration the rich possess in all societies is not without meaning or right. It is the approval given by the human understanding to the act of creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the sense of every human being that man should have this dominion of nature, should arm himself with tools and force the elements to drudge for him and give him power. Every one must seek to secure his independence; but he need not be rich. The old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but stated the limitation: “If the search for riches were sure to be successful, though I should become a groom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. As the search may not be successful, I will follow after that which I love.” There is in America a general conviction in the minds of all mature men, that every young man of good faculty and good habits can by perseverance attain to an adequate estate; if he have a turn for business, and a quick eye for the opportunities which are always offering for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such good season as to enjoy as well as transmit it.

Every human society wants to be officered by a best class, who shall be masters instructed in all the great arts of life; shall be wise, temperate, brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accomplishments. Every country wishes this, and each has taken its own method to secure such service to the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has been attempted to secure the existence of a superior class by hereditary nobility, with estates transmitted by primogeniture and entail. But in the last age, this system has been on its trial, and the verdict of mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method secured permanence of families, firmness of customs, a certain external culture and good taste; gratified the ear with preserving historic names: but the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less surely heroic grandsons; wealth and ease corrupted the race.

In America, the necessity of clearing the forest, laying out town and street, and building every house and barn and fence, then church and town-house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims brought, and made the whole population poor; and the like necessity is still found in each new settlement in the Territories. These needs gave their character to the public debates in every village and State. I have been often impressed at our country town-meetings with the accumulated virility, in each village, of five or six or eight or ten men, who speak so well, and so easily handle the affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a little town (with which I am most familiar) discussed with a clearness and thoroughness, and with a generosity too, that would have satisfied me had it been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each one of my readers has a parallel experience. And every one knows that in every town or city is always to be found a certain number of public-spirited men who perform, unpaid, a great amount of hard work in the interest of the churches, of schools, of public grounds, works of taste and refinement. And as in civil duties, so in social power and duties. Our gentlemen of the old school, that is, of the school of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, were bred after English types, and that style of breeding furnished fine examples in the last generation; but, though some of us have seen such, I doubt they are all gone. But nature is not poorer to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of new grace and power in address that honor the country. It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes directed on this subject, to fall in with an American to be proud of. I said never was such force, good meaning, good sense, good action, combined with such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and persistent preference for others. Wherever he moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that he should ride well, shoot well, said well, keep house well, administer affairs well; but he was the best talker, also, in the company: what with a perpetual practical wisdom, with an eye always to the working of the thing, what with the multitude and distinction of his facts (and one detected continually that he had a hand in everything that has been done), and in the temperance with which he parried all offence and opened the eyes of the person he talked with without contradicting him. Yet I said to myself, How little this man suspects, with his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any company, to meet a man superior to himself. And I think this is a good country that can bear such a creature as he is.

The young men in America at this moment take little thought of what men in England are thinking or doing. That is the point which decides the welfare of a people; which way does it look? If to any other people, it is not well with them. If occupied in its own affairs and thoughts and men, with a heat which excludes almost the notice of any other people, — as the Jews, the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Arabians, the French, the English, at their best times have been, — they are sublime; and we know that in this abstraction they are executing excellent work. Amidst the calamities which war has brought on our country this one benefit has accrued, — that our eyes are withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, and look homeward. We have come to feel that “by ourselves our safety must be bought;” to know the vast resources of the continent, the good-will that is in the people, their conviction of the great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, education and religious culture, and their determination to hold these fast, and, by them, to hold fast the country and penetrate every square mile of it with this American civilization.

The consolation and happy moment of life, atoning for all short-comings, is sentiment; a flame of affection or delight in the heart, burning up suddenly for its object; — as the love of the mother for her child; of the child for its mate; of the youth for his friend; of the scholar for his pursuit; of the boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion for his country; or in the tender-hearted philanthropist to spend and be spent for some romantic charity, as Howard for the prisoner, or John Brown for the slave. No matter what the object is, so it be good, this flame of desire makes life sweet and tolerable. It reinforces the heart that feels it, makes all its acts and words gracious and interesting. Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists, — talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry, — O, they adore poetry, — and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be tried. Another cure would be to fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong.

Would we codify the laws that should reign in households, and whose daily transgression annoys and mortifies us and degrades our household life, we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. Temperance, courage, love, are made up of the same jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. “As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens before me.” [Ernest Renan.]

Of course those people, and no others, interest us, who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream. They only can give the key and leading to better society: those who delight in each other only because both delight in the eternal laws; who forgive nothing to each other; who, by their joy and homage to these, are made incapable of conceit, which destroys almost all the fine wits. Any other affection between men than this geometric one of relation to the same thing, is a mere mush of materialism.

These are the bases of civil and polite society; namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and public action; whether political, or in the leading of social institutions. We have much to regret, much to mend, in our society; but I believe that with all liberal and hopeful men there is a firm faith in the beneficent results which we really enjoy; that intelligence, manly enterprise, good education, virtuous life and elegant manners have been and are found here, and, we hope, in the next generation will still more abound.

ELOQUENCE.

I do not know any kind of history, except the event of a battle, to which people listen with more interest than to any anecdote of eloquence; and the wise think it better than a battle. It is a triumph of pure power, and it has a beautiful and prodigious surprise in it. For all can see and understand the means by which a battle is gained: they count the armies, they see the cannon, the musketry, the cavalry, and the character and advantages of the ground, so that the result is often predicted by the observer with great certainty before the charge is sounded. Not so in a court of law, or in a legislature. Who knows before the debate begins what the preparation, or what the means are of the combatants? The facts, the reasons, the logic, — above all, the flame of passion and the continuous energy of will which is presently to be let loose on this bench of judges, or on this miscellaneous assembly gathered from the streets, — are all invisible and unknown. Indeed, much power is to be exhibited which is not yet called into existence, but is to be suggested on the spot by the unexpected turn things may take, — at the appearance of new evidence, or by the exhibition of an unlooked-for bias in the judges or in the audience. It is eminently the art which only flourishes in free countries. It is an old proverb that “Every people has its prophet;” and every class of the people has. Our community runs through a long scale of mental power, from the highest refinement to the borders of savage ignorance and rudeness. There are not only the wants of the intellectual and learned and poetic men and women to be met, but also the vast interests of property, public and private, of mining, of manufactures, of trade, of railroads, etc. These must have their advocates of each improvement and each interest. Then the political questions, which agitate millions, find or form a class of men by nature and habit fit to discuss and deal with these measures, and make them intelligible and acceptable to the electors. So of education, of art, of philanthropy.

Eloquence shows the power and possibility of man. There is one of whom we took no note, but on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret virtue never suspected, — that he can paint what has occurred and what must occur, with such clearness to a company, as if they saw it done before their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their will, and can make them do gladly what an hour ago they would not believe that they could be led to do at all: he makes them glad or angry or penitent at his pleasure; of enemies makes friends, and fills desponding men with hope and joy. After Sheridan’s speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, Mr. Pitt moved an adjournment, that the House might recover from the overpowering effect of Sheridan’s oratory. Then recall the delight that sudden eloquence gives, — the surprise that the moment is so rich. The orator is the physician. Whether he speaks in the Capitol or on a cart, he is the benefactor that lifts men above themselves, and creates a higher appetite than he satisfies. The orator is he whom every man is seeking when he goes into the courts, into the conventions, into any popular assembly, — though often disappointed, yet never giving over the hope. He finds himself perhaps in the Senate, when the forest has east out some wild, black-browed bantling to show the same energy in the crowd of officials which he had learned in driving cattle to the hills, or in scrambling through thickets in a winter forest, or through the swamp and river for his game. In the folds of his brow, in the majesty of his mien, Nature has marked her son; and in that artificial and perhaps unworthy place and company shall remind you of the lessons taught him in earlier days by the torrent in the gloom of the pine-woods, when he was the companion of the mountain cattle, of jays and foxes, and a hunter of the bear. Or you may find him in some lowly Bethel, by the seaside, where a hard-featured, scarred, and wrinkled Methodist becomes the poet of the sailor and the fisherman, whilst he pours out the abundant streams of his thought through a language all glittering and fiery with imagination; a man who never knew the looking-glass or the critic; a man whom college drill or patronage never made, and whom praise cannot spoil, — a man who conquers his audience by infusing his soul into them, and speaks by the right of being the person in the assembly who has the most to say, and so makes all other speakers appear little and cowardly before his face. For the time, his exceeding life throws all other gifts into shade, — philosophy speculating on its own breath, taste, learning, and all, — and yet how every listener gladly consents to be nothing in his presence, and to share this surprising emanation, and be steeped and ennobled in the new wine of this eloquence! it instructs in the power of man over men; that a man is a mover; to the extent of his being, a power; and, in contrast with the efficiency he suggests, our actual life and society appears a dormitory. Who can wonder at its influence on young and ardent minds? Uncommon boys follow uncommon men, and I think every one of us can remember when our first experiences made us for a time the victim and worshipper of the first master of this art whom we happened to hear in the court-house or in the caucus.

We reckon the bar, the senate, journalism, and the pulpit, peaceful professions; but you cannot escpape the demand for courage in these, and certainly there is no true orator who is not a hero. His attitude in the rostrum, on the platform, requires that he counterbalance his auditory. He is challenger, and must answer all comers. The orator must ever stand with forward foot, in the attitude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead of the assembly, ahead of the whole human race, or it is superfluous. His speech is not to be distinguished from action. It is the electricity of action. It is action, as the general’s word of command or chart of battle is action. I must feel that the speaker compromises himself to his auditory, comes for something, — it is a cry on the perilous edge of the fight, — or let him be silent. You go to a town-meeting where the people are called to some disagreeable duty, such as, for example, often occurred during the war, at the occasion of a new draft. They come unwillingly; they have spent their money once or twice very freely. They have sent their best men; the young and ardent, those of a martial temper, went at the first draft, or the second, and it is not easy to see who else can be spared or can be induced to go. The silence and coldness after the meeting is opened and the purpose of it stated, are not encouraging. When a good man rises in the cold and malicious assembly, you think, Well, sir, it would be more prudent to be silent; why not rest, sir, on your good record? Nobody doubts your talent and power, but for the present business, we know all about it, and are tired of being pushed into patriotism by people who stay at home. But he, taking no counsel of past things but only of the inspiration of his to-day’s feeling, surprises them with his tidings, with his better knowledge, his larger view, his steady gaze at the new and future event whereof they had not thought, and they are interested like so many children, and carried off out of all recollection of their malignant considerations, and he gains his victory by prophecy, where they expected repetition. He knew very well beforehand that they were looking behind and that he was looking ahead, and therefore it was wise to speak. Then the observer says, What a godsend is this manner of man to a town! and he, what a faculty! He is put together like a Waltham watch, or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar works.

No act indicates more universal health than eloquence. The special ingredients of this force are clear perceptions; memory; power of statement; logic; imagination, or the skill to clothe your thought in natural images; passion, which is the heat ; and then a grand will, which, when legitimate and abiding, we call character , the height of manhood. As soon as a man shows rare power of expression, like Chatham, Erskine, Patrick Henry, Webster, or Phillips, all the great interests, whether of state or of property, crowd to him to be their spokesman, so that he is at once a potentate, a ruler of men. A worthy gentleman, Mr. Alexander, listening to the debates of the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk in Edinburgh, and eager to speak to the questions but utterly failing in his endeavors, — delighted with the talent shown by Dr. Hugh Blair, went to him and offered him one thousand pounds sterling if he would teach him to speak with propriety in public. If the performance of the advocate reaches any high success it is paid in England with dignities in the professions, and in the State with seats in the cabinet, earldoms, and woolsacks. And it is easy to see that the great and daily growing interests at stake in this country must pay proportional prices to their spokesmen and defenders. It does not surprise us then to learn from Plutarch what great sums were paid at Athens to the teachers of rhetoric; and if the pupils got what they paid for, the lessons were cheap.

But this power which so fascinates and astonishes and commands is only the exaggeration of a talent which is universal. All men are competitors in this art. We have all attended meetings called for some object in which no one had beforehand any warm interest. Every speaker rose unwillingly, and even his speech was a bad excuse; but it is only the first plunge which is formidable; and deep interest or sympathy thaws the ice, loosens the tongue, and will carry the cold and fearful presently into self-possession and possession of the audience. Go into an assembly well excited, some angry political meeting on the eve of a crisis. Then it appears that eloquence is as natural as swimming, — an art which all men might learn, though so few do. It only needs that they should be once well pushed off into the water, overhead, without corks, and, after a mad struggle or two they find their poise and the use of their arms, and henceforward they possess this new and wonderful element.

The most hard - fisted, disagreeably restless, thought-paralyzing companion sometimes turns out in a public assembly to be a fluent, various, and effective orator. Now you find what all that excess of power which so chafed and fretted you in a tête-à-tête with him was for. What is peculiar in it is a certain creative heat, which a man attains to perhaps only once in his life. Those whom we admire — the great orators — have some habit of heat, and moreover a certain control of it, an art of husbanding it, — as if their hand was on the organstop, and could now use it temperately, and now let out all the length and breadth of the power. I remember that Jenny Lind, when in this country, complained of concert-rooms and town-halls, that they did not give her room enough to unroll her voice, and exulted in the opportunity given her in the great halls she found sometimes built over a railroad depot. And this is quite as true of the action of the mind itself, that a man of this talent sometimes finds himself cold and slow in private company, and perhaps a heavy companion; but give him a commanding occasion and the inspiration of a great multitude, and he surprises by new and unlooked-for powers. Before, he was out of place, and unfitted as a cannon in a parlor. To be sure there are physical advantages, — some eminently leading to this art. I mentioned Jenny Lind’s voice. A good voice has a charm in speech as in song; sometimes of itself enchains attention, and indicates a rare sensibility, especially when trained to wield all its powers. The voice, like the face, betrays the nature and disposition, and soon indicates what is the range of the speaker’s mind. Many people have no ear for music, but every one has an ear for skilful reading. Every one of us has at some time been the victim of a well-toned and cunning voice, and perhaps been repelled once for all by a harsh, mechanical speaker. The voice, indeed, is a delicate index of the state of mind. I have heard an eminent preacher say that he learns from the first tones of his voice on a Sunday morning whether he is to have a successful day. A singer cares little for the words of the song; he will make any words glorious. I think the like rule holds of the good reader. In the church I call him only a good reader who can read sense and poetry into any hymn in the hymn-book. Plutarch, in his enumeration of the ten Greek orators, is careful to mention their excellent voices, and the pains bestowed by some of them in training these. What character, what infinite variety belong to the voice! sometimes it is a flute, sometimes a triphammer; what range of force! In moments of clearer thought or deeper sympathy, the voice will attain a music and penetration which surprises the speaker as much as the auditor; he also is a sharer of the higher wind that blows over his strings. I believe that some orators go to the assembly as to a closet where to find their best thoughts. The Persian poet Saadi tells us that a person with a disagreeable voice was reading the Koran aloud, when a holy man, passing by, asked what was his monthly stipend. He answered, “Nothing at all.” “But why then do you take so much trouble?” He replied, “I read for the sake of God.” The other rejoined, “For God’s sake, do not read; for if you read the Koran in this manner you will destroy the splendor of Islamism.” Then there are persons of natural fascination, with certain frankness, winning manners, almost endearments in their style; like Bouillon, who could almost persuade you that a quartan ague was wholesome; like Louis XI. of France, whom Commines praises for “the gift of managing all minds by his accent and the caresses of his speech;” like Galiani, Voltaire, Robert Burns, Barclay, Fox, and Henry Clay. What must have been the discourse of St. Bernard, when mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands, companions their friends, lest they should be led by his eloquence to join the monastery.

It is said that one of the best readers in his time was the late President John Quincy Adams. I have heard that no man could read the Bible with such powerful effect. I can easily believe it, though I never heard him speak in public until his fine voice was much broken by age. But the wonders he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient organ showed what power might have belonged to it in early manhood. If “indignation makes verses,” as Horace says, it is not less true that a good indignation makes an excellent speech. In the early years of this century, Mr. Adams, at that time a member of the United States Senate at Washington, was elected Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in Harvard College. When he read his first lectures in 1806, not only the students heard him with delight, but the hall was crowded by the Professors and by unusual visitors. I remember, when, long after, I entered college, hearing the story of the numbers of coaches in which his friends came from Boston to hear him. On his return in the winter to the Senate at Washington, he took such ground in the debates of the following session as to lose the sympathy of many of his constituents in Boston. When, on his return from Washington, he resumed his lectures in Cambridge, his class attended, but the coaches from Boston did not come, and indeed many of his political friends deserted him. In 1809 he was appointed Minister to Russia, and resigned his chair in the University. His last lecture, in taking leave of his class, contained some nervous allusions to the treatment he had received from his old friends, which showed how much it had stung him, and which made a profound impression on the class. Here is the concluding paragraph, which long resounded in Cambridge: —

“At no hour of your life will the love of letters ever oppress you as a burden, or fail you as a resource. In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart, which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the mortifications of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when even your country may seem ready to abandon herself and you, when priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pass by on the other side, seek refuge, my un failing friends, and be assured you shall find it, in the friendship of Lálius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them.”

The orator must command the whole scale of the language, from the most elegant to the most low and vile. Every one has felt how superior in force is the language of the street to that of the academy. The street must be one of his schools. Ought not the scholar to be able to convey his meaning in terms as short and strong as the porter or truckman uses to convey his? And Lord Chesterfield thought that “without being instructed in the dialect of the Halles no man could be a complete master of French.” The speech of the man in the street is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making it what you call parliamentary. You say, “If he could only express himself;” but he does already, better than any one can for him, — can always get the ear of an audience to the exclusion of everybody else. Well, this is an example in point. That something which each man was created to say and do, he only or he best can tell you, and has a right to supreme attention so far. The power of their speech is, that it is perfectly understood by all; and I believe it to be true that when any orator at the bar or in the Senate rises in his thought, he descends in his language, — that is, when he rises to any height of thought or of passion he comes down to a language level with the ear of all his audience. It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln — one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg — in the two best specimens of eloquence we have had in this country. And observe that all poetry is written in the oldest and simplest English words. Dr. Johnson said, “There is in every nation a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This style is to be sought in the common intercourse of life among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement, where propriety resides.”

But all these are the gymnastics, the education of eloquence, and not itself. They cannot be too much considered and practised as preparation, but the powers are those I first named. If I should make the shortest list of the qualifications of the orator, I should begin with manliness; and perhaps it means here presence of mind. Men differ so much in control of their faculties! You can find in many, and indeed in all, a certain fundamental equality. Fundamentally all feel alike and think alike, and at a great heat they can all express themselves with an almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to enable a heavy man to come up with those who have a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us known men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at any sudden call. Some men, on such pressure, collapse, and cannot rally. If they are to put a thing in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the audience, their mind is a blank. Something which any boy would tell with color and vivacity they can only stammer out with hard literalness, — say it in the very words they heard, and no other. This fault is very incident to men of study, — as if the more they had read the less they knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, a hundred years ago, a man of marked ability among the clergy of New England. But when once going to preach the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in those days people walked from Salem to hear), on going up the pulpitstairs he was informed that a little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common and was drowned, and the doctor was requested to improve the sad occasion. The doctor was much distressed, and in his prayer he hesitated, he tried to make soft approaches, he prayed for Harvard College, he prayed for the schools, he implored the Divine Being “to — to — to bless to them all the boy that was this morning drowned in Frog Pond.” Now this is not want of talent or learning, but of manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his closet and his theology, had lost some natural relation to men, and quick application of his thought to the course of events. I should add what is told of him, — that he so disliked the “sensation” preaching of his time, that he had once prayed that “he might never be eloquent;” and, it appears, his prayer was granted. On the other hand, it would be easy to point to many masters whose readiness is sure; as the French say of Guizot, that “what Guizot learned this morning he has the air of having known from all eternity.” This unmanliness is so common a result of our half-education, — teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy, — allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and skates and coasting down the hills on his sled, and whatever else would lead him and keep him on even terms with boys, so that he can meet them as an equal, and lead in his turn, — that I wish his guardians to consider that they are thus preparing him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In England they send the most delicate and protected child from his luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in the public schools. A few bruises and scratches will do him no harm if he has thereby learned not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar with good drill in cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is the boast of English education, and of high importance to the matter in hand.

Lord Ashley, in 1696, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Parliament in favor of that clause of the bill which allowed the prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was not able to proceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the command of his faculties, he drew such an argument from his own confusion as more advantaged his cause than all the powers of eloquence could have done. “For,” said he, “if I, who had no personal concern in the question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life depended on his own abilities to defend it?” This happy turn did great service in promoting that excellent bill.

These are ascending stairs, — a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement, — know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you do know and believe; and are personally in it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak. He who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of any truth which Dunderhead does not see, must be a master of his art. Declamation is common; but such possession of thought as is here required, such practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth written in God’s language into a truth in Dunderhead’s language, is one of the most beautiful and cogent weapons that are forged in the shop of the Divine Artificer.

It was said of Robespierre’s audience, that though they understood not the words, they understood a fury in the words, and caught the contagion. This leads us to the high class, the men of character, who bring an overpowering personality into court, and the cause they maintain borrows importance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness is required, and he must have it or simulate it. If the cause be unfashionable, he will make it fashionaable. ‘T is the best man in the best training. If he does not know your fact, he will show that it is not worth the knowing. Indeed, as great generals do not fight many battles, but conquer by tactics, so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is the least part of the oration. It is the attitude taken, the unmistakable sign, never so casually given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in him.

But I say, provided your cause is really honest. There is always the previous question: How came you on that side? Your argument is ingenious, your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, but your major proposition palpably absurd. Will you establish a lie? You are a very elegant writer, but you can’t write up what gravitates down.

An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling, of Edinburgh, has noted that intellectual works in any department breed each other, by what he calls zymosis , i.e. fermentation; thus in the Elizabethan Age there was a dramatic zymosis , when all the genius ran in that direction, until it culminated in Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a metaphysical zymosis culminating in Kant, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so ending. To this we might add the great eras not only of painters but of orators. The historian Paterculus says of Cicero, that only in Cicero’s lifetime was any great eloquence in Rome; so it was said that no member of either house of the British Parliament will be ranked among the orators, whom Lord North did not see, or who did not see Lord North. But I should rather say that when a great sentiment, as religion or liberty, makes itself deeply felt in any age or country, then great orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along which they were lifted, so the great ideas that suddenly expand at some moment the mind of mankind, indicate themselves by orators.

If there ever was a country where eloquence was a power, it is the United States. Here is room for every degree of it, on every one of its ascending stages, — that of useful speech, in our commercial, manufacturing, railroad, and educational conventions; that of political advice and persuasion on the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best thought and noblest administrative ability that the citizen can offer. And here are the service of science, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty millions of people. Is it not worth the ambition of every generous youth to train and arm his mind with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of grace, and of character, to serve such a constituency?

RESOURCES.

Men are made up of potencies. We are magnets in an iron globe. We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck; the earth sensitive as iodine to light; the most plastic and impressionable medium, alive to every touch, and, whether searched by the plough of Adam, the sword of Cásar, the boat of Columbus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor’s chain of Picard, or the submarine telegraph, — to every one of these experiments it makes a gracious response. I am benefited by every observation of a victory of man over nature; by seeing that wisdom is better than strength; by seeing that every healthy and resolute man is an organizer, a method coming into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We are touched and cheered by every such example. We like to see the inexhaustible riches of Nature, and the access of every soul to her magazines. These examples wake an infinite hope, and call every man to emulation. A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst; believes neither in virtue nor in genius; which says’t is all of no use, life is eating us up,’t is only question who shall be last devoured, — dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us. A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism, — teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep, — all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things, — I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of the poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret in an inland manufacturing town for the first time to the sea-shore, gazing at the ocean, said she was “glad for once in her life to see something which there was enough of.”

Our Copernican globe is a great factory or shop of power, with its rotating constellations, times, and tides. The machine is of colossal size; the diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers and the volley of the battery out of all mechanic measure; and it takes long to understand its parts and its workings. This pump never sucks; these screws are never loose; this machine is never out of gear. The vat, the piston, the wheels and tires, never wear out, but are self-repairing. Is there any load which water cannot lift? If there be, try steam; or if not that, try electricity. Is there any exhausting of these means? Measure by barrels the spending of the brook that runs through your field. Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep. What spaces! what durations! dealing with races as merely preparations of somewhat to follow; or, in humanity, millions of lives of men to collect the first observations on which our astronomy is built; millions of lives to add only sentiments and guesses, which at last, gathered in by an ear of sensibility, make the furniture of the poet. See how children build up a language; how every traveller, every laborer, every impatient boss who sharply shortens the phrase or the word to give his order quicker, reducing it to the lowest possible terms, and there it must stay, — improves the national tongue. What power does Nature not owe to her duration, of amassing infinitesimals into cosmical forces!

The marked events in history, as the emigration of a colony to a new and more delightful coast; the building of a large ship; the discovery of the mariner’s compass, which perhaps the Phœnicians made; the arrival among an old stationary nation of a more instructed race, with new arts: — each of these events electrifies the tribe to which it befalls; supples the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it into that state of sensibility which makes the transition to civilization possible and sure. By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. Ah! what a plastic little creature he is! so shifty, so adaptive! his body a chest of tools, and he making himself comfortable in every climate, in every condition.

Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of timber, of mines, and of the sea, put into the possession of a people who wield all these wonderful machines, have the secret of steam, of electricity; and have the power and habit of invention in their brain. We Americans have got suppled into the state of melioration. Life is always rapid here, but what acceleration to its pulse in ten years, — what in the four years of the war! We have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our enormous geography; we have seen the snowy deserts on the northwest, seats of Esquimaux, become lands of promise. When our population, swarming west, had reached the boundary of arable land, — as if to stimulate our energy, on the face of the sterile waste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts found covered with gold and silver, floored with coal. It was thought a fable, what Guthrie, a traveller in Persia, told us, that “in Taurida, in any piece of ground where springs of naphtha (or petroleum) obtain, by merely sticking an iron tube in the earth and applying a light to the upper end, the mineral oil will burn till the tube is decomposed, or for a vast number of years.” But we have found the Taurida in Pennsylvania and Ohio. If they have not the lamp of Aladdin, they have the Aladdin oil. Resources of America! why, one thinks of St. Simon’s saying, “The Golden Age is not behind, but before you.” Here is man in the Garden of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. We have seen slavery disappear like a painted scene in a theatre; we have seen the most healthful revolution in the politics of the nation, — the Constitution not only amended, but construed in a new spirit. We have seen China opened to European and American ambassadors and commerce; the like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. As the walls of a modern house are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes, gas-pipes, heat-pipes, — so geography and geology are yielding to man’s convenience, and we begin to perforate and mould the old ball, as a carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are working the new Atlantic telegraph. American energy is overriding every venerable maxim of political science. America is such a garden of plenty, such a magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has not lost its value.

See haw nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares.

The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thousand anecdotes attesting the fertility of resource, the presence of mind, the skilled labor of our people. At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the army, found the locomotives broken, the railroad destroyed, and no rails. The commander called for men in the ranks who could rebuild the road. Many men stepped forward, searched in the water, found the hidden rails, laid the track, put the disabled engine together and continued their journey. The world belongs to the energetic man. His will gives him new eyes. He sees expedients and means where we saw none. The invalid sits shivering in lamb’s-wool and furs; the woodsman knows how to make warm garments out of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the sailor, the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, feet, teeth, eyes and ears. It is out of the obstacles to be encountered that they make the means of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail makes a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, the soldier, rolls himself in his blanket, and the falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his knapsack, is his eider-down, in which he sleeps warm till the morning. Nature herself gives the hint and the example, if we have wit to take it. See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. The old forester is never far from shelter; no matter how remote from camp or city, he carries Bangor with him. A sudden shower cannot wet him, if he cares to be dry; he draws his boat ashore, turns it over in a twinkling against a clump of alders, with catbriers which keep up the lee-side, crawls under it with his comrade, and lies there till the shower is over, happy in his stout roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fisherman looks about him, puts a round stick of wood underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at once. Napoleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not having had time to cut down the bridge, which was of stone, made use of the bodies of their dead to form an intrenchment. Malus, known for his discoveries in the polarization of light, was captain of a corps of engineers in Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, which was heinously unprovided and exposed. “Wanting a picket to which to attach my horse,” he says, “I tied him to my leg. I slept, and dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of Europe.” M. Tissenet had learned among the Indians to understand their language, and, coming among a wild party of Illinois, he overheard them say that they would scalp him. He said to them, “Will you scalp me? Here is my scalp,” and confounded them by lifting a little periwig he wore. He then explained to them that he was a great medicine-man, and that they did great wrong in wishing to harm him, who carried them all in his heart. So he opened his shirt a little and showed to each of the savages in turn the reflection of his own eyeball in a small pocket-mirror which he had hung next to his skin. He assured them that if they should provoke him he would burn up their rivers and their forests; and taking from his portmanteau a small phial of white brandy, he poured it into a cup, and lighting a straw at the fire in the wigwam, he kindled the brandy (which they believed to be water), and burned it up before their eyes. Then taking up a chip of dry pine, he drew a burning-glass from his pocket and set the chip on fire.

What a new face courage puts on everything! A determined man, by his very attitude and the tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins to conquer. “For they can conquer who believe they can.” Every one hears gladly that cheerful voice. He reveals to us the enormous power of one man over masses of men; that one man whose eye commands the end in view and the means by which it can be attained, is not only better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all mankind who do not see the issue and the means. “When a man is once possessed with fear,” said the old French Marshal Montluc, “and loses his judgment, as all men in a fright do, he knows not what he does. And it is the principal thing you are to beg at the hands of Almighty God, to preserve your understanding entire; for what danger soever there may be, there is still one way or other to get off, and perhaps to your honor. But when fear has once possessed you, God ye good even! You think you are flying towards the poop when you are running towards the prow, and for one enemy think you have ten before your eyes, as drunkards who see a thousand candles at once.”

Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated with passion, and once suffered to gain the ascendant, is diabolic and chaos come again, good sense has many arts of prevention and of relief. Disorganization it confronts with organization, with police, with military force. But in earlier stages of the disorder it applies milder and nobler remedies. The natural offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted examples among our orators, who have on conspicuous occasions handled and controlled, and, best of all, converted a malignant mob, by superior manhood, and by a wit which disconcerted and at last delighted the ringleaders. What can a poor truckman, who is hired to groan and to hiss, do, when the orator shakes him into convulsions of laughter so that he cannot throw his egg? If a good story will not answer, still milder remedies sometimes serve to disperse a mob. Try sending round the contribution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufacturer at Leeds, was to preside at a Free-Trade festival in that city; it was threatened that the operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up the meeting by a mob. Mr. Marshall was a man of peace; he had the pipes laid from the waterworks of his mill, with a stop-cock by his chair from which he could discharge a stream that would knock down an ox, and sat down very peacefully to his dinner, which was not disturbed.

See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it: the story, the pictures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the stereoscope, the rabbits, the mino bird, the popcorn, and Christmas hemlock spurting in the fire. The children never suspect how much design goes to it, and that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed a hundred times, when the necessity came of finding for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to twist. She relies on the same principle that makes the strength of Newton, — alternation of employment. See how he refreshed himself, resting from the profound researches of the calculus by astronomy; from astronomy by optics; from optics by chronology. It is a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and when the mind has exhausted its energies for one employment, it is still fresh and capable of a different task. We have not a toy or trinket for idle amusement but somewhere it is the one thing needful, for solid instruction or to save the ship or army. In the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the torches which each traveller carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve no purpose but to see the ground. When now and then the vaulted roof rises high overhead and hides all its possibilities in lofty depths, ‘t is but gloom on gloom. But the guide kindled a Roman candle, and held it here and there shooting its fireballs successively into each crypt of the groined roof, disclosing its starry splendor, and showing for the first time what that plaything was good for.

Whether larger or less, these strokes and all exploits rest at last on the wonderful structure of the mind. And we learn that our doctrine of resources must be carried into higher application, namely, to the intellectual sphere. But every power in energy speedily arrives at its limits, and requires to be husbanded: the law of light, which Newton said proceeded by “fits of easy reflection and transmission;” the come-and-go of the pendulum, is the law of mind; alternation of labors is its rest.

I should like to have the statistics of bold experimenting on the husbandry of mental power. In England men of letters drink wine; in Scotland, whiskey; in France, light wines; in Germany, beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle; in France the theatre and the ball occupy the night. In this country we have not learned how to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not the seaside necessary in summer? Games, fishing, bowling, hunting, gymnastics, dancing, — are not these needful to you? The chapter of pastimes is very long. There are better games than billiards and whist. It was a pleasing trait in Goethe’s romance, that Makaria retires from society “to astronomy and her correspondence.”

I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin on the Physiology of Taste deserves its fame. I know its repute, and I have heard it called the France of France. But the subject is so large and exigent, that a few particulars, and those the pleasures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I know many men of taste whose single opinions and practice would interest much more. It should be extended to gardens and grounds, and mainly one thing should be illustrated: that life in the country wants all things on a low tone, — wants coarse clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a man cannot hold, but an old horse that will stand tied in a pasture half a day without risk, so allowing the picnicparty the full freedom of the woods. Natural history is, in the country, most attractive; at once elegant, immortal, always opening new resorts. The first care of a man settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to himself by a little knowledge of nature, or a great deal, if he can; of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk. This will draw the sting out of frost, dreariness out of November and March, and the drowsiness out of August. To know the trees is, as Spenser says of the ash, “for nothing ill.” Shells, too; how hungry I found myself, the other day, at Agassiz’s Museum, for their names! But the uses of the woods are many, and some of them for the scholar high and peremptory. When his task requires the wiping out from memory

“all trivial fond records

That youth, and observation copied there,”

he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, and go to wooded uplands, to the clearing and the brook. Well for him if he can say with the old minstrel, “I know where to find a new song.”

If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown the thirteen or fourteen species of willow that grow in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly expand in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking at them, and, though insignificant enough in the general bareness of the forest, yet a great change takes place in them between fall and spring; in the first relentings of March they hasten, and long before anything else is ready, these osiers hang out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods. You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, these vivacious trees, so ancient, for they are almost the oldest of all. Among fossil remains, the willow and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all day to every wind; the cart-wheel in the road may crush them; every passenger may strike off a twig with his cane; every boy cuts them for a whistle; the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and tender bark; yet, in spite of accident and enemy, their gentle persistency lives when the oak is shattered by storm, and grows in the night and snow and cold. When I see in these brave plants this vigor and immortality in weakness, I find a sudden relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of vegetation, and I think it more grateful and health-giving than any news I am likely to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics.

It is easy to see that there is no limit to the chapter of Resources. I have not, in all these rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of my list. Resources of Man, — it is the inventory of the world, the roll of arts and sciences; it is the whole of memory, the whole of invention; it is all the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the omnipotence of will.

But the one fact that shines through all this plenitude of powers is, that as is the receiver, so is the gift; that all these acquisitions are victories of the good brain and brave heart; that the world belongs to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in vain to make a paradise but for good men. The tropics are one vast garden; yet man is more miserably fed and conditioned there than in the cold and stingy zones. The healthy, the civil, the industrious, the learned, the moral race, — Nature herself only yields her secret to these. And the resources of America and its future will be immense only to wise and virtuous men.

THE COMIC.

A taste for fun is all but universal in our species, which is the only joker in nature. The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence. And as the lower nature does not jest, neither does the highest. The Reason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but meddles never with degrees or fractions; and it is in comparing fractions with essential integers or wholes that laughter begins.

Aristotle’s definition of the ridiculous is, “what is out of time and place, without danger.” If there be pain and danger, it becomes tragic; if not, comic. I confess, this definition, though by an admirable definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we know.

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance. The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect, is comedy; and it announces itself physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter.

With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no halfness in nature, until the appearance of man. Unconscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. An oak or a chestnut undertakes no function it cannot execute; or if there be phenomena in botany which we call abortions, the abortion is also a function of nature, and assumes to the intellect the like completeness with the further function to which in different circumstances it had attained. The same rule holds true of the animals. Their activity is marked by unerring good-sense. But man, through his access to Reason, is capable of the perception of a whole and a part. Reason is the whole, and whatsoever is not that is a part. The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate goodnature at every object in existence, aloof as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.

In virtue of man’s access to Reason, or the Whole, the human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests to our imagination the perfection of truth or goodness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or imperfection. We have a primary association between perfectness and this form. But the facts that occur when actual men enter do not make good this anticipation; a discrepancy which is at once detected by the intellect, and the outward sign is the muscular irritation of laughter.

Reason does not joke, and men of reason do not; a prophet, in whom the moral sentiment predominates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of truth predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the standard, the ideal whole, exposing all actual defect; and hence the best of all jokes is the sympathetic contemplation of things by the understanding from the philosopher’s point of view. There is no joke so true and deep in actual life as when some pure idealist goes up and down among the institutions of society, attended by a man who knows the world, and who, sympathizing with the philoso-pher’s scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion and indignation of the detected, skulking institutions. His perception of disparity, his eye wandering perpetually from the rule to the crooked, lying, thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with laughter.

This is the radical joke of life and then of literature. The presence of the ideal of right and of truth in all action makes the yawning delinquencies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic to the interest, but droll to the intellect. The activity of our sympathies may for a time hinder our perceiving the fact intellectually, and so deriving mirth from it; but all falsehoods, all vices seen at sufficient distance, seen from the point where our moral sympathies do not interfere, become ludicrous. The comedy is in the intellect’s perception of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the difference, the comedy is enhanced whenever that ideal is embodied visibly in a man. Thus Falstaff, in Shakspeare, is a character of the broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly to his senses, coolly ignoring the Reason, whilst he invokes its name, pretending to patriotism and to parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the confusion betwixt reason and the negation of reason, — in other words, the rank rascaldom he is calling by its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute understanding, who sees the Right, and sympathizes with it, and in the heyday of youth feels also the full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time he is to that degree under the Reason that it does not amuse him as much as it amuses another spectator.

If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the Comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The perception of the Comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.

It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run into excess. Men celebrate their perception of halfness and a latent lie by the peculiar explosions of laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to these impressions, that if a man of wit come into the room where they are, it seems to take them out of themselves with violent convulsions of the face and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. How often and with what unfeigned compassion we have seen such a person receiving like a willing martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. The victim who has just received the discharge, if in a solemn company, has the air very much of a stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea; and though it does not split it, the poor bark is for the moment critically staggered. The peace of society and the decorum of tables seem to require that next to a notable wit should always be posted a phlegmatic bolt-upright man, able to stand without movement of muscle whole broadsides of this Greek fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and traverses the universe, and unless it encounter a mystic or a dumpish soul, goes everywhere heralded and harbingered by smiles and greetings. Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty of form, no majesty of carriage can plead any immunity, — they must walk gingerly, according to the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and all. “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Plutarch happily expresses the value of the jest as a legitimate weapon of the philosopher. “Men cannot exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but their philosophy even whilst they are silent or jest merrily; for as it is the highest degree of injustice not to be just and yet seem so, so it is the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in mirth to do the same with those that are serious and seem in earnest; for as in Euripides, the Bacchæ, though unprovided of iron weapons, and unarmed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of trees which they carried, thus the very jests and merry talk of true philosophers move those that are not altogether insensible, and unusually reform.”

In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is some seeming, some keeping of the word to the ear and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul. Thus, as the religious sentiment is the most vital and sublime of all our sentiments, and capable of the most prodigious effects, so is it abhorrent to our whole nature, when, in the absence of the sentiment, the act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its stead. To the sympathies this is shocking, and occasions grief. But to the intellect the lack of the sentiment gives no pain; it compares incessantly the sublime idea with the bloated nothing which pretends to be it, and the sense of the disproportion is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is the most real and earnest thing in nature, being a mere rapture, and excluding, when it appears, all other considerations, the vitiating this is the greatest lie. Therefore, the oldest gibe of literature is the ridicule of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In religion, the sentiment is all; the ritual or ceremony indifferent. But the inertia of men inclines them, when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it did; it goes through the ceremony omitting only the will, makes the mistake of the wig for the head, the clothes for the man. The older the mistake and the more overgrown the particular form is, the more ridiculous to the intellect. Captain John Smith, the discoverer of New England, was not wanting in humor. The Society in London which had contributed their means to convert the savages, hoping doubtless to see the Keokuks, Black Hawks, Roaring Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day converted into church-wardens and deacons at least, pestered the gallant rover with frequent solicitations out of England touching the conversion of the Indians, and the enlargement of the Church. Smith, in his perplexity how to satisfy the Society, sent out a party into the swamp, caught an Indian, and sent him home in the first ship to London, telling the Society they might convert one themselves.

The satire reaches its climax when the actual Church is set in direct contradiction to the dictates of the religious sentiment, as in the sketch of our Puritan politics in Hudibras: —

“Our brethren of New England use

Choice malefactors to excuse,

And hang the guiltless in their stead,

Of whom the churches have less need;

As lately happened, in a town

Where lived a cobbler, and but one,

That out of doctrine could cut use

And mend men’s lives as well as shoes.

This precious brother having slain

In times of peace, an Indian

Not of malice, but mere zeal

(Because he was an infidel),

The mighty Tottipottymoy

Sent to our elders an envoy,

Complaining loudly of the breach

Of league held forth by Brother Patch,

Against the articles in force

Between both churches, his and ours,

For which he craved the saints to render

Into his hands, or hang the offender;

But they, maturely having weighed

They had no more but him o’ th’ trade

(A man that served them in the double

Capacity to teach and cobble),

Resolved to spare him; yet to do

The Indian Hoghan Moghan too

Impartial justice, in his stead did

Hand an old weaver that was bedrid.”

In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to that in religion which lies against superstition. A classification or nomenclature used by the scholar only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws of nature, and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac for a night, and implying a march and a conquest to-morrow, — becomes through indolence a barrack and a prison, in which the man sits down immovably, and wishes to detain others. The physiologist Camper humorously confesses the effect of his studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. “I have been employed,” he says, “six months on the Cetacea; I understand the osteology of the head of all these monsters, and have made the combination with the human head so well that everybody now appears to me narwhale, porpoise, or mar-souins. Women, the prettiest in society, and those whom I find less comely, they are all either nar-whales or porpoises to my eyes.” I chanced the other day to fall in with an odd illustration of the remark I had heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health; I was hastening to visit an old and honored friend, who, I was in-formed, was in a dying condition, when I met his physician, who accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling in his eyes. “And how is my friend, the reverend Doctor?” I inquired. “O, I saw him this morning; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever seen: face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, all the symptoms perfect.” And he rubbed his hands with delight, for in the country we cannot find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis of the books. I think there is malice in a very trifling story which goes about, and which I should not take any notice of, did I not suspect it to contain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural History Society. It is of a boy who was learning his alphabet. “That letter is A,” said the teacher; “A,” drawled the boy. “That is B,” said the teacher; “B,” drawled the boy, and so on. “That is W,” said the teacher. “The devil!” exclaimed the boy, “is that We?”

The pedantry of literature belongs to the same category. In both cases there is a lie, when the mind, seizing a classification to help it to a sincerer knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification; or learning languages and reading books to the end of a better acquaintance with man, stops in the languages and books: in both the learner seems to be wise, and is not.

The same falsehood, the same confusion of the sympathies because a pretension is not made good, points the perpetual satire against poverty, since, according to Latin poetry and English doggerel,

“Poverty does nothing worse

Than to make man ridiculous.”

In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension of the parties to some consideration on account of their condition. If the man is not ashamed of his poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man who stands on his manhood destroys the jest. The poverty of the saint, of the rapt philosopher, of the naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the surrender of the man to his appearance; as if a man should neglect himself and treat his shadow on the wall with marks of infinite respect. It affects us oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to see a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is always droll. The relation of the parties is inverted — hat being for the moment master, the by-standers cheering the hat. The multiplication of artificial wants and expenses in civilized life, and the exaggeration of all trifling forms, present innumerable occasions for this discrepancy to expose itself. Such is the story told of the painter Astley, who, going out of Rome one day with a party for a ramble in the Campagna and the weather proving hot, refused to take off his coat when his companions threw off theirs, but sweltered on; which, exciting remark, his comrades playfully forced off his coat, and behold on the back of his waistcoat a gay cascade was thundering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very refreshing in so sultry a day; — a picture of his own, with which the poor painter had been fain to repair the shortcomings of his wardrobe. The same astonishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the man out of nature, through some superstition of his house or equipage, as if truth and virtue should be bowed out of creation by the clothes they wore, is the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning eminent fops and fashionists, and, in like manner, of the gay Rameau of Diderot, who believes in nothing but hunger, and that the sole end of art, virtue, and poetry is to put something for mastication between the upper and lower mandibles.

Alike in all these cases and in the instance of cowardice or fear of any sort, from the loss of life to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is violated. He whom all things should serve, serves some one of his own tools. In fine pictures the head sheds on the limbs the expression of the face. In Raphael’s Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, the crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but for the extraordinary energy of the face, it would draw the eye too much; but the countenance of the celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it not In poor pictures the limbs and trunk degrade the face. So among the women in the street, you shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, and the lady herself quite another, wearing withal an expression of meek submission to her bonnet and dress; and another whose dress obeys and heightens the expression of her form.

More food for the Comic is afforded whenever the personal appearance, the face, form, and manners, are subjects of thought with the man himself. No fashion is the best fashion for those matters which will take care of themselves. This is the butt of those jokes of the Paris drawing-rooms, which Napoleon reckoned so formidable, and which are copiously recounted in the French Mémoires. A lady of high rank, but of lean figure, had given the Countess Dulauloy the nickname of “Le Grenadier tricolore,” in allusion to her tall figure, as well as to her republican opinions; the Countess retaliated by calling Madame “the Venus of the Père-Lachaise,” a compliment to her skeleton which did not fail to circulate. “Lord C.,” said the Countess of Gordon, “O, he is a perfect comb, all teeth and back.” The Persians have a pleasant story of Tamerlane which relates to the same particulars: “Timur was an ugly man; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. One day when Chodscha was with him, Timur scratched his head, since the hour of the barber was come, and commanded that the barber should be called. Whilst he was shaven, the barber gave him a looking-glass in his hand. Timur saw himself in the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. Therefore he began to weep; Chodscha also set him-self to weep, and so they wept for two hours. On this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and entertained him with strange stories in order to make him forget all about it. Timur ceased weeping, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first to weep amain, and in good earnest. At last said Timur to Chodscha, ‘Hearken! I have looked in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I grieved, because, although I am Caliph, and have also much wealth, and many wives, yet still I am so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why weepest thou without ceasing?’ Chodscha answered, ‘If thou hast only seen thy face once, and at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself, but hast wept, what should we do, — we who see thy face every day and night? If we weep not, who should weep? Therefore have I wept.’ Timur almost split his sides with laughing.”

Politics also furnish the same mark for satire. What is nobler than the expansive sentiment of patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole nation? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to end in the very intelligible maxims of trade, so much for so much, the intellect feels again the half-man. Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and carry a principle against all opposition? But when the men appear who ask our votes as representatives of this ideal, we are sadly out of countenance.

But there is no end to this analysis. We do nothing that is not laughable whenever we quit our spontaneous sentiment. All our plans, managements, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom and love which man represents, are equally imperfect and ridiculous. But we cannot afford to part with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, as well as by tears and terrors; explore the whole of nature, the farce and buffoonery in the yard below, as well as the lessons of poets and philosophers upstairs in the hall, and get the rest and refreshment of the shaking of the sides. But the Comic also has its own speedy limits. Mirth quickly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon die of inanition, as some persons have been tickled to death. The same scourge whips the joker and the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was convulsing Naples with laughter, a patient waited on a physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming his life. The physician endeavored to cheer his spirits, and advised him to go to the theatre and see Carlini. He replied, “I am Carlini.”

QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.

Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and even at the infant mammals, must have remarked the extreme content they take in suction, which constitutes the main business of their life. If we go into a library or news-room, we see the same function on a higher plane, performed with like ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indicating the sweetness of the act. In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. Like Plato’s disciple who has perceived a truth, “he is preserved from harm until another period.” In every man’s memory, with the hours when life culminated are usually associated certain books which met his views. Of a large and powerful class we might ask with confidence, What is the event they most desire? what gift? What but the book that shall come, which they have sought through all libraries, through all languages, that shall be to their mature eyes what many a tinsel-covered toy pamphlet was to their childhood, and shall speak to the imagination? Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough of literature. If we encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he read. We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not less eager. “He that borrows the aid of an equal understanding,” said Burke, “doubles his own; he that uses that of a superior elevates his own to the stature of that he contemplates.”

We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation. The Patent-Office Commissioner knows that all machines in use have been invented and re-invented over and over; that the mariner’s compass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable types, the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., have been many times found and lost, from Egypt, China, and Pompeii down; and if we have arts which Rome wanted, so also Rome had arts which we have lost; that the invention of yesterday of making wood indestructible by means of vapor of coal-oil or paraffime was suggested by the Egyptian method which has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years.

The highest statement of new philosophy complacently caps itself with some prophetic maxim from the oldest learning. There is something mortifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme economy argues a very small capital of invention. The stream of affection flows broad and strong; the practical activity is a river of supply; but the dearth of design accuses the penury of intellect. How few thoughts! In a hundred years, millions of men and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory of philosophy that offers a solution of the great problems, not an art of education that fulfils the conditions. In this delay and vacancy of thought we must make the best amends we can by seeking the wisdom of others to fill the time.

If we confine ourselves to literature, ‘t is easy to see that the debt is immense to past thought. None escapes it. The originals are not original. There is imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history. The first book tyrannizes over the second. Read Tasso, and you think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think of Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how narrow are the limits of human invention. The “Paradise Lost” had never existed but for these precursors; and if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its native country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but real connection with our own Bibles.

Read in Plato and you shall find Christian dogmas, and not only so, but stumble on our evangelical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and, long before, in Heraclitus and Parmendies. Whoso knows Plutarch, Lucian, Rabelais, Montaigne and Bayle will have a key to many supposed originalities. Rabelais is the source of many a proverb, story, and jest, derived from him into all modern languages; and if we knew Rabelais’s reading we should see the rill of the Rabelais river. Sweden-borg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to uninstructed and to thoughtless persons: their originality will disappear to such as are either well-read or thoughtful; for scholars will recognize their dogmas as reappearing in men of a similar intellectual elevation throughout history. Albert, the “wonderful doctor,” St. Buonaventura, the “seraphic doctor,” Thomas Aquinas, the “angelic doctor” of the thirteenth century, whose books made the sufficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed, and he survives for us. “Renard the Fox,” a German poem of the thirteenth century, was long supposed to be the original work, until Grimm found fragments of another original a century older. M. Le Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of Molière, La Fontaine, Boccaccio, and of Voltaire.

Mythology is no man’s work; but, what we daily observe in regard to the bon-mots that circulate in society, — that every talker helps a story in repeating it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament of fact a good fable is constructed, — the same growth befalls mythology: the legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer, everybody adding a grace or dropping a fault or rounding the form, until it gets an ideal truth.

Religious literature, the psalms and liturgies of churches, are of course of this slow growth, — a fagot of selections gathered through ages, leaving the worse and saving the better, until it is at last the work of the whole communion of worshippers. The Bible itself is like an old Cremona; it has been played upon by the devotion of thousands of years until every word and particle is public and tunable. And whatever undue reverence may have been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic inspiration, the stronger tendency we are describing is likely to undo. What divines had assumed as the distinctive revelations of Christianity, theologic criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from the Stoics and poets of Greece and Rome. Later, when Confucius and the Indian scriptures were made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wisdom could be thought of; and the surprising results of the new researches into the history of Egypt have opened to us the deep debt of the churches of Rome and England to the Egyptian hierology.

The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humor, and the whole cyclopádia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years ago, when Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate filled the eyes and minds of young men, you might often hear cited as Mr. Webster’s three rules: first, never to do to-day what he could defer till to-morrow; secondly, never to do himself what he could make another do for him; and, thirdly, never to pay any debt to-day. Well, they are none the worse for being already told, in the last generation, of Sheridan; and we find in Grimm’s Mémoires that Sheridan got them from the witty D’Argenson; who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell of whom he first heard them told. In our own college days we remember hearing other pieces of Mr. Webster’s advice to students, — among others, this: that, when he opened a new book, he turned to the table of contents, took a pen, and sketched a sheet of matters and topics, what he knew and what he thought, before he read the book. But we find in Southey’s “Commonplace Book” this said of the Earl of Strafford: “I learned one rule of him,” says Sir G. Radcliffe, “which I think worthy to be remembered. When he met with a well-penned oration or tract upon any subject, he framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing and disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read the book; then, reading, compared his own with the author’s, and noted his own defects and the author’s art and fulness; whereby he drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own wants to supply them.” I remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that a lady having expressed in his presence a passionate wish to witness a great victory, he replied: “Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory, — excepting a great defeat.” But this speech is also D’Argenson’s, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to Baron Alderson upon Brougham, “What a wonderful versatile mind has Brougham! he knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything.” You may find the original of this gibe in Grimm, who says that Louis XVI., going out of chapel after hearing a sermon from the Abbé Maury, said, “Si l’Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout. “ A pleasantry which ran through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted family connection in New England, was only a theft of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s mot of a hundred years ago, that “the world was made up of men and women and Herveys.”

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus’s egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais’s dying words, “I am going to see the great Perhaps” ( le grand Peut-être ), only repeats the “IF” inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe’s favorite phrase, “the open secret,” translates Aristotle’s answer to Alexander, “These books are published and not published.” Madame de Staël’s “Architecture is frozen music” is borrowed from Goethe’s “dumb music,” which is Vitruvius’s rule, that “the architect must not only understand drawing, but music.” Wordsworth’s hero acting “on the plan which pleased his childish thought,” is Schiller’s “Tell him to reverence the dreams of his youth,” and earlier, Bacon’s “ Consilia juventutis plus divinitatis habent. “

In romantic literature examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse in the old Scotch ballad of “The Drowned Lovers,”

“Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water,

Thy streams are ower strang;

Make me thy wrack when I come back,

But spare me when I gang,”

is a translation of Martial’s epigram on Hero and Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the same: —

“Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo.”

Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of “John Barleycorn,” and furnished Moore with the original of the piece,

“When in death I shall calm recline

Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear,” etc.

There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human mind. Such are “The Seven Sleepers,” “Gyges’s Ring,” “The Travelling Cloak,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Pied Piper,” “Jack and his Beanstalk,” the “Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,” — whose omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all frontiers. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle up by the kitchen fire and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in Greece in Plato’s time. Antiphanes, one of Plato’s friends, laughingly compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon as they were pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter. It is only within this century that England and America discovered that their nursery-tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are the property of all the nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years.

If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of decoration, — if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences, — we shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest.

Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar’s dinner, from a hundred charities? A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority. In opening a new book we often discover, from the unguarded devotion with which the writer gives his motto or text, all we have to expect from him. If Lord Bacon appears already in the preface, I go and read the “Instauration” instead of the new book.

The mischief is quickly punished in general and in particular. Admirable mimics have nothing of their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat, — an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or a mistletoe or dodder among plants, — the self-supplying organs wither and dwindle, as being superfluous. In common prudence there is an early limit to this leaning on an original. In literature, quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, and, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.

But it is necessary to remember there are certain considerations which go far to qualify a reproach too grave. This vast mental indebtedness has every variety that pecuniary debt has, — every variety of merit. The capitalist of either kind is as hungry to lend as the consumer to borrow; and the transaction no more indicates intellectual turpitude in the borrower than the simple fact of debt involves bankruptey. On the contrary, in far the greater number of cases the transaction is honorable to both. Can we not help ourselves as discreetly by the force of two in literature? Certainly it only needs two well placed and well tempered for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending any private enterprise! Shall we converse as spies? Our very abstaining to repeat and credit the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he and they combine? Cannot they sink their jealousies in God’s love, and call their poem Beaumont and Fletcher, or the Theban Phalanx’s? The city will for nine days or nine years make differences and sinister comparisons: there is a new and more excellent public that will bless the friends. Nay, it is an inevitable fruit of our social nature. The child quotes his father, and the man quotes his friend. Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody, and to that person whatever he says has an enhanced value. Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust, in another mouth. There is none so eminent and wise but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or qualifies his own, and men of extraordinary genius acquire an almost absolute ascendant over their nearest companions. The Comte de Crillon said one day to M. d’Allonville, with French vivacity, “If the universe and I professed one opinion and M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should be at once convinced that the universe and I were mistaken.”

Original power is usually accompanied with assimilating power, and we value in Coleridge his excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as much possibly more, than his original suggestions. If an author give us just distinctions, inspiring lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not so important to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided by these, we know him as a benefactor, and shall return to him as long as he serves us so well. We may like well to know what is Plato’s and what is Montesquieu’s or Goethe’s part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west. Then there are great ways of borrowing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies: “Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life.” And we must thank Karl Ottfried Müller for the just remark, “Poesy, drawing within its circle all that is glorious and inspiring, gave itself but little concern as to where its flowers originally grew.” So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such superiority that Dubuc said: “He is like the false Amphitryon; although the stranger, it is always he who has the air of being master of the house.” Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, caught it up, meditated upon it, and very soon reproduced it in his conversation and writing. If De Quincey said, “That is what I told you,” he replied, “No: that is mine, — mine, and not yours.” On the whole, we like the valor of it. ‘T is on Marmontel’s principle, “I pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it;” and on Bacon’s broader rule, “I take all knowledge to be my province.” It betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no individual, but is the treasure of all men. And inasmuch as any writer has ascended to a just view of man’s condition, he has adopted this tone. In so far as the receiver’s aim is on life, and not on literature, will be his indifference to the source. The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship. It never troubles the simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought makes ridiculous the pains of the critic who should tell him where such a word had been said before. “It is no more according to Plato than according to me.” Truth is always present: it only needs to lift the iron lids of the mind’s eye to read its oracles. But the moment there is the purpose of display, the fraud is exposed, In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to invent. Always some steep transition, some sudden alteration of temperature, or of point of view, betrays the foreign interpolation.

There is, besides, a new charm in such intellectual works as, passing through long time, have had a multitude of authors and improvers. We admire that poetry which no man wrote, — no poet less than the genius of humanity itself, — which is to be read in a mythology, in the effect of a fixed or national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, or cities, or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is language. Every word in the language has once been used happily. The ear, caught by that felicity, retains it, and it is used again and again, as if the charm belonged to the word and not to the life of thought which so enforced it. These profane uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But a quick wit can at any time reinforce it, and it comes into vogue again. Then people quote so differently: one finding only what is gaudy and popular; another, the heart of the author, the report of his select and happiest hour; and the reader sometimes giving more to the citation than he owes to it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books; and you can easily pronounce, from the use and relevancy of the sentence, whether it had not done duty many times before, — whether your jewel was got from the mine or from an auctioneer. We are as much informed of a writer’s genius by what he selects as by what he originates. We read the quotation with his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows new interest from the rendering. As the journals say, “the italics are ours.” The profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader. The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize were never quoted until within this century; and Milton’s prose, and Burke, even, have their best fame within it. Every one, too, remembers his friends by their favorite poetry or other reading.

Observe also that a writer appears to more advantage in the pages of another book than in his own. In his own he waits as a candidate for your approbation; in another’s he is a lawgiver.

Then another’s thoughts have a certain advantage with us simply because they are another’s. There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears a fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at the wisdom, and is very merry at heart that he has now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of the new words into his own usual phrase, and he will wonder again at his own simplicity, such tricks do fine words play with us.

It is curious what new interest an old author acquires by official canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or Hallam, or other historian of literature. Their registration of his book, or citation of a passage, carries the sentimental value of a college diploma. Hallam, though never profound, is a fair mind, able to appreciate poetry unless it becomes deep, being always blind and deaf to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, like the Platonists, like Giordano Bruno, like Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan; and Hallam cites a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes a lyric of Edwards or Vaux, and straightway it commends itself to us as if it had received the Isthmian crown.

It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and not less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary person, in order to give it weight, — as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor, and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the Parliament of Paris, described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence, which he pretended to quote from a classic author, and which told admirably well. It is a curious reflex effect of this enhancement of our thought by citing it from another, that many men can write better under a mask than for themselves; as Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish costume, Macpherson as “Ossian;” and, I doubt not, many a young barrister in chambers in London, who forges good thunder for the “Times,” but never works as well under his own name. This is a sort of dramatizing talent; as it is not rare to find great powers of recitation, without the least original eloquence, — or people who copy drawings with admirable skill, but are incapable of any design.

In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote, — reading, as we say, between the lines. You have had the like experience in conversation: the wit was in what you heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best thought came from others. We heard in their words a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and could express ourselves in other people’s phrases to finer purpose than they knew. In Moore’s Diary, Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one of his friends who had said, “I don’t know how it is, a thing that falls flat from me seems quite an excellent joke when given at second-hand by Sheridan. I never like my own bon-mots until he adopts them.” Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip Francis, who, again, was less than his own “Junius;” and James Hogg (except in his poems “Kilmeny” and “The Witch of Fife”) is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the lens of John Wilson, — who, again, writes better under the domino of “Christopher North” than in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia Bacon, that Shakspeare’s plays were written by a society of wits, — by Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Bacon, and others around the Earl of Southampton, — had plainly for her the charm of the superior meaning they would acquire when read under this light; this idea of the authorship controlling our appreciation of the works themselves. We once knew a man overjoyed at the notice of his pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What range he gave his imagination! Who could have written it? Was it not Colonel Carbine, or Senator Tonitrus, or, at the least, Professor Maximilian? Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Roman hand. How it seemed the very voice of the refined and discerning public, inviting merit at last to consent to fame, and come up and take place in the reserved and authentic chairs! He carried the journal with haste to the sympathizing Cousin Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what dismay when the good Matilda, pleased with his pleasure, confessed she had written the criticism, and carried it with her own hands to the post-office! “Mr. Wordsworth,” said Charles Lamb, “allow me to introduce to you my only admirer.”

Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the world, that every soul existed in a society of souls, from which all its thoughts passed into it, as the blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child; and he noticed that, when in his bed, alternately sleeping and waking, — sleeping, he was surrounded by persons disputing and offering opinions on the one side and on the other side of a proposition; waking, the like suggestions occurred for and against the proposition as his own thoughts; sleeping again, he saw and heard the speakers as before: and this as often as he slept or waked. And if we expand the image, does it not look as if we men were thinking and talking out of an enormous antiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters that filled a sitting-room, but in a circle of intelligences that reached through all thinkers, poets, inventors, and wits, men and women, English, German, Celt, Aryan, Ninevite, Copt, — back to the first geometer, bard, mason, carpenter, planter, shepherd, — back to the first negro, who, with more health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing he saw and dealt with? Our benefactors are as many as the children who invented speech, word by word. Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

q½Ä± åµÖ : all things are in flux. It is inevitable that you are indebted to the past. You are fed and formed by it. The old forest is decomposed for the composition of the new forest. The old animals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish through chemistry the forming race, and every individual is only a momentary fixation of what was yesterday another’s, is to-day his, and will belong to a third to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds: our language, our science, our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair, — all these we never made, we found them ready-made; we but quote them. Goethe frankly said, “What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things: wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe.”

But there remains the indefeasible persistency of the individual to be himself. One leaf, one blade of grass, one meridian, does not resemble another. Every mind is different; and the more it is unfolded, the more pronounced is that difference. He must draw the elements into him for food, and, if they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked by sun and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, however received, these elements pass into the substance of his constitution, will be assimilated, and tend always to form, not a partisan, but a possessor of truth. To all that can be said of the preponderance of the Past, the single word Genius is a sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. The divine never quotes, but is, and creates. The profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, which makes the Past forgotten. Genius believes its faintest presentiment against the testimony of all history; for it knows that facts are not ultimates, but that a state of mind is the ancestor of everything. And what is Originality? It is being, being one’s self, and reporting accurately what we see and are. Genius is in the first instance, sensibility, the capacity of receiving just impressions from the external world, and the power of co-ordinating these after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or original force, for their right distribution and expression. If to this the sentiment of piety be added, if the thinker feels that the thought most strictly his own is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual suggestion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts become new and fertile whilst he speaks them.

Originals never lose their value. There is always in them a style and weight of speech, which the immanence of the oracle bestowed, and which cannot be counterfeited. Hence the permanence of the high poets. Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch cite the poets in the manner in which Scripture is quoted in our churches. A phrase or a single word is adduced, with honoring emphasis, from Pindar, Hesiod, or Euripides, as precluding all argument, because thus had they said: importing that the bard spoke not his own, but the words of some god. True poets have always ascended to this lofty platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth, were very conscious of their responsibilities. When a man thinks happily, he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. Pindar uses this haughty defiance, as if it were impossible to find his sources: “There are many swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice for those with understanding; but to the crowd they need interpreters. He is gifted with genius who knoweth much by natural talent.”

Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the subject to which it has a proper right is seen in mere fitness in time. He that comes second must needs quote him that comes first. The earliest describers of savage life, as Captain Cook’s account of the Society Islands, or Alexander Henry’s travels among our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just point of view. Landsmen and sailors freshly come from the most civilized countries, and with no false expectation, no sentimentality yet about wild life, healthily receive and report what they saw, — seeing what they must, and using no choice; and no man suspects the superior merit of the description, until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or Byron, or the artists, arrive, and mix so much art with their picture that the incomparable advantage of the first narrative appears. For the same reason we dislike that the poet should choose an antique or far-fetched subject for his muse, as if he avowed want of insight. The great deal always with the nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power can we pardon it, when the life of genius is so redundant that out of petulance it flings its fire into some old mummy, and, lo! it walks and blushes again here in the street.

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is for us; but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the Present. Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every man is or should be an inventor. We must not tamper with the organic motion of the soul. ‘T is certain that thought has its own proper motion, and the hints which flash from it, the words overheard at unawares by the free mind, are trustworthy and fertile when obeyed and not perverted to low and selfish account. This vast memory is only raw material. The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.

PROGRESS OF CULTURE.

Address read before the B K Society at Cambridge , July 18, 1867.

We meet to-day under happy omens to our ancient society, to the commonwealth of letters, to the country, and to mankind. No good citizen but shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal Union. The heart still beats with the public pulse of joy that the country has withstood the rude trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with the vast augmentation of strength which it draws from this proof. The storm which has been resisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength to the ship. We may be well contented with our fair inheritance. Was ever such coincidence of advantages in time and place as in America to-day? — the fusion of races and religions; the hungry cry for men which goes up from the wide continent; the answering facility of immigration, permitting every wanderer to choose his climate and government. Men come hither by nations. Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to fly with them over the sea, and to send their messages under it. They come from crowded, antiquated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple forms. Land without price is offered to the settler, cheap education to his children. The temper of our people delights in this whirl of life. Who would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?

“Prisca juvent alios, ego me nune denique natum Gratulor.”

All this activity has added to the value of life, and to the scope of the intellect. I will not say that American institutions have given a new enlargement to our idea of a finished man, but they have added important features to the sketch.

Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power. The war gave us the abolition of slavery, the success of the Sanitary Commission and of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Add to these the new scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment for debt; the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intemperance; the search for just rules affecting labor; the co-operative societies; the insurance of life and limb; the free-trade league; the improved almshouses; the enlarged scale of charities to relieve local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering Greeks; the incipient series of international congresses; — all, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary, teaching nations the taking of government into their own hands, and superseding kings.

The spirit is new. A silent revolution has impelled, step by step, all this activity. A great many full-blown conceits have burst. The coxcomb goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has found that this country and this age belong to the most liberal persuasion; that the day of ruling by scorn and sneers is past; that good sense is now in power, and that resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are now to be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, common civility, and Christian charity proposed by statesmen, and executed by justices of the peace, — by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable to cut the patriot in the street; nay, he lies at his mercy in the ballot of the club.

Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of a socialist, of a scholar, in this age. When classes are exasperated against each other, the peace of the world is always kept by striking a new note. Instantly the units part, and form in a new order, and those who were opposed are now side by side. In this country the prodigious mass of work that must be done has either made new divisions of labor or created new professions. Consider, at this time, what variety of issues, of enterprises public and private, what genius of science, what of administration, what of practical skill, what masters, each in his several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the mines, the inland and marine explorations, the novel and powerful philanthropies, as well as agriculture, the foreign trade and the home trade (whose circuits in this country are as spacious as the foreign), manufactures, the very inventions, all on a national scale too, have evoked! — all implying the appearance of gifted men, the rapid addition to our society of a class of true nobles, by which the self-respect of each town and State is enriched.

Take as a type the boundless freedom here in Massachusetts. People have in all countries been burned and stoned for saying things which are commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every one who was in Italy thirty-five years ago will remember the caution with which his host or guest in any house looked around him, if a political topic were broached. Here the tongue is free, and the hand; and the freedom of action goes to the brink, if not over the brink, of license.

A controlling influence of the times has been the wide and successful study of Natural Science. Steffens said, “The religious opinions of men rest on their views of nature.” Great strides have been made within the present century. Geology, astronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded grand results. The correlation of forces and the polarization of light have carried us to sublime generalizations, — have affected an imaginative race like poetic inspirations. We have been taught to tread familiarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont ourselves to daring conjectures. The narrow sectarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the door of the observatory, and a new and healthful air regenerates the human mind, and imparts a sympathetic enlargement to its inventions and method. That cosmical west-wind which, meteorologists tell us, constitutes, by the revolution of the globe, the upper current, is alone broad enough to carry to every city and suburb, to the farmer’s house, the miner’s shanty, and the fisher’s boat, the inspirations of this new hope of mankind. Now, if any one say we have had enough of these boastful recitals, then I say, Happy is the land wherein benefits like these have grown trite and commonplace.

We confess that in America everything looks new and recent. Our towns are still rude, the make-shifts of emigrants, and the whole architecture tent-like when compared with the monumental solidity of medieval and primeval remains in Europe and Asia. But geology has effaced these distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history. The oldest empires, — what we called venerable antiquity, — now that we have true measures of duration, show like creations of yesterday. It is yet quite too early to draw sound conclusions. The old six thousand years of chronology become a kitchen clock, no more a measure of time than an hour-glass or an egg-glass since the duration of geologic periods has come into view. Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added; and the rocks of Nahant or the dikes of the White Hills disclose that the world is a crystal, and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old but the mind.

But I find not only this equality between new and old countries, as seen by the eye of science, but also a certain equivalence of the ages of history; and as the child is in his playthings working incessantly at problems of natural philosophy, working as hard and as successfully as Newton, so it were ignorance not to see that each nation and period has done its full part to make up the result of existing civility. We are all agreed that we have not on the instant better men to show than Plutarch’s heroes. The world is always equal to itself. We cannot yet afford to drop Homer, nor Æschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after the breaking up of the Roman Empire, had its romantic era, and the productions of that era in each rose to about the same height. Take for an example in literature the Romance of Arthur , in Britain, or in the opposite province of Brittany; the Chanson de Roland , in France; the Chronicle of the Cid, in Spain; the Niebelungen Lied , in Germany; the Norse Sagas, in Scandinavia; and, I may add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. But if these works still survive and multiply, what shall we say of names more distant, or hidden through their very superiority to their coevals, — names of men who have left remains that certify a height of genius in their several directions not since surpassed, and which men in proportion to their wisdom still cherish, — as Zoroaster, Con fucius, and the grand scriptures, only recently known to Western nations, of the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of Menu, the Puranas, the poems of the Mahabarat and the Ramayana?

In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now? They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the eyes with which we see. It is one of our triumphs to have reinstated them. Their Dante and Alfred and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon; their Magna Charta, decimal numbers, mariner’s compass, gunpowder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their painting, are the delight and tuition of ours. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes and the necessity of reform in the calendar; looking over how many horizons as far as into Liverpool and New York, he announced that machines can be constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer; carriages, to move with incredible speed, without aid of animals; and machines to fly into the air like birds. Even the races that we still call savage or semisavage, and which preserve their arts from immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty by the skill with which they make their yam-cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs. The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance to the yacht “America.”

As we find thus a certain equivalence in the ages, there is also an equipollence of individual genius to the nation which it represents. It is a curious fact that a certain enormity of culture makes a man invisible to his contemporaries. It is always hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But, from time to time in history, men are born a whole age too soon. The founders of nations, the wise men and inventors who shine afterwards as their gods, were probably martyrs in their own time. All the transcendent writers and artists of the world,— ‘t is doubtful who they were, they are lifted so fast into mythology; Homer, Menu, Viasa, Dádalus, Hermes, Zoroaster, even Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names are too typical, — Homer, or blind man ; Menu, or man ; Viasa, compiler ; Dádalus, cunning ; Hermes, interpreter ; and so on. Probably the men were so great, so self-fed, that the recognition of them by others was not necessary to them. And every one has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely made), that the philosopher was above his audience. I think I have seen two or three great men who, for that reason, were of no account among scholars.

But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope of any time, must always be sought in the minorities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now; but in his own days his friends were few; and you would need to hunt him in a conventicle with the Methodists of the era, namely, Savonarola, Vittoria Colonna, Contarini, Pole, Occhino; superior souls, the religious of that day, drawn to each other and under some cloud with the rest of the world; reformers, the radicals of the hour, banded against the corruptions of Rome, and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them.

I find the single mind equipollent to a multitude of minds, say to a nation of minds, as a drop of water balances the sea; and under this view the problem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture implies all which gives the mind possession of its own powers; as languages to the critic, telescope to the astronomer. Culture alters the political status of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a monarchy. ‘T is king against king. It is ever the romance of history in all dynasties, — the co-presence of the revolutionary force in intel lect. It creates a personal independence which the monarch cannot look down, and to which he must often succumb. If a man know the laws of nature better than other men, his nation cannot spare him; nor if he know the power of numbers, the secret of geometry, of algebra; on which the computations of astronomy, of navigation, of machinery, rest. If he can converse better than any other, he rules the minds of men wherever he goes; if he has imagination, he intoxicates men. If he has wit, he tempers despotism by epigrams: a song, a satire, a sentence, has played its part in great events. Eloquence a hundred times has turned the scale of war and peace at will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced to two persons, — Philip, or the successor of Philip, on one side, and Demosthenes, a private citizen, on the other. If he has a military genius, like Belisarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or Bismarck, he is the king’s king. If a theologian of deep convictions and strong understanding carries his country with him, like Luther, the state becomes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor; as Thomas à Becket overpowered the English Henry. Wit has a great charter. Popes and kings and Councils of Ten are very sharp with their censorships and inquisitions, but it is on dull people. Some Dante or Angelo, Rabelais, Hafiz, Cervantes, Erasmus, Béranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever genuine wit of the old inimitable class, is always allowed. Kings feel that this is that which they themselves represent; this is no redkerchiefed, red-shirted rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real kingship, and their own only titular. Even manners are a distinction which, we sometimes see, are not to be overborne by rank or official power, or even by other eminent talents, since they too proceed from a certain deep innate perception of fit and fair.

It is too plain that a cultivated laborer is worth many untaught laborers; that a scientific engineer, with instruments and steam, is worth many hundred men, many thousands; that Archimedes or Napoleon is worth for labor a thousand thousands, and that in every wise and genial soul we have England, Greece, Italy, walking, and can dispense with populations of navvies .

Literary history and all history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. Every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million. The artist has always the masters in his eye, though he affect to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da Vinci, and Raffaelle is thinking of Michel Angelo. Tennyson would give his fame for a verdict in his favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and Huxley affect to address the American and English people, but are really writing to each other. Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay, the shipbuilder, thinks of George Steers; and Steers, of Pook, the naval constructor. The names of the masters at the head of each department of science, art, or function are often little known to the world, but are always known to the adepts; as Robert Brown in botany, and Gauss in mathematics. Often the master is a hidden man, but not to the true student; invisible to all the rest, resplendent to him. All his own work and culture form the eye to see the master. In politics, mark the importance of minorities of one, as of Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Arago. The importance of the one person who has the truth over nations who have it not, is because power obeys reality, and not appearance; according to quality, and not quantity. How much more are men than nations! the wise and good souls, the stoics in Greece and Rome, Socrates in Athens, the saints in Judea, Alfred the king, Shakspeare the poet, Newton the philosopher, the perceiver and obeyer of truth, — than the foolish and sensual millions around them! So that, wherever a true man appears, everything usually reckoned great dwarfs itself; he is the only great event, and it is easy to lift him into a mythological personage.

Then the next step in the series is the equiva lence of the soul to nature. I said that one of the distinctions of our century has been the devotion of cultivated men to natural science. The benefits thence derived to the arts and to civilization are signal and immense. They are felt in navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in astronomy, in mining, and in war. But over all their utilities, I must hold their chief value to be metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful powers he obtained, but the test it has been of the scholar. He has accosted this immeasurable nature, and got clear answers. He understood what he read. He found agreement with himself. It taught him anew the reach of the human mind, and that it was citizen of the universe.

The first quality we know in matter is centrality, — we call it gravity, — which holds the universe together, which remains pure and indestructible in each mote as in masses and planets, and from each atom rays out illimitable influence. To this material essence answers Truth, in the intellectual world, — Truth, whose centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere, whose existence we cannot disimagine; the soundness and health of things, against which no blow can be struck but it recoils on the striker; Truth, on whose side we always heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is its centrality, its capacity of truth, and its adhesion to it.

When the correlation of the sciences was announced by Oersted and his colleagues, it was no surprise; we were found already prepared for it. The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divinations of the human mind. Thus, if we should analyze Newton’s discovery, we should say that if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not have been found. We are told that in posting his books, after the French had measured on the earth a degree of the meridian, when he saw that his theoretic results were approximating that empirical one, his hand shook, the figures danced, and he was so agitated that he was forced to call in an assistant to finish the computation. Why agitated? — but because, when he saw, in the fall of an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the sun, of the sun and of all suns to the centre, that perception was accompanied by the spasm of delight by which the intellect greets a fact more immense still, a fact really universal, — holding in intellect as in matter, in morals as in intellect, — that atom draws to atom throughout nature, and truth to truth throughout spirit? His law was only a particular of the more universal law of centrality. Every law in nature, as gravity, centripetence, repulsion, polarity, undulation, has a counterpart in the intellect. The laws above are sisters of the laws below. Shall we study the mathematics of the sphere, and not its causal essence also? Nature is a fable whose moral blazes through it. There is no use in Copernicus if the robust periodicity of the solar system does not show its equal perfection in the mental sphere, the periodicity, the compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I shall never believe that centrifugence and centripetence balance, unless mind heats and meliorates, as well as the surface and soil of the globe.

On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid. Nature is brute but as this soul quickens it; Nature, always the effect, mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is ever as is our sensibility; it is hostile to ignorance, — plastic, transparent, delightful, to knowledge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow and atomic unfolding. All things admit of this extended sense, and the universe at last is only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of vaster interpretation and results. Nature is an enormous system, but in mass and in particle curiously available to the humblest need of the little creature that walks on the earth! The immeasurableness of Nature is not more astounding than his power to gather all her omnipotence into a manageable rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the eye and hand of the philosopher.

Here stretches out of sight, out of conception even, this vast Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable, all self-similar; an unbroken unity, and the mind of man is a key to the whole. He finds that the universe, as Newton said, was “made at one cast;” the mass is like the atom, — the same chemistry, gravity and conditions. The asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a meteoric stone is a chip of an asteroid. As language is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature, the play of all its laws, in one atom. The good wit finds the law from a single observation, — the law, and its limitations, and its correspondences, — as the farmer finds his cattle by a footprint. “State the sun, and you state the planets, and conversely.”

Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws to his science, not less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age, lasting as space and time, embosomed in time and space. And time and space, — what are they? Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives through, and leave where we found them; whose outrunning immensity, the old Greeks believed, astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot on the margin; impossible to deny, impossible to believe. Yet the moral element in man counterpoises this dismaying immensity and bereaves it of terror. The highest flight to which the muse of Horace ascended was in that triplet of lines in which he described the souls which can calmly confront the sublimity of Nature: —

“Hune solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis

Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla

Imbuti spectant.”

The sublime point of experience is the value of a sufficient man. Cube this value by the meeting of two such, of two or more such, who understand and support each other, and you have organized victory. At any time, it only needs the contemporaneous appearance of a few superior and attractive men to give a new and noble turn to the public mind.

The benefactors we have indicated were exceptional men, and great because exceptional. The question which the present age urges with increasing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high qualities which distinguished them can be imparted. The poet Wordsworth asked, “What one is, why may not millions be?” Why not? Knowledge exists to be imparted. Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the child to hear runs to meet the eagerness of the parent to explain. The air does not rush to fill a vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch the expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. The ear outgrows the tongue, is sooner ripe and perfect; but the tongue is always learning to say what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the same lesson.

There is anything but humiliation in the homage men pay to a great man; it is sympathy, love of the same things, effort to reach them, — the expression of their hope of what they shall become when the obstructions of their mal-formation and maleducation shall be trained away. Great men shall not impoverish, but enrich us. Great men, — the age goes on their credit; but all the rest, when their wires are continued and not cut, can do as signal things, and in new parts of nature. “No angel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to himself but the Lord alone.” There is not a person here present to whom omens that should astonish have not predicted his future, have not uncovered his past. The dreams of the night sup plement by their divination the imperfect experiments of the day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a coming fact, as the air and water that hang invisibly around us hasten to become solid in the oak and the animal. But the recurrence to high sources is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the crowd, lend ourselves to low fears and hopes, become the victims of our own arts and implements, and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves by so many ingenious crutches and machineries. What is the use of telegraphs? What of newspapers? To know in each social crisis how men feel in Kansas, in California, the wise man waits for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe the like air, eat of the same wheat, have wives and children, he knows that their joy or resentment rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the Source of events, has earlier information, a private despatch, which relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community.

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral sentiment. This is the fountain of power, preserves its eternal newness, draws its own rent out of every novelty in science. Science cor rects the old creeds; sweeps away, with every new perception, our infantile catechisms, and necessitates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, and awaited expectant these larger insights.

The affections are the wings by which the intellect launches on the void, and is borne across it. Great love is the inventor and expander of the frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It was the conviction of Plato, of Van Helmont, of Pascal, of Swedenborg, that piety is an essential condition of science, that great thoughts come from the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own poetry; they are so much the less poets. But great men are sincere. Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfilment. Every generalization shows the way to a larger. Men say, Ah! if a man could impart his talent, instead of his performance, what mountains of guineas would be paid! Yes, but in the measure of his absolute veracity he does impart it. When he does not play a part, does not wish to shine, — when he talks to men with the unrestrained frankness which children use with each other, he communicates himself, and not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and when we see creation we also begin to create. Depth of character, height of genius, can only find nourishment in this soil. The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed. Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding. Hope never spreads her golden wings but on unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the intellect as for the will. When the will is absolutely surrendered to the moral sentiment, that is virtue; when the wit is surrendered to intellectual truth, that is genius. Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor. I know well to what assembly of educated, reflecting, successful and powerful persons I speak. Yours is the part of those who have received much. It is an old legend of just men, Noblesse oblige; or, superior advantages bind you to larger generosity. Now I conceive that, in this economical world, where every drop and every crumb is husbanded, the transcendent powers of mind were not meant to be misused. The Divine Nature carries on its administration by good men. Here you are set down, scholars and idealists, as in a barbarous age; amidst insanity, to calm and guide it; amidst fools and blind, to see the right done; among violent proprietors, to check self-interest, stone-blind and stone-deaf, by considerations of humanity to the workman and to his child; amongst angry politicians swelling with self-esteem, pledged to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make valid the large considerations of equity and good sense; under bad governments to force on them, by your persistence, good laws. Around that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey.

We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether liberty will not disclose its proper checks; believing that a free press will prove safer than the censorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it will not bankrupt us; universal suffrage, believing that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the springs. It is thereby that men are great and have great allies. And who are the allies? Rude opposition, apathy, slander, — even these. Difficulties exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no more complain of the obstructions that make success hard, than of the iron walls of the gun which hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled round with iron tube with that purpose, to give it irresistible force in one direction. A strenuous soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the assailant that makes the vigor of the defender. The great are not tender at being obscure, despised, insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse fortune. Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times, which search till they find resistance and bottom. They wish, as Pindar said, “to tread the floors of hell, with necessities as hard as iron.” Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter. Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough. In England, it was the game laws which exasperated the farmers to carry the Reform Bill. It was what we call plantation manners which drove peaceable forgiving New England to emancipation without phrase. In the Rebellion, who were our best allies? Always the enemy. The community of scholars do not know their own power, and dishearten each other by tolerating political baseness in their members. Now nobody doubts the power of manners, or that wherever high society exists it is very well able to exclude pretenders. The intruder finds himself uncomfortable, and quickly departs to his own gang.

It has been our misfortune that the politics of America have been often immoral. It has had the worst effect on character. We are a complaisant, forgiving people, presuming, perhaps, on a feeling of strength. But it is not by easy virtue, where the public is concerned, that heroic results are ob tained. We have suffered our young men of ambition to play the game of politics and take the immoral side without loss of caste, — to come and go without rebuke. But that kind of loose association does not leave a man his own master. He cannot go from the good to the evil at pleasure, and then back again to the good. There is a text in Swedenborg which tells in figure the plain truth. He saw in vision the angels and the devils; but these two companies stood not face to face and hand in hand, but foot to foot, — these perpendicular up, and those perpendicular down.

Brothers, I draw new hope from the atmosphere we breathe to-day, from the healthy sentiment of the American people, and from the avowed aims and tendencies of the educated class. The age has new convictions. We know that in certain historic periods there have been times of negation, — a decay of thought, and a consequent national decline; that in France, at one time, there was almost a repudiation of the moral sentiment in what is called, by distinction, society, — not a believer within the Church, and almost not a theist out of it. In England the like spiritual disease affected the upper class in the time of Charles II., and down into the reign of the Georges. But it honorably distinguishes the educated class here, that they believe in the succor which the heart yields to the intellect, and draw greatness from its inspirations. And when I say the educated class, I know what a benignant breadth that word has, — new in the world, — reaching millions instead of hundreds. And more, when I look around me, and consider the sound material of which the cultivated class here is made up, — what high personal worth, what love of men, what hope, is joined with rich information and practical power, and that the most distinguished by genius and culture are in this class of benefactors, — I cannot distrust this geat knighthood of virtue, or doubt that the interests of science, of letters, of politics and humanity, are safe. I think their hands are strong enough to hold up the Republic. I read the promise of better times and of greater men.

PERSIAN POETRY

To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in Vienna in 1856, we owe our best knowledge of the Persians. He has translated into German, besides the “Divan”of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred poets who wrote during a period of five and a half centuries, from A.D. 1050 to 1600. The seven masters of the Persian Parnassus — Firdusi, Enweri, Nisami, Jelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Jami — have ceased to be empty names; and others, like Feri-deddin Attar and Omar Khayyam, promise to rise in Western estimation. That for which mainly books exist is communicated in these rich extracts. Many qualities go to make a good telescope, — as the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth; but the one eminent value is the space-penetrating power; and there are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.

Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. Its elements are few and simple, not exhibiting the long range and undulation of European existence, but rapidly reaching the best and the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game, — the poor, on a watermelon’s peel. All or nothing is the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoon, the mirage, the lion and the plague endanger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. “My father’s empire,” said Cyrus to Xenophon, “is so large that people perish with cold at one extremity whilst they are suffocated with heat at the other.” The temperament of the people agrees with this life in extremes. Religion and poetry are all their civilization. The religion teaches an inexorable Destiny. It distinguishes only two days in each man’s history, — his birthday, called the Day of the Lot , and the Day of Judgment. Courage and absolute submission to what is appointed him are his virtues.

The favor of the climate, making subsistence easy and encouraging an outdoor life, allows to the Eastern nations a highly intellectual organization, — leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the Hindoos (more Oriental in every sense), whom no people have surpassed in the grandeur of their ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs, with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry. Layard has given some details of the effect which the improv-visatori produced on the children of the desert. “When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young chief’s excitement was almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by these rude measures, which have the same kind of effect on the wild tribes of the Persian mountains. Such verses, chanted by their self-taught poets or by the girls of their encampment, will drive warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or prove an ample reward on their return from the dangers of the ghazon , or the fight. The excitement they produce exceeds that of the grape. He who would understand the influence of the Homeric ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect which similar compositions have upon the wild nomads of the East.” Elsewhere he adds, “Poetry and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab; a couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, without the evil effect of either.”

The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are connected with the Jewish history and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch. The principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry is Solomon. Solomon had three talismans: first, the signet-ring by which he commanded the spirits, on the stone of which was engraven the name of God; second, the glass in which he saw the secrets of his enemies and the causes of all things, figured; the third, the east-wind, which was his horse. His counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise fowl who had lived ever since the beginning of the world, and now lives alone on the highest summit of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none now living has seen him. By him Solomon was taught the language of birds, so that he heard secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of a length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon, — men placing themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on his left. When all were in order, the east-wind, at his command, took up the carpet and transported it with all that were upon it, whither he pleased, — the army of birds at the same time flying overhead and forming a canopy to shade them from the sun. It is related that when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a palace, of which the floor or pavement was of glass, laid over running water, in which fish were swimming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, and raised her robes, thinking she was to pass through the water. On the occasion of Solomon’s marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents, appeared before his throne. Behind them all came the ant, with a blade of grass: Solomon did not despise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier, at a certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one of the Dews or evil spirits found, and, governing in the name of Solomon, deceived the people.

Firdusi, the Persian Homer, has written in the Shah Nameh the annals of the fabulous and heroic kings of the country: of Karun (the Persian Crœsus), the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with all his treasures, lies buried not far from the Pyramids, in the sea which bears his name; of Jamschid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted seven hundred years; of Kai Kaus, in whose palace, built by demons on Alburz, gold and silver and precious stones were used so lavishly that in the brilliancy produced by their combined effect, night and day appeared the same; of Afrasiyab, strong as an ele-phant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean and his hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan that every hair on his body started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the sinews of an enemy.

These legends, with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life; the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschnun, of Chosru and Schirin, and those of the nightingale for the rose; pearl-diving, and the virtues of gems; the cohol, a cosmetic by which pearls and eyebrows are indelibly stained black, the bladder in which musk is brought, the down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the eyelash; lilies, roses, tulips, and jasmines, — make the staple imagery of Persian odes.

The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the most part, they affect short poems and epigrams. Gnomic verses, rules of life conveyed in a lively image, especially in an image addressed to the eye and contained in a single stanza, were always current in the East; and if the poem is long, it is only a string of unconnected verses. They use an incon-secutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and the connection between the stanzas of their longer odes is much like that between the refrain of our old English ballads, —

“The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall,”

or

“The rain it raineth every day,” —

and the main story.

Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the following: —

“The secret that should not be blown

Not one of thy nation must know;

You may padlock the gate of a town,

But never the mouth of a foe:”

or this of Omar Khayyam: —

“On earth’s wide thoroughfares below

Two only men contented go:

Who knows what’s right and what’s forbid,

And he from whom is knowledge hid.”

Here is a poem on a melon, by Adsched of Meru: —

“Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk,

Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare,

If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair,

If you leave it whole, the full harvest moon is there.”

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his extraordinary gifts adds to some of the attributes of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace and Burns, the insight of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance at Nature than belongs to either of these bards. He accosts all topics with an easy audacity. “He only,” he says, “is fit for company, who knows how to prize earthly happiness at the value of a nightcap. Our father Adam sold Paradise for two kernels of wheat; then blame me not, if I hold it dear at one grapestone.” He says to the Shah, “Thou who rulest after words and thoughts which no ear has heard and no mind has thought, abide firm until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from the old graybeard of the sky.” He says, —

“I batter the wheel of heaven

When it rolls not rightly by;

I am not one of the snivellers

Who fall thereon and die.”

The rapidity of his turns is always surprising us: —

“See how the roses burn!

Bring wine to quench the fire!

Alas! the flames come up with us,

We perish with desire.”

After the manner of his nation, he abounds in pregnant sentences which might be engraved on a sword-blade and almost on a ring.

“In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever wonderful.”

“Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another shuts.”

“On every side is an ambush laid by the robber-troops of circumstance; hence it is that the horseman of life urges on his courser at headlong speed.”

“The earth is a host who murders his guests.”

“Good is what goes on the road of Nature. On the straight way the traveller never misses.”

“Alas! till now I had not known My guide and Fortune’s guide are one.”

“The understanding’s copper coin Counts not with the gold of love.”

“’Tis writ on Paradise’s gate, ‘Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!’”

“The world is a bride superbly dressed; — Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul.”

“Loose the knots of the heart; never think on thy fate: No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl.”

“There resides in the grieving A poison to kill; Beware to go near them ‘T is pestilent still.”

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new ground of observation, whence to draw sometimes a deeper moral than regulated sober life affords, and this is foreseen: —

“I will be drunk and down with wine;

Treasures we find in a ruined house.”

Riot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden lot the veil that covers it: —

“To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs, Bring bands of wine for the stupid head.”

“The Builder of heaven Hath sundered the earth, So that no footway Leads out of it forth.

“On turnpikes of wonder Wine leads the mind forth, “Straight, sidewise, and upward, West, southward, and north.

“Stands the vault adamantine Until the Doomsday; The wine-cup shall ferry Thee o’er it away.”

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit in him is entire and as good as the world, which entitle the poet to speak with authority, and make him an object of interest and his every phrase and syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly fortify and ennoble his tone.

His was the fluent mind in which every thought and feeling came readily to the lips. “Loose the knots of the heart,” he says. We absorb elements enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with great arteries, — this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and gratification. The difference is not so much in the quality of men’s thoughts as in the power of uttering them. What is pent and smouldered in the dumb actor, is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new form, at once relief and creation.

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall, and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles, — that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and reverend, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows:

“Let us draw the cowl through the brook of wine.”

He tells his mistress that not the dervish, or the monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and certainly not their cowls and mummeries but her glances can impart to him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz for the name’s sake. A law or statute is to him what a fence is to a nimble school-boy, — a temptation for a jump. “We would do nothing but good, else would shame come to us on the day when the soul must hie hence; and should they then deny us Paradise, the Houris themselves would forsake that and come out to us.”

His complete intellectual emancipation he communicates to the reader. There is no example of such facility of allusion, such use of all materials. Nothing is too high, nothing too low for his occasion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to his cupbearer. This boundless charter is the right of genius.

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervish, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit in which the song is written that imports, and not the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy; and lays the emphasis on these to mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. These are the natural topics and language of his wit and perception. But it is the play of wit and the joy of song that he loves; and if you mistake him for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affirmations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the world. Sometimes it is a glance from the height of thought, as thus: —

“Bring wine; for in the audience-hall of the soul’s independence, what is sentinel or Sultan? what is the wise man or the intoxicated?”

And sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are only one pebble more in the eternal vortex and revolution of Fate: —

“I am: what I am

My dust will be again.”

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff; for it is not created to excite the animal appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelligence. In all poetry, Pindar’s rule holds, — ÃÅ½µÄ¿ÖÂ ÆÉ½µÖ , it speaks to the intelligent; and Hafiz is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, with a parrot’s, or, as at other times, with an eagle’s quill.

Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the unimportance of your subject to success, provided only the treatment be cordial. In general what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to grandees? Yet in the “Divan” you would not skip them, since his muse seldom supports him better:

“What lovelier forms things wear,

Now that the Shah comes back!”

And again: —

“Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down,

Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear.”

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a compliment to a handsome youth, —

“Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of Shiraz!

I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Bu-chara!” —

the verses came to the ears of Timour in his palace. Timour taxed Hafiz with treating disrespectfully his two cities, to raise and adorn which he had conquered nations. Hafiz replied, “Alas, my lord, if I had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor!”

The Persians had a mode of establishing copyright the most secure of any contrivance with which we are acquainted. The law of the ghaselle , or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza. Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece. It is itself a test of skill, as this self-naming is not quite easy. We remember but two or three examples in English poetry: that of Chaucer, in the “House of Fame;” Jonson’s epitaph on his son, —

“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;”

and Cowley’s, —

“The melancholy Cowley lay.”

But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the opportunity of the most playful self-assertion, always gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of Falstaff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells us, “The angels in heaven were lately learning his last pieces.” He says, “The fishes shed their pearls, out of desire and longing as soon as the ship of Hafiz swims the deep.”

“Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me;

O, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind!

This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded,

‘Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz!’”

Again, —

“I heard the harp of the planet Venus, and it said in the early morning, ‘I am the disciple of the sweet voiced Hafiz!’”

And again, —

“When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in heaven out to the dance.”

“No one has unvailed thoughts like Hafiz, since the locks of the World-bride were first curled.”

“Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not himself by nature noble.”

But we must try to give some of these poetic flourishes the metrical form which they seem to require: —

“Fit for the Pleiads’ azure chord

The songs I sung, the pearls I bored.”

Another: —

“I have no hoarded treasure,

Yet have I rich content;

The first from Allah to the Shah,

The last to Hafiz went.”

Another: —

“High heart, O Hafiz! though not thine

Fine gold and silver ore;

More worth to thee the gift of song,

And the clear insight more.”

Again: —

“O Hafiz! speak not of thy need;

Are not these verses thine?

Then all the poets are agreed,

No man can less repine.”

He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man of his people. To the vizier returning from Mecca he says, —

“Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune. Thou hast indeed seen the temple; but I, the Lord of the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk-bladder of the merchant or from the musky morning-wind that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe every hour of the day.”

And with still more vigor in the following lines: —

“Oft have I said, I say it once more,

I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself.

I am a kind of parrot; the mirror is holden to me;

What the Eternal says, I stammering say again.

Give me what you will; I eat thistles as roses,

And according to my food I grow and I give.

Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl,

And am only seeking one to receive it.”

And his claim has been admitted from the first. The muleteers and camel-drivers, on their way through the desert, sing snatches of his songs, not so much for the thought as for their joyful temper and tone; and the cultivated Persians know his poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not appear to have set any great value on his songs, since his scholars collected them for the first time after his death.

In the following poem the soul is figured as the Phœnix alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life: —

“My phœnix long ago secured His nest in the sky-vault’s cope; In the body’s cage immured, He was weary of life’s hope.

“Round and round this heap of ashes Now flies the bird amain, But in that odorous niche of heaven Nestles the bird again.

“Once flies he upward, he will perch On Tuba’s golden bough; His home is on that fruited arch Which cools the blest below.

“If over this world of ours His wings my phœnix spread, How gracious falls on land and sea The soul-refreshing shade!

“Either world inhabits he, Sees oft below him planets roll; His body is all of air compact, Of Allah’s love his soul.”

Here is an ode which is said to be a favorite with all educated Persians: —

“Come! — the palace of heaven rests on aery pillars, —

Come, and bring me wine; our days are wind.

I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul

Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces.

Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven

Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy?

O high-flying falcon! the Tree of Life is thy perch;

This nook of grief fits thee ill for a nest.

Hearken! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven;

I cannot divine what holds thee here in a net.

I, too, have a counsel for thee; O, mark it and keep it,

Since I received the same from the Master above:

Seek not for faith or for truth in a world of light-minded girls;

A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride.

Cumber thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not,

’Tis but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us.

Accept whatever befalls; uncover thy brow from thy locks;

Never to me nor to thee was option imparted;

Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose.

The loving nightingale mourns; — cause enow for mourning; —

Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?

Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech.”

The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive and fig-tree, the birds that inhabit them, and the garden flowers, are never wanting in these musky verses, and are always named with effect. “The willows,” he says, “bow themselves to every wind out of shame for their unfruitfulness.” We may open anywhere on a floral catalogue.

“By breath of beds of roses drawn, I found the grove in the morning pure, In the concert of the nightingales My drunken brain to cure.

“With unrelated glance I looked the rose in the eye: The rose in the hour of gloaming Flamed like a lamp hard-by

“She was of her beauty proud, And prouder of her youth, The while unto her flaming heart The bulbul gave his truth.

“The sweet narcissus closed Its eye, with passion pressed; The tulips out of envy burned Moles in their scarlet breast.

“The lilies white prolonged Their sworded tongue to the smell; The clustering anemones Their pretty secrets tell.’

Presently we have, —

“All day the rain

Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain,

The flood may pour from morn till night

Nor wash the pretty Indians white.”

And so onward, through many a page.

This picture of the first days of Spring, from Enweri, seems to belong to Hafiz: —

“O’er the garden water goes the wind alone

To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave;

The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone,

But it burns again on the tulips brave.”

Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, and they have matched on this head the absoluteness of Montaigne.

Hafiz says, —

“Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge enters.”

Ibn Jemin writes thus: —

“Whilst I disdain the populace,

I find no peer in higher place.

Friend is a word of royal tone,

Friend is a poem all alone.

Wisdom is like the elephant,

Lofty and rare inhabitant:

He dwells in deserts or in courts;

With hucksters he has no resorts.”

Jami says, —

“A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe,

So much the kindlier shows him than before;

Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw,

He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor.”

Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very sparing in our citations, though it forms the staple of the “Divan.” He has run through the whole gamut of passion, — from the sacred to the borders, and over the borders, of the profane. The same confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is habitual to him. From the plain text, —

“The chemist of love

Will this perishing mould,

Were it made out of mire,

Transmute into gold,” —

he proceeds to the celebration of his passion; and nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own orbit well enough; but when she saw the curve on Zuleika’s cheek, she was at a loss: —

“And since round lines are drawn

My darling’s lips about,

The very Moon looks puzzled on,

And hesitates in doubt

If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth

Be not her true way to the South.”

His ingenuity never sleeps: —

“Ah, could I hide me in my song,

To kiss thy lips from which it flows!”

and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies: —

“Fair fall thy soft heart!

A good work wilt thou do?

O, pray for the dead

Whom thine eyelashes slew!”

And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird, to take up her abode in! —

“They strew in the path of kings and czars Jewels and gems of price: But for thy head I will pluck down stars, And pave thy way with eyes.

“I have sought for thee a costlier dome Than Mahmoud’s palace high, And thou, returning, find thy home In the apple of Love’s eye.”

Then we have all degrees of passionate abandonment: —

“I know this perilous love-lane No whither the traveller leads, Yet my fancy the sweet scent of Thy tangled tresses feeds.

“In the midnight of thy locks, I renounce the day; In the ring of thy rose-lips, My heart forgets to pray.”

And sometimes his love rises to a religious sentiment: —

“Plunge in you angry waves, Renouncing doubt and care; The flowing of the seven broad seas Shall never wet thy hair.

“Is Allah’s face on thee Bending with love benign, And thou not less on Allah’s eye O fairest! turnest thine.”

We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few specimens from other poets.

NISAML

“While roses bloomed along the plain,

The nightingale to the falcon said,

‘Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?

With closed mouth thou utterest,

Though dying, no last word to man.

Yet sitt’st thou on the hand of princes,

And feedest on the grouse’s breast,

Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels

Squander in a single tone,

Lo! I feed myself with worms,

And my dwelling is the thorn.’ —

The falcon answered, ‘Be all ear:

I, experienced in affairs,

See fifty things, say never one;

But thee the people prizes not,

Who, doing nothing, say’st a thousand.

To me, appointed to the chase,

The king’s hand gives the grouse’s breast;

Whilst a chatterer like thee

Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell!’”

The following passages exhibit the strong tendency of the Persian poets to contemplative and religious poetry and to allegory.

ENWERI. body and soul.

“A painter in China once painted a hall; — Such a web never hung on an emperor’s wall; — One half from his brush with rich colors did run, The other he touched with a beam of the sun, So that all which delighted the eye in one side, The same, point for point, in the other replied. In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found; Thine the star-pointing-roof, and the base on the ground: Is one half depicted with colors less bright? Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!”

IBN JEMIN.

“I read on the porch of a palace bold In a purple tablet letters cast,— ‘A house though a million winters old, A house of earth comes down at last; Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All, And build the dome that shall not fall.”’

“What need,” cries the mystic Feisi, “of palaces and tapestry? What need even of a bed?

“The eternal Watcher, who doth wake

All night in the body’s earthen chest,

Will of thine arms a pillow make,

And a bolster of thy breast.”

Ferideddin Attar wrote the “Bird Conversations,” a mystical tale, in which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and arrived before the throne of the Simorg.

“The bird-soul was ashamed;

Their body was quite annihilated;

They had cleaned themselves from the dust,

And were by the light ensouled.

What was, and was not, — the Past, —

Was wiped out from their breast.

The sun from near-by beamed

Clearest light into their soul;

The resplendence of the Simorg beamed

As one back from all three.

They knew not, amazed, if they

Were either this or that.

They saw themselves all as Simorg,

Themselves in the eternal Simorg.

When to the Simorg up they looked,

They beheld him among themselves;

And when they looked on each other,

They saw themselves in the Simorg.

A single look grouped the two parties,

The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished,

This in that and that in this,

As the world has never heard.

So remained they, sunk in wonder,

Thoughtless in deepest thinking,

And quite unconscious of themselves.

Speechless prayed they to the Highest

To open this secret,

And to unlock Thou and We .

There came an answer without tongue. —

‘The Highest is a sun-mirror;

Who comes to Him sees himself therein,

Sees body and soul, and soul and body;

When you came to the Simorg,

Three therein appeared to you,

And, had fifty of you come,

So had you seen yourselves as many.

Him has none of us yet seen.

Ants see not the Pleiades.

Can the gnat grasp with his teeth

The body of the elephant?

What you see is He not;

What you hear is He not.

The valleys which you traverse,

The actions which you perform,

They lie under our treatment

And among our properties.

You as three birds are amazed,

Impatient, heartless, confused:

Far over you am I raised,

Since I am in act Simorg.

Ye blot out my highest being,

That ye may find yourselves on my throne;

Forever ye blot out yourselves,

As shadows in the sun. Farewell!’”

INSPIRATION.

It was Watt who told King George III. that he dealt in an article of which kings were said to be fond, — Power. ‘T is certain that the one thing we wish to know is, where power is to be bought. But we want a finer kind than that of commerce; and every reasonable man would give any price of house and land and future provision, for condensation, concentration, and the recalling at will of high mental energy. Our money is only a second best. We would jump to buy power with it, that is, intellectual perception moving the will. That is first best. But we don’t know where the shop is. If Watt knew, he forgot to tell us the number of the street. There are times when the intellect is so active that everything seems to run to meet it. Its supplies are found without much thought as to studies. Knowledge runs to the man, and the man runs to knowledge. In spring, when the snow melts, the maple-trees flow with sugar, and you cannot get tubs fast enough; but it is only for a few days. The hunter on the prairie, at the right season, has no need of choosing his ground; east, west, by the river, by the timber, he is everywhere near his game. But the favorable conditions are rather the exception than the rule.

The aboriginal man, in geology and in the dim lights of Darwin’s microscope, is not an engaging figure. We are very glad that he ate his fishes and snails and marrow-bones out of our sight and hearing, and that his doleful experiences were got through with so very long ago. They combed his mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him on end, sent him to school and made him pay taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story for the compassion or the repudiation of his descendants, who are all but unanimous to disown him. We must take him as we find him, — pretty well on in his education, and, in all our knowledge of him, an interesting creature, with a will, an invention, an imagination, a conscience and an inextinguishable hope.

The Hunterian law of arrested development is not confined to vegetable and animal structure, but reaches the human intellect also. In the savage man, thought is infantile; and, in the civilized, unequal and ranging up and down a long scale. In the best races it is rare and imperfect. In happy moments it is reinforced, and carries out what were rude suggestions to larger scope and to clear and grand conclusions. The poet cannot see a natural phenomenon which does not express to him a correspondent fact in his mental experience; he is made aware of a power to carry on and complete the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual facts. Everything which we hear for the first time was expected by the mind; the newest discovery was expected. In the mind we call this enlarged power Inspiration. I believe that nothing great and lasting can be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury. The man’s insight and power are interrupted and occasional; he can see and do this or that cheap task, at will, but it steads him not beyond. He is fain to make the ulterior step by mechanical means. It cannot so be done. That ulterior step is to be also by inspiration; if not through him, then by another man. Every real step is by what a poet called “lyrical glances,” by lyrical facility, and never by main strength and ignorance. Years of mechanic toil will only seem to do it; it will not so be done.

Inspiration is like yeast. ‘T is no matter in which of half a dozen ways you procure the infection; you can apply one or the other equally well to your purpose, and get your loaf of bread. And every earnest workman, in whatever kind, knows some favorable conditions for his task. When I wish to write on any topic, ‘t is of no consequence what kind of book or man gives me a hint or a motion, nor how far off that is from my topic.

Power is the first good. Rarey can tame a wild horse; but if he could give speed to a dull horse, were not that better? The toper finds, without asking, the road to the tavern, but the poet does not know the pitcher that holds his nectar. Every youth should know the way to prophecy as surely as the miller understands how to let on the water or the engineer the steam. A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us. Fine clothes, equipages, villa, park, social consideration, cannot cover up real poverty and insignificance, from my own eyes or from others like mine.

Thoughts let us into realities. Neither miracle nor magic nor any religious tradition, not the immortality of the private soul is incredible, after we have experienced an insight, a thought. I think it comes to some men but once in their life, sometimes a religious impulse, sometimes an intellectual insight. But what we want is consecutiveness. ‘T is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. The separation of our days by sleep almost destroys identity. Could we but turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds! With most men, scarce a link of memory holds yesterday and to-day together. Their house and trade and families serve them as ropes to give a coarse continuity. But they have forgotten the thoughts of yesterday; they say to-day what occurs to them, and something else to-morrow. This insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power, — as if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand, — tantalizes us. We cannot make the inspiration consecutive. A glimpse, a point of view that by its brightness excludes the purview is granted, but no panorama. A fuller inspiration should cause the point to flow and become a line, should bend the line and complete the circle. To-day the electric machine will not work, no spark will pass; then presently the world is all a cat’s back, all sparkle and shock. Sometimes there is no sea-fire, and again the sea is aglow to the horizon. Sometimes the Æolian harp is dumb all day in the window, and again it is garrulous and tells all the secrets of the world. In June the morning is noisy with birds; in August they are already getting old and silent.

Hence arises the question, Are these moods in any degree within control? If we knew how to command them! But where is the Franklin with kite or rod for this fluid? — a Franklin who can draw off electricity from Jove himself, and convey it into the arts of life, inspire men, take them off their feet, withdraw them from the life of trifles and gain and comfort, and make the world transparent, so that they can read the symbols of nature? What metaphysician has undertaken to enumerate the tonics of the torpid mind, the rules for the recovery of inspiration? That is least within control which is best in them. Of the modus of inspiration we have no knowledge. But in the experience of meditative men there is a certain agreement as to the conditions of reception. Plato, in his seventh Epistle, notes that the perception is only accomplished by long familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life according to the things themselves. “Then a light, as if leaping from a fire, will on a sudden be enkindled in the soul, and will then itself nourish itself.” He said again, “The man who is his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry.” The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. What is a man good for without enthusiasm? and what is enthusiasm but this daring of ruin for its object? There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; we are not the less drawn to them. The moth flies into the flame of the lamp; and Swedenborg must solve the problems that haunt him, though he be crazed or killed.

There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. ‘T is the doctrine of faith over works. The raptures of goodness are as old as history and new with this morning’s sun. The legends of Arabia, Persia, and India are of the same complexion as the Christian. Socrates, Menu, Confucius, Zertusht, — we recognize in all of them this ardor to solve the hints of thought.

I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, or only an example on a higher plane of the same gentle gravitation by which stones fall and rivers run. Experience identifies. Shakspeare seems to you miraculous; but the wonderful juxtapositions, parallelisms, transfers, which his genius effected, were all to him locked together as links of a chain, and the mode precisely as conceivable and familiar to higher intelligence as the index-making of the literary hack. The result of the hack is inconceivable to the type-setter who waits for it.

We must prize our own youth. Later, we want heat to execute our plans: the good-will, the knowledge, the whole armory of means are all present, but a certain heat that once used not to fail, refuses its office, and all is vain until this capricious fuel is supplied. It seems a semi-animal heat; as if tea, or wine, or sea-air, or mountains, or a genial companion, or a new thought suggested in book or conversation could fire the train, wake the fancy and the clear perception. Pit-coal, — where to find it? ‘T is of no use that your engine is made like a watch, — that you are a good workman, and know how to drive it, if there is no coal. We are waiting until some tyrannous idea emerging out of heaven shall seize and bereave us of this liberty with which we are falling abroad. Well, we have the same hint or suggestion, day by day. “I am not,” says the man, “at the top of my condition to-day, but the favorable hour will come when I can command all my powers, and when that will be easy to do which is at this moment impossible.” See how the passions augment our force, — anger, love, ambition! — sometimes sympathy, and the expectation of men. Garrick said that on the stage his great paroxysms surprised himself as much as his audience. If this is true on this low plane, it is true on the higher. Swedenborg’s genius was the perception of the doctrine that “The Lord flows into the spirits of angels and of men;” and all poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments when they were superior to themselves, — when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times; so that a religious poet once told me that he valued his poems, not because they were his, but because they were not. He thought the angels brought them to him.

Jacob Behmen said: “Art has not wrote here, nor was there any time to consider how to set it punctually down according to the right understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the spirit, which often went on haste, — so that the penman’s hand, by reason he was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And, though I could have written in a more accurate, fair, and plain manner, the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it, for it comes and goes as a sudden shower. In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university.”

The depth of the notes which we accidentally sound on the strings of nature is out of all proportion to our taught and ascertained faculty, and might teach us what strangers and novices we are, vagabond in this universe of pure power, to which we have only the smallest key. Herrick said: —

“‘T is not every day that I

Fitted am to prophesy;

No, but when the spirit fills

The fantastic panicles,

Full of fire, then I write

As the Godhead doth indite.

Thus enraged, my lines are hurled,

Like the Sibyl’s, through the world:

Look how next the holy fire

Either slakes, or doth retire;

So the fancy cools, — till when

That brave spirit comes again.”

Bonaparte said: “There is no man more pusillanimous than I, when I make a military plan. I magnify all the dangers, and all the possible mischances. I am in an agitation utterly painful. That does not prevent me from appearing quite serene to the persons who surround me. I am like a woman with child, and when my resolution is taken, all is forgot except whatever can make it succeed.”

There are, to be sure, certain risks in this presentiment of the decisive perception, as in the use of ether or alcohol: —

“Great wits to madness nearly are allied;

Both serve to make our poverty our pride.”

Aristotle said: “No great genius was ever without some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand or superior to the voice of common mortals be spoken except by the agitated soul.” We might say of these memorable moments of life that we were in them, not they in us. We found ourselves by happy fortune in an illuminated portion or meteorous zone, and passed out of it again, so aloof was it from any will of ours. “It is a principle of war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the lightning it is better than cannon.”

How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these.

1. Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise, on the mind. The Arabs say that “Allah does not count from life the days spent in the chase,” that is, those are thrown in. Plato thought “exercise would almost cure a guilty conscience.” Sydney Smith said: “You will never break down in a speech on the day when you have walked twelve miles.”

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as the condition of health Sleep benefits mainly by the sound health it produces; incidentally also by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson is sometimes slipped. Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.

“Sleep is like death, and after sleep

The world seems new begun;

White thoughts stand luminous and firm,

Like statues in the sun;

Refreshed from supersensuous founts,

The soul to clearer vision mounts.” [Allingham.]

A man must be able to escape from his cares and fears, as well as from hunger and want of sleep; so that another Arabian proverb has its coarse truth: “When the belly is full, it says to the head, Sing, fellow!” The perfection of writing is when mind and body are both in key; when the mind finds perfect obedience in the body. And wine, no doubt, and all fine food, as of delicate fruits, furnish some elemental wisdom. And the fire, too, as it burns in the chimney; for I fancy that my logs, which have grown so long in sun and wind by Walden, are a kind of muses. So of all the particulars of health and exercise and fit nutriment and tonics. Some people will tell you there is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.

2. The experience of writing letters is one of the keys to the modus of inspiration. When we have ceased for a long time to have any fulness of thoughts that once made a diary a joy as well as a necessity, and have come to believe that an image or a happy turn of expression is no longer at our command, in writing a letter to a friend we may find that we rise to thought and to a cordial power of expression that costs no effort, and it seems to us that this facility may be indefinitely applied and resumed. The wealth of the mind in this respect of seeing is like that of a looking-glass, which is never tired or worn by any multitude of objects which it reflects. You may carry it all round the world, it is ready and perfect as ever for new millions.

3. Another consideration, though it will not so much interest young men, will cheer the heart of older scholars, namely that there is diurnal and secular rest. As there is this daily renovation of sensibility, so it sometimes if rarely happens that after a season of decay or eclipse, darkening months or years, the faculties revive to their fullest force. One of the best facts I know in metaphys ical science is Niebuhr’s joyful record that after his genius for interpreting history had failed him for several years, this divination returned to him. As this rejoiced me, so does Herbert’s poem “The Flower.” His health had broken down early, he had lost his muse, and in this poem he says: —

“And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my only light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.”

His poem called “The Forerunners” also has supreme interest. I understand “The Harbingers” to refer to the signs of age and decay which he detects in himself, not only in his constitution, but in his fancy and his facility and grace in writing verse; and he signalizes his delight in this skill, and his pain that the Herricks, Lovelaces, and Marlows, or whoever else, should use the like genius in language to sensual purpose, and consoles himself that his own faith and the divine life in him remain to him unchanged, unharmed.

4. The power of the will is sometimes sublime; and what is will for, if it cannot help us in emergencies? Seneca says of an almost fatal sickness that befell him, “The thought of my father, who could not have sustained such a blow as my death, restrained me; I commanded myself to live.” Goethe said to Eckermann, “I work more easily when the barometer is high than when it is low. Since I know this, I endeavor, when the barometer is low, to counteract the injurious effect by greater exertion, and my attempt is successful.”

“To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals are swift.” Yes, for they know how to give you in one moment the solution of the riddle you have pondered for months. “Had I not lived with Mirabeau,” says Dumont, “I never should have known all that can be done in one day, or, rather, in an interval of twelve hours. A day to him was of more value than a week or a month to others. To-morrow to him was not the same impostor as to most others.”

5. Plutarch affirms that “souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction, and the chief cause that excites this faculty and virtue is a certain temperature of air and winds.” My anchorite thought it “sad that atmospheric influences should bring to our dust the communion of the soul with the Infinite.” But I am glad that the atmosphere should be an excitant, glad to find the dull rock itself to be deluged with Deity, — to be theist, Christian, poetic. The fine influences of the morning few can explain, but all will admit. Goethe acknowledges them in the poem in which he dislodges the nightingale from her place as Leader of the Muses: —

MUSAGETES.

“Often in deep midnight I called on the sweet muses. No dawn shines, And no day will appear: But at the right hour The lamp brings me pious light, That it, instead of Aurora or Phœbus, May enliven my quiet industry. But they left me lying in sleep Dull, and not to be enlivened, And after every Lite morning Followed unprofitable days.

“When now the Spring stirred, I said to the nightingales: ‘Dear nightingales, trill Early, O, early before my lattice, Wake me out of the deep sleep Which mightily chains the young man’ But the love-filled singers Poured by night before my window Their sweet melodies, — Kept awake my dear soul, Roused tender new longings In my lately touched bosom, And so the night passed, And Aurora found me sleeping; Yea, hardly did the sun wake me. At last it has become summer, And at the first glimpse of morning The busy early fly stings me Out of my sweet slumber. Unmerciful she returns again: When often the half-awake victim Impatiently drives her off, She calls hither the unscrupulous sisters, And from my eyelids Sweet sleep must depart. Vigorous, I spring from my couch, Seek the beloved Muses, Find them in the beech grove, Pleased to receive me; And I thank the annoying insect For many a golden hour. Stand, then, for me, ye tormenting creatures, Highly praised by the poet As the true Musagetes.”

The French have a proverb to the effect that not the day only, but all things have their morning,— “ Il n’y a que le matin en toutes choses. “ And it is a primal rule to defend your morning, to keep all its dews on, and with fine foresight to relieve it from any jangle of affairs — even from the question, Which task? I remember a capital prudence of old President Quincy, who told me that he never went to bed at night until he had laid out the studies for the next morning. I believe that in our good days a well-ordered mind has a new thought awaiting it every morning. And hence, eminently thoughtful men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have insisted on an hour of solitude every day, to meet their own mind and learn what oracle it has to impart. If a new view of life or mind gives us joy, so does new arrangement. I don’t know but we take as much delight in finding the right place for an old observation, as in a new thought.

6. Solitary converse with nature; for thence are ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer dawns, the October woods! I confide that my reader knows these delicious secrets, has perhaps

“Slighted Minerva’s learned tongue,

But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung.”

Are you poetical, impatient of trade, tired of labor and affairs? Do you want Monadnoc, Aglocochook, or Helvellyn, or Plinlimmon, dear to English song, in your closet? Caerleon, Provence, Ossian, and Cadwallon? Tie a couple of strings across a board and set it in your window, and you have an instrument which no artist’s harp can rival. It needs no instructed ear; if you have sensibility it admits you to sacred interiors; it has the sadness of nature, yet, at the changes, tones of triumph and festal notes ringing out all measures of loftiness. “Did you never observe,” says Gray, “‘while rocking winds are piping loud,’ that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the swell of an olian harp? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit.” Perhaps you can recall a delight like it, which spoke to the eye, when you have stood by a lake in the woods in summer, and saw where little flaws of wind whip spots or patches of still water into fleets of ripples, — so sudden, so slight, so spiritual, that it was more like the rippling of the Aurora Borealis at night than any spectacle of day.

7. But the solitude of nature is not so essential as solitude of habit. I have found my advantage in going in summer to a country inn, in winter to a city hotel, with a task which would not prosper at home. I thus secured a more absolute seclusion; for it is almost impossible for a housekeeper who is in the country a small farmer, to exclude interruptions and even necessary orders, though I bar out by system all I can, and resolutely omit, to my constant damage, all that can be omitted. At home, the day is cut into short strips. In the hotel, I have no hours to keep, no visits to make or receive, and I command an astronomic leisure. I forget rain, wind, cold, and heat. At home, I remember in my library the wants of the farm, and have all too much sympathy. I envy the abstraction of some scholars I have known, who could sit on a curbstone in State Street, put up their back, and solve their problem. I have more womanly eyes. All the conditions must be right for my success, slight as that is. What untunes is as bad as what cripples or stuns me. Novelty, surprise, change of scene, refresh the artist,— “break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into new forms,” as Hafiz said. The sea-shore and the taste of two metals in contact, and our enlarged powers in the presence, or rather at the approach and at the departure of a friend, and the mixture of lie in truth, and the experience of poetic creativeness which is not found in staying at home nor yet in travelling, but in transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly managed to present as much transitional surface as possible, — these are the types or conditions of this power. “A ride near the sea, a sail near the shore,” said the ancient. So Montaigne travelled with his books, but did not read in them. “ La Nature aime les croisements ,” says Fourier.

I know there is room for whims here; but in regard to some apparent trifles there is great agreement as to their annoyance. And the machine with which we are dealing is of such an inconceivable delicacy that whims also must be respected. Fire must lend its aid. We not only want time, but warm time. George Sand says, “I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.” And I remember that Thoreau, with his robust will, yet found certain trifles disturbing the delicacy of that health which composition exacted, — namely, the slightest irregularity, even to the drinking too much water on the preceding day. Even a steel pen is a nuisance to some writers. Some of us may remember, years ago, in the English journals, the petition, signed by Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Dickens and other writers in London, against the license of the organgrinders, who infested the streets near their houses, to levy on them blackmail.

Certain localities, as mountain-tops, the sea-side, the shores of rivers and rapid brooks, natural parks of oak and pine, where the ground is smooth and unencumbered, are excitants of the muse. Every artist knows well some favorite retirement. And yet the experience of some good artists has taught them to prefer the smallest and plainest chamber, with one chair and table and with no outlook, to these picturesque liberties. William Blake said, “Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.” And Sir Joshua Reynolds had no pleasure in Richmond; he used to say “the human face was his landscape.” These indulgences are to be used with great caution. Allston rarely left his studio by day. An old friend took him, one fine afternoon, a spacious circuit into the country, and he painted two or three pictures as the fruits of that drive. But he made it a rule not to go to the city on two consecutive days. One was rest; more was lost time. The times of force must be well husbanded, and the wise student will remember the prudence of Sir Tristam in Morte d’Arthur , who, having received from the fairy an enchantment of six hours of growing strength every day, took care to fight in the hours when his strength increased; since from noon to night his strength abated. What prudence again does every artist, every scholar need in the security of his easel or his desk! These must be remote from the work of the house, and from all knowledge of the feet that come and go therein. Allston, it is said, had two or three rooms in different parts of Boston, where he could not be found. For the delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your book-shelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.

8. Conversation, which, when it is best, is a series of intoxications. Not Aristotle, not Kant or Hegel, but conversation, is the right metaphysical professor. This is the true school of philosophy, — this the college where you learn what thoughts are, what powers lurk in those fugitive gleams, and what becomes of them; how they make history. A wise man goes to this game to play upon others and to be played upon, and at least as curious to know what can be drawn from himself as what can be drawn from them. For, in discourse with a friend, our thought, hitherto wrapped in our consciousness, detaches itself, and allows itself to be seen as a thought, in a manner as new and entertaining to us as to our companions. For provocation of thought, we use ourselves and use each other. Some perceptions — I think the best — are granted to the single soul; they come from the depth and go to the depth and are the permanent and controlling ones. Others it takes two to find. We must be warned by the fire of sympathy, to be brought into the right conditions and angles of vision. Conversation; for intellectual activity is contagious. We are emulous. If the tone of the companion is higher than ours, we delight in rising to it. ‘T is a historic observation that a writer must find an audience up to his thought, or he will no longer care to impart it, but will sink to their level or be silent. Homer said, “When two come together, one apprehends before the other;” but it is because one thought well that the other thinks better: and two men of good mind will excite each other’s activity, each attempting still to cap the other’s thought. In enlarged conversation we have suggestions that require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and sciences. By sympathy, each opens to the eloquence, and begins to see with the eyes of his mind. We were all lonely, thoughtless; and now a principle appears to all: we see new relations, many truths; every mind seizes them as they pass; each catches by the mane one of these strong coursers like horses of the prairie, and rides up and down in the world of the intellect. We live day by day under the illusion that it is the fact or event that imports, whilst really it is not that which signifies, but the use we put it to, or what we think of it. We esteem nations important, until we discover that a few individuals much more concern us; then, later, that it is not at last a few individuals, or any sacred heroes, but the lowliness, the outpouring, the large equality to truth of a single mind, — as if in the narrow walls of a human heart the whole realm of truth, the world of morals, the tribunal by which the universe is judged, found room to exist.

9. New poetry; by which I mean chiefly, old poetry that is new to the reader. I have heard from persons who had practice in rhyming, that it was sufficient to set them on writing verses, to read any original poetry. What is best in literature is the affirming, prophesying, spermatic words of menmaking poets. Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.

Words used in a new sense and figuratively, dart a delightful lustre; and every word admits a new use, and hints ulterior meanings. We have not learned the law of the mind, — cannot control and domesticate at will the high states of contemplation and continuous thought. “Neither by sea nor by land,” said Pindar, “canst thou find the way to the Hyperboreans;” neither by idle wishing, nor by rule of three or rule of thumb. Yet I find a mitigation or solace by providing always a good book for my journeys, as Horace or Martial or Goethe, — some book which lifts me quite out of prosaic surroundings, and from which I draw some lasting knowledge. A Greek epigram out of the anthology, a verse of Herrick or Lovelace, are in harmony both with sense and spirit.

You shall not read newspapers, nor politics, nor novels, nor Montaigne, nor the newest French book. You may read Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Hindoo mythology and ethics. You may read Chaucer, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Milton, — and Milton’s prose as his verse; read Collins and Gray; read Hafiz and the Trouveurs; nay, Welsh and British mythology of Arthur, and (in your ear) Ossian; fact-books, which all geniuses prize as raw material, and as antidote to verbiage and false poetry. Factbooks, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, are much more nearly allied to poetry than many books are that are written in rhyme. Only our newest knowledge works as a source of inspiration and thought, as only the outmost layer of liber on the tree. Books of natural science, especially those written by the ancients, — geography, botany, agriculture, explorations of the sea, of meteors, of astronomy, — all the better if written without literary aim or ambition. Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood. The deep book, no matter how remote the subject, helps us best.

Neither are these all the sources, nor can I name all. The receptivity is rare. The occasions or predisposing circumstances I could never tabulate; but now one, now another landscape, form, color, or companion, or perhaps one kind of sounding word or syllable, “strikes the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” and it is impossible to detect and wilfully repeat the fine conditions to which we have owed our happiest frames of mind. The day is good in which we have had the most perceptions. The analysis is the more difficult, because poppy-leaves are strewn when a generalization is made; for I can never remember the circumstances to which I owe it, so as to repeat the experiment or put myself in the conditions: —

“‘T is the most difficult of tasks to keep

Heights which the soul is compatent to gain.”

I value literary biography for the hints it furnishes from so many scholars, in so many countries, of what hygiene, what ascetic, what gymnastic, what social practices their experience suggested and approved. They are, for the most part, men who needed only a little wealth. Large estates, political relations, great hospitalities, would have been impediments to them. They are men whom a book could entertain, a new thought intoxicate and hold them prisoners for years perhaps. Aubrey and Burton and Wood tell me incidents which I find not insignificant.

These are some hints towards what is in all education a chief necessity, — the right government, or, shall I not say? the right obedience to the powers of the human soul. Itself is the dictator; the mind itself the awful oracle. All our power, all our happiness consists in our reception of its hints, which ever become clearer and grander as they are obeyed.

GREATNESS.

There is a prize which we are all aiming at, and the more power and goodness we have, so much more the energy of that aim. Every human being has a right to it, and in the pursuit we do not stand in each other’s way. For it has a long scale of degrees, a wide variety of views, and every aspirant, by his success in the pursuit, does not hinder but helps his competitors. I might call it completeness, but that is later, — perhaps adjourned for ages. I prefer to call it Greatness. It is the fulfilment of a natural tendency in each man. It is a fruitful study. It is the best tonic to the young soul. And no man is unrelated; therefore we admire eminent men, not for themselves, but as representatives. It is very certain that we ought not to be and shall not be contented with any goal we have reached. Our aim is no less than greatness; that which invites all, belongs to us all, — to which we are all sometimes untrue, cowardly, faithless, but of which we never quite despair, and which, in every sane moment, we resolve to make our own. It is also the only platform on which all men can meet. What anecdotes of any man do we wish to hear or read? Only the best. Certainly not those in which he was degraded to the level of dulness or vice, but those in which he rose above all competition by obeying a light that shone to him alone. This is the worthiest history of the world.

Greatness, — what is it? Is there not some injury to us, some insult in the word? What we commonly call greatness is only such in our barbarous or infant experience. ’Tis not the soldier, not Alexander or Bonaparte or Count Moltke surely, who represent the highest force of mankind; not the strong hand, but wisdom and civility, the creation of laws, institutions, letters, and art. These we call by distinction the humanities; these, and not the strong arm and brave heart, which are also indispensable to their defence. For the scholars represent the intellect, by which man is man; the intellect and the moral sentiment, — which in the last analysis can never be separated. Who can doubt the potency of an individual mind, who sees the shock given to torpid races — torpid for ages — by Mahomet; a vibration propagated over Asia and Africa? What of Menu? what of Buddha? of Shakspeare? of Newton? of Franklin?

There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears. The man in the tavern maintains his opinion, though the whole crowd takes the other side; we are at once drawn to him. The porter or truckman refuses a reward for finding your purse, or for pulling you drowning out of the river. Thereby, with the service, you have got a moral lift. You say of some new person, That man will go far, — for you see in his manners that the recognition of him by others is not necessary to him. And what a bitter-sweet sensation when we have gone to pour out our acknowledgment of a man’s nobleness, and found him quite indifferent to our good opinion! They may well fear Fate who have any infirmity of habit or aim; but he who rests on what he is, has a destiny above destiny, and can make mouths at Fortune. If a man’s centrality is incomprehensible to us, we may as well snub the sun. There is something in Archimedes or in Luther or Samuel Johnson that needs no protection. There is somewhat in the true scholar which he cannot be laughed out of, nor be terrified or bought off from. Stick to your own; don’t inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in.

A sensible person will soon see the folly and wickedness of thinking to please. Sensible men are very rare. A sensible man does not brag, avoids introducing the names of his creditable companions, omits himself as habitually as another man obtrudes himself in the discourse, and is content with putting his fact or theme simply on its ground. You shall not tell me that your commercial house, your partners, or yourself are of importance; you shall not tell me that you have learned to know men; you shall make me feel that; your saying so unsays it. You shall not enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me by their titles what books you have read. I am to infer that you keep good company by your better information and manners, and to infer your reading from the wealth and accuracy of your conversation.

Young men think that the manly character requires that they should go to California, or to India, or into the army. When they have learned that the parlor and the college and the counting-room demand as much courage as the sea or the camp, they will be willing to consult their own strength and education in their choice of place.

There are to each function and department of nature supplementary men: to geology, sinewy, out-of-doors men, with a taste for mountains and rocks, a quick eye for differences and for chemical changes. Give such, first a course in chemistry, and then a geological survey. Others find a charm and a profession in the natural history of man and the mammalia or related animals; others in ornithology, or fishes, or insects; others in plants; others in the elements of which the whole world is made. These lately have stimulus to their study through the extraordinary revelations of the spectroscope that the sun and the planets are made in part or in whole of the same elements as the earth is. Then there is the boy who is born with a taste for the sea, and must go thither if he has to run away from his father’s house to the forecastle; another longs for travel in foreign lands; another will be a lawyer; another, an astronomer; another, a painter, sculptor, architect, or engineer. Thus there is not a piece of nature in any kind but a man is born, who, as his genius opens, aims slower or faster to dedicate himself to that. Then there is the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the orator, the clergyman, the physician. ‘T is gratifying to see this adaptation of man to the world, and to every part and particle of it.

Many readers remember that Sir Humphry Davy said, when he was praised for his important discoveries, “My best discovery was Michael Faraday.” In 1848 I had the privilege of hearing Professor Faraday deliver, in the Royal Institution in London, a lecture on what he called Diamagnetism, — by which he meant cross-magnetism; and he snowed us various experiments on certain gases, to prove that whilst ordinarily magnetism of steel is from north to south, in other substances, gases, it acts from east to west. And further experiments led him to the theory that every chemical substance would be found to have its own, and a different, polarity. I do not know how far his experiments and others have been pushed in this matter, but one fact is clear to me, that diamagnetism is a law of the mind , to the full extent of Faraday’s idea; namely, that every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind; — as every man, with whatever family resemblances, has a new countenance, new manner, new voice, new thoughts, and new character. Whilst he shares with all mankind the gift of reason and the moral sentiment, there is a teaching for him from within which is leading him in a new path, and, the more it is trusted, separates and signalizes him, while it makes him more important and necessary to society. We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. Swedenborg called it the proprium , — not a thought shared with others, but constitutional to the man. A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man’s. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self-respect or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease I may say, or need never be at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent; — not to imitate or surpass a particular man in his way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method, style, wit eloquence. It is easy for a commander to command. Clinging to Nature, or to that province of nature which he knows, he makes no mistakes, but works after her laws and at her own pace, so that his doing, which is perfectly natural, appears miraculous to dull people. Montluc, the great Marshal of France, says of the Genoese admiral, Andrew Doria, “It seemed as if the sea stood in awe of this man.” And a kindred genius, Nelson, said, “I feel that I am fitter to do the action than to describe it.” Therefore I will say that another trait of greatness is facility.

This necessity of resting on the real, of speaking your private thought and experience, few young men apprehend. Set ten men to write their journal for one day, and nine of them will leave out their thought, or proper result, — that is, their net experience, — and lose themselves in misreporting the supposed experience of other people. Indeed I think it an essential caution to young writers, that they shall not in their discourse leave out the one thing which the discourse was written to say. Let that belief which you hold alone, have free course. I have observed that in all public speaking, the rule of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, but when his deep conviction, and the right and necessity he feels to convey that conviction to his audience, — when these shine and burn in his address; when the thought which he stands for gives its own authority to him, adds to him a grander personality, gives him valor, breadth, and new intellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems to speak through his lips. There is a certain transfiguration; all great orators have it, and men who wish to be orators simulate it.

If we should ask ourselves what is this self-respect, it would carry us to the highest problems. It is our practical perception of the Deity in man. It has its deep foundations in religion. If you have ever known a good mind among the Quakers, you will have found that is the element of their faith. As they express it, it might be thus: “I do not pretend to any commandment or large revelation, but if at any time I form some plan, propose a journey or a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obstacle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, but if it do not pass away I yield to it, obey it. You ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law; it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something which the contradiction of all mankind could not shake, and which the consent of all mankind could not confirm.”

You are rightly fond of certain books or men that you have found to excite your reverence and amulation. But none of these can compare with the greatness of that counsel which is open to you in happy solitude. I mean that there is for you the following of an inward leader, — a slow discrimination that there is for each a Best Counsel which enjoins the fit word and the fit act for every moment. And the path of each, pursued, leads to greatness. How grateful to find in man or woman a new emphasis of their own.

But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, to accept that work for which you were inwardly formed, — the second rule is concentration, which doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be that. The same laws hold for you as for the laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his own charge; sedulously wait every morning for the news concerning the structure of the world which the spirit will give him.

No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was created as an audience for him; the atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Read the performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Laplace. “He can toil terribly,” said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. These few words sting and bite and lash us when we are frivolous. Let us get out of the way of their blows by making them true of ourselves. There is so much to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his valor by his power to cope with intellectual giants. Leave others to count votes and calculate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge Laplace, know Newton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, criticise Kant and Swedenborg, and on all these arouse the central courage of insight. The scholar’s courage should be as terrible as the Cid’s, though it grow out of spiritual nature, not out of brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty, adds brain.

With this respect to the bias of the individual mind add, what is consistent with it, the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. The day will come when no badge, uniform, or medal will be worn; when the eye, which carries in it planetary influences from all the stars, will indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For it is true that the stratification of crusts in geology is not more precise than the degrees of rank in minds. A man will say: ‘I am born to this position; I must take it, and neither you nor I can help or hinder me. Surely, then, I need not fret myself to guard my own dignity.’ The great man loves the conversation or the book that convicts him, not that which soothes or flatters him. He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals his learning, conceals his charity. For the highest wisdom does not concern itself with particular men, but with man enamored with the law and the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, “If the picture is good, who cares who made it? What matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself or another?” If it is the truth, what matters who said it? If it was right, what signifies who did it? All greatness is in degree, and there is more above than below. Where were your own intellect, if greater had not lived? And do you know what the right meaning of Fame is? It is that sympathy, rather that fine element by which the good become partners of the greatness of their superiors.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility. No aristocrat, no prince born to the purple, can begin to compare with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so lowly, but that he knows that he can well afford it, resting on the largeness of God in him? I have read in an old book that Barcena the Jesuit confessed to another of his order that when the Devil appeared to him in his cell one night, out of his profound humility he rose up to meet him, and prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was more worthy to sit there than himself.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. The populace will say, with Horne Tooke, “If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.” I prefer to say, with the old Hebrew prophet, “Seekest thou great things? — seek them not;” or, what was said of the Spanish prince, “The more you took from him, the greater he appeared,” Plus on lui ôte, plus il est grand.

Scintillations of greatness appear here and there in men of unequal character, and are by no means confined to the cultivated and so-called moral class. It is easy to draw traits from Napoleon, who was not generous nor just, but was intellectual and knew the law of things. Napoleon commands our respect by his enormous self-trust, the habit of seeing with his own eyes, never the surface, but to the heart of the matter, whether it was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a king, — and by the speed and security of his action in the premises, always new. He has left a library of manuscripts, a multitude of sayings, every one of widest application. He was a man who always fell on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes missed, he had the faculty of taking up his genius, as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else. “Whatever they may tell you, believe that one fights with cannon as with fists; when once the fire is begun, the least want of ammunition renders what you have done already useless.” I find it easy to translate all his technics into all of mine, and his official advices are to me more literary and philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. His advice to his brother, King Joseph of Spain, was: “I have only one counsel for you, — Be Master. “ Depth of intellect relieves even the ink of crime with a fringe of light. We perhaps look on its crimes as experiments of a universal student; as he may read any book who reads all books, and as the English judge in old times, when learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read and write. It is difficult to find greatness pure. Well, I please myself with its diffusion; to find a spark of true fire amid much corruption. It is some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the soul which has this generous blood. How many men, detested in contemporary hostile history, of whom, now that the mists have rolled away, we have learned to correct our old estimates, and to see them as, on the whole, instruments of great benefit. Diderot was no model, but unclean as the society in which he lived; yet was he the best-natured man in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. His humanity knew no bounds. A poor scribbler who had written a lampoon against him and wished to dedicate it to a pious Due d’Orleans, came with it in his poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying the creature, wrote the dedication for him, and so raised five-and-twenty louis to save his famishing lampooner alive.

Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you to surpass others in any narrow or professional or monkish way. We like the natural greatness of health and wild power. I confess that I am as much taken by it in boys, and sometimes in people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, nor church-members, — even in persons open to the suspicion of irregular and immoral living, in Bohemians, — as in more orderly examples. For we must remember that in the lives of soldiers, sailors and men of large adventure, many of the stays and guards of our household life are wanting, and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime daring and performance are often close at hand. We must have some charity for the sense of the people, which admires natural power, and will elect it over virtuous men who have less. It has this excuse, that natural is really allied to moral power, and may always be expected to approach it by its own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and will see the force of morals over men, if it does not itself obey. Henry VII. of England was a wise king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in rebellion against him, was brought to London, and examined before the Privy Council, one said, “All Ireland cannot govern this Earl.” “Then let this Earl govern all Ireland,” replied the King.

It is noted of some scholars, like Swift and Gibbon and Donne, that they pretended to vices which they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy. William Blake the artist frankly says, “I never knew a bad man in whom there was not something very good.” Bret Harte has pleased himself with noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in the wild reprobates of the ranches and mines of California.

Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect; but those two elements know each other and always beckon to each other, until at last they meet in the man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells you a lamp shows you that the flame of oil, which contented you before, casts a strong shade in the path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; and this again casts a shadow in the path of the electric light. So does intellect when brought into the presence of character; character puts out that light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his Grand Duke of Weimar, does not shine. We can see that the Prince had the advantage of the Olympian genius. It is more plainly seen in the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick of Prussia. Voltaire is brilliant, nimble, and various, but Frederick has the superior tone. But it is curious that Byron writes down to Scott; Scott writes up to him. The Greeks surpass all men till they face the Romans, when Roman character prevails over Greek genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only classes of men who pursue the same studies, as chemists or astronomers, mathematicians or linguists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there are always men who have a more catholic genius, are really great as men, and inspire universal enthusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally all classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him. We have had such examples in this country, in Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and the seamen’s preacher, Father Taylor; in England, Charles James Fox; in Scotland, Robert Burns; and in France, though it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most remarkable example of this class that we have seen, — a man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

These may serve as local examples to indicate a magnetism which is probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of his own favorites, and which makes him require geniality and humanity in his heroes. What are these but the promise and the preparation of a day when the air of the world shall be purified by nobler society, when the measure of greatness shall be usefulness in the highest sense, — greatness consisting in truth, reverence, and good-will?

Life is made of illusions, and a very common one is the opinion you hear expressed in every village: ‘O yes, if I lived in New York or Philadelphia, Cambridge or New Haven or Boston or Andover, there might be fit society; but it happens that there are no fine young men, no superior women in my town.’ You may hear this every day; but it is a shallow remark. Ah! have you yet to learn that the eye altering alters all; that “the world is an echo which returns to each of us what we say?” It is not examples of greatness, but sensibility to see them, that is wanting. The good botanist will find flowers between the street pavements, and any man filled with an idea or a purpose will find examples and illustrations and coadjutors wherever he goes. Wit is a magnet to find wit, and character to find character. Do you not know that people are as those with whom they converse? And if all or any are heavy to me, that fact accuses me. Why complain, as if a man’s debt to his inferiors were not at least equal to his debt to his superiors? If men were equals, the waters would not move; but the difference of level which makes Niagara a cataract, makes eloquence, indignation, poetry, in him who finds there is much to communicate. With self-respect then there must be in the aspirant the strong fellow-feeling, the humanity, which makes men of all classes warm to him as their leader and representative.

We are thus forced to express our instinct of the truth by exposing the failures of experience. The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws, — who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye; — he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall be found.

IMMORTALITY.

In the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king, was deliberating on receiving the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles said to him: “The present life of man, O king, compared with that space of time beyond, of which we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and ministers. The hearth blazes in the middle and a grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain and snow are raging without. Driven by the chilling tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and flies delighted around us till it departs through the other. Whilst it stays in our mansion it feels not the winter storm; but when this short moment of happiness has been enjoyed, it is forced again into the same dreary tempest from which it had escaped, and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, and we are as ignorant of the state which preceded our present existence as of that which will follow it. Things being so, I feel that if this new faith can give us more certainty, it deserves to be received.”

In the first records of a nation in any degree thoughtful and cultivated, some belief in the life beyond life would of course be suggested. The Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of an established civilization, and I read in the second book of Herodotus this memorable sentence: “The Egyptians are the first of mankind who have affirmed the immortality of the soul.” Nor do I read it with less interest that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of metempsychosis; for I know well that where this belief once existed it would necessarily take a base form for the savage and a pure form for the wise; — so that I only look on the counterfeit as a proof that the genuine faith had been there. The credence of men, more than race or climate, makes their manners and customs; and the history of religion may be read in the forms of sepulture. There never was a time when the doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals must be enjoined, but among rude men moral judgments were rudely figured under the forms of dogs and whips, or of an easier and more plentiful life after death. And as the savage could not detach in his mind the life of the soul from the body, he took great care for his body. Thus the whole life of man in the first ages was ponderously determined on death; and, as we know, the polity of the Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and houses, respected burial. It made every man an undertaker, and the priesthood a senate of sextons. Every palace was a door to a pyramid: a king or rich man was a pyramidaire. The labor of races was spent on the excavation of catacombs. The chief end of man being to be buried well, the arts most in request were masonry and embalming, to give imperishability to the corpse.

The Greek, with his perfect senses and perceptions, had quite another philosophy, He loved life and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and taste, like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, and lifted them. He drove away the embalmers; he built no more of those doleful mountainous tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of parsley and laurel; made it bright with games of strength and skill, and chariot-races. He looked at death only as the distributor of imperishable glory. Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. He carried his arts to Rome, and built his beautiful tombs at Pompeii. The poet Shelley says of these delicately carved white marble cells, “They seem not so much hiding places of that which must decay, as voluptuous chambers for immortal spirit.” In the same spirit the modern Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be buried where the sun can see them, and that a little window may be cut in the sepulchre, from which the swallow might be seen when it comes back in the spring.

Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learning depends on the learner. No more truth can be conveyed than the popular mind can bear, and the barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine of the resurrection as the Egyptians took it. It was an affair of the body, and narrowed again by the fury of sect; so that grounds were sprinkled with holy water to receive only orthodox dust; and to keep the body still more sacredly safe for resurrection, it was put into the walls of the church; and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. I read at Melrose Abbey the inscription on the ruined gate: —

“The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold;

The Earth goes to the Earth sooner than it wold;

The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers;

The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours.”

Meantime the true disciples saw, through the letter, the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse and nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour. The most remarkable step in the religious history of recent ages is that made by the genius of Swedenborg, who described the moral faculties and affections of man, with the hard realism of an astronomer describing the suns and planets of our system, and explained his opinion of the history and destiny of souls in a narrative form, as of one who had gone in a trance into the society of other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible heaven, by continuing the like employments in the like circumstances as those we know; men in societies, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments; continuations of our earthly experience. We shall pass to the future existence as we enter into an agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us there. Milton anticipated the leading thought of Swedenborg, when he wrote, in “Paradise Lost,” —

“What if Earth

Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein

Each to the other like more than on earth is thought?”

Swedenborg had a vast genius and announced many things true and admirable, though always clothed in somewhat sad and Stygian colors. These truths, passing out of his system into general circulation, are now met with every day, qualifying the views and creeds of all churches and of men of no church. And I think we are all aware of a revolution in opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, the sermons and prayers heard, the habits of thought of religious persons, were all directed on death. All were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Roman Catholic purgatory, and death was dreadful. The emphasis of all the good books given to young people was on death. We were all taught that we were born to die; and over that, all the terrors that theology could gather from savage nations were added to increase the gloom. A great change has occurred. Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with firmness. “A wise man in our time caused to be written on his tomb, “Think on living.” That inscription describes a progress in opinion. Cease from this antedating of your experience. Sufficient to to-day are the duties of to-day. Don’t waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it:

“The name of death was never terrible

To him that knew to live.”

A man of thought is willing to die, willing to live; I suppose because he has seen the thread on which the beads are strung, and perceived that it reaches up and down, existing quite independently of the present illusions. A man of affairs is afraid to die, is pestered with terrors, because he has not this vision, and is the victim of those who have moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system, as Calvinism, Romanism, or Swedenborgism, for household use. It is the fear of the young bird to trust its wings. The experiences of the soul will fast outgrow this alarm. The saying of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to mend: “It is well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.” I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not: and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so. Schiller said, “What is so universal as death, must be benefit.” A friend of Michel Angelo saying to him that his constant labor for art must make him think of death with regret,— “By no means,” he said; “for if life be a pleasure, yet since death also is sent by the hand of the same Master, neither should that displease us.” Plutarch, in Greece, has a deep faith that the doctrine of the Divine Providence and that of the immortality of the soul rest en one and the same basis. Hear the opinion of Montesquieu: “If the immortality of the soul were an error, I should be sorry not to believe it. I avow that I am not so humble as the atheist; I know not how they think, but for me, I do not wish to exchange the idea of immortality against that of the beatitude of one day. I delight in believing myself as immortal as God himself. Independently of revealed ideas, metaphysical ideas give me a vigorous hope of my eternal well-being, which I would never renounce.” [Pensées Diverses, p. 223.]

I was lately told of young children who feel a certain terror at the assurance of life without end. “What! will it never stop?” the child said; “what! never die? never , never? It makes me feel so tired.” And I have in mind the expression of an older believer, who once said to me, “The thought that this frail being is never to end is so overwhelming that my only shelter is God’s presence.” This disquietude only marks the transition. The healthy state of mind is the love of life. What is so good, let it endure.

I find that what is called great and powerful life — the administration of large affairs, in commerce, in the courts, in the state, — is prone to develop narrow and special talent; but, unless combined with a certain contemplative turn, a taste for abstract truth, for the moral laws, does not build up faith or lead to content. There is a profound melancholy at the base of men of active and powerful talent, seldom suspected. Many years ago, there were two men in the United States Senate, both of whom are now dead. I have seen them both; one of them I personally knew. Both were men of distinction and took an active part in the politics of their day and generation. They were men of intellect, and one of them, at a later period, gave to a friend this anecdote. He said that when he entered the Senate he became in a short time intimate with one of his colleagues, and, though attentive enough to the routine of public duty, they daily returned to each other, and spent much time in conversation on the immortality of the soul and other intellectual questions, and cared for little else. When my friend at last left Congress, they parted, his colleague remaining there; and, as their homes were widely distant from each other, it chanced that he never met him again until, twenty-five years afterwards, they saw each other through open doors at a distance in a crowded reception at the President’s house in Washington. Slowly they advanced towards each other as they could, through the brilliant company, and at last met, — said nothing, but shook hands long and cordially. At last his friend said, “Any light, Albert?” “None,” replied Albert. “Any light, Lewis?” “None,” replied he. They looked in each other’s eyes silently, gave one more shake each to the hand he held, and thus parted for the last time. Now I should say that the impulse which drew these minds to this inquiry through so many years was a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. I ought to add that, though men of good minds, they were both pretty strong materialists in their daily aims and way of life. I admit that you shall find a good deal of skepticism in the streets and hotels and places of coarse amusement. But that is only to say that the practical faculties are faster developed than the spiritual. Where there is depravity there is a slaughter-house style of thinking. One argument of future life is the recoil of the mind in such company, — our pain at every skeptical statement. The skeptic affirms that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and puts us out of good activity. When Bonaparte insisted that the heart is one of the entrails, that it is the pit of the stomach that moves the world, — do we thank him for the gracious instruction? Our disgust is the protest of human nature against a lie.

The ground of hope is in the infinity of the world; which infinity reappears in every particle, the powers of all society in every individual, and of all mind in every mind. I know against all appearances that the universe can receive no detriment; that there is a remedy for every wrong and a satisfaction for every soul. Here is this wonderful thought. But whence came it? Who put it in the mind? It was not I, it was not you; it is elemental, — belongs to thought and virtue, and whenever we have either we see the beams of this light. When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds.

But proceeding to the enumeration of the few simple elements of the natural faith, the first fact that strikes us is our delight in permanence. All great natures are lovers of stability and permanence, as the type of the Eternal. After science begins, belief of permanence must follow in a healthy mind. Things so attractive, designs so wise, the secret workman so transcendently skilful that it tasks successive generations of observers only to find out, part with part, the delicate contrivance and adjustment of a weed, of a moss, to its wants, growth, and perpetuation; all these adjustments becoming perfectly intelligible to our study, — and the contriver of it all forever hidden! To breathe, to sleep, is wonderful. But never to know the Cause, the Giver, and infer his character and will! Of what import this vacant sky, these puffing elements, these insignificant lives full of selfsh loves and quarrels and ennui? Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist works not for himself, but for the believing mind, which turns his discoveries to revelations, receives them as private tokens of the grand good-will of the Creator.

The mind delights in immense time; delights in rocks, in metals, in mountain-chains, and in the evidence of vast geologic periods which these give; in the age of trees, say of the Sequoias, a few of which will span the whole history of mankind; in the noble toughness and imperishableness of the palm-tree, which thrives under abuse; delights in architecture, whose building lasts so long,— “A house,” says Ruskin, “is not in its prime until it is five hundred years old,” — and here are the Pyramids, which have as many thousands, and cromlechs and earthmounds much older than these.

We delight in stability, and really are interested in nothing that ends. What lasts a century pleases us in comparison with what lasts an hour. But a century, when we have once made it familiar and compared it with a true antiquity, looks dwarfish and recent; and it does not help the matter adding numbers, if we see that it has an end, which it will reach just as surely as the shortest. A candle a mile long or a hundred miles long does not help the imagination; only a self-feeding fire, an inextinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that we have not yet found date and origin for. But the nebular theory threatens their duration also, bereaves them of this glory, and will make a shift to eke out a sort of eternity by succession, as plants and animals do.

And what are these delights in the vast and permanent and strong, but approximations and resemblances of what is entire and sufficing, creative and self-sustaining life? For the Creator keeps his word with us. These long-lived or long-enduring objects are to us, as we see them, only symbols of somewhat in us far longer-lived. Our passions, our endeavors, have something ridiculous and mocking, if we come to so hasty an end. If not to be , how like the bells of a fool is the trump of fame! Nature does not, like the Empress Anne of Russia, call together all the architectural genius of the Empire to build and finish and furnish a palace of snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. Will you, with vast cost and pains, educate your children to be adepts in their several arts, and, as soon as they are ready to produce a masterpiece, call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down? We must infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable experiences which are of no visible value, and we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in steady and supported advances. The implanting of a desire indicates that the gratification of that desire is in the constitution of the creature that feels it; the wish for food, the wish for motion, the wish for sleep, for society, for knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded in the structure of the creature, and meant to be satisfied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society, by knowledge. If there is the desire to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate, like all our other experiences, a conviction of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn.

All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places that I do not yet know. I have known admirable persons, without feeling that they exhaust the possibilities of virtue and talent. I have seen what glories of climate, of summer mornings and evenings, of midnight sky; I have enjoyed the benefits of all this complex machinery of arts and civilization, and its results of comfort. The good Power can easily provide me millions more as good. Shall I hold on with both hands to every paltry possession? All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it be which the great Providence prepares for us, it must be something large and generous, and in the great style of his works. The future must be up to the style of our faculties, — of memory, of hope, of imagination, of reason. I have a house, a closet which holds my books, a table, a garden, a field: are these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel who beckons me away, — as if there were no room or skill elsewhere that could reproduce for me as my like or my enlarging wants may require? We wish to live for what is great, not for what is mean. I do not wish to live for the sake of my warm house, my orchard, or my pictures. I do not wish to live to wear out my boots.

As a hint of endless being, we may rank that novelty which perpetually attends life. The soul does not age with the body. On the borders of the grave, the wise man looks forward with equal elasticity of mind, or hope; and why not, after millions of years, on the verge of still newer existence? — for it is the nature of intelligent beings to be forever new to life. Most men are insolvent, or promise by their countenance and conversation and by their early endeavor much more than they ever perform, — suggesting a design still to be carried out; the man must have new motives, new companions, new condition, and another term. Franklin said, “Life is rather a state of embryo, a preparation for life. A man is not completely born until he has passed through death.” Every really able man, in whatever direction he work, — a man of large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a poet, a painter, — if you talk sincerely with him, considers his work, however much admired, as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?

The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to men, because they want more time and land in which to execute their thoughts. But a higher poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us as we are, with our experience, and transfer us to a new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants what we could of the wisdom of this. After we have found our depth there, and assimilated what we could of the new experience, transfer us to a new scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old thoughts, in which we were too much immersed. In short, all our intellectual action, not promises but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We are taken out of time and breathe a purer air. I know not whence we draw the assurance of prolonged life, of a life which shoots that gulf we call death and takes hold of what is real and abiding, by so many claims as from our intellectual history. Salt is a good preserver; cold is: but a truth cures the taint of mortality better, and “preserves from harm until another period.” A sort of absoluteness attends all perception of truth, — no smell of age, no hint of corruption. It is self-sufficing, sound, entire.

Lord Bacon said: “Some of the philosophers who were least divine denied generally the immortality of the soul, yet came to this point, that whatsoever motions the spirit of man could act and perform without the organs of the body, might remain after death; which were only those of the understanding, and not of the affections; so immortal and incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem to them to be.” And Van Helmont, the philosopher of Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely from the action of the intellect. “It is my greatest desire,” he said, “that it might be granted unto atheists to have tasted, at least but one only moment, what it is intellectually to understand; whereby they may feel the immortality of the mind, as it were by touching.” A farmer, a laborer, a mechanic, is driven by his work all day, but it ends at night; it has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer is also a scholar or thinker, his work has no end. That which he has learned is that there is much more to be learned. The wiser he is, he feels only the more his incompetence. “What we know is a point to what we do not know.” A thousand years, — tenfold, a hundredfold his faculties, would not suffice. The demands of his task are such that it becomes omnipresent. He studies in his walking, at his meals, in his amusements, even in his sleep. Montesquieu said, “The love of study is in us almost the only eternal passion. All the others quit us in proportion as this miserable machine which holds them approaches its ruin.” “Art is long,” says the thinker, “and life is short.” He is but as a fly or a worm to this mountain, this continent, which his thoughts inhabit. It is a perception that comes by the activity of the intellect; never to the lazy or rusty mind. Courage comes naturally to those who have the habit of facing labor and danger, and who therefore know the power of their arms and bodies; and courage or confidence in the mind comes to those who know by use its wonderful forces and inspirations and returns. Belief in its future is a reward kept only for those who use it. “To me,” said Goethe, “the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence, when the present can no longer sustain my spirit.”

It is a proverb of the world that good-will makes intelligence, that goodness itself is an eye; and the one doctrine in which all religions agree is that new light is added to the mind in proportion as it uses that which it has. “He that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” Ignorant people confound reverence for the intuitions with egotism. There is no confusion in the things themselves. The health of the mind consists in the perception of law. Its dignity consists in being under the law. Its goodness is the most generous extension of our private interests to the dignity and generosity of ideas. Nothing seems to me so excellent as a belief in the laws. It communicates nobleness, and, as it were, an asylum in temples to the loyal soul.

I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a complete success: no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not to be good. “If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,” said one of the old saints, “and these by any man’s suffering are enlarged and enthroned.”

The moral sentiment measures itself by sacrifice. It risks or ruins property, health, life itself, without hesitation, for its thought, and all men justify the man by their praise for this act. And Mahomet in the same mind declared, “Not dead but living ye are to account all those who are slain in the way of God.”

On these grounds I think that wherever man ripens, this audacious belief presently appears, — in the savage, savagely; in the good, purely. As soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevitable; as soon as virtue glows, this belief confirms itself. It is a kind of summary or completion of man. It cannot rest on a legend; it cannot be quoted from one to another; it must have the assurance of a man’s faculties that they can fill a larger theatre and a longer term than nature here allows him. Goethe said: “It is to a thinking being quite impossible to think himself non-existent, ceasing to think and live; so far does every one carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite spontaneously. But so soon as the man will be objective and go out of himself, so soon as he dogmatically will grasp a personal duration to bolster up in cockney fashion that inward assurance, he is lost in contradiction.” The doctrine is not sentimental, but is grounded in the necessities and forces we possess. Nothing will hold but that which we must be and must do: —

“Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set

By secret but inviolable springs.”

The revelation that is true is written on the palms of the hands, the thought of our mind, the desire of our heart, or nowhere. My idea of heaven is that there is no melodrama in it at all; that it is wholly real. Here is the emphasis of conscience and experience; this is no speculation, but the most practical of doctrines. Do you think that the eternal chain of cause and effect which pervades nature, which threads the globes as beads on a string, leaves this out of its circuit, — leaves out this desire of God and men as a waif and a caprice, altogether cheap and common, and falling without reason or merit?

We live by desire to live; we live by choice; by will, by thought, by virtue, by the vivacity of the laws which we obey, and obeying share their life, — or we die by sloth, by disobedience, by losing hold of life, which ebbs out of us. But whilst I find the signatures, the hints and suggestions, noble and wholesome, — whilst I find that all the ways of virtuous living lead upward and not downward, — yet it is not my duty to prove to myself the immortality of the soal. That knowledge is hidden very cunningly. Perhaps the archangels cannot find the secret of their existence, as the eye cannot see itself; — but, ending or endless, to live whilst I live.

There is a drawback to the value of all statements of the doctrine, and I think that one abstains from writing or printing on the immortality of the soul, because, when he comes to the end of his statement, the hungry eyes that run through it will close disappointed; the listeners say, That is not here which we desire; — and I shall be as much wronged by their hasty conclusions, as they feel themselves wronged by my omissions. I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality, than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth’s “Ode” is the best modern essay on the subject.

We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. The argument refuses to form in the mind. A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury, is ever hovering, but attempt to ground it, and the reasons are all vanishing and inadequate. You cannot make a written theory or demonstration of this as you can an orrery of the Copernican astronomy. It must be sacredly treated. Speak of the mount in the mount. Not by literature or theology, but only by rare integrity, by a man permeated and perfumed with airs of heaven, — with manliest or womanliest enduring love, — can the vision be clear to a use the most sublime. And hence the fact that in the minds of men the testimony of a few inspired souls has had such weight and penetration. You shall not say, “O my bishop, O my pastor, is there any resurrection? What do you think? Did Dr. Channing believe that we should know each other? did Wesley? did Butler? did Fénelon?” What questions are these! Go read Milton, Shakspeare, or any truly ideal poet. Read Plato, or any seer of the interior realities. Read St. Augustine, Swedenborg, Immanuel Kant. Let any master simply recite to you the substantial laws of the intellect, and in the presence of the laws themselves you will never ask such primary-school questions.

Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, shall I say, only an energy, there being no passive? He has it, and he alone, who gives life to all names, persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not the wildest mythology dies for him; no art is lost. He vivifies what he touches. Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but a taking of the soul out of time, as all high action of the mind does: when we are living in the sentiments we ask no questions about time. The spiritual world takes place; — that which is always the same. But see how the sentiment is wise. Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him took people out of time, and they felt eternal. A great integrity makes us immortal; an admiration, a deep love, a strong will, arms us above fear. It makes a day memorable. We say we lived years in that hour. It is strange that Jesus is esteemed by mankind the bringer of the doctrine of immortality. He is never once weak or sentimental; he is very abstemious of explanation, he never preaches the personal immortality; whilst Plato and Cicero had both allowed themselves to overstep the stern limits of the spirit, and gratify the people with that picture.

How ill agrees this majestical immortality of our religion with the frivolous population! “Will you build magnificently for mice? Will you offer empires to such as cannot set a house or private affairs in order? Here are people who cannot dispose of a day; an hour hangs heavy on their hands; and will you offer them rolling ages without end? But this is the way we rise. Within every man’s thought is a higher thought, — within the character he exhibits to-day, a higher character. The youth puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth, proceeding thence puts off the egotism of manhood, and becomes at last a public and universal soul. He is rising to greater heights, but also rising to realities; the outer relations and circumstances dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he is with God, — shares the will and the immensity of the First Cause.

It is curious to find the selfsame feeling, that it is not immortality, but eternity, — not duration, but a state of abandonment to the Highest, and so the sharing of His perfection, — appearing in the farthest east and west. The human mind takes no account of geography, language, or legends, but in all utters the same instinct.

Yama, the lord of Death, promised Nachiketas, the son of Gautama, to grant him three boons at his own choice. Nachiketas, knowing that his father Gautama was offended with him, said, “O Death! let Gautama be appeased in mind, and forget his anger against me: this I choose for the first boom.” Yama said, “Through my favor, Gautama will remember thee with love as before.” For the second boon, Nachiketas asks that the fire by which heaven is gained be made known to him; which also Yama allows, and says, “Choose the third boon, O Nachiketas!” Nachiketas said, there is this inquiry. Some say the soul exists after the death of man; others say it does not exist. This I should like to know, instructed by thee. Such is the third of the boons. Yama said, “For this question, it was inquired of old, even by the gods; for it is not easy to understand it. Subtle is its nature. Choose another boon, O Nachiketas! Do not compel me to this.” Nachiketas said, “Even by the gods was it inquired. And as to what thou sayest, O Death, that it is not easy to understand it, there is no other speaker to be found like thee. There is no other boon like this.” Yama said, “Choose sons and grandsons who may live a hundred years; choose herds of cattle; choose elephants and gold and horses; choose the wide expanded earth, and live thyself as many years as thou listeth. Or, if thou knowest a boon like this, choose it, together with wealth and far-extending life. Be a king, O Nachiketas! On the wide earth I will make thee the enjoyer of all desires. All those desires that are difficult to gain in the world of mortals, all those ask thou at thy pleasure; — those fair nymphs of heaven with their chariots, with their musical instruments; for the like of them are not to be gained by men. I will give them to thee, but do not ask the question of the state of the soul after death.” Nachiketas said, “All those enjoyments are of yesterday. With thee remain thy horses and elephants, with thee the dance and song. If we should obtain wealth, we live only as long as thou pleasest. The boon which I choose I have said.” Yama said, “One thing is good, another is pleasant. Blessed is he who takes the good, but he who chooses the pleasant loses the object of man. But thou, considering the objects of desire, hast abandoned them. These two, ignorance (whose object is what is pleasant) and knowledge (whose object is what is good), are known to be far asunder, and to lead to different goals. Believing this world exists, and not the other, the careless youth is subject to my sway. That knowledge for which thou hast asked is not to be obtained by argument. I know worldly happiness is transient, for that firm one is not to be obtained by what is not firm. The wise, by means of the union of the intellect with the soul, thinking him whom it is hard to behold, leaves both grief and joy. Thee, O Nachiketas! I believe a house whose door is open to Brahma. Brahma the supreme, whoever knows him obtains whatever he wishes. The soul is not born; it does not die; it was not produced from any one. Nor was any produced from it. Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain; subtler than what is subtle, greater than what is great, sitting it goes far, sleeping it goes everywhere. Thinking the soul as unbodily among bodies, firm among fleeting things, the wise man casts off all grief. The soul cannot be gained by knowledge, not by understanding, not by manifold science. It can be obtained by the soul by which it is desired. It reveals its own truths.”

LECTURES AND BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

CONTENTS

DEMONOLOGY.

ARISTOCRACY.

PERPETUAL FORCES.

CHARACTER.

EDUCATION.

THE SUPERLATIVE.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.

THE PREACHER.

THE MAN OF LETTERS.

THE SCHOLAR.

PLUTARCH.

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.

MARY MOODY EMERSON.

SAMUEL HOAR.

THOREAU.

CARLYLE.

GEORGE L. STEARNS.

DEMONOLOGY.

Night - dreams trace on Memory’s wall

Shadows of the thoughts of day,

And thy fortunes as they fall

The bias of thy will betray.

In the chamber, on the stairs,

Lurking dumb,

Go and come

Lemurs and Lars.

[From the course of lectures on “Human Life,” read in Boston, 1839-40. Published in the North American Review, 1877.]

The name Demonology covers dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic, and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry, and deserve notice chiefly because every man has usually in a lifetime two or three hints in this kind which are specially impressive to him. They also shed light on our structure.

The witchcraft of sleep divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children lying locked in each other’s arms, and carries them asunder by wide spaces of land and sea, and wide intervals of time: —

“There lies a sleeping city, God of dreams!

What an unreal and fantastic world

Is going on below!

Within the sweep of yon encircling wall

How many a large creation of the night,

Wide wilderness and mountain, rock and sea,

Peopled with busy, transitory groups,

Finds room to rise, and never feels the crowd.”

‘T is superfluous to think of the dreams of multitudes, the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying Reason, and become the theatre of delirious shows, wherein time, space, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion; a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid pictures. Sometimes the forgotten companions of childhood reappear: —

“They come, in dim procession led,

The cold, the faithless, and the dead,

As warm each hand, each brow as gay,

As if they parted yesterday:” —

or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous actions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral jokes and waking suddenly with ghastly laughter, to be rebuked by the cold, lonely, silent midnight, and to rake with confusion in memory among the gibbering nonsense to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation. Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissipate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them. When newly awaked from lively dreams, we are so near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere, — give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should repossess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment would come trooping back to us; but we cannot get our hand on the first link or fibre, and the whole is lost. There is a strange wilfulness in the speed with which it disperses and baffles our grasp.

A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them. The fairest forms, the most noble and excellent persons, are deformed by some pitiful and insane circumstance. The very landscape and scenery in a dream seem not to fit us, but like a coat or cloak of some other person to overlap and encumber the wearer; so is the ground, the road, the house, in dreams, too long or too short, and if it served no other purpose would show us how accurately nature fits man awake.

There is one memory of waking and another of sleep. In our dreams the same scenes and fancies are many times associated, and that too, it would seem, for years. In sleep one shall travel certain roads in stage-coaches or gigs, which he recognizes as familiar, and has dreamed that ride a dozen times; or shall walk alone in familiar fields and meadows, which road or which meadow in waking hours he never looked upon. This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in day light, that particular passages of conversation and action have occurred to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicion that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue, at some former hour, they know not when.

Animals have been called “the dreams of nature.” Perhaps for a conception of their consciousness we may go to our own dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obedience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous as these metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What compassion do these imprisoning forms awaken! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat of me down there? Does he know it? Can he too, as I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition, should learn in some moment the tough limitations of this fettering organization. It was in this glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses; Calidasa of his transmigration of souls. For these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps those wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for in varieties of our own species where organization seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kalmuck or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained by the same feeling; and sometimes too the sharp-witted prosperous white man awakens it. In a mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other faces the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barn-door fowl. You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained from suicide.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too. Their extravagance from nature is yet within a higher nature. They seem to us to suggest an abundance and fluency of thought not familiar to the waking experience. They pique us by independence of us, yet we know ourselves in this mad crowd, and owe to dreams a kind of divination and wisdom. My dreams are not me; they are not Nature, or the Not-me: they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub-and objective. We call the phantoms that rise, the creation of our fancy, but they act like mutineers, and fire on their commander; showing that every act, every thought, every cause, is bipolar, and in the act is contained the counteraction. If I strike, I am struck; if I chase, I am pursued.

Wise and sometimes terrible hints shall in them be thrown to the man out of a quite unknown intelligence. He shall be startled two or three times in his life by the justice as well as the significance of this phantasmagoria. Once or twice the conscious fetters shall seem to be unlocked, and a freer utterance attained. A prophetic character in all ages has haunted them. They are the maturation often of opinions not consciously carried out to statements, but whereof we already possessed the elements. Thus, when awake, I know the character of Rupert, but do not think what he may do. In dreams I see him engaged in certain actions which seem preposterous, — out of all fitness. He is hostile, he is cruel, he is frightful, he is a poltroon. It turns out prophecy a year later. But it was already in my mind as character, and the sibyl dreams merely embodied it in fact. Why then should not symptoms, auguries, forebodings be, and, as one said, the moanings of the spirit?

We are let by this experience into the high region of Cause, and acquainted with the identity of very unlike-seeming effects. We learn that actions whose turpitude is very differently reputed proceed from one and the same affection. Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed. A skilful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them, — a cheerful, manly part, or a poor drivelling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth. The same remark may be extended to the omens and coincidences which may have astonished us. Of all it is true that the reason of them is always latent in the individual. Goethe said: “These whimsical pictures, inasmuch as they originate from us, may well have an analogy with our whole life and fate.”

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, for the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. It is no wonder that particular dreams and presentiments should fall out and be prophetic. The fallacy consists in selecting a few insignificant hints when all are inspired with the same sense. As if one should exhaust his astonishment at the economy of his thumb-nail, and overlook the central causal miracle of his being a man. Every man goes through the world attended with innumerable facts prefiguring (yes, distinctly announcing) his fate, if only eyes of sufficient heed and illumination were fastened on the sign. The sign is always there, if only the eye were also; just as under every tree in the speckled sunshine and shade no man notices that every spot of light is a perfect image of the sun, until in some hour the moon eclipses the luminary; and then first we notice that the spots of light have become crescents, or annular, and correspond to the changed figure of the sun. Things are significant enough, Heaven knows; but the seer of the sign, — where is he? We doubt not a man’s fortune may be read in the lines of his hand, by palmistry; in the lines of his face, by physiognomy; in the outlines of the skull, by craniology: the lines are all there, but the reader waits. The long waves indicate to the instructed mariner that there is no near land in the direction from which they come. Belzoni describes the three marks which led him to dig for a door to the pyramid of Ghizeh. What thousands had beheld the same spot for so many ages, and seen no three marks!

Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun. All life, all creation, is tell-tale and betraying. A man reveals himself in every glance and step and movement and rest: —

“Head with foot hath private amity,

And both with moons and tides.”

Not a mathematical axiom but is a moral rule. The jest and byword to an intelligent ear extends its meaning to the soul and to all time. Indeed, all productions of man are so anthropomorphous that not possibly can he invent any fable that shall not have a deep moral and be true in senses and to an extent never intended by the inventor. Thus all the bravest tales of Homer and the poets, modern philosophers can explain with profound judgment of law and state and ethics. Lucian has an idle tale that Pancrates, journeying from Memphis to Coppus, and wanting a servant, took a door-bar and pronounced over it magical words, and it stood up and brought him water, and turned a spit, and carried bundles, doing all the work of a slave. What is this but a prophecy of the progress of art? For Pancrates write Watt or Fulton, and for “magical words” write “steam;” and do they not make an iron bar and half a dozen wheels do the work, not of one, but of a thousand skilful mechanics?

“Nature,” said Swedenborg, “makes almost as much demand on our faith as miracles do.” And I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man’s life is a fact so stupendous as to take the lustre out of all fiction. The lovers of marvels, of what we call the occult and unproved sciences, of mesmerism, of astrology, of coincidences, of intercourse, by writing or by rapping or by painting, with departed spirits, need not reproach us with incredulity because we are slow to accept their statement. It is not the incredibility of the fact, but a certain want of harmony between the action and the agents. We are used to vaster wonders than these that are alleged. In the hands of poets, of devout and simple minds, nothing in the line of their character and genius would surprise us. But we should look for the style of the great artist in it, look for completeness and harmony. Nature never works like a conjuror, to surprise, rarely by shocks, but by infinite graduation; so that we live embosomed in sounds we do not hear, scents we do not smell, spectacles we see not, and by innumerable impressions so softly laid on that though important we do not discover them until our attention is called to them.

For Spiritism, it shows that no man almost is fit to give evidence. Then I say to the amiable and sincere among them, these matters are quite too important than that I can rest them on any legends. If I have no facts, as you allege, I can very well wait for them. I am content and occupied with such miracles as I know, such as my eyes and ears daily show me, such as humanity and astronomy. If any others are important to me they will certainly be shown to me.

In times most credulous of these fancies the sense was always met and the superstition rebuked by the grave spirit of reason and humanity. When Hector is told that the omens are unpropitious, he replies, —

“One omen is the best, to fight for one’s country.”

Euripides said, “He is not the best prophet who guesses well, and he is not the wisest man whose guess turns out well in the event, but he who, whatever the event be, takes reason and probability for his guide.” “Swans, horses, dogs and dragons,” says Plutarch, “we distinguish as sacred, and vehicles of the Divine foresight, and yet we cannot believe that men are sacred and favorites of Heaven.” The poor shipmaster discovered a sound theology, when in the storm at sea he made his prayer to Neptune, “O God, thou mayst save me if thou wilt, and if thou wilt thou mayst destroy me; but, however, I will hold my rudder true.” Let me add one more example of the same good sense, in a story quoted out of Hecateus of Abdera: —

“As I was once travelling by the Red Sea, there was one among the horsemen that attended us named Masollam, a brave and strong man, and according to the testimony of all the Greeks and barbarians, a very skilful archer. Now while the whole multitude was on the way, an augur called out to them to stand still, and this man inquired the reason of their halting. The augur showed him a bird, and told him, ‘If that bird remained where he was, it would be better for them all to remain; if he flew on, they might proceed; but if he flew back they must return.’ The Jew said nothing, but bent his bow and shot the bird to the ground. This act offended the augur and some others, and they began to utter imprecations against the Jew. But he replied, ‘Wherefore? Why are you so foolish as to take care of this unfortunate bird? How could this fowl give us any wise directions respecting our journey, when he could not save his own life? Had he known anything of futurity, he would not have come here to be killed by the arrow of Masollam the Jew.’”

It is not the tendency of our times to ascribe importance to whimsical pictures of sleep, or to omens. But the faith in peculiar and alien power takes another form in the modern mind, much more resembling the ancient doctrine of the guardian genius. The belief that particular individuals are attended by a good fortune which makes them desirable associates in any enterprise of uncertain success, exists not only among those who take part in political and military projects, but influences all joint action of commerce and affairs, and a corresponding assurance in the individuals so distinguished meets and justifies the expectation of others by a boundless self-trust. “I have a lucky hand, sir,” said Napoleon to his hesitating Chancellor; “those on whom I lay it are fit for anything.” This faith is familiar in one form, — that often a certain abdication of prudence and foresight is an element of success; that children and young persons come off safe from casualties that would have proved dangerous to wiser people. We do not think the young will be forsaken; but he is fast approaching the age when the sub-miraculous external protection and leading are withdrawn and he is committed to his own care. The young man takes a leap in the dark and alights safe. As he comes into manhood he remembers passages and persons that seem, as he looks at them now, to have been supernaturally deprived of injurious influence on him. His eyes were holden that he could not see. But he learns that such risks he may no longer run. He observes, with pain, not that he incurs mishaps here and there, but that his genius, whose invisible benevolence was tower and shield to him, is no longer present and active.

In the popular belief, ghosts are a selecting tribe, avoiding millions, speaking to one. In our traditions, fairies, angels and saints show the like favoritism; so do the agents and the means of magic, as sorcerers and amulets. This faith in a doting power, so easily sliding into the current belief everywhere, and, in the particular of lucky days and fortunate persons, as frequent in America today day as the faith in incantations and philters was in old Rome, or the wholesome potency of the sign of the cross in modern Rome, — this supposed power runs athwart the recognized agencies, natural and moral, which science and religion explore. Heeded though it be in many actions and partnerships, it is not the power to which we build churches, or make liturgies and prayers, or which we regard in passing laws, or found college professorships to expound. Goethe has said in his Autobiography what is much to the purpose: —

“I believed that I discovered in nature, animate and inanimate, intelligent and brute, somewhat which manifested itself only in contradiction, and therefore could not be grasped by a conception, much less by a word. It was not god-like, since it seemed unreasonable; not human, since it had no understanding; not devilish, since it was beneficent; not angelic, since it is often a marplot. It resembled chance, since it showed no sequel. It resembled Providence, since it pointed at connection. All which limits us seemed permeable to that. It seemed to deal at pleasure with the necessary elements of our constitution; it shortened time and extended space. Only in the impossible it seemed to delight, and the possible to repel with contempt. This, which seemed to insert itself between all other things, to sever them, to bind them, I named the Demoniacal, after the example of the ancients, and of those who had observed the like.

“Although every demoniacal property can manifest itself in the corporeal and incorporeal, yes, in beasts too in a remarkable manner, yet it stands specially in wonderful relations with men, and forms in the moral world, though not an antagonist, yet a transverse element, so that the former may be called the warp, the latter the woof. For the phenomena which hence originate there are countless names, since all philosophies and religions have attempted in prose or in poetry to solve this riddle, and to settle the thing once for all, as indeed they may be allowed to do.

“But this demonic element appears most fruitful when it shows itself as the determining characteristic in an individual. In the course of my life I have been able to observe several such, some near, some farther off. They are not always superior persons, either in mind or in talent. They seldom recommend themselves through goodness of heart. But a monstrous force goes out from them, and they exert an incredible power over all creatures, and even over the elements; who shall say how far such an influence may extend? All united moral powers avail nothing against them. In vain do the clear-headed part of mankind discredit them as deceivers or deceived, — the mass is attracted. Seldom or never do they meet their match among their contemporaries; they are not to be conquered save by the universe itself, against which they have taken up arms. Out of such experiences doubtless arose the strange, monstrous proverb, ‘Nobody against God but God.’” [Goethe, Wahrheit and Dichtung, Book xx.]

It would be easy in the political history of every time to furnish examples of this irregular success, men having a force which without virtue, without shining talent, yet makes them prevailing. No equal appears in the field against them. A power goes out from them which draws all men and events to favor them. The crimes they commit, the exposures which follow, and which would ruin any other man, are strangely overlooked, or do more strangely turn to their account.

I set down these things as I find them, but however poetic these twilights of thought, I like daylight, and I find somewhat wilful, some play at blindman’s-buff, when men as wise as Goethe talk mysteriously of the demonological. The insinuation is that the known eternal laws of morals and matter are sometimes corrupted or evaded by this gipsy principle, which chooses favorites and works in the dark for their behoof; as if the laws of the Father of the universe were sometimes balked and eluded by a meddlesome Aunt of the universe for her pets. You will observe that this extends the popular idea of success to the very gods; that they foster a success to you which is not a success to all; that fortunate men, fortunate youths exist, whose good is not virtue or the public good, but a private good, robbed from the rest. It is a midsummer-madness, corrupting all who hold the tenet. The demonologic is only a fine name for egotism; an exaggeration namely of the individual, whom it is Nature’s settled purpose to postpone. “There is one world common to all who are awake, but each sleeper betakes himself to one of his own.” [Heraclitus.] Dreams retain the infirmities of our character. The good genius may be there or not, our evil genius is sure to stay. The Ego partial makes the dream; the Ego total the interpretation. Life is also a dream on the same terms.

The history of man is a series of conspiracies to win from Nature some advantage without paying for it. It is curious to see what grand powers we have a hint of and are mad to grasp, yet how slow Heaven is to trust us with such edge-tools. “All that frees talent without increasing self-command is noxious.” Thus the fabled ring of Gyges, making the wearer invisible, which is represented in modern fable by the telescope as used by Schlemil, is simply mischievous. A new or private language, used to serve only low or political purposes; the transfusion of the blood; the steam battery, so fatal as to put an end to war by the threat of universal murder; the desired discovery of the guided balloon, are of this kind. Tramps are troublesome enough in the city and in the highways, but tramps flying through the air and descending on the lonely traveller or the lonely farmer’s house or the bank messenger in the country, can well be spared. Men are not fit to be trusted with these talismans.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well. Animal magnetism inspires the prudent and moral with a certain terror; so the divination of contingent events, and the alleged second-sight of the pseudo-spiritualists. There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant, and these are such. Shun them as you would the secrets of the undertaker and the butcher. The best are never demoniacal or magnetic; leave this limbo to the Prince of the power of the air. The lowest angel is better. It is the height of the animal; below the region of the divine. Power as such is not known to the angels.

Great men feel that they are so by sacrificing their selfishness and falling back on what is humane; in renouncing family, clan, country, and each exclusive and local connection, to beat with the pulse and breathe with the lungs of nations. A Highland chief, an Indian sachem or a feudal baron may fancy that the mountains and lakes were made specially for him Donald, or him Tecumseh; that the one question for history is the pedigree of his house, and future ages will be busy with his renown; that he has a guardian angel; that he is not in the roll of common men, but obeys a high family destiny; when he acts, unheard-of success evinces the presence of rare agents; what is to befall him, omens and coincidences foreshow; when he dies banshees will announce his fate to kinsmen in foreign parts. What more facile than to project this exuberant selfhood into the region where individuality is forever bounded by generic and cosmical laws? The deepest flattery, and that to which we can never be insensible, is the flattery of omens.

We may make great eyes if we like, and say of one on whom the sun shines, “What luck presides over him!” But we know that the law of the Universe is one for each and for all. There is as precise and as describable a reason for every fact occurring to him, as for any occurring to any man. Every fact in which the moral elements intermingle is not the less under the dominion of fatal law. Lord Bacon uncovers the magic when he says, “Manifest virtues procure reputation; occult ones, fortune.” Thus the so-called fortunate man is one who, though not gifted to speak when the people listen, or to act with grace or with understanding to great ends, yet is one who, in actions of a low or common pitch, relies on his instincts, and simply does not act where he should not, but waits his time, and without effort acts when the need is. If to this you add a fitness to the society around him, you have the elements of fortune; so that in a particular circle and knot of affairs he is not so much his own man as the hand of nature and time. Just as his eye and hand work exactly together, — and to hit the mark with a stone he has only to fasten his eye firmly on the mark and his arm will swing true, — so the main ambition and genius being bestowed in one direction, the lesser spirits and involuntary aids within his sphere will follow. The fault of most men is that they are busybodies; do not wait the simple movement of the soul, but interfere and thwart the instructions of their own minds.

Coincidences, dreams, animal magnetism, omens, sacred lots, have great interest for some minds. They run into this twilight and say, “There’s more than is dreamed of in your philosophy.” Certainly these facts are interesting, and deserve to be considered. But they are entitled only to a share of attention, and not a large share. Nil magnificum, nil generosum sapit. Let their value as exclusive subjects of attention be judged of by the infallible test of the state of mind in which much notice of them leaves us. Read a page of Cudworth or of Bacon, and we are exhilarated and armed to manly duties. Read demonology or Colquhoun’s Report, and we are bewildered and perhaps a little besmirched. We grope. They who love them say they are to reveal to us a world of unknown, unsuspected truths. But suppose a diligent collection and study of these occult facts were made, they are merely physiological, semi-medical, related to the machinery of man, opening to our curiosity how we live, and no aid on the superior problems why we live, and what we do. While the dilettanti have been prying into the humors and muscles of the eye, simple men will have helped themselves and the world by using their eyes.

And this is not the least remarkable fact which the adepts have developed. Men who had never wondered at anything, who had thought it the most natural thing in the world that they should exist in this orderly and replenished world, have been unable to suppress their amazement at the disclosures of the somnambulist. The peculiarity of the history of Animal Magnetism is that it drew in as inquirers and students a class of persons never on any other occasion known as students and inquirers. Of course the inquiry is pursued on low principles. Animal magnetism peeps. It becomes in such hands a black art. The uses of the thing, the commodity, the power, at once come to mind and direct the course of inquiry. It seemed to open again that door which was open to the imagination of childhood — of magicians and fairies and lamps of Aladdin, the travelling cloak, the shoes of swiftness and the sword of sharpness that were to satisfy the uttermost wish of the senses without danger or a drop of sweat. But as Nature can never be outwitted, as in the Universe no man was ever known to get a cent’s worth without paying in some form or other the cent, so this prodigious promiser ends always and always will, as sorcery and alchemy have done before, in very small and smoky performance.

Mesmerism is high life below stairs; Momus playing Jove in the kitchens of Olympus. ‘T is a low curiosity or lust of structure, and is separated by celestial diameters from the love of spiritual truths. It is wholly a false view to couple these things in any manner with the religious nature and sentiment, and a most dangerous superstition to raise them to the lofty place of motives and sanctions. This is to prefer halos and rainbows to the sun and moon. These adepts have mistaken flatulency for inspiration. Were this drivel which they report as the voice of spirits really such, we must find out a more decisive suicide. I say to the table-rappers: —

“I well believe

Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,

And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate.”

They are ignorant of all that is healthy and useful to know, and by laws of kind, — dunces seeking dunces in the dark of what they call the spiritual world, — preferring snores and gastric noises to the voice of any muse. I think the rappings a new test, like blue litmus or other chemical absorbent, to try catechisms with. It detects organic skepticism in the very heads of the Church. ’Tis a lawless world. We have left the geometry, the compensation, and the conscience of the daily world, and come into the realm or chaos of chance and pretty or ugly confusion; no guilt and no virtue, but a droll bedlam, where everybody believes only after his humor, and the actors and spectators have no conscience or reflection, no police, no foot-rule, no sanity, — nothing but whim and whim creative.

Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments which haunt us. Willingly I too say, Hail! to the unknown awful powers which transcend the ken of the understanding. And the attraction which this topic has had for me and which induces me to unfold its parts before you is precisely because I think the numberless forms in which this superstition has re-appeared in every time and every people indicates the inextinguishableness of wonder in man, betrays his conviction that behind all your explanations is a vast and potent and living Nature, inexhaustible and sublime, which you cannot explain. He is sure no book, no man has told him all. He is sure the great Instinct, the circumambient soul which flows into him as into all, and is his life, has not been searched. He is sure that intimate relations subsist between his character and his fortunes, between him and his world; and until he can adequately tell them he will tell them wildly and fabulously. Demonology is the shadow of Theology.

The whole world is an omen and a sign. Why look so wistfully in a corner? Man is the Image of God. Why run after a ghost or a dream? The voice of divination resounds everywhere and runs to waste unheard, unregarded, as the mountains echo with the bleatings of cattle.

ARISTOCRACY.

But if thou do thy best,

Without remission, without rest,

And invite the sunbeam,

And abhor to feign or seem

Even to those who thee should love

And thy behavior approve;

If thou go in thine own likeness, —

Be it health or be it sickness, —

If thou go as thy father’s son,

If thou wear no mask or lie,

Dealing purely and nakedly, — …

[First read as a lecture — in England — in 1848; here printed with additions from other papers.]

There is an attractive topic, which never goes out of vogue and is impertinent in no community, — the permanent traits of the Aristocracy. It is an interest of the human race, and, as I look at it, inevitable, sacred and to be found in every country and in every company of men. My concern with it is that concern which all well-disposed persons will feel, that there should be model men, — true instead of spurious pictures of excellence, and, if possible, living standards.

I observe that the word gentleman is gladly heard in all companies; that the cogent motive with the best young men who are revolving plans and forming resolutions for the future, is the spirit of honor, the wish to be gentlemen. They do not yet covet political power, nor any exuberance of wealth, wealth that costs too much; nor do they wish to be saints; for fear of partialism; but the middle term, the reconciling element, the success of the manly character, they find in the idea of gentleman. It is not to be a man of rank, but a man of honor, accomplished in all arts and generosities, which seems to them the right mark and the true chief of our modern society. A reference to society is part of the idea of culture; science of a gentleman; art of a gentleman; poetry in a gentleman: intellectually held, that is, for their own sake, for what they are; for their universal beauty and worth; — not for economy, which degrades them, but not over-intellectually, that is, not to ecstasy, entrancing the man, but redounding to his beauty and glory.

In the sketches which I have to offer I shall not be surprised if my readers should fancy that I am giving them, under a gayer title, a chapter on Education. It will not pain me if I am found now and then to rove from the accepted and historic, to a theoretic peerage: or if it should turn out, what is true, that I am describing a real aristocracy, a chapter of Templars who sit indifferently in all climates and under the shadow of all institutions, but so few, so heedless of badges, so rarely convened, so little in sympathy with the predominant politics of nations, that their names and doings are not recorded in any Book of Peerage, or any Court Journal, or even Daily Newspaper of the world.

I find the caste in the man. The Golden Book of Venice, the scale of European chivalry, the Barons of England, the hierarchy of India with its impassable degrees, is each a transcript of the decigrade or centigraded Man. A many-chambered Aristocracy lies already organized in his moods and faculties. Room is found for all the departments of the State in the moods and faculties of each human spirit, with separate function and difference of dignity.

The terrible aristocracy that is in nature. Real people dwelling with the real, face to face undaunted: then, far down, people of taste, people dwelling in a relation, or rumor, or influence of good and fair, entertained by it, superficially touched, yet charmed by these shadows: — and, far below these, gross and thoughtless, the animal man, billows of chaos, down to the dancing and menial organizations.

I observe the inextinguishable prejudice men have in favor of a hereditary transmission of qualities. It is in vain to remind them that Nature appears capricious. Some qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last Nature adopts them and bakes them into her porcelain.

At all events I take this inextinguishable persuasion in men’s minds as a hint from the outward universe to man to inlay as many virtues and superiorities as he can into this swift fresco of the day, which is hardening to an immortal picture.

If one thinks of the interest which all men have in beauty of character and manners; that it is of the last importance to the imagination and affection, inspiring as it does that loyalty and worship so essential to the finish of character, — certainly, if culture, if laws, if primogeniture, if heraldry, if money could secure such a result as superior and finished men, it would be the interest of all mankind to see that the steps were taken, the pains incurred. No taxation, no concession, no conferring of privileges never so exalted would be a price too large.

The old French Revolution attracted to its first movement all the liberality, virtue, hope and poetry in Europe. By the abolition of kingship and aristocracy, tyranny, inequality and poverty would end. Alas! no; tyranny, inequality, poverty, stood as fast and fierce as ever. We likewise put faith in Democracy; in the Republican principle carried out to the extremes of practice in universal suffrage, in the will of majorities. The young adventurer finds that the relations of society, the position of classes, irk and sting him, and he lends himself to each malignant party that assails what is eminent. He will one day know that this is not removable, but a distinction in the nature of things; that neither the caucus, nor the newspaper, nor the Congress, nor the mob, nor the guillotine, nor fire, nor all together, can avail to outlaw, cut out, burn, or destroy the offense of superiority in persons. The manners, the pretension, which annoy me so much, are not superficial, but built on a real distinction in the nature of my companion. The superiority in him is inferiority in me, and if this particular companion were wiped by a sponge out of nature, my inferiority would still be made evident to me by other persons everywhere and every day.

No, not the hardest utilitarian will question the value of an aristocracy if he love himself. For every man confesses that the highest good which the universe proposes to him is the highest society. If a few grand natures should come to us and weave duties and offices between us and them, it would make our bread ambrosial.

I affirm that inequalities exist, not in costume, but in the powers of expression and action; a primitive aristocracy; and that we, certainly, have not come here to describe well-dressed vulgarity. I cannot tell how English titles are bestowed, whether on pure blood, or on the largest holder in the three-per-cents. The English government and people, or the French government, may easily make mistakes; but Nature makes none. Every mark and scutcheon of hers indicates constitutional qualities. In science, in trade, in social discourse, as in the state it is the same thing. Forever and ever it takes a pound to lift a pound.

It is plain that all the deference of modern society to this idea of the Gentleman, and all the whimsical tyranny of Fashion which has continued to engraft itself on this reverence, is a secret homage to reality and love which ought to reside in every man. This is the steel that is hid under gauze and lace, under flowers and spangles. And it is plain that instead of this idolatry, a worship; instead of this impure, a pure reverence for character, a new respect for the sacredness of the individual man, is that antidote which must correct in our country the disgraceful deference to public opinion, and the insane subordination of the end to the means. From the folly of too much association we must come back to the repose of self-reverence and trust.

The game of the world is a perpetual trial of strength between man and events. The common man is the victim of events. Whatever happens is too much for him, he is drawn this way and that way, and his whole life is a hurry. The superior man is at home in his own mind. We like cool people, who neither hope nor fear too much, but seem to have many strings to their bow, and can survive the blow well enough if stock should rise or fall, if parties should be broken up, if their money or their family should be dispersed; who can stand a slander very well; indeed on whom events make little or no impression, and who can face death with firmness. In short, we dislike every mark of a superficial life and action, and prize whatever mark of a central life.

What is the meaning of this invincible respect for war, here in the triumphs of our commercial civilization, that we can never quite smother the trumpet and the drum? How is it that the sword runs away with all the fame from the spade and the wheel? How sturdy seem to us in the history, those Merovingians, Guelphs, Dorias, Sforzas, Burgundies and Guesclins of the old warlike ages! We can hardly believe they were all such speedy shadows as we; that an ague or fever, a drop of water or a crystal of ice ended them. We give soldiers the same advantage to-day. From the most accumulated culture we are always running back to the sound of any drum and fife. And in any trade, or in law-courts, in orchard and farm, and even in saloons, they only prosper or they prosper best who have a military mind, who engineer in sword and cannon style, with energy and sharpness. Why, but because courage never loses its high price? Why, but because we wish to see those to whom existence is most adorned and attractive, foremost to peril it for their object, and ready to answer for their actions with their life.

The existence of an upper class is not injurious, as long as it is dependent on merit. For so long it is provocation to the bold and generous. These distinctions exist, and they are deep, not to be talked or voted away. If the differences are organic, so are the merits, that is to say the power and excellence we describe are real. Aristocracy is the class eminent by personal qualities, and to them belongs without assertion a proper influence. Men of aim must lead the aimless; men of invention the uninventive. I wish catholic men, who by their science and skill are at home in every latitude and longitude, who carry the world in their thoughts; men of universal politics, who are interested in things in proportion to their truth and magnitude; who know the beauty of animals and the laws of their nature, whom the mystery of botany allures, and the mineral laws; who see general effects and are not too learned to love the Imagination, the power and the spirits of Solitude; — men who see the dance in men’s lives as well as in a ball-room, and can feel and convey the sense which is only collectively or totally expressed by a population; men who are charmed by the beautiful Nemesis as well as by the dire Nemesis, and dare trust their inspiration for their welcome; who would find their fellows in persons of real elevation of whatever kind of speculative or practical ability. We are fallen on times so acquiescent and traditionary that we are in danger of forgetting so simple a fact as that the basis of all aristocracy must be truth, — the doing what elsewhere is pretended to be done. One would gladly see all our institutions rightly aristocratic in this wise.

I enumerate the claims by which men enter the superior class.

1. A commanding talent. In every company one finds the best man; and if there be any question, it is decided the instant they enter into any practical enterprise. If the finders of glass, gunpowder, printing, electricity, — if the healer of small-pox, the contriver of the safety lamp, of the aqueduct, of the bridge, of the tunnel; if the finders of parallax, of new planets, of steam power for boat and carriage, the finder of sulphuric ether and the electric telegraph, — if these men should keep their secrets, or only communicate them to each other, must not the whole race of mankind serve them as gods? It only needs to look at the social aspect of England and America and France, to see the rank which original practical talent commands.

Every survey of the dignified classes, in ancient or modern history, imprints universal lessons, and establishes a nobility of a prouder creation. And the conclusion which Roman Senators, Indian Brahmins, Persian Magians, European Nobles and great Americans inculcate, — that which they preach out of their material wealth and glitter, out of their old war and modern land-owning, even out of sensuality and sneers, is, that the radical and essential distinctions of every aristocracy are moral. Do not hearken to the men, but to the Destiny in the institutions. An aristocracy is composed of simple and sincere men for whom nature and ethics are strong enough, who say what they mean and go straight to their objects. It is essentially real.

The multiplication of monarchs known by telegraph and daily news from all countries to the daily papers, and the effect of freer institutions in England and America, has robbed the title of king of all its romance, as that of our commercial consuls as compared with the ancient Roman. We shall come to add “Kings” in the “Contents” of the Directory, as we do “Physicians,” “Brokers,” etc. In simple communities, in the heroic ages, a man was chosen for his knack; got his name, rank and living for that; and the best of the best was the aristocrat or king. In the Norse Edda it appears as the curious but excellent policy of contending tribes, when tired of war, to exchange hostages, and in reality each to adopt from the other a first-rate man, who thus acquired a new country; was at once made a chief. And no wrong was so keenly resented as any fraud in this transaction. In the heroic ages, as we call them, the hero uniformly has some real talent. Ulysses in Homer is represented as a very skilful carpenter. He builds the boat with which he leaves Calypso’s isle, and in his own palace carves a bedstead out of the trunk of a tree and inlays it with gold and ivory. Epeus builds the wooden horse. The English nation down to a late age inherited the reality of the Northern stock. In 1373, in writs of summons of members of Parliament, the sheriff of every county is to cause “two dubbed knights, or the most worthy esquires, the most expert in feats of arms, and no others; and of every city, two citizens, and of every borough, two burgesses, such as have greatest skill in shipping and merchandising, to be returned.”

The ancients were fond of ascribing to their nobles gigantic proportions and strength. The hero must have the force of ten men. The chief is taller by a head than any of his tribe. Douglas can throw the bar a greater cast. Richard can sever the iron bolt with his sword. The horn of Roland, in the romance, is heard sixty miles. The Cid has a prevailing health that will let him nurse the leper, and share his bed without harm. And since the body is the pipe through which we tap all the succors and virtues of the material world, it is certain that a sound body must be at the root of any excellence in manners and actions; a strong and supple frame which yields a stock of strength and spirits for all the needs of the day, and generates the habit of relying on a supply of power for all extraordinary exertions. When Nature goes to create a national man, she puts a symmetry between the physical and intellectual powers. She moulds a large brain, and joins to it a great trunk to supply it; as if a fine alembic were fed with liquor for its distillations from broad full vats in the vaults of the laboratory.

Certainly, the origin of most of the perversities and absurdities that disgust us is, primarily, the want of health. Genius is health and Beauty is health and Virtue is health. The petty arts which we blame in the half-great seem as odious to them also; — the resources of weakness and despair. And the manners betray the like puny constitution. Temperament is fortune, and we must say it so often. In a thousand cups of life, only one is the right mixture, — a fine adjustment to the existing elements. When that befalls, when the wellmixed man is born, with eyes not too dull nor too good, with fire enough and earth enough, capable of impressions from all things, and not too susceptible, — then no gift need be bestowed on him, he brings with him fortune, followers, love, power.

“I think he’ll be to Rome

As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it

By sovereignty of nature.”

Not the phrenologist but the philosopher may well say, Let me see his brain, and I will tell you if he shall be poet, king, founder of cities, rich, magnetic, of a secure hand, of a scientific memory, a right classifier; or whether he shall be a bungler, driveller, unlucky, heavy, and tedious.

It were to dispute against the sun, to deny this difference of brain. I see well enough that when I bring one man into an estate, he sees vague capabilities, what others might, could, would, or should do with it. If I bring another man, he sees what he should do with it. He appreciates the water-privilege, land fit for orchard, tillage, pasturage, wood-lot, cranberry-meadow; but just as easily he foresees all the means; all the steps of the process, and could lay his hand as readily on one as on another point in that series which opens the capability to the last point. The poet sees wishfully enough the result; the well-built head supplies all the steps, one as perfect as the other, in the series. Seeing this working head in him, it becomes to me as certain that he will have the direction of estates, as that there are estates. If we see tools in a magazine, as a file, an anchor, a plough, a pump, a paint-brush, a cider-press, a diving-bell, we can predict well enough their destination; and the man’s associations, fortunes, love, hatred, residence, rank, the books he will buy, the roads he will traverse are predetermined in his organism. Men will need him, and he is rich and eminent by nature. That man cannot be too late or too early. Let him not hurry or hesitate. Though millions are already arrived, his seat is reserved. Though millions attend, they only multiply his friends and agents. It never troubles the Senator what multitudes crack the benches and bend the galleries to hear. He who understands the art of war, reckons the hostile battalions and cities, opportunities and spoils.

An aristocracy could not exist unless it were organic. Men are born to command, and — it is even so— “come into the world booted and spurred to ride.” The blood royal never pays, we say. It obtains service, gifts, supplies, furtherance of all kinds from the love and joy of those who feel themselves honored by the service they render.

Dull people think it Fortune that makes one rich and another poor. Is it? Yes, but the fortune was earlier than they think, namely, in the balance or adjustment between devotion to what is agreeable to-day and the forecast of what will be valuable to-morrow.

Certainly I am not going to argue the merits of gradation in the universe; the existing order of more or less. Neither do I wish to go into a vindication of the justice that disposes the variety of lot. I know how steep the contrast of condition looks; such excess here and such destitution there; like entire chance, like the freaks of the wind, heaping the snow-drift in gorges, stripping the plain; such despotism of wealth and comfort in banquet-halls, whilst death is in the pots of the wretched, — that it behooves a good man to walk with tenderness and heed amidst so much suffering. I only point in passing to the order of the universe, which makes a rotation, — not like the coarse policy of the Greeks, ten generals, each commanding one day and then giving place to the next, or like our democratic politics, my turn now, your turn next, — but the constitution of things has distributed a new quality or talent to each mind, and the revolution of things is always bringing the need, now of this, now of that, and is sure to bring home the opportunity to every one.

The only relief that I know against the invidiousness of superior position is, that you exert your faculty; for whilst each does that, he excludes hard thoughts from the spectator. All right activity is amiable. I never feel that any man occupies my place, but that the reason why I do not have what I wish, is, that I want the faculty which entitles. All spiritual or real power makes its own place.

We pass for what we are, and we prosper or fail by what we are. There are men who may dare much and will be justified in their daring. But it is because they know they are in their place. As long as I am in my place, I am safe. “The best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.” Let a man’s social aims be proportioned to his means and power. I do not pity the misery of a man underplaced: that will right itself presently: but I pity the man overplaced. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of faculty. Whoever wants more power than is the legitimate attraction of his faculty, is a politician, and must pay for that excess; must truckle for it. This is the whole game of society and the politics of the world. Being will always seem well; — but whether possibly I cannot contrive to seem, without the trouble of being? Every Frenchman would have a career. We English are not any better with our love of making a figure. “I told the Duke of Newcastle,” says Bubb Dodington in his Memoirs, “that it must end one way or another, it must not remain as it was; for I was determined to make some sort of a figure in life; I earnestly wished it might be under his protection, but if that could not be, I must make some figure; what it would be I could not determine yet; I must look round me a little and consult my friends, but some figure I was resolved to make.”

It will be agreed everywhere that society must have the benefit of the best leaders. How to obtain them? Birth has been tried and failed. Caste in India has no good result. Ennobling of one family is good for one generation; not sure beyond. Slavery had mischief enough to answer for, but it had this good in it, — the pricing of men. In the South a slave was bluntly but accurately valued at five hundred to a thousand dollars, if a good field-hand; if a mechanic, as carpenter or smith, twelve hundred or two thousand. In Rome or Greece what sums would not be paid for a superior slave, a confidential secretary and manager, an educated slave; a man of genius, a Moses educated in Egypt? I don’t know how much Epictetus was sold for, or Æsop, or Toussaint l’Ouverture, and perhaps it was not a good market-day. Time was, in England, when the state stipulated beforehand what price should be paid for each citizen’s life, if he was killed. Now, if it were possible, I should like to see that appraisal applied to every man, and every man made acquainted with the true number and weight of every adult citizen, and that he be placed where he belongs, with so much power confided to him as he could carry and use.

In the absence of such anthropometer I have a perfect confidence in the natural laws. I think that the community, — every community, if obstructing laws and usages are removed, — will be the best measure and the justest judge of the citizen, or will in the long run give the fairest verdict and reward; better than any royal patronage; better than any premium on race; better than any statute elevating families to hereditary distinction, or any class to sacerdotal education and power. The verdict of battles will best prove the general; the town-meeting, the Congress, will not fail to find out legislative talent. The prerogatives of a right physician are determined, not by his diplomas, but by the health he restores to body and mind; the powers of a geometer by solving his problem; of a priest by the act of inspiring us with a sentiment which disperses the grief from which we suffered. When the lawyer tries his case in court he himself is also on trial and his own merits appear as well as his client’s. When old writers are consulted by young writers who have written their first book, they say, Publish it by all means; so only can you certainly know its quality.

But we venture to put any man in any place. It is curious how negligent the public is of the essential qualifications of its representatives. They ask if a man is a republican, a democrat? Yes. Is he a man of talent? Yes. Is he honest and not looking for an office or any manner of bribe? He is honest. Well then choose him by acclamation. And they go home and tell their wives with great satisfaction what a good thing they have done. But they forgot to ask the fourth question, not less important than either of the others, and without which the others do not avail. Has he a will? Can he carry his points against opposition? Probably not. It is not sufficient that your work follows your genius, or is organic, to give you the magnetic power over men. More than taste and talent must go to the Will. That must also be a gift of nature. It is in some; it is not in others. But I should say, if it is not in you, you had better not put yourself in places where not to have it is to be a public enemy.

The expectation and claims of mankind indicate the duties of this class. Some service they must pay. We do not expect them to be saints, and it is very pleasing to see the instinct of mankind on this matter, — how much they will forgive to such as pay substantial service and work energetically after their kind; but they do not extend the same indulgence to those who claim and enjoy the same prerogative but render no returns. The day is darkened when the golden river runs down into mud; when genius grows idle and wanton and reckless of its fine duties of being Saint, Prophet, Inspirer to its humble fellows, baulks their respect and confounds their understanding by silly extravagances. To a right aristocracy, to Hercules, to Theseus, Odin, the Cid, Napoleon; to Sir Robert Walpole, to Fox, Chatham, Mirabeau, Jefferson, O’Connell; — to the men, that is, who are incomparably superior to the populace in ways agreeable to the populace, showing them the way they should go, doing for them what they wish done and cannot do; — of course everything will be permitted and pardoned, — gaming, drinking, fighting, luxury. These are the heads of party, who can do no wrong, — everything short of infamous crime will pass. But if those who merely sit in their places and are not, like them, able; if the dressed and perfumed gentleman, who serves the people in no wise and adorns them not, is not even not afraid of them, if such an one go about to set ill examples and corrupt them, who shall blame them if they burn his barns, insult his children, assault his person, and express their unequivocal indignation and contempt? He eats their bread, he does not scorn to live by their labor, and after breakfast he cannot remember that there are human beings. To live without duties is obscene.

2. Genius, what is so called in strictness, — the power to affect the Imagination, as possessed by the orator, the poet, the novelist, or the artist, — has a royal right in all possessions and privileges being itself representative and accepted by all men as their delegate. It has indeed the best right, because it raises men above themselves, intoxicates them with beauty. They are honored by rendering it honor, and the reason of this allowance is that Genius unlocks for all men the chains of use, temperament and drudgery, and gives them a sense of delicious liberty and power.

The first example that occurs is an extraordinary gift of eloquence. A man who has that possession of his means and that magnetism that he can at all times carry the convictions of a public assembly, we must respect, and he is thereby ennobled. He has the freedom of the city. He is entitled to neglect trifles. Like a great general, or a great poet, or a millionaire, he may wear his coat out at elbows, and his hat on his feet, if he will. He has established relation, representativeness. The best feat of genius is to bring all the varieties of talent and culture into its audience; the mediocre and the dull are reached as well as the intelligent. I have seen it conspicuously shown in a village. Here are classes which day by day have no intercourse, nothing beyond perhaps a surly nod in passing. But I have seen a man of teeming brain come among these men, so full of his facts, so unable to suppress them, that he has poured out a river of knowledge to all comers, and drawing all these men round him, all sorts of men, interested the whole village, good and bad, bright and stupid, in his facts; the iron boundary lines had all faded away; the stupid had discovered that they were not stupid; the coldest had found themselves drawn to their neighbors by interest in the same things. This was a naturalist.

The more familiar examples of this power certainly are those who establish a wider dominion over men’s minds than any speech can; who think, and paint, and laugh, and weep, in their eloquent closets, and then convert the world into a huge whispering gallery, to report the tale to all men, and win smiles and tears from many generations. The eminent examples are Shakspeare, Cervantes, Bunyan, Burns, Scott, and now we must add Dickens. In the fine arts, I find none in the present age who have any popular power, who have achieved any nobility by ennobling the people.

3. Elevation of sentiment, refining and inspiring the manners, must really take the place of every distinction whether of material power or of intellectual gifts. The manners of course must have that depth and firmness of tone to attest their centrality in the nature of the man. I mean the things themselves shall be judges, and determine. In the presence of this nobility even genius must stand aside. For the two poles of nature are Beauty and Meanness, and noble sentiment is the highest form of Beauty. He is beautiful in face, in port, in manners, who is absorbed in objects which he truly believes to be superior to himself. Is there any parchment or any cosmetic or any blood that can obtain homage like that security of air presupposing so undoubtingly the sympathy of men in his designs? What is it that makes the true knight? Loyalty to his thought. That makes the beautiful scorn, the elegant simplicity, the directness, the commanding port which all men admire and which men not noble affect. For the thought has no debts, no hunger, no lusts, no low obligations or relations, no intrigue or business, no murder, no envy, no crime, but large leisures and an inviting future.

The service we receive from the great is a mutual deference. If you deal with the vulgar, life is reduced to beggary indeed. The astronomers are very eager to know whether the moon has an atmosphere; I am only concerned that every man have one. I observe however that it takes two to make an atmosphere. I am acquainted with persons who go attended with this ambient cloud. It is sufficient that they come. It is not important what they say. The sun and the evening sky are not calmer. They seem to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the show, and to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and in the field are those of men at rest: what have they to conceal? what have they to exhibit? Others I meet, who have no deference, and who denude and strip one of all attributes but material values. As much health and muscle as you have, as much land, as much house-room and dinner, avails. Of course a man is a poor bag of bones. There is no gracious interval, not an inch allowed. Bone rubs against bone. Life is thus a Beggar’s Bush. I know nothing which induces so base and forlorn a feeling as when we are treated for our utilities, as economists do, starving the imagination and the sentiment. In this impoverishing animation, I seem to meet a Hunger, a wolf. Rather let us be alone whilst we live, than encounter these lean kine. Man should emancipate man. He does so, not by jamming him, but by distancing him. The nearer my friend, the more spacious is our realm, the more diameter our spheres have. It is a measure of culture, the number of things taken for granted. When a man begins to speak, the churl will take him up by disputing his first words, so he cannot come at his scope. The wise man takes all for granted until he sees the parallelism of that which puzzled him with his own view.

I will not protract this discourse by describing the duties of the brave and generous. And yet I will venture to name one, and the same is almost the sole condition on which knighthood is to be won; this, namely, loyalty to your own order. The true aristocrat is he who is at the head of his own order, and disloyalty is to mistake other chivalries for his own. Let him not divide his homage, but stand for that which he was born and set to maintain. It was objected to Gustavus that he did not better distinguish between the duties of a carabine and a general, but exposed himself to all dangers and was too prodigal of a blood so precious. For a soul on which elevated duties are laid will so realize its special and lofty duties as not to be in danger of assuming through a low generosity those which do not belong to it.

There are all degrees of nobility, but amid the levity and giddiness of people one looks round, as for a tower of strength, on some self-dependent mind, who does not go abroad for an estimate, and has long ago made up its conclusion that it is impossible to fail. The great Indian sages had a lesson for the Brahmin, which every day returns to mind, “All that depends on another gives pain; all that depends on himself gives pleasure; in these few words is the definition of pleasure and pain.” The noble mind is here to teach us that failure is a part of success. Prosperity and pound-cake are for very young gentlemen, whom such things content; but a hero’s, a man’s success is made up of failures, because he experiments and ventures every day, and “the more falls he gets, moves faster on;” defeated all the time and yet to victory born. I have heard that in horsemanship he is not the good rider who never was thrown, but rather that a man never will be a good rider until he is thrown; then he will not be haunted any longer by the terror that he shall tumble, and will ride; — that is his business, — to ride, whether with falls or whether with none, to ride unto the place whither he is bound. And I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind, as that tenacity of purpose which, through all change of companions, of parties, of fortunes, — changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies out opposition, and arrives at its port. In his consciousness of deserving success, the caliph Ali constantly neglected the ordinary means of attaining it; and to the grand interests, a superficial success is of no account. It prospers as well in mistake as in luck, in obstruction and nonsense, as well as among the angels; it reckons fortunes mere paint; difficulty is its delight: perplexity is its noonday: minds that make their way without winds and against tides. But these are rare and difficult examples, we can only indicate them to show how high is the range of the realm of Honor.

I know the feeling of the most ingenious and excellent youth in America; I hear the complaint of the aspirant that we have no prizes offered to the ambition of virtuous young men; that there is no Theban Band; no stern exclusive Legion of Honor, to be entered only by long and real service and patient climbing up all the steps. We have a rich men’s aristocracy, plenty of bribes for those who like them; but a grand style of culture, which, without injury, an ardent youth can propose to himself as a Pharos through long dark years, does not exist, and there is no substitute. The youth, having got through the first thickets that oppose his entrance into life, having got into decent society, is left to himself, and falls abroad with too much freedom. But in the hours of insight we rally against this skepticism. We then see that if the ignorant are around us, the great are much more near; that there is an order of men, never quite absent, who enroll no names in their archives but of such as are capable of truth. They are gathered in no one chamber; no chamber would hold them; but, out of the vast duration of man’s race, they tower like mountains, and are present to every mind in proportion to its likeness to theirs. The solitariest man who shares their spirit walks environed by them; they talk to him, they comfort him, and happy is he who prefers these associates to profane companions. They also take shape in men, in women. There is no heroic trait, no sentiment or thought that will not sometime embody itself in the form of a friend. That highest good of rational existence is always coming to such as reject mean alliances.

One trait more we must celebrate, the self-reliance which is the patent of royal natures. It is so prized a jewel that it is sure to be tested. The rules and discipline are ordered for that. The Golden Table never lacks members; all its seats are kept full; but with this strange provision, that the members are carefully withdrawn into deep niches, so that no one of them can see any other of them, and each believes himself alone. In the presence of the Chapter it is easy for each member to carry himself royally and well; but in the absence of his colleagues and in the presence of mean people he is tempted to accept the low customs of towns. The honor of a member consists in an indifferency to the persons and practices about him, and in the pursuing undisturbed the career of a Brother, as if always in their presence, and as if no other existed. Give up, once for all, the hope of approbation from the people in the street, if you are pursuing great ends. How can they guess your designs?

All reference to models, all comparison with neighboring abilities and reputations, is the road to mediocrity. The generous soul, on arriving in a new port, makes instant preparation for a new voyage. By experiment, by original studies, by secret obedience, he has made a place for himself in the world; stands there a real, substantial, unprecedented person, and when the great come by, as always there are angels walking in the earth, they know him at sight. Effectual service in his own legitimate fashion distinguishes the true man. For he is to know that the distinction of a royal nature is a great heart; that not Louis Quatorze, not Chesterfield, nor Byron, nor Bonaparte is the model of the Century, but, wherever found, the old renown attaches to the virtues of simple faith and staunch endurance and clear perception and plain speech, and that there is a master grace and dignity communicated by exalted sentiments to a human form, to which utility and even genius must do homage. And it is the sign and badge of this nobility, the drawing his counsel from his own breast. For to every gentleman, grave and dangerous duties are proposed. Justice always wants champions. The world waits for him as its defender, for he will find in the well-dressed crowd, yes, in the civility of whole nations, vulgarity of sentiment. In the best parlors of modern society he will find the laughing devil, the civil sneer; in English palaces the London twist, derision, coldness, contempt of the masses, contempt of Ireland, dislike of the Chartist. The English House of Commons is the proudest assembly of gentlemen in the world, yet the genius of the House of Commons, its legitimate expression, is a sneer. In America he shall find deprecation of purism on all questions touching the morals of trade and of social customs, and the narrowest contraction of ethics to the one duty of paying money. Pay that, and you may play the tyrant at discretion and never look back to the fatal question, — where had you the money that you paid?

I know the difficulties in the way of the man of honor. The man of honor is a man of taste and humanity. By tendency, like all magnanimous men, he is a democrat. But the revolution comes, and does he join the standard of Chartist and outlaw? No, for these have been dragged in their ignorance by furious chiefs to the Red Revolution; they are full of murder, and the student recoils, — and joins the rich. If he cannot vote with the poor, he should stay by himself. Let him accept the position of armed neutrality, abhorring the crimes of the Chartist, abhorring the selfishness of the rich, and say, ‘The time will come when these poor enfans perdus of revolution will have instructed their party, if only by their fate, and wiser counsels will prevail; the music and the dance of liberty will come up to bright and holy ground and will take me in also. Then I shall not have forfeited my right to speak and act for mankind.’ Meantime shame to the fop of learning and philosophy who suffers a vulgarity of speech and habit to blind him to the grosser vulgarity of pitiless selfishness, and to hide from him the current of Tendency; who abandons his right position of being priest and poet of these impious and unpoetic doers of God’s work. You must, for wisdom, for sanity, have some access to the mind and heart of the common humanity. The exclusive excludes himself. No great man has existed who did not rely on the sense and heart of mankind as represented by the good sense of the people, as correcting the modes and over-refinements and class-prejudices of the lettered men of the world.

There are certain conditions in the highest degree favorable to the tranquillity of spirit and to that magnanimity we so prize. And mainly the habit of considering large interests, and things in masses, and not too much in detail. The habit of directing large affairs generates a nobility of thought in every mind of average ability. For affairs themselves show the way in which they should be handled; and a good head soon grows wise, and does not govern too much.

Now I believe in the closest affinity between moral and material power. Virtue and genius are always on the direct way to the control of the society in which they are found. It is the interest of society that good men should govern, and there is always a tendency so to place them. But, for the day that now is, a man of generous spirit will not need to administer public offices or to direct large interests of trade, or war, or politics, or manufacture, but he will use a high prudence in the conduct of life to guard himself from being dissipated on many things. There is no need that he should count the pounds of property or the numbers of agents whom his influence touches; it suffices that his aims are high, that the interest of intellectual and moral beings is paramount with him, that he comes into what is called fine society from higher ground, and he has an elevation of habit which ministers of empires will be forced to see and to remember.

I do not know whether that word Gentleman, although it signifies a leading idea in recent civilization, is a sufficiently broad generalization to convey the deep and grave fact of self-reliance. To many the word expresses only the outsides of cultivated men, — only graceful manners, and independence in trifles; but the fountains of that thought are in the deeps of man, a beauty which reaches through and through, from the manners to the soul; an honor which is only a name for sanctity, a self-trust which is a trust in God himself. Call it man of honor, or call it Man, the American who would serve his country must learn the beauty and honor of perseverance, he must reinforce himself by the power of character, and revisit the margin of that well from which his fathers drew waters of life and enthusiasm, the fountain I mean of the moral sentiments, the parent fountain from which this goodly Universe flows as a wave.

PERPETUAL FORCES.

“More servants wait on man

Than he ‘ll take notice of.”

George Herbert

Ever the Rock of Ages melts

Into the mineral air,

To be the quarry whence is built

Thought and its mansions fair.

[Reprinted from the North American Review, No. 125, 1877.]

The hero in the fairy tales has a servant who can eat granite rocks, another who can hear the grass grow, and a third who can run a hundred leagues in half an hour; so man in nature is surrounded by a gang of friendly giants who can accept harder stints than these, and help him in every kind. Each by itself has a certain omnipotence, but all, like contending kings and emperors, in the presence of each other, are antagonized and kept polite and own the balance of power.

We cannot afford to miss any advantage. Never was any man too strong for his proper work. Art is long, and life short, and he must supply this disproportion by borrowing and applying to his task the energies of Nature. Reinforce his self-respect, show him his means, his arsenal of forces, physical, metaphysical, immortal. Show him the riches of the poor, show him what mighty allies and helpers he has. And though King David had no good from making his census out of vain-glory, yet I find it wholesome and invigorating to enumerate the resources we can command, to look a little into this arsenal, and see how many rounds of ammunition, what muskets, and how many arms better than Springfield muskets, we can bring to bear.

Go out of doors and get the air. Ah, if you knew what was in the air. See what your robust neighbor, who never feared to live in it, has got from it; strength, cheerfulness, power to convince, heartiness and equality to each event.

All the earths are burnt metals. One half the avoirdupois of the rocks which compose the solid crust of the globe consists of oxygen. The adamant is always passing into smoke; the marble column, the brazen statue burn under the daylight, and would soon decompose if their molecular structure, disturbed by the raging sunlight, were not restored by the darkness of the night. What agencies of electricity, gravity, light, affinity combine to make every plant what it is, and in a manner so quiet that the presence of these tremendous powers is not ordinarily suspected. Faraday said, “A grain of water is known to have electric relations equivalent to a very powerful flash of lightning.” The ripe fruit is dropped at last without violence, but the lightning fell and the storm raged, and strata were deposited and uptorn and bent back, and Chaos moved from beneath, to create and flavor the fruit on your table to-day. The winds and the rains come back a thousand and a thousand times. The coal on your grate gives out in decomposing to-day exactly the same amount of light and heat which was taken from the sunshine in its formation in the leaves and boughs of the antediluvian tree.

Take up a spadeful or a buck-load of loam; who can guess what it holds? But a gardener knows that it is full of peaches, full of oranges, and he drops in a few seeds by way of keys to unlock and combine its virtues; lets it lie in sun and rain, and by and by it has lifted into the air its full weight in golden fruit.

The earliest hymns of the world were hymns to these natural forces. The Vedas of India, which have a date older than Homer, are hymns to the winds, to the clouds, and to fire. They all have certain properties which adhere to them, such as conservation, persisting to be themselves, impossibility of being warped. The sun has lost no beams, the earth no elements; gravity is as adhesive, heat as expansive, light as joyful, air as virtuous, water as medicinal as on the first day. There is no loss, only transference. When the heat is less here it is not lost, but more heat is there. When the rain exceeds on the coast, there is drought on the prairie. When the continent sinks, the opposite continent that is to say, the opposite shore of the ocean, rises. When life is less here, it spawns there.

These forces are in an ascending series, but seem to leave no room for the individual; man or atom, he only shares them; he sails the way these irresistible winds blow. But behind all these are finer elements, the sources of them, and much more rapid and strong; a new style and series, the spiritual. Intellect and morals appear only the material forces on a higher plane. The laws of material nature run up into the invisible world of the mind, and hereby we acquire a key to those sublimities which skulk and hide in the caverns of human consciousness. And in the impenetrable mystery which hides — and hides through absolute transparency — the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish.

But the laws of force apply to every form of it. The husbandry learned in the economy of heat or light or steam or muscular fibre applies precisely to the use of wit. What I have said of the inexorable persistence of every elemental force to remain itself, the impossibility of tampering with it or warping it, — the same rule applies again strictly to this force of intellect; that it is perception, a seeing, not making, thoughts. The man must bend to the law, never the law to him.

The brain of man has methods and arrangements corresponding to these material powers, by which he can use them. See how trivial is the use of the world by any other of its creatures. Whilst these forces act on us from the outside and we are not in their counsel, we call them Fate. The animal instincts guide the animal as gravity governs the stone, and in man that bias or direction of his constitution is often as tyrannical as gravity. We call it temperament, and it seems to be the remains of wolf, ape, and rattlesnake in him. While the reason is yet dormant, this rules; as the reflective faculties open, this subsides. We come to reason and knowledge; we see the causes of evils and learn to parry them and use them as instruments, by knowledge, being inside of them and dealing with them as the Creator does. It is curious to see how a creature so feeble and vulnerable as a man, who, unarmed, is no match for the wild beasts, tiger, or crocodile, none for the frost, none for the sea, none for a fog, or a damp air, or the feeble fork of a poor worm, — each of a thousand petty accidents puts him to death every day, — is yet able to subdue to his will these terrific forces, and more than these. His whole frame is responsive to the world, part for part, every sense, every pore to a new element, so that he seems to have as many talents as there are qualities in nature. No force but is his force. He does not possess them, he is a pipe through which their currents flow. If a straw be held still in the direction of the ocean-current, the sea will pour through it as through Gibraltar. If he should measure strength with them, if he should fight the sea and the whirlwind with his ship, he would snap his spars, tear his sails, and swamp his bark; but by cunningly dividing the force, tapping the tempest for a little side-wind, he uses the monsters, and they carry him where he would go. Look at him; you can give no guess at what power is in him. It never appears directly, but follow him and see his effects, see his productions. He is a planter, a miner, a shipbuilder, a machinist, a musician, a steam-engine, a geometer, an astronomer, a persuader of men, a lawgiver, a builder of towns; — and each of these by dint of a wonderful method or series that resides in him and enables him to work on the material elements.

We are surrounded by human thought and labor. Where are the farmer’s days gone? See, they are hid in that stone-wall, in that excavated trench, in the harvest grown on what was shingle and pinebarren. He put his days into carting from the distant swamp the mountain of muck which has been trundled about until it now makes the cover of fruitful soil. Labor hides itself in every mode and form. It is massed and blocked away in that stone house, for five hundred years. It is twisted and screwed into fragrant hay which fills the barn. It surprises in the perfect form and condition of trees clean of caterpillars and borers, rightly pruned, and loaded with grafted fruit. It is under the house in the well; it is over the house in slates and copper and water-spout; it grows in the corn; it delights us in the flower-bed; it keeps the cow out of the garden, the rain out of the library, the miasma out of the town. It is in dress, in pictures, in ships, in cannon; in every spectacle, in odors, in flavors, in sweet sounds, in works of safety, of delight, of wrath, of science.

The thoughts, no man ever saw, but disorder becomes order where he goes; weakness becomes power; surprising and admirable effects follow him like a creator. All forces are his; as the wise merchant by truth in his dealings finds his credit unlimited, — he can use in turn, as he wants it, all the property in the world, — so a man draws on all the air for his occasions, as if there were no other breather; on all the water as if there were no other sailor; he is warmed by the sun, and so of every element; he walks and works by the aid of gravitation; he draws on all knowledge as his province, on all beauty for his innocent delight, and first or last he exhausts by his use all the harvests, all the powers of the world. For man, the receiver of all, and depositary of these volumes of power, I am to say that his ability and performance are according to his reception of these various streams of force. We define Genius to be a sensibility to all the impressions of the outer world, a sensibility so equal that it receives accurately all impressions, and can truly report them, without excess or loss, as it received. It must not only receive all, but it must render all. And the health of man is an equality of inlet and outlet, gathering and giving. Any hoarding is tumor and disease.

If we were truly to take account of stock before the last Court of Appeals, — that were an inventory! What are my resources? “Our stock in life, our real estate, is that amount of thought which we have had,” — and which we have applied, and so domesticated. The ground we have thus created is forever a fund for new thoughts. A few moral maxims confirmed by much experience would stand high on the list, constituting a supreme prudence. Then the knowledge unutterable of our private strength, of where it lies, of its accesses and facilitations, and of its obstructions. My conviction of principles, — that is great part of my possessions. Certain thoughts, certain observations, long familiar to me in night-watches and daylights, would be my capital if I removed to Spain or China, or, by stranger translation, to the planet Jupiter or Mars, or to new spiritual societies. Every valuable person who joins in an enterprise, — is it a piece of industry, or the founding of a colony or a college, the reform of some public abuse, or some effort of patriotism, — what he chiefly brings, all he brings, is not his land or his money or body’s strength, but his thoughts, his way of classifying and seeing things, his method. And thus with every one a new power. In proportion to the depth of the insight is the power and reach of the kingdom he controls.

It would be easy to awake wonder by sketching the performance of each of these mental forces; as of the diving-bell of the Memory, which descends into the deeps of our past and oldest experience and brings up every lost jewel; or of the Fancy, which sends its gay balloon aloft into the sky to catch every tint and gleam of romance; of the Imagination, which turns every dull fact into pictures and poetry, by making it an emblem of thought. What a power, when, combined with the analyzing understanding, it makes Eloquence; the art of compelling belief, the art of making peoples’ hearts dance to his pipe! And not less, method, patience, self-trust, perseverance, love, desire of knowledge, the passion for truth. These are the angels that take us by the hand, these our immortal, invulnerable guardians. By their strength we are strong, and on the signal occasions in our career their inspirations flow to us and make the selfish and protected and tenderly-bred person strong for his duty, wise in counsel, skilful in action, competent to rule, willing to obey.

I delight in tracing these wonderful powers, the electricity and gravity of the human world. The power of persistence, of enduring defeat and of gaining victory by defeats, is one of these forces which never loses its charm. The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances, and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents. He is his own apprentice, and more time gives a great addition of power, just as a falling body acquires momentum with every foot of the fall. How we prize a good continuer! I knew a manufacturer who found his property invested in chemical works which were depreciating in value. He undertook the charge of them himself, began at the beginning, learned chemistry and acquainted himself with all the conditions of the manufacture. His friends dissuaded him, advised him to give up the work, which was not suited to the country. Why throw good money after bad? But he persisted, and after many years succeeded in his production of the right article for commerce brought up the stock of his mills to par, and then sold out his interest, having accomplished the reform that was required.

In each the talent is the perception of an order and series in the department he deals with, — of an order and series which pre-existed in nature, and which this mind sees and conforms to. The geometer shows us the true order in figures; the painter in laws of color; the dancer in grace. Bonaparte, with his celerity of combination, mute, unfathomable, reads the geography of Europe as if his eyes were telescopes; his will is an immense battery discharging irresistible volleys of power always at the right point in the right time.

There was a story in the journals of a poor prisoner in a Western police-court who was told he might be released if he would pay his fine. He had no money, he had no friends, but he took his flute out of his pocket and began to play, to the surprise, and, as it proved, to the delight of all the company; the jurors waked up, the sheriff forgot his duty, the judge himself beat time, and the prisoner was by general consent of court and officers allowed to go his way without any money. And I suppose, if he could have played loud enough, we here should have beat time, and the whole population of the globe would beat time, and consent that be should go without his fine.

I knew a stupid young farmer, churlish, living only for his gains, and with whom the only intercourse you could have was to buy what he had to sell. One day I found his little boy of four years dragging about after him the prettiest little wooden cart, so neatly built, and with decorations too, and learned that Papa had made it; that hidden deep in that thick skull was this gentle art and taste which the little fingers and caresses of his son had the power to draw out into day; he was no peasant after all. So near to us is the flowering of Fine Art in the rudest population. See in a circle of school-girls one with no beauty, no special vivacity, — but she can so recite her adventures that she is never alone, but at night or at morning wherever she sits the inevitable circle gathers around her, willing prisoners of that wonderful memory and fancy and spirit of life. Would you know where to find her? Listen for the laughter, follow the cheerful hum, see where is the rapt attention, and a pretty crowd all bright with one electricity; there in the centre of fellowship and joy is Scheherazade again.

See how rich life is; rich in private talents, each of which charms us in turn and seems the best. If we hear music we give up all to that; if we fall in with a cricket-club and see the game masterly played, the best player is the first of men; if we go to the regatta, we forget the bowler for the stroke oar; and when the soldier comes home from the fight, he fills all eyes. But the soldier has the same admiration of the great parliamentary debater. And poetry and literature are disdainful of all these claims beside their own. Like the boy who thought in turn each one of the four seasons the best, and each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in the year the crowner. The sensibility is all.

Every one knows what are the effects of music to put people in gay or mournful or martial mood. But these are the effects on dull subjects, and only the hint of its power on a keener sense. It is a stroke on a loose or tense cord. The story of Orpheus, of Arion, of the Arabian minstrel, are not fables, but experiments on the same iron at white heat.

By this wondrous susceptibility to all the impressions of Nature the man finds himself the receptacle of celestial thoughts, of happy relations to all men. The imagination enriches him, as if there were no other; the memory opens all her cabinets and archives; Science her length and breadth; Poetry her splendor and joy and the august circles of eternal law. These are means and stairs for new ascensions of the mind. But they are nowise impoverished for any other mind, not tarnished, not breathed upon; for the mighty Intellect did not stoop to him and become property, but he rose to it and followed its circuits. “It is ours while we use it, it is not ours when we do not use it.”

And so, one step higher, when he comes into the realm of sentiment and will. He sees the grandeur of justice, the victory of love, the eternity that belongs to all moral nature. He does not then invent his sentiment or his act, but obeys a pre-existing right which he sees. We arrive at virtue by taking its direction instead of imposing ours.

The last revelation of intellect and of sentiment is that in a manner it severs the man from all other men; makes known to him that the spiritual powers are sufficient to him if no other being existed; that he is to deal absolutely in the world, as if he alone were a system and a state, and though all should perish could make all anew.

The forces are infinite. Every one has the might of all, for the secret of the world is that its energies are solidaires; that they work together on a system of mutual aid, all for each and each for all; that the strain made on one point bears on every arch and foundation of the structure. But if you wish to avail yourself of their might, and in like manner if you wish the force of the intellect, the force of the will, you must take their divine direction, not they yours. Obedience alone gives the right to command. It is like the village operator who taps the telegraph-wire and surprises the secrets of empires as they pass to the capital. So this child of the dust throws himself by obedience into the circuit of the heavenly wisdom, and shares the secret of God.

Thus is the world delivered into your hand, but on two conditions, — not for property, but for use, use according to the noble nature of the gifts; and not for toys, not for self-indulgence. Things work to their ends, not to yours, and will certainly defeat any adventurer who fights against this ordination.

The effort of men is to use them for private ends. They wish to pocket land and water and fire and air and all fruits of these, for property, and would like to have Aladdin’s lamp to compel darkness, and iron-bound doors, and hostile armies, and lions and serpents to serve them like footmen. And they wish the same service from the spiritual faculties. A man has a rare mathematical talent, inviting him to the beautiful secrets of geometry, and wishes to clap a patent on it; or has the fancy and invention of a poet, and says, ‘I will write a play that shall be repeated in London a hundred nights;’; or a military genius, and instead of using that to defend his country, he says, ‘I will fight the battle so as to give me place and political consideration;’ or Canning or Thurlow has a genius of debate, and says, ‘I will know how with this weapon to defend the cause that will pay best and make me Chancellor or Foreign Secretary.’ But this perversion is punished with instant loss of true wisdom and real power.

I find the survey of these cosmical powers a doctrine of consolation in the dark hours of private or public fortune. It shows us the world alive, guided, incorruptible; that its cannon cannot be stolen nor its virtues misapplied. It shows us the long Providence, the safeguards of rectitude. It animates exertion; it warns us out of that despair into which Saxon men are prone to fall, — out of an idolatry of forms, instead of working to simple ends, in the belief that Heaven always succors us in working for these. This world belongs to the energetical. It is a fagot of laws, and a true analysis of these laws, showing how immortal and how self-protecting they are, would be a wholesome lesson for every time and for this time. That band which ties them together is unity, is universal good, saturating all with one being and aim, so that each translates the other, is only the same spirit applied to new departments. Things are saturated with the moral law. There is no escape from it. Violets and grass preach it; rain and snow, wind and tides, every change, every cause in Nature is nothing but a disguised missionary.

All our political disasters grow as logically out of our attempts in the past to do without justice, as the sinking of some part of your house comes of defect in the foundation. One thing is plain; a certain personal virtue is essential to freedom; and it begins to be doubtful whether our corruption in this country has not gone a little over the mark of safety, so that when canvassed we shall be found to be made up of a majority of reckless self-seekers. The divine knowledge has ebbed out of us and we do not know enough to be free.

I hope better of the state. Half a man’s wisdom goes with his courage. A boy who knows that a bully lives round the corner which he must pass on his daily way to school, is apt to take sinister views of streets and of school-education. And a sensitive politician suffers his ideas of the part New York or Pennsylvania or Ohio are to play in the future of the Union, to be fashioned by the election of rogues in some counties. But we must not gratify the rogues so deeply. There is a speedy limit to profligate politics.

Fear disenchants life and the world. If I have not my own respect I am an impostor, not entitled to other men’s, and had better creep into my grave. I admire the sentiment of Thoreau, who said, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear; God himself likes atheism better.” For the world is a battle-ground; every principle is a war-note, and the most quiet and protected life is at any moment exposed to incidents which test your firmness. The illusion that strikes me as the masterpiece in that ring of illusions which our life is, is the timidity with which we assert our moral sentiment. We are made of it, the world is built by it, things endure as they share it; all beauty, all health, all intelligence exist by it; yet we shrink to speak of it or to range ourselves by its side. Nay, we presume strength of him or them who deny it. Cities go against it; the college goes against it, the courts snatch at any precedent, at any vicious form of law to rule it out; legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it, and vote it down. Every new asserter of the right surprises us, like a man joining the church, and we hardly dare believe he is in earnest.

What we do and suffer is in moments, but the cause of right for which we labor never dies, works in long periods, can afford many checks, gains by our defeats, and will know how to compensate our extremest sacrifice. Wrath and petulance may have their short success, but they quickly reach their brief date and decompose, whilst the massive might of ideas is irresistible at last. Whence does the knowledge come? Where is the source of power? The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men. The world stands on ideas, and not on iron or cotton; and the iron of iron, the fire of fire, the ether and source of all the elements is moral force. As cloud on cloud, as snow on snow, as the bird on the air, and the planet on space in its flight, so do nations of men and their institutions rest on thoughts.

CHARACTER.

Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift,

Sit still, and Truth is near;

Suddenly it will uplift

Your eyelids to the sphere:

Wait a little, you shall see

The portraiture of things to be.

For what need I of book or priest

Or Sibyl from the mummied East

When every star is Bethlehem Star, —

I count as many as there are

Cinquefoils or violets in the grass,

So many saints and saviours,

So many high behaviours.

[Reprinted from the North American Review of April, 1866.]

Morals respects what men call goodness, that which all men agree to honor as justice, truth-speaking, good-will and good works. Morals respects the source or motive of this action. It is the science of substances, not of shows. It is the what, and not the how. It is that which all men profess to regard, and by their real respect for which recommend themselves to each other.

There is this eternal advantage to morals, that, in the question between truth and goodness, the moral cause of the world lies behind all else in the mind. It was for good, it is to good, that all works. Surely it is not to prove or show the truth of things, — that sounds a little cold and scholastic, — no, it is for benefit, that all subsists. As we say in our modern politics, catching at last the language of morals, that the object of the State is the greatest good of the greatest number, — so, the reason we must give for the existence of the world is, that it is for the benefit of all being.

Morals implies freedom and will. The will constitutes the man. He has his life in Nature, like a beast: but choice is born in him; here is he that chooses; here is the Declaration of Independence, the July Fourth of zoölogy and astronomy. He chooses, — as the rest of the creation does not. But will, pure and perceiving, is not wilfulness. When a man, through stubbornness, insists to do this or that, something absurd or whimsical, only because he will, he is weak; he blows with his lips against the tempest, he dams the incoming ocean with his cane. It were an unspeakable calamity if any one should think he had the right to impose a private will on others. That is the part of a striker, an assassin. All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power but the absence of power.

Morals is the direction of the will on universal ends. He is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral, — we say it with Marcus Aurelius and with Kant, — whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings; and with Vauvenargues, “the mercenary sacrifice of the public good to a private interest is the eternal stamp of vice.”

All the virtues are special directions of this motive; justice is the application of this good of the whole to the affairs of each one; courage is contempt of danger in the determination to see this good of the whole enacted; love is delight in the preference of that benefit redounding to another over the securing of our own share; humility is a sentiment of our insignificance when the benefit of the universe is considered.

If from these external statements we seek to come a little nearer to the fact, our first experiences in moral as in intellectual nature force us to discriminate a universal mind, identical in all men. Certain biases, talents, executive skills, are special to each individual; but the high, contemplative, all-commanding vision, the sense of Right and Wrong, is alike in all. Its attributes are self-existence, eternity, intuition and command. It is the mind of the mind. We belong to it, not it to us. It is in all men, and constitutes them men. In bad men it is dormant, as health is in men entranced or drunken; but, however inoperative, it exists underneath whatever vices and errors. The extreme simplicity of this intuition embarrasses every attempt at analysis. We can only mark, one by one, the perfections which it combines in every act. It admits of no appeal, looks to no superior essence. It is the reason of things.

The antagonist nature is the individual, formed into a finite body of exact dimensions, with appetites which take from everybody else what they appropriate to themselves, and would enlist the entire spiritual faculty of the individual, if it were posible, in catering for them. On the perpetual conflict between the dictate of this universal mind and the wishes and interests of the individual, the moral discipline of life is built. The one craves a private benefit, which the other requires him to renounce out of respect to the absolute good. Every hour puts the individual in a position where his wishes aim at something which the sentiment of duty forbids him to seek. He that speaks the truth executes no private function of an individual will, but the world utters a sound by his lips. He who doth a just action seeth therein nothing of his own, but an inconceivable nobleness attaches to it, because it is a dictate of the general mind. We have no idea of power so simple and so entire as this. It is the basis of thought, it is the basis of being. Compare all that we call ourselves, all our private and personal venture in the world, with this deep of moral nature in which we lie, and our private good becomes an impertinence, and we take part with hasty shame against ourselves: —

“High instincts, before which our mortal nature

Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised, —

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,

Are yet the master-light of all our seeing, —

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence, — truths that wake

To perish never.”

The moral element invites man to great enlargements, to find his satisfaction, not in particulars or events, but in the purpose and tendency; not in bread, but in his right to his bread; not in much corn or wool, but in its communication.

Not by adding, then, does the moral sentiment help us; no, but in quite another manner. It puts us in place. It centres, it concentrates us. It puts us at the heart of Nature, where we belong, in the cabinet of science and of causes, there where all the wires terminate which hold the world in magnetic unity, and so converts us into universal beings.

This wonderful sentiment, which endears itself as it is obeyed, seems to be the fountain of intellect; for no talent gives the impression of sanity, if wanting this; nay, it absorbs everything into itself. Truth, Power, Goodness, Beauty, are its varied names, — faces of one substance, the heart of all. Before it, what are persons, prophets, or seraphim but its passing agents, momentary rays of its light?

The moral sentiment is alone omnipotent. There is no labor or sacrifice to which it will not bring a man, and which it will not make easy. Thus there is no man who will bargain to sell his life, say at the end of a year, for a million or ten millions of gold dollars in hand, or for any temporary pleasures, or for any rank, as of peer or prince; but many a man who does not hesitate to lay down his life for the sake of a truth, or in the cause of his country, or to save his son or his friend. And under the action of this sentiment of the Right, his heart and mind expand above himself, and above Nature.

Though Love repine, and Reason chafe,

There came a voice without reply, —

“‘T is man’s perdition to be safe,

When for the truth he ought to die.”

Such is the difference of the action of the heart within and of the senses without. One is enthusiasm, and the other more or less amounts of horse power.

Devout men, in the endeavor to express their convictions, have used different images to suggest this latent force; as, the light, the seed, the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Dæmon, the still, small voice, etc., — all indicating its power and its latency. It is serenely above all mediation. In all ages, to all men, it saith, I am; and he who hears it feels the impiety of wandering from this revelation to any record or to any rival. The poor Jews of the wilderness cried: “Let not the Lord speak to us; let Moses speak to us.” But the simple and sincere soul makes the contrary prayer: ‘Let no intruder come between thee and me; deal Thou with me; let me know it is thy will, and I ask no more.’ The excellence of Jesus, and of every true teacher, is, that he affirms the Divinity in him and in us, — not thrusts himself between it and us. It would instantly indispose us to any person claiming to speak for the Author of Nature, the setting forth any fact or law which we did not find in our consciousness. We should say with Heraclitus: “Come into this smoky cabin; God is here also: approve yourself to him.”

We affirm that in all men is this majestic perception and command; that it is the presence of the Eternal in each perishing man; that it distances and degrades all statements of whatever saints, heroes, poets, as obscure and confused stammerings before its silent revelation. They report the truth. It is the truth. When I think of Reason, of Truth, of Virtue, I cannot conceive them as lodged in your soul and lodged in my soul, but that you and I and all souls are lodged in that; and I may easily speak of that adorable nature, there where only I behold it in my dim experiences, in such terms as shall seem to the frivolous, who dare not fathom their consciousness, as profane. How is a man a man? How can he exist to weave relations of joy and virtue with other souls, but because he is inviolable, anchored at the centre of Truth and Being? In the ever-returning hour of reflection, he says: ‘I stand here glad at heart of all the sympathies I can awaken and share, clothing myself with them as with a garment of shelter and beauty, and yet knowing that it is not in the power of all who surround me to take from me the smallest thread I call mine. If all things are taken away, I have still all things in my relation to the Eternal.’

We pretend not to define the way of its access to the private heart. It passes understanding. There was a time when Christianity existed in one child. But if the child had been killed by Herod, would the element have been lost? God sends his message, if not by one, then quite as well by another. When the Master of the Universe has ends to fulfill, he impresses his will on the structure of minds.

The Divine Mind imparts itself to the single person: his whole duty is to this rule and teaching. The aid which others give us is like that of the mother to the child, — temporary, gestative, a short period of lactation, a nurse’s or a governess’s care; but on his arrival at a certain maturity, it ceases, and would be hurtful and ridiculous if prolonged. Slowly the body comes to the use of its organs; slowly the soul unfolds itself in the new man. It is partial at first, and honors only some one or some few truths. In its companions it sees other truths honored, and successively finds their foundation also in itself. Then it cuts the cord, and no longer believes “because of thy saying,” but because it has recognized them in itself.

The Divine Mind imparts itself to the single person: but it is also true that men act powerfully on us. There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men’s words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better. That is only to say, there is degree and gradation throughout Nature; and the Deity does not break his firm laws in respect to imparting truth, more than in imparting material heat and light. Men appear from time to time who receive with more purity and fulness these high communications. But it is only as fast as this hearing from another is authorized by its consent with his own, that it is pure and safe to each; and all receiving from abroad must be controlled by this immense reservation.

It happens now and then, in the ages, that a soul is born which has no weakness of self, which offers no impediment to the Divine Spirit, which comes down into Nature as if only for the benefit of souls, and all its thoughts are perceptions of things as they are, without any infirmity of earth. Such souls are as the apparition of gods among men, and simply by their presence pass judgment on them. Men are forced by their own self-respect to give them a certain attention. Evil men shrink and pay involuntary homage by hiding or apologizing for their action.

When a man is born with a profound moral sentiment, preferring truth, justice and the serving of all men to any honors or any gain, men readily feel the superiority. They who deal with him are elevated with joy and hope; he lights up the house or the landscape in which he stands. His actions are poetic and miraculous in their eyes. In his presence, or within his influence, every one believes in the immortality of the soul. They feel that the invisible world sympathizes with him. The Arabians delight in expressing the sympathy of the unseen world with holy men.

When Omar prayed and loved,

“Where Syrian waters roll,

Aloft the ninth heaven glowed and moved

To the tread of the jubilant soul.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us by its large scope. I am in the habit of thinking, — not, I hope, out of a partial experience, but confirmed by what I notice in many lives, — that to every serious mind Providence sends from time to time five or six or seven teachers who are of the first importance to him in the lessons they have to impart. The highest of these not so much give particular knowledge, as they elevate by sentiment and by their habitual grandeur of view.

Great men serve us as insurrections do in bad governments. The world would run into endless routine, and forms incrust forms, till the life was gone. But the perpetual supply of new genius shocks us with thrills of life, and recalls us to principles. Lucifer’s wager in the old drama was, “There is no steadfast man on earth.” He is very rare. “A man is already of consequence in the world when it is known that we can implicitly rely on him.” See how one noble person dwarfs a whole nation of underlings. This steadfastness we indicate when we praise character.

Character denotes habitual self-possession, habitual regard to interior and constitutional motives, a balance not to be overset or easily disturbed by outward events and opinion, and by implication points to the source of right motive. We sometimes employ the word to express the strong and consistent will of men of mixed motive, but, when used with emphasis, it points to what no events can change, that is, a will built on the reason of things. Such souls do not come in troops: oftenest appear solitary, like a general without his command, because those who can understand and uphold such appear rarely, not many, perhaps not one, in a generation. And the memory and tradition of such a leader is preserved in some strange way by those who only half understand him, until a true disciple comes, who apprehends and interprets every word.

The sentiment never stops in pure vision, but will be enacted. It affirms not only its truth, but its supremacy. It is not only insight, as science, as fancy, as imagination is; or an entertainment, as friendship and poetry are; but it is a sovereign rule; and the acts which it suggests — as when it impels a man to go forth and impart it to other men, or sets him on some asceticism or some practice of self-examination to hold him to obedience, or some zeal to unite men to abate some nuisance, or establish some reform or charity which it commands — are the homage we render to this sentiment, as compared with the lower regard we pay to other thoughts: and the private or social practices we establish in its honor we call religion.

The sentiment, of course, is the judge and measure of every expression of it, — measures Judaism, Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, or whatever philanthropy, or politics, or saint, or seer pretends to speak in its name. The religions we call false were once true. They also were affirmations of the conscience correcting the evil customs of their times. The populace drag down the gods to their own level, and give them their egotism; whilst in Nature is none at all, God keeping out of sight, and known only as pure law, though resistless. Châteaubriand said, with some irreverence of phrase, If God made man in his image, man has paid him well back. “Si Dieu a fait I’homme à son image, I’homme I’a bien rendu.” Every nation is degraded by the goblins it worships instead of this Deity. The Dionysia and Saturnalia of Greece and Rome, the human sacrifice of the Druids, the Sradda of Hindoos, the Purgatory, the Indulgences, and the Inquisition of Popery, the vindictive mythology of Calvinism, are examples of this perversion.

Every particular instruction is speedily embodied in a ritual, is accommodated to humble and gross minds, and corrupted. The moral sentiment is the perpetual critic on these forms, thundering its protest, sometimes in earnest and lofty rebuke; but sometimes also it is the source, in natures less pure, of sneers and flippant jokes of common people, who feel that the forms and dogmas are not true for them, though they do not see where the error lies.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next, We use in our idlest poetry and discourse the words Jove, Neptune, Mercury, as mere colors, and can hardly believe that they had to the lively Greek the anxious meaning which, in our towns, is given and received in churches when our religious names are used: and we read with surprise the horror of Athens when, one morning, the statues of Mercury in the temples were found broken, and the like consternation was in the city as if, in Boston, all the Orthodox churches should be burned in one night.

The greatest dominion will be to the deepest thought. The establishment of Christianity in the world does not rest on any miracle but the miracle of being the broadest and most humane doctrine. Christianity was once a schism and protest against the impieties of the time, which had originally been protests against earlier impieties, but had lost their truth. Varnhagen von Ense, writing in Prussia in 1848, says: “The Gospels belong to the most aggressive writings. No leaf thereof could attain the liberty of being printed (in Berlin) to-day. What Mirabeaus, Rousseaus, Diderots, Fichtes, Heines, and many another heretic, one can detect therein!”

But before it was yet a national religion it was alloyed, and, in the hands of hot Africans, of luxurious Byzantines, of fierce Gauls, its creeds were tainted with their barbarism. In Holland, in England, in Scotland, it felt the national narrowness. How unlike our habitual turn of thought was that of the last century in this country! Our ancestors spoke continually of angels and archangels with the same good faith as they would have spoken of their own parents or their late minister. Now the words pale, are rhetoric, and all credence is gone. Our horizon is not far, say one generation, or thirty years: we all see so much. The older see two generations, or sixty years. But what has been running on through three horizons, or ninety years, looks to all the world like a law of Nature, and ‘t is an impiety to doubt. Thus, ‘t is incredible to us, if we look into the religious books of our grandfathers, how they held themselves in such a pinfold. But why not? As far as they could see, through two or three horizons, nothing but ministers and ministers. Calvinism was one and the same thing in Geneva, in Scotland, in Old and New England. If there was a wedding, they had a sermon; if a funeral, then a sermon; if a war, or small-pox, or a comet, or canker-worms, or a deacon died, — still a sermon: Nature was a pulpit; the churchwarden or tithing-man was a petty persecutor; the presbytery, a tyrant; and in many a house in country places the poor children found seven sabbaths in a week. Fifty or a hundred years ago, prayers were said, morning and evening, in all families; grace was said at table; an exact observance of the Sunday was kept in the houses of laymen as of clergymen. And one sees with some pain the disuse of rites so charged with humanity and aspiration. But it by no means follows, because those offices are much disused, that the men and women are irreligious; certainly not that they have less integrity or sentiment, but only, let us hope, that they see that they can omit the form without loss of real ground; perhaps that they find some violence, some cramping of their freedom of thought, in the constant recurrence of the form.

So of the changed position and manners of the clergy. They have dropped, with the sacerdotal garb and manners of the last century, many doctrines and practices once esteemed indispensable to their order. But the distinctions of the true clergyman are not less decisive. Men ask now, “Is he serious? Is he a sincere man, who lives as he teaches? Is he a benefactor?” So far the religion is now where it should be. Persons are discriminated as honest, as veracious, as illuminated, as helpful, as having public and universal regards, or otherwise; — are discriminated according to their aims, and not by these ritualities.

The changes are inevitable; the new age cannot see with the eyes of the last. But the change is in what is superficial; the principles are immortal, and the rally on the principle must arrive as people become intellectual. I consider theology to be the rhetoric of morals. The mind of this age has fallen away from theology to morals. I conceive it an advance. I suspect, that, when the theology was most florid and dogmatic, it was the barbarism of the people, and that, in that very time, the best men also fell away from theology, and rested in morals. I think that all the dogmas rest on morals, and that it is only a question of youth or maturity, of more or less fancy in the recipient; that the stern determination to do justly, to speak the truth, to be chaste and humble, was substantially the same, whether under a self-respect, or under a vow made on the knees at the shrine of Madonna.

When once Selden had said that the priests seemed to him to be baptizing their own fingers, the rite of baptism was getting late in the world. Or when once it is perceived that the English missionaries in India put obstacles in the way of schools, (as is alleged,) — do not wish to enlighten but to Christianize the Hindoos, — it is seen at once how wide of Christ is English Christianity.

Mankind at large always resemble frivolous children: they are impatient of thought, and wish to be amused. Truth is too simple for us; we do not like those who unmask our illusions. Fontenelle said: “If the Deity should lay bare to the eyes of men the secret system of Nature, the causes by which all the astronomic results are effected, and they finding no magic, no mystic numbers, no fatalities, but the greatest simplicity, I am persuaded they would not be able to suppress a feeling of mortification, and would exclaim, with disappointment, ‘Is that all?’” And so we paint over the bareness of ethics with the quaint grotesques of theology.

We boast the triumph of Christianity over Paganism, meaning the victory of the spirit over the senses; but Paganism hides itself in the uniform of the Church. Paganism has only taken the oath of allegiance, taken the cross, but is Paganism still, outvotes the true men by millions of majority, carries the bag, spends the treasure, writes the tracts, elects the minister, and persecutes the true believer.

There is a certain secular progress of opinion, which, in civil countries, reaches everybody. One service which this age has rendered is, to make the life and wisdom of every past man accessible and available to all. Socrates and Marcus Aurelius are allowed to be saints; Mahomet is no longer accursed; Voltaire is no longer a scarecrow; Spinoza has come to be revered. “The time will come,” says Varnhagen von Ense, “when we shall treat the jokes and sallies against the myths and churchrituals of Christianity — say the sarcasms of Voltaire, Frederic the Great, and D’Alembert — good-naturedly and without offence: since, at bottom, those men mean honestly, their polemics proceed out of a religious striving, and what Christ meant and willed is in essence more with them than with their opponents, who only wear and misrepresent the name of Christ. … Voltaire was an apostle of Christian ideas; only the names were hostile to him, and he never knew it otherwise. He was like the son of the vine-dresser in the Gospel, who said No, and went; the other said Yea, and went not. These men preached the true God, — Him whom men serve by justice and uprightness; but they called themselves atheists.”

When the highest conceptions, the lessons of religion, are imported, the nation is not culminating, has not genius, but is servile. A true nation loves its vernacular tongue. A completed nation will not import its religion. Duty grows everywhere, like children, like grass; and we need not go to Europe or to Asia to learn it. I am not sure that the English religion is not all quoted. Even the Jeremy Taylors, Fullers, George Herberts, steeped, all of them, in Church traditions, are only using their fine fancy to emblazon their memory. ‘T is Judæa, not England, which is the ground. So with the mordant Calvinism of Scotland and America. But this quoting distances and disables them: since with every repeater something of creative force is lost, as we feel when we go back to each original moralist. Pythagoras, Socrates, the Stoics, the Hindoo, Behmen, George Fox, — these speak originally; and how many sentences and books we owe to unknown authors, — to writers who were not careful to set down name or date or titles or cities or postmarks in these illuminations!

We, in our turn, want power to drive the ponderous State. The constitution and law in America must be written on ethical principles, so that the entire power of the spiritual world can be enlisted to hold the loyalty of the citizen, and to repel every enemy as by force of Nature. The laws of old empires stood on the religious convictions. Now that their religions are outgrown, the empires lack strength. Romanism in Europe does not represent the real opinion of enlightened men. The Lutheran Church does not represent in Germany the opinions of the universities. In England, the gentlemen, the journals, and now, at last, churchmen and bishops, have fallen away from the Anglican Church. And in America, where are no legal ties to churches, the looseness appears dangerous.

Our religion has got on as far as Unitarianism. But all the forms grow pale. The walls of the temple are wasted and thin, and, at last, only a film of whitewash, because the mind of our culture has already left our liturgies behind. “Every age,” says Varnhagen, “has another sieve for the religious tradition, and will sift it out again. Something is continually lost by this treatment, which posterity cannot recover.”

But it is a capital truth that Nature, moral as well as material, is always equal to herself. Ideas always generate enthusiasm. The creed, the legend, forms of worship, swiftly decay. Morals is the incorruptible essence, very heedless in its richness of any past teacher or witness, heedless of their lives and fortunes. It does not ask whether you are wrong or right in your anecdotes of them; but it is all in all how you stand to your own tribunal.

The lines of the religious sects are very shifting; their platforms unstable; the whole science of theology of great uncertainty, and resting very much on the opinions of who may chance to be the leading doctors of Oxford or Edinburgh, of Princeton or Cambridge, to-day. No man can tell what religious revolutions await us in the next years; and the education in the divinity colleges may well hesitate and vary. But the science of ethics has no mutation; and whoever feels any love or skill for ethical studies may safely lay out all his strength and genius in working in that mine. The pulpit may shake, but this platform will not. All the victories of religion belong to the moral sentiment Some poor soul beheld the Law blazing through such impediments as he had, and yielded himself to humility and joy. What was gained by being told that it was justification by faith?

The Church, in its ardor for beloved persons, clings to the miraculous, in the vulgar sense, which has even an immoral tendency, as one sees in Greek, Indian and Catholic legends, which are used to gloze every crime. The soul, penetrated with the beatitude which pours into it on all sides, asks no interpositions, no new laws, — the old are good enough for it, — finds in every cart-path of labor ways to heaven, and the humblest lot exalted. Men will learn to put back the emphasis peremptorily on pure morals, always the same, not subject to doubtful interpretation, with no sale of indulgences no massacre of heretics, no female slaves, no disfranchisement of woman, no stigma on race; to make morals the absolute test, and so uncover and drive out the false religions. There is no vice that has not skulked behind them. It is only yesterday that our American churches, so long silent on Slavery, and notoriously hostile to the Abolitionist, wheeled into line for Emancipation.

I am far from accepting the opinion that the revelations of the moral sentiment are insufficient, as if it furnished a rule only, and not the spirit by which the rule is animated. For I include in these, of course, the history of Jesus, as well as those of every divine soul which in any place or time delivered any grand lesson to humanity; and I find in the eminent experiences in all times a substantial agreement. The sentiment itself teaches unity of source, and disowns every superiority other than of deeper truth. Jesus has immense claims on the gratitude of mankind, and knew how to guard the integrity of his brother’s soul from himself also; but, in his disciples, admiration of him runs away with their reverence for the human soul, and they hamper us with limitations of person and text. Every exaggeration of these is a violation of the soul’s right, and inclines the manly reader to lay down the New Testament, to take up the Pagan philosophers. It is not that the Upanishads or the Maxims of Antoninus are better, but that they do not invade his freedom; because they are only suggestions, whilst the other adds the inadmissible claim of positive authority, — of an external command, where command cannot be. This is the secret of the mischievous result that, in every period of intellectual expansion, the Church ceases to draw into its clergy those who best belong there, the largest and freest minds, and that in its most liberal forms, when such minds enter it, they are coldly received, and find themselves out of place. This tharm in the Pagan moralists, of suggestion, the charm of poetry, of mere truth, (easily disengaged from their historical accidents which nobody wishes to force on us,) the New Testament loses by its connection with a church. Mankind cannot long suffer this loss, and the office of this age is to put all these writings on the eternal footing of equality of origin in the instincts of the human mind. It is certain that each inspired master will gain instantly by the separation from the idolatry of ages.

To their great honor, the simple and free minds among our clergy have not resisted the voice of Nature and the advanced perceptions of the mind; and every church divides itself into a liberal and expectant class, on one side, and an unwilling and conservative class on the other. As it stands with us now, a few clergymen, with a more theological cast of mind, retain the traditions, but they carry them quietly. In general discourse, they are never obtruded. If the clergyman should travel in France, in England, in Italy, he might leave them locked up in the same closet with his “occasional sermons” at home, and, if he did not return, would never think to send for them. The orthodox clergymen hold a little firmer to theirs, as Calvinism has a more tenacious vitality; but that is doomed also, and will only die last; for Calvinism rushes to be Unitarianism, as Unitarianism rushes to be pure Theism.

But the inspirations are never withdrawn. In the worst times, men of organic virtue are born, — men and women of native integrity, and indifferently in high and low conditions. There will always be a class of imaginative youths, whom poetry, whom the love of beauty, lead to the adoration of the moral sentiment, and these will provide it with new historic forms and songs. Religion is as inexpugnable as the use of lamps, or of wells, or of chimneys. We must have days and temples and teachers. The Sunday is the core of our civilization, dedicated to thought and reverence. It invites to the noblest solitude and the noblest society, to whatever means and aids of spiritual refreshment. Men may well come together to kindle each other to virtuous living. Confucius said, “If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the evening die, I can be happy.”

The churches already indicate the new spirit in adding to the perennial office of teaching, beneficent activities, — as in creating hospitals, ragged schools, offices of employment for the poor, appointing almoners to the helpless, guardians of foundlings and orphans. The power that in other times inspired crusades, or the colonization of New England, or the modern revivals, flies to the help of the deaf-mute and the blind, to the education of the sailor and the vagabond boy, to the reform of convicts and harlots, — as the war created the Hilton Head and Charleston missions, the Sanitary Commission, the nurses and teachers at Washington.

In the present tendency of our society, in the new importance of the individual, when thrones are crumbling and presidents and governors are forced every moment to remember their constituencies; when counties and towns are resisting centralization, and the individual voter his party, — society is threatened with actual granulation, religious as well as political. How many people are there in Boston? Some two hundred thousand. Well, then so many sects. Of course each poor soul loses all his old stays; no bishop watches him, no confessor reports that he has neglected the confessional, no class-leader admonishes him of absences, no fagot, no penance, no fine, no rebuke. Is not this wrong? is not this dangerous? ‘T is not wrong, but the law of growth. It is not dangerous, any more than the mother’s withdrawing her hands from the tottering babe, at his first walk across the nursery-floor: the child fears and cries, but achieves the feat, instantly tries it again, and never wishes to be assisted more. And this infant soul must learn to walk alone. At first he is forlorn, homeless; but this rude stripping him of all support drives him inward, and he finds himself unhurt; he finds himself face to face with the majestic Presence, reads the original of the Ten Commandments, the original of Gospels and Epistles; nay, his narrow chapel expands to the blue cathedral of the sky, where he

“Looks in and sees each blissful deity,

Where he before the thunderous throne doth lie.”

To nations or to individuals the progress of opinion is not a loss of moral restraint, but simply a change from coarser to finer checks. No evil can come from reform which a deeper thought will not correct. If there is any tendency in national expansion to form character, religion will not be a loser. There is a fear that pure truth, pure morals, will not make a religion for the affections. Whenever the sublimities of character shall be incarnated in a man, we may rely that awe and love and insatiable curiosity will follow his steps. Character is the habit of action from the permanent vision of truth. It carries a superiority to all the accidents of life. It compels right relation to every other man, — domesticates itself with strangers and enemies. “But I, father,” says the wise Prahlada, in the Vishnu Purana, “know neither friends nor foes, for I behold Kesava in all beings as in my own soul.” It confers perpetual insight. It sees that a man’s friends and his foes are of his own house-hold, of his own person What would it avail me, if I could destroy my enemies? There would be as many to-morrow. That which I hate and fear is really in myself, and no knife is long enough to reach to its heart. Confucius said one day to Ke Kang: “Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it.” Ke Kang, distressed about the number of thieves in the state, inquired of Confucius how to do away with them. Confucius said, “If you, sir, were not covetous, although you should reward them to do it, they would not steal.”

Its methods are subtle, it works without means. It indulges no enmity against any, knowing, with Prahlada that “the suppression of malignant feeling is itself a reward.” The more reason, the less government. In a sensible family, nobody ever hears the words “shall” and “sha’n’t;” nobody commands, and nobody obeys, but all conspire and joyfully co-operate. Take off the roofs of hundreds of happy houses, and you shall see this order without ruler, and the like in every intelligent and moral society. Command is exceptional, and marks some break in the link of reason; as the electricity goes round the world without a spark or a sound, until there is a break in the wire or the water chain. Swedenborg said, that, “in the spiritual world, when one wishes to rule, or despises others, he is thrust out of doors.” Goethe, in discussing the characters in “Wilhelm Meister,” maintained his belief that “pure loveliness and right good-will are the highest manly prerogatives, before which all energetic heroism, with its lustre and renown, must recede.” In perfect accord with this, Henry James affirms, that “to give the feminine element in life its hardearned but eternal supremacy over the masculine has been the secret inspiration of all past history.”

There is no end to the sufficiency of character. It can afford to wait; it can do without what is called success; it cannot but succeed. To a well-principled man existence is victory. He defends himself against failure in his main design by making every inch of the road to it pleasant. There is no trifle, and no obscurity to him: he feels the immensity of the chain whose last link he holds in his hand, and is led by it. Having nothing, this spirit hath all. It asks, with Marcus Aurelius, “What matter by whom the good is done?” It extols humility, — by every self-abasement lifted higher in the scale of being. It makes no stipulations for earthly felicity, — does not ask, in the absoluteness of its trust, even for the assurance of continued life.

EDUCATION.

With the key of the secret he marches faster

From strength to strength, and for night brings day,

While classes or tribes too weak to master

The flowing conditions of life, give way.

A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price. The use of the world is that man may learn its laws. And the human race have wisely signified their sense of this, by calling wealth, means, — Man being the end. Language is always wise.

Therefore I praise New England because it is the country in the world where is the freest expenditure for education. We have already taken, at the planting of the Colonies, (for aught I know for the first time in the world,) the initial step, which for its importance might have been resisted as the most radical of revolutions, thus deciding at the start the destiny of this country, — this, namely, that the poor man, whom the law does not allow to take an ear of corn when starving, nor a pair of shoes for his freezing feet, is allowed to put his hand into the pocket of the rich, and say, You shall educate me, not as you will, but as I will: not alone in the elements, but, by further provision, in the languages, in sciences, in the useful and in elegant arts. The child shall be taken up by the State, and taught, at the public cost, the rudiments of knowledge, and, at last, the ripest results of art and science.

Humanly speaking, the school, the college, society, make the difference between men. All the fairy tales of Aladdin or the invisible Gyges or the talisman that opens kings’ palaces or the enchanted halls under-ground or in the sea, are only fictions to indicate the one miracle of intellectual enlargement. When a man stupid becomes a man inspired, when one and the same man passes out of the torpid into the perceiving state, leaves the din of trifles, the stupor of the senses, to enter into the quasi-omniscience of high thought, — up and down, around, all limits disappear. No horizon shuts down. He sees things in their causes, all facts in their connection.

One of the problems of history is the beginning of civilization. The animals that accompany and serve man make no progress as races. Those called domestic are capable of learning of man a few tricks of utility or amusement, but they cannot communicate the skill to their race. Each individual must be taught anew. The trained dog cannot train another dog. And Man himself in many races retains almost the unteachableness of the beast. For a thousand years the islands and forests of a great part of the world have been filled with savages who made no steps of advance in art or skill beyond the necessity of being fed and warmed. Certain nations with a better brain and usually in more temperate climates, have made such progress as to compare with these as these compare with the bear and the wolf.

Victory over things is the office of man. Of course, until it is accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. His continual tendency, his great danger, is to overlook the fact that the world is only his teacher, and the nature of sun and moon, plant and animal only means of arousing his interior activity. Enamored of their beauty, comforted by their convenience, he seeks them as ends, and fast loses sight of the fact that they have worse than no values, that they become noxious, when he becomes their slave.

This apparatus of wants and faculties, this craving body, whose organs ask all the elements and all the functions of Nature for their satisfaction, educate the wondrous creature which they satisfy with light, with heat, with water, with wood, with bread, with wool. The necessities imposed by this most irritable and all-related texture have taught Man hunting, pasturage, agriculture, commerce, weaving, joining, masonry, geometry, astronomy. Here is a world pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced and planted with civil partitions and properties which all put new restraints on the young inhabitant. He too must come into this magic circle of relations, and know health and sickness, the fear of injury, the desire of external good, the charm of riches, the charm of power. The household is a school of power. There, within the door, learn the tragicomedy of human life. Here is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever. Here is poverty and all the wisdom its hated necessities can teach, here labor drudges, here affections glow, here the secrets of character are told, the guards of man, the guards of woman, the compensations which, like angels of justice, pay every debt: the opium of custom, whereof all drink and many go mad. Here is Economy, and Glee, and Hospitality, and Ceremony, and Frankness, and Calamity, and Death, and Hope.

Every one has a trust of power, — every man, every boy a jurisdiction, whether it be over a cow or a rood of a potato-field, or a fleet of ships, or the laws of a state. And what activity the desire of power inspires! What toils it sustains! How it sharpens the perceptions and stores the memory with facts. Thus a man may well spend many years of life in trade. It is a constant teaching of the laws of matter and of mind. No dollar of property can be created without some direct communication with nature, and of course some acquisition of knowledge and practical force. It is a constant contest with the active faculties of men, a study of the issues of one and another course of action, an accumulation of power, and, if the higher faculties of the individual be from time to time quickened, he will gain wisdom and virtue from his business.

As every wind draws music out of the Æolian harp, so doth every object in Nature draw music out of his mind. Is it not true that every landscape I behold, every friend I meet, every act I perform, every pain I suffer, leaves me a different being from that they found me? That poverty, love, authority, anger, sickness, sorrow, success, all work actively upon our being and unlock for us the concealed faculties of the mind? Whatever private or petty ends are frustrated, this end is always answered. Whatever the man does, or whatever befalls him, opens another chamber in his soul, — that is, he has got a new feeling, a new thought, a new organ. Do we not see how amazingly for this end man is fitted to the world?

What leads him to science? Why does he track in the midnight heaven a pure spark, a luminous patch wandering from age to age, but because he acquires thereby a majestic sense of power; learning that in his own constitution he can set the shining maze in order, and finding and carrying their law in his mind, can, as it were, see his simple idea realized up yonder in giddy distances and frightful periods of duration. If Newton come and first of men perceive that not alone certain bodies fall to the ground at a certain rate, but that all bodies in the Universe, the universe of bodies, fall always, and at one rate; that every atom in nature draws to every other atom, — he extends the power of his mind not only over every cubic atom of his native planet, but he reports the condition of millions of worlds which his eye never saw. And what is the charm which every ore, every new plant, every new fact touching winds, clouds, ocean currents, the secrets of chemical composition and decomposition possess for Humboldt? What but that much revolving of similar facts in his mind has shown him that always the mind contains in its transparent chambers the means of classifying the most refractory phenomena, of depriving them of all casual and chaotic aspect, and subordinating them to a bright reason of its own, and so giving to man a sort of property, — yea, the very highest property in every district and particle of the globe.

By the permanence of Nature, minds are trained alike, and made intelligible to each other. In our condition are the roots of language and communication, and these instructions we never exhaust.

In some sort the end of life is that the man - should take up the universe into himself, or out of that quarry leave nothing unrepresented. Yonder mountain must migrate into his mind. Yonder magnificent astronomy he is at last to import, fetching away moon, and planet, solstice, period, comet and binal star, by comprehending their relation and law. Instead of the timid stripling he was, he is to be the stalwart Archimedes, Pythagoras, Columbus, Newton, of the physic, metaphysic and ethics of the design of the world.

For truly the population of the globe has its origin in the aims which their existence is to serve; and so with every portion of them. The truth takes flesh in forms that can express it; and thus in history an idea always overhangs, like the moon, and rules the tide which rises simultaneously in all the souls of a generation.

Whilst thus the world exists for the mind; whilst thus the man is ever invited inward into shining realms of knowledge and power by the shows of the world, which interpret to him the infinitude of his own consciousness, — it becomes the office of a just education to awaken him to the knowledge of this fact.

We learn nothing rightly until we learn the symbolical character of life. Day creeps after day, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things, that we cannot enough despise, — call heavy, prosaic., and desert. The time we seek to kill: the attention it is elegant to divert from things around us. And presently the aroused intellect finds gold and gems in one of these scorned facts, — then finds that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds; that a fact is an Epiphany of God.

We have our theory of life, our religion, our philosophy; and the event of each moment, the shower, the steamboat disaster, the passing of a beautiful face, the apoplexy of our neighbor, are all tests to try our theory, the approximate result we call truth, and reveal its defects. If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church or old church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as a bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

When I see the doors by which God enters into the mind; that there is no sot or fop, ruffian or pedant into whom thoughts do not enter by passages which the individual never left open, I can expect any revolution in character, “I have hope,” said the great Leibnitz, “that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed.”

It is ominous, a presumption of crime, that this word Education has so cold, so hopeless a sound. A treatise on education, a convention for education, a lecture, a system, affects us with slight paralysis and a certain yawning of the jaws. We are not encouraged when the law touches it with its fingers. Education should be as broad as man. Whatever elements are in him that should foster and demonstrate. If he be dexterous, his tuition should make it appear; if he be capable of dividing men by the trenchant sword of his thought, education should unsheathe and sharpen it; if he is one to cement society by his all-reconciling affinities, oh! hasten their action! If he is jovial, if he is mercurial, if he is great-hearted, a cunning artificer, a strong commander, a potent ally, ingenious, useful, elegant, witty, prophet, diviner, — society has need of all these. The imagination must be addressed. Why always coast on the surface and never open the interior of nature, not by science, which is surface still, but by poetry? Is not the Vast an element of the mind? Yet what teaching, what book of this day appeals to the Vast?

Our culture has truckled to the times, — to the senses. It is not manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us brave or free. “We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, greathearted men. The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to inspire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspire with the Divine Providence. A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.

In affirming that the moral nature of man is the predominant element and should therefore be mainly consulted in the arrangements of a school, I am very far from wishing that it should swallow up all the other instincts and faculties of man. It should be enthroned in his mind, but if it monopolize the man he is not yet sound, he does not yet know his wealth. He is in danger of becoming merely devout, and wearisome through the monotony of his thought. It is not less necessary that the intellectual and the active faculties should be nourished and matured. Let us apply to this subject the light of the same torch by which we have looked at all the phenomena of the time; the infinitude, namely, of every man. Everything teaches that.

One fact constitutes all my satisfaction, inspires all my trust, viz., this perpetual youth, which, as long as there is any good in us, we cannot get rid of. It is very certain that the coming age and the departing age seldom understand each other. The old man thinks the young man has no distinct purpose, for he could never get anything intelligible and earnest out of him. Perhaps the young man does not think it worth his while to explain himself to so hard and inapprehensive a confessor. Let him be led up with a long-sighted forbearance, and let not the sallies of his petulance or folly be checked with disgust or indignation or despair.

I call our system a system of despair, and I find all the correction, all the revolution that is needed and that the best spirits of this age promise, in one word, in Hope. Nature, when she sends a new mind into the world, fills it beforehand with a desire for that which she wishes it to know and do. Let us wait and see what is this new creation, of what new organ the great Spirit had need when it incarnated this new Will. A new Adam in the garden, he is to name all the beasts in the field, all the gods in the sky. And jealous provision seems to have been made in his constitution that you shall not invade and contaminate him with the worn weeds of your language and opinions. The charm of life is this variety of genius, these contrasts and flavors by which Heaven has modulated the identity of truth, and there is a perpetual hankering to violate this individuality, to warp his ways of thinking and behavior to resemble or reflect your thinking and behavior. A low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character and fortune; an expectation which the child, if justice is done him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat his proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.

Or we sacrifice the genius of the pupil, the unknown possibilities of his nature, to a neat and safe uniformity, as the Turks whitewash the costly mosaics of ancient art which the Greeks left on their temple walls. Rather let us have men whose manhood is only the continuation of their boyhood, natural characters still; such are able and fertile for heroic action; and not that sad spectacle with which we are too familiar, educated eyes in uneducated bodies.

I like boys, the masters of the playground and of the street, — boys, who have the same liberal ticket of admission to all shops, factories, armories, town-meetings, caucuses, mobs, target-shootings, as flies have; quite unsuspected, coming in as naturally as the janitor, — known to have no money in their pockets, and themselves not suspecting the value of this poverty; putting nobody on his guard, but seeing the inside of the show, — hearing all the asides. There are no secrets from them, they know everything that befalls in the fire-company, the merits of every engine and of every man at the brakes, how to work it, and are swift to try their hand at every part; so too the merits of every locomotive on the rails, and will coax the engineer to let them ride with him and pull the handles when it goes to the engine-house. They are there only for fun, and not knowing that they are at school in the courthouse, or the cattle-show, quite as ranch and more than they were, an hour ago, in the arithmetic class.

They know truth from counterfeit as quick as the chemist does. They detect weakness in your eye and behavior a week before you open your mouth, and have given you the benefit of their opinion quick as a wink. They make no mistakes, have no pedantry, but entire belief-on experience. Their elections at base-ball or cricket are founded on merit, and are right. They don’t pass for swimmers until they can swim, nor for stroke-oar until they can row: and I desire to be saved from their contempt. If I can pass with them, I can manage well enough with their fathers.

Everybody delights in the energy with which boys deal and talk with each other; the mixture of fun and earnest, reproach and coaxing, love and wrath, with which the game is played; — the good-natured yet defiant independence of a leading boy’s behavior in the school-yard. How we envy in later life the happy youths to whom their boisterous games and rough exercise furnish the precise element which frames and sets off their school and college tasks, and teaches them, when least they think it, the use and meaning of these. In their fun and extreme freak they hit on the topmost sense of Horace. The young giant, brown from his hunting-tramp, tells his story well, interlarded with lucky allusions to Homer, to Virgil, to college-songs, to Walter Scott; and Jove and Achilles, partridge and trout, opera and binomial theorem, Caesar in Gaul, Sherman in Savannah, and hazing in Holwortky, dance through the narrative in merry confusion, yet the logic is good. If he can turn his books to such picturesque account in his fishing and hunting, it is easy to see how his reading and experience, as he has more of both, will interpenetrate each other. And every one desires that this pure vigor of action and wealth of narrative, cheered with so much humor and street rhetoric, should be carried into the habit of the young man, purged of its uproar and rudeness, but with all its vivacity entire. His hunting and campings-out have given him an indispensable base: I wish to add a taste for good company through his impatience of bad. That stormy genius of his needs a little direction to games, charades, verses of society, song, and a correspondence year by year with his wisest and best friends. Friendship is an order of nobility; from its revelations we come more worthilv into nature. Society he must have or he is poor indeed; he gladly enters a school which forbids conceit, affectation, emphasis and dulness, and requires of each only the flower of his nature and experience; requires good-will, beauty, wit, and select information; teaches by practice the law of conversation, namely, to hear as well as to speak.

Meantime, if circumstances do not permit the high social advantages, solitude has also its lessons. The obscure youth learns there the practice instead of the literature of his virtues; and, because of the disturbing effect of passion and sense, which by a multitude of trifles impede the mind’s eye from the quiet search of that fine horizon-line which truth keeps, — the way to knowledge and power has ever been an escape from too much engagement with affairs and possessions; a way, not through plenty and superfluity, but by denial and renunciation, into solitude and privation; and, the more is taken away, the more real and inevitable wealth of being is made known to us. The solitary knows the essence of the thought, the scholar in society only its fair face. There is no want of example of great men, great benefactors, who have been monks and hermits in habit. The bias of mind is sometimes irresistible in that direction. The man is, as it were, born deaf and dumb, and dedicated to a narrow and lonely life. Let him study the art of solitude, yield as gracefully as he can to his destiny. Why cannot he get the good of his doom, and if it is from eternity a settled fact that he and society shall be nothing to each other, why need he blush so, and make wry faces to keep up a freshman’s seat in the fine world? Heaven often protects valuable souls charged with great secrets, great ideas, by long shutting them up with their own thoughts. And the most genial and amiable of men must alternate society with solitude, and learn its severe lessons.

There comes the period of the imagination to each, a later youth; the power of beauty, the power of books, of poetry. Culture makes his books realities to him, their characters more brilliant, more effective on his mind, than his actual mates. Do not spare to put novels into the hands of young people as an occasional holiday and experiment; but, above all, good poetry in all kinds, epic, tragedy, lyric. If we can touch the imagination, we serve them, they will never forget it. Let him read “Tom Brown at Rugby,” read “Tom Brown at Oxford,” — better yet, read “Hodson’s Life “ — Hodson who took prisoner the king of Delhi. They teach the same truth, — a trust, against all appearances, against all privations, in your own worth, and not in tricks, plotting, or patronage.

I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

But I hear the outcry which replies to this suggestion: — Would you verily throw up the reins of public and private discipline; would you leave the young child to the mad career of his own passions and whimsies, and call this anarchy a respect for the child’s nature? I answer, — Respect the child, respect him to the end, but also respect yourself. Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue, — but no kinsman of his sin. Let him find you so true to yourself that you are the irreconcilable hater of his vice and the imperturbable slighter of his trifling.

The two points in a boy’s training are, to keep his naturel and train off all but that: — to keep his naturel, but stop off his uproar, fooling and horse-play; — keep his nature and arm it with knowledge in the very direction in which it points. Here are the two capital facts, Genius and Drill. The first is the inspiration in the well-born healthy child, the new perception he has of nature. Somewhat he sees in forms or hears in music or apprehends in mathematics, or believes practicable in mechanics or possible in political society, which no one else sees or hears or believes. This is the perpetual romance of new life, the invasion of God into the old dead world, when he sends into quiet houses a young soul with a thought which is not met, looking for something which is not there, but which ought to be there: the thought is dim but it is sure, and he casts about restless for means and masters to verify it; he makes wild attempts to explain himself and invoke the aid and consent of the bystanders. Baffled for want of language and methods to convey his meaning, not yet clear to himself, he conceives that though not in this house or town, yet in some other house or town is the wise master who can put him in possession of the rules and instruments to execute his will. Happy this child with a bias, with a thought which entrances him, leads him, now into deserts now into cities, the fool of an idea. Let him follow it in good a id in evil report, in good or bad company; it will justify itself; it will lead him at last into the illustrious society of the lovers of truth.

In London, in a private company, I became acquainted with a gentleman, Sir Charles Fellowes, who, being at Xanthus, in the Ægean Sea, had seen a Turk point with his staff to some carved work on the corner of a stone almost buried in the soil. Fellowes scraped away the dirt, was struck with the beauty of the sculptured ornaments, and, looking about him, observed more blocks and fragments like this. He returned to the spot, procured laborers and uncovered many blocks. He went back to England, bought a Greek grammar and learned the language; he read history and studied ancient art to explain his stones; he interested Gibson the sculptor; he invoked the assistance of the English Government; he called in the succor of Sir Humphry Davy to analyze the pigments; of experts in coins, of scholars and connoisseurs; and at last in his third visit brought home to England such statues and marble reliefs and such careful plans that he was able to reconstruct, in the British Museum where it now stands, the perfect model of the Ionic trophy-monument, fifty years older than the Parthenon of Athens, and which had been destroyed by earthquakes, then by iconoclast Christians, then by savage Turks. But mark that in the task he had achieved an excellent education, and become associated with distinguished scholars whom he had interested in his pursuit; in short, had formed a college for himself; the enthusiast had found the master, the masters, whom he sought. Always genius seeks genius, desires nothing so much as to be a pupil and to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself.

Nor are the two elements, enthusiasm and drill, incompatible. Accuracy is essential to beauty. The very definition of the intellect is Aristotle’s: “that by which we know terms or boundaries.” Give a boy accurate perceptions. Teach him the difference between the similar and the same. Make him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as he lives. It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge. He can learn anything which is important to him now that the power to learn is secured: as mechanics say, when one has learned the use of tools, it is easy to work at a new craft.

Letter by letter, syllable by syllable, the child learns to read, and in good time can convey to all the domestic circle the sense of Shakspeare. By many steps each just as short, the stammering boy and the hesitating collegian, in the school debate, in college clubs, in mock court, comes at last to full, secure, triumphant unfolding of his thought in the popular assembly, with a fullness of power that makes all the steps forgotten.

But this function of opening and feeding the human mind is not to be fulfilled by any mechanical or military method; is not to be trusted to any skill less large than Nature itself. You must not neglect the form, but you must secure the essentials. It is curious how perverse and intermeddling we are, and what vast pains and cost we incur to do wrong. Whilst we all know in our own experience and apply natural methods in our own business, — in education our common sense fails us, and we are continually trying costly machinery against nature, in patent schools and academies and in great colleges and universities.

The natural method forever confutes our experiments, and we must still come back to it. The whole theory of the school is on the nurse’s or mother’s knee. The child is as hot to learn as the mother is to impart. There is mutual delight. The joy of our childhood in hearing beautiful stories from some skilful aunt who loves to tell them, must be repeated in youth. The boy wishes to learn to skate, to coast, to catch a fish in the brook, to hit a mark with a snowball or a stone; and a boy a little older is just as well pleased to teach him these sciences. Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the secret of algebra, or of chemistry, or of good reading and good recitation of poetry or of prose, or of chosen facts in history or in biography.

Nature provided for the communication of thought, by planting with it in the receiving mind a fury to impart it. ‘T is so in every art, in every science. One burns to tell the new fact, the other burns to hear it. See how far a young doctor will ride or walk to witness a new surgical operation, I have seen a carriage-maker’s shop emptied of all its workmen into the street, to scrutinize a new pattern from New York. So in literature, the young man who has taste for poetry, for fine images, for noble thoughts, is insatiable for this nourishment, and forgets all the world for the more learned friend, — who finds equal joy in dealing out his treasures.

Happy the natural college thus self-instituted around every natural teacher; the young men of Athens around Socrates; of Alexandria around Plotinus; of Paris around Abelard; of Germany around Fichte, or Niebuhr, or Goethe: in short the natural sphere of every leading mind. But the moment this is organized, difficulties begin. The college was to be the nurse and home of genius; but, though every young man is born with some determination in his nature, and is a potential genius; is at last to be one; it is, in the most, obstructed and delayed, and, whatever they may hereafter be, their senses are now opened in advance of their minds. They are more sensual than intellectual. Appetite and indolence they have, but no enthusiasm. These come in numbers to the college: few geniuses: and the teaching comes to be arranged for these many, and not for those few. Hence the instruction seems to require skilful tutors, of accurate and systematic mind, rather than ardent and inventive masters. Besides, the youth of genius are eccentric, won’t drill, are irritable, uncertain, explosive, solitary, not men of the world, not good for every-day association. You have to work for large classes instead of individuals; you must lower your flag and reef your sails to wait for the dull sailors; you grow departmental, routinary, military almost with your discipline and college police. But what doth such a school to form a great and heroic character? What abiding Hope can it inspire? What Reformer will it nurse? What poet will it breed to sing to the human, race? What discoverer of Nature’s laws will it prompt to enrich us by disclosing in the mind the statute which all matter must obey? What fiery soul will it send out to warm a nation with his charity? What tranquil mind will it have fortified to walk with meekness in private and obscure duties, to wait and to suffer? Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?

So to regard the young child, the young man, requires, no doubt, rare patience: a patience that nothing but faith in the remedial forces of the soul can give. You see his sensualism; you see his want of those tastes and perceptions which make the power and safety of your character. Very likely. But he has something else. If he has his own vice, he has its correlative virtue. Every mind should be allowed to make its own statement in action, and its balance will appear. In these judgments one needs that foresight which was attributed to an eminent reformer, of whom it was said “his patience could see in the bud of the aloe the blossom at the end of a hundred years.” Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to some up with the bird Theory, which flies before it. Try your design on the best school. The scholars are of all ages and temperaments and capacities. It is difficult to class them, some are too young, some are slow, some perverse. Each requires so much consideration, that the morning hope of the teacher, of a day of love and progress, is often closed at evening by despair. Each single case, the more it is considered, shows more to be done; and the strict conditions of the hours, on one side, and the number of tasks, on the other. Whatever becomes of our method, the conditions stand fast, — six hours, and thirty, fifty, or a hundred and fifty pupils. Something must be done, and done speedily, and in this distress the wisest are tempted to adopt violent means, to proclaim martial law, corporal punishment, mechanical arrangement, bribes, spies, wrath, main strength and ignorance, in lieu of that wise genial providential influence they had hoped, and yet hope at some future day to adopt. Of course the devotion to details reacts injuriously on the teacher. He cannot indulge his genius, he cannot delight in personal relations with young friends, when his eye is always on the clock, and twenty classes are to be dealt with before the day is done. Besides, how can he please himself with genius, and foster modest virtue? A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements.

A rule is so easy that it does not need a man to apply it; an automaton, a machine, can be made to keep a school so. It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil. The advantages of this system of emulation and display are so prompt and obvious, it is such a time-saver, it is so energetic on slow and on bad natures, and is of so easy application, needing no sage or poet, but any tutor or schoolmaster in his first term can apply it, — that it is not strange that this calomel of culture should be a popular medicine. On the other hand, total abstinence from this drug, and the adoption of simple discipline and the following of nature, involves at once immense claims on the time, the thoughts, on the life of the teacher. It requires time, use, insight, event, all the great lessons and assistances of God; and only to think of using it implies character and profoundness; to enter on this course of discipline is to be good and great. It is precisely analogous to the difference between the use of corporal punishment and the methods of love. It is so easy to bestow on a bad boy a blow, overpower him, and get obedience without words, that in this world of hurry and distraction, who can wait for the returns of reason and the conquest of self; in the uncertainty too whether that will ever come? And yet the familiar observation of the universal compensations might suggest the fear that so summary a stop of a bad humor was more jeopardous than its continuance.

Now the correction of this quack practice is to import into Education the wisdom of life. Leave this military hurry and adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is patience. Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets of the forest, of plants, of birds, of beasts, of reptiles, of fishes, of the rivers and the sea? When he goes into the woods the birds fly before him and he finds none; when he goes to the river bank, the fish and the reptile swim away and leave him alone. His secret is patience; he sits down, and sits still; he is a statue; he is a log. These creatures have no value for their time, and he must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obstinate sitting still, reptile, fish, bird and beast, which all wish to return to their haunts, begin to return. He sits still; if they approach, he remains passive as the stone he sits upon. They lose their fear. They have curiosity too about him. By and by the curiosity masters the fear, and they come swimming, creeping and flying towards him; and as he is still immovable; they not only resume their haunts and their ordinary labors and manners, show themselves to him in their work-day trim, but also volunteer some degree of advances towards fellowship and good understanding with a biped who behaves so civilly and well. Can you not baffle the impatience and passion of the child by your tranquillity? Can you not wait for him, as Nature and Providence do? Can you not keep for his mind and ways, for his secret, the same curiosity you give to the squirrel, snake, rabbit, and the sheldrake and the deer? He has a secret; wonderful methods in him; he is, — every child, — a new style of man; give him time and opportunity. Talk of Columbus and Newton! I tell you the child just born in yonder hovel is the beginning of a revolution as great as theirs. But you must have the believing and prophetic eye. Have the self-command you wish to inspire. Your teaching and discipline must have the reserve and taciturnity of Nature. Teach them to hold their tongues by holding your own. Say little; do not snarl; do not chide; but govern by the eye. See what they need, and that the right thing is done.

I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals. The will, the male power, organizes, imposes its own thought and wish on others, and makes that military eye which controls boys as it controls men; admirable in its results, a fortune to him who has it, and only dangerous when it leads the workman to overvalue and overuse it and precludes him from finer means. Sympathy, the female force, — which they must use who have not the first, — deficient in instant control and the breaking down of resistance, is more subtle and lasting and creative. I advise teachers to cherish mother-wit. I assume that you will keep the grammar, reading, writing and arithmetic in order; ‘t is easy and of course you will. But smuggle in a little contraband wit, fancy, imagination, thought. If you have a taste which you have suppressed because it is not shared by those about you, tell them that. Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: they must not whisper, much less talk; but if one of the young people says a wise thing, greet it, and let all the children clap their hands. They shall have no book but school-books in the room; but if one has brought in a Plutarch or Shakspeare or Don Quixote or Goldsmith or any other good book, and understands what he reads, put him at once at the head of the class. Nobody shall be disorderly, or leave his desk without permission, but if a boy runs from his bench, or a girl, because the fire falls, or to check some injury that a little dastard is inflicting behind his desk on some helpless sufferer, take away the medal from the head of the class and give it on the instant to the brave rescuer. If a child happens to show that he knows any fact about astronomy, or plants, or birds, or rocks, or history, that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear. Then you have made your school-room like the world. Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

To whatsoever upright mind, to whatsoever beating heart I speak, to you it is committed to educate men. By simple living, by an illimitable soul, you inspire, you correct, you instruct, you raise, you embellish all. By your own act you teach the beholder how to do the practicable. According to the depth from which you draw your life, such is the depth not only of your strenuous effort, but of your manners and presence.

The beautiful nature of the world has here blended your happiness with your power. Work straight on in absolute duty, and you lend an arm and an encouragement to all the youth of the universe. Consent yourself to be an organ of your highest thought, and lo! suddenly you put all men in your debt, and are the fountain of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves of benefit to the borders of society, to the circumference of things.

THE SUPERLATIVE.

When wrath and terror changed Jove’s regal port

And the rash-leaping thunderbolt fell short.

For Art, for Music overthrilled,

The wine-cup shakes, the wine is spilled.

[Reprinted from the Century of February, 1882.]

The doctrine of temperance is one of many degrees. It is usually taught on a low platform, but one of great necessity, — that of meats and drinks, and its importance cannot be denied and hardly exaggerated. But it is a long way from the Maine Law to the heights of absolute self-command which respect the conservatism of the entire energies of the body, the mind, and the soul. I wish to point at some of its higher functions as it enters into mind and character.

There is a superlative temperament which has no medium range, but swiftly oscillates from the freezing to the boiling point, and which affects the manners of those who share it with a certain desperation. Their aspect is grimace. They go tearing, convulsed through life, — wailing, praying, exclaiming, swearing. We talk, sometimes, with people whose conversation would lead you to suppose that they had lived in a museum, where all the objects were monsters and extremes. Their good people are phœnixes; their naughty are like the prophet’s figs. They use the superlative of grammar: “most perfect,” “most exquisite,” “most horrible.” Like the French, they are enchanted, they are desolate, because you have got or have not got a shoe-string or a wafer you happen to want, — not perceiving that superlatives are diminutives, and weaken; that the positive is the sinew of speech, the superlative the fat. If the talker lose a tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dissolution of things has come. Controvert his opinion and he cries “Persecution!” and reckons himself with Saint Barnabas, who was sawn in two.

Especially we note this tendency to extremes in the pleasant excitement of horror-mongers. Is there something so delicious in disasters and pain? Bad news is always exaggerated, and we may challenge Providence to send a fact so tragical that we cannot contrive to make it a little worse in our gossip.

All this comes of poverty. We are unskilful definers. From want of skill to convey quality, we hope to move admiration by quantity. Language should aim to describe the fact. It is not enough to suggest it and magnify it. Sharper sight would indicate the true line. ‘T is very wearisome, this straining talk, these experiences all exquisite, intense and tremendous,— “The best I ever saw;” “I never in my life!” One wishes these terms gazetted and forbidden. Every favorite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, nor each unpleasing person a dark, diabolical intriguer; nor agonies, excruciations nor ecstasies our daily bread.

Horace Walpole relates that in the expectation, current in London a century ago, of a great earthquake, some people provided themselves with dresses for the occasion. But one would not wear earthquake dresses or resurrection robes for a working jacket, nor make a codicil to his will whenever he goes out to ride; and the secrets of death, judgment and eternity are tedious when recurring as minute-guns. Thousands of people live and die who were never, on a single occasion, hungry or thirsty, or furious or terrified. The books say, “It made my hair stand on end!” Who, in our municipal life, ever had such an experience? Indeed, I believe that much of the rhetoric of terror,— “It froze my blood,” “It made my knees knock,” etc. — most men have realized only in dreams and nightmares.

Then there is an inverted superlative, or superlative contrary, which shivers, like Demophoön, in the sun: wants fan and parasol on the cold Friday; is tired by sleep; feeds on drugs and poisons; finds the rainbow a discoloration; hates birds and flowers.

The exaggeration of which I complain makes plain fact the more welcome and refreshing. It is curious that a face magnified in a concave mirror loses its expression. All this overstatement is needless. A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams, and I can well spare the exaggerations which appear to me screens to conceal ignorance. Among these glorifiers, the coldest stickler for names and dates and measures cannot lament his criticism and coldness of fancy. Think how much pains astronomers and opticians have taken to procure an achromatic lens. Discovery in the heavens has waited for it; discovery on the face of the earth not less. I hear without sympathy the complaint of young and ardent persons that they find life no region of romance, with no enchanter, no giant, no fairies, nor even muses. I am very much indebted to my eyes, and am content that they should see the real world, always geometrically finished without blur or halo. The more I am engaged with it the more it suffices.

How impatient we are, in these northern latitudes, of looseness and intemperance in speech! Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an individual’s judgment. Doctor Channing’s piety and wisdom had such weight that, in Boston, the popular idea of religion was whatever this eminent divine held. But I remember that his best friend, a man of guarded lips, speaking of him in a circle of his admirers, said: “I have known him long, I have studied his character, and I believe him capable of virtue.” An eminent French journalist paid a high compliment to the Duke of Wellington, when his documents were published: “Here are twelve volumes of military-dispatches, and the word glory is not found in them.”

The English mind is arithmetical, values exactness, likes literal statement; stigmatizes any heat or hyperbole as Irish, French, Italian, and infers weakness and inconsequence of character in speakers who use it. It does not love the superlative but the positive degree. Our customary and mechanical existence is not favorable to flights; long nights and frost hold us pretty fast to realities. The people of English stock, in all countries, are a solid people, wearing good hats and shoes, and owners of land whose title-deeds are properly recorded. Their houses are of wood, and brick, and stone, not designed to reel in earthquakes, nor blow about through the air much in hurricanes, nor to be lost under sand-drifts, nor to be made bonfires of by whimsical viziers; but to stand as commodious, rentable tenements for a century or two. All our manner of life is on a secure and moderate pattern, such as can last. Violence and extravagance are once for all, distasteful; competence, quiet, comfort, are the agreed welfare.

Ever a low style is best. “I judge by every man’s truth of his degree of understanding,” said Chesterfield. And I do not know any advantage more conspicuous which a man owes to his experience in markets and the Exchange, or politics, than the caution and accuracy he acquires in his report of facts. “Uncle Joel’s news is always true,” said a person to me with obvious satisfaction, and said it justly; for the old head, after deceiving and being deceived many times, thinks, “What’s the use of having to unsay to-day what I said yesterday? I will not be responsible; I will not add an epithet. I will be as moderate as the fact, and will use the same expression, without color, which I received; and rather repeat it several times, word for word, than vary it ever so little.”

The first valuable power in a reasonable mind, one would say, was the power of plain statement, or the power to receive things as they befall, and to transfer the picture of them to another mind unaltered. ‘T is a good rule of rhetoric which Schlegel gives,— “In good prose, every word is underscored;” which, I suppose, means, Never italicize.

Spartans, stoics, heroes, saints and gods use a short and positive speech. They are never off their centres. As soon as they swell and paint and find truth not enough for them, softening of the brain has already begun. It seems as if inflation were a disease incident to too much use of words, and the remedy lay in recourse to things. I am daily struck with the forcible understatement of people who have no literary habit. The low expression is strong and agreeable. The citizen dwells in delusions. His dress and draperies, house and stables, occupy him. The poor countryman, having no circumstance of carpets, coaches, dinners, wine and dancing in his head to confuse him, is able to look straight at you, without refraction or prismatic glories, and he sees whether you see straight also, or whether your head is addled by this mixture of wines.

The common people diminish: “a cold snap;” “it rains easy;” “good haying weather.” When a farmer means to tell you that he is doing well with his farm, he says, “I don’t work as hard as I did, and I don’t mean to.” When he wishes to condemn any treatment of soils or of stock, he says, “It won’t do any good.” Under the Catskill Mountains the boy in the steamboat said, “Come up here, Tony; it looks pretty out-of-doors.” The farmers in the region do not call particular summits, as Killington, Camel’s Hump, Saddle-back, etc., mountains, but only “them ‘ere rises,” and reserve the word mountains for the range.

I once attended a dinner given to a great state functionary by functionaries, — men of law, state, and trade. The guest was a great man in his own country and an honored diplomatist in this. His health was drunk with some acknowledgment of his distinguished services to both countries, and followed by nine cold hurrahs. There was the vicious superlative. Then the great official spoke and beat his breast, and declared that he should remember this honor to the latest moment of his existence. He was answered again by officials. Pity, thought I, they should lie so about their keen sensibility to the nine cold hurrahs and to the commonplace compliment of a dinner. Men of the world value truth, in proportion to their ability; not by its sacredness, but for its convenience. Of such, especially of diplomatists, one has a right to expect wit and ingenuity to avoid the lie if they must comply with the form. Now, I had been present, a little before, in the country at a cattle-show dinner, which followed an agricultural discourse delivered by a farmer: the discourse, to say the truth, was bad; and one of our village fathers gave at the dinner this toast: “The orator of the day: his subject deserves the attention of every farmer.” The caution of the toast did honor to our village father. I wish great lords and diplomatists had as much respect for truth.

But whilst thus everything recommends simplicity and temperance of action; the utmost directness, the positive degree, we mean thereby that “rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument.” Whenever the true objects of action appear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.

The superlative is as good as the positive, if it be alive. If man loves the conditioned, he also loves the unconditioned. We don’t wish to sin on the other side, and to be purists, nor to check the invention of wit or the sally of humor. ‘T is very different, this weak and wearisome lie, from the stimulus to the fancy which is given by a romancing talker who does not mean to be exactly taken, — like the gallant skipper who complained to his owners that he had pumped the Atlantic Ocean three times through his ship on the passage, and ‘t was common to strike seals and porpoises in the hold. Or what was similarly asserted of the late Lord Jeffrey, at the Scottish bar, — an attentive auditor declaring on one occasion after an argument of three hours, that he had spoken the whole English language three times over in his speech.

The objection to unmeasured speech is its lie. All men like an impressive fact. The astronomer shows you in his telescope the nebula of Orion, that you may look on that which is esteemed the far thest-off land in visible nature. At the Bank of England they put a scrap of paper that is worth a million pounds sterling into the hands of the visitor to touch. Our travelling is a sort of search for the superlatives or summits of art, — much more the real wonders of power in the human form. The arithmetic of Newton, the memory of Magliabecchi or Mirandola, the versatility of Julius Cœsar, the concentration of Bonaparte, the inspiration of Shakspeare, are sure of commanding interest and awe in every company of men.

The superlative is the excess of expression. We are a garrulous, demonstrative kind of creatures, and cannot live without much outlet for all our sense and nonsense. And fit expression is so rare that mankind have a superstitious value for it, and it would seem the whole human race agree to value a man precisely in proportion to his power of expression; and to the most expressive man that has existed, namely, Shakspeare, they have awarded the highest place.

The expressors are the gods of the world, but the men whom these expressors revere are the solid, balanced, undemonstrative citizens who make the reserved guard, the central sense, of the world. For the luminous object wastes itself by its shining, — is luminous because it is burning up: and if the powers are disposed for display, there is all the less left for use and creation. The talent sucks the substance of the man. Superlatives must be bought by too many positives. Gardens of roses must be stripped to make a few drops of otto. And these raptures of fire and frost, which indeed cleanse pedantry out of conversation and make the speech salt and biting, would cost me the days of well being which are now so cheap to me, yet so valued. I like no deep stakes. I am a coward at gambling. I will bask in the common sun a while longer.

Children and thoughtless people like exaggerated event and activity; like to run to a house on fire, to a fight, to an execution; like to talk of a marriage, of a bankruptcy, of a debt, of a crime. The wise man shuns all this. I knew a grave man who, being urged to go to a church where a clergyman was newly ordained, said “he liked him very well, but he would go when the interesting Sundays were over.”

All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or real being. Nothing is for the most part less teemed. We are fond of dress, of ornament, of accomplishments, of talents, but distrustful of health, of soundness, of pure innocence. Yet nature measures her greatness by what she can spare, by what remains when all superfluity and accessories are shorn off.

Nor is there in nature itself any swell, any brag, any strain or shock, but a firm common sense through all her elephants and lions, through all her ducks and geese; a true proportion between her means and her performance. Semper sibi similis. You shall not catch her in any anomalies, nor swaggering into any monsters. In all the years that I have sat in town and forest, I never saw a winged dragon, a flying man, or a talking fish, but ever the strictest regard to rule, and an absence of all surprises. No; nature encourages no looseness, pardons no errors; freezes punctually at 32°, boils punctually at 212°; crystallizes in water at one invariable angle, in diamond at one, in granite at one; and if you omit the smallest condition the experiment will not succeed. Her communication obeys the gospel rule, yea or nay. She never expatiates, never goes into the reasons. Plant beech mast and it comes up, or it does not come up. Sow grain, and it does not come up: put lime into the soil and try again, and this time she says yea. To every question an abstemious but absolute reply. The like staidness is in her dealings with us. Nature is always serious, — does not jest with us. Where we have begun in folly, we are brought quickly to plain dealing. Life could not be carried on except by fidelity and good earnest; and she brings the most heartless trifler to determined purpose presently. The men whom she admits to her confidence, the simple and great characters, are uniformly marked by absence of pretension and by understatement. The old and the modern sages of clearest insight are plain men, who have held them selves hard to the poverty of nature.

The firmest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed, but where they speak and think and do what they must, because they are so and not otherwise.

But whilst the basis of character must be simplicity, the expression of character, it must be remembered, is, in great degree, a matter of climate. In the temperate climates there is a temperate speech, in torrid climates an ardent one. Whilst in Western nations the superlative in conversation is tedious and weak, and in character is a capital defect, nature delights in showing us that in the East it is animated, it is pertinent, pleasing, poetic. Whilst she appoints us to keep within the sharp boundaries of form as the condition of our strength, she creates in the East the uncontrollable yearning to escape from limitation into the vast and boundless; to use a freedom of fancy which plays with all the works of nature, great or minute, galaxy or grain of dust, as toys and words of the mind; inculcates the tenet of a beatitude to be found in escape from all organization and all personality, and makes ecstasy an institution.

Religion and poetry are all the civilization of the Arab. “The ground of Paradise,” said Mohammed, “is extensive, and the plants of it are hallelujahs.” Religion and poetry: the religion teaches an inexorable destiny; it distinguishes only two days in each man’s history, the day of his lot, and the day of judgment. The religion runs into asceticism and fate. The costume, the articles in which wealth is displayed, are in the same extremes. Thus the diamond and the pearl, which are only accidental and secondary in their use and value to us, are proper to the oriental world. The diver dives a beggar and rises with the price of a kingdom in his hand. A bag of sequins, a jewel, a balsam, a single horse, constitute an estate in countries where insecure institutions make every one desirous of concealable and convertible property. Shall I say, further, that the orientals excel in costly arts, in the cutting of precious stones, in working in gold, in weaving on hand-looms costly stuffs from silk and wool, in spices, in dyes and drugs, henna, otto and camphor, and in the training of slaves, elephants and camels, — things which are the poetry and superlative of commerce.

On the other hand, — and it is a good illustration of the difference of genius, — the European nations, and, in general, all nations in proportion to their civilization, understand the manufacture of iron. One of the meters of the height to which any civility rose is the skill in the fabric of iron. Universally, the better gold, the worse man. The political economist defies us to show any gold-mine country that is traversed by good roads: or a shore where pearls are found on which good schools are erected. The European civility, or that of the positive degree, is established by coal-mines, by ventilation, by irrigation and every skill — in having water cheap and pure, by iron, by agriculture for bread-stuffs, and manufacture of coarse and family cloths. Our modern improvements have been in the invention of friction matches; of India rubber shoes; of the famous two parallel bars of iron; then of the air-chamber of Watt, and of the judicious tubing of the engine, by Stephenson, in order to the construction of locomotives.

Meantime, Nature, who loves crosses and mixtures, makes these two tendencies necessary each to the other, and delights to re-enforce each peculiarity by imparting the other. The Northern genius finds itself singularly refreshed and stimulated by the breadth and luxuriance of Eastern imagery and modes of thinking, which go to check the pedantry of our inventions and the excess of our detail. There is no writing which has more electric power to unbind and animate the torpid intellect than the bold Eastern muse.

If it come back however to the question of final superiority, it is too plain that there is no question that the star of empire rolls West: that the warm sons of the Southeast have bent the neck under the yoke of the cold temperament and the exact understanding of the Northwestern races.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.

These rules were writ in human heart

By Him who built the day;

The columns of the universe

Not firmer based than they.

Thou shalt not try

To plant thy shrivelled pedantry

On the shoulders of the sky

[Reprinted from the North American Review, of May, 1878.]

Since the discovery of Oersted that galvanism and electricity and magnetism are only forms of one and the same force, and convertible each into the other, we have continually suggested to us a larger generalization: that each of the great departments of Nature — chemistry, vegetation, the animal life — exhibits the same laws on a different plane; that the intellectual and moral worlds are analogous to the material. There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man but in every particle. That convertibility we so admire in plants and animal structures, whereby the repairs and the ulterior uses are subserved, when one part is wounded or deficient, by another; this self-help and self-creation proceed from the same original power which works remotely in grandest and meanest structures by the same design, — works in a lobster or a mite worm as a wise man would if imprisoned in that poor form. ‘T is the effort of God, of the Supreme Intellect, in the extremest frontier of his universe.

As this unity exists in the organization of insect, beast and bird, still ascending to man, and from lower type of man to the highest yet attained, so it does not less declare itself in the spirit or intelligence of the brute. In ignorant ages it was common to vaunt the human superiority by underrating the instinct of other animals; but a better discernment finds that the difference is only of less and more. Experiment shows that the bird and the dog reason as the hunter does, that all the animals show the same good sense in their humble walk that the man who is their enemy or friend does; and, if it be in smaller measure, yet it is not diminished, as his often is, by freak and folly. St. Pierre says of the animals that a moral sentiment seems to have determined their physical organization.

I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated Nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less. The animal who is wholly kept down in Nature has no anxieties. By yielding, as he must do, to it, he is enlarged and reaches his highest point. The poor grub, in the hole of a tree, by yielding itself to Nature, goes blameless through its low part and is rewarded at last, casts its filthy hull, expands into a beautiful form with rainbow wings, and makes a part of the summer day. The Greeks called it Psyche, a manifest emblem of the soul. The man down in Nature occupies himself in guarding, in feeding, in warming and multiplying his body, and, as long as he knows no more, we justify him; but presently a mystic change is wrought, a new perception opens, and he is made a citizen of the world of souls: he feels what is called duty; he is aware that he owes a higher allegiance to do and live as a good member of this universe. In the measure in which he has this sense he is a man, rises to the universal life. The high intellect is absolutely at one with moral nature. A thought is imbosomed in a sentiment, and the attempt to detach and blazon the thought is like a show of cut flowers. The moral is the measure of health, and in the voice of Genius I hear invariably the moral tone, even when it is disowned in words; — health, melody and a wider horizon belong to moral sensibility. The finer the sense of justice, the better poet. The believer says to the skeptic: —

“One avenue was shaded from thine eyes

Through which I wandered to eternal truth.”

Humility is the avenue. To be sure, we exaggerate when we represent these two elements as disunited; every man shares them both; but it is true that men generally are marked by a decided predominance of one or of the other element.

In youth and in age we are moralists, and in mature life the moral element steadily rises in the regard of all reasonable men.

‘T is a sort of proverbial dying speech of scholars (at least it is attributed to many) that which Anthony Wood reports of Nathaniel Carpenter, an Oxford Fellow. “It did repent him,” he said, “that he had formerly so much courted the maid instead of the mistress,” (meaning philosophy and mathematics to the neglect of divinity). This, in the language of our time, would be ethics.

And when I say that the world is made up of moral forces, these are not separate. All forces are found in Nature united with that which they move: heat is not separate, light is not massed aloof, nor electricity, nor gravity, but they are always in combination. And so moral powers; they are thirsts for action, and the more you accumulate, the more they mould and form.

It is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe. ‘T is a long scale from the gorilla to the gentleman — from the gorilla to Plato, Newton, Shakspeare — to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation, the summits of science, art and poetry. The beginnings are slow and infirm, but it is an always accelerated march. The geologic world is chronicled by the growing ripeness of the strata from lower to higher, as it becomes the abode of more highly organized plants and animals. The civil history of men might be traced by the successive meliorations as marked in higher moral generalizations; — virtue meaning physical courage, then chastity and temperance, then justice and love; — bargains of kings with peoples of certain rights to certain classes, then of rights to masses, — then at last came the day when, as the historians rightly tell, the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal.

Every truth leads in another. The bud extrudes the old leaf, and every truth brings that which will supplant it. In the court of law the judge sits over the culprit, but in the court of life in the same hour the judge also stands as culprit before a true tribunal. Every judge is a culprit, every law an abuse. Montaigne kills off bigots as cowhage kills worms; but there is a higher muse there sitting where he durst not soar, of eye so keen that it can report of a realm in which all the wit and learning of the Frenchman is no more than the cunning of a fox.

It is the same fact existing as sentiment and as will in the mind, which works in Nature as irresistible law, exerting influence over nations, intelligent beings, or down in the kingdoms of brute or of chemical atoms. Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds, and see prismatic dew-drops — but her interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles. In the pre-adamite she bred valor only; by-and-by she gets on to man, and adds tenderness, and thus raises virtue piecemeal.

When we trace from the beginning, that ferocity has uses; only so are the conditions of the then world met, and these monsters are the scavengers, executioners, diggers, pioneers and fertilizers, destroying what is more destructive than they, and making better life possible. We see the steady aim of Benefit in view from the first. Melioration is the law. The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary, have served the cause of truth and virtue. There is always an instinctive sense of right, an obscure idea which animates either party and which in long periods vindicates itself at last. Thus a sublime confidence is fed at the bottom of the heart that, in spite of appearances, in spite of malignity and blind self-interest living for the moment, an eternal, beneficent necessity is always bringing things right; and, though we should fold our arms, — which we cannot do, for our duty requires us to be the very hands of this guiding sentiment, and work in the present moment, — the evils we suffer will at last end themselves through the incessant opposition of Nature to everything hurtful.

The excellence of men consists in the complete-ness with which the lower system is taken up into the higher — a process of much time and delicacy, but in which no point of the lower should be left untranslated; so that the warfare of beasts should be renewed in a finer field, for more excellent victories. Savage war gives place to that of Turenne and Wellington, which has limitations and a code. This war again gives place to the finer quarrel of property, where the victory is wealth and the defeat poverty.

The inevitabilities are always sapping every seeming prosperity built on a wrong. No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive. See how these things look in the page of history. Nations come and go, cities rise and fall, all the instincts of man, good and bad, work, — and every wish, appetite, and passion, rushes into act and embodies itself in usages, protects itself with laws. Some of them are useful and universally acceptable, hinder none, help all, and these are honored and perpetuated. Others are noxious. Community of property is tried, as when a Tartar horde or an Indian tribe roam over a vast tract for pasturage or hunting; but it is found at last that some establishment of property, allowing each on some distinct terms to fence and cultivate a piece of land, is best for all.

“For my part,” said Napoleon, “it is not the mystery of the incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich from destroying the poor.”

Shall I say then it were truer to see Necessity calm, beautiful, passionless, without a smile, covered with ensigns of woe, stretching her dark warp across the universe? These threads are Nature’s pernicious elements, her deluges, miasma, disease, poison; her curdling cold, her hideous reptiles and worse men, cannibals, and the depravities of civilization; the secrets of the prisons of tyranny, the slave and his master, the proud man’s scorn, the orphan’s tears, the vices of men, lust, cruelty and pitiless avarice. These make the gloomy warp of ages. Humanity sits at the dread loom and throws the shuttle and fills it with joyful rainbows, until the sable ground is flowered all over with a woof of human industry and wisdom, virtuous examples, symbols of useful and generous arts, with beauty and pure love, courage and the victories of the just and wise over malice and wrong.

Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself at last of every crime. An Eastern poet, in describing the golden age, said that God had made justice so dear to the heart of Nature that, if any injustice lurked anywhere under the sky, the blue vault would shrivel to a snake-skin and cast it out by spasms. But the spasms of Nature are years and centuries, and it will tax the faith of man to wait so long.

Man is always throwing his praise or blame on events, and does not see that he only is real, and the world his mirror and echo. He imputes the stroke to fortune, which in reality himself strikes. The student discovers one day that he lives in enchantment: the house, the works, the persons, the days, the weathers — all that he calls Nature, all that he calls institutions, when once his mind is active are visions merely, wonderful allegories, significant pictures of the laws of the mind; and through this enchanted gallery he is led by unseen guides to read and learn the laws of Heaven. This discovery may come early, — sometimes in the nursery, to a rare child; later in the school, but oftener when the mind is more mature; and to multitudes of men wanting in mental activity it never comes — any more than poetry or art. But it ought to come; it belongs to the human intellect, and is an insight which we cannot spare.

The idea of right exists in the human mind, and lays itself out in the equilibrium of Nature, in the equalities and periods of our system, in the level of seas, in the action and reaction of forces. Nothing is allowed to exceed or absorb the rest; if it do, it is disease, and is quickly destroyed. It was an early discovery of the mind, — this beneficent rule. Strength enters just as much as the moral element prevails. The strength of the animal to eat and to be luxurious and to usurp is rudeness and imbecility. The law is: To each shall be rendered his own. As thou sowest, thou shalt reap. Smite, and thou shalt smart. Serve, and thou shalt be served. If you love and serve men, you cannot, by any hiding or stratagem, escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the Divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles for evermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote and star and sun must range with it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

It is a doctrine of unspeakable comfort. He that plants his foot here, passes at once out of the kingdom of illusions. Others may well suffer in the hideous picture of crime with which earth is filled and the life of society threatened, but the habit of respecting that great order which certainly contains and will dispose of our little system, will take all fear from the heart. It did itself create and distribute all that is created and distributed, and, trusting to its power, we cease to care for what it will certainly order well. To good men, as we call good men, this doctrine of Trust is an unsounded secret. They use the word, they have accepted the notion of a mechanical supervision of human life, by which that certain wonderful being whom they call God does take up their affairs where their intelligence leaves them, and somehow knits and co-ordinates the issues of them in all that is beyond the reach of private faculty. They do not see that He, that It, is there, next and within; the thought of the thought; the affair of affairs; that he is existence, and take him from them and they would not be. They do not see that particulars are sacred to him, as well as the scope and outline; that these passages of daily life are his work; that in the moment when they desist from interference, these particulars take sweetness and grandeur, and become the language of mighty principles.

A man should be a guest in his own house, and a guest in his own thought. He is there to speak for truth; but who is he? Some clod the truth has snatched from the ground, and with fire has fashioned to a momentary man. Without the truth, he is a clod again. Let him find his superiority in not wishing superiority; find the riches of love which possesses that which it adores; the riches of poverty; the height of lowliness, the immensity of to-day; and, in the passing hour, the age of ages.

Wondrous state of man! never so happy as when he has lost all private interests and regards, and exists only in obedience and love of the Author.

The fiery soul said: “Let me be a blot on this fair world, the obscurest, the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso, — that I know it is His agency. I will love him, though he shed frost and darkness on every way of mine.” The emphasis of that blessed doctrine lay in lowliness. The new saint gloried in infirmities. Who or what was he? His rise and his recovery were vicarious. He has fallen in another; he rises in another.

We perish, and perish gladly, if the law remains. I hope it is conceivable that a man may go to ruin gladly, if he see that thereby no shade falls on that he loves and adores. We need not always be stipulating for our clean shirt and roast joint per diem. We do not believe the less in astronomy and vegetation, because we are writhing and roaring in our beds with rheumatism. Cripples and invalids, we doubt not there are bounding fawns in the forest, and lilies with graceful, springing stem; so neither do we doubt or fail to love the eternal law, of which we are such shabby practisers. Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship — never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul. We answer, when they tell us of the bad behavior of Luther or Paul: “Well, what if he did? Who was more pained than Luther or Paul?” Shall we attach ourselves violently to our teachers and historical personalities, and think the foundation shaken if any fault is shown in their record? But how is the truth hurt by their falling from it? The law of gravity is not hurt by every accident, though our leg be broken, No more is the law of justice by our departure from it.

We are to know that we are never without a pilot. When we know not how to steer, and dare not hoist a sail, we can drift. The current knows the way, though we do not. When the stars and sun appear, when we have conversed with navigators who know the coast, we may begin to put out an oar and trim a sail. The ship of heaven guides itself, and will not accept a wooden rudder.

Have you said to yourself ever: ‘I abdicate all choice, I see it is not for me to interfere. I see that I have been one of the crowd; that I have been a pitiful person, because I have wished to be my own master, and to dress and order my whole way and system of living. I thought I managed it very well. I see that my neighbors think so. I have heard prayers, I have prayed even, but I have never until now dreamed that this undertaking the entire management of my own affairs was not commendable. I have never seen, until now, that it dwarfed me. I have not discovered, until this blessed ray flashed just now through my soul, that there dwelt any power in Nature that would relieve me of my load. But now I see.’

What is this intoxicating sentiment that allies this scrap of dust to the whole of Nature and the whole of Fate, — that makes this doll a dweller in ages, mocker at time, able to spurn all outward advantages, peer and master of the elements? I am taught by it that what touches any thread in the vast web of being touches me. I am representative of the whole; and the good of the whole, or what I call the right, makes me invulnerable.

How came this creation so magically woven that nothing can do me mischief but myself, — that an invisible fence surrounds my being which screens me from all harm that I will to resist? If I will stand upright, the creation cannot bend me. But if I violate myself, if I commit a crime, the lightning loiters by the speed of retribution, and every act is not hereafter but instantaneously rewarded according to its quality. Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the universal mind by the individual will. Character is the habit of this obedience, and Religion is the accompanying emotion, the emotion of reverence which the presence of the universal mind ever excites in the individual.

We go to famous books for our examples of character, just as we send to England for shrubs which grow as well in our own door-yards and cow-pastures. Life is always rich, and spontaneous graces and forces elevate it in every domestic circle, which are overlooked while we are reading something less excellent in old authors. From the obscurity and casualty of those which I know, I infer the obscurity and casualty of the like balm and consolation and immortality in a thousand homes which I do not know, all round the world. And I see not why to these simple instincts, simple yet grand, all the heights and transcendencies of virtue and of enthusiasm are not open. There is power enough in them to move the world; and it is not any sterility or defect in ethics, but our negligence of these fine monitors, of these world-embracing sentiments, that makes religion cold and life low.

While the immense energy of the sentiment of duty and the awe of the supernatural exert incomparable influence on the mind, — yet it is often perverted, and the tradition received with awe, but without correspondent action of the receiver. Then you find so many men infatuated on that topic! Wise on all other, they lose their head the moment they talk of religion. It is the sturdiest prejudice in the public mind that religion is something by itself; a department distinct from all other experiences, and to which the tests and judgment men are ready enough to show on other things, do not apply. You may sometimes talk with the gravest and best citizen, and the moment the topic of religion is broached, he runs into a childish superstition. His face looks infatuated, and his conversation is. When I talked with an ardent missionary, and pointed out to him that his creed found no support in my experience, he replied, “It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world.” I answer: Other world! there is no other world. God is one and omnipresent; here or nowhere is the whole fact. The one miracle which God works evermore is in Nature, and imparting himself to the mind. When we ask simply, “What is true in thought? what is just in action?” it is the yielding of the private heart to the Divine mind, and all personal preferences, and all requiring of wonders, are profane.

The word miracle, as it is used, only indicates the ignorance of the devotee, staring with wonder to see water turned into wine, and heedless of the stupendous fact of his own personality. Here he stands, a lonely thought harmoniously organized into correspondence with the universe of mind and matter. What narrative of wonders coming down from a thousand years ought to charm his attention like this? Certainly it is human to value a general consent, a fraternity of believers, a crowded church; but as the sentiment purifies and rises, it leaves crowds. It makes churches of two, churches of one. A fatal disservice does this Swedenborg or other who offers to do my thinking for me. It seems as if, when the Spirit of God speaks so plainly to each soul, it were an impiety to be listening to one or another saint. Jesus was better than others, because he refused to listen to others and listened at home.

You are really interested in your thought. You have meditated in silent wonder on your existence in this world. You have perceived in the first fact of your conscious life here a miracle so astounding, — a miracle comprehending all the universe of miracles to which your intelligent life gives you access, — as to exhaust wonder, and leave you no need of hunting here or there for any particular exhibitions of power. Then up comes a man with a text of 1 John v. 7, or a knotty sentence from St. Paul, which he considers as the axe at the root of your tree. You cannot bring yourself to care for it. You say: “Cut away; my tree is Ygdrasil — the tree of life.” He interrupts for the moment your peaceful trust in the Divine Providence. Let him know by your security that your conviction is clear and sufficient, and if he were Paul himself, you also are here, and with your Creator.

We all give way to superstitions. The house in which we were born is not quite mere timber and stone; is still haunted by parents and progenitors. The creeds into which we were initiated in childhood and youth no longer hold their old place in the minds of thoughtful men, but they are not nothing to us, and we hate to have them treated with contempt. There is so much that we do not know, that we give to these suggestions the benefit of the doubt.

It is a necessity of the human mind that he who looks at one object should look away from all other objects. He may throw himself upon some sharp statement of one fact, some verbal creed, with such concentration as to hide the universe from him: but the stars roll above; the sun warms him. With patience and fidelity to truth he may work his way through, if only by coming against somebody who believes more fables than he does; and, in trying to dispel the illusions of his neighbor, he opens his own eyes.

In the Christianity of this country there is wide difference of opinion in regard to inspiration, prophecy, miracles, the future state of the soul; every variety of opinion, and rapid revolution in opinions, in the last half-century. It is simply impossible to read the old history of the first century as it was read in the ninth; to do so you must abolish in your mind the lessons of all the centuries from the ninth to the nineteenth.

Shall I make the mistake of baptizing the daylight, and time, and space, by the name of John or Joshua, in whose tent I chance to behold daylight, and space, and time? What anthropomorphists we are in this, that we cannot let moral distinctions be, but must mould them into human shape! “Mere morality” means, — not put into a personal master of morals. Our religion is geographical, belongs to our time and place; respects and mythologizes some one time and place and person and people. So it is occasional. It visits us only on some exceptional and ceremonial occasion, on a wedding or a baptism, on a sick-bed, or at a funeral, or perhaps on a sublime national victory or a peace. But that be sure is not the religion of the universal unsleeping providence, which lurks in trifles, in still, small voices, in the secrets of the heart and our closest thoughts, as efficiently as in our proclamations and successes.

Far be it from me to underrate the men or the churches that have fixed the hearts of men and organized their devout impulses or oracles into good institutions. The Church of Rome had its saints, and inspired the conscience of Europe — St. Augustine, and Thomas à Kempis, and Fénelon; the piety of the English Church in Cranmer, and Herbert, and Taylor; the Reformed Church, Scougal; the mystics, Behmen and Swedenborg; the Quakers, Fox and James Naylor. I confess our later generation appears ungirt, frivolous, compared with the religions of the last or Calvinistic age. There was in the last century a serious habitual reference to the spiritual world, running through diaries, letters and conversation — yes, and into wills and legal instruments also, compared with which our liberation looks a little foppish and dapper.

The religion of seventy years ago was an iron belt to the mind, giving it concentration and force. A rude people were kept respectable by the determination of thought on the eternal world. Now men fall abroad, — want polarity, — suffer in character and intellect. A sleep creeps over the great functions of man. Enthusiasm goes out. In its stead a low prudence seeks to hold society staunch, but its arms are too short, cordage and machinery never supply the place of life.

Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism. I will not now go into the metaphysics of that reaction by which in history a period of belief is followed by an age of criticism, in which wit takes the place of faith in the leading spirits, and an excessive respect for forms out of which the heart has departed becomes most obvious in the least religious minds. I will not now explore the causes of the result, but the fact must be conceded as of frequent recurrence, and never more evident than in our American church. To a self-denying, ardent church, delighting in rites and ordinances, has succeeded a cold, intellectual race, who analyze the prayer and psalm of their forefathers, and the more intellectual reject every yoke of authority and custom with a petulance unprecedented. It is a sort of mark of probity and sincerity to declare how little you believe, while the mass of the community indolently follow the old forms with childish scrupulosity, and we have punctuality for faith, and good taste for character.

But I hope the defect of faith with us is only apparent. We shall find that freedom has its own guards, and, as soon as in the vulgar it runs to license, sets all reasonable men on exploring those guards. I do not think the summit of this age truly reached or expressed unless it attain the height which religion and philosophy reached in any former age. If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of Platonism, or Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more truly, have not yet their own legitimate force.

Worship is the regard for what is above us. Men are respectable only as they respect. We delight in children because of that religious eye which belongs to them; because of their reverence for their seniors, and for their objects of belief. The poor Irish laborer one sees with respect, because he believes in something, in his church, and in his employers. Superstitious persons we see with respect, because their whole existence is not bounded by their hats and their shoes, but they walk attended by pictures of the imagination, to which they pay homage. You cannot impoverish man by taking away these objects above him without ruin. It is very sad to see men who think their goodness made of themselves; it is very grateful to see those who hold an opinion the reverse of this.

All ages of belief have been great; all of unbelief have been mean. The Orientals believe in Fate. That which shall befall them is written on the iron leaf; they will not turn on their heel to avoid famine, plague, or the sword of the enemy. That is great, and gives a great air to the people. We in America are charged with a great deficiency in worship; that reverence does not belong to our character; that our institutions, our politics, and our trade, have fostered a self-reliance which is small, liliputian, full of fuss and bustle; we look at and will bear nothing above us in the state, and do exceedingly applaud and admire ourselves, and believe in our senses and understandings, while our imagination and our moral sentiment are desolated. In religion too we want objects above; we are fast losing or have already lost our old reverence; new views of inspiration, of miracles, of the saints, have supplanted the old opinions, and it is vain to bring them again. Revolutions never go backward, and in all churches a certain decay of ancient piety is lamented, and all threatens to lapse into apathy and indifferentism. It becomes us to consider whether we cannot have a real faith and real objects in lieu of these false ones. The human mind, when it is trusted, is never false to itself. If there be sincerity and good meaning — if there be really in us the wish to seek for our superiors, for that which is lawfully above us, we shall not long look in vain.

Meantime there is great centrality, a centripetence equal to the centrifugence. The mystic or theist is never scared by any startling materialism. He knows the laws of gravitation and of repulsion are deaf to French talkers, be they never so witty. If theology shows that opinions are fast changing, it is not so with the convictions of men with regard to conduct. These remain. The most daring heroism, the most accomplished culture, or rapt holiness, never exhausted the claim of these lowly duties, — never penetrated to their origin, or was able to look behind their source. We cannot disenchant, we cannot impoverish ourselves, by obedience; but by humility we rise, by obedience we command, by poverty we are rich, by dying we live.

We are thrown back on rectitude forever and ever, only rectitude, — to mend one; that is all we can do. But that the zealot stigmatizes as a sterile chimney-corner philosophy. Now the first position I make is that natural religion supplies still all the facts which are disguised under the dogma of popular creeds. The progress of religion is steadily to its identity with morals.

How is the new generation to be edified? How should it not? The life of those once omnipotent traditions was really not in the legend, but in the moral sentiment and the metaphysical fact which the legends enclosed — and these survive. A new Socrates, or Zeno, or Swedenborg, or Pascal, or a new crop of geniuses like those of the Elizabethan age, may be born in this age, and, with happy heart and a bias for theism, bring asceticism, duty, and magnanimity into vogue again.

It is true that Stoicism, always attractive to the intellectual and cultivated, has now no temples, no academy, no commanding Zeno or Antoninus. It accuses us that it has none: that pure ethics is not now formulated and concreted into a cultus, a fraternity with assemblings and holy-days, with song and book, with brick and stone. Why have not those who believe in it and love it left all for this, and dedicated themselves to write out its scientific scriptures to become its Vulgate for millions? I answer for one that the inspirations we catch of this law are not continuous and technical, but joyful sparkles, and are recorded for their beauty, for the delight they give, not for their obligation; and that is their priceless good to men, that they charm and uplift, not that they are imposed. It has not yet its first hymn. But, that every line and word may be coals of true fire, ages must roll, ere these casual wide-falling cinders can be gathered into broad and steady altar-flame.

It does not yet appear what forms the religious feeling will take. It prepares to rise out of all forms to an absolute justice and healthy perception. Here is now a new feeling of humanity infused into public action. Here is contribution of money on a more extended and systematic scale than ever before to repair public disasters at a distance, and of political support to oppressed parties. Then there are the new conventions of social science, before which the questions of the rights of women, the laws of trade, the treatment of crime, regulation of labor, come for a hearing. If these are tokens of the steady currents of thought and will in these directions, one might well anticipate a new nation.

I know how delicate this principle is, — how difficult of adaptation to practical and social arrangements. It cannot be profaned; it cannot be forced; to draw it out of its natural current is to lose at once all its power. Such experiments as we recall are those in which some sect or dogma made the tie, and that was an artificial element, which chilled and checked the union. But is it quite impossible to believe that men should be drawn to each other by the simple respect which each man feels for another in whom he discovers absolute honesty; the respect he feels for one who thinks life is quite too coarse and frivolous, and that he should like to lift it a little, should like to be the friend of some man’s virtue? for another who, underneath his compliances with artificial society, would dearly like to serve somebody, — to test his own reality by making himself useful and indispensable?

Man does not live by bread alone, but by faith, by admiration, by sympathy. ‘T is very shallow to say that cotton, or iron, or silver and gold are kings of the world; there are rulers that will at any moment make these forgotten. Fear will. Love will. Character will. Men live by their credence. Governments stand by it, — by the faith that the people share, — whether it comes from the religion in which they were bred, or from an original conscience in themselves, which the popular religion echoes. If government could only stand by force, if the instinct of the people was to resist the government, it is plain the government must be two to one in order to be secure, and then it would not be safe from desperate individuals. But no; the old commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” holds down New York, and London, and Paris, and not a police or horse-guards.

The credence of men it is that moulds them, and creates at will one or another surface. The mind as it opens transfers very fast its choice from the circumstance to the cause; from courtesy to love, from inventions to science, from London or Washington law, or public opinion, to the self-revealing idea; from all that talent executes to the sentiment that fills the heart and dictates the future of nations. The commanding fact which I never do not see, is the sufficiency of the moral sentiment. We buttress it up, in shallow hours or ages, with legends, traditions and forms, each good for the one moment in which it was a happy type or symbol of the Power; but the Power sends in the next moment a new lesson, which we lose while our eyes are reverted and striving to perpetuate the old.

America shall introduce a pure religion. Ethics are thought not to satisfy affection. But all the religion we have is the ethics of one or another holy person; as soon as character appears, be sure love will, and veneration, and anecdotes and fables about him, and delight of good men and women in him. And what deeps of grandeur and beauty are known to us in ethical truth, what divination or insight belongs to it! For innocence is a wonderful electuary for purging the eyes to search the nature of those souls that pass before it. What armor it is to protect the good from outward or inward harm, and with what power it converts evil accidents into benefits; the power of its countenance; the power of its presence! To it alone comes true friendship; to it come grandeur of situation and poetic perception, enriching all it deals with.

Once men thought Spirit divine, and Matter diabolic; one Ormuzd, the other Ahriman. Now science and philosophy recognize the parallelism, the approximation, the unity of the two: how each reflects the other as face answers to face in a glass: nay, how the laws of both are one, or how one is the realization. We are learning not to fear truth.

The man of this age must be matriculated in the university of sciences and tendencies flowing from all past periods. He must not be one who can be surprised and shipwrecked by every bold or subtile word which malignant and acute men may utter in his hearing, but should be taught all skepticisms and unbeliefs, and made the destroyer of all card-houses and paper walls, and the sifter of all opinions, by being put face to face from his infancy with Reality.

A man who has accustomed himself to look at all his circumstances as very mutable, to carry his possessions, his relations to persons, and even his opinions, in his hand, and in all these to pierce to the principle and moral law, and everywhere to find that, — has put himself out of the reach of all skepticism; and it seems as if whatever is most affecting and sublime in our intercourse, in our happiness, and in our losses, tended steadily to uplift us to a life so extraordinary, and, one might say, superhuman.

THE PREACHER.

Ascending thorough just degrees

To a consummate holiness,

As angel blind to trespass done,

And bleaching all souls like the sun.

[Originally written as a parlor lecture to some Divinity students, in 1867; afterwards enlarged from earlier writings, and read in its present form at the Divinity Chapel, Cambridge, May 5th, 1879. Reprinted from the Unitarian Review for January, 1880.]

In the history of opinion, the pinch of falsehood shows itself first, not in argument and formal protest, but in insincerity, indifference and abandonment of the Church or the scientific or political or economic institution for other better or worse forms.

The venerable and beautiful traditions in which we were educated are losing their hold on human belief, day by day; a restlessness and dissatisfaction in the religious world marks that we are in a moment of transition; as when the Roman Church broke into Protestant and Catholic, or, earlier, when Paganism broke into Christians and Pagans. The old forms rattle, and the new delay to appear; material and industrial activity have materialized the age, and the mind, haughty with its sciences, disdains the religious forms as childish.

In consequence of this revolution in opinion, it appears, for the time, as the misfortune of this period that the cultivated mind has not the happiness and dignity of the religious sentiment. We are born too late for the old and too early for the new faith. I see in those classes and those persons in whom I am accustomed to look for tendency and progress, for what is most positive and most rich in human nature, and who contain the activity of to-day and the assurance of to-morrow, — I see in them character, but skepticism; a clear enough perception of the inadequacy of the popular religious statement to the wants of their heart and intellect, and explicit declarations of this fact. They have insight and truthfulness; they will not mask their convictions; they hate cant; but more than this I do not readily find. The gracious motions of the soul, — piety, adoration, — I do not find. Scorn of hypocrisy, pride of personal character, elegance of taste and of manners and pursuit, a boundless ambition of the intellect, willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the integrity of the character, — all these they have; but that religious submission and abandonment which give man a new element and being, and make him sublime, — it is not in churches, it is not in houses. I see movement, I hear aspirations, but I see not how the great God prepares to satisfy the heart in the new order of things. No Church, no State emerges; and when we have extricated ourselves from all the embarrassments of the social problem, the oracle does not yet emit any light on the mode of individual life. A thousand negatives it utters, clear and strong, on all sides; but the sacred affirmative it hides in the deepest abyss.

We do not see that heroic resolutions will save men from those tides which a most fatal moon heaps and levels in the moral, emotive and intellectual nature. It is certain that many dark hours, many imbecilities, periods of inactivity, — solstices when we make no progress, but stand still, — will occur. In those hours, we can find comfort in reverence of the highest power, and only in that. We never do quite nothing, or never need. It looks as if there were much doubt, much waiting, to be endured by the best. Perhaps there must be austere elections and determinations before any clear vision.

No age and no person is destitute of the sentiment, but in actual history its illustrious exhibitions are interrupted and periodical, — the ages of belief, of heroic action, of intellectual activity, of men cast in a higher mould.

But the sentiment that pervades a nation, the nation must react upon. It is resisted and corrupted by that obstinate tendency to personify and bring under the eyesight what should be the contemplation of Reason alone. The Understanding will write out the vision in a Confession of Faith. Art will embody this vanishing Spirit in temples, pictures, sculptures and hymns. The senses instantly transfer the reverence from the vanishing Spirit to this steadfast form. Ignorance and passion alloy and degrade. In proportion to a man’s want of goodness, it seems to him another and not himself; that is to say, the Deity becomes more objective, until finally flat idolatry prevails.

Of course the virtuous sentiment appears arrayed against the nominal religion, and the true men are hunted as unbelievers, and burned. Then the good sense of the people wakes up so far as to take tacit part with them, to cast off reverence for the Church; and there follows an age of unbelief.

This analysis was inevitable and useful. But the sober eye finds something ghastly in this empiricism. At first, delighted with the triumph of the intellect, the surprise of the results and the sense of power, we are like hunters on the scent and soldiers who rush to battle: but when the game is run down, when the enemy lies cold in his blood at our feet, we are alarmed at our solitude; we would gladly recall the life that so offended us; the face seems no longer that of an enemy.

I say the effect is withering; for, this examination resulting in the constant detection of errors, the flattered understanding assumes to judge all things, and to anticipate the same victories. In the activity of the understanding, the sentiments sleep. The understanding presumes in things above its sphere, and, because it has exposed errors in a church, concludes that a church is an error; because it has found absurdities to which the sentiment of veneration is attached, sneers at veneration; so that analysis has run to seed in unbelief. There is no faith left. We laugh and hiss, pleased with our power in making heaven and earth a howling wilderness.

Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without God in the world. To wander all day in the sunlight among the tribes of animals, unrelated to anything better; to behold the horse, cow and bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them; — no, the bird, as it hurried by with its bold and perfect flight, would disclaim his sympathy and declare him an outcast. To see men pursuing in faith their varied action, warm-hearted, providing for their children, loving their friends, performing their promises, — what are they to this chill, houseless, fatherless, aimless Cain, the man who hears only the sound of his own footsteps in God’s resplendent creation? To him, it is no creation; to him, these fair creatures are hapless spectres: he knows not what to make of it. To him, heaven and earth have lost their beauty. How gloomy is the day, and upon yonder shining pond what melancholy light! I cannot keep the sun in heaven, if you take away the purpose that animates him. The ball, indeed, is there, but his power to cheer, to illuminate the heart as well as the atmosphere, is gone forever. It is a lamp-wick for meanest uses. The words, great, venerable, have lost their meaning; every thought loses all its depth and has become mere surface.

But religion has an object. It does not grow thin or robust with the health of the votary. The object of adoration remains forever unhurt and identical. We are in transition, from the worship of the fathers which enshrined the law in a private and personal history, to a worship which recognizes the true eternity of the law, its presence to you and me, its equal energy in what is called brute nature as in what is called sacred. The next age will behold God in the ethical laws — as mankind begins to see them in this age, self-equal, self-executing, instantaneous and self-affirmed; needing no voucher, no prophet and no miracle besides their own irresistibility, — and will regard natural history, private fortunes and politics, not for themselves, as we have done, but as illustrations of those laws, of that beatitude and love. Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the One breaks in everywhere.

Every movement of religious opinion is of profound importance to politics and social life; and this of to-day has the best omens as being of the most expansive humanity, since it seeks to find in every nation and creed the imperishable doctrines. I find myself always struck and stimulated by a good anecdote, any trait of heroism, of faithful service. I do not find that the age or country makes the least difference; no, nor the language the actors spoke, nor the religion which they professed, whether Arab in the desert, or Frenchman in the Academy. I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion, — the religion of well-doing and daring, men of sturdy truth, men of integrity and feeling for others. My inference is that there is a statement of religion possible which makes all skepticism absurd.

The health and welfare of man consist in ascent from surfaces to solids; from occupation with details to knowledge of the design; from self-activity of talents, which lose their way by the lust of display, to the controlling and reinforcing of talents by the emanation of character. All that we call religion, all that saints and churches and Bibles from the beginning of the world have aimed at, is to suppress this impertinent surface-action, and animate man to central and entire action. The human race are afflicted with a St. Vitus’ dance; their fingers and toes, their members, their senses, their talents, are superfluously active, while the torpid heart gives no oracle. When that wakes, it will revolutionize the world. Let that speak, and all these rebels will fly to their loyalty. Now every man defeats his own action, — professes this but practises the reverse; with one hand rows, and with the other backs water. A man acts not from one motive, but from many shifting fears and short motives; it is as if he were ten or twenty less men than himself, acting at discord with one another, so that the result of most lives is zero. But when he shall act from one motive, and all his faculties play true, it is clear mathematically, is it not, that this will tell in the result as if twenty men had cooperated, — will give new senses, new wisdom of its own kind; that is, not more facts, nor new combinations, but divination, or direct intuition of the state of men and things?

The lessons of the moral sentiment are, once for all, an emancipation from that anxiety which takes the joy out of all life. It teaches a great peace. It comes itself from the highest place. It is that, which being in all sound natures, and strongest in the best and most gifted men, we know to be implanted by the Creator of Men. It is a commandment at every moment and in every condition of life to do the duty of that moment and to abstain from doing the wrong. And it is so near and inward and constitutional to each, that no commandment can compare with it in authority. All wise men regard it as the voice of the Creator himself.

I know there are those to whom the question of what shall be believed is the more interesting because they are to proclaim and teach what they believe.

All positive rules, ceremonial, ecclesiastical, distinctions of race or of person, are perishable; only those distinctions hold which are in the nature of things, not matters of positive ordinance. As the earth we stand upon is not imperishable, but is chemically resolvable into gases and nebulœ, so is the universe an infinite series of planes, each of which is a false bottom; and, when we think our feet are planted now at last on adamant, the slide is drawn out from under us.

We must reconcile ourselves to the new order of things. But is it a calamity? The poet Wordsworth greeted even the steam-engine and railroads; and when they came into his poetic Westmoreland, bisecting every delightful valley, deforming every consecrated grove, yet manned himself to say: —

“In spite of all that Beauty may disown

In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace

Her lawful offspring in man’s art, and Time,

Pleased with your triumphs o’er his brother Space,

Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown

Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.”

And we can keep our religion, despite of the violent railroads of generalization, whether French or German, that block and intersect our old parish highways.

In matters of religion, men eagerly fasten their eyes on the differences between their creed and yours, whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of men. What is essential to the theologian is, that whilst he is select in his opinions, severe in his search for truth, he shall be broad in his sympathies, — not to allow himself to be excluded from any church. He is to claim for his own whatever eloquence of St. Chrysostom or St. Jerome or St. Bernard he has felt. So not less of Bishop Taylor or George Herbert or Henry Scougal. He sees that what is most effective in the writer is what is dear to his, the reader’s, mind.

Be not betrayed into undervaluing the churches which annoy you by their bigoted claims. They too were real churches. They answered to their times the same need as your rejection of them does to ours. The Catholic Church has been immensely rich in men and influences. Augustine, à Kempis, Fénelon, breathe the very spirit which now fires you. So with Cudworth, More, Bunyan. I agree with them more than I disagree. I agree with their heart and motive; my discontent is with their limitations and surface and language. Their statement is grown as fabulous as Dante’s Inferno. Their purpose is as real as Dante’s sentiment and hatred of vice. Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker and bent on serving, teaching and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness, — to love him in other’s virtues.

An era in human history is the life of Jesus; and the immense influence for good leaves all the perversion and superstition almost harmless. Mankind have been subdued to the acceptance of his doctrine, and cannot spare the benefit of so pure a servant of truth and love.

Of course a hero so attractive to the hearts of millions drew the hypocrite and the ambitious into his train, and they used his name to falsify his history and undo his work. I fear that what is called religion, but is perhaps pew-holding, not obeys but conceals the moral sentiment. I put it to this simple test: Is a rich rogue made to feel his roguery among divines or literary men? No? Then ‘t is rogue again under the cassock. What sort of respect can these preachers or newspapers inspire by their weekly praises of texts and saints, when we know that they would say just the same things if Beelzebub had written the chapter, provided it stood where it does in the public opinion?

Anything but unbelief, anything but losing hold of the moral intuitions, as betrayed in the clinging to a form of devotion or a theological dogma; as if it was the liturgy, or the chapel, that was sacred, and not justice and humility and the loving heart and serving hand.

But besides the passion and interest which pervert, is the shallowness which impoverishes. The opinions of men lose all worth to him who perceives that they are accurately predictable from the ground of their sect. Nothing is more rare, in any man, than an act of his own. The clergy are as like as peas. I cannot tell them apart. It was said: They have bronchitis because they read from their papers sermons with a near voice, and then, looking at the congregation, they try to speak with their far voice, and the shock is noxious. I think they do this, or the converse of this, with their thought. They look into Plato, or into the mind, and then try to make parish mince-meat of the amplitudes and eternities, and the shock is noxious. It is the old story again: once we had wooden chalices and golden priests, now we have golden chalices and wooden priests.

The clergy are always in danger of becoming wards and pensioners of the so-called producing classes. Their first duty is self-possession founded on knowledge. The man of practice or worldly force requires of the preacher a talent, a force, like his own; the same as his own, but wholly applied to the priest’s things. He does not forgive an application in the preacher to the merchant’s things. He wishes him to be such a one as he himself should have been, had he been priest. He is sincere and ardent in his vocation, and plunged in it. Let priest or poet be as good in theirs.

The simple fact that the pulpit exists, that all over this country the people are waiting to hear a sermon on Sunday, assures that opportunity which is inestimable to young men, students of theology, for those large liberties. The existence of the Sunday, and the pulpit waiting for a weekly sermon, give him the very conditions, the À¿$ ÃÄ$ he wants. That must be filled, and he is armed to fill it. Let him value his talent as a door into Nature. Let him see his performances only as limitations. Then, over all, let him value the sensibility that receives, that loves, that dares, that affirms.

There are always plenty of young, ignorant people, — though some of them are seven, and some of them seventy years old, — wanting peremptorily instruction; but, in the usual averages of parishes, only one person that is qualified to give it. It is only that person who concerns me, — him only that I see. The others are very amiable and promising, but they are only neuters in the hive, — every one a possible royal bee, but not now significant. It does not signify what they say or think to-day; ‘t is the cry and the babble of the nursery, and their only virtue, docility. Buckminster, Channing, Dr. Lowell, Edward Taylor, Parker, Bushnell, Chapin, — it is they who have been necessary, and the opinions of the floating crowd of no importance whatever.

I do not love sensation preaching, — the person alities for spite, the hurrah for our side, the review of our appearances and what others say of us! That you may read in the gazette. We come to church properly for self-examination, for approach to principles to see how it stands with us, with the deep and dear facts of right and love. At the same time it is impossible to pay no regard to the day’s events, to the public opinion of the times, to the stirring shouts of parties, to the calamities and prosperities of our town and country; to war and peace, new events, great personages, to good harvests, new resources, to bankruptcies, famines and desolations. We are not stocks or stones, we are not thinking machines, but allied to men around us, as really though not quite so visibly as the Siamese brothers. And it were inhuman to affect ignorance or indifference on Sundays to what makes our blood beat and our countenance dejected Saturday or Monday. No, these are fair tests to try our doctrines by, and see if they are worth anything in life. The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

Man proposes, but God disposes. We shall not very long have any part or lot in this earth, in whose affairs we so hotly mix, and where we feel and speak so energetically of our country and our cause. It is a comfort to reflect that the gigantic evils which seem to us so mischievous and so incurable will at last end themselves and rid the world of their presence, as all crime sooner or later must. But be that event for us soon or late, we are not excused from playing our short part in the best manner we can, no matter how insignificant our aid may be. Our children will be here, if we are not; and their children’s history will be colored by our action. But if we have no children, or if the events in which we have taken our part shall not see their solution until a distant future, there is yet a deeper fact; that as much justice as we can see and practise is useful to men, and imperative, whether we can see it to be useful or not.

The essential ground of a new book or a new sermon is a new spirit. The author has a new thought, sees the sweep of a more comprehensive tendency than others are aware of; falters never, but takes the victorious tone. For power is not so much shown in talent as in tone. And if I had to counsel a young preacher, I should say: When there is any difference felt between the foot-board of the pulpit and the floor of the parlor, you have not yet said that which you should say.

Inspiration will have advance, affirmation, the forward foot, the ascending state; it will be an opener of doors; it will invent its own methods: the new wine will make the bottles new. Spirit is motive and ascending. Only let there be a deep observer, and he will make light of new shop and new circumstance that afflict you; new shop, or old cathedral, it is all one to him. He will find the circumstance not altered, as deep a cloud of mystery on the cause, as dazzling a glory on the invincible law. Given the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes and strokes of genius close by him as Dante or Shakspeare beheld. A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection. We are happy and enriched; we go away invigorated, assisted each in our own work, however different, and shall not forget to come again for new impulses.

The supposed embarrassments to young clergymen exist only to feeble wills. They need not consider them. The differences of opinion, the strength of old sects or timorous literalists, since it is not armed with prisons or fagots as in ruder times or countries, is not worth considering except as furnishing a needed stimulus. That gray deacon or respectable matron with Calvinistic antecedents, you can readily see, could not have presented any obstacle to the march of St. Bernard or of George Fox, of Luther or of Theodore Parker. And though I observe the deafness to counsel among men, yet the power of sympathy is always great; and affirmative discourse, presuming assent, will often obtain it when argument would fail. Such, too, is the active power of good temperament. Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid! As for position, the position is always the same, — insulting the timid, and not taken by storm, but flanked, I may say, by the resolute, simply by minding their own affair. Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject; seeing that opinions are temporary, but convictions uniform and eternal, — seeing that a sentiment never loses its pathos or its persuasion, but is youthful after a thousand years.

The inevitable course of remark for us, when we meet each other for meditation on life and duty, is not so much the enjoining of this or that cure or burning out of our errors of practice, as simply the celebration of the power and beneficence amid which and by which we live, not critical, but affirmative.

All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and its use. A wise man advises that we should see to it that we read and speak two or three reasonable words, every day, amid the crowd of affairs and the noise of trifles. I should say boldly that we should astonish every day by a beam out of eternity; retire a moment to the grand secret we carry in our bosom, of inspiration from heaven. But certainly on this seventh let us be the children of liberty, of reason, of hope; refresh the sentiment; think as spirits think, who belong to the universe, whilst our feet walk in the streets of a little town and our hands work in a small knot of affairs. We shall find one result, I am sure, — a certain originality and a certain haughty liberty proceeding out of our retirement and self-communion, which streets can never give, infinitely removed from all vaporing and bravado, and which yet is more than a match for any physical resistance. It is true that which they say of our New England œestrum, which will never let us stand or sit, but drives us like mad through the world. The calmest and most protected life cannot save us. We want some intercalated days, to bethink us and to derive order to our life from the heart. That should be the use of the Sabbath, — to check this headlong racing and put us in possession of ourselves once more, for love or for shame.

The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the substantial benefit endures. We no longer recite the old creeds of Athanasius or Arius, of Calvin or Hopkins. The forms are flexible, but the uses not less real. The old heart remains as ever with its old human duties. The old intellect still lives, to pierce the shows to the core. Truth is simple, and will not be antique; is ever present, and insists on being of this age and of this moment. Here is thought and love and truth and duty, new as on the first day of Adam and of angels.

“There are two pairs of eyes in man; and it is requisite that the pair which are beneath should be closed when the pair that are above them perceive; and that when the pair above are closed, those which are beneath are opened.” The lower eyes see only surfaces and effects, the upper eyes behold causes and the connection of things. And when we go alone, or come into the house of thought and worship, we come with purpose to be disabused of appearances, to see realities, the great lines of our destiny, to see that life has no caprice or fortune, is no hopping squib, but a growth after immutable laws under beneficent influences the most immense. The Church is open to great and small in all nations; and how rare and lofty, how unattainable, are the aims it labors to set before men! We come to educate, come to isolate, to be abstractionists; in fine, to open the upper eyes to the deep mystery of cause and effect, to know that though ministers of justice and power fail, Justice and Power fail never. The open secret of the world is the art of subliming a private soul with inspirations from the great and public and divine Soul from which we live.

THE MAN OF LETTERS.

On bravely through the sunshine and the showers,

Time hath his work to do, and we have ours.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man;

When Duty whispers low ‘Thou must,’

The youth replies, ‘I can.’

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF WATERVILLE COLLEGE, 1863.

Gentlemen of the Literary Societies:

Some of you are to-day saying your farewells to each other, and to-morrow will receive the parting honors of the College. You go to be teachers, to become physicians, lawyers, divines; in due course, statesmen, naturalists, philanthropists; I hope, some of you, to be the men of letters, critics, philosophers; perhaps the rare gift of poetry already sparkles, and may yet burn. At all events, before the shadows of these times darken over your youthful sensibility and candor, let me use the occasion which your kind request gives me, to offer you some counsels which an old scholar may without pretension bring to youth, in regard to the career of letters, — the power and joy that belong to it, and its high office in evil times. I offer perpetual congratulation to the scholar; he has drawn the white lot in life. The very disadvantages of his condition point at superiorities. He is too good for the world; he is in advance of his race; his function is prophetic. He belongs to a superior society, and is born one or two centuries too early for the rough and sensual population into which he is thrown. But the Heaven which sent him hither knew that well enough, and sent him as a leader to lead. Are men perplexed with evil times? The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the source of events. He has earlier information, a private despatch which relieves him of the terror which presses on the rest of the community. He is a learner of the laws of nature and the experiences of history; a prophet surrendered with self-abandoning sincerity to the Heaven which pours through him its will to mankind. This is the theory, but you know how far this is from the fact, that nothing has been able to resist the tide with which the material prosperity of America in years past has beat down the hope of youth, the piety of learning. The country was full of activity, with its wheat, coal, iron, cotton; the wealth of the globe was here, too much work and not men enough to do it. Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia sent millions of laborers; still the need was more. Every kind of skill was in demand, and the bribe came to men of intellectual culture, — Come, drudge in our mill. America at large exhibited such a confusion as California showed in 1849, when the cry of gold was first raised. All the distinctions of profession and habit ended at the mines. All the world took off their coats and worked in shirt-sleeves. Lawyers went and came with pick and wheelbarrow; doctors of medicine turned teamsters; stray clergymen kept the bar in saloons; professors of colleges sold cigars, mince-pies, matches, and so on. It is the perpetual tendency of wealth to draw on the spiritual class, not in this coarse way, but in plausible and covert ways. It is charged that all vigorous nations, except our own, have balanced their labor by mental activity, and especially by the imagination, — the cardinal human power, the angel of earnest and believing ages. The subtle Hindoo, who carried religion to ecstasy and philosophy to idealism, produced the wonderful epics of which, in the present century, the translations have added new regions to thought. The Egyptian built Thebes and Karnak on a scale which dwarfs our art, and by the paintings on their interior walls invited us into the secret of the religious belief whence he drew such power. The Greek was so perfect in action and in imagination, his poems, from Homer to Euripides, so charming in form and so true to the human mind that we cannot forget or outgrow their mythology. The Hebrew nation compensated for the insignificance of its members and territory by its religious genius, its tenacious belief; its poems and histories cling to the soil of this globe like the primitive rocks. On the south and east shores of the Mediterranean Mahomet impressed his fierce genius how deeply into the manners, language and poetry of Arabia and Persia! See the activity of the imagination in the Crusades: the front of morn was full of fiery shapes; the chasm was bridged over; heaven walked on earth, and Earth could see with eyes the Paradise and the Inferno. Dramatic “mysteries” were the entertainment of the people. Parliaments of Love and Poesy served them, instead of the House of Commons, Congress and the newspapers. In Puritanism, how the whole Jewish history became flesh and blood in those men, let Bunyan show. Now it is agreed that we are utilitarian; that we are skeptical, frivolous; that with universal cheap education we have stringent theology, but religion is low. There is much criticism, not on deep grounds, but an affirmative philosophy is wanting. Our profoundest philosophy (if it were not contradiction in terms) is skepticism. The great poem of the age is the disagreeable poem of “Faust,” — of which the “Festus” of Bailey and the “Paracelsus” of Browning are English variations. We have superficial sciences, restless, gossiping, aimless activity. We run to Paris, to London, to Rome, to Mesmerism, Spiritualism, to Pusey, to the Catholio Church, as if for the want of thought, and those who would check and guide have a dreary feeling that in the change and decay of the old creeds and motives there was no offset to supply their place. Our industrial skill, arts ministering to convenience and luxury, have made life expensive, and therefore greedy, careful, anxious; have turned the eyes downward to the earth, not upward to thought.

Ernest Renan finds that Europe has thrice assembled for exhibitions of industry, and not a poem graced the occasion; and nobody remarked the defect. A French prophet of our age, Fourier, predicted that one day, instead of by battles and Œcumenical Councils, the rival portions of humanity would dispute each other’s excellence in the manufacture of little cakes.

“In my youth,” said a Scotch mountaineer, “a Highland gentleman measured his importance by the number of men his domain could support. After some time the question was, to know how many great cattle it would feed. To-day we are come to count the number of sheep. I suppose posterity will ask how many rats and mice it will feed.”

Dickens complained that in America, as soon as he arrived in any of the Western towns, a committee waited on him and invited him to deliver a temperance lecture. Bowditch translated Laplace, and when he removed to Boston, the Hospital Life Assurance Company insisted that he should make their tables of annuities. Napoleon knows the art of war, but should not be put on picket duty. Linnœeus or Robert Brown must not be set to raise gooseberries and cucumbers, though they be excellent botanists. A shrewd broker out of State Street visited a quiet countryman possessed of all the virtues, and in his glib talk said, “With your character now I could raise all this money at once, and make an excellent thing of it.”

There is an oracle current in the world, that nations die by suicide. The sign of it is the decay of thought. Niebuhr has given striking examples of that fatal portent; as in the loss of power of thought that followed the disasters of the Athenians in Sicily.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency. He represents intellectual or spiritual force. I wish him to rely on the spiritual arm; to live by his strength, not by his weakness. A scholar defending the cause of slavery, of arbitrary government, of monopoly, of the oppressor, is a traitor to his profession. He has ceased to be a scholar. He is not company for clean people. The worst times only show him how independent he is of times; only relieve and bring out the splendor of his privilege. Disease alarms the family, but the physician sees in it a temporary mischief, which he can check and expel. The fears and agitations of men who watch the markets, the crops, the plenty or scarcity of money, or other superficial events, are not for him. He knows that the world is always equal to itself; that the forces which uphold and pervade it are eternal. Air, water, fire, iron, gold, wheat, electricity, animal fibre, have not lost a particle of power, and no decay has crept over the spiritual force which gives bias and period to boundless nature. Bad times, — what are bad times? Nature is rich, exuberant, and mocks at the puny forces of destruction. Man makes no more impression on her wealth than the caterpillar or the cankerworm whose petty ravage, though noticed in an orchard or a village, is insignificant in the vast exuberance of the summer. There is no unemployed force in Nature. All decomposition is recomposition. War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize. Weeks, months pass — a new harvest; trade springs up, and there stand new cities, new homes all rebuilt and sleepy with permanence. Italy, France — a hundred times those countries have been trampled with armies and burned over: a few summers, and they smile with plenty and yield new men and new revenues.

If churches are effete, it is because the new Heaven forms. You are here as the carriers of the power of Nature, — as Roger Bacon, with his secret of gunpowder, with his secret of the balloon and of steam; as Copernicus, with his secret of the true astronomy; as Columbus, with America in his logbook; as Newton, with his gravity; Harvey, with his circulation; Smith, with his law of trade; Franklin, with lightning; Adams, with Independence; Kant, with pure reason; Swedenborg, with his spiritual world. You are the carriers of ideas which are to fashion the mind and so the history of this breathing world, so as they shall be, and not otherwise.

Every man is a scholar potentially, and does not need any one good so much as this of right thought.

“Calm pleasures here abide, majestic pains.”

Coleridge traces “three silent revolutions,” of which the first was “when the clergy fell from the Church.” A scholar was once a priest. But the Church clung to ritual, and the scholar clung to joy, low as well as high, and thus the separation was a mutual fault. But I think it is a schism which must be healed. The true scholar is the Church. Only the duties of Intellect must be owned. Down with these dapper trimmers and sycophants! let us have masculine and divine men, formidable lawgivers, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, who warp the churches of the world from their traditions, and penetrate them through and through with original perception. The intellectual man lives in perpetual victory. As certainly as water falls in rain on the tops of mountains and runs down into valleys, plains and pits, so does thought fall first on the best minds, and run down, from class to class, until it reaches the masses, and works revolutions.

Nature says to the American: “I understand mensuration and numbers; I compute the ellipse of the moon, the ebb and flow of waters, the curve and the errors of planets, the balance of attraction and recoil. I have measured out to you by weight and tally the powers you need. I give you the land and sea, the forest and the mine, the elemental forces nervous energy. When I add difficulty, I add brain. See to it that you hold and administer the continent for mankind. One thing you have rightly done. You have offered a patch of land in the wilderness to every son of Adam who will till it. Other things you have begun to do, — to strike off the chains which snuffling hypocrites had bound on the weaker race. You are to imperil your lives and fortunes for a principle. The ambassador is held to maintain the dignity of the Republic which he represents. But what does the scholar represent? The organ of ideas, the subtle force which creates Nature and men and states; — consoler, upholder, imparting pulses of light and shocks of electricity, guidance and courage. So let his habits be formed, and all his economies heroic; no spoiled child, no drone, no epicure, but a stoic, formidable, athletic, knowing how to be poor, loving labor, and not flogging his youthful wit with tobacco and wine; treasuring his youth. I wish the youth to be an armed and complete man; no helpless angel to be slapped in the face, but a man dipped in the Styx of human experience, and made invulnerable so, — self-helping. A redeeming trait of the Sophists of Athens, Hippias and Gorgias, is that they made their own clothes and shoes. Learn to harness a horse, to row a boat, to camp down in the woods, to cook your supper. I chanced lately to be at West Point, and, after attending the examination in scientific classes, I went into the barracks. The chamber was in perfect order; the mattress on the iron camp-bed rolled up, as if ready for removal. I asked the first Cadet, “Who makes your bed?” “I do.” “Who fetches your water?” “I do.” “Who blacks your shoes?” “I do.” It was so in every room. These are first steps to power. Learn of Samuel Johnson or David Hume, that it is a primary duty of the man of letters to secure his independence.

Stand by your order. ‘T is some thirty years since the days of the Reform Bill in England, when on the walls in London you read everywhere placards, “Down with the Lords.” At that time, Earl Grey, who was leader of Reform, was asked, in Parliament, his policy on the measures of the Radicals. He replied, “I shall stand by my order.” Where there is no vision, the people perish. The fault lies with the educated class, the men of study and thought. There is a very low feeling of duty: the merchant is true to the merchant, the noble in England and Europe stands by his order, the politician believes in his arts and combinations; but the scholar does not stand by his order, but defers to the men of this world.

Gentlemen, I am here to commend to you your art and profession as thinkers. It is real. It is the secret of power. It is the art of command. All superiority is this, or related to this. “All that the world admires comes from within.” Thought makes us men; ranks us; distributes society; distributes the work of the world; is the prolific source of all arts, of all wealth, of all delight, of all grandeur. Men are as they believe. Men are as they think, and the man who knows any truth not yet discerned by other men, is master of all other men so far as that truth and its wide relations are concerned.

Intellect measures itself by its counteraction to any accumulation of material force. There is no mass which it cannot surmount and dispose of. The exertions of this force are the eminent experiences, — out of a long life all that is worth remembering. These are the moments that balance years. Does any one doubt between the strength of a thought and that of an institution? Does any one doubt that a good general is better than a park of artillery? See a political revolution dogging a book. See armies, institutions, literatures, appearing in the train of some wild Arabian’s dream.

There is a proverb that Napoleon, when the Mameluke cavalry approached the French lines, ordered the grenadiers to the front, and the asses and the savans to fall into the hollow square. It made a good story, and circulated in that day. But how stands it now? The military expedition was a failure. Bonaparte himself deserted, and the army got home as it could, all fruitless; not a trace of it remains. All that is left of it is the researches of those savans on the antiquities of Egypt, including the great work of Denon, which led the way to all the subsequent studies of the English and German scholars on that foundation. Pytheas of Ægina was victor in the Pancratium of the boys, at the Isthmian games. He came to the poet Pindar and wished him to write an ode in his praise, and inquired what was the price of a poem. Pindar replied that he should give him one talent, about a thousand dollars of our money. “A talent!” cried Pytheas; “why, for so much money I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.” “Very likely.” On second thoughts, he returned and paid for the poem. And now not only all the statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples themselves, and the very walls of the city are utterly gone, whilst the ode of Pindar, in praise of Pytheas, remains entire.

The treachery of scholars! They are idealists, and should stand for freedom, justice, and public good. The scholar is bound to stand for all the virtues and all the liberties, — liberty of trade, liberty of the press, liberty of religion, — and he should open all the prizes of success and all the roads of Nature to free competition.

The country complains loudly of the inefficiency of the army. It was badly led. But, before this, it was not the army alone, it was the population that was badly led. The clerisy, the spiritual guides, the scholars, the seers have been false to their trust.

Rely on yourself. There is respect due to your teachers, but every age is new, and has problems to solve, insoluble by the last age. Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit. Neither your teachers, nor the universal teachers, the laws, the customs or dogmas of nations, neither saint nor sage, can compare with that counsel which is open to you. No, it is not nations, no, nor even masters, not at last a few individuals or any heroes, but himself only, the large equality to truth of a single mind, — as if, in the narrow walls of a human heart, the wide realm of truth, the world of morals, the tribunal by which the universe is judged, found room to exist.

Our people have this levity and complaisance, — they fear to offend, do not wish to be misunderstood; do not wish, of all things, to be in the minority. God and Nature are altogether sincere, and Art should be as sincere. It is not enough that the work should show a skilful hand, ingenious contrivance and admirable polish and finish; it should have a commanding motive in the time and condition in which it was made. We should see in it the great belief of the artist, which caused him to make it so as he did, and not otherwise; nothing frivolous, nothing that he might do or not do, as he chose, but somewhat that must be done then and there by him; he could not take his neck out of that yoke, and save his soul. And this design must shine through the whole performance. Sincerity is, in dangerous times, discovered to be an immeasurable advantage. I distrust all the legends of great accomplishments or performance of unprincipled men. Very little reliance must be put on the common stories that circulate of this great senator’s or that great barrister’s learning, their Greek, their varied literature. That ice won’t bear. Reading! — do you mean that this senator or this lawyer, who stood by and allowed the passage of infamous laws, was a reader of Greek books? That is not the question; but to what purpose did they read? I allow them the merit of that reading which appears in their opinions, tastes, beliefs, and practice. They read that they might know, did they not? Well, these men did not know. They blundered; they were utterly ignorant of that which every boy or girl of fifteen knows perfectly, — the rights of men and women. And this big-mouthed talker, among his dictionaries and Leipzic editions of Lysias, had lost his knowledge. But the President of the Bank nods to the President of the Insurance Office, and relates that at Virginia Springs this idol of the forum exhausted a trunkful of classic authors. There is always the previous question, How came you on that side? You are a very elegant writer, but you can’t write up what gravitates down.

It is impossible to extricate oneself from the questions in which our age is involved. All of us have shared the new enthusiasm of country and of liberty which swept like a whirlwind through all souls at the outbreak of war, and brought, by ennobling us, an offset for its calamity.

War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at once. In quiet times, custom stifles this discussion as sentimental, and brings in the brazen devil, as by immemorial right. The war uplifted us into generous sentiments. War ennobles the age. We do not often have a moment of grandeur in these hurried, slipshod lives, but the behavior of the young men has taught us much. We will not again disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie.

I learn with joy and with deep respect that this college has sent its full quota to the field. I learn with grief, but with honoring pain, that you have had your sufferers in the battle, and that the noble youth have returned wounded and maimed. The times are dark, but heroic. The times develop the strength they need. Boys are heroes. Women have shown a tender patriotism and inexhaustible charity. And on each new threat of faction, the ballot of the people has been unexpectedly right. But the issues already appearing overpay the cost. Slavery is broken, and, if we use our advantage, irretrievably. For such a gain, to end once for all that pest of all our free institutions, one generation might well be sacrificed; perhaps it will; that this continent be purged and a new era of equal rights dawn on the universe. Who would not, if it could be made certain that the new morning of universal liberty should rise on our race by the perishing of one generation, — who would not consent to die?

THE SCHOLAR.

For thought, and not praise,

Thought is the wages

For which I sell days,

Will gladly sell ages

And willing grow old,

Deaf and dumb, blind and cold,

Melting matter into dreams,

Panoramas which I saw,

And whatever glows or seems

Into substance, into Law.

The sun and moon shall fall amain

Like sowers’ seeds into his brain,

There quickened to be born again

AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE WASHINGTON AND JEFFERSON SOCIETIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 28TH JUNE, 1876.

Gentlemen: 

The Athenians took an oath, on a certain crisis in their affairs, to esteem wheat, the vine and the olive the bounds of Attica. The territory of scholars is yet larger. A stranger but yesterday to every person present, I find myself already at home, for the society of lettered men is a university which does not bound itself with the walls of one cloister or college, but gathers in the distant and solitary student into its strictest amity. Literary men gladly acknowledge these ties which find for the homeless and the stranger a welcome where least looked for. But in proportion as we are conversant with the laws of life, we have seen the like. We are used to these surprises. This is but one operation of a more general law. As in coming among strange faces we find that the love of letters makes us friends, so in strange thoughts, in the worldly habits which harden us, we find with some surprise that learning and truth and beauty have not let us go; that the spiritual nature is too strong for us; that those excellent influences which men in all ages have called the Muse, or by some kindred name, come in to keep us warm and true; that the face of Nature remains irresistibly alluring. We have strayed from the territorial monuments of Attica, but here still are wheat and olives and the vine.

I do not now refer to that intellectual conscience which forms itself in tender natures, and gives us many twinges for our sloth and unfaithfulness: — the influence I speak of is of a higher strain. Stung by this intellectual conscience, we go to measure our tasks as scholars, and screw ourselves up to energy and fidelity, and our sadness is suddenly overshone by a sympathy of blessing. Beauty, the inspirer, the cheerful festal principle, the leader of gods and men, which draws by being beautiful, and not by considerations of advantage, comes in and puts a new face on the world. I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries and unpublished beauties; heralds of civility, nobility, learning and wisdom; affirmers of the one law, yet as those who should affirm it in music and dancing; expressors themselves of that firm and cheerful temper, infinitely removed from sadness, which reigns through the kingdoms of chemistry, vegetation, and animal life. Every natural power exhilarates; a true talent delights the possessor first. A celebrated musician was wont to say, that men knew not how much more he delighted himself with his playing than he did others; for if they knew, his hearers would rather demand of him than give him a reward. The scholar is here to fill others with love and courage by confirming their trust in the love and wisdom which are at the heart of all things; to affirm noble sentiments; to hear them wherever spoken, out of the deeps of ages, out of the obscurities of barbarous life, and to republish them: — to untune nobody, but to draw all men after the truth, and to keep men spiritual and sweet.

Language can hardly exaggerate the beatitude of the intellect flowing into the faculties. This is the power that makes the world incarnated in man, and laying again the beams of heaven and earth, setting the north and the south, and the stars in their places. Intellect is the science of metes and bounds; yet it sees no bound to the eternal proceeding of law forth into nature. All the sciences are only new applications, each translatable into the other, of the one law which his mind is.

This, gentlemen, is the topic on which I shall speak, — the natural and permanent function of the Scholar, as he is no permissive or accidental appearance, but an organic agent in nature. He is here to be the beholder of the real; self-centred amidst the superficial; here to revere the dominion of a serene necessity and be its pupil and apprentice by tracing everything home to a cause; here to be sobered, not by the cares of life, as men say, no, but by the depth of his draughts of the cup of immortality.

One is tempted to affirm the office and attributes of the scholar a little the more eagerly, because of a frequent perversity of the class itself. Men are ashamed of their intellect. The men committed by profession as well as by bias to study, the clergyman, the chemist, the astronomer, the metaphysician, the poet, talk hard and worldly, and share the infatuation of cities. The poet and the citizen perfectly agree in conversation on the wise life. The poet counsels his own son as if he were a merchant. The poet with poets betrays no amiable weakness. They all chime in, and are as inexorable as bankers on the subject of real life. They have no toleration for literature; art is only a fine word for appearance in default of matter. And they sit white over their stoves, and talk themselves hoarse over the mischief of books and the effeminacy of book-makers. But at a single strain of a bugle out of a grove, or at the dashing among the stones of a brook from the hills; at the sound of some subtle word that falls from the lips of an imaginative person, or even at the reading in solitude of some moving image of a wise poet, this grave conclusion is blown out of memory; the sun shines, and the worlds roll to music, and the poet replaces all this cowardly Self-denial and God-denial of the literary class with the conviction that to one poetic success the world will surrender on its knees. Instantly he casts in his lot with the pearl-diver and the diamond-merchant. Like them he will joyfully lose days and months, and estates and credit, in the profound hope that one restoring, all-rewarding, immense success will arrive at last, which will give him at one bound a universal dominion. And rightly; for if his wild prayers are granted, if he is to succeed, his achievment is the piercing of the brass heavens of use and limitation, and letting in a beam of the pure eternity which burns up this limbo of shadows and chimeras in which we dwell. Yes, Nature is too strong for us; she will not be denied; she has balsams for our hurts, and hellebores for our insanities. She does not bandy words with us, but comes in with a new ravishing experience and makes the old time ridiculous. Every poet knows the unspeakable hope, and represents its audacity.

I am not disposed to magnify temporary differences, but for the moment it appears as if in former times learning and intellectual accomplishments had secured to the possessor greater rank and authority. If this were only the reaction from excessive expectations from literature, now disappointed, it were a just censure. It was superstitious to exact too much from philosophers and the literary class. The Sophists, the Alexandrian grammarians, the wits of Queen Anne’s, the philosophers and diffusion — societies have not much helped us. Granted, freely granted. Men run out of one superstition into an opposite superstition, and practical people in America give themselves wonderful airs. The cant of the time inquires superciliously after the new ideas; it believes that ideas do not lead to the owning of stocks; they are perplexing and effeminating.

Young men, I warn you against the clamors of these self-praising frivolous activities, — against these busy-bodies; against irrational labor; against chattering, meddlesome, rich and official people. If their doing came to any good end! Action is legitimate and good; forever be it honored! right, original, private, necessary action, proceeding new from the heart of man, and going forth to beneficent and as yet incalculable ends. Yes; but not a petty fingering and running, a senseless repeating of yesterday’s fingering and running; an acceptance of the method and frauds of other men; an overdoing and busy-ness which pretends to the honors of action, but resembles the twitches of St. Vitus. The action of these men I cannot respect, for they do not respect it themselves. They were better and more respectable abed and asleep. All the best of this class, all who have any insight or generosity of spirit are frequently disgusted, and fain to put it behind them.

Gentlemen, I do not wish to check your impulses to action: I would not hinder you of one swing of your arm. I do not wish to see you effeminate gownsmen, taking hold of the world with the tips of your fingers, or that life should be to you as it is to many, optical, not practical. Far otherwise: I rather wish you to experiment boldly and give play to your energies, but not, if I could prevail with you, in conventional ways. I should wish your energy to run in works and emergencies growing out of your personal character. Nature will fast enough instruct you in the occasion and the need, and will bring to each of you the crowded hour, the great opportunity. Love, Rectitude, everlasting Fame, will come to each, of you in loneliest places with their grand alternatives, and Honor watches to see whether you dare seize the palms.

I have no quarrel with action, only I prefer no action to misaction, and I reject the abusive application of the term practical to those lower activities. Let us hear no more of the practical men, or I will tell you something of them, — this, namely, that the scholar finds in them unlooked-for acceptance of his most paradoxical experience. There is confession in their eyes, and if they parade their business and public importance, it is by way of apology and palliation for not being the students and obeyers of those diviner laws. Talk frankly with them and you learn that you have little to tell them; that the Spirit of the Age has been before you with influences impossible to parry or resist. The dry-goods men, and the brokers, the lawyers and the manufacturers are idealists, and only differ from the philosopher in the intensity of the charge. We are all contemporaries and bones of one body.

The shallow clamor against theoretic men comes from the weak. Able men may sometimes affect a contempt for thought, which no able man ever feels. For what alone in the history of this world interests all men in proportion as they are men? What but truth, and perpetual advance in knowledge of it, and brave obedience to it in right action? Every man or woman who can voluntarily or involuntarily give them any insight or suggestion on these secrets they will hearken after. The poet writes his verse on a scrap of paper, and instantly the desire and love of all mankind take charge of it, as if it were Holy Writ. What need has he to cross the sill of his door? Why need he meddle with politics? His idlest thought, his yesternight’s dream is told already in the Senate. What the Genius whispered him at night he reported to the young men at dawn. He rides in them, he traverses sea and land. The engineer in the locomotive is waiting for him; the steamboat is hissing at the wharf, and the wheels whirling to go. ‘T is wonderful, ‘t is almost scandalous, this extraordinary favoritism shown to poets. I do not mean to excuse it. I admit the enormous partiality. It only shows that such is the gulf between our perception and our painting, the eye is so wise, and the hand so clumsy, that all the human race have agreed to value a man according to his power of expression. For him arms, art, politics, trade waited like menials, until the lord of the manor should arrive. Even the demonstrations of nature for millenniums seem not to have attained their end, until this interpreter arrives. “I,” said the great-hearted Kepler, “may well wait a hundred years for a reader, since God Almighty has waited six thousand years for an observer like myself.”

Genius is a poor man and has no house, but see, this proud landlord who has built the palace and furnished it so delicately, opens it to him and beseeches him to make it honorable by entering there and eating bread. Where is the palace in England whose tenants are not too happy if it can make a home for Pope or Addison or Swift or Burke or Canning or Tennyson? Or if wealth has humors and wishes to shake off the yoke and assert itself, — oh, by all means let it try! Will it build its fences very high, and make its Almacks too narrow for a wise man to enter? Will it be independent? I incline to concede the isolation which it asks, that it may learn that it is not independent but parasitical.

There could always be traced, in the most bar-barous tribes, and also in the most character-destroying civilization, some vestiges of a faith in genius, as in the exemption of a priesthood or bards or artists from taxes and tolls levied on other men; or in civic distinction; or in enthusiastic homage; or in hospitalities; as if men would signify their sense that genius and virtue should not pay money for house and land and bread, because they have a royal right in these and in all things, — a first mortgage that takes effect before the right of the present proprietor. For they are the First Good, of which Plato affirms that “all things are for its sake, and it is the cause of everything beautiful.”

This reverence is the re-establishment of natural order; for as the solidest rocks are made up of invisible gases, as the world is made of thickened light and arrested electricity, so men know that ideas are the parents of men and things; there was never anything that did not proceed from a thought. The scholar has a deep ideal interest in the moving show around him. He knew the motley system in its egg. We have — have we not? — a real relation to markets and brokers and currency and coin. “Gold and silver,” says one of the Platonists, “grow in the earth from the celestial gods, — an effluxion from them.” The unmentionable dollar itself has at last a high origin in moral and metaphysical nature. Union Pacific stock is not quite private property, but the quality and essence of the universe is in that also. Have we less interest in ships or in shops, in manual work or in household affairs; in any object of nature, or in any handiwork of man; in any relation of life or custom of society? The scholar is to show, in each, identity and connexion; he is to show its origin in the brain of man, and its secret history and issues. He is the attorney of the world, and can never be superfluous where so vast a variety of questions are ever coming up to be solved, and for ages.

I proceed to say that the allusions just now made to the extent of his duties, the manner in which every day’s events will find him in work, may show that his place is no sinecure. The scholar, when he comes, will be known by an energy that will animate all who see him. The labor of ambition and avarice will appear fumbling beside his. In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue. In this country we are fond of results and of short ways to them; and most in this department. In our experiences, learning is not learned, nor is genius wise. The name of the Scholar is taken in vain. We who should be the channel of that unweariable Power which never sleeps, must give our diligence no holidays. Other men are planting and building, baking and tanning, running and sailing, heaving and carrying, each that he may peacefully execute the fine function by which they all are helped. Shall he play, whilst their eyes follow him from far with reverence, attributing to him the delving in great fields of thought, and conversing with supernatural allies? If he is not kindling his torch or collecting oil, he will fear to go by a workshop; he will not dare to hear the music of a saw or plane; the steam-engine will reprimand, the steam-pipe will hiss at him; he cannot look a blacksmith in the eye; in the field he will be shamed by mowers and reapers. The speculative man, the scholar, is the right hero. He is brave, because he sees the omnipotence of that which inspires him. Is there only one courage and one warfare? I cannot manage sword and rifle; can I not therefore be brave? I thought there were as many courages as men. Is an armed man the only hero? Is a man only the breech of a gun or the haft of a bowie-knife? Men of thought fail in fighting down malignity, because they wear other armor than their own. Let them decline henceforward foreign methods and foreign courages. Let them do that which they can do. Let them fight by their strength, not by their weakness. It seems to me that the thoughtful man needs no armor but this — concentration. One thing is for him settled, that he is to come at his ends. He is not there to defend himself, but to deliver his message; if his voice is clear, then clearly; if husky, then huskily; if broken, he can at least scream; gag him, he can still write it; bruise, mutilate him, cut off his hands and feet, he can still crawl towards his object on his stumps. It is the corruption of our generation that men value a long life, and do not esteem life simply as a means of expressing a sentiment.

The great English patriot Algernon Sidney wrote to his father from his prison a little before his execution: “I have ever had in my mind that when God should cast me into such a condition as that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing he shows me the time has come when I should resign it.” Beauty belongs to the sentiment, and is always departing from those who depart out of that. The hero rises out of all comparison with contemporaries and with ages of men, because he disesteems old age, and lands, and money, and power, and will oppose all mankind at the call of that private and perfect Right and Beauty in which he lives.

Man is a torch borne in the wind. The ends I have hinted at made the scholar or spiritual man indispensable to the Republic or Commonwealth of Man. Nature could not leave herself without a seer and expounder. But he could not see or teach without organs. The same necessity then that would create him reappears in his splendid gifts. There is no power in the mind but in turn becomes an instrument. The descent of genius into talents is part of the natural order and history of the world. The incarnation must be. We cannot eat the granite nor drink hydrogen. They must be decompounded and recompounded into corn and water before they can enter our flesh. There is a great deal of spiritual energy in the universe, but it is not palpable to us until we can make it up into man. There is plenty of air, but it is worth nothing until by gathering it into sails we can get it into shape and service to carry us and our cargo across the sea. Then it is paid for by hundreds of thousands of our money. Plenty of water also, sea full, sky full; who cares for it? But when we can get it where we want it, and in measured portions, on a mill-wheel, or boat-paddle, we will buy it with millions. There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is nought till we have made it up into loaves and soup. So we find it in higher relations. There is plenty of wild wrath, but it steads not until we can get it racked off, shall I say? and bottled into persons; a little pure, and not too much, to every head. How many young geniuses we have known, and none but ourselves will ever hear of them for want in them of a little talent!

Ah, gentlemen, I own I love talents and accomplishments; the feet and hands of genius. As Burke said, “it is not only our duty to make the right known, but to make it prevalent.” So I delight to see the Godhead in distribution; to see men that can come at their ends. These shrewd faculties belong to man. I love to see them in play, and to see them trained: this memory carrying in its caves the pictures of all the past, and rendering them in the instant when they can serve the possessor; — the craft of mathematical combination, which carries a working-plan of the heavens and of the earth in a formula. I am apt to believe, with the Emperor Charles V., that “as many languages as a man knows, so many times is he a man.” I like to see a man of that virtue that no obscurity or disguise can conceal, who wins all souls to his way of thinking. I delight in men adorned and weaponed with manlike arts, who could alone, or with a few like them, reproduce Europe and America, the result of our civilization.

It is excellent when the individual is ripened to that degree that he touches both the centre and the circumference, so that he is not only widely intelligent, but carries a council in his breast for the emergency of to-day; and alternates the contemplation of the fact in pure intellect, with the total conversion of the intellect into energy; Jove, and the thunderbolt launched from his hand. Perhaps I value power of achievement a little more because in America there seems to be a certain indigence in this respect. I think there is no more intellectual people than ours. They are very apprehensive and curious. But there is a sterility of talent. These iron personalities, such as in Greece and Italy and once in England were formed to strike fear into kings and draw the eager service of thousands, rarely appear. We have general intelligence, but no Cyclop arms. A very little intellectual force makes a disproportionately great impression, and when one observes how eagerly our people entertain and discuss a new theory, whether home-born or imported, and how little thought operates how great an effect, one would draw a favorable inference as to their intellectual and spiritual tendencies. It seems as if two or three persons coming who should add to a high spiritual aim great constructive energy, would carry the country with them.

In making this claim of costly accomplishments for the scholar, I chiefly wish to infer the dignity of his work by the lustre of his appointments. He is not cheaply equipped. The universe was rifled to furnish him. He is to forge out of coarsest ores the sharpest weapons. But if the weapons are valued for themselves, if his talents assume an independence, and come to work for ostentation, they cannot serve him. It was said of an eminent Frenchman, that “he was drowned in his talents.” The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief and misleading; so that presently all is wrong, talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatness, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art; and the young, coming up with innocent hope, and looking around them at education, at the professions and employments, at religious and literary teachers and teaching, — finding that nothing outside corresponds to the noble order in the soul, are confused, and become skeptical and forlorn. Hope is taken from youth unless there be, by the grace of God, sufficient vigor in their instinct to say, “All is wrong and human invention. I declare anew from Heaven that truth exists new and beautiful and profitable forevermore.” Order is heaven’s first law. These gifts, these senses, these facilities are excellent as long as subordinated; all wasted and mischievous when they assume to lead and not obey. What is the use of strength or cunning or beauty, or musical voice, or birth, or breeding, or money, to a maniac? Yet society, in which we live, is subject to fits of frenzy; sometimes is for an age together a maniac, with birth, breeding, beauty, cunning, strength and money. And there is but one defence against this principle of chaos, and that is the principle of order, or brave return at all hours to an infinite common-sense, to the mother-wit, to the wise instinct, to the pure intellect.

When a man begins to dedicate himself to a particular function, as his logical, or his remembering, or his oratorical, or his arithmetical skill; the advance of his character and genius pauses; he has run to the end of his line; seal the book; the development of that mind is arrested. The scholar is lost in the showman. Society is babyish, and is, dazzled and deceived by the weapon, without inquiring into the cause for which it is drawn; like boys by the drums and colors of the troops.

The objection of men of the world to what they call the morbid intellectual tendency in our young men at present, is not a hostility to their truth, but to this, its shortcoming, that the idealistic views unfit their children for business in their sense, and do not qualify them for any complete life of a better kind. They threaten the validity of contracts, but do not prevail so far as to establish the new kingdom which shall supersede contracts, oaths, and property. “We have seen to weariness what yon cannot do; now show us what you can and will do,” asks the practical man, and with perfect reason.

We are not afraid of new truth, — of truth never, new, or old, — no, but of a counterfeit. Everybody hates imbecility and shortcoming, not new methods. The astronomer is not ridiculous inasmuch as he is an astronomer, but inasmuch as he is not an astronomer. Be that you are: be that cheerly and sovereignly. Plotinus makes no apologies, he says roundly, “the knowledge of the senses is truly ludicrous.” “Body and its properties belong to the region of nonentity, as if more of body was necessarily produced where a defect of being happens in a greater degree.” “Matter,” says Plutarch, “is privation.” Let the man of ideas at this hour be as direct, and as fully committed. Have you a thought in your heart? There was never such need of it as now. As we read the newspapers, as we see the effrontery with which money and power carry their ends and ride over honesty and good-meaning, patriotism and religion seem to shriek like ghosts. We will not speak for them, because to speak for them seems so weak and hopeless. We will hold fast our opinion and die in silence. But a true orator will make us feel that the states and kingdoms, the senators, lawyers and rich men are caterpillars’ webs and caterpillars, when seen in the light of this despised and imbecile truth. Then we feel what cowards we have been. Truth alone is great. The orator too becomes a fool and a shadow before this light which lightens through him. It shines backward and forward, diminishes and annihilates everybody, and the prophet so gladly feels his personality lost in this victorious life. The spiritual nature exhibits itself so in its counteraction to any accumulation of material force. There is no mass that can be a counterweight for it. This makes one man good against mankind. This is the secret of eloquence, for it is the end of eloquence in a half-hour’s discourse, — perhaps by a few sentences, — to persuade a multitude of persons to renounce their opinions, and change the course of life. They go forth not the men they came in, but shriven, convicted, and converted.

We have many revivals of religion. We have had once what was called the Revival of Letters. I wish to see a revival of the human mind: to see men’s sense of duty extend to the cherishing and use of their intellectual powers: their religion should go with their thought and hallow it. Whosoever looks with heed into his thoughts will find that our science of the mind has not got far. He will find there is somebody within him that knows more than he does, a certain dumb life in life; a simple wisdom behind all acquired wisdom; some-what not educated or educable; not altered or alterable; a mother-wit which does not learn by experience or by books, but knew it all already; makes no progress, but was wise in youth as in age. More or less clouded it yet resides the same in all, saying Ay, ay, or No, no to every proposition. Yet its grand Ay and its grand No are more musical than all eloquence. Nobody has found the limit of its knowledge. Whatever object is brought before it is already well known to it. Its justice is perfect; its look is catholic and universal, its light ubiquitous like the sun. It does not put forth organs, it rests in presence: yet trusted and obeyed in happy natures it becomes active and salient, and makes new means for its great ends.

The scholar then is unfurnished who has only literary weapons. He ought to have as many talents as he can; memory, arithmetic, practical power, manners, temper, lion-heart, are all good things, and if he has none of them he can still manage, if he have the main-mast, — if he is anything. But he must have the resource of resources, and be planted on necessity. For the sure months are bringing him to an examination-day in which nothing is remitted or excused, and for which no tutor, no book, no lectures, and almost no preparation can be of the least avail. He will have to answer certain questions, which, I must plainly tell you, cannot be staved off. For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the invisible world, are the interrogators: Who are you? What do you? Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness? Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul?

Can he answer these questions? can he dispose of them? Happy if you can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life! Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all who know them. These questions speak to Genius, to that power which is underneath and greater than all talent, and which proceeds out of the constitution of every man: to Genius, which is an emanation of that it tells of; whose private counsels are not tinged with selfishness, but are laws. Men of talent fill the eye with their pretension. They go out into some camp of their own, and noisily persuade society that this thing which they do is the needful cause of all men. They have talents for contention, and they nourish a small difference into a loud quarrel. But the world is wide, nobody will go there after to-morrow. The gun they have pointed can defend nothing but itself, nor itself any longer than the man is by. What is the use of artificial positions? But Genius has no taste for weaving sand, or for any trifling, but flings itself on real elemental things, which are powers, self-defensive; which first subsist, and then resist unweariably forevermore all that opposes. Genius has truth and clings to it, so that what it says and does is not in a by-road, visited only by curiosity, but on the great highways of nature, which were before the Appian Way, and which all souls must travel. Genius delights only in statements which are themselves true, which attack and wound any who opposes them, whether he who brought them here remains here or not; — which are live men, and do daily declare fresh war against all falsehood and custom, and will not let an offender go; which society cannot dispose of or forget, but which abide there and will not down at anybody’s bidding, but stand frowning and formidable, and will and must be finally obeyed and done.

The scholar must be ready for bad weather, poverty, insult, weariness, repute of failure, and many vexations. He must have a great patience, and ride at anchor and vanquish every enemy whom his small arms cannot reach, by the grand resistance of submission, of ceasing to do. He is to know that in the last resort he is not here to work, but to be worked upon. He is to eat insult, drink insult, be clothed and shod in insult until he has learned that this bitter bread and shameful dress is also wholesome and warm, is in short indifferent; is of the same chemistry as praise and fat living; that they also are disgrace and soreness to him who has them. I think much may be said to discourage and dissuade the young scholar from his career. Freely be that said. Dissuade all you can from the lists. Sift the wheat, frighten away the lighter souls. Let us keep only the heavy-armed. Let those come who cannot but come, and who see that there is no choice here, no advantage and no disadvantage compared with other careers. For the great Necessity is our patron, who distributes sun and shade after immutable laws.

Yes, he has his dark days, he has weakness, he has waitings, he has bad company, he is pelted by storms of cares, untuning cares, untuning company. Well, let him meet them. He has not consented to the frivolity, nor to the dispersion. The practical aim is forever higher than the literary aim. He shall not submit to degradation, but shall bear these crosses with what grace he can. He is still to decline how many glittering opportunities, and to retreat, and wait. So shall you find in this penury and absence of thought a purer splendor than ever clothed the exhibitions of wit. I invite you not to cheap joys, to the flutter of gratified vanity, to a sleek and rosy comfort; no, but to bareness, to power, to enthusiasm, to the mountain of vision, to true and natural supremacy, to the society of the great, and to love. Give me bareness and poverty so that I know them as the sure heralds of the Muse. Not in plenty, not in a thriving, well-to-do condition, she delighteth. He that would sacrifice at her altar must not leave a few flowers, an apple, or some symbolic gift. No; he must relinquish orchards and gardens, prosperity and convenience; he may live on a heath without trees; sometimes hungry, and sometimes rheumatic with cold. The fire retreats and concentrates within into a pure flame, pure as the stars to which it mounts.

But, gentlemen, there is plainly no end to these expansions. I have exhausted your patience, and I have only begun. I had perhaps wiselier adhered to my first purpose of confining my illustration to a single topic, but it is so much easier to say many things than to explain one. Well, you will see the drift of all my thoughts, this namely — that the scholar must be much more than a scholar, that his ends give value to every means, but he is to subdue and keep down his methods; that his use of books is occasional, and infinitely subordinate; that he should read a little proudly, as one who knows the original, and cannot therefore very highly value the copy. In like manner he is to hold lightly every tradition, every opinion, every person, out of his piety to that Eternal Spirit which dwells unexpressed with him. He shall think very highly of his destiny. He is here to know the secret of Genius; to become, not a reader of poetry, but Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakspeare, Swedenborg, in the fountain, through that. If one man could impart his faith to another, if I could prevail to communicate the incommunicable mysteries, you should see the breadth of your realm; — that ever as you ascend your proper and native path, you receive the keys of Nature and history, and rise on the same stairs to science and to joy.

PLUTARCH.

The soul

Shall have society of its own rank:

Be great, be true, and all the Scipios,

The Catos, the wise patriots of Rome,

Shall flock to you and tarry by your side

And comfort you with their high company.

For Joy and Beauty planted it

With faerie gardens cheered,

And boding Fancy haunted it

With men and women weird.

[This paper was originally printed as an introduction to Plutarch’s Morals, edited by Professor William W. Goodwin, and published, in 1871, by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co, through whose courtesy it is included in this edition.]

It is remarkable that of an author so familiar as Plutarch, not only to scholars, but to all reading men, and whose history is so easily gathered from his works, no accurate memoir of his life, not even the dates of his birth and death, should have come down to us. Strange that the writer of so many illustrious biographies should wait so long for his own. It is agreed that he was born about the year 50 of the Christian era. He has been represented as having been the tutor of the Emperor Trajan, as dedicating one of his books to him, as living long in Rome in great esteem, as having received from Trajan the consular dignity, and as having been appointed by him the governor of Greece. He was a man whose real superiority had no need of these flatteries. Meantime, the simple truth is, that he was not the tutor of Trajan, that he dedicated no book to him, was not consul in Rome, nor governor of Greece; appears never to have been in Rome but on two occasions, and then on business of the people of his native city, Chœronea; and though he found or made friends at Rome, and read lectures to some friends or scholars, he did not know or learn the Latin language there; with one or two doubtful exceptions, never quotes a Latin book; and though the contemporary, in his youth or in his old age, of Persius, Juvenal, Lucan and Seneca, of Quintilian, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder and the Younger, he does not cite them, and, in return, his name is never mentioned by any Roman writer. It would seem that the community of letters and of personal news was even more rare at that day than the want of printing, of railroads and telegraphs, would suggest to us.

But this neglect by his contemporaries has been compensated by an immense popularity in modern nations. Whilst his books were never known to the world in their own Greek tongue, it is curious that the “Lives” were translated and printed in Latin, thence into Italian, French, and English, more than a century before the original “Works” were yet printed. For whilst the “Lives” were translated in Rome in 1470, and the “Morals,” part by part, soon after, the first printed edition of the Greek “Works” did not appear until 1572. Hardly current in his own Greek, these found learned interpreters in the scholars of Germany, Spain and Italy. In France, in the middle of the most turbulent civil wars, Amyot’s translation awakened general attention. His genial version of the “Lives” in 1559, of the “Morals” in 1572, had signal success. King Henry IV. wrote to his wife, Marie de Medicis: “ Vive Dieu. As God liveth, you could not have sent me anything which could be more agreeable than the news of the pleasure you have taken in this reading. Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs.” Still earlier, Rabelais cites him with due respect. Montaigne, in 1589, says: “We dunces had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the dirt. By this favor of his we dare now speak and write. The ladies are able to read to schoolmasters. ’Tis our breviary.” Montesquieu drew from him his definition of law, and, in his Pensées, declares, “I am always charmed with Plutarch; in his writings are circumstances attached to persons, which give great pleasure;” and adds examples. Saint Evremond read Plutarch to the great Condé under a tent. Rollin, so long the historian of antiquity for France, drew unhesitatingly his history from him. Voltaire honored him, and Rousseau acknowledged him as his master. In England, Sir Thomas North translated the “Lives” in 1579, and Holland the “Morals” in 1603, in time to be used by Shakspeare in his plays, and read by Bacon, Dryden, and Cudworth.

Then, recently, there has been a remarkable revival, in France, in the taste for Plutarch and his contemporaries; led, we may say, by the eminent critic Sainte-Beuve. M. Octave Gréard, in a critical work on the “Morals,” has carefully corrected the popular legends and constructed from the works of Plutarch himself his true biography. M. Levéque has given an exposition of his moral philosophy, under the title of “A Physician of the Soul,” in the Revue des Deux Mondes; and M. C. Martha, chapters on the genius of Marcus Aurelius, of Persius, and Lucretius, in the same journal; whilst M. Fustel de Coulanges has explored from its roots in the Aryan race, then in their Greek and Roman descendants, the primeval religion of the household.

Plutarch occupies a unique place in literature as an encyclopœdia of Greek and Roman antiquity. Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science — natural, moral, or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings, drew his attention and came to his pen with more or less fulness of record. He is, among prose writers, what Chaucer is among English poets, a rep ertory for those who want the story without search ing for it at first hand, — a compend of all accepted traditions. And all this without any supreme in tellectual gifts. He is not a profound mind; not a master in any science; not a lawgiver, like Lycurgus or Solon; not a metaphysician, like Parmenides, Plato, or Aristotle; not the founder of any sect or community, like Pythagoras or Zeno; not a naturalist, like Pliny or Linnœus; not a leader of the mind of a generation, like Plato or Goethe. But if he had not the highest powers, he was yet a man of rare gifts. He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by the force of morals. Though the most amiable of boon-companions, this generous religion gives him aperçus like Goethe’s.

Plutarch was well-born, well-taught, well-conditioned; a self-respecting, amiable man, who knew how to better a good education by travels, by devotion to affairs private and public; a master of ancient culture, he read books with a just criticism; eminently social, he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and knew the high value of good conversation; and declares in a letter written to his wife that “he finds scarcely an erasure, as in a book well-written, in the happiness of his life.”

The range of mind makes the glad writer. The reason of Plutarch’s vast popularity is his humanity. A man of society, of affairs; upright, practical; a good son, husband, father, and friend, — he has a taste for common life, and knows the court, the camp and the judgment-hall, but also the forge, farm, kitchen and cellar, and every utensil and use, and with a wise man’s or a poet’s eye. Thought defends him from any degradation. He does not lose his way, for the attractions are from within, not from without. A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception. Plutarch’s memory is full, and his horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his; he is tolerant even of vice, if he finds it genial; enough a man of the world to give even the Devil his due, and would have hugged Robert Burns, when he cried: —

“O wad ye tak’ a thought and mend!”

He is a philosopher with philosophers, a naturalist with naturalists, and sufficiently a mathematician to leave some of his readers, now and then, at a long distance behind him, or respectfully skipping to the next chapter. But this scholastic omniscience of our author engages a new respect, since they hope he understands his own diagram.

He perpetually suggests Montaigne, who was the best reader he has ever found, though Montaigne excelled his master in the point and surprise of his sentences. Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain-spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure. What better praise has any writer received than he whom Montaigne finds “frank in giving things, not words,” dryly adding, “it vexes me that he is so exposed to the spoil of those that are conversant with him.” It is one of the felicities of literary history, the tie which inseparably couples these two names across fourteen centuries. Montaigne, whilst he grasps Ætienne de la Boèce with one hand, reaches back the other to Plutarch. These distant friendships charm us, and honor all the parties, and make the best example of the universal citizenship and fraternity of the human mind.

I do not know where to find a book — to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s— “so rammed with life,” and this in chapters chiefly ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental. No poet could illustrate his thought with more novel or striking similes or happier anecdotes. His style is realistic, picturesque and varied; his sharp objective eyes seeing everything that moves, shines, or threatens in nature or art, or thought or dreams. Indeed, twilights, shadows, omens and spectres have a charm for him. He believes in witchcraft and the evil eye, in demons and ghosts, — but prefers, if you please, to talk of these in the morning. His vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an incident. I admire his rapid and crowded style, as if he had such store of anecdotes of his heroes that he is forced to suppress more than he recounts, in order to keep up with the hasting history.

His surprising merit is the genial facility with which he deals with his manifold topics. There is no trace of labor or pain. He gossips of heroes, philosophers and poets; of virtues and genius; of love and fate and empires. It is for his pleasure that he recites all that is best in his reading: he prattles history. But he is no courtier, and no Boswell: he is ever manly, far from fawning, and would be welcome to the sages and warriors he reports, as one having a native right to admire and recount these stirring deeds and speeches. I find him a better teacher of rhetoric than any modern. His superstitions are poetic, aspiring, affirmative. A poet might rhyme all day with hints drawn from Plutarch, page on page. No doubt, this superior suggestion for the modern reader owes much to the foreign air, the Greek wine, the religion and history of antique heroes. Thebes, Sparta, Athens and Rome charm us away from the disgust of the passing hour. But his own cheerfulness and rude health are also magnetic. In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all. ‘T is all Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this emperor. This facility and abundance make the joy of his narrative, and he is read to the neglect of more careful historians. Yet he inspires a curiosity, sometimes makes a necessity, to read them. He disowns any attempt to rival Thucydides; but I suppose he has a hundred readers where Thucydides finds one, and Thucydides must often thank Plutarch for that one. He has preserved for us a multitude of precious sentences, in prose or verse, of authors whose books are lost; and these embalmed fragments, through his loving selection alone, have come to be proverbs of later mankind. I hope it is only my immense ignorance that makes me believe that they do not survive out of his pages, — not only Thespis, Polemos, Euphorion, Ariston, Evenus, etc., but fragments of Menander and Pindar. At all events, it is in reading the fragments he has saved from lost authors that I have hailed another example of the sacred care which has unrolled in our times, and still searches and unrolls papyri from ruined libraries and buried cities, and has drawn attention to what an ancient might call the politeness of Fate, — we will say, more advisedly, the benign Providence which uses the violence of war, of earthquakes and changed water-courses, to save underground through barbarous ages the relics of ancient art, and thus allows us to witness the upturning of the alphabets of old races, and the deciphering of forgotten languages, so to complete the annals of the forefathers of Asia, Africa and Europe.

His delight in poetry makes him cite with joy the speech of Gorgias, “that the tragic poet who deceived was juster than he who deceived not, and he that was deceived was wiser than he who was not deceived.”

It is a consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity for completing his studies. Many examples might be cited of nervous expression and happy allusion, that indicate a poet and an orator, though he is not ambitious of these titles, and cleaves to the security of prose narrative, and only shows his intellectual sympathy with these; yet I cannot forbear to cite one or two sentences which none who reads them will forget. In treating of the style of the Pythian Oracle, he says: —

“Do you not observe, some one will say, what a grace there is in Sappho’s measures, and how they delight and tickle the ears and fancies of the hearers? Whereas the Sibyl, with her frantic grimaces, uttering sentences altogether thoughtful and serious, neither fucused nor perfumed, continues her voice a thousand years through the favor of the Divinity that speaks within her.”

Another gives an insight into his mystic tendencies: —

“Early this morning, asking Epaminondas about the manner of Lysis’s burial, I found that Lysis had taught him as far as the incommunicable mysteries of our sect, and that the same Dœmon that waited on Lysis, presided over him, if I can guess at the pilot from the sailing of the ship. The paths of life are large, but in few are men directed by the Dœmons. When Theanor had said this, he looked attentively on Epaminondas, as if he designed a fresh search into his nature and inclinations.”

And here is his sentiment on superstition, some what condensed in Lord Bacon’s citation of it: “I had rather a great deal that men should say, There was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say that there was one Plutarch that would eat up his children as soon as they were born, as the poets speak of Saturn.”

The chapter “On Fortune” should be read by poets, and other wise men; and the vigor of his pen appears in the chapter “Whether the Athenians were more Warlike or Learned,” and in his attack upon Usurers.

There is, of course, a wide difference of time in the writing of these discourses, and so in their merit. Many of them are mere sketches or notes for chapters in preparation, which were never digested or finished. Many are notes for disputations in the lecture-room. His poor indignation against Herodotus was perhaps a youthful prize essay: it appeared to me captious and labored; or perhaps, at a rhetorician’s school, the subject of Herodotus being the lesson of the day, Plutarch was appointed by lot to take the adverse side.

The plain-speaking of Plutarch, as of the ancient writers generally, coming from the habit of writing for one sex only, has a great gain for brevity, and, in our new tendencies of civilization, may tend to correct a false delicacy.

We are always interested in the man who treats the intellect well. We expect it from the philosopher, — from Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant; but we know that metaphysical studies in any but minds of large horizon and incessant inspiration have their dangers. One asks sometimes whether a metaphysician can treat the intellect well. The central fact is the superhuman intelligence, pouring into us from its unknown fountain, to be received with religious awe, and defended from any mixture of our will. But this high Muse comes and goes; and the danger is that, when the Muse is wanting, the student is prone to supply its place with microscopic subtleties and logomachy. It is fatal to spiritual health to lose your admiration. “Let others wrangle,” said St. Augustine; “I will wonder.” Plato and Plotinus are enthusiasts, who honor the race; but the logic of the sophists and materialists, whether Greek or French, fills us with disgust. Whilst we expect this awe and reverence of the spiritual power from the philosopher in his closet, we praise it in the man of the world; — the man who lives on quiet terms with existing institutions, yet indicates his perception of these high oracles; as do Plutarch, Montaigne, Hume and Goethe. These men lift themselves at once from the vulgar and are not the parasites of wealth. Perhaps they sometimes compromise, go out to dine, make and take compliments; but they keep open the source of wisdom and health. Plutarch is uniformly true to this centre. He had not lost his wonder. He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like another Berkeley, “Matter is itself privation;” and again, “The Sun is the cause that all men are ignorant of Apollo, by sense withdrawing the rational intellect from that which is to that which appears.” He thinks that “souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction;” he delights in memory, with its miraculous power of resisting time. He thinks that “Alexander invaded Persia with greater assistance from Aristotle than from his father Philip.” He thinks that “he who has ideas of his own is a bad judge of another man’s, it being true that the Eleans would be the most proper judges of the Olympic games, were no Eleans gamesters.” He says of Socrates, that he endeavored to bring reason and things together, and make truth consist with sober sense. He wonders with Plato at that nail of pain and pleasure which fastens the body to the mind. The mathematics give him unspeakable pleasure, but he chiefly liked that proportion which teaches us to account that which is just, equal; and not that which is equal, just.

Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato, than as a disputant; and, true to his practical character, he wishes the philosopher not to hide in a corner, but to commend himself to men of public regards and ruling genius: “for, if he once possess such a man with principles of honor and religion, he takes a compendious method, by doing good to one, to oblige a great part of mankind.” ‘T is a temperance, not an eclecticism, which makes him adverse to the severe Stoic, or the Gymnosophist, or Diogenes, or any other extremist. That vice of theirs shall not hinder him from citing any good word they chance to drop. He is an eclectic in such sense as Montaigne was, — willing to be an expectant, not a dogmatist.

In many of these chapters it is easy to infer the relation between the Greek philosophers and those who came to them for instruction. This teaching was no play nor routine, but strict, sincere and affectionate. The part of each of the class is as important as that of the master. They are like the base-ball players, to whom the pitcher, the bat, the catcher and the scout are equally important. And Plutarch thought, with Ariston, “that neither a bath nor a lecture served any purpose, unless they were purgative.” Plutarch has such a keen pleasure in realities that he has none in verbal disputes; he is impatient of sophistry, and despises the Epicharmian disputations: as, that he who ran in debt yesterday owes nothing to-day, as being another man; so, he that was yesterday invited to supper, the next night comes an unbidden guest, for that he is quite another person.

Except as historical curiosities, little can be said in behalf of the scientific value of the “Opinions of the Philosophers,” the “Questions” and the “Symposiacs.” They are, for the most part, very crude opinions; many of them so puerile that one would believe that Plutarch in his haste adopted the notes of his younger auditors, some of them jocosely misreporting the dogma of the professor, who laid them aside as memoranda for future revision, which he never gave, and they were posthumously published. Now and then there are hints of superior science. You may cull from this record of barbarous guesses of shepherds and travellers, statements that are predictions of facts established in modern science. Usually, when Thales, Anaximenes or An-aximander are quoted, it is really a good judgment. The explanation of the rainbow, of the floods of the Nile, and of the remora, etc., are just; and the bad guesses are not worse than many of Lord Bacon’s.

His Natural History is that of a lover and poet, and not of a physicist. His humanity stooped affectionately to trace the virtues which he loved in the animals also. “Knowing and not knowing is the affirmative or negative of the dog; knowing you is to be your friend; not knowing you, your enemy.” He quotes Thucydides’ saying that “not the desire of honor only never grows old, but much less also the inclination to society and affection to the State, which continue even in ants and bees to the very last.”

But, though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. La Harpe said that “Plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever existed.”

‘T is almost inevitable to compare Plutarch with Seneca, who, born fifty years earlier, was for many years his contemporary, though they never met, and their writings were perhaps unknown to each other. Plutarch is genial, with an endless interest in all human and divine things; Seneca, a professional philosopher, a writer of sentences, and, though he keep a sublime path, is less interesting, because less humane; and when we have shut his book, we forget to open it again. There is a certain violence in his opinions, and want of sweetness. He lacks the sympathy of Plutarch. He is tiresome through perpetual didactics. He is not happily living. Cannot the simple lover of truth enjoy the virtues of those he meets, and the virtues suggested by them, so to find himself at some time purely contented? Seneca was still more a man of the world than Plutarch; and, by his conversation with the Court of Nero, and his own skill, like Voltaire’s, of living with men of business and emulating their address in affairs by great accumulation of his own property, learned to temper his philosophy with facts. He ventured far, — apparently too far, — for so keen a conscience as he inly had. Yet we owe to that wonderful moralist illustrious maxims; as if the scarlet vices of the times of Nero had the natural effect of driving virtue to its loftiest antagonisms. “Seneca,” says L’Estrange, “was a pagan Christian, and is very good reading for our Christian pagans.” He was Buddhist in his cold abstract virtue, with a certain impassibility beyond humanity. He called pity, “that fault of narrow souls.” Yet what noble words we owe to him: “God divided man into men, that they might help each other;” and again, “The good man differs from God in nothing but duration.” His thoughts are excellent, if only he had the right to say them. Plutarch, meantime, with every virtue under heaven, thought it the top of wisdom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and to reach in mirth the same ends which the most serious are proposing.

Plutarch thought “truth to be the greatest good that man can receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.” “When you are persuaded in your mind that you cannot either offer or perform anything more agreeable to the gods than the entertaining a right notion of them, you will then avoid superstition as a no less evil than atheism.” He cites Euripides to affirm, “If gods do aught dishonest, they are no gods,” and the memorable words of Antigone, in Sophocles, concerning the moral sentiment: —

“For neither now nor yesterday began

These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can

A man be found who their first entrance knew.”

His faith in the immortality of the soul is another measure of his deep humanity. He reminds his friends that the Delphic oracles have given several answers the same in substance as that formerly given to Corax the Naxian: —

“It sounds profane impiety

To teach that human souls e’er die.”

He believes that the doctrine of the Divine Providence, and that of the immortality of the soul, rest on one and the same basis. He thinks it impossible either that a man beloved of the gods should not be happy, or that a wise and just man should not be beloved of the gods. To him the Epicureans are hateful, who held that the soul perishes when it is separated from the body. “The soul, incapable of death, suffers in the same manner in the body, as birds that are kept in a cage.” He believes “that the souls of infants pass immediately into a better and more divine state.”

I can easily believe that an anxious soul may find in Plutarch’s chapter called “Pleasure not attainable by Epicurus,” and his “Letter to his Wife Timoxena,” a more sweet and reassuring argument on the immortality than in the Phœdo of Plato; for Plutarch always addresses the question on the human side, and not on the metaphysical; as Walter Scott took hold of boys and young men, in England and America, and through them of their fathers. His grand perceptions of duty lead him to his stern delight in heroism; a stoic resistance to low indulgence; to a fight with fortune; a regard for truth; his love of Sparta, and of heroes like Aristides, Phocion and Cato. He insists that the highest good is in action. He thinks that the inhabitants of Asia came to be vassals to one, only for not having been able to pronounce one syllable; which is, No. So keen is his sense of allegiance to right reason, that he makes a fight against Fortune whenever she is named. At Rome he thinks her wings were clipped: she stood no longer on a ball, but on a cube as large as Italy. He thinks it was by superior virtue that Alexander won his battles in Asia and Africa, and the Greeks theirs against Persia.

But this Stoic in his fight with Fortune, with vices, effeminacy and indolence, is gentle as a woman when other strings are touched. He is the most amiable of men. “To erect a trophy in the soul against anger is that which none but a great and victorious puissance is able to achieve.”— “Anger turns the mind out of doors, and bolts the door.” He has a tenderness almost to tears when he writes on “Friendship,” on the “Training of Children,” and on the “Love of Brothers.” “There is no treasure,” he says, “parents can give to their children, like a brother; ’tis a friend given by nature, a gift nothing can supply; once lost, not to be replaced. The Arcadian prophet, of whom Herodotus speaks, was obliged to make a wooden foot in place of that which had been chopped off. A brother, embroiled with his brother, going to seek in the street a stranger who can take his place, resembles him who will cut off his foot to give himself one of wood.”

All his judgments are noble. He thought, with Epicurus, that it is more delightful to do than to receive a kindness. “This courteous, gentle, and benign disposition and behavior is not so acceptable, so obliging or delightful to any of those with whom we converse, as it is to those who have it.” There is really no limit to his bounty: “It would be generous to lend our eyes and ears, nay, if possible, our reason and fortitude to others, whilst we are idle or asleep.” His excessive and fanciful humanity reminds one of Charles Lamb, whilst it much exceeds him. When the guests are gone, he “would leave one lamp burning, only as a sign of the respect he bore to fires, for nothing so resembles an animal as fire. It is moved and nourished by itself, and by its brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes everything apparent, and in its quenching shows some power that seems to proceed from a vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists, like an animal dying, or violently slaughtered;” and he praises the Romans, who, when the feast was over, “dealt well with the lamps, and did not take away the nourishment they had given, but permitted them to live and shine by it.”

I can almost regret that the learned editor of the present republication has not preserved, if only as a piece of history, the preface of Mr. Morgan, the editor and in part writer of this Translation of 1718. In his dedication of the work to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Wm. Wake, he tells the Primate that “Plutarch was the wisest man of his age, and, if he had been a Christian, one of the best too; but it was his severe fate to flourish in those days of ignorance, which, ‘t is a favorable opinion to hope that the Almighty will sometime wink at; that our souls may be with these philosophers together in the same state of bliss.” The puzzle in the worthy translator’s mind between his theology and his reason well reappears in the puzzle of his sentence.

I know that the chapter of “Apothegms of Noble Commanders” is rejected by some critics as not a genuine work of Plutarch; but the matter is good, and is so agreeable to his taste and genius, that if he had found it, he would have adopted it. If he did not compile the piece, many, perhaps most of the anecdotes were already scattered in his works. If I do not lament that a work not his should be ascribed to him, I regret that he should have suffered such destruction of his own. What a trilogy is lost to mankind in his Lives of Scipio, Epaminondas, and Pindar!

His delight in magnanimity and self-sacrifice has made his books, like Homer’s Iliad, a bible for heroes; and wherever the Cid is relished, the legends of Arthur, Saxon Alfred and Richard the Lion-hearted, Robert Bruce, Sydney, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Cromwell, Nelson, Bonaparte, and Walter Scott’s Chronicles in prose or verse, — there will Plutarch, who told the story of Leonidas, of Agesilaus, of Aristides, Phocion, Themistocles, Demosthenes, Epaminondas, Cœsar, Cato and the rest, sit as the bestower of the crown of noble knighthood, and laureate of the ancient world.

The chapters “On the Fortune of Alexander,” in the “Morals,” are an important appendix to the portrait in the “Lives.” The union in Alexander of sublime courage with the refinement of his pure tastes, making him the carrier of civilization into the East, are in the spirit of the ideal hero, and endeared him to Plutarch. That prince kept Homer’s poems not only for himself under his pillow in his tent, but carried these for the delight of the Persian youth, and made them acquainted also with the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles. He persuaded the Sogdians not to kill, but to cherish their aged parents; the Persians to reverence, not marry their mothers; the Scythians to bury and not eat their dead parents. What a fruit and fitting monument of his best days was his city Alexandria, to be the birthplace or home of Plotinus, St. Augustine, Synesius, Posidonius, Ammonius, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Origen, Aratus, Apollonius and Apuleius.

If Plutarch delighted in heroes, and held the balance between the severe Stoic and the indulgent Epicurean, his humanity shines not less in his intercourse tercourse with his personal friends. He was a genial host and guest, and delighted in bringing chosen companions to the supper-table. He knew the laws of conversation and the laws of good-fellowship quite as well as Horace, and has set them down with such candor and grace as to make them good reading to-day. The guests not invited to a private board by the entertainer, but introduced by a guest as his companions, the Greek called shadows; and the question is debated whether it was civil to bring them, and he treats it candidly, but concludes: “Therefore, when I make an invitation, since it is hard to break the custom of the place, I give my guests leave to bring shadows; but when I myself am invited as a shadow, I assure you I refuse to go.” He has an objection to the introduction of music at feasts. He thought it wonderful that a man having a muse in his own breast, and all the pleasantness that would fit an entertainment, would have pipes and harps play, and by that external noise destroy all the sweetness that was proper and his own.

I cannot close these notes without expressing my sense of the valuable service which the Editor has rendered to his Author and to his readers. Professor Goodwin is a silent benefactor to the book, wherever I have compared the editions. I did not know how careless and vicious in parts the old book was, until, in recent reading of the old text, on coming on anything absurd or unintelligible, I referred to the new text and found a clear and accurate statement in its place. It is the vindication of Plutarch. The correction is not only of names of authors and of places grossly altered or misspelled, but of unpardonable liberties taken by the translators, whether from negligence or freak.

One proof of Plutarch’s skill as a writer is that he bears translation so well. In spite of its carelessness and manifold faults, which, I doubt not, have tried the patience of its present learned editor and corrector, I yet confess my enjoyment of this old version, for its vigorous English style. The work of some forty or fifty University men, some of them imperfect in their Greek, it is a monument of the English language at a period of singular vigor and freedom of style. I hope the Commission of the Philological Society in London, charged with the duty of preparing a Critical Dictionary, will not overlook these volumes, which show the wealth of their tongue to greater advantage than many books of more renown as models. It runs through the whole scale of conversation in the street, the market, the coffee-house, the law courts, the palace, the college and the church. There are, no doubt, many vulgar phrases, and many blunders of the printer; but it is the speech of business and conversation, and in every tone, from lowest to highest.

We owe to these translators many sharp perceptions of the wit and humor of their author, sometimes even to the adding of the point. I notice one, which, although the translator has justified his rendering in a note, the severer criticism of the Editor has not retained. “Were there not a sun, we might, for all the other stars, pass our days in the Reverend Dark, as Heraclitus calls it.” I find a humor in the phrase which might well excuse its doubtful accuracy.

It is a service to our Republic to publish a book that can force ambitious young men, before they mount the platform of the county conventions, to read the “Laconic Apothegms” and the “Apothegms of Great Commanders.” If we could keep the secret, and communicate it only to a few chosen aspirants, we might confide that, by this noble infiltration, they would easily carry the victory over all competitors. But, as it was the desire of these old patriots to fill with their majestic spirit all Sparta or Rome, and not a few leaders only, we hasten to offer them to the American people.

Plutarch’s popularity will return in rapid cycles. If over-read in this decade, so that his anecdotes and opinions become commonplace, and to-day’s novelties are sought for variety, his sterling values will presently recall the eye and thought of the best minds, and his books will be reprinted and read anew by coming generations. And thus Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

“Of old things all are over old,

Of good things none are good enough; —

We’ll show that we can help to frame

A world of other stuff.”

The ancient manners were giving way. There grew a certain tenderness on the people, not before remarked. Children had been repressed and kept in the background; now they were considered, cosseted and pampered. I recall the remark of a witty physician who remembered the hardships of his own youth; he said, “It was a misfortune to have been born when children were nothing, and to live till men were nothing.”

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement. At times the resistance is reanimated, the schism runs under the world and appears in Literature, Philosophy, Church, State, and social customs. It is not easy to date these eras of activity with any precision, but in this region one made itself remarked, say in 1820 and the twenty years following.

It seemed a war between intellect and affection; a crack in nature, which split every church in Christendom into Papal and Protestant; Calvinism into Old and New schools; Quakerism into Old and New; brought new divisions in politics; as the new conscience touching temperance and slavery. The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness. The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.

This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation, of freedom, of analysis, of detachment. Every man for himself. The public speaker disclaims speaking for any other; he answers only for himself. The social sentiments are weak; the sentiment of patriotism is weak; veneration is low; the natural affections feebler than they were. People grow philosophical about native land and parents and relations. There is an universal resistance to ties and ligaments once supposed essential to civil society. The new race is stiff, heady and rebellious; they are fanatics in freedom; they hate tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, governors, yea, almost laws. They have a neck of unspeakable tenderness; it winces at a hair. They rebel against theological as against political dogmas; against mediation, or saints, or any nobility in the unseen.

The age tends to solitude. The association of the time is accidental and momentary and hypocritical, the detachment intrinsic and progressive. The association is for power, merely, — for means; the end being the enlargement and independency of the individual. Anciently, society was in the course of things. There was a Sacred Band, a Theban Phalanx. There can be none now. College classes, military corps, or trades-unions may fancy themselves indissoluble for a moment, over their wine; but it is a painted hoop, and has no girth. The age of arithmetic and of criticism has set in. The structures of old faith in every department of society a few centuries have sufficed to destroy. Astrology, magic, palmistry, are long gone. The very last ghost is laid. Demonology is on its last legs. Prerogative, government, goes to pieces day by day. Europe is strewn with wrecks; a constitution once a week. In social manners and morals the revolution is just as evident. In the law courts, crimes of fraud have taken the place of crimes of force. The stockholder has stepped into the place of the warlike baron. The nobles shall not any longer, as feudal lords, have power of life and death over the churls, but now, in another shape, as capitalists, shall in all love and peace eat them up as before. Nay, government itself becomes the resort of those whom government was invented to restrain. “Are there any brigands on the road?” inquired the traveller in France. “Oh, no, set your heart at rest on that point,” said the landlord; “what should these fellows keep the highway for, when they can rob just as effectually, and much more at their ease, in the bureaus of office?”

In literature the effect appeared in the decided tendency of criticism. The most remarkable literary work of the age has for its hero and subject precisely this introversion: I mean the poem of Faust. In philosophy, Immanuel Kant has made the best catalogue of the human faculties and the best analysis of the mind. Hegel also, especially. In science the French savant, exact, pitiless, with barometer, crucible, chemic test and calculus in hand, travels into all nooks and islands, to weigh, to analyze and report. And chemistry, which is the analysis of matter, has taught us that we eat gas, drink gas, tread on gas, and are gas. The same decomposition has changed the whole face of physics; the like in all arts, modes. Authority falls, in Church, College, Courts of Law, Faculties, Medicine. Experiment is credible; antiquity is grown ridiculous.

It marked itself by a certain predominance of the intellect in the balance of powers. The warm swart Earth-spirit which made the strength of past ages, mightier than it knew, with instincts instead of science, like a mother yielding food from her own breast instead of preparing it through chemic and culinary skill, — warm negro ages of sentiment and vegetation, — all gone; another hour had struck and other forms arose. Instead of the social existence which all shared, was now separation. Every one for himself; driven to find all his resources, hopes, rewards, society and deity within himself.

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives. The popular religion of our fathers had received many severe shocks from the new times; from the Arminians, which was the current name of the backsliders from Calvinism, sixty years ago; then from the English philosophic theologians, Hartley and Priestley and Belsham, the followers of Locke; and then I should say much later from the slow but extraordinary influence of Swedenborg; a man of prodigious mind, though as I think tainted with a certain suspicion of insanity, and therefore generally disowned, but exerting a singular power over an important intellectual class; then the powerful influence of the genius and character of Dr. Channing.

Germany had created criticism in vain for us until 1820, when Edward Everett returned from his five years in Europe, and brought to Cambridge his rich results, which no one was so fitted by natural grace and the splendor of his rhetoric to introduce and recommend. He made us for the first time acquainted with Wolff’s theory of the Homeric writings, with the criticism of Heyne. The novelty of the learning lost nothing in the skill and genius of his relation, and the rudest undergraduate found a new morning opened to him in the lectureroom of Harvard Hall.

There was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. He had an inspiration which did not go beyond his head, but which made him the master of elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form needed; sculptured lips; a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England. He had a great talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity on the topic of the moment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever, a fact had always just transpired which composed, with some other fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and happy coincidence. It was remarked that for a man who threw out so many facts he was seldom convicted of a blunder. He had a good deal of special learning, and all his learning was available for purposes of the hour. It was all new learning, that wonderfully took and stimulated the young men. It was so coldly and weightily communicated from so commanding a platform, as if in the consciousness and consideration of all history and all learning, — adorned with so many simple and austere beauties of expression, and enriched with so many excellent digressions and significant quotations, that, though nothing could be conceived beforehand less attractive or indeed less fit for green boys from Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with their unripe Latin and Greek reading, than exegetical discourses in the style of Voss and Wolff and Ruhnken, on the Orphic and Ante-Homeric remains, — yet this learning instantly took the highest place to our imagination in our unoccupied American Parnassus. All his auditors felt the extreme beauty and dignity of the manner, and even the coarsest were contented to go punctually to listen, for the manner, when they had found out that the subject-matter was not for them. In the lecture-room, he abstained from all ornament, and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudition in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he was then a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his auditor for the self-denial of the professor’s chair, and, with an infantine simplicity still, of manner, he gave the reins to his florid, quaint and affluent fancy.

Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which we have never seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful how memorable were words made which were only pleasing pictures, and covered no new or valid thoughts. He abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splendid allusion, in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his own wit and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical words; — feats which no man could better accomplish, such was his self-command and the security of his manner. All his speech was music, and with such variety and invention that the ear was never tired. Especially beautiful were his poetic quotations. He delighted in quoting Milton, and with such sweet modulation that he seemed to give as much beauty as he borrowed; and whatever he has quoted will be remembered by any who heard him, with inseparable association with his voice and genius. He had nothing in common with vulgarity and infirmity, but, speaking, walking, sitting, was as much aloof and uncommon as a star. The smallest anecdote of his behavior or conversation was eagerly caught and repeated, and every young scholar could recite brilliant sentences from his sermons, with mimicry, good or bad, of his voice. This influence went much farther, for he who was heard with such throbbing hearts and sparkling eyes in the lighted and crowded churches, did not let go his hearers when the church was dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent form followed the boy home to his bed-chamber; and not a sentence was written in academic exercises, not a declamation attempted in the college chapel, but showed the omnipresence of his genius to youthful heads. This made every youth his defender, and boys filled their mouths with arguments to prove that the orator had a heart. This was a triumph of Rhetoric. It was not the intellectual or the moral principles which he had to teach. It was not thoughts. When Massachusetts was full of his fame it was not contended that he had thrown any truths into circulation. But his power lay in the magic of form; it was in the graces of manner; in a new perception of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes. There was that finish about this person which is about women, and which distinguishes every piece of genius from the works of talent, — that these last are more or less matured in every degree of completeness according to the time bestowed on them, but works of genius in their first and slightest form are still wholes. In every public discourse there was nothing left for the indulgence of his hearer, no marks of late hours and anxious, unfinished study, but the goddess of grace had breathed on the work a last fragrancy and glitter.

By a series of lectures largely and fashionably attended for two winters in Boston he made a beginning of popular literary and miscellaneous lecturing, which in that region at least had important results. It is acquiring greater importance every day, and becoming a national institution. I am quite certain that this purely literary influence was of the first importance to the American mind.

In the pulpit Dr. Frothingham, an excellent classical and German scholar, had already made us acquainted, if prudently, with the genius of Eich horn’s theologic criticism. And Professor Norton a little later gave form and method to the like studies in the then infant Divinity School. But I think the paramount source of the religious revolution was Modern Science; beginning with Copernicus, who destroyed the pagan fictions of the Church, by showing mankind that the earth on which we live was not the centre of the Universe, around which the sun and stars revolved every day, and thus fitted to be the platform on which the Drama of the Divine Judgment was played before the assembled Angels of Heaven,— “the scaffold of the divine vengeance” Saurin called it, — but a little scrap of a planet, rushing round the sun in our system, which in turn was too minute to be seen at the distance of many stars which we behold. Astronomy taught us our insignificance in Nature; showed that our sacred as our profane history had been written in gross ignorance of the laws, which were far grander than we knew; and compelled a certain extension and uplifting of our views of the Deity and his Providence. This correction of our superstitions was confirmed by the new science of Geology, and the whole train of discoveries in every department. But we presently saw also that the religious nature in man was not affected by these errors in his understanding. The religious sentiment made nothing of bulk or size, or far or near; triumphed over time as well as space; and every lesson of humility, or justice, or charity, which the old ignorant saints had taught him, was still forever true.

Whether from these influences, or whether by a reaction of the general mind against the too formal science, religion and social life of the earlier period, — there was, in the first quarter of our nineteenth century, a certain sharpness of criticism, an eagerness for reform, which showed itself in every quarter. It appeared in the popularity of Lavater’s Physiognomy, now almost forgotten. Gall and Spurzheim’s Phrenology laid a rough hand on the mysteries of animal and spiritual nature, dragging down every sacred secret to a street show. The attempt was coarse and odious to scientific men, but had a certain truth in it; it felt connection where the professors denied it, and was a leading to a truth which had not yet been announced. On the heels of this intruder came Mesmerism, which broke into the inmost shrines, attempted the explanation of miracle and prophecy, as well as of creation. What could be more revolting to the contemplative philosopher! But a certain success attended it, against all expectation. It was human, it was genial, it affirmed unity and connection between remote points, and as such was excellent criticism on the narrow and dead classification of what passed for science; and the joy with which it was greeted was an instinct of the people which no true philosopher would fail to profit by. But while society remained in doubt between the indignation of the old school and the audacity of the new, a higher note sounded. Unexpected aid from high quarters came to iconoclasts. The German poet Goethe revolted against the science of the day, against French and English science, declared war against the great name of Newton, proposed his own new and simple optics: in Botany, his simple theory of metamorphosis; — the eye of a leaf is all; every part of the plant from root to fruit is only a modified leaf, the branch of a tree is nothing but a leaf whose serratures have become twigs. He extended this into anatomy and animal life, and his views were accepted. The revolt became a revolution. Schelling and Oken introduced their ideal natural philosophy, Hegel his metaphysics, and extended it to Civil History.

The result in literature and the general mind was a return to law; in science, in politics, in social life; as distinguished from the profligate manners and politics of earlier times. The age was moral. Every immorality is a departure from nature, and is punished by natural loss and deformity. The popularity of Combe’s Constitution of Man; the humanity which was the aim of all the multitudinous works of Dickens; the tendency even of Punch’s caricature, was all on the side of the people. There was a breath of new air, much vague expectation, a consciousness of power not yet finding its determinate aim.

I attribute much importance to two papers of Dr. Channing, one on Milton and one on Napoleon, which were the first specimens in this country of that large criticism which in England had given power and fame to the Edinburgh Review. They were widely read, and of course immediately fruitful in provoking emulation which lifted the style of Journalism. Dr. Channing, whilst he lived, was the star of the American Church, and we then thought, if we do not still think, that he left no successor in the pulpit. He could never be reported, for his eye and voice could not be printed, and his discourses lose their best in losing them. He was made for the public; his cold temperament made him the most unprofitable private companion; but all America would have been impoverished in wanting him. We could not then spare a single word he uttered in public, not so much as the reading a lesson in Scripture, or a hymn, and it is curious that his printed writings are almost a history of the times; as there was no great public interest, political, literary, or even economical (for he wrote on the Tariff), on which he did not leave some printed record of his brave and thoughtful opinion. A poor little invalid all his life, he is yet one of those men who vindicate the power of the American race to produce greatness.

Dr. Channing took counsel in 1840 with George Ripley, to the point whether it were possible to bring cultivated, thoughtful people together, and make society that deserved the name. He had earlier talked with Dr. John Collins Warren on the like purpose, who admitted the wisdom of the design and undertook to aid him in making the experiment. Dr. Channing repaired to Dr. Warren’s house on the appointed evening, with large thoughts which he wished to open. He found a well-chosen assembly of gentlemen variously distinguished; there was mutual greeting and introduction, and they were chatting agreeably on indifferent matters and drawing gently towards their great expectation, when a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines; and so ended the first attempt to establish œsthetic society in Boston.

Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present. Though I recall the fact, I do not retain any instant consequence of this attempt, or any connection between it and the new zeal of the friends who at that time began to be drawn together by sympathy of studies and of aspiration. Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr. Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others, gradually drew together and from time to time spent an afternoon at each other’s houses in a serious conversation. With them was always one well-known form, a pure idealist, not at all a man of letters, nor of any practical talent, nor a writer of books; a man quite too cold and contemplative for the alliances of friendship, with rare simplicity and grandeur of perception, who read Plato as an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were intellectual, — whilst the men of talent complained of the want of point and precision in this abstract and religious thinker.

These fine conversations, of course, were incomprehensible to some in the company, and they had their revenge in their little joke. One declared that “It seemed to him like going to heaven in a swing;” another reported that, at a knotty point in the discourse, a sympathizing Englishman with a squeaking voice interrupted with the question, “Mr. Alcott, a lady near me desires to inquire whether omnipotence abnegates attribute?”

I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston that there was some concert of doctrinaires to establish certain opinions and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or three men or women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Otherwise, their education and reading were not marked, but had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary. I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given nobody knows by whom, or when it was first applied. As these persons became in the common chances of society acquainted with each other, there resulted certainly strong friendships, which of course were exclusive in proportion to their heat: and perhaps those persons who were mutually the best friends were the most private and had no ambition of publishing their letters, diaries, or conversation.

From that time meetings were held for conversation, with very little form, from house to house, of people engaged in studies, fond of books, and watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter it flowed. Nothing could be less formal, yet the intelligence and character and varied ability of the company gave it some notoriety and perhaps waked curiosity as to its aims and results.

Nothing more serious came of it than the modest quarterly journal called “The Dial” which, under the editorship of Margaret Fuller, and later of some other, enjoyed its obscurity for four years. All its papers were unpaid contributions, and it was rather a work of friendship among the narrow circle of students than the organ of any party. Perhaps its writers were its chief readers: yet it contained some noble papers by Margaret Fuller, and some numbers had an instant exhausting sale, because of papers by Theodore Parker.

Theodore Parker was our Savonarola, an excellent scholar, in frank and affectionate communication with the best minds of his day, yet the tribune of the people, and the stout Reformer to urge and defend every cause of humanity with and for the humblest of mankind. He was no artist. Highly refined persons might easily miss in him the element of beauty. What he said was mere fact, almost offended you, so bald and detached; little cared he. He stood altogether for practical truth; and so to the last. He used every day and hour of his short life, and his character appeared in the last moments with the same firm control as in the mid day of strength. I habitually apply to him the words of a French philosopher who speaks of “the man of Nature who abominates the steam-engine and the factory. His vast lungs breathe independence with the air of the mountains and the woods.”

The vulgar politician disposed of this circle cheaply as “the sentimental class.” State Street had an instinct that they invalidated contracts and threatened the stability of stocks; and it did not fancy brusque manners. Society always values, even in its teachers, inoffensive people, susceptible of conventional polish. The clergyman who would live in the city may have piety, but must have taste, whilst there was often coming, among these, some John the Baptist, wild from the woods, rude, hairy, careless of dress and quite scornful of the etiquette of cities. There was a pilgrim in those days walking in the country who stopped at every door where he hoped to find hearing for his doctrine, which was, Never to give or receive money. He was a poor printer, and explained with simple warmth the belief of himself and five or six young men with whom he agreed in opinion, of the vast mischief of our insidious coin. He thought every one should labor at some necessary product, and as soon as he had made more than enough for himself, were it corn, or paper, or cloth, or boot-jacks, he should give of the commodity to any applicant, and in turn go to his neighbor for any article which he had to spare. Of course we were curious to know how he sped in his experiments on the neighbor, and his anecdotes were interesting, and often highly creditable. But he had the courage which so stern a return to Arcadian manners required, and had learned to sleep, in cold nights, when the farmer at whose door he knocked declined to give him a bed, on a wagon covered with the buffalo-robe under the shed, — or under the stars, when the farmer denied the shed and the buffalo-robe. I think he persisted for two years in his brave practice, but did not enlarge his church of believers.

These reformers were a new class. Instead of the fiery souls of the Puritans, bent on hanging the Quaker, burning the witch and banishing the Romanist, these were gentle souls, with peaceful and even with genial dispositions, casting sheep’s-eyes even on Fourier and his houris. It was a time when the air was full of reform. Robert Owen of Lanark came hither from England in 1845, and read lectures or held conversations wherever he found listeners; the most amiable, sanguine and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on a right and perfect socialism, or that all mankind would adopt it. He was then seventy years old, and being asked, “Well, Mr. Owen, who is your disciple? How many men are there possessed of your views who will remain after you are gone, to put them in practice?” “Not one,” was his reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that Fourier learned of him all the truth he had; the rest of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. Owen made the best impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his “Three Errors.” His charitable construction of men and their actions was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversy with Christians, and he interpreted with great generosity the acts of the “Holy Alliance,” and Prince Metternich, with whom the persevering doctrinaire had obtained interviews; “Ah,” he said, “you may depend on it there are as tender hearts and as much good will to serve men, in palaces, as in colleges.”

And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they have been urged. They appeared the inspired men of their time. Mr. Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward, with the fidelity and devotion of a saint, to the slow ears of his generation. Fourier, almost as wonderful an example of the mathematical mind of France as La Place or Napoleon, turned a truly vast arithmetic to the question of social misery, and has put men under the obligation which a generous mind always confers, of conceiving magnificent hopes and making great demands as the right of man. He took his measure of that which all should and might enjoy, from no soup-society or charity-concert, but from the refinements of palaces, the wealth of universities, and the triumphs of artists. He thought nobly. A man is entitled to pure air, and to the air of good conversation in his bringing up, and not, as we or so many of us, to the poor-smell and musty chambers, cats and fools. Fourier carried a whole French Revolution in his head, and much more. Here was arithmetic on a huge scale. His ciphering goes where ciphering never went before, namely, into stars, atmospheres, and animals, and men and women, and classes of every character. It was the most entertaining of French romances, and could not but suggest vast possibilities of reform to the coldest and least sanguine.

We had an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and their theory, from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushed his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith and importunacy. As we listened to his exposition it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant’s step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere trifler. It must now set itself to raise the social condition of man and to redress the disorders of the planet he inhabits. The Desert of Sahara, the Campagna di Roma, the frozen Polar circles, which by their pestilential or hot or cold airs poison the temperate regions, accuse man. Society, concert, co-operation, is the secret of the coming Paradise. By reason of the isolation of men at the present day, all work is drudgery. By concert and the allowing each laborer to choose his own work, it becomes pleasure. “Attractive Industry” would speedily subdue, by adventurous scientific and persistent tillage, the pestilential tracts; would equalize temperature, give health to the globe and cause the earth to yield “healthy imponderable fluids” to the solar system, as now it yields noxious fluids. The hyœna, the jackal, the gnat, the bug, the flea, were all beneficent parts of the system; the good Fourier knew what those creatures should have been, had not the mould slipped, through the bad state of the atmosphere; caused no doubt by the same vicious imponderable fluids. All these shall be redressed by human culture, and the useful goat and dog and innocent poetical moth, or the wood-tick to consume decomposing wood, shall take their place. It takes sixteen hundred and eighty men to make one Man, complete in all the faculties; that is, to be sure that you have got a good joiner, a good cook, a barber, a poet, a judge, an umbrella-maker, a mayor and alderman, and so on. Your community should consist of two thousand persons, to prevent accidents of omission; and each community should take up six thousand acres of land. Now fancy the earth planted with fifties and hundreds of these phalanxes side by side, — what tillage, what architecture, what refectories, what dormitories, what reading-rooms, what concerts, what lectures, what gardens, what baths! What is not in one will be in another, and many will be within easy distance. Then know you one and all, that Constantinople is the natural capital of the globe. There, in the Golden Horn, will the Arch-Phalanx be established; there will the Omniarch reside. Aladdin and his magician, or the beautiful Scheherezade can alone, in these prosaic times before the sight, describe the material splendors collected there. Poverty shall be abolished; deformity, stupidity and crime shall be no more. Genius, grace, art, shall abound, and it is not to be doubted but that in the reign of “Attractive Industry” all men will speak in blank verse.

Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and magnificent pictures. The ability and earnestness of the advocate and his friends, the comprehensiveness of their theory, its apparent directness of proceeding to the end they would secure, the indignation they felt and uttered in the presence of so much social misery, commanded our attention and respect. It contained so much truth, and promised in the attempts that shall be made to realize it so much valuable instruction, that we are engaged to observe every step of its progress. Yet in spite of the assurances of its friends that it was new and widely discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society, we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our feeling was that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas, at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, — but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier’s system is that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is that this particular order and series is to be imposed, by force or preaching and votes, on all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. Could not the conceiver of this design have also believed that a similar model lay in every mind, and that the method of each associate might be trusted, as well as that of his particular Committee and General Office, No. 200 Broadway? Nay, that it would be better to say, Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just, and straightway every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized, and in obedience to his most private being he finds himself, according to his presentiment, though against all sensuous probability, acting in strict concert with all others who followed their private light.

Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims and of such bold and generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.

It argued singular courage, the adoption of Fourier’s system, to even a limited extent, with his books lying before the world only defended by the thin veil of the French language. The Stoic said, Forbear, Fourier said, Indulge. Fourier was of the opinion of St. Evremond; abstinence from pleasure appeared to him a great sin. Fourier was very French indeed. He labored under a misapprehension of the nature of women. The Fourier marriage was a calculation how to secure the greatest amount of kissing that the infirmity of human constitution admitted. It was false and prurient, full of absurd French superstitions about women; ignorant how serious and how moral their nature always is; how chaste is their organization; how lawful a class.

It is the worst of community that it must inevitably transform into charlatans the leaders, by the endeavor continually to meet the expectation and admiration of this eager crowd of men and women seeking they know not what. Unless he have a Cossack roughness of clearing himself of what belongs not, charlatan he must be.

It was easy to see what must be the fate of this fine system in any serious and comprehensive attempt to set it on foot in this country. As soon as our people got wind of the doctrine of Marriage held by this master, it would fall at once into the hands of a lawless crew who would flock in troops to so fair a game, and, like the dreams of poetic people on the first outbreak of the old French Revolution, so theirs would disappear in a slime of mire and blood.

There is of course to every theory a tendency to run to an extreme, and to forget the limitations. In our free institutions, where every man is at liberty to choose his home and his trade, and all possible modes of working and gaining are open to him, fortunes are easily made by thousands, as in no other country. Then property proves too much for the man, and the men of science, art, intellect, are pretty sure to degenerate into selfish housekeepers, dependent on wine, coffee, furnace-heat, gas-light and fine furniture. Then instantly things swing the other way, and we suddenly find that civilization crowed too soon; that what we bragged as triumphs were treacheries: that we have opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the castle; that civilization was a mistake; that nothing is so vulgar as a great warehouse of rooms full of furniture and trumpery; that, in the circumstances, the best wisdom were an auction or a fire. Since the foxes and the birds have the right of it, with a warm hole to keep out the weather, and no more, — a pent-house to fend the sun and rain is the house which lays no tax on the owner’s time and thoughts, and which he can leave, when the sun is warm, and defy the robber. This was Thoreau’s doctrine, who said that the Fourierists had a sense of duty which led them to devote themselves to their second-best. And Thoreau gave in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief the purest ethics. He was more real and practically believing in them than any of his company, and fortified you at all times with an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. Thoreau was in his own person a practical answer, almost a refutation, to the theories of the socialists. He required no Phalanx, no Government, no society, almost no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels; brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town; and his independence made all others look like slaves. He was a good Abbot Sampson, and carried a counsel in his breast. “Again and again I congratulate myself on my so-called poverty, I could not overstate this advantage.” “What you call bareness and poverty, is to me simplicity. God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I love best to have each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other times. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time too.” There’s an optimist for you.

I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age in which we live, and, in common with so many other good facts, the efflorescence of the period, and predicting a good fruit that ripens. They were not the creators they believed themselves, but they were unconscious prophets of a true state of society; one which the tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it; but they were describers of that which is really being done. The large cities are phalansteries; and the theorists drew all their argument from facts already taking place in our experience. The cheap way is to make every man do what he was born for. One merchant to whom I described the Fourier project, thought it must not only succeed, but that agricultural association must presently fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers into association in self-defence, as the great commercial and manufacturing companies had done. Society in England and in America is trying the experiment again in small pieces, in co-operative associations, in cheap eating-houses, as well as in the economies of club-houses and in cheap reading-rooms.

It chanced that here in one family were two brothers, one a brilliant and fertile inventor, and close by him his own brother, a man of business, who knew how to direct his faculty and make it instantly and permanently lucrative. Why could not the like partnership be formed between the inventor and the man of executive talent everywhere? Each man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he and they combine? Talents supplement each other. Beaumont and Fletcher and many French novelists have known how to utilize such partnerships. Why not have a larger one, and with more various members?

Housekeepers say, “There are a thousand things to everything,” and if one must study all the strokes to be laid, all the faults to be shunned in a building or work of art, of its keeping, its composition, its site, its color, there would be no end. But the architect, acting under a necessity to build the house for its purpose, finds himself helped, he knows not how, into all these merits of detail, and steering clear, though in the dark, of those dangers which might have shipwrecked him.

BROOK FARM.

The West Roxbury association was formed in 1841, by a society of members, men and women, who bought a farm in West Roxbury, of about two hundred acres, and took possession of the place in April. Mr. George Ripley was the President, and I think Mr. Charles Dana (afterwards well known as one of the editors of the New York Tribune), was the secretary. Many members took shares by paying money, others held shares by their labor. An old house on the place was enlarged, and three new houses built. William Allen was at first and for some time the head farmer, and the work was distributed in orderly committees to the men and women. There were many employments more or less lucrative found for, or brought hither by these members, — shoemakers, joiners, sempstresses. They had good scholars among them, and so received pupils for their education. The parents of the children in some instances wished to live there, and were received as boarders. Many persons attracted by the beauty of the place and the culture and ambition of the community, joined them as boarders, and lived there for years. I think the numbers of this mixed community soon reached eighty or ninety souls.

It was a noble and generous movement in the projectors, to try an experiment of better living. They had the feeling that our ways of living were too conventional and expensive, not allowing each to do what he had a talent for, and not permitting men to combine cultivation of mind and heart with a reasonable amount of daily labor. At the same time, it was an attempt to lift others with themselves, and to share the advantages they should attain, with others now deprived of them.

There was no doubt great variety of character and purpose in the members of the community. It consisted in the main of young people, — few of middle age, and none old. Those who inspired and organized it were of course persons impatient of the routine, the uniformity, perhaps they would say the squalid contentment of society around them, which was so timid and skeptical of any progress. One would say then that impulse was the rule in the society, without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal, routinary character of our educational, religious, social and economical life in Massachusetts. Yet there was immense hope in these young people. There was nobleness; there were self-sacrificing victims who compensated for the levity and rashness of their companions. The young people lived a great deal in a short time, and came forth some of them perhaps with shattered constitutions. And a few grave sanitary influences of character were happily there, which, I was assured, were always felt.

George W. Curtis of New York, and his brother, of English Oxford, were members of the family from the first. Theodore Parker, the near neighbor of the farm and the most intimate friend of Mr. Ripley, was a frequent visitor. Mr. Ichabod Morton of Plymouth, a plain man formerly engaged through many years in the fisheries with success, — eccentric, with a persevering interest in Education, and of a very democratic religion, came and built a house on the farm, and he, or members of his family, continued there to the end. Margaret Fuller, with her joyful conversation and large sympathy, was often a guest, and always in correspondence with her friends. Many ladies, whom to name were to praise, gave character and varied attraction to the place.

In and around Brook Farm, whether as members, boarders, or visitors, were many remarkable persons, for character, intellect, or accomplishments. I recall one youth of the subtlest mind, I believe I must say the subtlest observer and diviner of character I ever met, living, reading, writing, talking there, perhaps as long as the colony held together; his mind fed and overfed by whatever is exalted in genius, whether in Poetry or Art, in Drama or Music, or in social accomplishment and elegancy; a man of no. employment or practical aims, a student and philosopher, who found his daily enjoyment not with the elders or his exact contemporaries so much as with the fine boys who were skating and playing ball or bird-hunting; forming the closest friendships with such, and finding his delight in the petulant heroisms of boys; yet was he the chosen counsellor to whom the guardians would repair on any hitch or difficulty that occurred, and draw from him a wise counsel. A fine, subtle, inward genius, puny in body and habit as a girl, yet with an aplomb like a general, never disconcerted. He lived and thought, in 1842, such worlds of life; all hinging on the thought of Being or Reality as opposed to consciousness; hating intellect with the ferocity of a Swedenborg. He was the Abbé or spiritual father, from his religious bias. His reading lay in Æschylus, Plato, Dante, Calderon, Shakspeare, and in modern novels and romances of merit. There too was Hawthorne, with his cold yet gentle genius, if he failed to do justice to this temporary home. There was the accomplished Doctor of Music, who has presided over its literature ever since in our metropolis. Rev. William Henry Channing, now of London, was from the first a student of Socialism in France and England, and in perfect sympathy with this experiment. An English baronet, Sir John Caldwell, was a frequent visitor, and more or less directly interested in the leaders and the success.

Hawthorne drew some sketches, not happily, as I think; I should rather say, quite unworthy of his genius. No friend who knew Margaret Fuller could recognize her rich and brilliant genius under the dismal mask which the public fancied was meant for her in that disagreeable story.

The Founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were always flying not only from house to house, but from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan.

In the American social communities, the gossip found such vent and sway as to become despotic. The institutions were whispering-galleries, in which the adored Saxon privacy was lost. Married women I believe uniformly decided against the community. It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen.

It was a curious experience of the patrons and leaders of this noted community, in which the agreement with many parties was that they should give so many hours of instruction in mathematics, in music, in moral and intellectual philosophy, and so forth, — that in every instance the new comers showed themselves keenly alive to the advantages of the society, and were sure to avail themselves of every means of instruction; their knowledge was increased, their manners refined, — but they became in that proportion averse to labor, and were charged by the heads of the departments with a certain indolence and selfishness.

In practice it is always found that virtue is occasional, spotty, and not linear or cubic. Good people are as bad as rogues if steady performance is claimed; the conscience of the conscientious runs in veins, and the most punctilious in some particulars are latitudinarian in others. It was very gently said that people on whom beforehand all persons would put the utmost reliance were not responsible. They saw the necessity that the work must be done, and did it not, and it of course fell to be done by the few religious workers. No doubt there was in many a certain strength drawn from the fury of dissent. Thus Mr. Ripley told Theodore Parker, “There is your accomplished friend — : he would hoe corn all Sunday if I would let him, but all Massachusetts could not make him do it on Monday.”

Of course every visitor found that there was a comic side to this Paradise of shepherds and shepherdesses. There was a stove in every chamber, and every one might burn as much wood as he or she would saw. The ladies took cold on washing-day; so it was ordained that the gentlemen-shepherds should wring and hang out clothes; which they punctually did. And it would sometimes occur that when they danced in the evening, clothespins dropped plentifully from their pockets. The country members naturally were surprised to observe that one man ploughed all day and one looked out of the window all day, and perhaps drew his picture, and both received at night the same wages. One would meet also some modest pride in their advanced condition, signified by a frequent phrase, “Before we came out of civilization.”

The question which occurs to you had occurred much earlier to Fourier: “How in this charming Elysium is the dirty work to be done?” And long ago Fourier had exclaimed, “Ah! I have it,” and jumped with joy. “Don’t you see,” he cried, “that nothing so delights the young Caucasian child as dirt? See the mud-pies that all children will make if you will let them. See how much more joy they find in pouring their pudding on the table-cloth than into their beautiful mouths. The children from six to eight, organized into companies with flags and uniforms, shall do this last function of civilization.”

In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every factory, a foreman; in a shop, a master; in a boat, the skipper; but in this Farm, no authority; each was master or mistress of his or her actions; happy, hapless anarchists. They expressed, after much perilous experience, the conviction that plain dealing was the best defence of manners and moral between the sexes. People cannot live together in any but necessary ways. The only candidates who will present themselves will be those who have tried the experiment of independence and ambition, and have failed; and none others will barter for the most comfortable equality the chance of superiority. Then all communities have quarrelled. Few people can live together on their merits. There must be kindred, or mutual economy, or a common interest in their business, or other external tie.

The society at Brook Farm existed, I think, about six or seven years, and then broke up, the Farm was sold, and I believe all the partners came out with pecuniary loss. Some of them had spent on it the accumulations of years. I suppose they all, at the moment, regarded it as a failure. I do not think they can so regard it now, but probably as an important chapter in their experience which has been of lifelong value. What knowledge of themselves and of each other, what various practical wisdom, what personal power, what studies of character, what accumulated culture many of the members owed to it! What mutual measure they took of each other! It was a close union, like that in a ship’s cabin, of clergymen, young collegians, merchants, mechanics, farmers’ sons and daughters, with men and women of rare opportunities and delicate culture, yet assembled there by a sentiment which all shared, some of them hotly shared, of the honesty of a life of labor and of the beauty of a life of humanity. The yeoman saw refined manners in persons who were his friends; and the lady or the romantic scholar saw the continuous strength and faculty in people who would have disgusted them but that these powers were now spent in the direction of their own theory of life.

I recall these few selected facts, none of them of much independent interest, but symptomatic of the times and country. I please myself with the thought that our American mind is not now eccentric or rude in its strength, but is beginning to show a quiet power, drawn from wide and abundant sources, proper to a Continent and to an educated people. If I have owed much to the special influences I have indicated, I am not less aware of that excellent and increasing circle of masters in arts and in song and in science, who cheer the intellect of our cities and this country to-day, — whose genius is not a lucky accident, but normal, and with broad foundation of culture, and so inspires the hope of steady strength advancing on itself, and a day without night.

THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.

[The Dial, vol. iii., p. 100.]

In the month of November, 1840, a Convention of Friends of Universal Reform assembled in the Chardon Street Chapel in Boston, in obedience to a call in the newspapers, signed by a few individuals, inviting all persons to a public discussion of the institutions of the Sabbath, the Church and the Ministry. The Convention organized itself by the choice of Edmund Quincy as Moderator, spent three days in the consideration of the Sabbath, and adjourned to a day in March of the following year, for the discussion of the second topic. In March, accordingly, a three-days’ sessions was holden in the same place, on the subject of the Church, and a third meeting fixed for the following November, which was accordingly holden; and the Convention debated, for three days again, the remaining subject of the Priesthood. This Convention never printed any report of its deliberations, nor pretended to arrive at any result by the expression of its sense in formal resolutions; — the professed objects of those persons who felt the greatest interest in its meetings being simply the elucidation of truth through free discussion. The daily newspapers reported, at the time, brief sketches of the course of proceedings, and the remarks of the principal speakers. These meetings attracted a great deal of public attention, and were spoken of in different circles in every note of hope, of sympathy, of joy, of alarm, of abhorrence and of merriment. The composition of the assembly was rich and various. The singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts of New England and also from the Middle States, men of every shade of opinion from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion, eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm. If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers, — all came successively to the top, and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring innovators and the champions-until-death of the old cause sat side by side. The still-living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet after several generations, encountered the founders of families, fresh merit, emerging, and expanding the brows to a new breadth, and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The assembly was characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength and earnestness, whilst many of the most intellectual and cultivated persons attended its councils. Dr. Channing, Edward Taylor, Bronson Alcott, Mr. Garrison, Mr. May, Theodore Parker, H. C. Wright, Dr. Osgood, William Adams, Edward Palmer, Jones Very, Maria W. Chapman, and many other persons of a mystical or sectarian or philanthropic renown, were present, and some of them participant. And there was no want of female speakers; Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and that flea of Conventions, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her interminable scroll. If there was not parliamentary order, there was life, and the assurance of that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty which, in all periods, characterizes the inhabitants of this part of America.

There was a great deal of wearisome speaking in each of those three-days’ sessions, but relieved by signal passages of pure eloquence, by much vigor of thought, and especially by the exhibition of character, and by the victories of character. These men and women were in search of something better and more satisfying than a vote or a definition, and they found what they sought, or the pledge of it, in the attitude taken by individuals of their number of resistance to the insane routine of parliamentary usage; in the lofty reliance on principles, and the prophetic dignity and transfiguration which accompanies, even amidst opposition and ridicule, a man whose mind is made up to obey the great inward Commander, and who does not anticipate his own action, but awaits confidently the new emergency for the new counsel. By no means the least value of this Convention, in our eye, was the scope it gave to the genius of Mr. Alcott, and not its least instructive lesson was the gradual but sure ascendency of his spirit, in spite of the incredulity and derision with which he is at first received, and in spite, we might add, of his own failures. Moreover, although no decision was had, and no action taken on all the great points mooted in the discussion, yet the Convention brought together many remarkable persons, face to face, and gave occasion to memorable interviews and conversations, in the hall, in the lobbies, or around the doors.

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.

We love the venerable house Our fathers built to God: In Heaven are kept their grateful vows, Their dust endears the sod.

From humble tenements around Came up the pensive train And in the church a blessing found That filled their homes again.

[This sketch was written for the Social Circle, a club in Concord now more than a century old, and said to be the lineal descendant of the Committee of Safety in the Revolution. Mr. Emerson was a member for many years and greatly valued its weekly evening meetings, held, during the winter, at the houses of the members. After the death of Dr. Ripley, an early member and connected with him by marriage, Mr. Emerson was asked to prepare the customary Memoir for the Club Book.]  

Ezra Repley was born May 1, 1751 (O. S.), at Woodstock, Connecticut. He was the fifth of the nineteen children of Noah and Lydia (Kent) Ripley. Seventeen of these nineteen children married, and it is stated that the mother died leaving nineteen children, one hundred and two grandchildren and ninety-six great-grandchildren. The father was born at Hingham, on the farm purchased by his ancestor, William Ripley, of England, at the first settlement of the town; which farm has been occupied by seven or eight generations. Ezra Ripley followed the business of farming till sixteen years of age, when his father wished him to be qualified to teach a grammar school, not thinking himself able to send one son to college without injury to his other children. With this view, the father agreed with the late Rev. Dr. Forbes of Gloucester, then minister of North Brookfield, to fit Ezra for college by the time he should be twenty-one years of age, and to have him labor during the time sufficiently to pay for his instruction, clothing and books.

But, when fitted for college, the son could not be contented with teaching, which he had tried the preceding winter. He had early manifested a desire for learning, and could not be satisfied without a public education. Always inclined to notice ministers, and frequently attempting, when only five or six years old, to imitate them by preaching, now that he had become a professor of religion he had an ardent desire to be a preacher of the gospel. He had to encounter great difficulties, but, through a kind providence and the patronage of Dr. Forbes, he entered Harvard University, July, 1772. The commencement of the Revolutionary War greatly interrupted his education at college. In 1775, in his senior year, the college was removed from Cambridge to this town. The studies were much broken up. Many of the students entered the army, and the class never returned to Cambridge. There were an unusually large number of distinguished men in this class of 1776: Christopher Gore, Governor of Massachusetts and Senator in Congress; Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of Massachusetts; George Thacher, Judge of the Supreme Court; Royall Tyler, Chief Justice of Vermont; and the late learned Dr. Prince, of Salem.

Mr. Ripley was ordained minister of Concord November 7, 1778. He married, November 16, 1780, Mrs. Phoebe (Bliss) Emerson, then a widow of thirty-nine, with five children. They had three children: Samuel, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss, born August 1, 1784; Sarah, born April 8, 1789. He died September 21, 1841.

To these facts, gathered chiefly from his own diary, and stated nearly in his own words, I can only add a few traits from memory.

He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America. It was a pit that his old meeting-house should have been modernized in his time. I am sure all who remember both will associate his form with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit, — with Watts’s hymns, with long prayers, rich with the diction of ages; and not less with the report like musketry from the movable seats. He and his contemporaries, the old New England clergy, were believers in what is called a particular providence, — certainly, as they held it, a very particular providence, — following the narrowness of King David and the Jews, who thought the universe existed only or mainly for their church and congregation. Perhaps I cannot better illustrate this tendency than by citing a record from the diary of the father of his predecessor, [Rev. Joseph Emerson.] the minister of Malden, written in the blank leaves of the almanac for the year 1735. The minister writes against January 31st: “Bought a shay for 27 pounds, 10 shillings. The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family.” In March following he notes: “Had a safe and comfortable journey to York.” But April 24th, we find: “Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver. Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful the preservation.” Then again, May 5th: “Went to the beach with three of the children. The beast, being frightened when we were all out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the Divine care and protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses?” Well, on 15th May we have this: “Shay brought home; mending cost thirty shillings. Favored in this respect beyond expectation.” 16th May: “My wife and I rode together to Rumney Marsh. The beast frighted several times.” And at last we have this record, June 4th: “Disposed of my shay to Rev. Mr. White.”

The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley and his associates. He was a perfectly sincere man, punctual, severe, but just and charitable, and if he made his forms a strait-jacket to others, he wore the same himself all his years. Trained in this church, and very well qualified by his natural talent to work in it, it was never out of his mind. He looked at every person and thing from the parochial point of view. I remember, when a boy, driving about Concord with him, and in passing each house he told the story of the family that lived in it, and especially he gave me anecdotes of the nine church members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor, and showed me how every one of the nine had come to bad fortune or to a bad end. His prayers for rain and against the lightning, “that it may not lick up our spirits;” and for good weather; and against sickness and insanity; “that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and others;” are well remembered, and his own entire faith that these petitions were not to be overlooked, and were entitled to a favorable answer. Some of those around me will remember one occasion of severe drought in this vicinity, when the late Rev. Mr. Goodwin offered to relieve the Doctor of the duty of leading in prayer; but the Doctor suddenly remembering the season, rejected his offer with some humor, as with an air that said to all the congregation, “This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious. I will pray myself.” One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, “We are in the Lord’s hand; mind your rake, George! We are in the Lord’s hand;” and seemed to say, “You know me; this field is mine, — Dr. Ripley’s, — thine own servant!”

He used to tell the story of one of his old friends, the minister of Sudbury, who, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner, and said, “You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.” I once rode with him to a house at Nine Acre Corner to attend the funeral of the father of a family. He mentioned to me on the way his fears that the oldest son, who was now to succeed to the farm, was becoming intemperate. We presently arrived, and the Doctor addressed each of the mourners separately: “Sir, I condole with you.” “Madam, I condole with you.” “Sir, I knew your great-grandfather. When I came to this town, your great-grand-father was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that large family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name and usefulness of your ancestors. If you fail,— ‘Ichabod, the glory is departed.’ Let us pray.” Right manly he was, and the manly thing he could always say. I can remember a little speech he made to me, when the last tie of blood which held me and my brothers to his house was broken by the death of his daughter. He said, on parting, “I wish you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected.”

When “Put” Merriam, after his release from the state prison, had the effrontery to call on the doctor as an old acquaintance, in the midst of general conversation Mr. Frost, came in, and the doctor presently said, “Mr. Merriam, my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (which you know very well) which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us.” With the Doctor’s views it was a matter of religion to say thus much. He had a reverence and love of society, and the patient, continuing courtesy, carrying out every respectful attention to the end, which marks what is called the manners of the old school. His hospitality obeyed Charles Lamb’s rule, and “ran fine to the last.” His partiality for ladies was always strong, and was by no means abated by time. He claimed privilege of years, was much addicted to kissing; spared neither maid, wife, nor widow, and, as a lady thus favored remarked to me, “seemed as if he was going to make a meal of you.”

He was very credulous, and as he was no reader of books or journals, he knew nothing beyond the columns of his weekly religious newspaper, the tracts of his sect, and perhaps the Middlesex Yeoman. He was the easy dupe of any tonguey agent, whether colonizationist or anti-papist, or charlatan of iron combs, or tractors, or phrenology, or magnetism, who went by. At the time when Jack Downing’s letters were in every paper, he repeated to me at table some of the particulars of that gentleman’s intimacy with General Jackson, in a manner that betrayed to me at once that he took the whole for fact. To undeceive him, I hastened to recall some particulars to show the absurdity of the thing, as the Major and the President going out skating on the Potomac, etc. “Why,” said the Doctor with perfect faith, “it was a bright moonlight night;” and I am not sure that he did not die in the belief in the reality of Major Downing. Like other credulous men, he was opinionative, and, as I well remember, a great browbeater of the poor old fathers who still survived from the 19th of April, to the end that they should testify to his history as he had written it.

He was a man so kind and sympathetic, his character was so transparent, and his merits so intelligible to all observers, that he was very justly appreciated in this community. He was a natural gentleman, no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly and public - spirited; his nature social, his house open to all men. We remember the remark made by the old farmer who used to travel hither from Maine, that no horse from the Eastern country would go by the doctor’s gate. Travellers from the West and North and South bear the like testimony. His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door. Though he knew the value of a dollar as well as another man, yet he loved to buy dearer and sell cheaper than others. He subscribed to all charities, and it is no reflection on others to say that he was the most public-spirited man in the town. The late Dr. Gardiner, in a funeral sermon on some parishioner whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, “He was good at fires.” Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet all will remember that even in his old age, if the fire-bell was rung, he was instantly on horseback with his buckets and bag.

He showed even in his fireside discourse traits of that pertinency and judgment, softening ever and anon into elegancy, which make the distinction of the scholar, and which, under better discipline, might have ripened into a Bentley or a Porson. He had a foresight, when he opened his mouth, of all that he would say, and he marched straight to the conclusion. In debate in the vestry of the Lyceum, the structure of his sentences was admirable; so neat, so natural, so terse, his words fell like stones; and often, though quite unconscious of it, his speech was a satire on the loose, voluminous, draggle-tail periods of other speakers. He sat down when he had done. A man of anecdote, his talk in the parlor was chiefly narrative. We remember the remark of a gentleman who listened with much delight to his conversation at the time when the Doctor was preparing to go to Baltimore and Washington, that “a man who could tell a story so well was company for kings and John Quincy Adams.”

Sage and savage strove harder in him than in any of my acquaintances, each getting the mastery by turns, and pretty sudden turns: “Save us from the extremity of cold and these violent sudden changes.” “The society will meet after the Lyceum, as it is difficult to bring people together in the evening, — and no moon.” “Mr. N. F. is dead, and I expect to hear of the death of Mr. B. It is cruel to separate old people from their wives in this cold weather.”

With a very limited acquaintance with books, his knowledge was an external experience, an Indian wisdom, the observation of such facts as country life for nearly a century could supply. He watched with interest the garden, the field, the orchard, the house and the barn, horse, cow, sheep and dog, and all the common objects that engage the thought of the farmer. He kept his eye on the horizon, and knew the weather like a sea-captain. The usual experiences of men, birth, marriage, sickness, death, burial; the common temptations; the common ambitions; — he studied them all, and sympathized so well in these that he was excellent company and counsel to all, even the most humble and ignorant. With extraordinary states of mind, with states of enthusiasm or enlarged speculation, he had no sympathy, and pretended to none. He was sincere, and kept to his point, and his mark was never remote. His conversation was strictly personal and apt to the party and the occasion. An eminent skill he had in saying difficult and unspeakable things; in delivering to a man or a woman that which all their other friends had abstained from saying, in uncovering the bandage from a sore place, and applying the surgeon’s knife with a truly surgical spirit. Was a man a sot, or a spendthrift, or too long time a bachelor, or suspected of some hidden crime, or had he quarrelled with his wife, or collared his father, or was there any cloud or suspicious circumstances in his behavior, the good pastor knew his way straight to that point, believing himself entitled to a full explanation, and whatever relief to the conscience of both parties plain speech could effect was sure to be procured. In all such passages he justified himself to the conscience, and commonly to the love, of the persons concerned. He was the more competent to these searching discourses from his knowledge of family history. He knew everybody’s grand father, and seemed to address each person rather as the representative of his house and name, than as an individual. In him have perished more local and personal anecdotes of this village and vicinity than are possessed by any survivor. This intimate knowledge of families, and this skill of speech, and still more, his sympathy, made him incomparable in his parochial visits, and in his exhortations and prayers. He gave himself up to his feelings, and said on the instant the best things in the world. Many and many a felicity he had in his prayer, now forever lost, which defied all the rules of all the rhetoricians. He did not know when he was good in prayer or sermon, for he had no literature and no art; but he believed, and therefore spoke. He was eminently loyal in his nature, and not fond of adventure or innovation. By education, and still more by temperament, he was engaged to the old forms of the New England Church. Not speculative, but affectionate; devout, but with an extreme love of order, he adopted heartily, though in its mildest form, the creed and catechism of the fathers, and appeared a modern Israelite in his attachment to the Hebrew history and faith. He was a man very easy to read, for his whole life and conversation were consistent. All his opinions and actions might be securely predicted by a good observer on short acquaintance. My classmate at Cambridge, Frederick King, told me from Governor Gore, who was the Doctor’s classmate, that in college he was called Holy Ripley.

And now, in his old age, when all the antique Hebraism and its customs are passing away, it is fit that he too should depart, — most fit that in the fall of laws a loyal man should die.

MARY MOODY EMERSON.

The yesterday doth never smile,

To-day goes drudging through the while,

Yet in the name of Godhead, I

The morrow front and can defy;

Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,

Cannot withhold his conquering aid.

Ah me! it was my childhood’s thought,

If He should make my web a blot

On life’s fair picture of delight,

My heart’s content would find it right.

But O, these waves and leaves, —

When happy, stoic Nature grieves, —

No human speech so beautiful

As their murmurs mine to lull.

On this altar God hath built

I lay my vanity and guilt;

Nor me can Hope or Passion urge,

Hearing as now the lofty dirge

Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,

Nature’s funeral high and dim, —

Sable pageantry of clouds,

Mourning summer laid in shrouds.

Many a day shall dawn and die,

Many an angel wander by,

And passing, light my sunken turf,

Mcist perhaps by ocean surf,

Forgotten amid splendid tombs,

Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms.

On earth I dream; — I die to be:

Time! shake not thy bald head at me.

I challenge thee to hurry past,

Or for my turn to fly too fast.

[Lucy Percy, Countess of Carlisle, the friend of Strafford and of Pym, is thus described by Sir Toby Matthews:]

“She is of too high a mind and dignity not only to seek, but almost to wish, the friendship of any creature. They whom she is pleased to choose are such as are of the most eminent condition both for power and employment, — not with any design towards her own particular, either of advantage or curiosity, but her nature values fortunate persons. She prefers the conversation of men to that of women; not but she can talk on the fashions with her female friends, but she is too soon sensible that she can set them as she wills; that pre-eminence shortens all equality. She converses with those who are most distinguished for their conversational powers. Of Love freely will she discourse, listen to all its faults and mark its power: and will take a deep interest for persons of celebrity.”

[Aunt of Mr. Emerson, and a potent influence on the lives of him and his brothers. This paper was read before the “Woman’s Club,” in Boston, in 1869, under the title “Amita,” which was also the original superscription of the “Nun’s Aspiration,” in his Poems; a rendering into verse of a passage in Miss Emerson’s diary. Part of this poem forms the motto of this chapter.]

I wish to meet the invitation with which the ladies have honored me by offering them a portrait of real life. It is a representative life, such as could hardly have appeared out of New England; of an age now past, and of which I think no types survive. Perhaps I deceive myself and overestimate its interest. It has to me a value like that which many readers find in Madame Guyon, in Rahel, in Eugénie de Guérin, but it is purely original and hardly admits of a duplicate. Then it is a fruit of Calvinism and New England, and marks the precise time when the power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and humanity.

I have found that I could only bring you this portrait by selections from the diary of my heroine, premising a sketch of her time and place. I report some of the thoughts and soliloquies of a country girl, poor, solitary,— ‘a goody’ as she called herself, — growing from youth to age amid slender opportunities and usually very humble company.

Mary Moody Emerson was born just before the outbreak of the Revolution. When introduced to Lafayette at Portland, she told him that she was “in arms” at the Concord Fight. Her father, the minister of Concord, a warm patriot in 1775, went as a chaplain to the American army at Ticonderoga: he carried his infant daughter, before he went, to his mother in Malden and told her to keep the child until he returned. He died at Rutland, Vermont, of army-fever, the next year, and Mary remained at Malden with her grandmother, and, after her death, with her father’s sister, in whose house she grew up, rarely seeing her brothers and sisters in Concord. This aunt and her husband lived on a farm, were getting old, and the husband a shiftless, easy man. There was plenty of work for the little niece to do day by day, and not always bread enough in the house.

One of her tasks, it appears, was to watch for the approach of the deputy-sheriff, who might come to confiscate the spoons or arrest the uncle for debt. Later, another aunt, who had become insane, was brought hither to end her days. More and sadder work for this young girl. She had no companions, lived in entire solitude with these old people, very rarely cheered by short visits from her brothers and sisters. Her mother had married again, — married the minister who succeeded her husband in the parish at Concord, [Dr. Ezra Ripley,] and had now a young family growing up around her.

Her aunt became strongly attached to Mary, and persuaded the family to give the child up to her as a daughter, on some terms embracing a care of her future interests. She would leave the farm to her by will. This promise was kept; she came into possession of the property many years after, and her dealings with it gave her no small trouble, though they give much piquancy to her letters in after years. Finally it was sold, and its price invested in a share of a farm in Maine, where she lived as a boarder with her sister, for many years. It was in a picturesque country, within sight of the White Mountains, with a little lake in front at the foot of a high hill called Bear Mountain. Not far from the house was a brook running over a granite floor like the Franconia Flume, and noble forests around. Every word she writes about this farm (“Elm Vale,” Waterford,) her dealings and vexations about it, her joys and raptures of religion and Nature, interest like a romance, and to those who may hereafter read her letters, will make its obscure acres amiable.

In Malden she lived through all her youth and early womanhood, with the habit of visiting the families of her brothers and sisters on any necessity of theirs. Her good will to serve in time of sickness or of pressure was known to them, and promptly claimed, and her attachment to the youths and maidens growing up in those families was secure for any trait of talent or of character. Her sympathy for young people who pleased her was almost passionate, and was sure to make her arrival in each house a holiday.

Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Harder, Locke, Madame De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious authority in their mind, and nowise the slight, merely entertaining quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, — how venerable and organic as Nature they are in her mind! What a subject is her mind and life for the finest novel I When I read Dante, the other day, and his paraphrases to signify with more adequateness Christ or Jehovah, whom do you think I was reminded of? Whom but Mary Emerson and her eloquent theology?

She had a deep sympathy with genius. When it was unhallowed, as in Byron, she had none the less, whilst she deplored and affected to denounce him. But she adored it when ennobled by character. She liked to notice that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence. She wished you to scorn to shine. “My opinion,” she writes, (is) “that a mind like Byron’s would never be satisfied with modern Unitarianism, — that the fiery depths of Calvinism, its high and mysterious elections to eternal bliss, beyond angels, and all its attendant wonders would have alone been fitted to fix his imagination.”

Her wit was so fertile, and only used to strike, that she never used it for display, any more than a wasp would parade his sting. It was ever the will and not the phrase that concerned her. Yet certain expressions, when they marked a memorable state of mind in her experience, recurred to her afterwards, and 6he would vindicate herself as having said to Dr, R — or Uncle L — so and so, at such a period of her life. But they were intensely true when first spoken. All her language was happy, but inimitable, unattainable by talent, as if caught from some dream. She calls herself “the puny pilgrim, whose sole talent is sympathy.” “I like that kind of apathy that is a triumph to overset.”

She writes to her nephew Charles Emerson, in 1833:— “I could never have adorned the garden. If I had been in aught but dreary deserts, I should have idolized my friends, despised the world and been haughty. I never expected connections and matrimony. My taste was formed in romance, and I knew I was not destined to please. I love God and his creation as I never else could. I scarcely feel the sympathies of this life enough to agitate the pool. This in general, one ease or so excepted, and even this is a relation to God through you. ‘T was so in my happiest early days, when you were at my side.”

Destitution is the Muse of her genius, — Destitution and Death. I used to propose that her epitaph should be: “Here lies the angel of Death.” And wonderfully as she varies and poetically repeats that image in every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to the other, — the grandeur of humility and privation, as thus; “The chief witness which I have had of a Godlike principle of action and feeling is in the disinterested joy felt in others’ superiority. For the love of superior virtue is mine own gift from God.’ “Where were thine own intellect if others had not lived?”

She had many acquaintances among the notables of the time; and now and then in her migrations from town to town in Maine and Massachusetts, in search of a new boarding-place, discovered some preacher with sense or piety, or both. For on her arrival at any new home she was likely to steer first to the minister’s house and pray his wife to take a boarder; and as the minister found quickly that she knew all his books and many more, and made shrewd guesses at his character and possibilities, she would easily rouse his curiosity, as a person who could read his secret and tell him his fortune.

She delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners. When she met a young person who interested her, she made herself acquainted and intimate with him or her at once, by sympathy, by flattery, by raillery, by anecdotes, by wit, by rebuke, and stormed the castle. None but was attracted or piqued by her interest and wit and wide acquaintance with books and with eminent names. She said she gave herself full swing in these sudden intimacies, for she knew she should disgust them soon, and resolved to have their best hours. “Society is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her attentions.” She surprised, attracted, chided and denounced her companion by turns, and pretty rapid turns. But no intelligent youth or maiden could have once met her without remembering her with interest, and learning something of value.’ Scorn trifles, lift your aims: do what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive: these were the lessons which were urged with vivacity, in ever new language. But if her companion was dull, her impatience knew no bounds. She tired presently of dull conversations, and asked to be read to, and so disposed of the visitor. If the voice or the reading tired her, she would ask the friend if he or she would do an errand for her, and so dismiss them. If her companion were a little ambitious, and asked her opinions on books or matters on which she did not wish rude hands laid, she did not hesitate to stop the intruder with “How’s your cat, Mrs. Tenner?”

“I was disappointed,” she writes, “in finding my little Calvinist no companion, a cold little thing who lives in society alone, and is looked up to as a specimen of genius. I performed a mission in secretly undermining his vanity, or trying to. Alas! never done but by mortifying affliction.” From the country she writes to her sister in town, “You cannot help saying that my epistle is a striking specimen of egotism. To which I can only answer that, in the country, we converse so much more with ourselves, that we are almost led to forget everybody else. The very sound of your bells and the rattling of the carriages have a tendency to divert selfishness.” “This seems a world rather of trying each others’ dispositions than of enjoying each others’ virtues.”

She had the misfortune of spinning with a greater velocity than any of the other tops. She would tear into the chaise or out of it, into the house or out of it, into the conversation, into the thought, into the character of the stranger, — disdaining all the graduation by which her fellows time their steps: and though she might do very happily in a planet where others moved with the like velocity, she was offended here by the phlegm of all her fellow-creatures, and disgusted them by her impatience. She could keep step with no human being. Her nephew [C. C. E.] wrote of her: “I am glad the friendship with Aunt Mary is ripening. As by seeing a high tragedy, reading a true poem, or a novel like ‘Corinne,’ so, by society with her, one’s mind is electrified and purged. She is no statute book of practical commandments, nor orderly digest of any system of philosophy, divine or human, but a Bible, miscellaneous in its parts, but one in its spirit, wherein are sentences of condemnation, promises and covenants of love that make foolish the wisdom of the world with the power of God.”

Our Delphian was fantastic enough, Heaven knows, yet could always be tamed by large and sincere conversation. Was there thought and eloquence, she would listen like a child. Her aspiration and prayer would begin, and the whim and petulance in which by diseased habit she had grown to indulge without suspecting it, was burned up in the glow of her pure and poetic spirit, which dearly loved the Infinite.

She writes: “August, 1847: Vale. — My oddities were never designed — effect of an uncalculating constitution, at first, then through isolation; and as to dress, from duty. To be singular of choice, without singular talents and virtues, is as ridiculous as ungrateful.” “It is so universal with all classes to avoid contact with me that I blame none. The fact has generally, increased piety and self-love.” “As a traveller enters some fine palace and finds all the doors closed, and he only allowed the use of some avenues and passages, so have I wandered from the cradle over the apartments of social affections, or the cabinets of natural or moral philosophy, the recesses of ancient and modern lore. All say — Forbear to enter the pales of the initiated by birth, wealth, talents and patronage. I submit with delight, for it is the echo of a decree from above; and from the highway hedges where I get lodging, and from the rays which burst forth when the crowd are entering these noble saloons, whilst I stand in the doors, I get a pleasing vision which is an earnest of the interminable skies where the mansions are prepared for the poor.”

“To live to give pain rather than pleasure (the latter so delicious) seems the spider-like necessity of my being on earth, and I have gone on my queer way with joy, saying, “Shall the clay interrogate?” But in every actual case, ‘t is hard, and we lose sight of the first necessity, — here too amid works red with default in all great and grand and infinite aims. Yet with intentions disinterested, though uncontrolled by proper reverence for others.”

When Mrs. Thoreau called on her one day, wearing pink ribbons, she shut her eyes, and so conversed with her for a time. By and by she said, “Mrs. Thoreau, I don’t know whether you have observed that my eyes are shut.” “Yes, Madam, I have observed it.” “Perhaps you would like to know the reasons?” “Yes, I should.” “I don’t like to see a person of your age guilty of such levity in her dress.”

When her cherished favorite, E. H., was at the Vale, and had gone out to walk in the forest with Hannah, her niece, Aunt Mary feared they were lost, and found a man in the next house and begged him to go and look for them. The man went and returned saying that he could not find them. “Go and cry, ‘Elizabeth!’” The man rather declined this service, as he did not know Miss H. She was highly offended, and exclaimed, “God has given you a voice that you might use it in the service of your fellow-creatures. Go instantly and call ‘Elizabeth’ till you find them.” The man went immediately, and did as he was bid, and having found them apologized for calling thus, by telling what Miss Emerson had said to him.

When some ladies of my acquaintance by an unusual chance found themselves in her neighborhood and visited her, I told them that she was no whistle that every mouth could play on, but a quite clannish instrument, a pibroch, for example, from which none but a native Highlander could draw music.

In her solitude of twenty years, with fewest books and those only sermons, and a copy of “Paradise Lost,” without covers or title-page, so that later, when she heard much of Milton and sought his work, she found it was her very book which she knew so well, — she was driven to find Nature her companion and solace. She speaks of “her attempts in Malden, to wake up the soul amid the dreary scenes of monotonous Sabbaths, when Nature looked like a pulpit.”

“Maiden, November 15th, 1805. — What a rich day, so fully occupied in pursuing truth that I scorned to touch a novel which for so many years I have wanted. How insipid is fiction to a mind touched with immortal views! November 16th. — I am so small in my expectations, that a week of industry delights. Rose before light every morn; visited from necessity once, and again for books; read Butler’s Analogy; commented on the Scriptures; read in a little book, — Cicero’s Letters, — a few: touched Shakspeare, — washed, carded, cleaned house, and baked. To-day cannot recall an error, nor scarcely a sacrifice, but more fulness of content in the labors of a day never was felt. There is a sweet pleasure in bending to circumstances while superior to them.

“Malden, September, 1807. — The rapture of feeling I would part from, for days more devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its Author, — feels that it is related to him more than by any ties of Creation, — it exults, too fondly perhaps for a state of trial. But in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow or appear to glow with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the spirit with wonder and curiosity, — then, however awed, who can fear? Since Sabbath, Aunt B — [the insane aunt] was brought here. Ah! mortifying sight! instinct perhaps triumphs over reason, and every dignified respect to herself, in her anxiety about recovery, and the smallest means connected. Not one wish of others detains her, not one care. But it alarms me not, I shall delight to return to God. His name my fullest confidence. His sole presence ineffable pleasure.

“I walked yesterday five or more miles, lost to mental or heart existence, through fatigue, — just fit for the society I went into, all mildness and the most commonplace virtue. The lady is celebrated for her cleverness, and she was never so good to me. Met a lady in the morning walk, a foreigner, — conversed on the accomplishments of Miss T. My mind expanded with novel and innocent pleasure. Ah! were virtue, and that of dear heavenly meekness attached by any necessity to a lower rank of genteel people, who would sympathize with the exalted with satisfaction? But that is not the case, I believe. A mediocrity does seem to me more distant from eminent virtue than the extremes of station; though after all it must depend on the nature of the heart. A mediocre mind will be deranged in either extreme of wealth or poverty, praise or censure, society or solitude. The feverish lust of notice perhaps in all these cases would injure the heart of common refinement and virtue.”

Later she writes of her early days in Malden: “When I get a glimpse of the revolutions of nations — that retribution which seems forever going on in this part of creation, — I remember with great satisfaction that from all the ills suffered, in childhood and since, from others, I felt that it was rather the order of things than their individual fault. It was from being early impressed by my poor unpractical aunt, that Providence and Prayer were all in all. Poor woman! Could her own temper in childhood or age have been subdued, how happy for herself, who had a warm heart; but for me would have prevented those early lessons of fortitude, which her caprices taught me to practise. Had I prospered in life, what a proud, excited being, even to fever ishness, I might have been. Loving to shine, flattered and flattering, anxious, and wrapped in others, frail and feverish as myself.”

She alludes to the early days of her solitude, sixty years afterward, on her own farm in Maine, speaking sadly the thoughts suggested by the rich autumn landscape around her: “Ah! as I walked out this afternoon, so sad was wearied Nature that I felt her whisper to me, ‘Even these leaves you use to think my better emblems have lost their charm on me too, and I weary of my pilgrimage, — tired that I must again be clothed in the grandeurs of winter, and anon be bedizened in flowers and cascades. Oh, if there be a power superior to me, — and that there is, my own dread fetters proclaim, — when will He let my lights go out, my tides cease to an eternal ebb? Oh for transformation! I am not infinite, nor have I power or will, but bound and imprisoned, the tool of mind, even of the beings I feed and adorn. Vital, I feel not: not active, but passive, and cannot aid the creatures which seem my progeny, — myself. But you are ingrate to tire of me, now you want to look beyond. ‘T was I who soothed your thorny childhood, though you knew me not, and you were placed in my most leafless waste. Yet I comforted thee when going on the daily errand, fed thee with my mallows, on the first young day of bread failing. More, I led thee when thou knewest not a syllable of my active Cause, (any more than if it had been dead eternal matter,) to that Cause; and from the solitary heart taught thee to say, at first womanhood, Alive with God is enough,— ‘t is rapture.’”

“This morning rich in existence; the remembrance of past destitution in the deep poverty of my aunt, and her most unhappy temper; of bitterer days of youth and age, when my senses and understanding seemed but means of labor, or to learn my own unpopular destiny, and that — but no more; — joy, hope and resignation unite me to Him whose mysterious Will adjusts everything, and the darkest and lightest are alike welcome. Oh! could this state of mind continue, death would not be longed for.” “I felt, till above twenty years old, as though Christianity were as necessary to the world as existence; — was ignorant that it was lately promulged, or partially received.” Later: “Could I have those hours in which in fresh youth I said, To obey God is joy, though there were no hereafter, I should rejoice, though returning to dust.”

“Folly follows me as the shadow does the form. Yet my whole life devoted to find some new truth which will link me closer to God. And the simple principle which made me say, in youth and laborious poverty, that, should He make me a blot on the fair face of his Creation, I should rejoice in His will, has never been equalled, though it returns in the long life of destitution like an Angel. I end days of fine health and cheerfulness without getting upward now. How did I use to think them lost! If more liberal views of the divine government make me think nothing lost which carries me to His now hidden presence, there may be danger of losing and causing others the loss of that awe and sobriety so indispensable.”

She was addressed and offered marriage by a man of talents, education and good social position, whom she respected. The proposal gave her pause and much to think, but after consideration she refused it, I know not on what grounds: but a few allusions to it in her diary suggest that it was a religious act, and it is easy to see that she could hardly promise herself sympathy in her religious abandonment with any but a rarely-found partner.

“1807. Jan. 19, Malden [alluding to the sale of her farm]. Last night I spoke two sentences about that foolish place, which I most bitterly lament, — not because they were improper, but they arose from anger. It is difficult, when we have no kind of barrier, to command our feelings. But this shall teach me. It humbles me beyond anything I have met, to find myself for a moment affected with hope, fear, or especially anger, about interest. But I did overcome and return kindness for the repeated provocations. What is it? My uncle has been the means of lessening my property. Ridiculous to wound him for that. He was honestly seeking his own. But at last, this very night, the bargain is closed, and I am delighted with myself: — my dear self has done well. Never did I so exult in a trifle. Happy beginning of my bargain, though the sale of the place appears to me one of the worst things for me at this time.”

“Jan. 21. Weary at times of objects so tedious to hear and see. O the power of vision, then the delicate power of the nerve which receives impressions from sounds! If ever I am blest with a social life, let the accent be grateful. Could I at times be regaled with music, it would remind me that there are sounds. Shut up in this severe weather with careful, infirm, afflicted age, it is wonderful, my spirits: hopes I can have none. Not a prospect but is dark on earth, as to knowledge and joy from externals: but the prospect of a dying bed reflects lustre on all the rest.

“The evening is fine, but I dare not enjoy it. The moon and stars reproach me, because I had to do with mean fools. Should I take so much care to save a few dollars? Never was I so much ashamed. Did I say with what rapture I might dispose of them to the poor? Pho! self-preservation, dignity, confidence in the future, contempt of trifles! Alas, I am disgraced. Took a momentary revenge on — for worrying me.”

“Jan. 30. I walked to Captain Dexter’s. Sick. Promised never to put that ring on. Ended miserably the month which began so worldly.

“It was the choice of the Eternal that gave the glowing seraph his joys, and to me my vile imprisonment. I adore Him. It was His will that gives my superiors to shine in wisdom, friendship, and ardent pursuits, while I pass my youth, its last traces, in the veriest shades of ignorance and complete destitution of society. I praise Him, though when my strength of body falters, it is a trial not easily described.”

“True, I must finger the very farthing candleends, — the duty assigned to my pride; and indeed so poor are some of those allotted to join me on the weary needy path, that’t is benevolence enjoins selfdenial. Could I but dare it in the bread-and-water diet! Could I but live free from calculation, as in the first half of life, when my poor aunt lived. I had ten dollars a year for clothes and charity, and I never remember to have been needy, though I never had but two or three aids in those six years of earning my home. That ten dollars my dear father earned, and one hundred dollars remain, and I can’t bear to take it, and don’t know what to do. Yet I would not breathe to — or — my want. ‘T is only now that I would not let — pay my hotel-bill. They have enough to do. Besides, it would send me packing to depend for anything. Better anything than dishonest dependence, which robs the poorer, and despoils friendship of equal connection.”

In 1830, in one of her distant homes, she reproaches herself with some sudden passion she has for visiting her old home and friends in the city, where she had lived for a while with her brother [Mr. Emerson’s father] and afterwards with his widow. “Do I yearn to be in Boston? ‘T would fatigue, disappoint; I, who have so long despised means, who have always found it a sort of rebellion to seek them? Yet the old desire for the worm is not so greedy as [mine] to find myself in my old haunts.”

1833. “The difficulty of getting places of low board for a lady, is obvious. And, at moments, I am tired out. Yet how independent, how better than to hang on friends! And sometimes I fancy that I am emptied and peeled to carry some seed to the ignorant, which no idler wind can so well dispense.” “Hard to contend for a health which is daily used in petition for a final close.” “Am I, poor victim, swept on through the sternest ordinations of nature’s laws which slay? yet I’ll trust.” “There was great truth in what a pious enthusiast said, that, if God should cast him into hell, he would yet clasp his hands around Him.”

“Newburyport, Sept. 1822. High, solemn, entrancing noon, prophetic of the approach of the Presiding Spirit of Autumn. God preserve my reason! Alone, feeling strongly, fully, that I have deserved nothing; according to Adam Smith’s idea of society, ‘done nothing;’ doing nothing, never expect to; yet joying in existence, perhaps striving to beautify one individual of God’s creation.

“Our civilization is not always mending our poetry. It is sauced and spiced with our complexity of arts and inventions, but lacks somewhat of the grandeur that belongs to a Doric and unphilosophical age. In a religious contemplative public it would have less outward variety, but simpler and grander means; a few pulsations of created beings a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament enable us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories, — to do more, — to date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God’s operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone, the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approach to God. And the gray-headed god throws his shadows all around, and his slaves catch, now at this, now at that, one at the halo he throws around poetry, or pebbles, bugs, or bubbles. Sometimes they climb, sometimes creep into the meanest holes — but they are all alike in vanishing, like the shadow of a cloud.”

To her nephew Charles: “War; what do I think of it? Why in your ear I think it so much better than oppression that if it were ravaging the whole geography of despotism it would be an omen of high and glorious import. Channing paints its miseries, but does he know those of a worse war, — private animosities, pinching, bitter warfare of the human heart, the cruel oppression of the poor by the rich, which corrupts old worlds? How much better, more honest, are storming and conflagration of towns! They are but letting blood which corrupts into worms and dragons. A war-trump would be harmony to the jars of theologains and statesmen such as the papers bring. It was the glory of the Chosen People, nay, it is said there was war in Heaven. War is among the means of discipline, the rough meliorators, and no worse than the strife with poverty, malice and ignorance. War devastates the conscience of men, yet corrupt peace does not less. And if you tell me of the miseries of the battle-field, with the sensitive Channing, (of whose love of life I am ashamed), what of a few days of agony, what of a vulture being the bier, tomb and parson of a hero, compared to the long years of sticking on a bed and wished away? For the widows and orphans — Oh, I could give facts of the long-drawn years of imprisoned minds and hearts, which uneducated orphans endure!

“O Time! Thou loiterer. Thou, whose might has laid low the vastest and crushed the worm, restest on thy hoary throne, with like potency over thy agitations and thy graves. When will thy routines give way to higher and lasting institutions? When thy trophies and thy name and all its wizard forms be lost in the Genius of Eternity? In Eternity, no deceitful promises, no fantastic illusions, no riddles concealed by thy shrouds, none of thy Arachnean webs, which decoy and destroy. Hasten to finish thy motley work, on which frightful Gorgons are at play, spite of holy ghosts. ‘T is already moth-eaten and its shuttles quaver, as the beams of the loom are shaken.

“Sat. 25. Hail requiem of departed Time! Never was incumbent’s funeral followed by expectant heir with more satisfaction. Yet not his hope is mine. For in the weary womb are prolific numbers of the same sad hour, colored by the memory of defeats in virtue, by the prophecy of others, more dreary, blind and sickly. Yet He who formed thy web, who stretched thy warp from long ages, has graciously given man to throw his shuttle, or feel he does, and irradiate the filling woof with many a flowery rainbow, — labors, rather — evanescent efforts, which will wear like flowerets in brighter soils; — has attuned his mind in such unison with the harp of the universe, that he is never without some chord of hope’s music. ‘T is not in the nature of existence, while there is a God, to be without the pale of excitement. When the dreamy pages of life seem all turned and folded down to very weariness, even this idea of those who fill the hour with crowded virtues, lifts the spectator to other worlds, and he adores the eternal purposes of Him who lifteth up and casteth down, bringeth to dust, and raiseth to the skies. ‘T is a strange deficiency in Brougham’s title of a System of Natural Theology, when the moral constitution of the being for whom these contrivances were made is not recognized. The wonderful inhabitant of the building to which unknown ages were the mechanics, is left out as to that part where the Creator had put his own lighted candle, placed a vice-gerent. Not to complain of the poor old earth’s chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist. Yet its youthful charms as decked by the hand of Moses’ Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to Science. Yet there is a sombre music in the whirl of times so long gone by. And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry: — its oceans, when beating the symbols of ceaseless ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How grand its preparation for souls, — souls who were to feel the Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions, and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element.

“September, 1836. Vale. The mystic dream which is shed over the season. O, to dream more deeply; to lose external objects a little more! Yet the hold on them is so slight, that duty is lost sight of perhaps, at times. Sadness is better than walking talking acting somnambulism. Yes, this entire solitude with the Being who makes the powers of life! Even Fame, which lives in other states of Virtue, palls. Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness. Number the waste-places of the journey, — the secret martyrdom of youth, heavier than the stake, I thought, the narrow limits which know no outlet, the bitter dregs of the cup, — and all are sweetened by the purpose of Him I love. The idea of being no mate for those intellectualists I’ve loved to admire, is no pain. Hereafter the same solitary joy will go with me, were I not to live, as I expect, in the vision of the Infinite. Never do the feelings of the Infinite, and the consciousness of finite frailty and ignorance, harmonize so well as at this mystic season in the deserts of life. Contradictions the modern German says, of the Infinite and finite.”

I sometimes fancy I detect in her writings, a certain — shall I say — polite and courtly homage to the name and dignity of Jesus, not at all spontaneous, but growing out of her respect to the Revelation, and really Telling and betraying her organic dislike to any interference, any mediation between her and the Author of her being, assurance of whose direct dealing with her she incessantly invokes: for example, the parenthesis “Saving thy presence, Priest and Medium of all this approach for a sinful creature!” “Were it possible that the Creator was not virtually present with the spirits and bodies which He has made: — if it were in the nature of things possible He could withdraw himself, — I would hold on to the faith, that, at some moment of His existence, I was present: that, though cast from Him, my sorrows, my ignorance and meanness were a part of His plan; my death, too, however long and tediously delayed to prayer, — was decreed, was fixed. Oh how weary in youth — more so scarcely now, not whenever I can breathe, as it seems, the atmosphere of the Omnipresence: then I ask not faith nor knowledge; honors, pleasures, labors, I always refuse, compared to this divine partaking of existence; — but how rare, how dependent on the organs through which the soul operates!

The sickness of the last week was fine medicine; pain disintegrated the spirit, or became spiritual. I rose, — I felt that I had given to God more perhaps than an angel could, — had promised Him in youth that to be a blot on this fair world, at His command, would be acceptable. Constantly offer myself to continue the obscurest and loneliest thing ever heard of, with one proviso, — His agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou dost, while Thou sheddest frost and darkness on every path of mine.”

For years she had her bed made in the form of a coffin; and delighted herself with the discovery of the figure of a coffin made every evening on their sidewalk, by the shadow of a church tower which adjoined the house.

Saladin caused his shroud to be made, and carried it to battle as his standard. She made up her shroud, and death still refusing to come, and she thinking it a pity to let it lie idle, wore it as a night-gown, or a day-gown, nay, went out to ride in it, on horseback, in her mountain roads, until it was worn out. Then she had another made up, and as she never travelled without being provided for this dear and indispensable contingency, I believe she wore out a great many.

“1833. I have given up, the last year or two, the hope of dying. In the lowest ebb of health nothing is ominous; diet and exercise restore. So it seems best to get that very humbling business of insurance. I enter my dear sixty the last of this month.” “1835, June 16. Tedious indisposition: — hoped, as it took a new form, it would open the cool, sweet grave. Now existence itself in any form is sweet. Away with knowledge; — God alone. He communicates this our condition and humble waiting, or I should never perceive Him. Science, Nature, — O, I’ve yearned to open some page; — not now, too late. Ill health and nerves. O dear worms, — how they will at some sure time take down this tedious tabernacle, most valuable companions, instructors in the science of mind, by gnawing away the meshes which have chained it. A very Beatrice in showing the Paradise. Yes, I irk under contact with forms of depravity, while I am resigned to being nothing, never expect a palm, a laurel, hereafter.”

“1826, July. If one could choose, and without crime be gibbeted, — were it not altogether better than the long drooping away by age without mentality or devotion? The vulture and crow would caw caw, and, unconscious of any deformity in the mutilated body, would relish their meal, make no grimace of affected sympathy, nor suffer any real compassion. I pray to die, though happier myriads and mine own companions press nearer to the throne. His coldest beam will purify and render me forever holy. Had I the highest place of acquisition and diffusing virtue here, the principle of human sympathy would be too strong for that rapt emotion, that severe delight which I crave; nay for that kind of obscure virtue which is so rich to lay at the feet of the Author of morality. Those economists (Adam Smith) who say nothing is added to the wealth of a nation but what is dug out of the earth, and that, whatever disposition of virtue may exist, unless something is done for society, deserves no fame, — why I am content with such paradoxical kind of facts; but one secret sentiment of virtue, disinterested (or perhaps not), is worthy, and will tell, in the world of spirits, of God’s immediate presence, more than the blood of many a martyr who has it not.” “I have heard that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power and influence on the arts and sciences. I believe thus much, that their large perception consumed their egotism, or made it impossible for them to make small calculations.”

“That greatest of all gifts, however small my power of receiving, — the capacity, the element to love the All-perfect, without regard to personal happiness: — happiness?— ‘t is itself.” She checks herself amid her passionate prayers for immediate communion with God;— “I who never made a sacrifice to record, — I cowering in the nest of quiet for so many years; — I indulge the delight of sympathizing with great virtues, — blessing their Original: Have I this right?” “While I am sympathizing in the government of God over the world, perhaps I lose nearer views. Well, I learned his existence a priori. No object of science or observation ever was pointed out to me by my poor aunt, but His Being and commands; and oh how much I trusted Him with every event till I learned the order of human events from the pressure of wants.”

“What a timid, ungrateful creature! Fear the deepest pit-falls of age, when pressing on, in imagination at least, to Him with whom a day is a thousand years, — with whom all miseries and irregularities are conforming to universal good! Shame on me who have learned within three years to sit whole days in peace and enjoyment without the least apparent benefit to any, or knowledge to myself; — resigned, too, to the memory of long years of slavery passed in labor and ignorance, to the loss of that character which I once thought and felt so sure of, without ever being conscious of acting from calculation.”

Her friends used to say to her, “I wish you joy of the worm.” And when at last her release arrived, the event of her death had really such a comic tinge in the eyes of every one who knew her, that her friends feared they might, at her funeral, not dare to look at each other, lest they should forget the serious proprieties of the hour.

She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply. It is frivolous to ask,— “And was she ever a Christian in practice?” Cassandra uttered, to a frivolous, skeptical time, the arcana of the Gods: but it is easy to believe that Cassandra domesticated in a lady’s house would have proved a troublesome boarder. Is it the less desirable to have the lofty abstractions because the abstractionist is nervous and irritable? Shall we not keep Flamsteed and Herschel in the observatory, though it should even be proved that they neglected to rectify their own kitchen clock? It is essential to the safety of every mackerel fisher that latitudes and longitudes should be astronomically ascertained; and so every banker, shopkeeper and wood-sawyer has a stake in the elevation of the moral code by saint and prophet. Very rightly, then, the Christian ages, proceeding on a grand instinct, have said: Faith alone, Faith alone.

SAMUEL HOAR.

“Magno se judice quisque tuetur; Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni.”

A year ago, how often did we meet Beneath these elms, once more in sober bloom, Thy tall, sad figure pacing down the street, And now the robin sings above thy tomb! Thy name on other shores may ne’er be known, Though Rome austere no graver consul knew, But Massachusetts her true son shall own; Out of her soil thy hardy virtues grew. She loves the man that chose the conquered cause, With upright soul that bowed to God alone; The clean hands that upheld her equal laws, The old religion ne’er to be outgrown; The cold demeanor, the warm heart beneath, The simple grandeur of thy life and death. F. B. Sanborn. April, 1857.

[Written on the 4th Nov., 1856, the day when Mr. Buchanan was chosen President of the United States. Reprinted from Putnam’s Magazine.]     

Here is a day on which more public good or evil is to be done than was ever done on any day. And this is the pregnant season, when our old Roman, Samuel Hoar, has chosen to quit this world. Ab iniquo certamine indignabundus recessit.

He was born under a Christian and humane star, full of mansuetude and nobleness, honor and charity; and, whilst he was willing to face every disagreeable duty, whilst he dared to do all that might beseem a man, his self-respect restrained him from any foolhardiness. The Homeric heroes, when they saw the gods mingling in the fray, sheathed their swords. So did not he feel any call to make it a contest of personal strength with mobs or nations; but when he saw the day and the gods went against him, he withdrew, but with an unaltered belief. All was conquered prœter atrocem animum Catonis.

At the time when he went to South Carolina as the Commissioner of Massachusetts, in 1844, whilst staying in Charleston, pending his correspondence with the governor and the legal officers, he was repeatedly warned that it was not safe for him to appear in public, or to take his daily walk, as he had done, unattended by his friends, in the streets of the city. He was advised to withdraw to private lodgings, which were eagerly offered him by friends. He rejected the advice, and refused the offers, saying that he was old, and his life was not worth much, but he had rather the boys should troll his old head like a foot-ball in their streets, than that he should hide it. And he continued the uniform practice of his daily walk into all parts of the city. But when the mob of Charleston was assembled in the streets before his hotel, and a deputation of gentlemen waited upon him in the hall to say they had come with the unanimous voice of the State to remove him by force, and the carriage was at the door, he considered his duty discharged to the last point of possibility. The force was apparent and irresistible; the legal officer’s part was up; it was now time for the military officer to be sent; and he said, “Well, gentlemen, since it is your pleasure to use force, I must go.” But his opinion was unchanged.

In like manner now, when the votes of the Free States, as shown in the recent election in the State of Pennsylvania, had disappointed the hopes of mankind and betrayed the cause of freedom, he considered the question of justice and liberty, for his age, lost, and had no longer the will to drag his days through the dishonors of the long defeat, and promptly withdrew, but with unaltered belief.

He was a very natural, but a very high character; a man of simple tastes, plain and true in speech, with a clear perception of justice, and a perfect obedience thereto in his action; of a strong understanding, precise and methodical, which gave him great eminence in the legal profession. It was rather his reputation for severe method in his intellect than any special direction in his studies that caused him to be offered the mathematical chair in Harvard University, when vacant in 1806. The severity of his logic might have inspired fear, had it not been restrained by his natural reverence, which made him modest and courteous, though his courtesy had a grave and almost military air. He combined a uniform self-respect with a natural reverence for every other man; so that it was perfectly easy for him to associate with farmers, and with plain, uneducated, poor men, and he had a strong, unaffected interest in farms, and crops, and weathers, and the common incidents of rural life. It was just as easy for him to meet on the same floor, and with the same plain courtesy, men of distinction and large ability. He was fond of farms and trees, fond of birds, and attentive to their manners and habits; addicted to long and retired walks; temperate to asceticism, for no lesson of his experience was lost on him, and his self-command was perfect. Though rich, of a plainness and almost poverty of personal expenditure, yet liberal of his money to any worthy use, readily lending it to young men, and industrious men, and by no means eager to reclaim of them either the interest or the principal. He was open-handed to every charity, and every public claim that had any show of reason in it. When I talked with him one day of some inequality of taxes in the town, he said it was his practice to pay whatever was demanded; for, though he might think the taxation large and very unequally proportioned, yet he thought the money might as well go in this way as in any other.

The strength and the beauty of the man lay in the natural goodness and justice of his mind, which, in manhood and in old age, after dealing all his life with weighty private and public interests, left an infantile innocence, of which we have no second or third example, — the strength of a chief united to the modesty of a child. He returned from courts or congresses to sit down, with unaltered humility, in the church or in the town-house, on the plain wooden bench where honor came and sat down beside him.

He was a man in whom so rare a spirit of justice visibly dwelt, that if one had met him in a cabin or in a forest he must still seem a public man, answering as sovereign state to sovereign state; and might easily suggest Milton’s picture of John Bradshaw, that “he was a consul from whom the fasces did not depart with the year, but in private seemed ever sitting in judgment on kings.” Everybody knew where to find him. What he said, that would he do. But he disdained any arts in his speech: he was not adorned with any graces of rhetoric,

“But simple truth his utmost skill.”

So cautious was he, and tender of the truth, that he sometimes wearied his audience with the pains he took to qualify and verify his statements, adding clause on clause to do justice to all his conviction. He had little or no power of generalization. But a plain way he had of putting his statement with all his might, and now and then borrowing the aid of a good story, or a farmer’s phrase, whose force had imprinted it on his memory, and, by the same token, his hearers were bound to remember his point.

The impression he made on juries was honorable to him and them. For a long term of years, he was at the head of the bar in Middlesex, practising, also, in the adjoining counties. He had one side or the other of every important case, and his influence was reckoned despotic, and sometimes complained of as a bar to public justice. Many good stories are still told of the perplexity of jurors who found the law and the evidence on one side, and yet Squire Hoar had said that he believed, on his conscience, his client entitled to a verdict. And what Middlesex jury, containing any God-fearing men in it, would hazard an opinion in flat contradiction to what Squire Hoar believed to be just? He was entitled to this respect; for he discriminated in the business that was brought to him, and would not argue a rotten cause; and he refused very large sums offered him to undertake the defense of criminal persons.

His character made him the conscience of the community in which he lived. And in many a town it was asked, “What does Squire Hoar think of this?” and in political crises, he was entreated to write a few lines to make known to good men in Chelmsford, or Marlborough, or Shirley, what that opinion was. I used to feel that his conscience was a kind of meter of the degree of honesty in the country, by which on each occasion it was tried, and sometimes found wanting. I am sorry to say he could not be elected to Congress a second time from Middlesex.

And in his own town, if some important end was to be gained, — as, for instance, when the county commissioners refused to rebuild the burned courthouse, on the belief that the courts would be transferred from Concord to Lowell, — all parties combined to send Mr. Hoar to the Legislature, where his presence and speech, of course, secured the rebuilding; and, of course also, having answered our end, we passed him by and elected somebody else at the next term.

His head, with singular grace in its lines, had a resemblance to the bust of Dante. He retained to the last the erectness of his tall but slender form, and not less the full strength of his mind. Such was, in old age, the beauty of his person and carriage, as if the mind radiated, and made the same impression of probity on all beholders. His beauty was pathetic and touching in these latest days, and, as now appears, it awakened a certain tender fear in all who saw him, that the costly ornament of our homes and halls and streets was speedily to be removed. Yet how solitary he looked, day by day in the world, this man so revered, this man of public life, of large acquaintance and wide family connection! Was it some reserve of constitution, or was it only the lot of excellence, that with aims so pure and single, he seemed to pass out of life alone, and, as it were, unknown to those who were his content poraries and familiars?

[The following sketch of Mr. Hoar from a slightly different point of view, was prepared by Mr. Emerson, shortly after the above paper appeared in “Putnam’s Magazine” (December, 1856), at the request of the Editor of the “Monthly Religious Magazine,” and was printed there, January, 1857. It is here appended as giving some additional traits of a characteristic figure which may serve as a pendant in some respects to that of Dr. Ripley.]

Mr. Hoar was distinguished in his profession by the grasp of his mind, and by the simplicity of his means. His ability lay in the clear apprehension and the powerful statement of the material points of his case. He soon possessed it, and he never possessed it better, and he was equally ready at any moment to state the facts. He saw what was essential and refused whatever was not, so that no man embarrassed himself less with a needless array of books and evidences of contingent value.

These tactics of the lawyer were the tactics of his life. He had uniformly the air of knowing just what he wanted and of going to that in the shortest way. It is singular that his character should make so deep an impression, standing and working as he did on so common a ground. He was neither spiritualist nor man of genius nor of a literary nor an executive talent. In strictness the vigor of his understanding was directed on the ordinary domestic and municipal well-being. Society had reason to cherish him, for he was a main pillar on which it leaned. The useful and practical super-abounded in his mind, and to a degree which might be even comic to young and poetical persons. If he spoke of the engagement of two lovers, he called it a contract. Nobody cared to speak of thoughts or aspirations to a black-letter lawyer, who only studied to keep men out of prison, and their lands out of attachment. Had you read Swedenborg or Plotinus to him, he would have waited till you had done, and answered you out of the Revised Statutes. He had an affinity for mathematics, but it was a taste rather than a pursuit, and of the modern sciences he liked to read popular books on geology. Yet so entirely was this respect to the ground plan and substructure of society a natural ability, and from the order of his mind, and not for “tickling commodity,” that it was admirable, as every work of nature is, and like one of those opaque crystals, big beryls weighing tons, which are found in Acworth, New Hampshire, not less perfect in their angles and structure, and only less beautiful, than the transparent topazes and diamonds. Meantime, whilst his talent and his profession led him to guard the material wealth of society, a more disinterested person did not exist And if there were regions of knowledge not open to him, he did not pretend to them. His modesty was sincere. He had a childlike innocence and a native temperance, which left him no temptations, and enabled him to meet every comer with a free and disengaged courtesy that had no memory in it.

“Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.”

No person was more keenly alive to the stabs which the ambition and avarice of men inflicted on the common-wealth. Yet when politicians or speculators approached him, these memories left no scar; his countenance had an unalterable tranquillity and sweetness; he had nothing to repent of, — let the cloud rest where it might, he dwelt in eternal sunshine.

He had his birth and breeding in a little country town, where the old religion existed in strictness, and spent all his energy in creating purity of manners and careful education. No art or practice of the farm was unknown to him, and the farmers greeted him as one of themselves, whilst they paid due homage to his powers of mind and to his virtues.

He loved the dogmas and the simple usages of his church; was always an honored and sometimes an active member. He never shrunk from a disagreeable duty. In the time of the Sunday laws he was a tithing-man; under the Maine Law he was a prosecutor of the liquor dealers. It seemed as if the New England church had formed him to be its friend and defender; the lover and assured friend of its parish by-laws, of its ministers, its rites, and its social reforms. He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are native.

I have spoken of his modesty; he had nothing to say about himself; and his sincere admiration was com manded by certain heroes of the profession, like Judge Parsons and Judge Marshall, Mr. Mason and Mr. Webster. When some one said, in his presence, that Chief Justice Marshall was failing in his intellect, Mr. Hoar remarked that “Judge Marshall could afford to lose brains enough to furnish three or four common men, before common men would find it out.” He had a huge respect for Mr. Webster’s ability, with whom he had often occasion to try his strength at the bar, and a proportionately deep regret at Mr. Webster’s political course in his later years.

There was no elegance in his reading or tastes beyond the crystal clearness of his mind. He had no love of poetry; and I have heard that the only verse that he was ever known to quote was the Indian rule:

“When the oaks are in the gray,

Theu, farmers, plant away.”

But I find an elegance in his quiet but firm withdrawal from all business in the courts which he could drop without manifest detriment to the interests involved (and this when in his best strength), and his self-dedication thenceforward to unpaid services of the Temperance and Peace and other philanthropic societies, the Sunday Schools, the cause of Education, and specially of the University, and to such political activities as a strong sense of duty and the love of order and of freedom urged him to forward.

Perfect in his private life, the husband, father, friend, he was severe only with himself. He was as if on terms of honor with those nearest him, nor did he think a lifelong familiarity could excuse any omission of courtesy from him. He carried ceremony finely to the last. But his heart was all gentleness, gratitude and bounty.

With beams December planets dart,

His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;

July was in his sunny heart,

October in his liberal hand.

THOREAU.

A Queen rejoices in her peers,

And wary Nature knows her own,

By court and city, dale and down,

And like a lover volunteers.

And to her son will treasures more,

And more to purpose, freely pour

In one wood walk, than learned men

Will find with glass in ten times ten.

It seemed as if the breezes brought him,

It seemed as if the sparrows taught him,

As if by secret sign he knew

Where in far fields the orchis grew.

[Part of this paper was the Address delivered by Mr. Emerson at the funeral of Mr. Thoreau, in May, 1862. In the following summer it was enlarged and printed in the “Atlantic Monthly” in its present form.]

Henry David Thoreau was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came to this country from the Isle of Guernsey. His character exhibited occasional traits drawn from this blood, in singular combination with a very strong Saxon genius.

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817. He was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any literary distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their service to him, holding them in small esteem, whilst yet his debt to them was important. After leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. His father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its equality with the best London manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied, that he should never make another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.” He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature, though as yet never speaking of zoology or botany, since, though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious of technical and textual science.

At this time, a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college, whilst all his companions were choosing their profession, or eager to begin some lucrative employment, it was inevitable that his thoughts should be exercised on the same question, and it required rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of disappointing the natural expectations of his family and friends: all the more difficult that he had a perfect probity, was exact in securing his own independence, and in holding every man to the like duty. But Thoreau never faltered. He was a born protestant. He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well. If he slighted and defied the opinions of others, it was only that he was more intent to reconcile his practice with his own belief. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earning it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to him, as building a boat or a fence, planting, grafting, surveying, or other short work, to any long engagements. With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less time to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of his leisure.

A natural skill for mensuration, growing out of his mathematical knowledge and his habit of ascertaining the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains, and the air-line distance of his favorite summits, — this, and his intimate knowledge of the territory about Concord, made him drift into the profession of land-surveyor. It had the advantage for him that it led him continually into new and secluded grounds, and helped his studies of Nature. His accuracy and skill in this work were readily appreciated, and he found all the employment he wanted.

He could easily solve the problems of the surveyor, but he was daily beset with graver questions, which he manfully confronted. He interrogated every custom, and wished to settle all his practice on an ideal foundation. He was a protestant a, outrance, and few lives contain so many renunciations. He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone;’ he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist-he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. Perhaps he fell into his way of living without forecasting it much, but approved it with later wisdom. “I am often reminded,” he wrote in his journal, “that if I had bestowed on me the wealth of Crœsus, my aims must be still the same, and my means essentially the same.” He had no temptations to fight against, no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. A fine house, dress, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people were all thrown away on him. He much preferred a good Indian, and considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms. He declined invitations to dinner-parties, because there each was in every one’s way, and he could not meet the individuals to any purpose. “They make their, pride,” he said, “in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, “The nearest.” He did not like the taste of wine, and never had a vice in his life. He said,— “I have a faint recollection of pleasure derived from smoking dried lily-stems, before I was a man. I had commonly a supply of these. I have never smoked anything more noxious.”

He chose to he rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself. In his travels, he used the railroad only to get over so much, country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles, avoiding taverns, buying a lodging in farmers’ and fishermen’s houses, as cheaper, and more agreeable to him, and because there he could better find the men and the information he wanted.

There was somewhat military in his nature, not to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did not feel himself except in opposition. He wanted a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory, I may say required a little sense of victory, a roll of the drum, to call his powers into full exercise. It cost him nothing to say No; indeed he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient-was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. “I love Henry,” said one of his friends, “but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.”

Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes. Talking, one day, of a public discourse, Henry remarked, that whatever succeeded with the audience was bad. I said, “Who would not like to write something which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody?” Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons. But, at supper, a young girl, understanding that he was to lecture at the Lyceum, sharply asked him, “Whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story, such as she wished to hear, or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about.” Henry turned to her, and bethought himself, and, I saw, was trying to believe that he had matter that might fit her and her brother, who were to sit up and go to the lecture, if it was a good one for them.

He was a speaker and actor of the truth, born such, and was ever running into dramatic situations from this cause. In any circumstance it interested all bystanders to know what part Henry would take, and what he would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each emergency. In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay-his town tax, and was put in jail A friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened the next year. But, as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I believe he ceased to resist. No opposition or ridicule had any weight with him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it was the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence if every one present held the opposite opinion. On one occasion he went to the University Library to procure some books. The librarian refused to lend them. Mr. Thoreau repaired to the President, who stated to him the rules and usages, which permitted the loan of books to resident graduates, to clergymen who were alumni, and to some others resident within a circle of ten miles’ radius from the College. Mr. Thoreau explained to the President that the railroad had destroyed the old scale of distances, — that the library was useless, yes, and President and College useless, on the terms of his rules, — that the one benefit he owed to the College was its library, — that, at this moment, not only his want of books was imperative but he wanted a large number of books, and assured him that he, Thoreau, and not the librarian, was the proper custodian of these. In short, the President found the petitioner so formidable, and the rules getting to look so ridiculous, that he ended by giving him a privilege which in his hands proved unlimited thereafter.

No truer American existed than Thoreau. His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt. He listened impatiently to news or bonmots gleaned from London circles; and though he tried to be civil, these anecdotes fatigued him. The men were all imitating each other, and on a small mould. Why can they not live as far apart as possible, and each be a man by himself? What he sought was the most energetic nature; and he wished to go to Oregon, not to London. “In every part of Great Britain,” he wrote in his diary, “are discovered traces of the Romans, their funereal urns, their camps, their roads, their dwellings. But New England, at least, is not based on any Roman ruins. We have not to lay the foundations of our houses on the ashes of a former civilization.”

But, idealist as he was, standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, it is needless to say he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers.. Yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to the Anti-Slavery party. One man, whose personal acquaintance he had formed, he honored with exceptional regard. Before the first friendly word had been spoken for Captain John Brown, he sent notices to most houses in Concord that; he would speak in a public hall on the condition and character of John Brown, on Sunday evening, and invited all people to come. The Republican Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was premature and not advisable. He replied,— “I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” The hall was filled at an early hour by people of all parties, and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised themselves.

It was said of Plotinus that he was ashamed of his body, and ‘t is very likely he had good reason for it, — that his body was a bad servant, and he had not skill in dealing with the material world, as happens often to men of abstract intellect. But Mr. Thoreau was equipped with a most adapted and serviceable body. He was of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion, with strong, serious blue eyes, and a grave aspect, — his face covered in the late years with a becoming beard. His senses were acute, his frame well-knit and hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. And there was a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. From, a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he, could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp. He was a good swimmer, runner, skater, boatman, and would probably outwalk most countrymen in a day’s journey. And the relation of body to mind was still finer than we have indicated. He said he wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.

He had a strong common-sense, like that which Rose Flammock the weaver’s daughter in Scott’s romance commends in her father, as resembling a yardstick, which, whilst it measures dowlas and diaper, can equally well measure tapestry and cloth of gold. He had always a new resource. When I was planting forest trees, and had procured half a peck of acorns, he said that only a small portion of them would be sound, and proceeded to examine them and select the sound ones. But finding this took time, he said, “I think if you put them all into water the good ones will sink;” which experiment we tried with success. He could plan a garden or a house or a barn; would have been competent to lead a “Pacific Exploring Expedition;” could give judicious counsel in the gravest private or public affairs.

He lived for the day, not cumbered and mortified by his memory. If be brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary. A very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town, always ready for any excursion that promised well, or for conversation prolonged into late hours. His trenchant sense was never stopped by his rules of daily prudence, but was always up to the new occasion. He liked and used the simplest food, yet, when some one urged a vegetable diet, Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that “the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House.” He said,— “You can sleep near the railroad, and never be disturbed: Nature knows very well what sounds are worth attending to and has made up her mind not to hear the railroad-whistle. But things respect the devout mind, and a mental ecstacy was never interrupted.” He noted what repeatedly befell him, that, after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good players happened to him. One day, walking with a stranger, who inquired where Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, “Everywhere,” and, stooping forward, picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mount Washington, in Tuckerman’s Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was in the act of getting up from his fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of the Arnica mollis.

His robust common sense, armed with stout hands, keen perceptions and strong will, cannot yet account for the superiority which shone in his simple and hidden life. I must add the cardinal fact, that there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men, which showed him the material world as a means and symbol. This discovery, which sometimes yields to poets a certain casual and interrupted light, serving for the ornament of their writing, was in him an unsleeping insight; and whatever faults or obstructions of temperament might cloud it, he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. In his youth, he said, one day, “The other world is all my art; my pencils will draw no other; my jack-knife will cut nothing else; I do not use it as a means.” This was the muse and genius that ruled his opinions, conversation, studies, work and course of life. This made him a searching judge of men. At first glance he measured his companion, and, though insensible to some fine traits of culture, could very well report his weight and calibre. And this made the impression of genius which his conversation sometimes gave.

He understood the matter in hand at a glance, and saw the limitations and poverty of those he talked with, so that nothing seemed concealed from such terrible eyes. I have repeatedly known young men of sensibility converted in a moment to the belief that this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do. His own dealing with them was never affectionate, but superior, didactic, scorning their petty ways, — very slowly conceding, or not conceding at all, the promise of his society at their houses, or even at his own. “Would he not walk with them?” “He did not know. There was nothing so important to him as his walk; he had no walks to throw away on company.” Visits were offered him from respectful parties, but he declined them. Admiring friends offered to carry him at their own cost to the Yellowstone River, — to the West Indies, — to South America. But though nothing could be more grave or considered than his refusals, they remind one, in quite new relations, of that fop Brummel’s reply to the gentleman who offered him his carriage in a shower, “But where will you ride, then?” — and what accusing silences, and what searching and irresistible speeches, battering down all defenses, his companions can remember!

Mr. Thoreau dedicated his genius with such en. tire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea. The river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. The result of the recent survey of the Water Commissioners appointed by the State of Massachusetts he had reached by his private experiments, several years earlier. Every fact which occurs in the bed, on the banks, or in the air over it; the fishes, and their spawning and nests, their manners, their food; the shad-flies which fill the air on a certain evening once a year, and which are snapped at by the fishes so ravenously that many of these die of repletion; the conical heaps of small stones on the river-shallows, the huge nests of small fishes, one of which will sometimes overfill a cart; the birds which frequent the stream, heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey; the snake, muskrat, otter, woodchuck and fox, on the banks; the turtle, frog, hyla and cricket, which make the banks vocal, — were all known to him, and, as it were, townsmen and fellow-creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of its dimensions on an inch-rule, or in the exhibition of its skeleton, or the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy. He liked to speak of the manners of the river, as itself a lawful creature, yet with exactness, and always to an observed fact. As he knew the river, so the ponds in this region.

One of the weapons he used, more important to him than microscope or alcohol-receiver to other investigators, was a whim which grew on him by indulgence, yet appeared in gravest statement, namely, of extolling his own town and neighborhood as the most favored centre for natural observation. He remarked that the Flora of Massachusetts embraced almost all the important plants of America, — most of the oaks, most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the nuts. He returned Kane’s “Arctic Voyage” to a friend of whom he had borrowed it, with the remark, that “Most of the phenomena noted might be observed in Concord.” He seemed a little envious of the Pole, for the coincident sunrise and sunset, or five minutes’ day after six months: a splendid fact, which Annursnuc had never afforded him. He found red snow in one of his walks, and told me that he expected to find yet the Victoria regia in Concord. He was the attorney of the indigenous plants, and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants as of the Indian to the civilized man, and noticed, with pleasure, that the willow bean-poles his neighbor had grown more than his beans, “See these weeds,” he said, “which have been hoed at by a million farmers all spring and summer, and yet have prevailed, and just now come out triumphant over all lanes, pastures, fields and gardens, such is their vigor. We have insulted them with low names, too, — as Pigweed, Wormwood, Chick-weed, Shad-blossom.” He says, “They have brave names, too, — Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth, etc.”

I think his fancy for referring everything to the meridian of Concord did not grow out of any ignorance or depreciation of other longitudes or latitudes, but was rather a playful expression of his conviction of the indifferency of all places, and that the best place for each is where he stands. He expressed it once in this wise:— “I think nothing is to be hoped from you, if this bit of mould under your feet is not sweeter to you to eat than any other in this world, or in any world.”

The other weapon with which he conquered all obstacles in science was patience. He knew how to sit immovable, a part of the rock he rested on, until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits, nay, moved by curiosity, should come to him and watch him.

It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great. Under his arm he carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket, his diary and pencil, a spy-glass for birds, microscope, jack-knife, and twine. He wore a straw hat, stout shoes, strong gray trousers, to brave scrub-oaks and smilax, and to climb a tree for a hawk’s or a squirrel’s nest. He waded into the pool for the water-plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. On the day I speak of he looked for the Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. The redstart was flying about, and presently the fine grosbeaks, whose brilliant scarlet “makes the rash gazer wipe his eye,” and whose fine clear note Thoreau compared to that of a tanager which has got rid of its hoarseness. Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird which sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You. seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”

His interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind, was connected with Nature, — and the meaning of Nature was never attempted to be defined by him. He would not offer a memoir of his observations to the Natural History Society, “Why should I? To detach the description from its connections in my mind would make it no longer true or valuable to me: and they do not wish what belongs to it.” His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a type of the order and beauty of the whole.

His determination on Natural History was organic. He confessed that lie sometimes felt like a hound or a panther, and, if horn among Indians, would have been a fell hunter. But, restrained by his Massachusetts culture, he played out the game in this mild form of botany and ichthyology. His intimacy with animals suggested what Thomas Puller records of Butler the apiologist, that “either he had told the bees things or the bees had told him.” Snakes coiled round his leg; the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters. Our naturalist had perfect magnanimity; he had no secrets: he would carry you to the heron’s haunt, or even to his most prized botanical swamp, — possibly knowing that you could never find it again, yet willing to take his risks.

No college ever offered him a diploma, or a professor’s chair; no academy made him its corresponding secretary, its discoverer, or even its member. Perhaps these learned bodies feared the satire of his presence. Yet so much knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed; none in a more large and religious synthesis. For not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself; and as he discovered everywhere among doctors some leaning of courtesy, it discredited them. He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a surveyor [oon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian remains and the like, which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to feel a little as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all men with a native authority,

Indian relics abound in Concord, — arrow-heads, stone chisels, pestles, and fragments of pottery; and on the river-bank, large heaps of clam-shells and ashes mark spots which the savages frequented. These, and every circumstance touching the Indian, were important in his eyes. His visits to Maine were chiefly for love of the Indian. He had the satisfaction of seeing the manufacture of the bark-canoe, as well as of trying his hand in its management on the rapids. He was inquisitive about the making of the stone arrow-head, and in his last days charged a youth setting out for the Rocky Mountains to find an Indian who could tell him that: “It was well worth a visit to California to learn it” Occasionally, a small party of Penobscot Indians would visit Concord, and pitch their tents for a few weeks in summer on the river-bank. He failed not to make acquaintance with the best of them; though he well knew that asking questions of Indians is like catechizing beavers and rabbits. In his last visit to Maine he had great satisfaction from Joseph Polis, an intelligent Indian of Oldtown, who was his guide for some weeks.

He was equally interested in every natural fact. The depth of his perception found likeness of law throughout Nature, and I know not any genius who so swiftly inferred universal law from the single fact. He was no pedant of a department. His eye was open to beauty, and his ear to music. He found these, not in rare conditions, but wheresoever he went. He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph-wire.

His poetry might be bad or good; he no doubt wanted a lyric facility and technical skill, but he had the source of poetry in his spiritual perception. He was a good reader and critic, and his judgment on poetry was to the ground of it. He could not be deceived as to the presence or absence of the poetic element in any composition, and his thirst for this made him negligent and perhaps scornful of superficial graces. He would pass by many delicate rhythms, but he would have detected every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm in prose. He was so enamored of the spiritual beauty that he held all actual written poems in very light esteem in the comparison. He admired Æschylus and Pindar; but, when some one was commending them, he said that Æschylus and the Greeks, in describing Apollo and Orpheus, had given no song, or no good one. “They ought not to have moved trees, but to have chanted to the gods such a hymn as would have sung all their old ideas out of their heads, and new ones in.” His own verses are often rude and defective. The gold does not yet run pure, is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey. But if he want lyric fineness and technical merits, if he have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent. He knew the worth of the Imagination for the uplifting and consolation of human life, and liked to throw every thought into a symbol. The fact you tell is of no value, but only the impression. For this reason his presence was poetic, always piqued the curiosity to know more deeply the secrets of his mind. He had many reserves, an unwillingness to exhibit to profane eyes what was still sacred in his own, and knew well how to throw a poetic veil over his experience. All readers of “Walden” will remember his mythical record of his disappointments: —

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who have heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.” [Walden: p. 20.]

His riddles were worth the reading, and I confide that if at any time I do not understand the expression, it is yet just. Such was the wealth of his truth that it was not worth his while to use words in vain. His poem entitled “Sympathy” reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtility it could animate. His classic poem on “Smoke” suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides. His biography is in his verses. His habitual thought makes all his poetry a hymn to the Cause of causes, the Spirit which vivifies and controls his own: —

“I hearing get, who had but ears,

And sight, who had but eyes before;

I moments live, who lived but years,

And truth discern, who knew but learning’s lore.”

And still more in these religious lines: —

“Now chiefly is my natal hour,

And only now my prime of life;

I will not doubt the love untold,

Which not my worth nor want have bought,

Which wooed me young, and wooes me old,

And to this evening hath me brought.”

Whilst he used in his writings a certain petulance of remark in reference to churches or churchmen, he was a person of a rare, tender and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought. Of course, the same isolation which belonged to his original thinking and living detached him from the social religious forms. This is neither to be censured nor regretted. Aristotle long ago explained it, when he said, “One who surpasses his fellow-citizens in virtue is no longer a part of the city. Their law is not for him, since he is a law to himself.”

Thoreau was sincerity itself, and might fortify the convictions of prophets in the ethical laws by his holy living. It was an affirmative experience which refused to be set aside. A truth-speaker he, capable of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet, and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind.

His virtues, of course, sometimes ran into extremes. It was easy to trace to the inexorable demand on all for exact truth that austerity which made this willing hermit more solitary even than he wished. Himself of a perfect probity, he required not less of others. He had a disgust at crime, and no worldly success would cover it. He detected paltering as readily in dignified and prosperous persons as in beggars, and with equal scorn. Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers called him “that terrible Thoreau,” as if he spoke when silent, and was still present when he had departed. I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.

The habit of a realist to find things the reverse of their appearance inclined him to put every statement in a paradox. A certain habit of antagonism defaced his earlier writings, — a trick of rhetoric not quite outgrown in his later, of substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite. He praised wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air, in snow and ice he would find sultriness, and commended the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. “It was so dry, that you might call it wet.”

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher’s perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. Though he meant to be just, he seemed haunted by a certain chronic assumption that the science of the day pretended completeness, and he had just found out that the savans had neglected to discriminate a particular botanical variety, had failed to describe the seeds or count the sepals. “That is to say,” we replied, “the blockheads were not born in Concord;, but who said they were? It was their unspeakable misfortune to be born in London, or Paris, or Rome; but, poor fellows, they did what they could, considering that they never saw Bateman’s Pond, or Nine-Acre Corner, or Becky Stow’s Swamp; besides, what were you sent into the world for, but to add this observation?”

Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!

But these foibles, real or apparent, were fast vanishing in the incessant growth of a spirit so robust and wise, and which effaced its defeats with new triumphs. His study of Nature was a perpetual ornament to him, and inspired his friends with curiosity to see the world through his eyes, and to hear his adventures. They possessed every kind of interest.

He had many elegancies of his own, whilst he scoffed at conventional elegance. Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. His senses were acute, and he remarked that by night every dwelling-house gives out bad air, like a slaughter-house. He liked the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond-lily, — then, the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and “life-everlasting,” and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight, — more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what is concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. He loved Nature so well, was so happy in her solitude, that he became very jealous of cities and the sad work which their refinements and artifices made with man and his dwelling. The axe was always destroying his forest. “Thank God,” he said, “they cannot cut down the clouds!” “All kinds of figures are drawn on the blue ground with this fibrous white paint.”

I subjoin a few sentences taken from his unpublished manuscripts, not only as records of his thought and feeling, but for their power of description and literary excellence: —

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

“The chub is a soft fish, and tastes like boiled brown paper salted.”

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.”

“The locust z-ing.”

“Devil’s - needles zigzagging along the Nut-Meadow brook.”

“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.”

“I put on some hemlock-boughs, and the rich salt crackling of their leaves was like mustard to the ear, the crackling of uncountable regiments. Dead trees love the fire.”

“The bluebird carries the sky on his back.”

“The tanager flies through the green foliage as if it would ignite the leaves.”

“If I wish for a horse-hair for my compass-sight I must go to the stable; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to the road.”

“Immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”

“Fire is the most tolerable third party.”

“Nature made ferns for pure leaves, to show what she could do in that line.”

“No tree has so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech.”

“How did these beautiful rainbow-tints get into the shell of the fresh-water clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark river?”

“Hard are the times when the infant’s shoes are second-foot.”

“We are strictly confined to our men to whom we give liberty.”

“Nothing is so much to be feared as fear. Atheism may comparatively be popular with God himself.”

“Of what significance the things you can forget? A little thought is sexton to all the world.”

“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?”

“Only he can be trusted with gifts who can present a face of bronze to expectations.”

“I ask to be melted. You can only ask of the metals that they be tender to the fire that melts them. To nought else can they be tender.”

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called “Life-Everlasting,” a Gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens), climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweisse, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he has been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.

CARLYLE.

Hold with the Maker, not the Made,

Sit with the Cause, or grim or glad.

[From a letter written soon after Mr. Emerson’s visit to Carlyle in 1848. Read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at their meeting after the death of Carlyle, February, 1881. Published in their Proceedings, and also in “Scribner’s Magazine,” May, 1881.]

Thomas Carlyle is an immense talker, as extraordinary in his conversation as in his writing, — I think even more so.

He is not mainly a scholar, like the most of my acquaintances, but a practical Scotchman, such as you would find in any saddler’s or iron-dealer’s shop, and then only accidentally and by a surprising addition, the admirable scholar and writer he is. If you would know precisely how he talks, just suppose Hugh Whelan (the gardener) had found leisure enough in addition to all his daily work to read Plato and Shakspeare, Augustine and Calvin, and, remaining Hugh Whelan all the time, should talk scornfully of all this nonsense of books that he had been bothered with, and you shall have just the tone and talk and laughter of Carlyle. I called him a trip-hammer with “an Æolian attachment.”

He has, too, the strong religious tinge you sometimes find in burly people. That, and all his qualities, have a certain virulence, coupled though it be in his case with the utmost impatience of Christendom and Jewdom and all existing presentments of the good old story. He talks like a very unhappy man, — profoundly solitary, displeased and hindered by all men and things about him, and, biding his time, meditating how to undermine and explode the whole world of nonsense which torments him. He is obviously greatly respected by all sorts of people, understands his own value quite as well as Webster, of whom his behavior sometimes reminds me, and can see society on his own terms.

And, though no mortal in America could pretend to talk with Carlyle, who is also as remarkable in England as the Tower of London, yet neither would he in any manner satisfy us (Americans), or begin to answer the questions which we ask. He is a very national figure, and would by no means bear transplantation. They keep Carlyle as a sort of portable cathedral-bell, which they like to produce in companies where he is unknown, and set a-swinging, to the surprise and consternation of all persons, — bishops, courtiers, scholars, writers, — and, as in companies here (in England) no man is named or introduced, great is the effect and great the inquiry Forster of Rawdon described to me a dinner at the table d’ hôte of some provincial hotel where he carried Carlyle, and where an Irish canon had uttered something. Carlyle began to talk, first to the waiters, and then to the walls, and then, lastly, unmistakably to the priest, in a manner that frightened the whole company.

Young men, especially those holding liberal opinions, press to see him, but it strikes me like being hot to see the mathematical or Greek professor before they have got their lesson. It needs something more than a clean shirt and reading German to visit him. He treats them with contempt; they profess freedom and he stands for slavery; they praise republics and he likes the Russian Czar; they admire Cobden and free trade and he is a protectionist in political economy; they will eat vegetables and drink water, and he is a Scotchman who thinks English national character has a pure enthusiasm for beef and mutton, — describes with gusto the crowds of people who gaze at the sirloins in the dealer’s shop-window, and even likes the Scotch night-cap; they praise moral suasion, he goes for murder, money, capital punishment, and other pretty abominations of English law. They wish freedom of the press, and he thinks the first thing he would do, if he got into Parliament, would be to turn out the reporters, and stop all manner of mischievous speaking to Buncombe, and wind-bags. “In the Long Parliament,” he says, “the only great Parliament, they sat secret and silent, grave as an ecumenical council, and I know not what they would have done to anybody that had got in there and attempted to tell out of doors what they did.” They go for free institutions, for letting things alone, and only giving opportunity and motive to every man; he for a stringent government, that shows people what they must do, and makes them do it. “Here,” he says, “the Parliament gathers up six millions of pounds every year to give to the poor, and yet the people starve. I think if they would give it to me, to provide the poor with labor, and with authority to make them work or shoot them, — and I to be hanged if I did not do it, — I could find them in plenty of Indian meal.”

He throws himself readily on the other side. If you urge free trade, he remembers that every laborer is a monopolist. The navigation laws of England made its commerce. “St. John was insulted by the Dutch; he came home, got the law passed that foreign vessels should pay high fees, and it out the throat of the Dutch, and made the English trade.” If you boast of the growth of the country, and show him the wonderful results of the census, he finds nothing so depressing as the sight of a great mob. He saw once, as he told me, three or four miles of human beings, and fancied that “the airth was some great cheese, and these were mites.” If a tory takes heart at his hatred of stump-oratory and model republics, he replies, “Yes, the idea of a pig-headed soldier who will obey orders, and fire on his own father at the command of his officer, is a great comfort to the aristocratic mind.” It is not so much that Carlyle cares for this or that dogma, as that he likes genuineness (the source of all strength) in his companions.

If a scholar goes into a camp of lumbermen or a gang of riggers, those men will quickly detect any fault of character. Nothing will pass with them but what is real and sound. So this man is a hammer that crushes mediocrity and pretension. He detects weakness on the instant, and touches it. He has a vivacious, aggressive temperament, and unimpressionable. The literary, the fashionable, the political man, each fresh from triumphs in his own sphere, comes eagerly to see this man, whose fun they have heartily enjoyed, sure of a welcome, and are struck with despair at the first onset. His firm, victorious, scoffing vituperation strikes them with chill and hesitation. His talk often reminds you of what was said of Johnson: “If his pistol missed fire he would knock you down with the butt-end.”

Mere intellectual partisanship wearies him; he detects in an instant if a man stands for any cause to which he is not born and organically committed. A natural defender of anything, a lover who will live and die for that which he speaks for, and who does not care for him or for anything but his own business, he respects; and the nobler this object, of course, the better. He hates a literary trifler, and if, after Guizot had been a tool of Louis Philippe for years, he is now to come and write essays on the character of Washington, on “The Beautiful,” and on “Philosophy of History,” he thinks that nothing.

Great is his reverence for realities, — for all such traits as spring from the intrinsic nature of the actor. He humors this into the idolatry of strength. A strong nature has a charm for him, previous, it would seem, to all inquiry whether the force be divine or diabolic. He preaches, as by cannonade, the doctrine that every noble nature was made by God, and contains, if savage passions, also fit checks and grand impulses, and, however extravagant, will keep its orbit and return from far.

Nor can that decorum which is the idol of the Englishman, and in attaining which the Englishman exceeds all nations, win from him any obeisance. He is eaten up with indignation against such as desire to make a fair show in the flesh.

Combined with this warfare on respectabilities, and, indeed, pointing all his satire, is the severity of his moral sentiment. In proportion to the peals of laughter amid which he strips the plumes of a pretender and shows the lean hypocrisy to every vantage of ridicule, does he worship whatever enthusiasm, fortitude, love, or other sign of a good nature is in a man.

There is nothing deeper in his constitution than his humor, than the considerate, condescending good-nature with which he looks at every object in existence, as a man might look at a mouse. He feels that the perfection of health is sportiveness, and will not look grave even at dullness or tragedy.

His guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; but that is a truth of character, not of catechisms. He says, “There is properly no religion in England. These idle nobles at Tattersall’s — there is no work or word of serious purpose in them; they have this great lying Church; and life is a humbug.” He prefers Cambridge to Oxford, but he thinks Oxford and Cambridge education indurates the young men, as the Styx hardened Achilles, so that when they come forth of them, they say, “Now we are proof; we have gone through all the degrees, and are case-hardened against the veracities of the Universe; nor man nor God can penetrate us.”

Wellington he respects as real and honest, and as having made up his mind, once for all, that he will not have to do with any kind of a lie. Edwin Chadwick is one of his heroes, — who proposes to provide every house in London with pure water, sixty gallons to every head, at a penny a week; and in the decay and downfall of all religions, Carlyle thinks that the only religious act which a man nowadays can securely perform is to wash himself well.

Of course the new French revolution of 1848 was the best thing he had seen, and the teaching this great swindler, Louis Philippe, that there is a God’s justice in the Universe, after all, was a great satisfaction. Czar Nicholas was his hero; for in the ignominy of Europe, when all thrones fell like card-houses, and no man was found with conscience enough to fire a gun for his crown, but every one ran away in a coucou, with his head shaved, through the Barrière de Passy, one man remained who believed he was put there by God Almighty to govern his empire, and, by the help of God, had resolved to stand there.

He was very serious about the bad times; he had seen this evil coming, but thought it would not come in his time. But now’t is coming, and the only good he sees in it is the visible appearance of the gods. He thinks it the only question for wise men, instead of art and fine fancies and poetry and such things, to address themselves to the problem of society. This confusion is the inevitable end of such falsehoods and nonsense as they have been embroiled with.

Carlyle has, best of all men in England, kept the manly attitude in his time. He has stood for scholars, asking no scholar what he should say. Holding an honored place in the best society, he has stood for the people, for the Chartist, for the pauper, intrepidly and scornfully teaching the nobles their peremptory duties.

His errors of opinion are as nothing in comparison with this merit, in my judgment. This aplomb cannot be mimicked; it is the speaking to the heart of the thing. And in England, where the morgue of aristocracy has very slowly admitted scholars into society, — a very few houses only in the high circles being ever opened to them, — he has carried himself erect, made himself a power confessed by all men, and taught scholars their lofty duty. He never feared the face of man.

GEORGE L. STEARNS.

“Who, when great trials come,

Nor seeks nor shunnes them; but doth calmly stay

Till he the thing and the example weigh:

All being brought into a summe

What place or person calls for he doth pay.”

George Herbert.

 [Mr. Emerson paid this tribute to the nobility of character, and eminent services to the republic, of his friend, Major George L. Stearns, at his funeral at Medford, on the 18th of April, 1867.]

We do not know how to prize good men until they depart. High virtue has such an air of nature and necessity that to thank its possessor would be to praise the water for flowing or the fire for warming us. But, on the instant of their death, we wonder at our past insensibility, when we see how impossible it is to replace them. There will be other good men, but not these again. And the painful surprise which the last week brought us, in the tidings of the death of Mr. Stearns, opened all eyes to the just consideration of the singular merits of the citizen, the neighbor, the friend, the father, and the husband, whom this assembly mourns. We recall the all but exclusive devotion of this excellent man during the last twelve years to public and patriotic interests. Known until that time in no very wide circle as a man of skill and perseverance in his business; of pure life; of retiring and affectionate habits; happy in his domestic relations, — his extreme interest in the national politics, then growing more anxious year by year, engaged him to scan the fortunes of freedom with keener attention. He was an early laborer in the resistance to slavery. This brought him into sympathy with the people of Kansas. As early as 1855 the Emigrant Aid Society was formed; and in 1856 he organized the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee, by means of which a large amount of money was obtained for the “free-State men,” at times of the greatest need. He was the more engaged to this cause by making in 1857 the acquaintance of Captain John Brown, who was not only an extraordinary man, but one who had a rare magnetism for men of character, and attached some of the best and noblest to him, on very short acquaintance, by lasting ties. Mr. Stearns made himself at once necessary to Captain Brown as one who respected his inspirations, and had the magnanimity to trust him entirely, and to arm his hands with all needed help.

For the relief of Kansas, in 1856-57, his own contributions were the largest and the first. He never asked any one to give so much as he himself gave, and his interest was so manifestly pure and sincere that he easily obtained eager offerings in quarters where other petitioners failed. He did not hesitate to become the banker of his clients, and to furnish them money and arms in advance of the subscriptions which he obtained. His first donations were only entering-wedges of his later; and, unlike other benefactors, he did not give money to excuse his entire preoccupation in his own pursuits, but as an earnest of the dedication of his heart and hand to the interests of the sufferers, — a pledge kept until the success he wrought and prayed for was consummated. In 1862, on the President’s first or preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation, he took the first steps for organizing the Freedman’s Bureau, — a department which has since grown to great proportions. In 1863 he began to recruit colored soldiers in Buffalo, then at Philadelphia and Nashville. But these were only parts of his work. He passed his time in incessant consultation with all men whom he could reach, to suggest and urge the measures needed for the hour. And there are few men with real or supposed influence, North or South, with whom he has not at some time communicated. Every important patriotic measure in this region has had his sympathy, and of many he has been the prime mover. He gave to each his strong support, but uniformly shunned to appear in public. For himself or his friends he asked no reward; for himself, he asked only to do the hard work. His transparent singleness of purpose, his freedom from all by-ends, his plain good sense, courage, adherence, and his romantic generosity disarmed, first or last, all gainsayers. His examination before the United States Senate Committee on the Harper’s Ferry Invasion, in January, 1860, as reported in the public documents, is a chapter well worth reading, as a shining example of the manner in which a truth-speaker baffles all statecraft, and extorts at last a reluctant homage from the bitterest adversaries.

I have heard, what must be true, that he had great executive skill, a clear method, and a just attention to all the details of the task in hand. Plainly he was no boaster or pretender, but a man for up-hill work, a soldier to bide the brunt; a man whom disasters, which dishearten other men, only stimulated to new courage and endeavor.

I have heard something of his quick temper, that he was indignant at this or that man’s behavior, but never that his anger outlasted for a moment the mischief done or threatened to the good cause, or ever stood in the way of his hearty coöperation with the offenders when they returned to the path of public duty. I look upon him as a type of the American republican. A man of the people, in strictly private life, girt with family ties; an active and intelligent manufacturer and merchant, enlightened, enough to see a citizen’s interest in the public affairs, and virtuous enough to obey to the uttermost the truth he saw, — he became, in the most natural manner, an indispensable power in the state. Without such vital support as he, and such as he, brought to the government, where would that government be? When one remembers his incessant service; his journeys and residences in many States; the societies he worked with; the councils in which he sat; the wide correspondence, presently enlarged by printed circulars, then by newspapers established wholly or partly at his own cost; the useful suggestions; the celerity with which his purpose took form; and his immovable convictions, — I think this single will was worth to the cause ten thousand ordinary partisans, well-disposed enough, but of feebler and interrupted action.

These interests, which he passionately adopted, inevitably led him into personal communication with patriotic persons holding the same views, — with two Presidents, with members of Congress, with officers of the government and of the army, and with leading people everywhere. He had been always a man of simple tastes, and through all his years devoted to the growing details of his prospering manufactory. But this sudden association now with the leaders of parties and persons of pronounced power and influence in the nation, and the broad hospitality which brought them about his board at his own house or in New York, or in Washington, never altered one feature of his face, one trait of his manners. There he sat in the council, a simple, resolute Republican, an enthusiast only in his love of freedom and the good of men; with no pride of opinion, and with this distinction, that, if he could not bring his associates to adopt his measure, he accepted, with entire sweetness the next best measure which could secure their assent. But these public benefits were purchased at a severe cost. For a year or two, the most affectionate and domestic of men became almost a stranger in his beautiful home. And it was too plain that the excessive toil and anxieties, into which his ardent spirit led him, overtasked his strength and wore out prematurely his constitution. It is sad that such a life should end prematurely; but when I consider that he lived long enough to see with his own eyes the salvation of his country, to which he had given all his heart; that he did not know an idle day; was never called to suffer under the decays and loss of his powers, or to see that others were waiting for his place and privilege, but lived while he lived, and beheld his work prosper for the joy and benefit of all mankind, — I count him happy among men.

Almost I am ready to say to these mourners, Be not too proud in your grief, when you remember that there is not a town in the remote State of Kansas that will not weep with you as at the loss of its founder; not a Southern State in which the freedmen will not learn to-day from their preachers that one of their most efficient benefactors has departed, and will cover his memory with benedictions; and that, after all his efforts to serve men without appearing to do so, there is hardly a man in this country worth knowing who does not hold his name in exceptional honor. And there is to my mind somewhat so absolute in the action of a good man that we do not, in thinking of him, so much as make any question of the future. For the Spirit of the Universe seems to say: “He has done well; is not that saying all?”

MISCELLANIES

CONTENTS

THE LORD’S SUPPER.

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE, AT CONCORD

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD APRIL 19TH, 1867.

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CONCORD ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, AUGUST 1, 1844.

WAR.

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.

THE ASSAULT UPON MR. SUMNER.

SPEECH AT THE KANSAS RELIEF MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE, WEDNESDAY. EVENING, SEPTEMBER 10, 1856.

JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT BOSTON.

JOHN BROWN. SPEECH AT SALEM, JANUARY 6,

THEODORE PARKER.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH. JULY 21, 1865.

EDITORS’ ADDRESS.

WOMAN.

ADDRESS TO KOSSUTH.

ROBERT BURNS.

WALTER SCOTT.

REMARKS AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION.

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT TEMPLE, FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869.

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC.

Emerson, 1858

THE LORD’S SUPPER.

SERMON DELIVERED BEFORE THE SECOND CHURCH IN BOSTON SEPTEMBER 9, 1832

The Kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. — Romans xiv. 17.

In the history of the Church no subject has been more fruitful of controversy than the Lord’s Supper. There never has been any unanimity in the understanding of its nature, nor any uniformity in the mode of celebrating it. Without considering the frivolous questions which have been lately debated as to the posture in which men should partake of it; whether mixed or unmixed wine should be served; whether leavened or unleavened bread should be broken; — the questions have been settled differently in every church, who should be admitted to the feast, and how often it should be prepared. In the Catholic Church, infants were at one time permitted and then forbidden to partake; and, since the ninth century, the laity receive the bread only, the cup being reserved to the priesthood. So, as to the time of the solemnity. In the Fourth Lateran Council, it was decreed that any believer should communicate at least once in a year, — at Easter. Afterwards it was determined that this Sacrament should be received three times in the year, — at Easter, Whitsuntide and Christmas. But more important controversies have arisen respecting its nature. The famous question of the Real Presence was the main controversy between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. The doctrine of the Consubstantiation taught by Luther was denied by Calvin. In the Church of England, Archbishops Laud and Wake maintained that the elements were an Eucharist, or sacrifice of Thanksgiving to God; Cudworth and Warburton, that this was not a sacrifice, but a sacrificial feast; and Bishop Hoadley, that it was neither a sacrifice nor a feast after sacrifice, but a simple commemoration. And finally, it is now near two hundred years since the Society of Quakers denied the authority of the rite altogether, and gave good reasons for disusing it.

I allude to these facts only to show that, so far from the supper being a tradition in which men are fully agreed, there has always been the widest room for difference of opinion upon this particular. Having recently given particular attention to this subject, I was led to the conclusion that Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples; and, further, to the opinion, that it is not expedient to celebrate it as we do. I shall now endeavor to state distinctly my reasons for these two opinions.

I. The authority of the rite.

An account of the last supper of Christ with his disciples is given by the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Matt. xxvi. 26-30) are recorded the words of Jesus in giving bread and wine on that occasion to his disciples, but no expression occurs intimating that this feast was here-after to be commemorated. In St. Mark (Mark xiv. 22-25) the same words are recorded, and still with no intimation that the occasion was to be remembered. St. Luke (Luke xxii. 19), after relating the breaking of the bread, has these words: “This do in remembrance of me.” In St. John, although other occurrences of the same evening are related, this whole transaction is passed over without notice.

Now observe the facts. Two of the Evangelists, namely, Matthew and John, were of the twelve disciples, and were present on that occasion. Neither of them drops the slightest intimation of any intention on the part of Jesus to set up anything permanent. John especially, the beloved disciple, who has recorded with minuteness the conversation and the transactions of that memorable evening, has quite omitted such a notice. Neither does it appear to have come to the knowledge of Mark, who, though not an eye-witness, relates the other facts. This material fact, that the occasion was to be remembered, is found in Luke alone, who was not present. There is no reason, however, that we know, for rejecting the account of Luke. I doubt not, the expression was used by Jesus. I shall presently consider its meaning. I have only brought these accounts together, that you may judge whether it is likely that a solemn institution, to be continued to the end of time by all mankind, as they should come, nation after nation, within the influence of the Christian religion, would have been established in this slight manner — in a manner so slight, that the intention of commemorating it should not appear, from their narrative, to have caught the ear or dwelt in the mind of the only two among the twelve who wrote down what happened.

Still we must suppose that the expression, “This do in remembrance of me,” had come to the ear of Luke from some disciple who was present. What did it really signify? It is a prophetic and an affectionate expression. Jesus is a Jew, sitting with his countrymen, celebrating their national feast. He thinks of his own impending death, and wishes the minds of his disciples to be prepared for it. “When hereafter,” he says to them, “you shall keep the Passover, it will have an altered aspect to your eyes. It is now a historical covenant of God with the Jewish nation. Hereafter it will remind you of a new covenant sealed with my blood. In years to come, as long as your people shall come up to Jerusalem to keep this feast, the connection which has subsisted between us will give a new meaning in your eyes to the national festival, as the anniversary of my death.” I see natural feeling and beauty in the use of such language from Jesus, a friend to his friends; I can readily imagine that he was willing and desirous, when his disciples met, his memory should hallow their intercourse; but I cannot bring myself to believe that in the use of such an expression he looked beyond the living generation, beyond the abolition of the festival he was celebrating, and the scattering of the nation, and meant to impose a memorial feast upon the whole world.

Without presuming to fix precisely the purpose in the mind of Jesus, you will see that many opinions may be entertained of his intention, all consistent with the opinion that he did not design a perpetual ordinance. He may have foreseen that his disciples would meet to remember him, and that with good effect. It may have crossed his mind that this would be easily continued a hundred or a thousand years, — as men more easily transmit a form than a virtue, — and yet have been altogether out of his purpose to fasten it upon men in all times and all countries.

But though the words, “Do this in remembrance of me,” do not occur in Matthew, Mark or John, and although it should be granted us that, taken alone, they do not necessarily import so much as is usually thought, yet many persons are apt to imagine that the very striking and personal manner in which the eating and drinking is described, indicates a striking and formal purpose to found a festival. And I admit that this impression might probably be left upon the mind of one who read only the passages under consideration in the New Testament. But this impression is removed by reading any narrative of the mode in which the ancient or the modern Jews have kept the Passover. It is then perceived that the leading circumstances in the Gospels are only a faithful account of that ceremony. Jesus did not celebrate the Passover, and afterwards the Supper, but the Supper was the Passover. He did with his disciples exactly what every master of a family in Jerusalem was doing at the same hour with his household. It appears that the Jews ate the lamb and the unleavened bread and drank wine after a prescribed manner. It was the custom for the master of the feast to break the bread and to bless it, using this formula, which the Talmudists have preserved to us, “Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God, who givest us the fruit of the vine,” — and then to give the cup to all. Among the modern Jews, who in their dispersion retain the Passover, a hymn is also sung after this ceremony, specifying the twelve great works done by God for the deliverance of their fathers out of Egypt.

But still it may be asked, Why did Jesus make expressions so extraordinary and emphatic as these— “This is my body which is broken for you. Take; eat. This is my blood which is shed for you. Drink it”? — I reply they are not extraordinary expressions from him. They were familiar in his mouth. He always taught by parables and symbols. It was the national way of teaching, and was largely used by him. Remember the readiness which he always showed to spiritualize every occurrence. He stopped and wrote on the sand. He admonished his disciples respecting the leaven of the Pharisees. He instructed the woman of Samaria respecting living water. He permitted himself to be anointed, declaring that it was for his interment. He washed the feet of his disciples. These are admitted to be symbolical actions and expressions. Here, in like manner, he calls the bread his body, and bids the disciples eat. He had used the same expression repeatedly before. The reason why St. John does not repeat his words on this occasion, seems to be that he had reported a similar discourse of Jesus to the people of Capernaum more at length already (John vi. 27-60.) He there tells the Jews, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” And when the Jews on that occasion complained that they did not comprehend what he meant, he added for their better understanding, and as if for our understanding, that we might not think his body was to be actually eaten, that he only meant we should live by his commandment. He closed his discourse with these explanatory expressions: “The flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life.”

Whilst I am upon this topic, I cannot help remarking that it is not a little singular that we should have preserved this rite and insisted upon perpetuating one symbolical act of Christ whilst we have totally neglected all others, — particularly one other which had at least an equal claim to our observance. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and told them that, as he had washed their feet they ought to wash one another’s feet; for he had given them an example, that they should do as he had done to them. I ask any person who believes the Supper to have been designed by Jesus to be commemorated forever, to go and read the account of it in the other Gospels, and then compare with it the account of this transaction in St. John, and tell me if this be not much more explicitly authorized than the Supper. It only differs in this, that we have found the Supper used in New England and the washing of the feet not. But if we had found it an established rite in our churches, on grounds of mere authority, it would have been impossible to have argued against it. That rite is used by the Church of Rome, and by the Sandemanians. It has been very properly dropped by other Christians. Why? For two reasons: (1) because it was a local custom, and unsuitable in western countries; and (2) because it was typical, and all understood that humility is the thing signified. But the Passover was local too, and does not concern us, and its bread and wine were typical, and do not help us to understand the redemption which they signified. These views of the original account of the Lord’s Supper lead me to esteem it an occasion full of solemn and prophetic interest, but never intended by Jesus to be the foundation of a perpetual institution.

It appears however in Christian history that the disciples had very early taken advantage of these impressive words of Christ to hold religious meetings, where they broke bread and drank wine as symbols. I look upon this fact as very natural in the circumstances of the Church. The disciples lived together; they threw all their property into a common stock; they were bound together by the memory of Christ, and nothing could be more natural than that this eventful evening should be affectionately remembered by them; that they, Jews like Jesus, should adopt his expressions and his types, and furthermore, that what was done with peculiar propriety by them, his personal friends, with less propriety should come to be extended to their companions also. In this way religious feasts grew up among the early Christians. They were readily adopted by the Jewish converts who were familiar with religious feasts, and also by the Pagan converts whose idolatrous worship had been made up of sacred festivals, and who very readily abused these to gross riot, as appears from the censures of St. Paul. Many persons consider this fact, the observance of such a memorial feast by the early disciples, decisive of the question whether it ought to be observed by us. There was good reason for his personal friends to remember their friend and repeat his words. It was only too probable that among the half converted Pagans and Jews, any rite, any form, would find favor, whilst yet unable to comprehend the spiritual character of Christianity.

The circumstance, however, that St. Paul adopts these views, has seemed to many persons conclusive in favor of the institution. I am of opinion that it is wholly upon the epistle to the Corinthians, and not upon the Gospels, that the ordinance stands. Upon this matter of St. Paul’s view of the Supper, a few important considerations must be stated.

The end which he has in view, in the eleventh chapter of the first Epistle is not to enjoin upon his friends to observe the Supper, but to censure their abuse of it. We quote the passage nowadays as if it enjoined attendance upon the Supper; but he wrote it merely to chide them for drunkenness. To make their enormity plainer he goes back to the origin of this religious feast to show what sort of feast that was, out of which this riot of theirs came, and so relates the transactions of the Last Supper. “I have received of the Lord,” he says, “that which I delivered to you.” By this expression it is often thought that a miraculous communication is implied; but certainly without good reason, if it is remembered that St. Paul was living in the lifetime of all the apostles who could give him an account of the transaction; and it is contrary to all reason to suppose that God should work a miracle to convey information that could so easily be got by natural means. So that the import of the expression is that he had received the story of an eye-witness such as we also possess.

But there is a material circumstance which diminishes our confidence in the correctness of the Apostle’s view; and that is, the observation that his mind had not escaped the prevalent error of the primitive church, the belief, namely, that the second coming of Christ would shortly occur, until which time, he tells them, this feast was to be kept. Elsewhere he tells them that at that time the world would be burnt up with fire, and a new government established, in which the Saints would sit on thrones; so slow were the disciples during the life and after the ascension of Christ, to receive the idea which we receive, that his second coming was a spiritual kingdom, the dominion of his religion in the hearts of men, to be extended gradually over the whole world. In this manner we may see clearly enough how this ancient ordinance got its footing among the early Christians, and this single expectation of a speedy reappearance of a temporal Messiah, which kept its influence even over so spiritual a man as St. Paul, would naturally tend to preserve the use of the rite when once established.

We arrive then at this conclusion: first, that it does not appear, from a careful examination of the account of the Last Supper in the Evangelists, that it was designed by Jesus to be perpetual; secondly, that it does not appear that the opinion of St. Paul, all things considered, ought to alter our opinion derived from the Evangelists.

One general remark before quitting this branch of this subject. We ought to be cautious in taking even the best ascertained opinions and practices of the primitive church, for our own. If it could be satisfactorily shown that they esteemed it authorized and to be transmitted forever, that does not settle the question for us. We know how inveterately they were attached to their Jewish prejudices, and how often even the influence of Christ failed to enlarge their views. On every other subject succeeding times have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.

II. But it is said: “Admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual. What harm doth it? Here it stands, generally accepted, under some form, by the Christian world, the undoubted occasion of much good; is it not better it should remain?” This is the question of expediency.

I proceed to state a few objections that in my judgment lie against its use in its present form.

1. If the view which I have taken of the history of the institution be correct, then the claim of authority should be dropped in administering it. You say, every time you celebrate the rite, that Jesus enjoined it; and the whole language you use conveys that impression. But if you read the New Testament as I do, you do not believe he did.

2. It has seemed to me that the use of this ordinance tends to produce confusion in our views of the relation of the soul to God. It is the old objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, — that the true worship was transferred from God to Christ, or that such confusion was introduced into the soul that an undivided worship was given nowhere. Is not that the effect of the Lord’s Supper? I appeal now to the convictions of communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ. For the service does not stand upon the basis of a voluntary act, but is imposed by authority. It is an expression of gratitude to Christ, enjoined by Christ. There is an endeavor to keep Jesus in mind, whilst yet the prayers are addressed to God. I fear it is the effect of this ordinance to clothe Jesus with an authority which he never claimed and which distracts the mind of the worshipper. I know our opinions differ much respecting the nature and offices of Christ, and the degree of veneration to which he is entitled. I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind can admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being, goes to take away all right ideas. I appeal, brethren, to your individual experience. In the moment when you make the least petition to God, though it be but a silent wish that he may approve you, or add one moment to your life, — do you not, in the very act, necessarily exclude all other beings from your thought? In that act, the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or your child.

But is not Jesus called in Scripture the Mediator? He is the mediator in that only sense in which possibly any being can mediate between God and man, — that is, an instructor of man. He teaches us how to become like God. And a true disciple of Jesus will receive the light he gives most thankfully; but the thanks he offers, and which an exalted being will accept, are not compliments, commemorations, but the use of that instruction.

3. Passing other objections, I come to this, that the use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. Whatever long usage and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine no aid to devotion, and to some it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another.

The statement of this objection leads me to say that I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that he even contemplated making permanent this mode of commemoration, every way agreeable to an Eastern mind, and yet on trial it was disagreeable to my own feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.

4. The importance ascribed to this particular ordinance is not consistent with the spirit of Christianity. The general object and effect of the ordinance is unexceptionable. It has been, and is, I doubt not, the occasion of indefinite good; but an importance is given by Christians to it which never can belong to any form. My friends, the apostle well assures us that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to one form a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ. If I understand the distinction of Christianity, the reason why it is to be preferred over all other systems and is divine is this, that it is a moral system; that it presents men with truths which are their own reason, and enjoins practices that are their own justification; that if miracles may be said to have been its evidence to the first Christians, they are not its evidence to us, but the doctrines themselves; that every practice is Christian which praises itself, and every practice unchristian which condemns itself. I am not engaged to Christianity by decent forms, or saving ordinances; it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to it, — let these be the sandy foundations of falsehoods. What I revere and obey in it is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward. Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions then should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us.

And therefore, although for the satisfaction of others I have labored to show by the history that this rite was not intended to be perpetual; although I have gone back to weigh the expressions of Paul, I feel that here is the true point of view. In the midst of considerations as to what Paul thought, and why he so thought, I cannot help feeling that it is time misspent to argue to or from his convictions, or those of Luke and John, respecting any form. I seem to lose the substance in seeking the shadow. That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to this purpose; and now, with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance, — really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial? Is not this to make men, — to make ourselves, — forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the eye of God there is no other measure of the value of any one form than the measure of its use?

There remain some practical objections to the ordinance, into which I shall not now enter. There is one on which I had intended to say a few words; I mean the unfavorable relation in which it places that numerous class of persons who abstain from it merely from disinclination to the rite.

Influenced by these considerations, I have proposed to the brethren of the Church to drop the use of the elements and the claim of authority in the administration of this ordinance, and have suggested a mode in which a meeting for the same purpose might be held, free of objection.

My brethren have considered my views with patience and candor, and have recommended, unanimously, an adherence to the present form. I have therefore been compelled to consider whether it becomes me to administer it. I am clearly of opinion I ought not. This discourse has already been so far extended that I can only say that the reason of my determination is shortly this: — It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the end of the world, if it please men and please Heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces.

As it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community, that it is an indispensable part of the pastoral office to administer this ordinance, I am about to resign into your hands that office which you have confided to me. It has many duties for which I am feebly qualified. It has some which it will always be my delight to discharge according to my ability, wherever I exist. And whilst the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest functions.

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE, AT CONCORD

ON THE SECOND CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN, SEPTEMBER 12, 1835.

Fellow Citizens:

The town of Concord begins, this day, the third century of its history. By a common consent, the people of New England, for a few years past, as the second centennial anniversary of each of its early settlements arrived, have seen fit to observe the day. You have thought it becoming to commemorate the planting of the first inland town. The sentiment is just, and the practice is wise. Our ears shall not be deaf to the voice of time. We will review the deeds of our fathers, and pass that just verdict on them we expect from posterity on our own.

And yet, in the eternity of nature, how recent our antiquities appear! The imagination is impatient of a cycle so short. Who can tell how many thousand years, every day, the clouds have shaded these fields with their purple awning? The river, by whose banks most of us were born, every winter, for ages, has spread its crust of ice over the great meadows which, in ages, it had formed. But the little society of men who now, for a few years, fish in this river, plough the fields it washes, mow the grass and reap the corn, shortly shall hurry from its banks as did their forefathers. “Man’s life,” said the Witan to the Saxon king, “is the sparrow that enters at a window, flutters round the house, and flies out at another, and none knoweth whence he came, or whither he goes.” The more reason that we should give to our being what permanence we can; — that we should recall the Past, and expect the Future.

Yet the race survives whilst the individual dies. In the country, without any interference of the law, the agricultural life favors the permanence of families. Here are still around me the lineal descendants of the first settlers of this town. Here is Blood, Flint, Willard, Meriam, Wood, Hosmer, Barrett, Wheeler, Jones, Brown, Buttrick, Brooks, Stow, Hoar, Heywood, Hunt, Miles, — the names of the inhabitants for the first thirty years; and the family is in many cases represented, when the name is not. If the name of Bulkeley is wanting, the honor you have done me this day, in making me your organ, testifies your persevering kindness to his blood.

I shall not be expected, on this occasion, to repeat the details of that oppression which drove our fathers out hither. Yet the town of Concord was settled by a party of non-conformists, immediately from Great Britain. The best friend the Massachusetts colony had, though much against his will, was Archbishop Laud in England. In consequence of his famous proclamation setting up certain novelties in the rites of public worship, fifty godly ministers were suspended for contumacy, in the course of two years and a half. Hindered from speaking, some of these dared to print the reasons of their dissent, and were punished with imprisonment or mutilation.  1  This severity brought some of the best men in England to overcome that natural repugnance to emigration which holds the serious and moderate of every nation to their own soil. Among the silenced clergymen was a distinguished minister of Woodhill, in Bedfordshire, Rev. Peter Bulkeley, descended from a noble family, honored for his own virtues, his learning and gifts as a preacher, and adding to his influence the weight of a large estate.  2  Persecution readily knits friendship between its victims. Mr. Bulkeley having turned his estate into money and set his face towards New England, was easily able to persuade a good number of planters to join him. They arrived in Boston in 1634.  3  Probably there had been a previous correspondence with Governor Winthrop, and an agreement that they should settle at Musketaquid. With them joined Mr. Simon Willard, a merchant from Kent in England. They petitioned the General Court for a grant of a township, and on the 2d of September, 1635, corresponding in New Style to 12th September, two hundred years ago this day, leave to begin a plantation at Musketaquid was given to Peter Bulkeley, Simon Willard, and about twelve families more. A month later, Rev. John Jones and a large number of settlers destined for the new town arrived in Boston.  4

The grant of the General Court was but a preliminary step. The green meadows of Musketaquid or Grassy Brook were far up in the woods, not to be reached without a painful and dangerous journey through an uninterrupted wilderness. They could cross the Massachusetts or Charles river, by the ferry at Newtown; they could go up the river as far as Watertown. But the Indian paths leading up and down the country were a foot broad. They must then plunge into the thicket, and with their axes cut a road for their teams, with their women and children and their household stuff, forced to make long circuits too, to avoid hills and swamps. Edward Johnson of Woburn has described in an affecting narrative their labors by the way. “Sometimes passing through thickets where their hands are forced to make way for their bodies’ passage, and their feet clambering over the crossed trees, which when they missed, they sunk into an uncertain bottom in water, and wade up to their knees, tumbling sometimes higher, sometimes lower. At the end of this, they meet a scorching plain, yet not so plain but that the ragged bushes scratch their legs foully, even to wearing their stockings to their bare skin in two or three hours. Some of them, having no leggins, have had the blood trickle down at every step. And in time of summer, the sun casts such a reflecting heat from the sweet fern, whose scent is very strong, that some nearly fainted.” They slept on the rocks, wherever the night found them. Much time was lost in travelling they knew not whither, when the sun was hidden by clouds; for “their compass miscarried in crowding through the bushes,” and the Indian paths, once lost, they did not easily find.

Johnson, relating undoubtedly what he had himself heard from the pilgrims, intimates that they consumed many days in exploring the country, to select the best place for the town. Their first temporary accommodation was rude enough. “After they have found a place of abode, they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter, under a hill-side, and casting the soil aloft upon timbers, they make a fire against the earth, at the highest side. And thus these poor servants of Christ provide shelter for themselves, their wives and little ones, keeping off the short showers from their lodgings, but the long rains penetrate through, to their great disturbance in the night season. Yet in these poor wigwams they sing psalms, pray and praise their God, till they can provide them houses, which they could not ordinarily, till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought forth bread to feed them. This they attain with sore travail, every one that can lift a hoe to strike into the earth, standing stoutly to his labors, and tearing up the roots and bushes from the ground, which, the first year, yielded them a lean crop, till the sod of the earth was rotten, and therefore they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season. But the Lord is pleased to provide for them great store of fish in the spring time, and especially, alewives, about the bigness of a herring.”  5  These served them also for manure. For flesh, they looked not for any, in those times, unless they could barter with the Indians for venison and raccoons. “Indian corn, even the coarsest, made as pleasant meal as rice.”  6  All kinds of garden fruits grew well, “and let no man,” writes our pious chronicler, in another place, “make a jest of pumpkins, for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people until their corn and cattle were increased.”  7

The great cost of cattle, and the sickening of their cattle upon such wild fodder as was never cut before; the loss of their sheep and swine by wolves; the sufferings of the people in the great snows and cold soon following; and the fear of the Pequots; are the other disasters enumerated by the historian.

The hardships of the journey and of the first encampment, are certainly related by their contemporary with some air of romance, yet they can scarcely be exaggerated. A march of a number of families with their stuff, through twenty miles of unknown forest, from a little rising town that had not much to spare, to an Indian town in the wilderness that had nothing, must be laborious to all, and for those who were new to the country and bred in softness, a formidable adventure. But the pilgrims had the preparation of an armed mind, better than any hardihood of body. And the rough welcome which the new land gave them was a fit introduction to the life they must lead in it.

But what was their reception at Musketaquid? This was an old village of the Massachusetts Indians. Tahattawan, the Sachem, with Waban his son-in-law, lived near Nashawtuck, now Lee’s Hill.  8  Their tribe, once numerous, the epidemic had reduced. Here they planted, hunted and fished. The moose was still trotting in the country, and of his sinews they made their bowstring. Of the pith elder, that still grows beside our brooks, they made their arrow. Of the Indian Hemp they spun their nets and lines for summer angling, and, in winter, they sat around holes in the ice, catching salmon, pickerel, breams and perch, with which our river abounded.  9  Their physical powers, as our fathers found them, and before yet the English alcohol had proved more fatal to them than the English sword, astonished the white men.  10  Their sight was so excellent, that, standing on the sea shore, they often told of the coming of a ship at sea, sooner by one hour, yea, two hours sail, than any Englishman that stood by, on purpose to look out.  11  Roger Williams affirms that he has known them run between eighty and a hundred miles in a summer’s day, and back again within two days. A little pounded parched corn or no-cake sufficed them on the march. To his bodily perfection, the wild man added some noble traits of character. He was open as a child to kindness and justice. Many instances of his humanity were known to the Englishmen who suffered in the woods from sickness or cold. “When you came over the morning waters,” said one of the Sachems, “we took you into our arms. We fed you with our best meat. Never went white man cold and hungry from Indian wigwam.”

The faithful dealing and brave good-will, which, during the life of the friendly Massasoit, they uniformly experienced at Plymouth and at Boston, went to their hearts. So that the peace was made, and the ear of the savage already secured, before the pilgrims arrived at his seat of Musketaquid, to treat with him for his lands.

It is said that the covenant made with the Indians by Mr. Bulkeley and Major Willard, was made under a great oak, formerly standing near the site of the Middlesex Hotel.  12  Our Records affirm that Squaw Sachem, Tahattawan, and Nimrod did sell a tract of six miles square to the English, receiving for the same, some fathoms of Wampumpeag, hatchets, hoes, knives, cotton cloth and shirts. Wibbacowet, the husband of Squaw Sachem, received a suit of cloth, a hat, a white linen band, shoes, stockings and a great coat; and, in conclusion, the said Indians declared themselves satisfied, and told the Englishmen they were welcome. And after the bargain was concluded, Mr. Simon Willard, pointing to the four corners of the world, declared that they had bought three miles from that place, east, west, north and south.  13

The Puritans, to keep the remembrance of their unity one with another, and of their peaceful compact with the Indians, named their forest settlement CONCORD. They proceeded to build, under the shelter of the hill that extends for a mile along the north side of the Boston road, their first dwellings. The labors of a new plantation were paid by its excitements. I seem to see them, with their pious pastor, addressing themselves to the work of clearing the land. Natives of another hemisphere, they beheld, with curiosity, all the pleasing features of the American forest. The landscape before them was fair, if it was strange and rude. The little flower which at this season stars our woods and roadsides with its profuse blooms, might attract even eyes as stern as theirs with its humble beauty. The useful pine lifted its cones into the frosty air. The maple which is already making the forest gay with its orange hues, reddened over those houseless men. The majestic summits of Wachusett and Monadnoc towering in the horizon, invited the steps of adventure westward.

As the season grew later, they felt its inconveniences. “Many were forced to go barefoot and bareleg, and some in time of frost and snow, yet were they more healthy than now they are.”  14  The land was low but healthy; and if, in common with all the settlements, they found the air of America very cold, they might say with Higginson, after his description of the other elements, that “New England may boast of the element of fire, more than all the rest; for all Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires as New England. A poor servant, that is to possess but fifty acres, may afford to give more wood for fire as good as the world yields, than many noblemen in England.”  15  Many were their wants, but more their privileges. The light struggled in through windows of oiled paper,  16  but they read the word of God by it. They were fain to make use of their knees for a table, but their limbs were their own. Hard labor and spare diet they had, and off wooden trenchers, but they had peace and freedom, and the wailing of the tempest in the woods sounded kindlier in their ear than the smooth voice of the prelates, at home, in England. “There is no people,” said their pastor to his little flock of exiles, “but will strive to excel in something What can we excel in, if not in holiness? If we look to number, we are the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through the whole world. We cannot excel nor so much as equal other people in these things; and if we come short in grace and holiness too, we are the most despicable people under heaven. Strive we, therefore, herein to excel, and suffer not this crown to be taken away from us.”  17  The sermon fell into good and tender hearts; the people conspired with their teacher. Their religion was sweetness and peace amidst toil and tears. And, as we are informed. “the edge of their appetite was greater to spiritual duties at their first coming, in time of wants, than afterwards.”

The original Town Records, for the first thirty years, are lost. We have records of marriages and deaths, beginning nineteen years after the settlement; and copies of some of the doings of the town in regard to territory, of the same date. But the original distribution of the land, or an account of the principles on which it was divided, are not preserved. Agreeably to the custom of the times, a large portion was reserved to the public, and it appears from a petition of some new comers, in 1643, that a part had been divided among the first settlers without price, on the single condition of improving it.  18  Other portions seem to have been successively divided off and granted to individuals, at the rate of sixpence or a shilling an acre. But, in the first years, the land would not pay the necessary public charges, and they seem to have fallen heavily on the few wealthy planters. Mr. Bulkeley, by his generosity, spent his estate, and, doubtless in consideration of his charges, the General Court, in 1639, granted him 300 acres towards Cambridge; and to Mr. Spencer, probably for the like reason, 300 acres by the Alewife River. In 1638, 1200 acres were granted to Governor Winthrop, and 1000 to Thomas Dudley of the lands adjacent to the town, and Governor Winthrop selected as a building spot the land near the house of Capt. Humphrey Hunt.  19  The first record now remaining is that of a reservation of land for the minister, and the appropriation of new lands as commons or pastures to some poor men. At the same date, in 1654, the town having divided itself into three districts, called the North, South and East quarters, Ordered, “that the North quarter are to keep and maintain all their highways and bridges over the great river, in their quarter, and, in respect of the greatness of their charge there about, and in regard of the ease of the East quarter above the rest, in their highways, they are to allow the North quarter £3.”  20

Fellow Citizens, this first recorded political act of our fathers, this tax assessed on its inhabitants by a town, is the most important event in their civil history, implying, as it does, the exercise of a sovereign power, and connected with all the immunities and powers of a corporate town in Massachusetts. The greater speed and success that distinguish the planting of the human race in this country, over all other plantations in history, owe themselves mainly to the new subdivisions of the State into small corporations of land and power. It is vain to look for the inventor. No man made them. Each of the parts of that perfect structure grew out of the necessities of an instant occasion. The germ was formed in England. The charter gave to the freemen of the Company of Massachusetts Bay, the election of the Governor and Council of Assistants. It moreover gave them the power of prescribing the manner in which freemen should be elected; and ordered that all fundamental laws should be enacted by the freemen of the colony. But the Company removed to New England; more than one hundred freemen were admitted the first year, and it was found inconvenient to assemble them all.  21  And when, presently, the design of the colony began to fulfill itself, by the settlement of new plantations in the vicinity of Boston, and parties, with grants of land, straggled into the country to truck with the Indians and to clear the land for their own benefit, the Governor and freemen in Boston found it neither desirable nor possible to control the trade and practices of these farmers What could the body of freemen, meeting four times a year, at Boston, do for the daily wants of the planters at Musketaquid? The wolf was to be killed; the Indian to be watched and resisted; wells to be dug; the forest to be felled; pastures to be cleared; corn to be raised; roads to be cut; town and farm lines to be run. These things must be done, govern who might. The nature of man and his condition in the world, for the first time within the period of certain history, controlled the formation of the State. The necessity of the colonists wrote the law. Their wants, their poverty, their manifest convenience made them bold to ask of the Governor and of the General Court, immunities, and, to certain purposes, sovereign powers. The townsmen’s words were heard and weighed, for all knew that it was a petitioner that could not be slighted; it was the river, or the winter, or famine, or the Pequots, that spoke through them to the Governor ernor and Council of Massachusetts Bay. Instructed by necessity, each little company organized itself after the pattern of the larger town, by appointing its constable, and other petty half-military officers. As early as 1633,  22  the office of townsman or selectman appears, who seems first to have been appointed by the General Court, as here, at Concord, in 1639. In 1635, the Court say,” whereas particular towns have many things which concern only themselves, it is Ordered, that the freemen of every town shall have power to dispose of their own lands, and woods, and choose their own particular officers.”  23  This pointed chiefly at the office of constable, but they soon chose their own selectmen, and very early assessed taxes; a power at first resisted,  24  but speedily confirmed to them.

Meantime, to this paramount necessity, a milder and more pleasing influence was joined. I esteem it the happiness of this country, that its settlers, whilst they were exploring their granted and natural rights and determining the power of the magistrate, were united by personal affection. Members of a church before whose searching covenant all rank was abolished, they stood in awe of each other, as religious men. They bore to John Winthrop, the Governor, a grave but hearty kindness. For the first time, men examined the powers of the chief whom they loved and revered. For the first time, the ideal social compact was real. The bands of love and reverence held fast the little state, whilst they untied the great cords of authority to examine their soundness and learn on what wheels they ran. They were to settle the internal constitution of the towns, and, at the same time, their power in the commonwealth. The Governor conspires with them in limiting his claims to their obedience, and values much more their love than his chartered authority. The disputes between that forbearing man and the deputies are like the quarrels of girls, so much do they turn upon complaints of unkindness, and end in such loving reconciliations. It was on doubts concerning their own power, that, in 1634, a committee repaired to him for counsel, and he advised, seeing the freemen were grown so numerous, to send deputies from every town once in a year to revise the laws and to assess all monies.  25  And the General Court, thus constituted, only needed to go into separate session from the council, as they did in 1644,  26  to become essentially the same assembly they are this day.

By this course of events, Concord and the other plantations found themselves separate and independent of Boston, with certain rights of their own, which, what they were, time alone could fully determine; enjoying, at the same time, a strict and loving fellowship with Boston, and sure of advice and aid, on every emergency. Their powers were speedily settled by obvious convenience, and the towns learned to exercise a sovereignty in the laying of taxes; in the choice of their deputy to the house of representatives; in the disposal of the town lands; in the care of public worship, the school and the poor; and, what seemed of at least equal importance, to exercise the right of expressing an opinion on every question before the country. In a town-meeting, the great secret of political science was uncovered, and the problem solved, how to give every individual his fair weight in the government, without any disorder from numbers. In a town-meeting, the roots of society were reached. Here the rich gave counsel, but the poor also; and moreover, the just and the unjust. He is ill-informed who expects, on running down the town records for two hundred years, to find a church of saints, a metropolis of patriots, enacting wholesome and creditable laws. The constitution of the towns forbid it. In this open democracy, every opinion had utterance; every objection, every fact, every acre of land, every bushel of rye, its entire weight. The moderator was the passive mouth-piece, and the vote of the town, like the vane on the turret overhead, free for every wind to turn, and always turned by the last and strongest breath. In these assemblies, the public weal, the call of interest, duty, religion, were heard; and every local feeling, every private grudge, every suggestion of petulance and ignorance, were not less faithfully produced. Wrath and love came up to town-meeting in company. By the law of 1641, every man, — freeman or not, — inhabitant or not, — might introduce any business into a public meeting. Not a complaint occurs in all the volumes of our Records, of any inhabitant being hindered from speaking, or suffering from any violence or usurpation of any class. The negative ballot of a ten shilling freeholder was as fatal as that of the honored owner of Blood’s Farms or Willard’s Purchase. A man felt himself at liberty to exhibit, at town-meeting, feelings and actions that he would have been ashamed of anywhere but amongst his neighbors. Individual protests are frequent. Peter Wright  desired his dissent might be recorded from the town’s grant to John Shepard.  27  In 1795, several town-meetings are called, upon the compensation to be made to a few proprietors for land taken in making a bridle road; and one of them demanding large damages, many offers were made him in town-meeting, and refused; “which the town thought very unreasonable.” The matters there debated are such as to invite very small considerations. The ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man’s capacity for self-government.

It is the consequence of this institution that not a school-house, a public pew, a bridge, a pound, a mill-dam, hath been set up, or pulled down, or altered, or bought, or sold, without the whole population of this town having a voice in the affair. A general contentment is the result. And the people truly feel that they are lords of the soil. In every winding road, in every stone fence, in the smokes of the poor-house chimney, in the clock on the church, they read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments.

The British government has recently presented to the several public libraries of this country, copies of the splendid edition of the Domesday Book, and other ancient public Records of England. I cannot but think that it would be a suitable acknowledgment of this national munificence, if the records of one of our towns, — of this town, for example, — should be printed, and presented to the governments of Europe; to the English nation, as a thank-offering, and as a certificate of the progress of the Saxon race; to the continental nations as a lesson of humanity and love. Tell them, the Union has twenty-four States, and Massachusetts is one. Tell them, Massachusetts has three hundred towns, and Concord is one; that in Concord are five hundred rateable polls, and every one has an equal vote.

About ten years after the planting of Concord, efforts began to be made to civilize the Indians, and “to win them to the knowledge of the true God.” This indeed, in so many words, is expressed in the charter of the Colony as one of its ends; and this design is named first in the printed “Considerations,”  28  that inclined Hampden, and determined Winthrop and his friends, to come hither. The interest of the Puritans in the natives was heightened by a suspicion at that time prevailing, that these were the lost ten tribes of Israel. The man of the woods might well draw on himself the compassion of the planters. His erect and perfect form, though disclosing some irregular virtues, was found joined to a dwindled soul. Master of all sorts of wood-craft, he seemed a part of the forest and the lake, and the secret of his amazing skill seemed to be that he partook of the nature and fierce instincts of the beasts he slew. Those who dwelled by ponds and rivers had some tincture of civility, but the hunters of the tribe were found intractable at catechism. Thomas Hooker anticipated the opinion of Humboldt, and called them “the ruins of mankind.”

Early efforts were made to instruct them, in which Mr. Bulkeley, Mr. Flint, and Capt. Willard, took an active part. In 1644, Squaw Sachem, the widow of Nanepashemet, the great Sachem of Concord and Mistic, with two sachems of Wachusett, made a formal submission to the English government, and intimated their desire, “as opportunity served, and the English lived among them, to learn to read God’s word, and know God aright;” and the General Court acted on their request.  29  John Eliot, in October, 1646, preached his first sermon in the Indian language at Noonantum; Waban, Tahattawan, and their sannaps, going thither from Concord to hear him. There under the rubbish and ruins of barbarous life, the human heart heard the voice of love, and awoke as from a sleep. The questions which the Indians put betray their reason and their ignorance. “Can Jesus Christ understand prayers in the Indian language?” “If a man be wise, and his sachem weak, must he obey him?” At a meeting which Eliot gave to the squaws apart, the wife of Wampooas propounded the question, “Whether do I pray when my husband prays, if I speak nothing as he doth, yet if I like what he saith?”— “which questions were accounted of by some, as part of the whitenings of the harvest toward.”  30  Tahattawan, our Concord sachem, called his Indians together, and bid them not oppose the courses which the English were taking for their good; for, said he, all the time you have lived after the Indian fashion, under the power of the higher sachems, what did they care for you? They took away your skins, your kettles and your wampum, at their own pleasure, and this was all they regarded. But you may see the English mind no such things, but only seek your welfare, and instead of taking away, are ready to give to you. Tahattawan and his son-in-law Waban, besought Eliot to come and preach to them at Concord, and here they entered, by his assistance, into an agreement to twenty-nine rules, all breathing a desire to conform themselves to English customs.  31  They requested to have a town given them within the bounds of Concord, near unto the English. When this question was propounded by Tahattawan, he was asked, why he desired a town so near, when there was more room for them up in the country? The Sachem replied, that he knew if the Indians dwelt far from the English, they would not so much care to pray, nor could they be so ready to hear the word of God, but would be, all one, Indians still; but dwelling near the English, he hoped it might be otherwise with them then. We, who see in the squalid remnants of the twenty tribes of Massachusetts, the final failure of this benevolent enterprise, can hardly learn without emotion, the earnestness with which the most sensible individuals of the copper race held on to the new hope they had conceived, of being elevated to equality with their civilized brother. It is piteous to see their self-distrust in their request to remain near the English, and their unanimous entreaty to Capt. Willard, to be their Recorder, being very solicitous that what they did agree upon might be faithfully kept without alteration. It was remarkable that the preaching was not wholly new to them. “Their forefathers,” the Indians told Eliot, “did know God, but after this, they fell into a deep sleep, and when they did awake, they quite forgot him.”  32

At the instance of Eliot, in 1651, their desire was granted by the General Court, and Nashobah, lying near Nagog pond, now partly in Littleton, partly in Acton, became an Indian town, where a Christian worship was established under an Indian ruler and teacher.  33  Wilson relates, that, at their meetings, “the Indians sung a psalm, made Indian by Eliot, in one of our ordinary English tunes, melodiously.”  34  Such was, for half a century, the success of the general enterprise, that, in 1676, there were five hundred and sixty-seven praying Indians, and in 1689, twenty-four Indian preachers, and eighteen assemblies.

Meantime, Concord increased in territory and population. The lands were divided; highways were cut from farm to farm, and from this town to Boston. A military company had been organized in 1636. The Pequots, the terror of the farmer, were exterminated in 1637. Capt. Underhill, in 1638, declared, that “the new plantations of Dedham and Concord do afford large accommodation, and will contain abundance of people.”  35  In 1639, our first selectmen, Mr. Flint, Lt. Willard, and Richard Griffin were appointed.  36  And, in 1640, when the colony rate was £1200, Concord was assessed £50.  37  The country already began to yield more than was consumed by the inhabitants.  38  The very great immigration from England made the lands more valuable every year, and supplied a market for the produce. In 1643, the colony was so numerous, that it became expedient to divide it into four counties, Concord being included in Middlesex.  39  In 1644, the town contained sixty families.

But, in 1640, all immigration ceased, and the country produce and farm-stock depreciated.  40  Other difficulties accrued. The fish, which had been the abundant manure of the settlers, was found to injure the land.  41  The river, at this period, seems to have caused some distress now by its overflow, now by its drought.  42  A cold and wet summer blighted the corn; enormous flocks of pigeons beat down and eat up all sorts of English grain; and the crops suffered much from mice.  43  New plantations and better land had been opened, far and near; and whilst many of the colonists at Boston thought to remove, or did remove to England, the Concord people became uneasy, and looked around for new seats. In 1643, one seventh or one eighth part of the inhabitants went to Connecticut with Rev. Mr. Jones, and settled Fairfield. Weakened by this loss, the people begged to be released from a part of their rates, to which the General Court consented.  44  Mr. Bulkeley dissuaded his people from removing, and admonished them to increase their faith with their griefs. Even this check which befell them acquaints us with the rapidity of their growth, for the good man, in dealing with his people, taxes them with luxury. “We pretended to come hither,” he says, “for ordinances; but now ordinances are light matters with us; we are turned after the prey. We have among us excess and pride of life; pride in apparel, daintiness in diet, and that in those who, in times past, would have been satisfied with bread. This is the sin of the lowest of the people. “  45  Better evidence could not be desired of the rapid growth of the settlement.

The check was but momentary. The earth teemed with fruits. The people on the bay built ships, and found the way to the West Indies, with pipe-staves, lumber and fish; and the country people speedily learned to supply themselves with sugar, tea and molasses. The college had been already gathered in 1638. Now the school house went up. The General Court, in 1647, “to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, Ordered, that every township, after the Lord had increased them to the number of fifty house-holders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar school, the masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University.”  46  With these requirements Concord not only complied, but, in 1653, subscribed a sum for several years to the support of Harvard College.  47

But a new and alarming public distress retarded the growth of this, as of the sister towns during more than twenty years from 1654 to 1676. In 1654, the four united New England Colonies agreed to raise 270 foot and 40 horse, to reduce Ninigret, Sachem of the Niantics, and appointed Major Simon Willard, of this town, to the command.  48  This war seems to have been pressed by three of the colonies, and reluctantly entered by Massachusetts. Accordingly, Major Willard did the least he could, and incurred the censure of the Commissioners, who write to their “loving friend Major Willard,” “that they leave to his consideration the inconveniences arising from his non-attendance to his commission.”  49  This expedition was but the introduction of the war with King Philip. In 1670, the Wampanoags began to grind their hatchets, and mend their guns, and insult the English. Philip surrendered seventy guns to the Commissioners in Taunton Meetinghouse,  50  but revenged his humiliation a few years after, by carrying fire and the tomahawk into the English villages. From Narraganset to the Connecticut River, the scene of war was shifted as fast as these red hunters could traverse the forest. Concord was a military post. The inactivity of Major Willard, in Ninigret’s war, had lost him no confidence. He marched from Concord to Brookfield, in season to save the people whose houses had been burned, and who had taken shelter in a fortified house.  51  But he fought with disadvantage against an enemy who must be hunted before every battle. Some flourishing towns were burned. John Monoco, a formidable savage, boasted that “he had burned Medfield and Lancaster, and would burn Groton, Concord, Watertown and Boston;” adding, “what me will, me do.” He did burn Groton, but before he had executed the remainder of his threat he was hanged, in Boston, in September, 1676.  52

A still more formidable enemy was removed, in the same year, by the capture of Canonchet, the faithful ally of Philip, who was soon afterwards shot at Stonington. He stoutly declared to the Commissioners that “he would not deliver up a Wampanoag, nor the paring of a Wampanoag’s nail,” and when he was told that his sentence was death, he said “he liked it well that he was to die before his heart was soft, or he had spoken anything unworthy of himself.”  53

We know beforehand who must conquer in that unequal struggle. The red man may destroy here and there a straggler, as a wild beast may; he may fire a farm-house, or a village; but the association of the white men and their arts of war give them an overwhelming advantage, and in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory. I confess what chiefly interests me, in the annals of that war, is the grandeur of spirit exhibited by a few of the Indian chiefs. A nameless Wampanoag who was put to death by the Mohicans, after cruel tortures, was asked by his butchers during the torture, how he liked the war? — he said, “he found it as sweet as sugar was to Englishmen.”  54

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion. The virtues of patriotism and of prodigious courage and address were exhibited on both sides, and, in many instances, by women. The historian of Concord has preserved an instance of the resolution of one of the daughters of the town. Two young farmers, Abraham and Isaac Shepherd, had set their sister Mary, a girl of fifteen years, to watch whilst they threshed grain in the barn. The Indians stole upon her before she was aware, and her brothers were slain. She was carried captive into the Indian country, but, at night, whilst her captors were asleep, she plucked a saddle from under the head of one of them, took a horse they had stolen from Lancaster, and having girt the saddle on, she mounted, swam across the Nashua river, and rode through the forest to her home.  55

With the tragical end of Philip, the war ended. Beleaguered in his own country, his corn cut down, his piles of meal and other provision wasted by the English, it was only a great thaw in January, that, melting the snow and opening the earth, enabled his poor followers to come at the ground-nuts, else they had starved. Hunted by Captain Church, he fled from one swamp to another; his brother, his uncle, his sister, and his beloved squaw being taken or slain, he was at last shot down by an Indian deserter, as he fled alone in the dark of the morning, not far from his own fort.  56

Concord suffered little from the war. This is to be attributed no doubt, in part, to the fact that troops were generally quartered here, and that it was the residence of many noted soldiers. Tradition finds another cause in the sanctity of its minister. The elder Bulkeley was gone. In 1659,  57  his bones were laid at rest in the forest. But the mantle of his piety and of the people’s affection fell upon his son Edward,  58  the fame of whose prayers, it is said, once saved Concord from an attack of the Indian.  59  A great defence undoubtedly was the village of Praying Indians, until this settlement fell a victim to the envenomed prejudice against their countrymen. The worst feature in the history of those years, is, that no man spake for the Indian. When the Dutch, or the French, or the English royalist disagreed with the Colony, there was always found a Dutch, or French, or tory party, — an earnest minority, — to keep things from extremity. But the Indian seemed to inspire such a feeling as the wild beast inspires in the people near his den. It is the misfortune of Concord to have permitted a disgraceful outrage upon the friendly Indians settled within its limits, in February, 1676, which ended in their forcible expulsion from the town.

This painful incident is but too just an example of the measure which the Indians have generally received from the whites. For them the heart of charity, of humanity, was stone. After Philip’s death, their strength was irrecoverably broken. They never more disturbed the interior settlements, and a few vagrant families, that are now pensioners on the bounty of Massachusetts, are all that is left of the twenty tribes.

“Alas! for them — their day is o’er,

Their fires are out from hill and shore,

No more for them the wild deer bounds,

The plough is on their hunting grounds;

The pale man’s axe rings in their woods,

The pale man’s sail skims o’er their floods,

Their pleasant springs are dry.”  60

I turn gladly to the progress of our civil history. Before 1666, 15,000 acres had been added by grants of the General Court to the original territory of the town,  61  so that Concord then included the greater part of the towns of Bedford, Acton, Lincoln and Carlisle.

In the great growth of the country, Concord participated, as is manifest from its increasing polls and increased rates. Randolph at this period writes to the English Government, concerning the country towns; “The farmers are numerous and wealthy, live in good houses; are given to hospitality; and make good advantage by their corn, cattle, poultry, butter and cheese.”  62  Edward Bulkeley was the pastor, until his death, in 1696. His youngest brother, Peter, was deputy from Concord, and was chosen speaker of the house of deputies in 1676. The following year, he was sent to England, with Mr. Stoughton, as agent for the colony; and, on his return, in 1685, was a royal councillor. But I am sorry to find that the servile Randolph speaks of him with marked respect.  63  It would seem that his visit to England had made him a courtier. In 1689, Concord partook of the general indignation of the province against Andros. A company marched to the capital under Lieut. Heald, forming a part of that body concerning which we are informed, “the country people came armed into Boston, on the afternoon (of Thursday, 18th April,) in such rage and heat, as made us all tremble to think what would follow; for nothing would satisfy them but that the governor must be bound in chains or cords, and put in a more secure place, and that they would see done before they went away; and to satisfy them he was guarded by them to the fort.”  64  But the town records of that day confine themselves to descriptions of lands, and to conferences with the neighboring towns to run boundary lines. In 1699, so broad was their territory, I find the selectmen running the lines with Chelmsford, Cambridge and Watertown.  65  Some interesting peculiarities in the manners and customs of the time, appear in the town’s books. Proposals of marriage were made by the parents of the parties, and minutes of such private agreements sometimes entered on the clerk’s records.  66  The public charity seems to have been bestowed in a manner now obsolete. The town lends its commons as pastures, to poor men; and “being informed of the great present want of Thomas Pellit, gave order to Stephen Hosmer, to deliver a town cow, of a black color, with a white face, unto said Pellit, for his present supply.”  67

From the beginning to the middle of the eighteenth century, our records indicate no interruption of the tranquillity of the inhabitants, either in church or in civil affairs. After the death of Rev. Mr. Estabrook, in 1711, it was propounded at the town meeting, “whether one of the three gentlemen lately improved here in preaching, namely, Mr. John Whiting, Mr. Holyoke and Mr. Prescott shall be now chosen in the work of the ministry? Voted affirmatively.”  68  Mr. Whiting, who was chosen, was, we are told in his epitaph, “a universal lover of mankind.” The charges of education and of legislation, at this period, seem to have afflicted the town; for, they vote to petition the General Court, to be eased of the law relating to providing a schoolmaster; happily, the Court refused; and in 1712, the selectmen agreed with Capt. James Minott, “for his son Timothy to keep the school at the schoolhouse for the town of Concord, for half a year beginning 2d June; and if any scholar shall come, within the said time, for larning exceeding his son’s ability, the said Captain doth agree to instruct them himself in the tongues, till the above said time be fulfilled; for which service, the town is to pay Capt. Minott ten pounds.”  69  Capt. Minott seems to have served our prudent fathers in the double capacity of teacher and representative. It is an article in the selectmen’s warrant for the town meeting, “to see if the town will lay in for a representative not exceeding four pounds.” Captain Minott was chosen, and after the General Court was adjourned received of the town for his services, an allowance of three shillings per day. The country was not yet so thickly settled but that the inhabitants suffered from wolves and wild-cats, which infested the woods; since bounties of twenty shillings are given as late as 1735, to Indians and whites, for the heads of these animals, after the constable has cut off the ears.  70

Mr. Whiting was succeeded in the pastoral office by Rev. Daniel Bliss, in 1738. Soon after his ordination, the town seems to have been divided by ecclesiastical discords. In 1741, the celebrated Whitfield preached here, in the open air, to a great congregation. Mr. Bliss heard that great orator with delight, and by his earnest sympathy with him, in opinion and practice, gave offence to a part of his people. Party and mutual councils were called, but no grave charge was made good against him. I find, in the Church Records, the charges preferred against him, his answer thereto, and the result of the Council. The charges seem to have been made by the lovers of order and moderation against Mr. Bliss, as a favorer of religious excitements. His answer to one of the counts breathes such true piety that I cannot forbear to quote it. The ninth allegation is “That in praying for himself, in a church meeting, in December last, he said, ‘he was a poor vile worm of the dust, that was allowed as Mediator between God and this people.’” To this Mr. Bliss replied, “In the prayer you speak of, Jesus Christ was acknowledged as the only Mediator between God and man; at which time, I was filled with wonder, that such a sinful and worthless worm as I am, was allowed to represent Christ, in any manner, even so far as to be bringing the petitions and thank-offerings of the people unto God, and God’s will and truths to the people; and used the word Mediator in some differing light from that you have given it; but I confess I was soon uneasy that I had used the word, lest some would put a wrong meaning thereupon.”  71  The Council admonished Mr. Bliss of some improprieties of expression, but bore witness to his purity and fidelity in his office. In 1764, Whitfield preached again at Concord, on Sunday afternoon; Mr. Bliss preached in the morning, and the Concord people thought their minister gave them the better sermon of the two. It was also his last.

The planting of the Colony was the effect of religious principle. The Revolution was the fruit of another principle, — the devouring thirst for justice. From the appearance of the article in the Selectmen’s warrant, in 1765, “to see if the town will give the Representative any instructions about any important affair to be transacted by the General Court, concerning the Stamp Act;”  72  to the peace of 1783, the Town Records breathe a resolute and warlike spirit, so bold from the first as hardly to admit of increase.

It would be impossible on this occasion to recite all these patriotic papers. I must content myself with a few brief extracts. On the 24th January, 1774, in answer to letters received from the united committees of correspondence, in the vicinity of Boston, the town say:

“We cannot possibly view with indifference the past and present obstinate endeavors of the enemies of this, as well as the mother country, to rob us of those rights, that are the distinguishing glory and felicity of this land; rights, that we are obliged to no power, under heaven, for the enjoyment of; as they are the fruit of the heroic enterprises of the first settlers of these American colonies. And though we cannot but be alarmed at the great majority, in the British parliament, for the imposition of unconstitutional taxes on the colonies, yet, it gives life and strength to every attempt to oppose them, that not only the people of this, but the neighboring provinces are remarkably united in the important and interesting opposition, which, as it succeeded before, in some measure, by the blessing of heaven, so, we cannot but hope it will be attended with still greater success, in future.

“ Resolved , That these colonies have been and still are illegally taxed by the British parliament, as they are not virtually represented therein.

“That the purchasing commodities subject to such illegal taxation is an explicit, though an impious and sordid resignation of the liberties of this free and happy people.

“That, as the British parliament have empowered the East India Company to export their tea into America, for the sole purpose of raising a revenue from hence; to render the design abortive, we will not, in this town, either by ourselves, or any from or under us, buy, sell, or use any of the East India Company’s tea, or any other tea, whilst there is a duty for raising a revenue thereon in America; neither will we suffer any such tea to be used in our families.

“That, all such persons as shall purchase, sell, or use any such tea, shall, for the future, be deemed unfriendly to the happy constitution of this country.

“That, in conjunction with our brethren in America, we will risk our fortunes, and even our lives, in defence of his majesty, King George the Third, his person, crown and dignity; and will, also, with the same resolution, as his free-born subjects in this country, to the utmost of our power, defend all our rights inviolate to the latest posterity.

“That, if any person or persons, inhabitants of this province, so long as there is a duty on tea, shall import any tea from the India House, in England, or be factors for the East India Company, we will treat them, in an eminent degree, as enemies to their country, and with contempt and detestation.

“That, we think it our duty, at this critical time of our public affairs, to return our hearty thanks to the town of Boston, for every rational measure they have taken for the preservation or recovery of our invaluable rights and liberties infringed upon; and we hope, should the state of our public affairs require it, that they will still remain watchful and persevering; with a steady zeal to espy out everything that shall have a tendency to subvert our happy constitution.”  73

On the 27th June, near three hundred persons, upwards of twenty-one years of age, inhabitants of Concord, entered into a covenant, “solemnly engaging with each other, in the presence of God, to suspend all commercial intercourse with Great Britain, until the act for blocking the harbor of Boston be repealed; and neither to buy nor consume any merchandise imported from Great Britain, nor to deal with those who do.”  74

In August, a County Convention met in this town, to deliberate upon the alarming state of public affairs, and published an admirable report.  75  In September, incensed at the new royal law which made the judges dependent on the crown, the inhabitants assembled on the common, and forbade the justices to open the court of sessions. This little town then assumed the sovereignty. It was judge and jury and council and king. On the 26th of the month, the whole town resolved itself into a committee of safety, “to suppress all riots, tumults, and disorders in said town, and to aid all untainted magistrates in the execution of the laws of the land.”  76  It was then voted, to raise one or more companies of Minute Men, by enlistment, to be paid by the town whenever called out of town; and to provide arms and ammunition, “that those who are unable to purchase them themselves, may have the advantage of them, if necessity calls for it.”  77  In October, the Provincial Congress met in Concord. John Hancock was President. This body was composed of the foremost patriots, and adopted those efficient measures whose progress and issue belong to the history of the nation.  78

The clergy of New England were, for the most part, zealous promoters of the revolution. A deep religious sentiment sanctified the thirst for liberty. All the military movements in this town were solemnized by acts of public worship. In January, 1775, a meeting was held for the enlisting of minute men. Rev. William Emerson, the Chaplain of the Provincial Congress, preached to the people. Sixty men enlisted and, in a few days, many more. On 13th March, at a general review of all the military companies, he preached to a very full assembly, taking for his text, 2 Chronicles xiii. 12, “And, behold, God himself is with us for our captain, and his priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you.”  79  It is said that all the services of that day made a deep impression on the people, even to the singing of the psalm.

A large amount of military stores had been deposited in this town, by order of the Provincial Committee of Safety. It was to destroy those stores, that the troops who were attacked in this town, on the 19th April, 1775, were sent hither by General Gage.

The story of that day is well known. In these peaceful fields, for the first time since a hundred years, the drum and alarm-gun were heard, and the farmers snatched down their rusty firelocks from the kitchen walls, to make good the resolute words of their town debates. In the field where the western abutment of the old bridge may still be seen, about half a mile from this spot, the first organized resistance was made to the British arms. There the Americans first shed British blood. Eight hundred British soldiers, under the command of Lieut.-Col. Francis Smith, had marched from Boston to Concord; at Lexington had fired upon the brave handful of militia, for which a speedy revenge was reaped by the same militia in the afternoon. When they entered Concord, they found the militia and minute-men assembled under the command of Col. Barrett and Major Buttrick. This little battalion, though in their hasty council some were urgent to stand their ground, retreated before the enemy to the high land on the other bank of the river, to wait for reinforcement. Col. Barrett ordered the troops not to fire, unless fired upon. The British following them across the bridge, posted two companies, amounting to about one hundred men, to guard the bridge, and secure the return of the plundering party. Meantime, the men of Acton, Bedford, Lincoln and Carlisle, all once included in Concord, remembering their parent town in the hour of danger, arrived and fell into the ranks so fast, that Major Buttrick found himself superior in number to the enemy’s party at the bridge. And when the smoke began to rise from the village where the British were burning cannon-carriages and military stores, the Americans resolved to force their way into town. The English beginning to pluck up some of the planks of the bridge, the Americans quickened their pace, and the British fired one or two shots up the river, (our ancient friend here, Master Blood, saw the water struck by the first ball;) then a single gun, the ball from which wounded Luther Blanchard and Jonas Brown, and then a volley, by which Captain Isaac Davis and Abner Hosmer of Acton were instantly killed. Major Buttrick leaped from the ground, and gave the command to fire, which was repeated in a simultaneous cry by all his men. The Americans fired, and killed two men and wounded eight. A head stone and a foot stone, on this bank of the river, mark the place where these first victims lie. The British retreated immediately towards the village, and were joined by two companies of grenadiers, whom the noise of the firing had hastened to the spot. The militia and minute men, — every one from that moment being his own commander, — ran over the hills opposite the battlefield, and across the great fields, into the east quarter of the town, to waylay the enemy, and annoy his retreat. The British, as soon as they were rejoined by the plundering detachment, began that disastrous retreat to Boston, which was an omen to both parties of the event of the war.

In all the anecdotes of that day’s events we may discern the natural action of the people. It was not an extravagant ebullition of feeling, but might have been calculated on by any one acquainted with the spirits and habits of our community. Those poor farmers who came up, that day, to defend their native soil, acted from the simplest instincts. They did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory. They never dreamed their children would contend who had done the most. They supposed they had a right to their corn and their cattle, without paying tribute to any but their own governors. And as they had no fear of man, they yet did have a fear of God. Capt. Charles Miles, who was wounded in the pursuit of the enemy, told my venerable friend who sits by me, that “he went to the services of that day, with the same seriousness and acknowledgement of God, which he carried to church.”

The presence of these aged men who were in arms on that day, seems to bring us nearer to it. The benignant Providence which has prolonged their lives to this hour, gratifies the strong curiosity of the new generation. The Pilgrims are gone; but we see what manner of persons they were who stood in the worst perils of the Revolution. We hold by the hand the last of the invincible men of old, and confirm from living lips the sealed records of time.

And you, my fathers, whom God and the history of your country have ennobled, may well bear a chief part in keeping this peaceful birth-day of our town. You are indeed extraordinary heroes. If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, you had. You have fought a good fight. And having quit you like men in the battle, you have quit yourselves like men in your virtuous families; in your cornfields; and in society. We will not hide your honorable gray hairs under perishing laurel leaves, but the eye of affection and veneration follows you. You are set apart, — and forever, — for the esteem and gratitude of the human race, To you belongs a better badge than stars and ribbons. This prospering country is your ornament, and this expanding nation is multiplying your praise with millions of tongues.

The agitating events of those days were duly remembered in the church. On the second day after the affray, divine service was attended, in this house, by 700 soldiers. William Emerson, the pastor, had a hereditary claim to the affection of the people, being descended in the fourth generation from Edward Bulkeley, son of Peter. But he had merits of his own. The cause of the colonies was so much in his heart, that he did not cease to make it the subject of his preaching and his prayers, and is said to have deeply inspired many of his people with his own enthusiasm. He, at least, saw clearly the pregnant consequences of the 19th April. I have found within a few days, among some family papers, his almanac of 1775, in a blank leaf of which he has written a narrative of the fight;  80  and, at the close of the month, he writes, “This month remarkable for the greatest events of the present age.” To promote the same cause, he asked, and obtained of the town, leave to accept the commission of chaplain to the Northern army, at Ticonderoga, and died, after a few months, of the distemper that prevailed in the camp.

In the whole course of the war the town did not depart from this pledge it had given. Its little population of 1300 souls behaved like a party to the contest. The number of its troops constantly in service is very great. Its pecuniary burdens are out of all proportion to its capital. The economy so rigid which marked its earlier history, has all vanished. It spends profusely, affectionately, in the service. “Since,” say the plaintive records, “General Washington, at Cambridge, is not able to give but 24s. per cord for wood, for the army; it is Voted, that this town encourage the inhabitants to supply the army, by paying two dollars per cord, over and above the General’s price, to such as shall carry wood thither;”  81  and 210 cords of wood were carried.  82  A similar order is taken respecting hay. Whilst Boston was occupied by the British troops, Concord contributed to the relief of the inhabitants, £70, in money; 225 bushels of grain; and a quantity of meat and wood. When, presently, the poor of Boston were quartered by the Provincial Congress on the neighboring country, Concord received 82 persons to its hospitality.  83  In the year 1775, it raised 100 minute men, and 74 soldiers to serve at Cambridge. In March, 1776, 145 men were raised by this town to serve at Dorchester Heights.  84  In June, the General Assembly of Massachusetts resolved to raise 5,000 militia for six months, to reinforce the Continental army. “The numbers,” say they, “are large, but this Court has the fullest assurance, that their brethren, on this occasion, will not confer with flesh and blood, but will, without hesitation, and with the utmost alacrity and despatch, fill up the numbers proportioned to the several towns.”  85  On that occasion, Concord furnished 67 men, paying them itself, at an expense of £622. And so on, with every levy, to the end of the war. For these men it was continually providing shoes, stockings, shirts, coats, blankets and beef. The taxes, which, before the war, had not much exceeded £200 per annum, amounted, in the year 1782, to $9,544, in silver.  86

The great expense of the war was borne with cheerfulness, whilst the war lasted; but years passed, after the peace, before the debt was paid. As soon as danger and injury ceased, the people were left at leisure to consider their poverty and their debts. The town records show how slowly the inhabitants recovered from the strain of excessive exertion. Their instructions to their representatives are full of loud complaints of the disgraceful state of public credit, and the excess of public expenditure. They may be pardoned, under such distress, for the mistakes of an extreme frugality. They fell into a common error, not yet dismissed to the moon, that the remedy was, to forbid the great importation of foreign commodities, and to prescribe by law the prices of articles. The operation of a new government was dreaded, lest it should prove expensive, and the country towns thought it would be cheaper if it were removed from the capital. They were jealous lest the General Court should pay itself too liberally, and our fathers must be forgiven by their charitable posterity, if, in 1782, before choosing a representative, it was “Voted, that the person who should be chosen representative to the General Court should receive 6s. per day, whilst in actual service, an account of which time he should bring to the town, and if it should be that the General Court should resolve, that, their pay should be more than 6s., then the representative shall be hereby directed to pay the overplus into the town treasury.”  87  This was securing the prudence of the public servants.

But whilst the town had its own full share of the public distress, it was very far from desiring relief at the cost of order and law. In 1786, when the general sufferings drove the people in parts of Worcester and Hampshire counties to insurrection, a large party of armed insurgents arrived in this town, on the 12th September, to hinder the sitting of the Court of Common Pleas. But they found no countenance here.  88  The same people who had been active in a County Convention to consider grievances, condemned the rebellion, and joined the authorities in putting it down. In 1787, the admirable instructions given by the town to its representative are a proud monument of the good sense and good feeling that prevailed. The grievances ceased with the adoption of the Federal constitution. The constitution of Massachusetts had been already accepted. It was put to the town of Concord, in October, 1776, by the Legislature, whether the existing house of representatives should enact a constitution for the State? The town answered No.  89  The General Court, notwithstanding, draughted a constitution, sent it here, and asked the town whether they would have it for the law of the State? The town answered No, by a unanimous vote. In 1780, a constitution of the State, proposed by the Convention chosen for that purpose, was accepted by the town with the reservation of some articles.  90  And, in 1788, the town, by its delegate, accepted the new Constitution of the United States, and this event closed the whole series of important public events in which this town played a part.

From that time to the present hour, this town has made a slow but constant progress in population and wealth, and the arts of peace. It has suffered neither from war, nor pestilence, nor famine, nor flagrant crime. Its population, in the census of 1830, was 2,020 souls. The public expenses, for the last year, amounted to $4,290; for the present year, to $5,040.  91  If the community stints its expense in small matters, it spends freely on great duties. The town raises, this year, $1,800 for its public schools; besides about $1,200 which are paid, by subscription, for private schools. This year, it expends $800 for its poor; the last year it expended $900. Two religious societies, of differing creed, dwell together in good understanding, both promoting, we hope, the cause of righteousness and love. Concord has always been noted for its ministers. The living need no praise of mine. Yet it is among the sources of satisfaction and gratitude, this day, that the aged with whom is wisdom, our fathers’ counsellor and friend, is spared to counsel and intercede for the sons.

Such, Fellow Citizens, is an imperfect sketch of the history of Concord. I have been greatly indebted, in preparing this sketch, to the printed but unpublished History of this town, furnished me by the unhesitating kindness of its author, long a resident in this place. I hope that History will not long remain unknown. The author has done us and posterity a kindness, by the zeal and patience of his research, and has wisely enriched his pages with the resolutions, addresses and instructions to its agents, which from time to time, at critical periods, the town has voted. Meantime, I have read with care the town records themselves. They must ever be the fountains of all just information respecting your character and customs. They are the history of the town. They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice. For the most part, the town has deserved the name it wears. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense. I find no ridiculous laws, no eavesdropping legislators, no hanging of witches, no ghosts, no whipping of Quakers, no unnatural crimes. The tone of the records rises with the dignity of the event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make pretty intelligible the will of a free and just community. Frugal our fathers were, — very frugal, — though, for the most part, they deal generously by their minister, and provide well for the schools and the poor. If, at any time, in common with most of our towns, they have carried this economy to the verge of a vice, it is to be remembered that a town is, in many respects, a financial corporation. They economize, that they may sacrifice. They stint and higgle on the price of a pew, that they may send 200 soldiers to General Washington to keep Great Britain at bay. For splendor, there must somewhere be rigid economy. That the head of the house may go brave, the members must be plainly clad, and the town must save that the State may spend. Of late years, the growth of Concord has been slow. Without navigable waters, without mineral riches, without any considerable mill privileges, the natural increase of her population is drained by the constant emigration of the youth. Her sons have settled the region around us, and far from us. Their wagons have rattled down the remote western hills. And in every part of this country, and in many foreign parts, they plough the earth, they traverse the sea, they engage in trade and in all the professions.

Fellow Citizens; let not the solemn shadows of two hundred years, this day, fall over us in vain. I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old. Every moment carries us farther from the two great epochs of public principle, the Planting, and the Revolution of the colony. Fortunate and favored this town has been, in having received so large an infusion of the spirit of both of those periods. Humble as is our village in the circle of later and prouder towns that whiten the land, it has been consecrated by the presence and activity of the purest men. Why need I remind you of our own Hosmers, Minotts, Cumings, Barretts, Beattons, the departed benefactors of the town? On the village green have been the steps of Winthrop and Dudley; of John Eliot, the Indian apostle, who had a courage that intimidated those savages whom his love could not melt; of Whitfield, whose silver voice melted his great congregation into tears; of Hancock, and his compatriots of the provincial Congress; of Langdon, and the college over which he presided. But even more sacred influences than these have mingled here with the stream of human life. The merit of those who fill a space in the world’s history, who are borne forward, as it were, by the weight of thousands whom they lead, sheds a perfume less sweet than do the sacrifices of private virtue. I have had much opportunity of access to anecdotes of families, and I believe this town to have been the dwelling place, in all times since its planting, of pious and excellent persons, who walked meekly through the paths of common life, who served God, and loved man, and never let go the hope of immortality. The benediction of their prayers and of their principles lingers around us. The acknowledgment of the Supreme Being exalts the history of this people. It brought the fathers hither. In a war of principle, it delivered their sons. And so long as a spark of this faith survives among the children’s children, so long shall the name of Concord be honest and venerable.

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD APRIL 19TH, 1867.

Fellow Citizens:

The day is in Concord doubly our calendar day, as being the anniversary of the invasion of the town by the British troops in 1775, and of the departure of the company of volunteers for Washington, in 1861. We are all pretty well aware that the facts which make to us the interest of this day are in a great degree personal and local here: that every other town and city has its own heroes and memorial days, and that we can hardly expect a wide sympathy for the names and anecdotes which we delight to record. We are glad and proud that we have no monopoly of merit. We are thankful that other towns and cities are as rich; that the heroes of old and of recent date, who made and kept America free and united, were not rare or solitary growths, but sporadic over vast tracts of the Republic. Yet, as it is a piece of nature and the common sense that the throbbing chord that holds us to our kindred, our friends and our town, is not to be denied or resisted, — no matter how frivolous or unphilosophical its pulses, — we shall cling affectionately to our houses, our river and pastures, and believe that our visitors will pardon us if we take the privilege of talking freely about our nearest neighbors as in a family party; — well assured, meantime, that the virtues we are met to honor were directed on aims which command the sympathy of every loyal American citizen, were exerted for the protection of our common country, and aided its triumph.

The town has thought fit to signify its honor for a few of its sons by raising an obelisk in the square. It is a simple pile enough, — a few slabs of granite, dug just below the surface of the soil, and laid upon, the top of it; but as we have learned that the upheaved mountain, from which these discs or flakes were broken, was once a glowing mass at white heat, slowly crystallized, then uplifted by the central fires of the globe: so the roots of the events it appropriately marks are in the heart of the universe. I shall say of this obelisk, planted here in our quiet plains, what Richter says of the volcano in the fair landscape of Naples: “Vesuvius stands in this poem of Nature, and exalts everything, as war does the age.”

The art of the architect and the sense of the town have made these dumb stones speak; have, if I may borrow the old language of the church, converted these elements from a secular to a sacred and spiritual use; have made them look to the past and the future; have given them a meaning for the imagination and the heart. The sense of the town, the eloquent inscriptions the shaft now hears, the memories of these martyrs, the noble names which yet have gathered only their first fame, whatever good grows to the country out of the war, the largest results, the future power and genius of the land, will go on clothing this shaft with daily beauty and spiritual life. ‘T is certain that a plain stone like this, standing on such memories, having no reference to utilities, but only to the grand instincts of the civil and moral man, mixes with surrounding nature, — by day, with the changing seasons, by night the stars roll over it gladly, — becomes a sentiment, a poet, a prophet, an orator, to every townsman and passenger, an altar where the noble youth shall in all time come to make his secret vows.

The old Monument, a short half-mile from this house, stands to signalize the first Revolution, where the people resisted offensive usurpations, offensive taxes of the British Parliament, claiming that there should be no tax without representation. Instructed by events, after the quarrel began, the Americans took higher ground, and stood for political independence. But in the necessities of the hour, they overlooked the moral law, and winked at a practical exception to the Bill of Rights they had drawn up. They winked at the exception, believing it insignificant. But the moral law, the nature of things, did not wink at it, but kept its eye wide open. It turned out that this one violation was a subtle poison, which in eighty years corrupted the whole overgrown body politic, and brought the alternative of extirpation of the poison or ruin to the Republic.

This new Monument is built to mark the arrival of the nation at the new principle, — say, rather, at its new acknowledgment, for the principle is as old as Heaven, — that only that State can live, in which injury to the least member is recognized as damage to the whole.

Reform must begin at home. The aim of the hour was to reconstruct the South; but first the North had to be reconstructed. Its own theory and practice of liberty had got sadly out of gear, and must be corrected. It was done on the instant. A thunder-storm at sea sometimes reverses the magnets in the ship, and south is north. The storm of war works the like miracle on men. Every democrat who went South came back a republican, like the governors who, in Buchanan’s time, went to Kansas, and instantly took the free-state colors. War, says the poet, is

“the arduous strife,

To which the triumph of all good is given.”

Every principle is a war-note. When the rights of man are recited under any old government, every one of them is a declaration of war. War civilizes, re-arranges the population, distributing by ideas, — the innovators on one side, the antiquaries on the other. It opens the eyes wider. Once we were patriots up to the town-bounds, or the State-line. But when you replace the love of family or clan by a principle, as freedom, instantly that fire runs over the State-line into New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and Ohio, into the prairie and beyond, leaps the mountains, bridges river and lake, burns as hotly in Kansas and California as in Boston, and no chemist can discriminate between one soil and the other. It lifts every population to an equal power and merit.

As long as we debate in council, both sides may form their private guess what the event may be, or which is the strongest. But the moment you cry “Every man to his tent, O Israel!” the delusions of hope and fear are at an end; — the strength is now to be tested by the eternal facts. There will be no doubt more. The world is equal to itself. The secret architecture of things begins to disclose itself; the fact that all things were made on a basis of right; that justice is really desired by all intelligent beings; that opposition to it is against the nature of things; and that, whatever may happen in this hour or that, the years and the centuries are always pulling down the wrong and building up the right.

The war made the Divine Providence credible to many who did not believe the good Heaven quite honest. Every man was an abolitionist by conviction, but did not believe that his neighbor was. The opinions of masses of men, which the tactics of primary caucuses and the proverbial timidity of trade had concealed, the war discovered; and it was found, contrary to all popular belief, that the country was at heart abolitionist, and for the Union was ready to die.

As cities of men are the first effects of civilization, and also instantly causes of more civilization, so armies, which are only wandering cities, generate a vast heat, and lift the spirit of the soldiers who compose them to the boiling point. The armies mustered in the North were as much missionaries to the mind of the country as they were carriers of material force, and had the vast advantage of carrying whither they marched a higher civilization. Of course, there are noble men everywhere, and there are such in the South; and the noble know the noble, wherever they meet; and we have all heard passages of generous and exceptional behavior exhibited by individuals there to our officers and men, during the war. But the common people, rich or poor, were the narrowest and most conceited of mankind, as arrogant as the negroes on the Gambia River; and, by the way, it looks as if the editors of the Southern press were in all times selected from this class. The invasion of Northern farmers, mechanics, engineers, tradesmen, lawyers and students did more than forty years of peace had done to educate the South. “This will be a slow business,” writes our Concord captain home, “for we have to stop and civilize the people as we go along.”

It is an interesting part of the history, the manner in which this incongruous militia were made soldiers. That was done again on the Kansas plan. Our farmers went to Kansas as peaceable, Godfearing men as the members of our school-committee here. But when the Border raids were let loose on their villages, these people, who turned pale at home if called to dress a cut finger, on witnessing the butchery done by the Missouri riders on women and babes, were so beside themselves with rage, that they became on the instant the bravest soldiers and the most determined avengers. And the first events of the war of the Rebellion gave the like training to the new recruits.

All sorts of men went to the war, — the roughs, men who liked harsh play and violence, men for whom pleasure was not strong enough, but who wanted pain, and found sphere at last for their superabundant energy; then the adventurous type of New Englander, with his appetite for novelty and travel; the village politician, who could now verify his newspaper knowledge, see the South, and amass what a stock of adventures to retail hereafter at the fireside, or to the well-known companions on the Mill-dam; young men, also, of excellent education and polished manners, delicately brought up; manly farmers, skilful mechanics, young tradesmen, men hitherto of narrow opportunities of knowing the world, but well taught in the grammar-schools. But perhaps in every one of these classes were idealists, men who went from a religious duty. I have a note of a conversation that occurred in our first company, the morning before the battle of Bull Run. At a halt in the march, a few of our boys were sitting on a rail fence talking together whether it was right to sacrifice themselves. One of them said, “he had been thinking a good deal about it, last night, and he thought one was never too young to die for a principle.” One of our later volunteers, on the day when he left home, in reply to my question, How can you be spared from your farm, now that your father is so ill? said: “I go because I shall always be sorry if I did not go when the country called me. I can go as well as another.” One wrote to his father these words:— “You may think it strange that I, who have always naturally rather shrunk from danger, should wish to enter the army; but there is a higher Power that tunes the hearts of men, and enables them to see their duty, and gives them courage to face the dangers with which those duties are attended.” And the captain writes home of another of his men,— “ B — comes from a sense of duty and love of country, and these are the soldiers you can depend upon.”

None of us can have forgotten how sharp a test to try our peaceful people with, was the first call for troops. I doubt not many of our soldiers could repeat the confession of a youth whom I knew in the beginning of the war, who enlisted in New York, went to the field, and died early. Before his departure he confided to his sister that he was naturally a coward, but was determined that no one should ever find it out; that he had long trained himself by forcing himself, on the suspicion of any near danger, to go directly up to it, cost him what struggles it might. Yet it is from this temperament of sensibility that great heroes have been formed.

Our first company was led by an officer who had grown up in this village from a boy. The older among us can well remember him at school, at play and at work, all the way up, the most amiable, sensible, unpretending of men; fair, blonde, the rose lived long in his cheek; grave, but social, and one of the last men in this town you would have picked out for the rough dealing of war, — not a trace of fierceness, much less of recklessness, or of the devouring thirst for excitement; tender as a woman in his care for a cough or a chilblain in his men; had troches and arnica in his pocket for them. The army officers were welcome to their jest on him as too kind for a captain, and, later, as the colonel who got off his horse when he saw one of his men limp on the march, and told him to ride. But he knew that his men had found out, first that he was captain, then that he was colonel, and neither dared nor wished to disobey him. He was a man without conceit, who never fancied himself a philosopher or a saint; the most modest and amiable of men, engaged in common duties, but equal always to the occasion; and the war showed him still equal, however stern and terrible the occasion grew, — disclosed in him a strong good sense, great fertility of resource, the helping hand, and then the moral qualities of a commander, — a patience not to be tired out, a serious devotion to the cause of the country that never swerved, a hope that never failed. He was a Puritan in the army, with traits that remind one of John Brown, — an integrity incorruptible, and an ability that always rose to the need.

You will remember that these colonels, captains and lieutenants, and the privates too, are domestic men, just wrenched away from their families and their business by this rally of all the manhood in the land. They have notes to pay at home; have farms, shops, factories, affairs of every kind to think of and write home about. Consider what sacrifice and havoc in business arrangements this war-blast made. They have to think carefully of every last resource at home on which their wives or mothers may fall back; upon the little account in the savings-bank, the grass that can be sold, the old cow, or the heifer. These necessities make the topics of the ten thousand letters with which the mail-bags came loaded day by day. These letters play a great part in the war. The writing of letters made the Sunday in every camp: — meantime they are without the means of writing. After the first marches there is no letter-paper, there are no envelopes, no postage-stamps, for these were wetted into a solid mass in the rains and mud. Some of these letters are written on the back of old bills, some on brown paper, or strips of newspaper; written by firelight, making the short night shorter; written on the knee, in the mud, with pencil, six words at a time; or in the saddle, and have to stop because the horse will not stand still. But the words are proud and tender,— “Tell mother I will not disgrace her;” “tell her not to worry about me, for I know she would not have had me stay at home if she could as well as not.” The letters of the captain are the dearest treasures of this town. Always devoted, sometimes anxious, sometimes full of joy at the deportment of his comrades, they contain the sincere praise of men whom I now see in this assembly. If Marshal Montluc’s Memoirs are the Bible of soldiers, as Henry IV. of France said, Colonel Prescott might furnish the Book of Epistles.

He writes, “You don’t know how one gets attached to a company by living with them and sleeping with them all the time. I know every man by heart. I know every man’s weak spot, — who is shaky, and who is true blue.” He never remits his care of the men, aiming to hold them to their good habits and to keep them cheerful. For the first point, he keeps up a constant acquaintance with them; urges their correspondence with their friends; writes news of them home, urging his own correspondent to visit their families and keep them informed about the men; encourages a temperance society which is formed in the camp. “I have not had a man drunk, or affected by liquor, since we came here.” At one time he finds his company unfortunate in having fallen between two companies of quite another class,— “‘t is profanity all the time: yet instead of a bad influence on our men, I think it works the other way, — it disgusts them.”

One day he writes: “I expect to have a time, this forenoon, with the officer from West Point who drills us. He is very profane, and I will not stand it. If he does not stop it, I shall march my men right away when he is drilling them. There is a fine for officers swearing in the army, and I have too many young men that are not used to such talk. I told the colonel this morning I should do it, and shall, — don’t care what the consequence is. This lieutenant seems to think that these men who never saw a gun, can drill as well as he, who has been at West Point four years.” At night he adds: “I told that officer from West Point, this morning, that he could not swear at my company as he did yesterday; told him I would not stand it any way. I told him I had a good many young men in my company whose mothers asked me to look after them, and I should do so, and not allow them to hear such language, especially from an officer, whose duty it was to set them a better example. Told him I did not swear myself and would not allow him to. He looked at me as much as to say, Do you know whom you are talking to ? and I looked at him as much as to say, Yes, I do. He looked rather ashamed, but went through the drill without an oath.” So much for the care of their morals. His next point is to keep them cheerful. ‘T is better than medicine. He has games of baseball, and pitching quoits, and euchre, whilst part of the military discipline is sham-fights.

The best men heartily second him, and invent excellent means of their own. When, afterwards, five of these men were prisoners in the Parish Prison in New Orleans, they set themselves to use the time to the wisest advantage, — formed a debating club, wrote a daily or weekly newspaper, called it “Stars and Stripes.” It advertises, “prayer meeting at 7 o’clock, in cell No. 8, second floor,” and their own printed record is a proud and affecting narrative.

Whilst the regiment was encamped at Camp Andrew, near Alexandria, in June, 1861, marching orders came. Colonel Lawrence sent for eight wagons, but only three came. On these they loaded all the canvas of the tents, but took no tent-poles.

“It looked very much like a severe thunderstorm,” writes the captain, “and I knew the men would all have to sleep out of doors, unless we carried them. So I took six poles, and went to the colonel, and told him I had got the poles for two tents, which would cover twenty-four men, and unless he ordered me not to carry them, I should do so. He said he had no objection, only thought they would be too much for me. We only had about twelve men” (the rest of the company being, perhaps, on picket or other duty), “and some of them have their heavy knapsacks and guns to carry, so could not carry any poles. We started and marched two miles without stopping to rest, not having had anything to eat, and being very hot and dry.” At this time Captain Prescott was daily threatened with sickness, and suffered the more from this heat. “I told Lieutenant Bowers, this morning, that I could afford to be sick from bringing the tent-poles, for it saved the whole regiment from sleeping out doors; for they would not have thought of it, if I had not taken mine. The major had tried to discourage me; — said, ‘perhaps, if I carried them over, some other company would get them;’ — I told him, perhaps he did not think I was smart.” He had the satisfaction to see the whole regiment enjoying the protection of these tents.

In the disastrous battle of Bull Run this company behaved well, and the regimental officers believed, what is now the general conviction of the country, that the misfortunes of the day were not so much owing to the fault of the troops, as to the insufficiency of the combinations by the general officers. It happened, also, that the Fifth Massachusetts was almost unofficered. The colonel was, early in the day, disabled by a casualty; the lieutenant-colonel, the major and the adjutant were already transferred to new regiments, and their places were not yet filled. The three months of the enlistment expired a few days after the battle.

In the fall of 1861, the old Artillery company of this town was reorganized, and Captain Richard Barrett received a commission in March, 1862, from the State, as its commander. This company, chiefly recruited here, was later embodied in the Forty-seventh Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, enlisted as nine months’ men, and sent to New Orleans, where they were employed in guard duty during their term of service. Captain Humphrey H. Buttrick, lieutenant in this regiment, as he had been already lieutenant in Captain Prescott’s company in 1861, went out again in August, 1864, a captain in the Fifty-ninth Massachusetts, and saw hard service in the Ninth Corps, under General Burnside. The regiment being formed of veterans, and in fields requiring great activity and exposure, suffered extraordinary losses; Captain Buttrick and one other officer being the only officers in it who were neither killed, wounded, nor captured. In August, 1862, on the new requisition for troops, when it was becoming difficult to meet the draft, — mainly through the personal example and influence of Mr. Sylvester Lovejoy, twelve men, including himself, were enlisted for three years, and, being soon after enrolled in the Fortieth Massachusetts, went to the war; and a very good account has been heard, not only of the regiment, but of the talents and virtues of these men.

After the return of the three months’ company to Concord, in 1861, Captain Prescott raised a new company of volunteers, and Captain Bowers another. Each of these companies included recruits from this town, and they formed part of the Thirty-second Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers. Enlisting for three years, and remaining to the end of the war, these troops saw every variety of hard service which the war offered, and, though suffering at first some disadvantage from change of commanders, and from severe losses, they grew at last, under the command of Colonel Prescott, to an excellent reputation, attested by the names of the thirty battles they were authorized to inscribe on their flag, and by the important position usually assigned them in the field.

I have found many notes of their rough experience in the march and in the field. In McClellan’s retreat in the Peninsula, in July, 1862, “it is all our men can do to draw their feet out of the mud. We marched one mile through mud, without exagger n, one foot deep, — a good deal of the way over my boots, and with short rations; on one day nothing but liver, blackberries, and pennyroyal tea.”— “At Fredericksburg we lay eleven hours in one spot without moving, except to rise and fire.” The next note is, “cracker for a day and a half, — but all right.” Another day, “had not left the ranks for thirty hours, and the nights were broken by frequent alarms. How would Concord people,” he asks, “like to pass the night on the battle-field, and hear the dying cry for help, and not be able to go to them?” But the regiment did good service at Harrison’s Landing, and at Antietam, under Colonel Parker; and at Fredericksburg, in December, Lieutenant-Colonel Prescott loudly expresses his satisfaction at his comrades, now and then particularizing names: “Bowers, Shepard and Lauriat are as brave as lions.”

At the battle of Gettysburg, in July, 1863, the brigade of which the Thirty-second Regiment formed a part, was in line of battle seventy-two hours, and suffered severely. Colonel Prescott’s regiment went in with two hundred and ten men, nineteen officers. On the second of July they had to cross the famous wheat-field, under fire from the rebels in front and on both flanks. Seventy men were killed or wounded out of seven companies. Here Francis Buttrick, whose manly beauty all of us remember, and Sergeant Appleton, an excellent soldier, were fatally wounded. The colonel was hit by three bullets. “I feel,” he writes, “I have much to be thankful for that my life is spared, although I would willingly die to have the regiment do as well as they have done. Our colors had several holes made, and were badly torn. One bullet hit the staff which the bearer had in his hand. The color-bearer is brave as a lion; he will go anywhere you say, and no questions asked; his name is Marshall Davis.” The Colonel took evident pleasure in the fact that he could account for all his men. There were so many killed, so many wounded, — but no missing. For that word “missing” was apt to mean skulking. Another incident: “A friend of Lieutenant Barrow complains that we did not treat his body with respect, inasmuch as we did not send it home. I think we were very fortunate to save it at all, for in ten minutes after he was killed the rebels occupied the ground, and we had to carry him and all of our wounded nearly two miles in blankets. There was no place nearer than Baltimore where we could have got a coffin, and I suppose it was eighty miles there. We laid him in two double blankets, and then sent off a long distance and got boards off a barn to make the best coffin we could, and gave him burial.”

After Gettysburg, Colonel Prescott remarks that our regiment is highly complimented. When Colonel Gurney, of the Ninth, came to him the next day to tell him that “folks are just beginning to appreciate the Thirty-second Regiment: it always was a good regiment, and people are just beginning to find it out;” Colonel Prescott notes in his journal,— “Pity they have not found it out before it was all gone. We have a hundred and seventy-seven guns this morning.”

Let me add an extract from the official report of the brigade commander: “Word was sent by General Barnes, that, when we retired, we should fall back under cover of the woods. This order was communicated to Colonel Prescott, whose regiment was then under the hottest fire. Understanding it to be a peremptory order to retire them, he replied, ‘I don’t want to retire; I am not ready to retire; I can hold this place;’ and he made good his assertion. Being informed that he misunderstood the order, which was only to inform him how to retire when it became necessary, he was satisfied, and he and his command held their ground manfully.” It was said that Colonel Prescott’s reply, when reported, pleased the Acting Brigadier-General Sweitzer mightily.

After Gettysburg, the Thirty-second Regiment saw hard service at Rappahannock Station; and at Baltimore, in Virginia, where they were drawn up in battle order for ten days successively: crossing the Rapidan, and suffering from such extreme cold, a few days later, at Mine Run, that the men were compelled to break rank and run in circles to keep themselves from being frozen. On the third of December, they went into winter quarters.

I must not follow the multiplied details that make the hard work of the next year. But the campaign in the Wilderness surpassed all their worst experience hitherto of the soldier’s life. On the third of May, they crossed the Rapidan for the fifth time. On the twelfth, at Laurel Hill, the regiment had twenty-one killed and seventy-five wounded, including five officers. “The regiment has been in the front and centre since the battle begun, eight and a half days ago, and is now building breastworks on the Fredericksburg road. This has been the hardest fight the world ever knew. I think the loss of our army will be forty thousand. Every day, for the last eight days, there has been a terrible battle the whole length of the line. One day they drove us; but it has been regular bulldog fighting.” On the twenty-first, they had been, for seventeen days and nights, under arms without rest. On the twenty-third, they crossed the North Anna, and achieved a great success. On the thirtieth, we learn, “Our regiment has never been in the second line since we crossed the Rapidan, on the third.” On the night of the thirtieth.— “The hardest day we ever had. We have been in the first line twenty-six days, and fighting every day but two; whilst your newspapers talk of the inactivity of the Army of the Potomac. If those writers could be here and fight all day, and sleep in the trenches, and be called up several times in the night by picket-firing, they would not call it inactive.” June fourth is marked in the diary as “An awful day; — two hundred men lost to the command;” and not until the fifth of June comes at last a respite for a short space, during which the men drew shoes and socks, and the officers were able to send to the wagons and procure a change of clothes, for the first time in five weeks.

But from these incessant labors there was now to be rest for one head, — the honored and beloved commander of the regiment. On the sixteenth of June, they crossed the James River, and marched to within three miles of Petersburg. Early in the morning of the eighteenth they went to the front, formed line of battle, and were ordered to take the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad from the Rebels. In this charge, Colonel George L. Prescott was mortally wounded. After driving the enemy from the railroad, crossing it, and climbing the farther bank to continue the charge, he was struck, in front of his command, by a musket ball which entered his breast near the heart. He was carried off the field to the division hospital, and died on the following morning. On his death-bed, he received the needless assurances of his general, that “he had done more than all his duty,” — needless to a conscience so faithful and unspotted. One of his townsmen and comrades, a sergeant in his regiment, writing to his own family, uses these words: “He was one of the few men who fight for principle. He did not fight for glory, honor, nor money, but because he thought it his duty. These are not my feelings only, but of the whole regiment.”

On the first of January, 1865, the Thirty-second Regiment made itself comfortable in log huts, a mile south of our rear line of works before Petersburg. On the fourth of February, sudden orders came to move next morning at daylight. At Dabney’s Mills, in a sharp fight, they lost seventy-four in killed, wounded and missing. Here Major Shepard was taken prisoner. The lines were held until the tenth, with more than usual suffering from snow and hail and intense cold, added to the annoyance of the artillery fire. On the first of April, the regiment connected with Sheridan’s cavalry, near the Five Forks, and took an important part in that battle which opened Petersburg and Richmond, and forced the surrender of Lee. On the ninth, they marched in support of the cavalry, and were advancing in a grand charge, when the white flag of Gen. Lee appeared. The brigade of which the Thirty-second Regiment formed part was detailed to receive the formal surrender of the Rebel arms. The homeward march began on the thirteenth, and the regiment was mustered out in the field, at Washington, on the twenty-eighth of June, and arrived in Boston on the first of July.

Fellow-citizens: The obelisk records only the names of the dead. There is something partial in this distribution of honor. Those who went through those dreadful fields and returned not, deserve much more than all the honor we can pay. But those also who went through the same fields and returned alive, put just as much at hazard as those who died, and, in other countries, would wear distinctive badges of honor as long as they lived. I hope the disuse of such medals or badges in this country only signifies that everybody knows these men, and carries their deed in such lively remembrance that they require no badge or reminder. I am sure I need not bespeak your gratitude to these fellow-citizens and neighbors of ours. I hope they will be content with the laurels of one war.

But let me, in behalf of this assembly, speak directly to you, our defenders, and say, that it is easy to see that if danger should ever threaten the homes which you guard, the knowledge of your presence will be a wall of fire for their protection. Brave men! you will hardly be called to see again fields as terrible as those you have already trampled with your victories.

There are people who can hardly read the names on yonder bronze tablet, the mist so gathers in their eyes. Three of the names are of sons of one family. A gloom gathers on this assembly, composed as it is of kindred men and women, for, in many houses, the dearest and noblest is gone from their hearthstone. Yet it is tinged with light from heaven. A duty so severe has been discharged, and with such immense results of good, lifting private sacrifice to the sublime, that, though the cannon volleys have a sound of funeral echoes, they can yet hear through them the benedictions of their country and mankind.

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CONCORD ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, AUGUST 1, 1844.

Friends and Fellow Citizens :

We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts: a day which gave the immense fortification of a fact, of gross history, to ethical abstractions. It was the settlement, as far as a great Empire was concerned, of a question on which almost every leading citizen in it had taken care to record his vote; one which for many years absorbed the attention of the best and most eminent of mankind. I might well hesitate, coming from other studies, and without the smallest claim to be a special laborer in this work of humanity, to undertake to set this matter before you; which ought rather to be done by a strict co-operation of many well-advised persons; but I shall not apologize for my weakness. In this cause, no man’s weakness is any prejudice: it has a thousand sons; if one man cannot speak, ten others can; and, whether by the wisdom of its friends, or by the folly of the adversaries; by speech and by silence; by doing and by omitting to do, it goes forward. Therefore I will speak, — or, not I, but the might of liberty in my weakness. The subject is said to have the property of making dull men eloquent.

It has been in all men’s experience a marked effect of the enterprise in behalf of the African, to generate an overbearing and defying spirit. The institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts. Under such an impulse, I was about to say, If any cannot speak, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence, — I had almost said, Creep into your grave, the universe has no need of you! But I have thought better: let him not go. When we consider what remains to be done for this interest in this country, the dictates of humanity make us tender of such as are not yet persuaded. The hardest selfishness is to be borne with. Let us withhold every reproachful, and, if we can, every indignant remark. In this cause, we must renounce our temper, and the risings of pride. If there be any man who thinks the ruin of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of his own comfort, — who would not so much as part with his ice-cream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think I must not hesitate to satisfy that man that also his cream and vanilla are safer and cheaper by placing the negro nation on a fair footing, than by robbing them. If the Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxury of his vassalage, on the heavy Ethiopian manners of his house-servants, their silent obedience, their hue of bronze, their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for the more intelligent but precarious hired service of whites, I shall not refuse to show him that when their free-papers are made out, it will still be their interest to remain on his estate, and that the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced that it is cheaper to pay wages than to own the slave.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature. From the earliest monuments it appears that one race was victim and served the other races. In the oldest temples of Egypt, negro captives are painted on the tombs of kings, in such attitudes as to show that they are on the point of being executed; and Herodotus, our oldest historian, relates that the Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots. From the earliest time, the negro has been an article of luxury to the commercial nations. So has it been, down to the day that has just dawned on the world. Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughterhouses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell what negro-slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum and brandy; gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world, — there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of the sun, — I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers. The prizes of society, the trumpet of fame, the privileges of learning, of culture, of religion, the decencies and joys of marriage, honor, obedience, personal authority and a perpetual melioration into a finer civility, — these were for all, but not for them. For the negro, was the slave-ship to begin with, in whose filthy hold he sat in irons, unable to lie down; bad food, and insufficiency of that; dis-franchisement; no property in the rags that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished him in her bosom, no right to the children of his body; no security from the humors, none from the crimes, none from the appetites of his master: toil, famine, insult and flogging; and, when he sank in the furrow, no wind of good fame blew over him, no priest of salvation visited him with glad tidings: but he went down to death with dusky dreams of African shadow-catchers and Obeahs hunting him. Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the beginning, offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra, or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one. The black man was greedy, and chose the largest. “The buckra box was full up with pen, paper and whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for negro to this day.”

But the crude element of good in human affairs must work and ripen, spite of whips and plantation-laws and West Indian interest. Conscience rolled on its pillow, and could not sleep. We sympathize very tenderly here with the poor aggrieved planter, of whom so many unpleasant things are said; but if we saw the whip applied to old men, to tender women; and, undeniably, though I shrink to say so, pregnant women set in the treadmill for refusing to work; when, not they, but the eternal law of animal nature refused to work; — if we saw men’s backs flayed with cowhides, and “hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine or pickle, rubbed in with a cornhusk, in the scorching heat of the sun;” — if we saw the runaways hunted with blood-hounds into swamps and hills; and, in cases of passion, a planter throwing his negro into a copper of boiling cane-juice, — if we saw these things with eyes, we too should wince. They are not pleasant sights. The blood is moral: the blood is anti-slavery: it runs cold in the veins: the stomach rises with disgust, and curses slavery. Well, so it happened; a good man or woman, a country boy or girl, — it would so fall out, — once in a while saw these injuries and had the indiscretion to tell of them. The horrid story ran and flew; the winds blew it all over the world. They who heard it asked their rich and great friends if it was true, or only missionary lies. The richest and greatest, the prime minister of England, the king’s privy council were obliged to say that it was too true. It became plain to all men, the more this business was looked into, that the crimes and cruelties of the slave-traders and slave-owners could not be overstated. The more it was searched, the more shocking anecdotes came up, — things not to be spoken. Humane persons who were informed of the reports, insisted on proving them. Granville Sharpe was accidentally made acquainted with the sufferings of a slave, whom a West Indian planter had brought with him to London and had beaten with a pistol on his head, so badly that his whole body became diseased, and the man useless to his master, who left him to go whither he pleased. The man applied to Mr. William Sharpe, a charitable surgeon, who attended the diseases of the poor. In process of time, he was healed. Granville Sharpe found him at his brother’s and procured a place for him in an apothecary’s shop. The master accidentally met his recovered slave, and instantly endeavored to get possession of him again. Sharpe protected the slave. In consulting with the lawyers, they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal. ‘But the decisions are against you, and Lord Mansfield, now Chief Justice of England, leans to the decisions.’ Sharpe instantly sat down and gave himself to the study of English law for more than two years, until he had proved that the opinions relied on, of Talbot and Yorke, were incompatible with the former English decisions and with the whole spirit of English law. He published his book in 1769, and he so filled the heads and hearts of his advocates that when he brought the case of George Somerset, another slave, before Lord Mansfield, the slavish decisions were set aside, and equity affirmed. There is a sparkle of God’s righteousness in Lord Mansfield’s judgment, which does the heart good. Very unwilling had that great lawyer been to reverse the late decisions; he suggested twice from the bench, in the course of the trial, how the question might be got rid of: but the hint was not taken; the case was adjourned again and again, and judgment delayed. At last judgment was demanded, and on the 22d June, 1772, Lord Mansfield is reported to have decided in these words: —

“Immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law , long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority and time of its introduction, are lost; and in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly; (tracing the subject to natural principles , the claim of slavery never can be supported.) The power claimed by this return never was in use here. We cannot say the cause set forth by this return is allowed or approved of by the laws of this kingdom; and therefore the man must be discharged.”

This decision established the principle that the “air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe,” but the wrongs in the islands were not thereby touched. Public attention, however, was drawn that way, and the methods of the stealing and the transportation from Africa became noised abroad. The Quakers got the story. In their plain meeting-houses and prim dwellings this dismal agitation got entrance. They were rich: they owned, for debt or by inheritance, island property; they were religious, tender-hearted men and women; and they had to hear the news and digest it as they could. Six Quakers met in London on the 6th July, 1783, — William Dillwyn, Samuel Hoar, George Harrison, Thomas Knowles, John Lloyd, Joseph Woods, “to consider what step they should take for the relief and liberation of the negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave-trade on the coast of Africa.” They made friends and raised money for the slave; they interested their Yearly Meeting; and all English and all American Quakers. John Woolman of New Jersey, whilst yet an apprentice, was uneasy in his mind when he was set to write a bill of sale of a negro, for his master. He gave his testimony against the traffic, in Maryland and Virginia. Thomas Clarkson was a youth at Cambridge, England, when the subject given out for a Latin prize dissertation was, “Is it right to make slaves of others against their will? “He wrote an essay, and won the prize; but he wrote too well for his own peace; he began to ask himself if these things could be true; and if they were, he could no longer rest. He left Cambridge; he fell in with the six Quakers. They engaged him to act for them. He himself interested Mr. Wilberforce in the matter. The shipmasters in that trade were the greatest miscreants, and guilty of every barbarity to their own crews. Clarkson went to Bristol, made himself acquainted with the interior of the slave-ships and the details of the trade. The facts confirmed his sentiment, “that Providence had never made that to be wise which was immoral, and that the slave-trade was as impolitic as it was unjust;” that it was found peculiarly fatal to those employed in it. More seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole remaining trade of the country in two. Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox were drawn into the generous enterprise. In 1788, the House of Commons voted Parliamentary inquiry. In 1791, a bill to abolish the trade was brought in by Wil-berforce, and supported by him and by Fox and Burke and Pitt, with the utmost ability and faithfulness; resisted by the planters and the whole West Indian interest, and lost. During the next sixteen years, ten times, year after year, the attempt was renewed by Mr. Wilberforce, and ten times defeated by the planters. The king, and all the royal family but one, were against it. These debates are instructive, as they show on what grounds the trade was assailed and defended. Everything generous, wise, and sprightly is sure to come to the attack. On the other part are found cold prudence, barefaced selfishness and silent votes. But the nation was aroused to enthusiasm. Every horrid fact became known. In 1791, three hundred thousand persons in Britain pledged themselves to abstain from all articles of island produce. The planters were obliged to give way; and in 1807, on the 25th March, the bill passed, and the slave-trade was abolished.

The assailants of slavery had early agreed to limit their political action on this subject to the abolition of the trade, but Granville Sharpe, as a matter of conscience, whilst he acted as chairman of the London Committee, felt constrained to record his protest against the limitation, declaring that slavery was as much a crime against the Divine law, as the slave-trade. The trade, under false flags, went on as before. In 1821, according to official documents presented to the American government by the Colonization Society, 200,000 slaves were deported from Africa. Nearly 30,000 were landed in the port of Havana alone. In consequence of the dangers of the trade growing out of the act of abolition, ships were built sharp for swiftness, and with a frightful disregard of the comfort of the victims they were destined to transport. They carried five, six, even seven hundred stowed in a ship built so narrow as to be unsafe, being made just broad enough on the beam to keep the sea. In attempting to make its escape from the pursuit of a man-of-war, one ship flung five hundred slaves alive into the sea. These facts went into Parliament. In the islands was an ominous state of cruel and licentious society; every house had a dungeon attached to it; every slave was worked by the whip. There is no end to the tragic anecdotes in the municipal record’s of the colonies. The boy was set to strip and to flog his own mother to blood, for a small offence. Looking in the face of his master by the negro was held to be violence by the island courts. He was worked sixteen hours, and his ration by law, in some islands, was a pint of flour and one salt herring a day. He suffered insult, stripes, mutilation, at the humor of the master: iron collars were riveted on their necks with iron prongs ten inches long; capsicum pepper was rubbed in the eyes of the females; and they were done to death with the most shocking levity between the master and manager, without fine or inquiry. And when, at last, some Quakers, Moravians, and Wesleyan and Baptist missionaries, following in the steps of Carey and Ward in the East Indies, had been moved to come and cheer the poor victim with the hope of some reparation, in a future world, of the wrongs he suffered in this, these missionaries were persecuted by the planters, their lives threatened, their chapels burned, and the negroes furiously forbidden to go near them. These outrages rekindled the flame of British indignation. Petitions poured into Parliament: a million persons signed their names to these; and in 1833, on the 14th May, Lord Stanley, minister of the colonies, introduced into the House of Commons his bill for the Emancipation.

The scheme of the minister, with such modification as it received in the legislature, proposed gradual emancipation; that, on 1st August, 1834, all persons now slaves should be entitled to be registered as apprenticed laborers, and to acquire thereby all the rights and privileges of freemen, subject to the restriction of laboring under certain conditions. These conditions were, that the prædials should owe three fourths of the profits of their labor to their masters for six years, and the non-prædials for four years. The other fourth of the apprentice’s time was to be his own, which he might sell to his master, or to other persons; and at the end of the term of years fixed, he should be free.

With these provisions and conditions, the bill proceeds, in the twelfth section, in the following terms: “Be it enacted, that all and every person who, on the 1st August, 1834, shall be holden in slavery within any such British colony as aforesaid, shall upon and from and after the said 1st August, become and be to all intents and purposes free, and discharged of and from all manner of slavery, and shall be absolutely and forever manumitted; and that the children thereafter born to any such persons, and the offspring of such children, shall, in like manner, be free, from their birth; and that from and after the 1st August, 1834, slavery shall be and is hereby utterly and forever abolished and declared unlawful throughout the British colonies, plantations, and possessions abroad.”

The ministers, having estimated the slave products of the colonies in annual exports of sugar, rum and coffee, at £1,500,000 per annum , estimated the total value of the slave-property at 30,000,000 pounds sterling, and proposed to give the planters, as a compensation for so much of the slaves’ time as the act took from them, 20,000,000 pounds sterling, to be divided into nineteen shares for the nineteen colonies, and to be distributed to the owners of slaves by commissioners, whose appointment and duties were regulated by the Act. After much debate, the bill passed by large majorities. The apprenticeship system is understood to have proceeded from Lord Brougham, and was by him urged on his colleagues, who, it is said, were inclined to the policy of immediate emancipation.

The colonial legislatures received the act of Parliament with various degrees of displeasure, and, of course, every provision of the bill was criticised with severity. The new relation between the master and the apprentice, it was feared, would be mischievous; for the bill required the appointment of magistrates who should hear every complaint of the apprentice and see that justice was done him. It was feared that the interest of the master and servant would now produce perpetual discord between them. In the island of Antigua, containing 37,000 people, 30,000 being negroes, these objections had such weight, that the legislature rejected the apprenticeship system, and adopted absolute emancipation. In the other islands the system of the ministry was accepted.

The reception of it by the negro population was equal in nobleness to the deed. The negroes were called together by the missionaries and by the planters, and the news explained to them. On the night of the 31st July, they met everywhere at their churches and chapels, and at midnight, when the clock struck twelve, on their knees, the silent, weeping assembly became men; they rose and embraced each other; they cried, they sung, they prayed, they were wild with joy, but there was no riot, no feasting. I have never read anything in history more touching than the moderation of the negroes. Some American captains left the shore and put to sea, anticipating insurrection and general murder. With far different thoughts, the negroes spent the hour in their huts and chapels. I will not repeat to you the well-known paragraph, in which Messrs. Thome and Kimball, the commissioners sent out in the year 1837 by the American Anti-slavery Society, describe the occurrences of that night in the island of Antigua. It has been quoted in every newspaper, and Dr. Channing has given it additional fame. But I must be indulged in quoting a few sentences from the pages that follow it, narrating the behavior of the emancipated people on the next day.  93

“The first of August came on Friday, and a release was proclaimed from all work until the next Monday. The day was chiefly spent by the great mass of the negroes in the churches and chapels. The clergy and missionaries throughout the island were actively engaged, seizing the opportunity to enlighten the people on all the duties and responsibilities of their new relation, and urging them to the attainment of that higher liberty with which Christ maketh his children free. In every quarter, we were assured, the day was like a Sabbath. Work had ceased. The hum of business was still: tranquillity pervaded the towns and country. The planters informed us, that they went to the chapels where their own people were assembled, greeted them, shook hands with them, and exchanged the most hearty good wishes. At Grace Hill, there were at least a thousand persons around the Moravian Chapel who could not get in. For once the house of God suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. At Grace Bay, the people, all dressed in white, formed a procession, and walked arm in arm into the chapel. We were told that the dress of the negroes on that occasion was uncommonly simple and modest. There was not the least disposition to gayety. Throughout the island, there was not a single dance known of, either day or night, nor so much as a fiddle played.”

On the next Monday morning, with very few exceptions, every negro on every plantation was in the field at his work. In some places, they waited to see their master, to know what bargain he would make; but, for the most part, throughout the islands, nothing painful occurred. In June, 1835, the ministers, Lord Aberdeen and Sir George Grey, declared to the Parliament that the system worked well; that now for ten months, from 1st August, 1834, no injury or violence had been offered to any white, and only one black had been hurt in 800,000 negroes: and, contrary to many sinister predictions, that the new crop of island produce would not fall short of that of the last year.

But the habit of oppression was not destroyed by a law and a day of jubilee. It soon appeared in all the islands that the planters were disposed to use their old privileges, and overwork the apprentices; to take from them, under various pretences, their fourth part of their time; and to exert the same licentious despotism as before. The negroes complained to the magistrates and to the governor. In the island of Jamaica, this ill blood continually grew worse. The governors, Lord Belmore, the Earl of Sligo, and afterwards Sir Lionel Smith (a governor of their own class, who had been sent out to gratify the planters,) threw themselves on the side of the oppressed, and were at constant quarrel with the angry and bilious island legislature. Nothing can exceed the ill humor and sulkiness of the addresses of this assembly.

I may here express a general remark, which the history of slavery seems to justify, that it is not founded solely on the avarice of the planter. We sometimes say, the planter does not want slaves, he only wants the immunities and the luxuries which the slaves yield him; give him money, give him a machine that will yield him as much money as the slaves, and he will thankfully let them go. He has no love of slavery, he wants luxury, and he will pay even this price of crime and danger for it. But I think experience does not warrant this favorable distinction, but shows the existence, beside the covetousness, of a bitterer element, the love of power, the voluptuousness of holding a human being in his absolute control. We sometimes observe that spoiled children contract a habit of annoying quite wantonly those who have charge of them, and seem to measure their own sense of well-being, not by what they do, but by the degree of reaction they can cause. It is vain to get rid of them by not minding them: if purring and humming is not noticed, they squeal and screech; then if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms contented, provided you do nothing. If you take a book and read, he commences hostile operations. The planter is the spoiled child of his unnatural habits, and has contracted in his indolent and luxurious climate the need of excitement by irritating and tormenting his slave.

Sir Lionel Smith defended the poor negro girls, prey to the licentiousness of the planters; they shall not be whipped with tamarind rods if they do not comply with their master’s will; he defended the negro women; they should not be made to dig the cane-holes, (which is the very hardest of the field-work;) he defended the Baptist preachers and the stipendiary magistrates, who are the negroes’ friends, from the power of the planter. The power of the planters however, to oppress, was greater than the power of the apprentice and of his guardians to withstand. Lord Brougham and Mr. Buxton declared that the planter had not fulfilled his part in the contract, whilst the apprentices had fulfilled theirs; and demanded that the emancipation should be hastened, and the apprenticeship abolished. Parliament was compelled to pass additional laws for the defence and security of the negro, and in ill humor at these acts, the great island of Jamaica, with a population of half a million, and 300,000 negroes, early in 1838, resolved to throw up the two remaining years of apprenticeship, and to emancipate absolutely on the 1st August, 1838. In British Guiana, in Dominica, the same resolution had been earlier taken with more good will; and the other islands fell into the measure; so that on the 1st August, 1838, the shackles dropped from every British slave. The accounts which we have from all parties, both from the planters (and those too who were originally most opposed to the measure), and from the new freemen, are of the most satisfactory kind. The manner in which the new festival was celebrated, brings tears to the eyes. The First of August, 1838, was observed in Jamaica as a day of thanksgiving and prayer. Sir Lionel Smith, the governor, writes to the British Ministry, “It is impossible for me to do justice to the good order, decorum and gratitude which the whole laboring population manifested on that happy occasion. Though joy beamed on every countenance, it was throughout tempered with solemn thankfulness to God, and the churches and chapels were everywhere filled with these happy people in humble offering of praise.”

The Queen, in her speech to the Lords and Commons, praised the conduct of the emancipated population: and in 1840 Sir Charles Metcalfe, the new governor of Jamaica, in his address to the Assembly expressed himself to that late exasperated body in these terms: “All those who are acquainted with the state of the island know that our emancipated population are as free, as independent in their conduct, as well-conditioned, as much in the enjoyment of abundance, and as strongly sensible of the blessings of liberty, as any that we know of in any country. All disqualifications and distinctions of color have ceased; men of all colors have equal rights in law, and an equal footing in society, and every man’s position is settled by the same circumstances which regulate that point in other free countries, where no difference of color exists. It may be asserted, without fear of denial, that the former slaves of Jamaica are now as secure in all social rights, as freeborn Britons.” He further describes the erection of numerous churches, chapels and schools which the new population required, and adds that more are still demanded. The legislature, in their reply, echo the governor’s statement, and say, “The peaceful demeanor of the emancipated population redounds to their own credit, and affords a proof of their continued comfort and prosperity.”

I said, this event is signal in the history of civilization. There are many styles of civilization, and not one only. Ours is full of barbarities. There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and exerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason. Our culture is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency of coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year. Such as one house, such are all. The owner of a New York manor imitates the mansion and equipage of the London nobleman; the Boston merchant rivals his brother of New York; and the villages copy Boston. There have been nations elevated by great sentiments. Such was the civility of Sparta and the Dorian race, whilst it was defective in some of the chief elements of ours. That of Athens, again, lay in an intellect dedicated to beauty. That of Asia Minor in poetry, music and arts; that of Palestine in piety; that of Rome in military arts and virtues, exalted by a prodigious magnanimity; that of China and Japan in the last exaggeration of decorum and etiquette. Our civility, England determines the style of, inasmuch as England is the strongest of the family of existing nations, and as we are the expansion of that people. It is that of a trading nation; it is a shopkeeping civility. The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and has the prejudices and timidities of that profession. And we are shopkeepers, and have acquired the vices and virtues that belong to trade. We peddle, we truck, we sail, we row, we ride in cars, we creep in teams, we go in canals, — to market, and for the sale of goods. The national aim and employment streams into our ways of thinking, our laws, our habits and our manners. The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict. It was, or it seemed the dictate of trade, to keep the negro down. We had found a race who were less warlike, and less energetic shopkeepers than we; who had very little skill in trade. We found it very convenient to keep them at work, since, by the aid of a little whipping, we could get their work for nothing but their board and the cost of whips.

What if it cost a few unpleasant scenes on the coast of Africa? That was a great way off; and the scenes could be endured by some sturdy, unscrupulous fellows, who could go, for high wages, and bring us the men, and need not trouble our ears with the disagreeable particulars. If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the churchbells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. The coffee was fragrant; the tobacco was incense; the brandy made nations happy; the cotton clothed the world. What! all raised by these men, and no wages? Excellent! What a convenience! They seemed created by Providence to bear the heat and the whipping, and make these fine articles.

But unhappily, most unhappily, gentlemen, man is born with intellect, as well as with a love of sugar; and with a sense of justice, as well as a taste for strong drink. These ripened, as well as those. You could not educate him, you could not get any poetry, any wisdom, any beauty in woman, any strong and commanding character in man, but these absurdities would still come flashing out, — these absurdities of a demand for justice, a generosity for the weak and oppressed. Unhappily too for the planter, the laws of nature are in harmony with each other: that which the head and the heart demand, is found to be, in the long run, for what the grossest calculator calls his advantage. The moral sense is always supported by the permanent interest of the parties. Else, I know not how, in our world, any good would ever get done. It was shown to the planters that they, as well as the negroes, were slaves; that though they paid no wages, they got very poor work; that their estates were ruining them, under the finest climate; and that they needed the severest monopoly laws at home to keep them from bankruptcy. The oppression of the slave recoiled on them. They were full of vices; their children were lumps of pride, sloth, sensuality and rottenness. The position of woman was nearly as bad as it could be; and, like other robbers, they could not sleep in security. Many planters have said, since the emancipation, that, before that day, they were the greatest slaves on the estates. Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay. For these reasons the islands proved bad customers to England. It was very easy for manufacturers less shrewd than those of Birmingham and Manchester to see that if the state of things in the islands was altered, if the slaves had wages, the slaves would be clothed, would build houses, would fill them with tools, with pottery, with crockery, with hardware; and negro women love fine clothes as well as white women. In every naked negro of those thousands, they saw a future customer. Meantime, they saw further that the slave-trade, by keeping in barbarism the whole coast of eastern Africa, deprives them of countries and nations of customers, if once freedom and civility and European manners could get a foothold there. But the trade could not be abolished whilst this hungry West Indian market, with an appetite like the grave, cried, “More, more, bring me a hundred a day;” they could not expect any mitigation in the madness of the poor African war-chiefs. These considerations opened the eyes of the dullest in Britain. More than this, the West Indian estate was owned or mortgaged in England, and the owner and the mortgagee had very plain intimations that the feeling of English liberty was gaining every hour new mass and velocity, and the hostility to such as resisted it would be fatal. The House of Commons would destroy the protection of island produce, and interfere in English politics in the island legislation: so they hastened to make the best of their position, and accepted the bill.

These considerations, I doubt not, had their weight; the interest of trade, the interest of the revenue, and, moreover, the good fame of the action. It was inevitable that men should feel these motives. But they do not appear to have had an excessive or unreasonable weight. On reviewing this history, I think the whole transaction reflects infinite honor on the people and parliament of England. It was a stately spectacle, to see the cause of human rights argued with so much patience and generosity and with such a mass of evidence before that powerful people. It is a creditable incident in the history that when, in 1789, the first privy-council report of evidence on the trade (a bulky folio embodying all the facts which the London Committee had been engaged for years in collecting, and all the examinations before the council) was presented to the House of Commons, a late day being named for the discussion, in order to give members time, — Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Pitt, the prime minister, and other gentlemen, took advantage of the postponement to retire into the country to read the report. For months and years the bill was debated, with some consciousness of the extent of its relations, by the first citizens of England, the foremost men of the earth; every argument was weighed, every particle of evidence was sifted and laid in the scale; and, at last, the right triumphed, the poor man was vindicated, and the oppressor was flung out. I know that England has the advantage of trying the question at a wide distance from the spot where the nuisance exists: the planters are not, excepting in rare examples, members of the legislature. The extent of the empire, and the magnituds and number of other questions crowding into court, keep this one in balance, and prevent it from obtaining that ascendency, and being urged with that intemperance which a question of property tends to acquire. There are causes in the composition of the British legislature, and the relation of its leaders to the country and to Europe, which exclude much that is pitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies. From these reasons, the question was discussed with a rare independence and magnanimity. It was not narrowed down to a paltry electioneering trap; and, I must say, a delight in justice, an honest tenderness for the poor negro, for man suffering these wrongs, combined with the national pride, which refused to give the support of English soil or the protection of the English flag to these disgusting violations of nature.

Forgive me, fellow-citizens, if I own to you, that in the last few days that my attention has been occupied with this history, I have not been able to read a page of it without the most painful comparisons. Whilst I have read of England, I have thought of New England. Whilst I have meditated in my solitary walks on the magnanimity of the English Bench and Senate, reaching out the benefit of the law to the most helpless citizen in her world-wide realm, I have found myself oppressed by other thoughts. As I have walked in the pastures and along the edge of woods, I could not keep my imagination on those agreeable figures, for other images that intruded on me. I could not see the great vision of the patriots and senators who have adopted the slave’s cause: — they turned their backs on me. No: I see other pictures, — of mean men: I see very poor, very ill-clothed, very ignorant men, not surrounded by happy friends, — to be plain, — poor black men of obscure employment as mariners, cooks, or stewards, in ships, yet citizens of this our Commonwealth of Massachusetts, — freeborn as we, — whom the slave-laws of the States of South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana have arrested in the vessels in which they visited those ports, and shut up in jails so long as the vessel remained in port, with the stringent addition, that if the shipmaster fails to pay the costs of this official arrest and the board in jail, these citizens are to be sold for slaves, to pay that expense. This man, these men, I see, and no law to save them. Fellow-citizens, this crime will not be hushed up any longer. I have learned that a citizen of Nantucket, walking in New Orleans, found a freeborn citizen of Nantucket, a man, too, of great personal worth, and, as it happened, very dear to him, as having saved his own life, working chained in the streets of that city, kidnapped by such a process as this. In the sleep of the laws, the private interference of two excellent citizens of Boston has, I have ascertained, rescued several natives of this State from these Southern prisons. Gentlemen, I thought the deck of a Massachusetts ship was as much the territory of Massachusetts as the floor on which we stand. It should be as sacred as the temple of God. The poorest fishing smack that floats under the shadow of an iceberg in the Northern seas, or hunts the whale in the Southern ocean, should be encompassed by her laws with comfort and protection, as much as within the arms of Cape Ann and Cape Cod. And this kidnapping is suffered within our own land and federation, whilst the fourth article of the Constitution of the United States ordains in terms, that, “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.” If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler; the State-house in Boston is a play-house; the General Court is a dishonored body, if they make laws which they cannot execute. The great-hearted Puritans have left no posterity. The rich men may walk in State Street, but they walk without honor; and the farmers may brag their democracy in the country, but they are disgraced men. If the State has no power to defend its own people in its own shipping, because it has delegated that power to the Federal Government, has it no representation in the Federal Government? Are those men dumb? I am no lawyer, and cannot indicate the forms applicable to the case, but here is something which transcends all forms. Let the senators and representatives of the State, containing a population of a million freemen, go in a body before the Congress and say that they have a demand to make on them, so imperative that all functions of government must stop until it is satisfied. If ordinary legislation cannot reach it, then extraordinary must be applied. The Congress should instruct the President to send to those ports of Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans such orders and such force as should release, forthwith, all such citizens of Massachusetts as were holden in prison without the allegation of any crime, and should set on foot the strictest inquisition to discover where such persons, brought into slavery by these local laws at any time heretofore, may now be. That first; — and then, let order be taken to indem nify all such as have been incarcerated. As for dangers to the Union, from such demands! — the Union is already at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus outraged. Is it an union and covenant in which the State of Massachusetts agrees to be imprisoned, and the State of Carolina to imprison? Gentlemen, I am loath to say harsh things, and perhaps I know too little of politics for the smallest weight to attach to any censure of mine, — but I am at a loss how to characterize the tameness and silence of the two senators and the ten representatives of the State at Washington. To what purpose have we clothed each of those representatives with the power of seventy thousand persons, and each senator with near half a million, if they are to sit dumb at their desks and see their constituents captured and sold; — perhaps to gentlemen sitting by them in the hall? There is a scandalous rumor that has been swelling louder of late years, — perhaps it is wholly false, — that members are bullied into silence by Southern gentlemen. It is so easy to omit to speak, or even to be absent when delicate things are to be handled. I may as well say what all men feel, that whilst our very amiable and very innocent representatives and senators at Washington are accomplished lawyers and merchants, and very eloquent at dinners and at caucuses, there is a disastrous want of men from New England. I would gladly make exceptions, and you will not suffer me to forget one eloquent old man, in whose veins the blood of Massachusetts rolls, and who singly has defended the freedom of speech, and the rights of the free, against the usurpation of the slave-holder. But the reader of Congressional debates, in New England, is perplexed to see with what admirable sweetness and patience the majority of the free States are schooled and ridden by the minority of slave-holders. What if we should send thither representatives who were a particle less amiable and less innocent? I entreat you, sirs, let not this stain attach, let not this misery accumulate any longer. If the managers of our political parties are too prudent and too cold; — if, most unhappily, the ambitious class of young men and political men have found out that these neglected victims are poor and without weight; that they have no graceful hospitalities to offer; no valuable business to throw into any man’s hands, no strong vote to cast at the elections; and therefore may with impunity be left in their chains or to the chance of chains, — then let the citizens in their primary capacity take up their cause on this very ground, and say to the government of the State, and of the Union, that government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves. And as an omen and assurance of success, I point you to the bright example which England set you, on this day, ten years ago.

There are other comparisons and other imperative duties which come sadly to mind, — but I do not wish to darken the hours of this day by crimination; I turn gladly to the rightful theme, to the bright aspects of the occasion.

This event was a moral revolution. The history of it is before you. Here was no prodigy, no fabulous hero, no Trojan horse, no bloody war, but all was achieved by plain means of plain men, working not under a leader, but under a sentiment. Other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant. It was the masters revolting from their mastery. The slave-holder said, I will not hold slaves. The end was noble and the means were pure. Hence the elevation and pathos of this chapter of history. The lives of the advocates are pages of greatness, and the connection of the eminent senators with this question constitutes the immortalizing moments of those men’s lives. The bare enunciation of the theses at which the lawyers and legislators arrived, gives a glow to the heart of the reader. Lord Chancellor Northington is the author of the famous sentence, “As soon as any man puts his foot on English ground, he becomes free.” “I was a slave,” said the counsel of Somerset, speaking for his client, “for I was in America: I am now in a country where the common rights of mankind are known and regarded.” Granville Sharpe filled the ear of the judges with the sound principles that had from time to time been affirmed by the legal authorities: “Derived power cannot be superior to the power from which it is derived: ““The reasonableness of the law is the soul of the law:” “It is better to suffer every evil, than to consent to any.” Out it would come, the God’s truth, out it came, like a bolt from a cloud, for all the mumbling of the lawyers. One feels very sensibly in all this history that a great heart and soul are behind there, superior to any man, and making use of each, in turn, and infinitely attractive to every person according to the degree of reason in his own mind, so that this cause has had the power to draw to it every particle of talent and of worth in England, from the beginning. All the great geniuses of the British senate, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Grenville, Sheridan, Grey, Canning, ranged themselves on its side; the poet Cowper wrote for it: Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, in this country, all recorded their votes. All men remember the subtlety and the fire of indignation which the “Edinburgh Review” contributed to the cause; and every liberal mind, poet, preacher, moralist, statesman, has had the fortune to appear somewhere for this cause. On the other part, appeared the reign of pounds and shillings, and all manner of rage and stupidity; a resistance which drew from Mr. Huddlestone in Parliament the observation, “That a curse attended this trade even in the mode of defending it. By a certain fatality, none but the vilest arguments were brought forward, which corrupted the very persons who used them. Every one of these was built on the narrow ground of interest, of pecuniary profit, of sordid gain, in opposition to every motive that had reference to humanity, justice, and religion, or to that great principle which comprehended them all.” This moral force perpetually reinforces and dignifies the friends of this cause. It gave that tenacity to their point which has insured ultimate triumph; and it gave that superiority in reason, in imagery, in eloquence, which makes in all countries anti-slavery meetings so attractive to the people, and has made it a proverb in Massachusetts, that “eloquence is dog-cheap at the anti-slavery chapel.”

I will say further that we are indebted mainly to this movement and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics, and a reference of every question to the absolute standard. It is notorious that the political, religious and social schemes, with which the minds of men are now most occupied, have been matured, or at least broached, in the free and daring discussions of these assemblies. Men have become aware, through the emancipation and kindred events, of the presence of powers which, in their days of darkness, they had overlooked. Virtuous men will not again rely on political agents. They have found out the deleterious effect of political association. Up to this day we have allowed to statesmen a paramount social standing, and we bow low to them as to the great. We cannot extend this deference to them any longer. The secret cannot be kept, that the seats of power are filled by underlings, ignorant, timid and selfish to a degree to destroy all claim, excepting that on compassion, to the society of the just and generous. What happened notoriously to an American ambassador in England, that he found himself compelled to palter and to disguise the fact that he was a slave-breeder, happens to men of state. Their vocation is a presumption against them among well-meaning people. The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end. There are now other energies than force, other than political, which no man in future can allow himself to disregard. There is direct conversation and influence. A man is to make himself felt by his proper force. The tendency of things runs steadily to this point, namely, to put every man on his merits, and to give him so much power as he naturally exerts, — no more, no less. Of course, the timid and base persons, all who are conscious of no worth in themselves, and who owe all their place to the opportunities which the old order of things allowed them, to deceive and defraud men, shudder at the change, and would fain silence every honest voice, and lock up every house where liberty and innovation can be pleaded for. They would raise mobs, for fear is very cruel. But the strong and healthy yeomen and husbands of the land, the self-sustaining class of inventive and industrious men, fear no competition or superiority. Come what will, their faculty cannot be spared.

The First of August marks the entrance of a new element into modern politics, namely, the civilization of the negro. A man is added to the human family. Not the least affecting part of this history of abolition is the annihilation of the old indecent nonsense about the nature of the negro. In the case of the ship Zong, in 1781, whose master had thrown one hundred and thirty-two slaves alive into the sea, to cheat the underwriters, the first jury gave a verdict in favor of the master and owners: they had a right to do what they had done. Lord Mansfield is reported to have said on the bench, “The matter left to the jury is, — Was it from necessity? For they had no doubt, — though it shocks one very much, — that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. It is a very shocking case.” But a more enlightened and humane opinion began to prevail. Mr. Clarkson, early in his career, made a collection of African productions and manufactures, as specimens of the arts and culture of the negro; comprising cloths and loom, weapons, polished stones and woods, leather, glass, dyes, ornaments, soap, pipe-bowls and trinkets. These he showed to Mr. Pitt, who saw and handled them with extreme interest. “On sight of these,” says Clarkson, “many sublime thoughts seemed to rush at once into his mind, some of which he expressed;” and hence appeared to arise a project which was always dear to him, of the civilization of Africa, — a dream which forever elevates his fame. In 1791, Mr. Wilberforce announced to the House of Commons, “We have already gained one victory: we have obtained for these poor creatures the recognition of their human nature, which for a time was most shamefully denied them.” It was the sarcasm of Montesquieu, “it would not do to suppose that negroes were men, lest it should turn out that whites were not;” for the white has, for ages, done what he could to keep the negro in that hoggish state. His laws have been furies. It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears. If, before, he was taxed with such stupidity, or such defective vision, that he could not set a table square to the walls of an apartment, he is now the principal if not the only mechanic in the West Indies; and is, besides, an architect, a physician, a lawyer, a magistrate, an editor, and a valued and increasing political power. The recent testimonies of Sturge, of Thome and Kimball, of Gurney, of Philippo, are very explicit on this point, the capacity and the success of the colored and the black population in employments of skill, of profit and of trust; and best of all is the testimony to their moderation. They receive hints and advances from the whites that they will be gladly received as subscribers to the Exchange, as members of this or that committee of trust. They hold back, and say to each other that “social position is not to be gained by pushing.”

I have said that this event interests us because it came mainly from the concession of the whites; I add, that in part it is the earning of the blacks. They won the pity and respect which they have received, by their powers and native endowments. I think this a circumstance of the highest import. Their whole future is in it. Our planet, before the age of written history, had its races of savages, like the generations of sour paste, or the animalcules that wriggle and bite in a drop of putrid water. Who cares for these or for their wars? We do not wish a world of bugs or of birds; neither afterward of Seythians, Caraibs or Feejees. The grand style of nature, her great periods, is all we observe in them. Who cares for oppressing whites, or oppressed blacks, twenty centuries ago, more than for bad dreams? Eaters and food are in the harmony of nature; and there too is the germ forever protected, unfolding gigantic leaf after leaf, a newer flower, a richer fruit, in every period, yet its next product is never to be guessed. It will only save what is worth saving; and it saves not by compassion, but by power. It appoints no police to guard the lion, but his teeth and claws; no fort or city for the bird, but his wings; no rescue for flies and mites, but their spawning numbers, which no ravages can overcome. It deals with men after the same manner. If they are rude and foolish, down they must go. When at last in a race, a new principle appears, an idea, — that conserves it; ideas only save races. If the black man is feeble and not important to the existing races, not on a parity with the best race, the black man must serve, and be exterminated. But if the black man carries in his bosom an indispensable element of a new and coming civilization; for the sake of that element, no wrong, nor strength nor circumstance can hurt him: he will survive and play his part. So now, the arrival in the world of such men as Toussaint, and the Haytian heroes, or of the leaders of their race in Barbadoes and Jamaica, outweighs in good omen all the English and American humanity. The anti-slavery of the whole world is dust in the balance before this, — is a poor squeamishness and nervousness: the might and the right are here: here is the anti-slave: here is man: and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance. The intellect, — that is miraculous! Who has it, has the talisman: his skin and bones, though they were of the color of night, are transparent, and the everlasting stars shine through, with attractive beams. But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful or lovely, is degrading and futile. All the songs and newspapers and money-subscriptions and vituperation of such as do not think with us, will avail nothing against a fact. I say to you, you must save yourself, black or white, man or woman; other help is none. I esteem the occasion of this jubilee to be the proud discovery that the black race can contend with the white; that, in the great anthem which we call history, a piece of many parts and vast compass, after playing a long time a very low and subdued accompaniment, they perceive the time arrived when they can strike in with effect and take a master’s part in the music. The civility of the world has reached that pitch that their more moral genius is becoming indispensable, and the quality of this race is to be honored for itself. For this, they have been preserved in sandy deserts, in rice-swamps, in kitchens and shoe-shops, so long: now let them emerge, clothed and in their own form.

There remains the very elevated consideration which the subject opens, but which belongs to more abstract views than we are now taking, this namely, that the civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members. America is not civil, whilst Africa is barbarous.

These considerations seem to leave no choice for the action of the intellect and the conscience of the country. There have been moments in this, as well as in every piece of moral history, when there seemed room for the infusions of a skeptical philosophy; when it seemed doubtful whether brute force would not triumph in the eternal struggle. I doubt not that sometimes, a despairing negro, when jumping over the ship’s sides to escape from the white devils who surrounded him, has believed there was no vindication of right; it is horrible to think of, but it seemed so. I doubt not that sometimes the negro’s friend, in the face of scornful and brutal hundreds of traders and drivers, has felt his heart sink. Especially, it seems to me, some degree of despondency is pardonable, when he observes the men of conscience and of intellect, his own natural allies and champions, — those whose attention should be nailed to the grand objects of this cause, so hotly offended by whatever incidental petulances or infirmities of indiscreet defenders of the negro, as to permit themselves to be ranged with the enemies of the human race; and names which should be the alarums of liberty and the watchwords of truth, are mixed up with all the rotten rabble of selfishness and tyranny. I assure myself that this coldness and blindness will pass away. A single noble wind of sentiment will scatter them forever. I am sure that the good and wise elders, the ardent and generous youth, will not permit what is incidental and exceptional to withdraw their devotion from the essential and permanent characters of the question. There have been moments, I said, when men might be forgiven who doubted. Those moments are past. Seen in masses, it cannot be disputed, there is progress in human society. There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly. The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with slavery. The Intellect, with blazing eye, looking through history from the beginning onward, gazes on this blot and it disappears. The sentiment of Right, once very low and indistinct, but ever more articulate, because it is the voice of the universe, pronounces Freedom. The Power that built this fabric of things affirms it in the heart; and in the history of the First of August, has made a sign to the ages, of his will.

WAR.

The archangel Hope

Looks to the azure cope,

Waits through dark ages for the morn,

Defeated day by day, but unto Victory born.

It has been a favorite study of modern philosophy to indicate the steps of human progress, to watch the rising of a thought in one man’s mind, the communication of it to a few, to a small minority, its expansion and general reception, until it publishes itself to the world by destroying the existing laws and institutions, and the generation of new. Looked at in this general and historical way, many things wear a very different face from that they show near by, and one at a time, — and, particularly, war. War, which to sane men at the present day begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men’s brains instead of their bowels, — when seen in the remote past, in the infancy of society, appears a part of the connection of events, and, in its place, necessary.

As far as history has preserved to us the slow unfoldings of any savage tribe, it is not easy to see how war could be avoided by such wild, passionate, needy, ungoverned, strong-bodied creatures. For in the infancy of society, when a thin population and improvidence make the supply of food and of shelter insufficient and very precarious, and when hunger, thirst, ague and frozen limbs universally take precedence of the wants of the mind and the heart, the necessities of the strong will certainly be satisfied at the cost of the weak, at whatever peril of future revenge. It is plain, too, that in the first dawnings of the religious sentiment, that blends itself with their passions and is oil to the fire. Not only every tribe has war-gods, religious festivals in victory, but religious wars.

The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when he learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. It presently finds the value of good sense and of foresight, and Ulysses takes rank next to Achilles. The leaders, picked men of a courage and vigor tried and augmented in fifty battles, are emulous to distinguish themselves above each other by new merits, as clemency, hospitality, splendor of living. The people imitate the chiefs. The strong tribe, in which war has become au art, attack and conquer their neighbors, and teach them their arts and virtues. New territory, augmented numbers and extended interests call out new virtues and abilities, and the tribe makes long strides. And, finally, when much progress has been made, all its secrets of wisdom and art are disseminated by its invasions. Plutarch, in his essay “On the Fortune of Alexander,” considers the invasion and conquest of the East by Alexander as one of the most bright and pleasing pages in history; and it must be owned he gives sound reason for his opinion. It had the effect of uniting into one great interest the divided commonwealths of Greece, and infusing a new and more enlarged public spirit into the councils of their statesmen. It carried the arts and language and philosophy of the Greeks into the sluggish and barbarous nations of Persia, Assyria and India. It introduced the arts of husbandry among tribes of hunters and shepherds. It weaned the Scythians and Persians from some cruel and licentious practices to a more civil way of life. It introduced the sacredness of marriage among them. It built seventy cities, and sowed the Greek customs and humane laws over Asia, and united hostile nations under one code. It brought different families of the human race together, — to blows at first, but afterwards to truce, to trade and to intermarriage. It would be very easy to show analogous benefits that have resulted from military movements of later ages.

Considerations of this kind lead us to a true view of the nature and office of war. We see it is the subject of all history; that it has been the principal employment of the most conspicuous men; that it is at this moment the delight of half the world, of almost all young and ignorant persons; that it is exhibited to us continually in the dumb show of brute nature, where war between tribes, and between individuals of the same tribe, perpetually rages. The microscope reveals miniature butchery in atomies and infinitely small biters that swim and fight in an illuminated drop of water; and the little globe is but a too faithful miniature of the large.

What does all this war, beginning from the lowest races and reaching up to man, signify? Is it not manifest that it covers a great and beneficent principle, which nature had deeply at heart? What is that principle? — It is self-help. Nature implants with life the instinct of self-help, perpetual struggle to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom, to attain to a mastery and the security of a permanent, self-defended being; and to each creature these objects are made so dear that it risks its life continually in the struggle for these ends.

But whilst this principle, necessarily, is inwrought into the fabric of every creature, yet it is but one instinct; and though a primary one, or we may say the very first, yet the appearance of the other instincts immediately modifies and controls this; turns its energies into harmless, useful and high courses, showing thereby what was its ultimate design; and, finally, takes out its fangs. The instinct of self-help is very early unfolded in the coarse and merely brute form of war, only in the childhood and imbecility of the other instincts, and remains in that form only until their development. It is the ignorant and childish part of mankind that is the fighting part. Idle and vacant minds want excitement, as all boys kill cats. Bull-baiting, cockpits and the boxer’s ring are the enjoyment of the part of society whose animal nature alone has been developed. In some parts of this country, where the intellectual and moral faculties have as yet scarcely any culture, the absorbing topic of all conversation is whipping; who fought, and which whipped? Of man, boy, or beast, the only trait that much interests the speakers is the pugnacity. And why? Because the speaker has as yet no other image of manly activity and virtue, none of endurance, none of perseverance, none of charity, none of the attainment of truth. Put him into a circle of cultivated men, where the conversation broaches the great questions that besiege the human reason, and he would be dumb and unhappy, as an Indian in church.

To men of a sedate and mature spirit, in whom is any knowledge or mental activity, the detail of battle becomes insupportably tedious and revolting. It is like the talk of one of those monomaniacs whom we sometimes meet in society, who converse on horses; and Fontenelle expressed a volume of meaning when he said, “I hate war, for it spoils conversation.”

Nothing is plainer than that the sympathy with war is a juvenile and temporary state. Not only the moral sentiment, but trade, learning and whatever makes intercourse, conspire to put it down. Trade, as all men know, is the antagonist of war. Wherever there is no property, the people will put on the knapsack for bread; but trade is instantly endangered and destroyed. And, moreover, trade brings men to look each other in the face, and gives the parties the knowledge that these enemies over sea or over the mountain are such men as we; who laugh and grieve, who love and fear, as we do. And learning and art, and especially religion, weave ties that make war look like fratricide, as it is. And as all history is the picture of war, as we have said, so it is no less true that it is the record of the mitigation and decline of war. Early in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Italian cities had grown so populous and strong, that they forced the rural nobility to dismantle their castles, which were dens of cruelty, and come and reside in the towns. The Popes, to their eternal honor, declared religious jubilees, during which all hostilities were suspended throughout Christendom, and man had a breathing space. The increase of civility has abolished the use of poison and of torture, once supposed as necessary as navies now. And, finally, the art of war, what with gunpowder and tactics, has made, as all men know, battles less frequent and less murderous.

By all these means, war has been steadily on the decline; and we read with astonishment of the beastly fighting of the old times. Only in Elizabeth’s time, out of the European waters, piracy was all but universal. The proverb was,— “No peace beyond the line;” and the seaman shipped on the buccaneer’s bargain, “No prey, no pay.” The celebrated Cavendish, who was thought in his times a good Christian man, wrote thus to Lord Hunsdon, on his return from a voyage round the world:— “Sept. 1588. It hath pleased Almighty God to suffer me to circumpass the whole globe of the world, entering in at the Strait of Magellan, and returning by the Cape of Buena Esperança; in which voyage, I have either discovered or brought certain intelligence of all the rich places of the world, which were ever discovered by any Christian. I navigated along the coast of Chili, Peru, and New Spain, where I made great spoils. I burnt and sunk nineteen sail of ships, small and great. All the villages and towns that ever I landed at, I burned and spoiled. And had I not been discovered upon the coast, I had taken great quantity of treasure. The matter of most profit to me was a great ship of the king’s, which I took at California,” c. And the good Cavendish piously begins this statement,— “It hath pleased Almighty God.”

Indeed, our American annals have preserved the vestiges of barbarous warfare down to more recent times. I read in Williams’s “History of Maine,” that “Assacombuit, the Sagamore of the Anagunti-cook tribe, was remarkable for his turpitude and ferocity above all other known Indians; that, in 1705, Vaudreuil sent him to France, where he was introduced to the king. When he appeared at court, he lifted up his hand, and said, ‘This hand has slain a hundred and fifty of your majesty’s enemies within the territories of New England.’ This so pleased the king that he knighted him, and ordered a pension of eight livres a day to be paid him during life.” This valuable person, on his return to America, took to killing his own neighbors and kindred, with such appetite that his tribe combined against him, and would have killed him had he not fled his country for ever.

The scandal which we feel in such facts certainly shows that we have got on a little. All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation: the doctrine of the right of war still remains.

For ages (for ideas work in ages, and animate vast societies of men) the human race has gone on under the tyranny — shall I so call it? — of this first brutish form of their effort to be men; that is, for ages they have shared so much of the nature of the lower animals, the tiger and the shark, and the savages of the water-drop. They have nearly exhausted all the good and all the evil of this form: they have held as fast to this degradation as their worst enemy could desire; but all things have an end, and so has this. The eternal germination of the better has unfolded new powers, new instincts, which were really concealed under this rough and base rind. The sublime question has startled one and another happy soul in different quarters of the globe, — Cannot love be, as well as hate? Would not love answer the same end, or even a better? Cannot peace be, as well as war?

This thought is no man’s invention, neither St. Pierre’s nor Rousseau’s, but the rising of the general tide in the human soul, — and rising highest, and first made visible, in the most simple and pure souls, who have therefore announced it to us beforehand; but presently we all see it. It has now become so distinct as to be a social thought: societies can be formed on it. It is expounded, illustrated, defined, with different degrees of clearness; and its actualization, or the measures it should inspire, predicted according to the light of each seer.

The idea itself is the epoch; the fact that it has become so distinct to any small number of persons as to become a subject of prayer and hope, of concert and discussion, — that is the commanding fact. This having come, much more will follow. Revolutions go not backward. The star once risen, though only one man in the hemisphere has yet seen its upper limb in the horizon, will mount and mount, until it becomes visible to other men, to multitudes, and climbs the zenith of all eyes. And so it is not a great matter how long men refuse to believe the advent of peace: war is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only How soon ?

That the project of peace should appear visionary to great numbers of sensible men; should appear laughable even, to numbers; should appear to the grave and good-natured to be embarrassed with extreme practical difficulties, — is very natural. ‘This is a poor, tedious society of yours,’ they say: ‘we do not see what good can come of it. Peace! why, we are all at peace now. But if a foreign nation should wantonly insult or plunder our commerce, or, worse yet, should land on our shores to rob and kill, you would not have us sit, and be robbed and killed? You mistake the times; you overestimate the virtue of men. You forget that the quiet which now sleeps in cities and in farms, which lets the wagon go unguarded and the farmhouse unbolted, rests on the perfect understanding of all men that the musket, the halter and the jail stand behind there, ready to punish any disturber of it. All admit that this would be the best policy, if the world were all a church, if all men were the best men, if all would agree to accept this rule. But it is absurd for one nation to attempt it alone.”

In the first place, we answer that we never make much account of objections which merely respect the actual state of the world at this moment, but which admit the general expediency and permanent excellence of the project. What is the best must be the true; and what is true, — that is, what is at bottom fit and agreeable to the constitution of man, — must at last prevail over all obstruction and all opposition. There is no good now enjoyed by society that was not once as problematical and visionary as this. It is the tendency of the true interest of man to become his desire and steadfast aim.

But, further, it is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances. We have all grown up in the sight of frigates and navy yards, of armed forts and islands, of arsenals and militia. The reference to any foreign register will inform us of the number of thousand or million men that are now under arms in the vast colonial system of the British empire, of Russia, Austria and France; and one is scared to find at what a cost the peace of the globe is kept. This vast apparatus of artillery, of fleets, of stone bastions and trenches and embankments; this incessant patrolling of sentinels; this waving of national flags; this reveille and evening gun; this martial music and endless playing of marches and singing of military and naval songs seem to us to constitute an imposing actual, which will not yield in centuries to the feeble, deprecatory voices of a handful of friends of peace.

Thus always we are daunted by the appearances; not seeing that their whole value lies at bottom in the state of mind. It is really a thought that built this portentous war-establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away. Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to their moral state, or their state of thought. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of some man’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers. Observe the ideas of the present day, — orthodoxy, skepticism, missions, popular education, temperance, antimasonry, anti-slavery; see how each of these abstractions has embodied itself in an imposing apparatus in the community; and how timber, brick, lime and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master-idea reigning in the minds of many persons.

You shall hear, some day, of a wild fancy which some man has in his brain, of the mischief of secret oaths. Come again one or two years afterwards, and you shall see it has built great houses of solid wood and brick and mortar. You shall see a hundred presses printing a million sheets; you shall see men and horses and wheels made to walk, run and roll for it: this great body of matter thus executing that one man’s wild thought. This happens daily, yearly about us, with half thoughts, often with flimsy lies, pieces of policy and speculation. With good nursing they will last three or four years before they will come to nothing. But when a truth appears, — as, for instance, a perception in the wit of one Columbus that there is land in the Western Sea; though he alone of all men has that thought, and they all jeer, — it will build ships; it will build fleets; it will carry over half Spain and half England; it will plant a colony, a state, nations and half a globe full of men.

We surround ourselves always, according to our freedom and ability, with true images of ourselves in things, whether it be ships or books or cannons or churches. The standing army, the arsenal, the camp and the gibbet do not appertain to man. They only serve as an index to show where man is now; what a bad, ungoverned temper he has; what an ugly neighbor he is; how his affections halt; how low his hope lies. He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.

It follows of course that the least change in the man will change his circumstances; the least enlargement of his ideas, the least mitigation of his feelings in respect to other men; if, for example, he could be inspired with a tender kindness to the souls of men, and should come to feel that every man was another self with whom he might come to join, as left hand works with right. Every degree of the ascendancy of this feeling would cause the most striking changes of external things: the tents would be struck; the men-of-war would rot ashore; the arms rust; the cannon would become streetposts; the pikes, a fisher’s harpoon; the marching regiment would be a caravan of emigrants, peaceful pioneers at the fountains of the Wabash and the Missouri. And so it must and will be: bayonet and sword must first retreat a little from their ostentatious prominence; then quite hide themselves, as the sheriff’s halter does now, inviting the attendance only of relations and friends; and then, lastly, will be transferred to the museums of the curious, as poisoning and torturing tools are at this day.

War and peace thus resolve themselves into a mercury of the state of cultivation. At a certain stage of his progress, the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. At a certain higher stage, he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart. At a still higher stage, he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but, being attacked, he bears it and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual but to the common soul of all men.

Since the peace question has been before the public mind, those who affirm its right and expediency have naturally been met with objections more or less weighty. There are cases frequently put by the curious, — moral problems, like those problems in arithmetic which in long winter evenings the rustics try the hardness of their heads in ciphering out. And chiefly it is said, — Either accept this principle for better, for worse, carry it out to the end, and meet its absurd consequences; or else, if you pretend to set an arbitrary limit, a “Thus far, no farther,” then give up the principle, and take that limit which the common-sense of all mankind has set, and which distinguishes offensive war as criminal, defensive war as just. Otherwise, if you go for no war, then be consistent, and give up self-defence in the highway, in your own house. Will you push it thus far? Will you stick to your principle of non-resistance when your strong-box is broken open, when your wife and babes are insulted and slaughtered in your sight? If you say yes, you only invite the robber and assassin; and a few bloody-minded desperadoes would soon butcher the good.

In reply to this charge of absurdity on the extreme peace doctrine, as shown in the supposed consequences, I wish to say that such deductions consider only one half of the fact. They look only at the passive side of the friend of peace, only at his passivity; they quite omit to consider his activity. But no man, it may be presumed, ever embraced the cause of peace and philanthropy for the sole end and satisfaction of being plundered and slain. A man does not come the length of the spirit of martyrdom without some active purpose, some equal motive, some flaming love. If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great and able men. Let me know more of that nation; I shall not find them defenceless, with idle hands springing at their sides. I shall find them men of love, honor and truth; men of an immense industry; men whose influence is felt to the end of the earth; men whose very look and voice carry the sentence of honor and shame; and all forces yield to their energy and persuasion. Whenever we see the doctrine of peace embraced by a nation, we may be assured it will not be one that invites injury; but one, on the contrary, which has a friend in the bottom of the heart of every man, even of the violent and the base; one against which no weapon can prosper; one which is looked upon as the asylum of the human race and has the tears and the blessings of mankind.

In the second place, as far as it respects individual action in difficult and extreme cases, I will say, such cases seldom or never occur to the good and just man; nor are we careful to say, or even to know, what in such crises is to be done. A wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide beforehand what he shall do in a given extreme event. Nature and God will instruct him in that hour.

The question naturally arises, How is this new aspiration of the human mind to be made visible and real? How is it to pass out of thoughts into things?

Not, certainly, in the first place, in the way of routine and mere forms , — the universal specific of modern politics; not by organizing a society, and going through a course of resolutions and public manifestoes, and being thus formally accredited to the public and to the civility of the newspapers. We have played this game to tediousness. In some of our cities they choose noted duellists as presidents and officers of anti-duelling societies. Men who love that bloated vanity called public opinion think all is well if they have once got their bantling through a sufficient course of speeches and cheerings, of one, two, or three public meetings; as if they could do anything: they vote and vote, cry hurrah on both sides, no man responsible, no man caring a pin. The next season, an Indian war, or an aggression on our commerce by Malays; or the party this man votes with have an appropriation to carry through Congress: instantly he wags his head the other way, and cries, Havoc and war!

This is not to be carried by public opinion, but by private opinion, by private conviction, by private, dear and earnest love. For the only hope of this cause is in the increased insight, and it is to be accomplished by the spontaneous teaching, of the cultivated soul, in its secret experience and meditation, — that it is now time that it should pass out of the state of beast into the state of man; it is to hear the voice of God, which bids the devils that have rended and torn him come out of him and let him now be clothed and walk forth in his right mind.

Nor, in the next place, is the peace principle to be carried into effect by fear. It can never be defended, it can never be executed, by cowards. Everything great must be done in the spirit of greatness. The manhood that has been in war must be transferred to the cause of peace, before war can lose its charm, and peace be venerable to men.

The attractiveness of war shows one thing through all the throats of artillery, the thunders of so many sieges, the sack of towns, the jousts of chivalry, the shock of hosts, — this namely, the conviction of man universally, that a man should be himself responsible, with goods, health and life, for his behavior; that he should not ask of the State protection; should ask nothing of the State; should be himself a kingdom and a state; fearing no man; quite willing to use the opportunities and advantages that good government throw in his way, but nothing daunted, and not really the poorer if government, law and order went by the board; because in himself reside infinite resources; because he is sure of himself, and never needs to ask another what in any crisis it behooves him to do.

What makes to us the attractiveness of the Greek heroes? of the Roman? What makes the attractiveness of that romantic style of living which is the material of ten thousand plays and romances, from Shakspeare to Scott; the feudal baron, the French, the English nobility, the Warwicks, Plantagenets? It is their absolute self-dependence. I do not wonder at the dislike some of the friends of peace have expressed at Shakspeare. The veriest churl and Jacobin cannot resist the influence of the style and manners of these haughty lords. We are affected, as boys and barbarians are, by the appearance of a few rich and wilful gentlemen who take their honor into their own keeping, defy the world, so confident are they of their courage and strength, and whose appearance is the arrival of so much life and virtue. In dangerous times they are presently tried, and therefore their name is a flourish of trumpets. They, at least, affect us as a reality. They are not shams, but the substance of which that age and world is made. They are true heroes for their time. They make what is in their minds the greatest sacrifice. They will, for an injurious word, peril all their state and wealth, and go to the field. Take away that principle of responsibleness, and they become pirates and ruffians.

This self-subsistency is the charm of war; for this self-subsistency is essential to our idea of man. But another age comes, a truer religion and ethics open, and a man puts himself under the dominion of principles. I see him to be the servant of truth, of love and of freedom, and immoveable in the waves of the crowd. The man of principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles of lordship or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad, expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uniformly, on his private choice and disdaining consequences, — does not yield, in my imagination, to any man. He is willing to be hanged at his own gate, rather than consent to any compromise of his freedom or the suppression of his conviction. I regard no longer those names that so tingled in my ear. This is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter stomach.

The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice. If peace is sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. War is better, and the peace will be broken. If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man’s life; — men who have, by their intellectual insight or else by their moral elevation, attained such a perception of their own intrinsic worth, that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep.

If the universal cry for reform of so many inveterate abuses, with which society rings, — if the desire of a large class of young men for a faith and hope, intellectual and religious, such as they have not yet found, be an omen to be trusted; if the disposition to rely more in study and in action on the unexplored riches of the human constitution, — if the search of the sublime laws of morals and the sources of hope and trust, in man, and not in books, in the present, and not in the past, proceed; if the rising generation can be provoked to think it unworthy to nestle into every abomination of the past, and shall feel the generous darings of austerity and virtue, then war has a short day, and human blood will cease to flow.

It is of little consequence in what manner, through what organs, this purpose of mercy and holiness is effected. The proposition of the Congress of Nations is undoubtedly that at which the present fabric of our society and the present course of events do point. But the mind, once prepared for the reign of principles, will easily find modes of expressing its will. There is the highest fitness in the place and time in which this enterprise is begun. Not in an obscure corner, not in a feudal Europe, not in an antiquated appanage where no onward step can be taken without rebellion, is this seed of benevolence laid in the furrow, with tears of hope; but in this broad America of God and man, where the forest is only now falling, or yet to man, where the green earth opened to the inundation of emigrant men from all quarters of oppression and guilt; here, where not a family, not a few men, but mankind, shall say what shall be; here, we ask, Shall it be War, or shall it be Peace?

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.

LECTURE READ IN THE TABERNACLE, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 7, 1854.

I do not often speak to public questions; — they are odious and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits in prison; — spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not. And then I see what havoc it makes with any good mind, a dissipated philanthropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is, not to know their own task, or to take their ideas from others. From this want of manly rest in their own and rash acceptance of other people’s watchwords, come the imbecility and fatigue of their conversation. For they cannot affirm these from any original experience, and of course not with the natural movement and total strength of their nature and talent, but only from their memory, only from their cramp position of standing for their teacher. They say what they would have you believe, but what they do not quite know.

My own habitual view is to the well-being of students or scholars. And it is only when the public event affects them, that it very seriously touches me. And what I have to say is to them. For every man speaks mainly to a class whom he works with and more or less fully represents. It is to these I am beforehand related and engaged, in this audience or out of it — to them and not to others. And yet, when I say the class of scholars or students, — that is a class which comprises in some sort all mankind, comprises every man in the best hours of his life; and in these days not only virtually but actually. For who are the readers and thinkers of 1854? Owing to the silent revolution which the newspaper has wrought, this class has come in this country to take in all classes. Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, work-yards and warehouses. With them enters the car — the newsboy, that humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion. He unfolds his magical sheets, — twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs — and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast. There is, no doubt, chaff enough in what he brings; but there is fact, thought, and wisdom in the crude mass, from all regions of the world.

I have lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience from American Slavery. I never saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the check on my free speech and action, until, the other day, when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the country. I say Mr. Webster, for though the Bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had: it cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it and made the law. I say inferior men. There were all sorts of what are called brilliant men, accomplished men, men of high station, a President of the United States, Senators, men of eloquent speech, but men without self-respect, without character, and it was strange to see that office, age, fame, talent, even a repute for honesty, all count for nothing. They had no opinions, they had no memory for what they had been saying like the Lord’s Prayer all their lifetime: they were only looking to what their great Captain did: if he jumped, they jumped, if he stood on his head, they did. In ordinary, the supposed sense of their district and State is their guide, and that holds them to the part of liberty and justice. But it is always a little difficult to decipher what this public sense is; and when a great man comes who knots up into himself the opinions and wishes of the people, it is so much easier to follow him as an exponent of this. He too is responsible; they will not be. It will always suffice to say,— “I followed him.”

I saw plainly that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more than in their power to misguide us. I saw that a great man, deservedly admired for his powers and their general right direction, was able, — fault of the total want of stamina in public men, — when he failed, to break them all with him, to carry parties with him.

In what I have to say of Mr. Webster I do not confound him with vulgar politicians before or since. There is always base ambition enough, men who calculate on the immense ignorance of the masses; that is their quarry and farm: they use the constituencies at home only for their shoes. And, of course, they can drive out from the contest any honorable man. The low can best win the low, and all men like to be made much of. There are those too who have power and inspiration only to do ill. Their talent or their faculty deserts them when they undertake any thing right. Mr. Webster had a natural ascendancy of aspect and carriage which distinguished him over all his contemporaries. His countenance, his figure, and his manners were all in so grand a style, that he was, without effort, as superior to his most eminen rivals as they were to the humblest; so that his arrival in any place was an event which drew crowds of people, who went to satisfy their eyes, and could not see him enough. I think they looked at him as the representative of the American Continent. He was there in his Adamitic capacity, as if he alone of all men did not disappoint the eye and the ear, but was a fit figure in the landscape.

I remember his appearance at Bunker’s Hill. There was the Monument, and here was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing: he was only to say plain and equal things, — grand things if he had them, and, if he had them not, only to abstain from saying unfit things, — and the whole occasion was answered by his presence. It was a place for behavior more than for speech, and Mr. Webster walked through his part with entire success. His excellent organization, the perfection of his elocution and all that thereto belongs, — voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner, — we shall not soon find again. Then he was so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric; he saw through his matter, hugged his fact so close, went to the principle or essential, and never indulged in a weak flourish, though he knew perfectly well how to make such exordiums, episodes and perorations as might give perspective to his harangues without in the least embarrassing his march or confounding his transitions. In his statement things lay in daylight; we saw them in order as they were. Though he knew very well how to present his own personal claims, yet in his argument he was intellectual, — stated his fact pure of all personality, so that his splendid wrath, when his eyes became lamps, was the wrath of the fact and the cause he stood for.

His power, like that of all great masters, was not in excellent parts, but was total. He had a great and everywhere equal property. He worked with that closeness of adhesion to the matter in hand which a joiner or a chemist uses, and the same quiet and sure feeling of right to his place that an oak or a mountain have to theirs. After all his talents have been described, there remains that perfect propriety which animated all the details of the action or speech with the character of the whole, so that his beauties of detail are endless. He seemed born for the bar, born for the senate, and took very naturally a leading part in large private and in public affairs; for his head distributed things in their right places, and what he saw so well he compelled other people to see also. Great is the privilege of eloquence. What gratitude does every man feel to him who speaks well for the right, — who translates truth into language entirely plain and clear!

The history of this country has given a disastrous importance to the defects of this great man’s mind. Whether evil influences and the corruption of politics, or whether original infirmity, it was the misfortune of his country that with this large understanding he had not what is better than intellect, and the source of its health. It is a law of our nature that great thoughts come from the heart. If his moral sensibility had been proportioned to the force of his understanding, what limits could have been set to his genius and beneficent power. But he wanted that deep source of inspiration. Hence a sterility of thought, the want of generalization in his speeches, and the curious fact that, with a general ability which impresses all the world, there is not a single general remark, not an observation on life and manners, not an aphorism that can pass into literature from his writings.

Four years ago to-night, on one of those high critical moments in history when great issues are determined, when the powers of right and wrong are mustered for conflict, and it lies with one mau to give a casting vote, — Mr. Webster, most unexpectedly, threw his whole weight on the side of Slavery, and caused by his personal and official authority the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.

It is remarked of the Americans that they value dexterity too much, and honor too little; that they think they praise a man more by saying that he is “smart” than by saying that he is right. Whether the defect be national or not, it is the defect and calamity of Mr. Webster; and it is so far true of his countrymen, namely, that the appeal is sure to be made to his physical and mental ability when his character is assailed. His speeches on the seventh of March, and at Albany, at Buffalo, at Syracuse and Boston are cited in justification. And Mr. Webster’s literary editor believes that it was his wish to rest his fame on the speech of the seventh of March. Now, though I have my own opinions on this seventh of March discourse and those others, and think them very transparent and very open to criticism, — yet the secondary merits of a speech, namely, its logic, its illustrations, its points, etc., are not here in question. Nobody doubts that Daniel Webster could make a good speech. Nobody doubts that there were good and plausible things to be said on the part of the South. But this is not a question of ingenuity, not a question of syllogisms, but of sides. How came he there ?

There are always texts and thoughts and arguments. But it is the genius and temper of the man which decides whether he will stand for right or for might. Who doubts the power of any fluent debater to defend either of our political parties, or any client in our courts? There was the same law in England for Jeffries and Talbot and Yorke to read slavery out of, and for Lord Mansfield to read freedom. And in this country one sees that there is always margin enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read one way and a servile judge another.

But the question which History will ask is broader. In the final hour when he was forced by the peremptory necessity of the closing armies to take a side, — did he take the part of great principles, the side of humanity and justice, or the side of abuse and oppression and chaos?

Mr. Webster decided for Slavery, and that, when the aspect of the institution was no longer doubtful, no longer feeble and apologetic and proposing soon to end itself, but when it was strong, aggressive, and threatening an illimitable increase. He listened to State reasons and hopes, and left, with much complacency we are told, the testament of his speech to the astonished State of Massachusetts, vera pro gratis ; a ghastly result of all those years of experience in affairs, this, that there was nothing better for the foremost American man to tell his countrymen than that Slavery was now at that strength that they must beat down their conscience and become kidnappers for it.

This was like the doleful speech falsely ascribed to the patriot Brutus: “Virtue, I have followed thee through life, and I find thee but a shadow.” Here was a question of an immoral law; a question agitated for ages, and settled always in the same way by every great jurist, that an immoral law cannot be valid. Cicero, Grotius, Coke, Blackstone, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Burke, Jefferson, do all affirm this, and I cite them, not that they can give evidence to what is indisputable, but because, though lawyers and practical statesmen, the habit of their profession did not hide from them that this truth was the foundation of States.

Here was the question, Are you for man and for the good of man; or are you for the hurt and harm of man? It was question whether man shall be treated as leather? whether the Negroes shall be as the Indians were in Spanish America, a piece of money? Whether this system, which is a kind of mill or factory for converting men into monkeys, shall be upheld and enlarged? And Mr. Webster and the country went for the application to these poor men of quadruped law.

People were expecting a totally different course from Mr. Webster. If any man had in that hour possessed the weight with the country which he had acquired, he could have brought the whole country to its senses. But not a moment’s pause was allowed. Angry parties went from bad to worse, and the decision of Webster was accompanied with everything offensive to freedom and good morals. There was something like an attempt to debauch the moral sentiment of the clergy and of the youth. Burke said he “would pardon something to the spirit of liberty.” But by Mr. Webster the opposition to the law was sharply called treason, and prosecuted so. He told the people at Boston “they must conquer their prejudices;” that “agitation of the subject of Slavery must be suppressed.” He did as immoral men usually do, made very low bows to the Christian Church, and went through all the Sunday decorums; but when allusion was made to the question of duty and the sanctions of morality, he very frankly said, at Albany, “Some higher law, something existing somewhere between here and the third heaven, — I do not know where.” And if the reporters say true, this wretched atheism found some laughter in the company.

I said I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become or was fast becoming a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous.

The way in which the country was dragged to consent to this, and the disastrous defection (on the miserable cry of Union) of the men of letters, of the colleges, of educated men, nay, of some preachers of religion, — was the darkest passage in the history. It showed that our prosperity had hurt us, and that we could not be shocked by crime. It showed that the old religion and the sense of the right had faded and gone out; that while we reckoned ourselves a highly cultivated nation, our bellies had run away with our brains, and the principles of culture and progress did not exist.

For I suppose that liberty is an accurate index, in men and nations, of general progress. The theory of personal liberty must always appeal to the most refined communities and to the men of the rarest perception and of delicate moral sense. For there are rights which rest on the finest sense of justice, and, with every degree of civility, it will be more truly felt and defined. A barbarous tribe of good stock will, by means of their best heads, secure substantial liberty. But where there is any weakness in a race, and it becomes in a degree matter of concession and protection from their stronger neighbors, the incompatibility and offensiveness of the wrong will of course be most evident to the most cultivated. For it is, — is it not? — the essence of courtesy, of politeness, of religion, of love, to prefer another, to postpone oneself, to protect another from oneself? That is the distinction of the gentleman, to defend the weak and redress the injured, as it is of the savage and the brutal to usurp and use others.

In Massachusetts, as we all know, there has always existed a predominant conservative spirit. We have more money and value of every kind than other people, and wish to keep them. The plea on which freedom was resisted was Union. I went to certain serious men, who had a little more reason than the rest, and inquired why they took this part? They answered that they had no confidence in their strength to resist the Democratic party; that they saw plainly that all was going to the utmost verge of licence; each was vying with his neighbor to lead the party, by proposing the worst measure, and they threw themselves on the extreme conservatism, as a drag on the wheel: that they knew Cuba would be had, and Mexico would be had, and they stood stiffly on conservatism, and as near to monarchy as they could, only to moderate the velocity with which the car was running down the precipice. In short, their theory was despair; the Whig wisdom was only reprieve, a waiting to be last devoured. They side with Carolina, or with Arkansas, only to make a show of Whig strength, wherewith to resist a little longer this general ruin.

I have a respect for conservatism. I know how deeply founded it is in our nature, and how idle are all attempts to shake ourselves free from it. We are all conservatives, half Whig, half Democrat, in our essences: and might as well try to jump out of our skins as to escape from our Whiggery. There are two forces in Nature, by whose antagonism we exist; the power of Fate, Fortune, the laws of the world, the order of things, or however else we choose to phrase it, the material necessities, on the one hand, — and Will or Duty or Freedom on the other.

May and Must, and the sense of right and duty, on the one hand, and the material necessities on the other: May and Must. In vulgar politics the Whig goes for what has been, for the old necessities, — the Musts. The reformer goes for the Better, for the ideal good, for the Mays. But each of these parties must of necessity take in, in some measure, the principles of the other. Each wishes to cover the whole ground; to hold fast and to advance. Only, one lays the emphasis on keeping, and the other on advancing. I too think the musts are a safe company to follow, and even agreeable. But if we are Whigs, let us be Whigs of nature and science, and so for all the necessities. Let us know that, over and above all the musts of poverty and appetite, is the instinct of man to rise, and the instinct to love and help his brother.

Now, Gentlemen, I think we have in this hour instruction again in the simplest lesson. Events roll, millions of men are engaged, and the result is the enforcing of some of those first commandments which we heard in the nursery. We never get beyond our first lesson, for, really, the world exists, as I understand it, to teach the science of liberty, which begins with liberty from fear.

The events of this month are teaching one thing plain and clear, the worthlessness of good tools to bad workmen; that official papers are of no use; resolutions of public meetings, platforms of conventions, no, nor laws, nor constitutions, any more. These are all declaratory of the will of the moment, and are passed with more levity and on grounds far less honorable than ordinary business transactions of the street.

You relied on the constitution. It has not the word slave in it; and very good argument has shown that it would not warrant the crimes that are done under it; that, with provisions so vague for an object not named, and which could not be availed of to claim a barrel of sugar or a barrel of corn, — the robbing of a man and of all his posterity is effected. You relied on the Supreme Court. The law was right, excellent law for the lambs. But what if unhappily the judges were chosen from the wolves, and give to all the law a wolfish interpretation? You relied on the Missouri Compromise. That is ridden over. You relied on State sovereignty in the Free States to protect their citizens. They are driven with contempt out of the courts and out of the territory of the Slave States, — if they are so happy as to get out with their lives, — and now you relied on these dismal guaranties infamously made in 1850; and, before the body of Webster is yet crumbled, it is found that they have crumbled. This eternal monument of his fame and of the Union is rotten in four years. They are no guaranty to the Free States. They are a guaranty to the Slave States that, as they have hitherto met with no repulse, they shall meet with none.

I fear there is no reliance to be put on any kind or form of covenant, no, not on sacred forms, none on churches, none on bibles. For one would have said that a Christian would not keep slaves; — but the Christians keep slaves. Of course they will not dare to read the Bible? Won’t they? They quote the Bible, quote Paul, quote Christ to justify slavery. If slavery is good, then is lying, theft, arson, homicide, each and all good, and to be maintained by Union societies.

These things show that no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves. The Devil nestles comfortably into them all. There is no help but in the head and heart and hamstrings of a man. Covenants are of no use without honest men to keep them; laws of none, but with loyal citizens to obey them. To interpret Christ it needs Christ in the heart. The teachings of the Spirit can be apprehended only by the same spirit that gave them forth. To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others. You must be citadels and warriors, yourselves, declarations of Independence, the charter, the battle and the victory. Cromwell said, “We can only resist the superior training of the King’s soldiers, by enlisting godly men.” And no man has a right to hope that the laws of New York will defend him from the contamination of slaves another day until he has made up his mind that he will not owe his protection to the laws of New York, but to his own sense and spirit. Then he protects New York. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world, — to be himself the counterbalance of all falsehood and all wrong. “The army of unright is encamped from pole to pole, but the road of victory is known to the just.” Everything may be taken away; he may be poor, he may be houseless, yet he will know out of his arms to make a pillow, and out of his breast a bolster. Why have the minority no influence? Because they have not a real minority of one.

I conceive that thus to detach a man and make him feel that he is to owe all to himself, is the way to make him strong and rich; and here the optimist must find, if anywhere, the benefit of Slavery. We have many teachers; we are in this world for culture, to be instructed in realities, in the laws of moral and intelligent nature; and our education is not conducted by toys and luxuries, but by austere and rugged masters, by poverty, solitude, passions, War, Slavery; to know that Paradise is under the shadow of swords; that divine sentiments which are always soliciting us are breathed into us from on high, and are an offset to a Universe of suffering and crime; that self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God. The insight of the religious sentiment will disclose to him unexpected aids in the nature of things. The Persian Saadi said, “Beware of hurting, the orphan. When the orphan sets a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.”

Whenever a man has come to this mind, that there is no Church for him but his believing prayer; no Constitution but his dealing well and justly with his neighbor; no liberty but his invincible will to do right, — then certain aids and allies will promptly appear: for the constitution of the Universe is on his side. It is of no use to vote down gravitation or morals. What is useful will last, whilst that which is hurtful to the world will sink beneath all the opposing forces which it must exasperate. The terror which the Marseillaise struck into oppression, it thunders again to-day,

“Tout est soldat pour vous combattre.”

Everything turns soldier to fight you down. The end for which man was made is not crime in any form, and a man cannot steal without incurring the penalties of the thief, though all the legislatures vote that it is virtuous, and though there be a general conspiracy among scholars and official persons to hold him up, and to say, “ Nothing is good but stealing. “ A man who commits a crime defeats the end of his existence. He was created for benefit, and he exists for harm; and as well-doing makes power and wisdom, ill-doing takes them away. A man who steals another man’s labor steals away his own faculties; his integrity, his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. It takes away the presentiments.

I suppose in general this is allowed, that if you have a nice question of right and wrong, you would not go with it to Louis Napoleon, or to a political hack; or to a slave-driver. The habit of mind of traders in power would not be esteemed favorable to delicate moral perception. American slavery affords no exception to this rule. No excess of good nature or of tenderness in individuals has been able to give a new character to the system, to tear down the whipping-house. The plea that the negro is an inferior race sounds very oddly in my ear in the mouth of a slave-holder. “The masters of slaves seem generally anxious to prove that they are not of a race superior in any noble quality to the meanest of their bondmen.” And indeed when the Southerner points to the anatomy of the negro, and talks of chimpanzee, — I recall Montesquieu’s remark, “It will not do to say that negroes are men, lest it should turn out that whites are not.”

Slavery is disheartening; but Nature is not so helpless but it can rid itself at last of every wrong. But the spasms of Nature are centuries and ages, and will tax the faith of short-lived men. Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely. The proverbs of the nations affirm these delays, but affirm the arrival. They say, “God may consent, but not forever.” The delay of the Divine Justice — this was the meaning and soul of the Greek Tragedy; this the soul of their religion. “There has come, too, one to whom lurking warfare is dear, Retribution, with a soul full of wiles; a violator of hospitality; guileful without the guilt of guile; limping, late in her arrival.” They said of the happiness of the unjust, that “at its close it begets itself an offspring and does not die childless, and instead of good fortune, there sprouts forth for posterity ever-ravening calamity:”

“For evil word shall evil word be said,

For murder-stroke a murder-stroke be paid.

Who smites must smart.”

These delays, you see them now in the temper of the times. The national spirit in this country is so drowsy, pre-occupied with interest, deaf to principle. The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish. They believe only in Anglo-Saxons. In 1825 Greece found America deaf, Poland found America deaf, Italy and Hungary found her deaf. England maintains trade, not liberty; stands against Greece; against Hungary; against Schleswig Holstein; against the French Republic, whilst it was a republic.

To faint hearts the times offer no invitation, and torpor exists here throughout the active classes on the subject of domestic slavery and its appalling aggressions. Yes, that is the stern edict of Providence, that liberty shall be no hasty fruit, but that event on event, population on population, age on age, shall cast itself into the opposite scale, and not until liberty has slowly accumulated weight enough to countervail and preponderate against all this, can the sufficient recoil come. All the great cities, all the refined circles, all the statesmen, Guizot, Palmerston, Webster, Calhoun, are sure to be found befriending liberty with their words, and crushing it with their votes. Liberty is never cheap. It is made difficult, because freedom is the accomplishment and perfectness of man. He is a finished man; earning and bestowing good; equal to the world; at home in nature and dignifying that; the sun does not see anything nobler, and has nothing to teach him. Therefore mountains of difficulty must be surmounted, stern trials met, wiles of seduction, dangers, healed by a quarantine of calamities to measure his strength before he dare say I am free.

Whilst the inconsistency of slavery with the principles on which the world is built guarantees its downfall, I own that the patience it requires is almost too sublime for mortals, and seems to demand of us more than mere hoping. And when one sees how fast the rot spreads, — it is growing serious — I think we demand of superior men that they be superior in this, — that the mind and the virtue shall give their verdict in their day, and accelerate so far the progress of civilization. Possession is sure to throw its stupid strength for existing power, and appetite and ambition will go for that. Let the aid of virtue, intelligence and education be cast where they rightfully belong. They are organically ours. Let them be loyal to their own. I wish to see the instructed class here know their own flag, and not fire on their comrades. We should not forgive the clergy for taking on every issue the immoral side; nor the Bench, if it put itself on the side of the culprit; nor the Government, if it sustain the mob against the laws.

It is a potent support and ally to a brave man standing single, or with a few, for the right, and out-voted and ostracized, to know that better men in other parts of the country appreciate the service and will rightly report him to his own and the next age. Without this assurance, he will sooner sink. He may well say, If my countrymen do not care to be defended, I too will decline the controversy, from which I only reap invectives and hatred. Yet the lovers of liberty may with reason tax the coldness and indifferentism of scholars and literary men. They are lovers of liberty in Greece and Rome and in the English Commonwealth, but they are lukewarm lovers of the liberty of America in 1854. The Universities are not, as in Hobbes’s time, “the core of rebellion,” no, but the seat of inertness. They have forgotten their allegiance to the Muse, and grown worldly and political. I listened, lately, on one of those occasions when the University chooses one of its distinguished sons returning from the political arena, believing that Senators and Statesmen would be glad to throw off the harness and to dip again in the Castalian pools. But if audiences forget themselves, statesmen do not. The low bows to all the crockery gods of the day were duly made: — only in one part of the discourse the orator allowed to transpire rather against his will a little sober sense. It was this ‘I am as you see a man virtuously inclined, and only corrupted by my profession of politics. I should prefer the right side. You, gentlemen of these literary and scientific schools, and the important class you represent, have the power to make your verdict clear and prevailing. Had you done so, you would have found me its glad organ and champion. Abstractly, I should have preferred that side. But you have not done it. You have not spoken out. You have failed to arm me. I can only deal with masses as I find them. Abstractions are not for me. I go then for such parties and opinions as have provided me with a working apparatus. I give you my word, not without regret, that I was first for you; and though I am now to deny and condemn you, you see it is not my will but the party necessity.’ Having made this manifesto and professed his adoration for liberty in the time of his grandfathers, he proceeded with his work of denouncing freedom and freemen at the present day, much in the tone and spirit in which Lord Bacon prosecuted his benefactor Essex. He denounced every name and aspect under which liberty and progress dare show themselves in this age and country, but with a lingering conscience which qualified each sentence with a recommendation to mercy.

But I put it to every noble and generous spirit, to every poetic, every heroic, every religious heart, that not so is our learning, our education, our poetry, our worship to be declared. Liberty is aggressive, Liberty is the Crusade of all brave and conscientious men, the Epic Poetry, the new religion, the chivalry of all gentlemen. This is the oppressed Lady whom true knights on their oath and honor must rescue and save.

Now at last we are disenchanted and shall have no more false hopes. I respect the Anti-Slavery Society. It is the Cassandra that has foretold all that has befallen, fact for fact, years ago; foretold all, and no man laid it to heart. It seemed, as the Turks say, “Fate makes that a man should not believe his own eyes.” But the Fugitive Law did much to unglue the eyes of men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring. The Anti-Slavery Society will add many members this year. The Whig Party will join it: the Democrats will join it. The population of the Free States will join it. I doubt not, at last, the Slave States will join it. But be that sooner or later, and whoever comes or stays away, I hope we have reached the end of our unbelief, have come to a belief that there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our own co-operation.

THE ASSAULT UPON MR. SUMNER.

A SPEECH AT A MEETING OF THE CITIZENS IN THE TOWN HALL, IN CONCORD, MAY 26, 1856.

Mr. Chairman : — I sympathize heartily with the spirit of the resolutions. The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom. Life has not parity of value in the free state and in the slave state. In one, it is adorned with education, with skilful labor, with arts, with long prospective interests, with sacred family ties, with honor and justice. In the other, life is a fever; man is an animal, given to pleasure, frivolous, irritable, spending his days in hunting and practising with deadly weapons to defend himself against his slaves and against his companions brought up in the same idle and dangerous way. Such people live for the moment, they have properly no future, and readily risk on every passion a life which is of small value to themselves or to others. Many years ago, when Mr. Webster was challenged in Washington to a duel by one of these madcaps, his friends came forward with prompt good sense and said such a thing was not to be thought of; Mr. Webster’s life was the property of his friends and of the whole country, and was not to be risked on the turn of a vagabond’s ball. Life and life are incommensurate. The whole State of South Carolina does not now offer one or any number of persons who are to be weighed for a moment in the scale with such a person as the meanest of them all has now struck down. The very conditions of the game must always be, — the worst life staked against the best. It is the best whom they desire to kill. It is only when they cannot answer your reasons, that they wish to knock you down. If, therefore, Massachusetts could send to the Senate a better man than Mr. Sumner, his death would be only so much the more quick and certain. Now, as men’s bodily strength, or skill with knives and guns, is not usually in proportion to their knowledge and mother-wit, but oftener in the inverse ratio, it will only do to send foolish persons to Washington, if you wish them to be safe.

The outrage is the more shocking from the singularly pure character of its victim. Mr. Sumner’s position is exceptional in its honor. He had not taken his degrees in the caucus and in hack politics. It is notorious that, in the long time when his election was pending, he refused to take a single step to secure it. He would not so much as go up to the State House to shake hands with this or that person whose good will was reckoned important by his friends. He was elected. It was a homage to character and talent. In Congress, he did not rush into party position. He sat long silent and studious. His friends, I remember, were told that they would find Sumner a man of the world like the rest; ‘‘t is quite impossible to be at Washington and not bend; he will bend as the rest have done.’ Well, he did not bend. He took his position and kept it. He meekly bore the cold shoulder from some of his New England colleagues, the hatred of his enemies, the pity of the indifferent, cheered by the love and respect of good men with whom he acted; and has stood for the North, a little in advance of all the North, and therefore without adequate support. He has never faltered in his maintenance of justice and freedom. He has gone beyond the large expectation of his friends in his increasing ability and his manlier tone. I have heard that some of his political friends tax him with indolence or negligence in refusing to make electioneering speeches, or otherwise to bear his part in the labor which party-organization requires. I say it to his honor. But more to his honor are the faults which his enemies lay to his charge. I think, sir, if Mr. Sumner had any vices, we should be likely to hear of them. They have fastened their eyes like microscopes for five years on every act, word, manner and movement, to find a flaw, — and with what result? His opponents accuse him neither of drunkenness, nor debauchery, nor job, nor speculation, nor rapacity, nor personal aims of any kind. No; but with what? Why, beyond this charge, which it is impossible was ever sincerely made, that he broke over the proprieties of debate, I find him accused of publishing his opinion of the Nebraska conspiracy in a letter to the people of the United States, with discourtesy. Then, that he is an abolitionist; as if every sane human being were not an abolitionist, or a believer that all men should be free. And the third crime he stands charged with, is, that his speeches were written before they were spoken; which of course must be true in Sumner’s case, as it was true of Webster, of Adams, of Calhoun, of Burke, of Chatham, of Demosthenes; of every first-rate speaker that ever lived. It is the high compliment he pays to the intelligence of the Senate and of the country. When the same reproach was cast on the first orator of ancient times by some caviler of his day, he said, “I should be ashamed to come with one unconsidered word before such an assembly.” Mr. Chairman, when I think of these most small faults as the worst which party hatred could allege, I think I may borrow the language which Bishop Burnet applied to Sir Isaac Newton, and say that Charles Sumner “has the whitest soul I ever knew.”

Well, sir, this noble head, so comely and so wise, must be the target for a pair of bullies to beat with clubs. The murderer’s brand shall stamp their foreheads wherever they may wander in the earth. But I wish, sir, that the high respects of this meeting shall be expressed to Mr. Sumner; that a copy of the resolutions that have been read may be forwarded to him. I wish that he may know the shudder of terror which ran through all this community on the first tidings of this brutal attack. Let him hear that every man of worth in New England loves his virtues; that every mother thinks of him as the protector of families; that every friend of freedom thinks him the friend of freedom. And if our arms at this distance cannot defend him from assassins, we confide the defence of a life so precious, to all honorable men and true patriots, and to the Almighty Maker of men.

SPEECH AT THE KANSAS RELIEF MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE, WEDNESDAY. EVENING, SEPTEMBER 10, 1856.

I regret , with all this company, the absence of Mr. Whitman of Kansas, whose narrative was to constitute the interest of this meeting. Mr. Whitman is not here; but knowing, as we all do, why he is not, what duties kept him at home, he is more than present. His vacant chair speaks for him. For quite other reasons, I had been wiser to have stayed at home, unskilled as I am to address a political meeting, but it is impossible for the most recluse to extricate himself from the questions of the times.

There is this peculiarity about the case of Kansas, that all the right is on one side. We hear the screams of hunted wives and children answered by the howl of the butchers. The testimony of the telegraphs from St. Louis and the border confirm the worst details. The printed letters of the border ruffians avow the facts. When pressed to look at the cause of the mischief in the Kansas laws, the President falters and declines the discussion; but his supporters in the Senate, Mr. Cass, Mr. Geyer, Mr. Hunter, speak out, and declare the intolerable atrocity of the code. It is a maxim that all party spirit produces the incapacity to receive natural impressions from facts; and our recent political history has abundantly borne out the maxim. But these details that have come from Kansas are so horrible, that the hostile press have but one word in reply, namely, that it is all exaggeration, ‘t is an Abolition lie. Do the Committee of Investigation say that the outrages have been overstated? Does their dismal catalogue of private tragedies show it? Do the private letters? Is it an exaggeration, that Mr. Hopps of Somerville, Mr. Hoyt of Deerfield, Mr. Jennison of Groton, Mr. Phillips of Berkshire, have been murdered? That Mr. Robinson of Fitchburg has been imprisoned? Rev. Mr. Nute of Springfield seized, and up to this time we have no tidings of his fate?

In these calamities under which they suffer, and the worse which threaten them, the people of Kansas ask for bread, clothes, arms and men, to save them alive, and enable them to stand against these enemies of the human race. They have a right to be helped, for they have helped themselves.

This aid must be sent, and this is not to be doled out as an ordinary charity; but bestowed up to the magnitude of the want, and, as has been elsewhere said, “on the scale of a national action.” I think we are to give largely, lavishly, to these men. And we must prepare to do it. We must learn to do with less, live in a smaller tenement, sell our apple-trees, our acres, our pleasant houses. I know people who are making haste to reduce their expenses and pay their debts, not with a view to new accumulations, but in preparation to save and earn for the benefit of the Kansas emigrants.

We must have aid from individuals, — we must also have aid from the State. I know that the last Legislature refused that aid. I know that lawyers hesitate on technical grounds, and wonder what method of relief the Legislature will apply. But I submit that, in a case like this, where citizens of Massachusetts, legal voters here, have emigrated to national territory under the sanction of every law, and are then set on by highwaymen, driven from their new homes, pillaged, and numbers of them killed and scalped, and the whole world knows that this is no accidental brawl, but a systematic war to the knife, and in defiance of all laws and liberties, I submit that the Governor and Legislature should neither slumber nor sleep till they have found out how to send effectual aid and comfort to these poor farmers, or else should resign their seats to those who can. But first let them hang the halls of the State House with black crape, and order funeral service to be said there for the citizens whom they were unable to defend.

We stick at the technical difficulties. I think there never was a people so choked and stultified by forms. We adore the forms of law, instead of making them vehicles of wisdom and justice. I like the primary assembly. I own I have little esteem for governments. I esteem them only good in the moment when they are established. I set the private man first. He only who is able to stand alone is qualified to be a citizen. Next to the private man, I value the primary assembly, met to watch the government and to correct it. That is the theory of the American State, that it exists to execute the will of the citizens, is always responsible to them, and is always to be changed when it does not. First, the private citizen, then the primary assembly, and the government last.

In this country for the last few years the government has been the chief obstruction to the common weal. Who doubts that Kansas would have been very well settled, if the United States had let it alone? The government armed and led the ruffians against the poor farmers. I do not know any story so gloomy as the politics of this country for the last twenty years, centralizing ever more manifestly round one spring, and that a vast crime, and ever more plainly, until it is notorious that all promotion, power and policy are dictated from one source, — illustrating the fatal effects of a false position to demoralize legislation and put the best people always at a disadvantage; — one crime always present, always to be varnished over, to find fine names for; and we free-statesmen, as accomplices to the guilt, ever in the power of the grand offender.

Language has lost its meaning in the universal cant. Representative Government is really mis-representative; Union is a conspiracy against the Northern States which the Northern States are to have the privilege of paying for; the adding of Cuba and Central America to the slave marts is enlarging the area of Freedom. Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom , fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto of rose and lavender, — I call it bilge water. They call it Chivalry and Freedom; I call it the stealing all the earnings of a poor man and the earnings of his little girl and boy, and the earnings of all that shall come from him, his children’s children forever.

But this is Union, and this is Democracy; and our poor people, led by the nose by these fine words, dance and sing, ring bells and fire cannon, with every new link of the chain which is forged for their limbs by the plotters in the Capitol.

What are the results of law and union? There is no Union. Can any citizen of Massachusetts travel in honor through Kentucky and Alabama and speak his mind? Or can any citizen of the Southern country who happens to think kidnapping a bad thing, say so? Let Mr. Underwood of Virginia answer. Is it to be supposed that there are no men in Carolina who dissent from the popular sentiment now reigning there? It must happen, in the variety of human opinions, that there are dissenters. They are silent as the grave. Are there no women in that country, — women, who always carry the conscience of a people? Yet we have not heard one discordant whisper.

In the free States, we give a snivelling support to slavery. The judges give cowardly interpretations to the law, in direct opposition to the known foundation of all law, that every immoral statute is void. And here of Kansas, the President says: “Let the complainants go to the courts;” though he knows that when the poor plundered farmer comes to the court, he finds the ringleader who has robbed him, dismounting from his own horse, and unbuckling his knife to sit as his judge.

The President told the Kansas Committee that the whole difficulty grew from “the factious spirit of the Kansas people, respecting institutions which they need not have concerned themselves about.” A very remarkable speech from a Democratic President to his fellow citizens, that they are not to concern themselves with institutions which they alone are to create and determine. The President is a lawyer, and should know the statutes of the land. But I borrow the language of an eminent man, used long since, with far less occasion: “If that be law, let the ploughshare be run under the foundations of the Capitol;” — and if that be Government, extirpation is the only cure.

I am glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing. Massachusetts, in its heroic day, had no government — was an anarchy. Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor; and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mount Hoosac. California, a few years ago, by the testimony of all people at that time in the country, had the best government that ever existed. Pans of gold lay drying outside of every man’s tent, in perfect security. The land was measured into little strips of a few feet wide, all side by side. A bit of ground that your hand could cover was worth one or two hundred dollars, on the edge of your strip; and there was no dispute. Every man throughout the country was armed with knife and revolver, and it was known that instant justice would be administered to each offence, and perfect peace reigned. For the Saxon man, when he is well awake, is not a pirate but a citizen, all made of hooks and eyes, and links himself naturally to his brothers, as bees hook themselves to one another and to their queen in a loyal swarm.

But the hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough. A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be, than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new, it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy 3,000 miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a network that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.

Fellow Citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic, I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the Sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. Come home and stay at home, while there is a country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land where freedom exists.

JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT BOSTON.

REMARKS AT A MEETING FOR THE RELIEF OF THE FAMILY OF JOHN BROWN, AT TREMONT TEMPLE, BOSTON, NOVEMBER 18, 1859.

Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens :

I share the sympathy and sorrow which have brought us together. Gentlemen who have preceded me have well said that no wall of separation could here exist. This commanding event which has brought us together, eclipses all others which have occurred for a long time in our history, and I am very glad to see that this sudden interest in the hero of Harper’s Ferry has provoked an extreme curiosity in all parts of the Republic, in regard to the details of his history. Every anecdote is eagerly sought, and I do not wonder that gentlemen find traits of relation readily between him and themselves. One finds a relation in the church, another in the profession, another in the place of his birth. He was happily a representative of the American Republic. Captain John Brown is a farmer, the fifth in descent from Peter Brown, who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower, in 1620. All the six have been farmers. His grandfather, of Simsbury, in Connecticut, was a captain in the Revolution. His father, largely interested as a raiser of stock, became a contractor to supply the army with beef, in the war of 1812, and our Captain John Brown, then a boy, with his father, was present and witnessed the surrender of General Hull. He cherishes a great respect for his father, as a man of strong character, and his respect is probably just. For himself, he is so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed, the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own. Many of you have seen him, and every one who has heard him speak has been impressed alike by his simple, artless goodness, joined with his sublime courage. He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought his fifth ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather’s ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles — two instruments shall I say? — the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in conversation here concerning them, “Better that a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country.” There is a Unionist, — there is a strict constructionist for you. He believes in the Union of the States, and he conceives that the only obstruction to the Union is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for its abolition. The Governor of Virginia has pronounced his eulogy in a manner that discredits the moderation of our timid parties. His own speeches to the court have interested the nation in him. What magnanimity, and what innocent pleading, as of childhood! You remember his words: “If I had interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or any of their friends, parents, wives, or children, it would all have been right. But I believe that to have interfered as I have done, for the despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

It is easy to see what a favorite he will be with history, which plays such pranks with temporary reputations. Nothing can resist the sympathy which all elevated minds must feel with Brown, and through them the whole civilized world; and if he must suffer, he must drag official gentlemen into an immortality most undesirable, and of which they have already some disagreeable forebodings. Indeed, it is the reductio ad absurdum of Slavery, when the Governor of Virginia is forced to hang a man whom he declares to be a man of the most integrity, truthfulness and courage he has ever met. Is that the kind of man the gallows is built for? It were bold to affirm that there is within that broad Commonwealth, at this moment, another citizen as worthy to live, and as deserving of all public and private honor, as this poor prisoner.

But we are here to think of relief for the family of John Brown. To my eyes, that family looks very large and very needy of relief. It comprises his brave fellow-sufferers in the Charlestown Jail; the fugitives still hunted in the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania; the sympathizers with him in all the States; and I may say, almost every man who loves the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence, like him, and who sees what a tiger’s thirst threatens him in the malignity of public sentiment in the Slave States. It seems to me that a common feeling joins the people of Massachusetts with him.

I said John Brown was an idealist. He believed in his ideas to that extent that he existed to put them all into action; he said, “he did not believe in moral suasion, he believed in putting the thing through.” He saw how deceptive the forms are. We fancy, in Massachusetts, that we are free; yet it seems the Government is quite unreliable. Great wealth, great population, men of talent in the Executive, on the Bench, — all the forms right, — and yet, life and freedom are not safe. Why? Because the judges rely on the forms, and do not, like John Brown, use their eyes to see the fact behind the forms. They assume that the United States can protect its witness or its prisoner. And, in Massachusetts, that is true, but the moment he is carried out of the bounds of Massachusetts, the United States, it is notorious, afford no protection at all; the Government, the judges, are an envenomed party, and give such protection as they give in Utah to honest citizens, or in Kansas; such protection as they gave to their own Commodore Paulding, when he was simple enough to mistake the formal instructions of his Government for their real meaning. The state judges fear collision between their two allegiances; but there are worse evils than collision; namely, the doing substantial injustice. A good man will see that the use of a judge is to secure good government, and where the citizen’s weal is imperilled by abuse of the Federal power, to use that arm which can secure it, viz., the local government. Had that been done on certain calamitous occasions, we should not have seen the honor of Massachusetts trailed in the dust, stained to all ages, once and again, by the ill-timed formalism of a venerable bench. If judges cannot find law enough to maintain the sovereignty of the state, and to protect the life and freedom of every inhabitant not a criminal, it is idle to compliment them as learned and venerable. What avails their learning or veneration? At a pinch, they are no more use than idiots. After the mischance they wring their hands, but they had better never have been born. A Vermont Judge Hutchinson, who has the Declaration of Independence in his heart; a Wisconsin judge, who knows that laws are for the protection of citizens against kidnappers, is worth a court house full of lawyers so idolatrous of forms as to let go the substance. Is any man in Massachusetts so simple as to believe that when a United States Court in Virginia, now, in its present reign of terror, sends to Connecticut, or New York, or Massachusetts, for a witness, it wants him for a witness? No; it wants him for a party; it wants him for meat to slaughter and eat. And your habeas corpus is, in any way in which it has been, or, I fear, is likely to be used, a nuisance, and not a protection; for it takes away his right reliance on himself, and the natural assistance of his friends and fellow-citizens, by offering him a form which is a piece of paper.

But I am detaining the meeting on matters which others understand better. I hope, then, that in administering relief to John Brown’s family, we shall remember all those whom his fate concerns, all who are in sympathy with him, and not forget to aid him in the best way, by securing freedom and independence in Massachusetts.

JOHN BROWN. SPEECH AT SALEM, JANUARY 6,

Mr. Chairman:

I have been struck with one fact, that the best orators who have added their praise to his fame, — and I need not go out of this house to find the purest eloquence in the country, — have one rival who comes off a little better, and that is John Brown. Every thing that is said of him leaves people a little dissatisfied; but as soon as they read his own speeches and letters they are heartily contented, — such is the singleness of purpose which justifies him to the head and the heart of all. Taught by this experience, I mean, in the few remarks I have to make, to cling to his history, or let him speak for himself.

John Brown, the founder of liberty in Kansas, was born in Torrington, Litchfield County, Conn., in 1800. When he was five years old his father emigrated to Ohio, and the boy was there set to keep sheep and to look after cattle and dress skins; he went bareheaded and barefooted, and clothed in buckskin. He said that he loved rough play, could never have rough play enough; could not see a seedy hat without wishing to pull it off. But for this it needed that the playmates should be equal; not one in fine clothes and the other in buckskin; not one his own master, hale and hearty, and the other watched and whipped. But it chanced that in Pennsylvania, where he was sent by his father to collect cattle, he fell in with a boy whom he heartily liked and whom he looked upon as his superior. This boy was a slave; he saw him beaten with an iron shovel, and otherwise maltreated; he saw that this boy had nothing better to look forward to in life, whilst he himself was petted and made much of; for he was much considered in the family where he then stayed, from the circumstance that this boy of twelve years had conducted alone a drove of cattle a hundred miles. But the colored boy had no friend, and no future. This worked such indignation in him that he swore an oath of resistance to Slavery as long as he lived. And thus his enterprise to go into Virginia and run off five hundred or a thousand slaves was not a piece of spite or revenge, a plot of two years or of twenty years, but the keeping of an oath made to Heaven and earth forty-seven years before. Forty-seven years at least, though I incline to accept his own account of the matter at Charlestown, which makes the date a little older, when he said, “This was all settled millions of years before the world was made.”

He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty; a fair specimen of the best stock of New England; having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness. Our farmers were Orthodox Calvinists, mighty in the Scriptures; had learned that life was a preparation, a “probation,” to use their word, for a higher world, and was to be spent in loving and serving mankind.

Thus was formed a romantic character absolutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle as a child in the house. And, as happens usually to men of romantic character, his fortunes were romantic. Walter Scott would have delighted to draw his picture and trace his adventurous career. A shepherd and herdsman, he learned the manners of animals, and knew the secret signals by which animals communicate. He made his hard bed on the mountains with them; he learned to drive his flock through thickets all but impassable; he had all the skill of a shepherd by choice of breed and by wise husbandry to obtain the best wool, and that for a course of years. And the anecdotes preserved show a far-seeing skill and conduct which, in spite of adverse accidents, should secure, one year with another, an honest reward, first to the farmer, and afterwards to the dealer. If he kept sheep, it was with a royal mind; and if he traded in wool, he was a merchant prince, not in the amount of wealth, but in the protection of the interests confided to him.

I am not a little surprised at the easy effrontery with which political gentlemen, in and out of Congress, take it upon them to say that there are not a thousand men in the North who sympathize with John Brown. It would be far safer and nearer the truth to say that all people, in proportion to their sensibility and self-respect, sympathize with him. For it is impossible to see courage, and disinterestedness, and the love that casts out fear, without sympathy. All women are drawn to him by their predominance of sentiment. All gentlemen, of course, are on his side. I do not mean by “gentlemen,” people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men of gentle blood and generosity, “fulfilled with all nobleness,” who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed; like the dying Sidney, pass the cup of cold water to the wounded soldier who needs it more. For what is the oath of gentle blood and knighthood? What but to protect the weak and lowly against the strong oppressor?

Nothing is more absurd than to complain of this sympathy, or to complain of a party of men united in opposition to Slavery. As well complain of gravity, or the ebb of the tide. Who makes the Abolitionist? The Slaveholder. The sentiment of mercy is the natural recoil which the laws of the universe provide to protect mankind from destruction by savage passions. And our blind statesmen go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it.

THEODORE PARKER.

AN ADDRESS AT THE MEMORIAL MEETING AT THE MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, JUNE 15, 1860.

At the death of a good and admirable person, we meet to console and animate each other by the recollection of his virtues.

I have the feeling that every man’s biography is at his own expense. He furnishes not only the facts but the report. I mean that all biography is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be known and believed. In Plutarch’s lives of Alexander and Pericles, you have the secret whispers of their confidence to their lovers and trusty friends. For it was each report of this kind that impressed those to whom it was told in a manner to secure its being told everywhere to the best, to those who speak with authority to their own times and therefore to ours. For the political rule is a cosmical rule, that if a man is not strong in his own district, he is not a good candidate elsewhere.

He whose voice will not be heard here again, could well afford to tell his experiences; they were all honorable to him, and were part of the history of the civil and religious liberty of his times. Theodore Parker was a son of the soil, charged with the energy of New England, strong, eager, inquisitive of knowledge, of a diligence that never tired, upright, of a haughty independence, yet the gentlest of companions; a man of study, fit for a man of the world; with decided opinions and plenty of power to state them; rapidly pushing his studies so far as to leave few men qualified to sit as his critics. He elected his part of duty, or accepted nobly that assigned him in his rare constitution. Wonderful acquisition of knowledge, a rapid wit that heard all, and welcomed all that came, by seeing its bearing. Such was the largeness of his reception of facts and his skill to employ them, that it looked as if he were some President of Council to whom a score of telegraphs were ever bringing in reports; and his information would have been excessive, but for the noble use he made of it ever in the interest of humanity. He had a strong understanding, a logical method, a love for facts, a rapid eye for their historic relations, and a skill in stripping them of traditional lustres. He had a sprightly fancy, and often amused himself with throwing his meaning into pretty apologues; yet we can hardly ascribe to his mind the poetic element, though his scholarship had made him a reader and quoter of verses. A little more feeling of the poetic significance of his facts would have disqualified him for some of his severer offices to his generation. The old religions have a charm for most minds which it is a little uncanny to disturb. ‘T is sometimes a question, shall we not leave them to decay without rude shocks? I remember that I found some harshness in his treatment both of Greek and of Hebrew antiquity, and sympathized with the pain of many good people in his auditory, whilst I acquitted him, of course, of any wish to be flippant. He came at a time when, to the irresistible march of opinion, the forms still retained by the most advanced sects showed loose and lifeless, and he, with something less of affectionate attachment to the old, or with more vigorous logic, rejected them. ‘T is objected to him that he scattered too many illusions. Perhaps more tenderness would have been graceful; but it is vain to charge him with perverting the opinions of the new generation.

The opinions of men are organic. Simply, those came to him who found themselves expressed by him. And had they not met this enlightened mind, in which they beheld their own opinions combined with zeal in every cause of love and humanity, they would have suspected their opinions and suppressed them, and so sunk into melancholy or malignity — a feeling of loneliness and hostility to what was reckoned respectable. ‘T is plain to me that he has achieved a historic immortality here; that he has so woven himself in these few years into the history of Boston, that he can never be left out of your annals. It will not be in the acts of City Councils, nor of obsequious Mayors; nor, in the State House, the proclamations of Governors, with their failing virtue — failing them at critical moments — that coming generations will study what really befell: but in the plain lessons of Theodore Parker in this Music Hall, in Faneuil Hall, or in Legislative Committee Rooms, that the true temper and authentic record of these days will be read. The next generation will care little for the chances of elections that govern Governors now, it will care little for fine gentlemen who behaved shabbily; but it will read very intelligently in his rough story, fortified with exact anecdotes, precise with names and dates, what part was taken by each actor; who threw himself into the cause of humanity and came to the rescue of civilization at a hard pinch, and who blocked its course.

The vice charged against America is the want of sincerity in leading men. It does not lie at his door. He never kept back the truth for fear to make an enemy. But, on the other hand, it was complained that he was bitter and harsh, that his zeal burned with too hot a flame. It is so difficult, in evil times, to escape this charge! for the faithful preacher most of all. It was his merit, like Luther, Knox and Latimer, and John Baptist, to speak tart truth, when that was peremptory and when there were few to say it. But his sympathy for goodness was not less energetic. One fault he had, he overestimated his friends, — I may well say it, — and sometimes vexed them with the importunity of his good opinion, whilst they knew better the ebb which follows unfounded praise. He was capable, it must be said, of the most unmeasured eulogies on those he esteemed, especially if he had any jealousy that they did not stand with the Boston public as highly as they ought. His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits, — I cannot think of one rival, — that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants, — it is a hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious music or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are.

His ministry fell on a political crisis also; on the years when Southern slavery broke over its old banks, made new and vast pretensions, and wrung from the weakness or treachery of Northern people fatal concessions in the Fugitive-Slave Bill and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Two days, bitter in the memory of Boston, the days of the rendition of Sims and of Burns, made the occasion of his most remarkable discourses. He kept nothing back. In terrible earnest he denounced the public crime, and meted out to every official, high and low, his due portion. By the incessant power of his statement, he made and held a party. It was his great service to freedom. He took away the reproach of silent consent that would otherwise have lain against the indignant minority, by uttering in the hour and place wherein these outrages were done, the stern protest.

But, whilst I praise this frank speaker, I have no wish to accuse the silence of others. There are men of good powers who have so much sympathy that they must be silent when they are not in sympathy. If you don’t agree with them, they know they only injure the truth by speaking. Their faculties will not play them true, and they do not wish to squeak and gibber, and so they shut their mouths. I can readily forgive this, only not the other, the false tongue which makes the worse appear the better cause. There were, of course, multitudes to censure and defame this truth-speaker. But the brave know the brave. Fops, whether in hotels or churches, will utter the fop’s opinion, and faintly hope for the salvation of his soul; but his manly enemies, who despised the fops, honored him; and it is well known that his great hospitable heart was the sanctuary to which every soul conscious of an earnest opinion came for sympathy — alike the brave slaveholder and the brave slave-rescuer. These met in the house of this honest man — for every sound heart loves a responsible person, one who does not in generous company say generous things, and in mean company base things, but says one thing — now cheerfully, now indignantly — but always because he must, and because he sees that, whether he speak or refrain from speech, this is said over him; and history, nature and all souls testify to the same.

Ah, my brave brother! it seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss were immense, and your place cannot be supplied. But you will already be consoled in the transfer of your genius, knowing well that the nature of the world will affirm to all men, in all times, that which for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke; that the winds of Italy murmur the same truth over your grave; the winds of America over these bereaved streets; that the sea which bore your mourners home affirms it, the stars in their courses, and the inspirations of youth; whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human rights, with perverted learning and disgraced graces, rot and are forgotten with their double tongue saying all that is sordid for the corruption of man.

The sudden and singular eminence of Mr. Parker, the importance of his name and influence, are the verdict of his country to his virtues. We have few such men to lose; amiable and blameless at home, feared abroad as the standard-bearer of liberty, taking all the duties he could grasp, and more, refusing to spare himself, he has gone down in early glory to his grave, to be a living and enlarging power, wherever learning, wit, honest valor and independence are honored.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

Use, labor of each for all, is the health and virtue of all beings. Ich dien, I serve, is a truly royal motto. And it is the mark of nobleness to volunteer the lowest service, the greatest spirit only attaining to humility. Nay, God is God because he is the servant of all. Well, now here comes this conspiracy of slavery, — they call it an institution, I call it a destitution, — this stealing of men and setting them to work, stealing their labor, and the thief sitting idle himself; and for two or three ages it has lasted, and has yielded a certain quantity of rice, cotton and sugar. And, standing on this doleful experience, these people have endeavored to reverse the natural sentiments of mankind, and to pronounce labor disgraceful, and the well-being of a man to consist in eating the fruit of other men’s labor.

Labor: a man coins himself into his labor; turns his day, his strength, his thought, his affection into some product which remains as the visible sign of his power; and to protect that, to secure that to him, to secure his past self to his future self, is the object of all government. There is no interest in any country so imperative as that of labor; it covers all, and constitutions and governments exist for that, — to protect and insure it to the laborer. All honest men are daily striving to earn their bread by their industry. And who is this who tosses his empty head at this blessing in disguise, the constitution of human nature, and calls labor vile, and insults the faithful workman at his daily toil? I see for such madness no hellebore, — for such calamity no solution but servile war and the Africanization of the country that permits it.

At this moment in America the aspects of political society absorb attention. In every house, from Canada to the Gulf, the children ask the serious father,— “What is the news of the war to-day, and when will there be better times?” The boys have no new clothes, no gifts, no journeys; the girls must go without new bonnets; boys and girls find their education, this year, less liberal and complete. All the little hopes that heretofore made the year pleasant are deferred. The state of the country fills us with anxiety and stern duties. We have attempted to hold together two states of civilization: a higher state, where labor and the tenure of land and the right of suffrage are democratical; and a lower state, in which the old military tenure of prisoners or slaves, and of power and land in a few hands, makes an oligarchy: we have attempted to hold these two states of society under one law. But the rude and early state of society does not work well with the later, nay, works badly, and has poisoned politics, public morals and social intercourse in the Republic, now for many years.

The times put this question, Why cannot the best civilization be extended over the whole country, since the disorder of the less-civilized portion menaces the existence of the country? Is this secular progress we have described, this evolution of man to the highest powers, only to give him sensibility, and not to bring duties with it? Is he not to make his knowledge practical? to stand and to withstand? Is not civilization heroic also? Is it not for action? has it not a will? “There are periods,” said Niebuhr, “when something much better than happiness and security of life is attainable.” We live in a new and exceptional age. America is another word for Opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal, slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the destinies of this people. The evil you contend with has taken alarming proportions, and you still content yourself with parrying the blows it aims, but, as if enchanted, abstain from striking at the cause.

If the American people hesitate, it is not for want of warning or advices. The telegraph has been swift enough to announce our disasters. The journals have not suppressed the extent of the calamity. Neither was there any want of argument or of experience. If the war brought any surprise to the North, it was not the fault of sentinels on the watch-tower, who had furnished full details of the designs, the muster and the means of the enemy. Neither was anything concealed of the theory or practice of slavery. To what purpose make more big books of these statistics? There are already mountains of facts, if any one wants them. But people do not want them. They bring their opinion into the world. If they have a comatose tendency in the brain, they are pro-slavery while they live; if of a nervous sanguineous temperament, they are abolitionists. Then interests were never persuaded. Can you convince the shoe interest, or the iron interest, or the cotton interest, by reading passages from Milton or Montesquieu? You wish to satisfy people that slavery is bad economy. Why, the “Edinburgh Review” pounded on that string, and made out its case, forty years ago. A democratic statesman said to me, long since, that, if he owned the State of Kentucky, he would manumit all the slaves, and be a gainer by the transaction. Is this new? No, everybody knows it. As a general economy it is admitted. But there is no one owner of the state, but a good many small owners. One man owns land and slaves; another owns slaves only. Here is a woman who has no other property, — like a lady in Charleston I knew of, who owned fifteen sweeps and rode in her carriage. It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of these to make any change, and they are fretful and talkative, and all their friends are; and those less interested are inert, and, from want of thought, averse to innovation. It is like free trade, certainly the interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many. Banknotes rob the public, but are such a daily convenience that we silence our scruples and make believe they are gold. So imposts are the cheap and right taxation; but, by the dislike of people to pay out a direct tax, governments are forced to render life costly by making them pay twice as much, hidden in the price of tea and sugar.

In this national crisis, it is not argument that we want, but that rare courage which dares commit itself to a principle, believing that Nature is its ally, and will create the instruments it requires, and more than make good any petty and injurious profit which it may disturb. There never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set down in any history. We want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality, namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race, can act in the interest of civilization. Government must not be a parish clerk, a justice of the peace. It has, of necessity, in any crisis of the state, the absolute powers of a Dictator. The existing Administration is entitled to the utmost candor. It is to be thanked for its angelic virtue, compared with any executive experiences with which we have been familiar. But the times will not allow us to indulge in compliment. I wish I saw in the people that inspiration which, if Government would not obey the same, would leave the Government behind and create on the moment the means and executors it wanted. Better the war should more dangerously threaten us, — should threaten fracture in what is still whole, and punish us with burned capitals and slaughtered regiments, and so exasperate the people to energy, exasperate our nationality. There are Scriptures written invisibly on men’s hearts, whose letters do not come out until they are enraged. They can be read by war-fires, and by eyes in the last peril.

We cannot but remember that there have been days in American history, when, if the Free States had done their duty, Slavery had been blocked by an immovable barrier, and our recent calamities forever precluded. The Free States yielded, and every compromise was surrender and invited new demands. Here again is a new occasion which Heaven offers to sense and virtue. It looks as if we held the fate of the fairest possession of mankind in our hands, to be saved by our firmness or to be lost by hesitation.

The one power that has legs long enough and strong enough to wade across the Potomac offers itself at this hour; the one strong enough to bring all the civility up to the height of that which is best, prays now at the door of Congress for leave to move. Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue. This is a progressive policy, puts the whole people in healthy, productive, amiable position, puts every man in the South in just and natural relations with every man in the North, laborer with laborer.

I shall not attempt to unfold the details of the project of emancipation. It has been stated with great ability by several of its leading advocates. I will only advert to some leading points of the argument, at the risk of repeating the reasons of others. The war is welcome to the Southerner; a chivalrous sport to him, like hunting, and suits his semi-civilized condition. On the climbing scale of progress, he is just up to war, and has never appeared to such advantage as in the last twelvemonth. It does not suit us. We are advanced some ages on the war-state, — to trade, art and general cultivation. His laborer works for him at home, so that he loses no labor by the war. All our soldiers are laborers; so that the South, with its inferior numbers, is almost on a footing in effective war-population with the North. Again, as long as we fight without any affirmative step taken by the Government, any word intimating forfeiture in the rebel States of their old privileges under the law, they and we fight on the same side, for Slavery. Again, if we conquer the enemy, — what then? We shall still have to keep him under, and it will cost as much to hold him down as it did to get him down. Then comes the summer, and the fever will drive the soldiers home; next winter we must begin at the beginning, and conquer him over again. What use then to take a fort, or a privateer, or get possession of an inlet, or to capture a regiment of rebels?

But one weapon we hold which is sure. Congress can, by edict, as a part of the military defence which it is the duty of Congress to provide, abolish slavery, and pay for such slaves as we ought to pay for. Then the slaves near our armies will come to us; those in the interior will know in a week what their rights are, and will, where opportunity offers, prepare to take them. Instantly, the armies that now confront you must run home to protect their estates, and must stay there, and your enemies will disappear.

There can be no safety until this step is taken. We fancy that the endless debate, emphasized by the crime and by the cannons of this war, has brought the Free States to some conviction that it can never go well with us whilst this mischief of slavery remains in our politics, and that by concert or by might we must put an end to it. But we have too much experience of the futility of an easy reliance on the momentary good dispositions of the public. There does exist, perhaps, a popular will that the Union shall not be broken, — that our trade, and therefore our laws, must have the whole breadth of the continent, and from Canada to the Gulf. But, since this is the rooted belief and will of the people, so much the more are they in danger, when impatient of defeats, or impatient of taxes, to go with a rush for some peace; and what kind of peace shall at that moment be easiest attained, they will make concessions for it, — will give up the slaves, and the whole torment of the past half-century will come back to be endured anew.

Neither do I doubt, if such a composition should take place, that the Southerners will come back quietly and politely, leaving their haughty dictation. It will be an era of good feelings. There will be a lull after so loud a storm; and, no doubt, there will be discreet men from that section who will earnestly strive to inaugurate more moderate and fair administration of the Government, and the North will for a time have its full share and more, in place and counsel. But this will not last; — not for want of sincere good-will in sensible Southerners, but because Slavery will again speak through them its harsh necessity. It cannot live but by injustice, and it will be unjust and violent to the end of the world.

The power of Emancipation is this, that it alters the atomic social constitution of the Southern people. Now, their interest is in keeping out white labor; then, when they must pay wages, their interest will be to let it in, to get the best labor, and, if they fear their blacks, to invite Irish, German and American laborers. Thus, whilst Slavery makes and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the whole objection to union. Emancipation at one stroke elevates the poor white of the South, and identifies his interest with that of the Northern laborer.

Now, in the name of all that is simple and generous, why should not this great right be done? Why should not America be capable of a second stroke for the well-being of the human race, as eighty or ninety years ago she was for the first, — of an affirmative step in the interests of human civility, urged on her, too, not by any romance of sentiment, but by her own extreme perils? It is very certain that the statesman who shall break through the cobwebs of doubt, fear and petty cavil that lie in the way, will be greeted by the unanimous thanks of mankind. Men reconcile themselves very fast to a bold and good measure when once it is taken, though they condemned it in advance. A week before the two captive commissioners were surrendered to England, every one thought it could not be done: it would divide the North. It was done, and in two days all agreed it was the right action. And this action, which costs so little, (the parties injured by it being such a handful that they can very easily be indemnified,) rids the world, at one stroke, of this degrading nuisance, the cause of war and ruin to nations. This measure at once puts all parties right. This is borrowing, as I said, the omnipotence of a principle. What is so foolish as the terror lest the blacks should be made furious by freedom and wages? It is denying these that is the outrage, and makes the danger from the blacks. But justice satisfies everybody, — white man, red man, yellow man and black man. All like wages, and the appetite grows by feeding.

But this measure, to be effectual, must come speedily. The weapon is slipping out of our hands. “Time,” say the Indian Scriptures, “drinketh up the essence of every great and noble action which ought to be performed, and which is delayed in the execution.”

I hope it is not a fatal objection to this policy that it is simple and beneficent thoroughly, which is the attribute of a moral action. An unprecedented material prosperity has not tended to make us Stoics or Christians. But the laws by which the universe is organized reappear at every point, and will rule it. The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. It is not free institutions, it is not a republic, it is not a democracy, that is the end, — no, but only the means. Morality is the object of government. We want a state of things in which crime shall not pay. This is the consolation on which we rest in the darkness of the future and the afflictions of to-day, that the government of the world is moral, and does forever destroy what is not. It is the maxim of natural philosophers that the natural forces wear out in time all obstacles, and take place: and it is the maxim of history that victory always falls at last where it ought to fall; or, there is perpetual march and progress to ideas. But, in either case, no link of the chain can drop out. Nature works through her appointed elements; and ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

Since the above pages were written, President Lincoln has proposed to Congress that the Government shall co-operate with any State that shall enact a gradual abolishment of Slavery. In the recent series of national successes, this Message is the best. It marks the happiest day in the political year. The American Executive ranges itself for the first time on the side of freedom. If Congress has been backward, the President has advanced. This state-paper is the more interesting that it appears to be the President’s individual act, done under a strong sense of duty. He speaks his own thought in his own style. All thanks and honor to the Head of the State! The Message has been received throughout the country with praise, and, we doubt not, with more pleasure than has been spoken. If Congress accords with the President, it is not yet too late to begin the emancipation; but we think it will always be too late to make it gradual.

An experience agrees that it should be immediate. More and better than the President has spoken shall, perhaps, the effect of this Message be, — but, we are sure, not more or better than he hoped in his heart, when, thoughtful of all the complexities of his position, he penned these cautious words.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN BOSTON IN SEPTEMBER, 1862.

In so many arid forms which States incrust themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur. These are the jets of thought into affairs, when, roused by danger or inspired by genius, the political leaders of the day break the else insurmountable routine of class and local legislation, and take a step forward in the direction of catholic and universal interests. Every step in the history of political liberty is a sally of the human mind into the untried Future, and has the interest of genius, and is fruitful in heroic anecdotes. Liberty is a slow fruit. It comes, like religion, for short periods, and in rare conditions, as if awaiting a culture of the race which shall make it organic and permanent. Such moments of expansion in modern history were the Confession of Augsburg, the plantation of America, the English Commonwealth of 1648, the Declaration of American Independence in 1776, the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies, the passage of the Reform Bill, the repeal of the Corn-Laws, the Magnetic Ocean-Telegraph, though yet imperfect, the passage of the Homestead Bill in the last Congress, and now, eminently, President Lincoln’s Proclamation on the twenty-second of September. These are acts of great scope, working on a long future and on permanent interests, and honoring alike those who initiate and those who receive them. These measures provoke no noisy joy, but are received into a sympathy so deep as to apprise us that mankind are greater and better than we know. At such times it appears as if a new public were created to greet the new event. It is as when an orator, having ended the compliments and pleasantries with which he conciliated attention, and having run over the superficial fitness and commodities of the measure he urges, suddenly, lending himself to some happy inspiration, announces with vibrating voice the grand human principles involved; — the bravos and wits who greeted him loudly thus far are surprised and overawed; a new audience is found in the heart of the assembly, — an audience hitherto passive and unconcerned, now at last so searched and kindled that they come forward, every one a representative of mankind, standing for all nationalities.

The extreme moderation with which the President advanced to his design, — his long-avowed expectant policy, as if he chose to be strictly the executive of the best public sentiment of the country, waiting only till it should be unmistakably pronounced, — so fair a mind that none ever listened so patiently to such extreme varieties of opinion, — so reticent that his decision has taken all parties by surprise, whilst yet it is just the sequel of his prior acts, — the firm tone in which he announces it, without inflation or surplusage, — all these have bespoken such favor to the act, that, great as the popularity of the President has been, we are beginning to think that we have underestimated the capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast. He has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man. He is well entitled to the most indulgent construction. Forget all that we thought shortcomings, every mistake, every delay. In the extreme embarrassments of his part, call these endurance, wisdom, magnanimity; illuminated, as they now are, by this dazzling success.

When we consider the immense opposition that has been neutralized or converted by the progress of the war (for it is not long since the President anticipated the resignation of a large number of officers in the army, and the secession of three States, on the promulgation of this policy), — when we see how the great stake which foreign nations hold in our affairs has recently brought every European power as a client into this court, and it became every day more apparent what gigantic and what remote interests were to be affected by the decision of the President, — one can hardly say the deliberation was too long. Against all timorous counsels he had the courage to seize the moment; and such was his position, and such the felicity attending the action, that he has replaced Government in the good graces of mankind. “Better is virtue in the sovereign than plenty in the season,” say the Chinese. ‘T is wonderful what power is, and how ill it is used, and how its ill use makes life mean, and the sunshine dark. Life in America had lost much of its attraction in the later years. The virtues of a good magistrate undo a world of mischief, and, because Nature works with rectitude, seem vastly more potent than the acts of bad governors, which are ever tempered by the good-nature in the people, and the incessant resistance which fraud and violence encounter. The acts of good governors work a geometrical ratio, as one midsummer day seems to repair the damage of a year of war.

A day which most of us dared not hope to see, an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties, seems now to be close before us. October, November, December will have passed over beating hearts and plotting brains: then the hour will strike, and all men of African descent who have faculty enough to find their way to our lines are assured of the protection of American law.

It is by no means necessary that this measure should be suddenly marked by any signal results on the negroes or on the Rebel masters. The force of the act is that it commits the country to this justice, — that it compels the innumerable officers, civil, military, naval, of the Republic to range themselves on the line of this equity. It draws the fashion to this side. It is not a measure that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new Administration. For slavery over-powers the disgust of the moral sentiment only through immemorial usage. It cannot be introduced as an improvement of the nineteenth century. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have not been sacrificed in vain. It makes a victory of our defeats. Our hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired. With a victory like this, we can stand many disasters. It does not promise the redemption of the black race; that lies not with us: but it relieves it of our opposition. The President by this act has paroled all the slaves in America; they will no more fight against us: and it relieves our race once for all of its crime and false position. The first condition of success is secured in putting ourselves right. We have recovered ourselves from our false position, and planted our-selves on a law of Nature:

“If that fail,

The pillared firmament is rottennes,

And earth’s base built on stubble.”

The Government has assured itself of the best constituency in the world: every spark of intellect, every virtuous feeling, every religious heart, every man of honor, every poet, every philosopher, the generosity of the cities, the health of the country, the strong arms of the mechanic, the endurance of farmers, the passionate conscience of women, the sympathy of distant nations, — all rally to its support.

Of course, we are assuming the firmness of the policy thus declared. It must not be a paper proclamation. We confide that Mr. Lincoln is in earnest, and, as he has been slow in making up his mind, has resisted the importunacy of parties and of events to the latest moment, he will be as absolute in his adhesion. Not only will he repeat and follow up his stroke, but the nation will add its irresistible strength. If the ruler has duties, so has the citizen. In times like these, when the nation is imperilled, what man can, without shame, receive good news from day to day without giving good news of himself? What right has any one to read in the journals tidings of victories, if he has not bought them by his own valor, treasure, personal sacrifice, or by service as good in his own department? With this blot removed from our national honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not fear henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free institutions will be such.

In the light of this event the public distress begins to be removed. What if the brokers’ quotations show our stocks discredited, and the gold dollar costs one hundred and twenty-seven cents? These tables are fallacious. Every acre in the Free States gained substantial value on the twenty-second of September. The cause of disunion and war has been reached and begun to be removed. Every man’s house-lot and garden are relieved of the malaria which the purest winds and strongest sunshine could not penetrate and purge. The territory of the Union shines to-day with a lustre which every European emigrant can discern from far; a sign of inmost security and permanence. Is it feared that taxes will check immigration? That depends on what the taxes are spent for. If they go to fill up this yawning Dismal Swamp, which engulfed armies and populations, and created plague, and neutralized hitherto all the vast capabilities of this continent, — then this taxation, which makes the land wholesome and habitable, and will draw all men unto it, is the best investment in which property-holder ever lodged his earnings.

Whilst we have pointed out the opportuneness of the Proclamation, it remains to be said that the President had no choice. He might look wistfully for what variety of courses lay open to him; every line but one was closed up with fire. This one, too, bristled with danger, but through it was the sole safety. The measure he has adopted was imperative. It is wonderful to see the unseasonable senility of what is called the Peace Party, through all its blindiner their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely, its inevitableness. The war existed long before the cannonade of Sumter, and could not be postponed. It might have begun other wise or elsewhere, but war was in the minds and bones of the combatants, it was written on the iron leaf, and you might as easily dodge gravitation. If we had consented to a peaceable secession of the Rebels, the divided sentiment of the Border States made peaceable secession impossible, the insatiable temper of the South made it impossible, and the slaves on the border, wherever the border might be, were an incessant fuel to rekindle the fire. Give the Confederacy New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, and they would have demanded St. Louis and Baltimore. Give them these, and they would have insisted on Washington. Give them Washington, and they would have assumed the army and navy, and, through these, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. It looks as if the battle-field would have been at least as large in that event as it is now. The war was formidable, but could not be avoided. The war was and is an immense mischief, but brought with it the immense benefit of drawing a line and rallying the Free States to fix it impassably, — preventing the whole force of Southern connection and influence throughout the North from distracting every city with endless confusion, detaching that force and reducing it to handfuls, and, in the progress of hostilities, disinfecting us of our habitual proclivity, through the affection of trade and the traditions of the Democratic party, to follow Southern leading.

These necessities which have dictated the conduct of the Federal Government are overlooked especially by our foreign critics. The popular statement of the opponents of the war abroad is the impossibility of our success. “If you could add,” say they, “to your strength the whole army of England, of France and of Austria, you could not coerce eight millions of people to come under this Government against their will.” This is an odd thing for an Englishman, a Frenchman, or an Austrian to say, who remembers Europe of the last seventy years, — the condition of Italy, until 1859, — of Poland, since 1793, — of France, of French Algiers, — of British Ireland, and British India. But, granting the truth, rightly read, of the historical aphorism, that “the people always conquer,” it is to be noted that, in the Southern States, the tenure of land and the local laws, with slavery, give the social system not a democratic but an aristocratic complexion; and those States have shown every year a more hostile and aggressive temper, until the instinct of self-preservation forced us into the war. And the aim of the war on our part is indicated by the aim of the President’s Proclamation, namely, to break up the false combination of Southern society, to destroy the piratic feature in it which makes it our enemy only as it is the enemy of the human race, and so allow its reconstruction on a just and healthful basis. Then new affinities will act, the old repulsion will cease, and, the cause of war being removed, Nature and trade may be trusted to establish a lasting peace.

We think we cannot overstate the wisdom and benefit of this act of the Government. The malignant cry of the Secession press within the Free States, and the recent action of the Confederate Congress, are decisive as to its efficiency and correctness of aim. Not less so is the silent joy which has greeted it in all generous hearts, and the new hope it has breathed into the world. It was well to delay the steamers at the wharves until this edict could be put on board. It will be an insurance to the ship as it goes plunging through the sea with glad tidings to all people. Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die: hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet:

“Incertainties now crown themselves assured,

And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.”

Meantime that ill-fated, much-injured race which the Proclamation respects will lose somewhat of the dejection sculptured for ages in their bronzed countenance, uttered in the wailing of their plaintive music, — a race naturally benevolent, docile, industrious, and whose very miseries sprang from their great talent for usefulness, which, in a more moral age, will not only defend their independence, but will give them a rank among nations.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

REMARKS AT THE FUNERAL SERVICES HELD IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1886.

We meet under the gloom of a calamity which darkens down over the minds of good men in all civil society, as the fearful tidings travel over sea, over land, from country to country, like the shadow of an uncalculated eclipse over the planet. Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain to mankind as this has caused, or will cause, on its announcement; and this, not so much because nations are by modern arts brought so closely together, as because of the mysterious hopes and fears which, in the present day, are connected with the name and institutions of America.

In this country, on Saturday, every one was struck dumb, and saw at first only deep below deep, as he meditated on the ghastly blow. And perhaps, at this hour, when the coffin which contains the dust of the President sets forward on its long march through mourning States, on its way to his home in Illinois, we might well be silent, and suffer the awful voices of the time to thunder to us. Yes, but that first despair was brief: the man was not so to be mourned. He was the most active and hopeful of men; and his work had not perished: but acclamations of praise for the task he had accomplished burst out into a song of triumph, which even tears for his death cannot keep down.

The President stood before us as a man of the people. He was thoroughly American, had never crossed the sea, had never been spoiled by English insularity or French dissipation; a quite native, aboriginal man, as an acorn from the oak; no aping of foreigners, no frivolous accomplishments, Kentuckian born, working on a farm, a flatboatman, a captain in the Black Hawk war, a country lawyer, a representative in the rural Legislature of Illinois; — on such modest foundations the broad structure of his fame was laid. How slowly, and yet by happily prepared steps, he came to his place. All of us remember, — it is only a history of five or six years, — the surprise and the disappointment of the country at his first nomination by the Convention at Chicago. Mr. Seward, then in the culmination of his good fame, was the favorite of the Eastern States. And when the new and comparatively unknown name of Lincoln was announced, (notwithstanding the report of the acclamations of that Convention,) we heard the result coldly and sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local reputation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious times; and men naturally talked of the chances in politics as incalculable. But it turned out not to be chance. The profound good opinion which the people of Illinois and of the West had conceived of him, and which they had imparted to their colleagues that they also might justify themselves to their constituents at home, was not rash, though they did not begin to know the riches of his worth.

A plain man of the people, an extraordinary fortune attended him. He offered no shining qualities at the first encounter; he did not offend by superiority. He had a face and manner which disarmed suspicion, which inspired confidence, which confirmed good-will. He was a man without vices. He had a strong sense of duty, which it was very easy for him to obey. Then, he had what farmers call a long head; was excellent in working out the sum for himself; in arguing his case and convincing you fairly and firmly. Then, it turned out that he was a great worker; had prodigious faculty of performance; worked easily. A good worker is so rare; everybody has some disabling quality. In a host of young men that start together and promise so many brilliant leaders for the next age, each fails on trial; one by bad health, one by conceit, or by love of pleasure, or lethargy, or an ugly temper, — each has some disqualifying fault that throws him Out of the career. But this man was sound to the core, cheerful, persistent, all right for labor, and liked nothing so well.

Then, he had a vast good-nature, which made him tolerant and accessible to all; fair-minded, leaning to the claim of the petitioner; affable, and not sensible to the affliction which the innumerable visits paid to him when President would have brought to any one else. And how this good-nature became a noble humanity, in many a tragic case which the events of the war brought to him, every one will remember; and with what increasing tenderness he dealt when a whole race was thrown on his compassion. The poor negro said of him, on an impressive occasion, “Massa Linkum am eberywhere.”

Then his broad good-humor, running easily into jocular talk, in which he delighted and in which he excelled, was a rich gift to this wise man. It enabled him to keep his secret; to meet every kind of man and every rank in society; to take off the edge of the severest decisions; to mask his own purpose and sound his companion; and to catch with true instinct the temper of every company he addressed. And, more than all, it is to a man of severe labor, in anxious and exhausting crises, the natural restorative, good as sleep, and is the protection of the overdriven brain against rancor and insanity.

He is the author of a multitude of good sayings, bo disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Æsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs. But the weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of their application to the moment, are destined hereafter to wide fame. What pregnant definitions; what unerring common sense; what foresight; and, on great occasion, what lofty, and more than national, what humane tone! His brief speech at Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded occasion. This, and one other American speech, that of John Brown to the court that tried him, and a part of Kossuth’s speech at Birmingham, can only be compared with each other, and with no fourth.

His occupying the chair of State was a triumph of the good-sense of mankind, and of the public conscience. This middle-class country had got a middle-class President, at last. Yes, in manners and sympathies, but not in powers, for his powers were superior. This man grew according to the need. His mind mastered the problem of the day; and, as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of it. Rarely was man so fitted to the event. In the midst of fears and jealousies, in the Babel of counsels and parties, this man wrought incessantly with all his might and all his honesty, laboring to find what the people wanted, and how to obtain that. It cannot be said there is any exaggeration of his worth. If ever a man was fairly tested, he was. There was no lack of resistance, nor of slander, nor of ridicule. The times have allowed no state secrets; the nation has been in such ferment, such multitudes had to be trusted, that no secret could be kept. Every door was ajar, and we know all that befell.

Then, what an occasion was the whirlwind of the war. Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years, — four years of battle-days, — his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.

Adam Smith remarks that the axe, which in Houbraken’s portraits of British kings and worthies is engraved under those who have suffered at the block, adds a certain lofty charm to the picture. And who does not see, even in this tragedy so recent, how fast the terror and ruin of the massacre are already burning into glory around the victim? Far happier this fate than to have lived to be wished away; to have watched the decay of his own faculties; to have seen, — perhaps even he, — the proverbial ingratitude of statesmen; to have seen mean men preferred. Had he not lived long enough to keep the greatest promise that ever man made to his fellow-men, — the practical abolition of slavery? He had seen Tennessee, Missouri and Maryland emancipate their slaves. He had seen Savannah, Charleston and Richmond surrendered; had seen the main army of the rebellion lay down its arms. He had conquered the public opinion of Canada, England and France. Only Washington can compare with him in fortune.

And what if it should turn out, in the unfolding of the web, that he had reached the term; that this heroic deliverer could no longer serve us; that the rebellion had touched its natural conclusion, and what remained to be done required new and uncommitted hands, — a new spirit born out of the ashes of the war; and that Heaven, wishing to show the world a completed benefactor, shall make him serve his country even more by his death than by his life? Nations, like kings, are not good by facility and complaisance. “The kindness of kings consists in justice and strength.” Easy good-nature has been the dangerous foible of the Republic, and it was necessary that its enemies should outrage it, and drive us to unwonted firmness, to secure the salvation of this country in the next ages.

The ancients believed in a serene and beautiful Genius which ruled in the affairs of nations; which, with a slow but stern justice, carried forward the fortunes of certain chosen houses, weedings out single offenders or offending families, and securing at last the firm prosperity of the favorites of Heaven. It was too narrow a view of the Eternal Nemesis. There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of nations, which makes little account of time, little of one generation or race, makes no account of disasters, conquers alike by what is called defeat or by what is called victory, thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes everything immoral as inhuman, and obtains the ultimate triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything which resists the moral laws of the world. It makes its own instruments, creates the man for the time, trains him in poverty, inspires his genius, and arms him for his task. It has given every race its own talent, and ordains that only that race which combines perfectly with the virtues of all shall endure.

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH. JULY 21, 1865.

Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen :

With whatever opinion we come here, I think it is not in man to see, without a feeling of pride and pleasure, a tried soldier, the armed defender of the right. I think that in these last years all opinions have been affected by the magnificent and stupendous spectacle which Divine Providence has offered us of the energies that slept in the children of this country, — that slept and have awakened. I see thankfully those that are here, but dim eyes in vain explore for some who are not.

The old Greek Heraclitus said, “War is the Father of all things.” He said it, no doubt, as science, but we of this day can repeat it as political and social truth. War passes the power of all chemical solvents, breaking up the old adhesions and allowing the atoms of society to take a new order. It is not the Government, but the War, that has appointed the good generals, sifted out the pedants, put in the new and vigorous blood. The War has lifted many other people besides Grant and Sherman into their true places. Even Divine Providence, we may say, always seems to work after a certain military necessity. Every nation punishes the General who is not victorious. It is a rule in games of chance that the cards beat all the players, and revolutions disconcert and outwit all the insurgents.

The revolutions carry their own points, sometimes to the ruin of those who set them on foot. The proof that war also is within the highest right, is a marked benefactor in the hands of Divine Providence, is its morale. The war gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation. It charged with power, peaceful, amiable men, to whose life war and discord were abhorrent. What an infusion of character went out from this and other colleges! What an infusion of character down to the ranks! The experience has been uniform that it is the gentle soul that makes the firm hero after all. It is easy to recall the mood in which our young men, snatched from every peaceful pursuit, went to the war. Many of them had never handled a gun. They said, “It is not in me to resist. I go because I must. It is a duty which I shall never forgive myself if I decline. I do not know that I can make a soldier. I may be very clumsy. Perhaps I shall be timid; but you can rely on me. Only one thing is certain, I can well die, but I cannot afford to misbehave.”

In fact the infusion of culture and tender humanity from these scholars and idealists who went to the war in their own despite, — God knows they had no fury for killing their old friends and countrymen, — had its signal and lasting effect. It was found that enthusiasm was a more potent ally than science and munitions of war without it. “It is a principle of war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the thunderbolt you must prefer it to the cannon.” Enthusiasm was the thunderbolt. Here in this little Massachusetts, in smaller Rhode Island, in this little nest of New England republics it flamed out when the guilty gun was aimed at Sumter.

Mr. Chairman, standing here in Harvard College, the parent of all the colleges; in Massachusetts, the parent of all the North; when I consider her influence on the country as a principal planter of the Western States, and now, by her teachers, preachers, journalists and books, as well as by traffic and production, the diffuser of religious, literary and political opinion; — and when I see how irresistible the convictions of Massachusetts are in these swarming populations, — I think the little state bigger than I knew. When her blood is up she has a fist big enough to knock down an empire. And her blood was roused. Scholars changed the black coat for the blue. A single company in the forty-fourth Massachusetts regiment contained thirty-five sons of Harvard. You all know as well as I the story of these dedicated men, who knew well on what duty they went, — whose fathers and mothers said of each slaughtered son, “We gave him up when he enlisted.” One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the first negro regiment, “If he accepts it, I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.” These men, thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the front and always employed. They might say, with their forefathers the old Norse Vikings, “We sung the mass of lances from morning until evening.” And in how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen, they who came by night to his funeral on the morrow returned to the warpath to show his slayers the way to death!

Ah! young brothers, all honor and gratitude to you, — you, manly defenders, Liberty’s and Humanity’s body-guard! We shall not again disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We see — we thank you for it — a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this generation of American men, if they had been demanded.

EDITORS’ ADDRESS.

MASSACHUSETTS QUARTERLY REVIEW, DECEMBER, 184[EDITOR: ILLEGIBLE NUMBER]

The American people are fast opening their own destiny. The material basis is of such extent that no folly of man can quite subvert it; for the territory is a considerable fraction of the planet, and the population neither loath nor inexpert to use their advantages. Add, that this energetic race derive an unprecedented material power from the new arts, from the expansions effected by public schools, cheap postage and a cheap press, from the telescope, the telegraph, the railroad, steamship, steam-ferry, steam-mill; from domestic architecture, chemical agriculture, from ventilation, from ice, ether, caoutchouc, and innumerable inventions and manufactures.

A scholar who has been reading of the fabulous magnificence of Assyria and Persia, of Rome and Constantinople, leaves his library and takes his seat in a railroad-car, where he is importuned by newsboys with journals still wet from Liverpool and Havre, with telegraphic despatches not yet fifty minutes old from Buffalo and Cincinnati. At the screams of the steam-whistle, the train quits city and suburbs, darts away into the interior, drops every man at his estate as it whirls along, and shows our traveller what tens of thousands of powerful and weaponed men, science-armed and society-armed, sit at large in this ample region, obscure from their numbers and the extent of the domain. He reflects on the power which each of these plain republicans can employ; how far these chains of intercourse and travel reach, interlock, and ramify; what levers, what pumps, what exhaustive analyses are applied to nature for the benefit of masses of men. Then he exclaims, What a negro-fine royalty is that of Jamschid and Solomon! What a substantial sovereignty does my townsman possess! A man who has a hundred dollars to dispose of, — a hundred dollars over his bread, — is rich beyond the dreams of the Cæsars.

Keep our eyes as long as we can on this picture, we cannot stave off the ulterior question, — the famous question of Cineas to Pyrrhus, — the where to of all this power and population, these surveys and inventions, this taxing and tabulating, mill-privilege, roads, and mines. The aspect this country presents is a certain maniacal activity, an immense apparatus of cunning machinery which turns out, at last, some Nuremberg toys. Has it generated, as great interests do, any intellectual power? Where are the works of the imagination — the surest test of a national genius? At least as far as the purpose and genius of America is yet reprorted in any book, it is a sterility and no genius.

One would say there is nothing colossal in the country but its geography and its material activities; that the moral and intellectual effects are not on the same scale with the trade and production. There is no speech heard but that of auctioneers, newsboys, and the caucus. Where is the great breath of the New World, the voice of aboriginal nations opening new eras with hymns of lofty cheer? Our books and fine arts are imitations; there is a fatal incuriosity and disinclination in our educated men to new studies and the interrogation of nature. We have taste, critical talent, good professors, good commentators, but a lack of male energy. What more serious calamity can befall a people than a constitutional dulness and limitation? The moral influence of the intellect is wanting. We hearken in vain for any profound voice speaking to the American heart, cheering timid good men, animating the youth, consoling the defeated, and intelligently announcing duties which clothe life with joy, and endear the face of land and sea to men. It is a poor consideration that the country wit is precocious, and, as we say, practical; that political interests on so broad a scale as ours are administered by little men with some saucy village talent, by deft partisans, good cipherers; strict economists, quite empty of all superstition.

Conceding these unfavorable appearances, it would yet be a poor pedantry to read the fates of this country from these narrow data. On the contrary, we are persuaded that moral and material values are always commensurate. Every material organization exists to a moral end, which makes the reason of its existence. Here are no books, but who can see the continent with its inland and surrounding waters, its temperate climates, its west-wind breathing vigor through all the year, its confluence of races so favorable to the highest energy, and the infinite glut of their production, without putting new queries to Destiny as to the purpose for which this muster of nations and this sudden creation of enormous values is made?

This is equally the view of science and of patriotism. We hesitate to employ a word so much abused as patriotism , whose true sense is almost the reverse of its popular sense. We have no sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for one side, for one state, for one town: the right patriotism consists in the delight which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to the benefit of humanity. Every foot of soil has its proper quality; the grape on two sides of the same fence has new flavors; and so every acre on the globe, every family of men, every point of climate, has its distinguishing virtues. Certainly then this country does not lie here in the sun causeless; and though it may not be easy to define its influence, men feel already its emancipating quality in the careless self-reliance of the manners, in the freedom of thought, in the direct roads by which grievances are reached and redressed, and even in the reckless and sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions. Bad as it is, this freedom leads onward and upward, — to a Columbia of thought and art, which is the last and endless end of Columbus’s adventure.

Lovers of our country, but not always approvers of the public counsels, we should certainly be glad to give good advice in politics. We have not been able to escape our national and endemic habit, and to be liberated from interest in the elections and in public affairs. Nor have we cared to disfranchise ourselves. We are more solicitous than others to make our politics clear and healthful, as we believe politics to be nowise accidental or exceptional, but subject to the same laws with trees, earths, and acids. We see that reckless and destructive fury which characterizes the lower classes of American society, and which is pampered by hundreds of prof. ligate presses. The young intriguers who drive in bar-rooms and town-meetings the trade of politics, sagacious only to seize the victorious side, have put the country into the position of an overgrown bully, and Massachusetts finds no heart or head to give weight and efficacy to her contrary judgment. In hours when it seemed only to need one just word from a man of honor to have vindicated the rights of millions, and to have given a true direction to the first steps of a nation, we have seen the best understandings of New England, the trusted leaders of her counsels, constituting a snivelling and despised opposition, clapped on the back by comfortable capitalists from all sections, and persuaded to say, We are too old to stand for what is called a New England sentiment any longer. Rely on us for commercial representatives, but for questions of ethics, — who knows what markets may be opened? We are not well, we are not in our seats, when justice and humanity are to be spoken for.

We have a bad war, many victories, each of which converts the country into an immense chanticleer; and a very insincere political opposition. The country needs to be extricated from its delirium at once. Public affairs are chained in the same law with private; the retributions of armed states are not less sure and signal than those which come to private felons. The facility of majorities is no protection from the natural sequence of their own acts. Men reason badly, but nature and destiny are logical.

But, whilst we should think our pains well bestowed if we could cure the infatuation of statesmen, and should be sincerely pleased if we could give a direction to the Federal politics, we are far from believing politics the primal interest of men. On the contrary, we hold that the laws and governors cannot possess a commanding interest for any but vacant or fanatical people; for the reason that this is simply a formal and superficial interest; and men of a solid genius are only interested in substantial things.

The State, like the individual, should rest on an ideal basis. Not only man but nature is injured by the imputation that man exists only to be fattened with bread, but he lives in such connection with Thought and Fact that his bread is surely involved as one element thereof, but is not its end and aim. So the insight which commands the laws and conditions of the true polity precludes forever all interest in the squabbles of parties. As soon as men have tasted the enjoyment of learning, friendship and virtue, for which the State exists, the prizes of office appear polluted, and their followers outcasts.

A journal that would meet the real wants of this time must have a courage and power sufficient to solve the problems which the great groping society around us, stupid with perplexity, is dumbly exploring. Let it not show its astuteness by dodging each difficult question and arguing diffusely every point on which men are long ago unanimous. Can it front this matter of Socialism, to which the names of Owen and Fourier have attached, and dispose of that question? Will it cope with the allied questions of Government, Nonresistance, and all that belongs under that category? Will it measure itself with the chapter on Slavery, in some sort the special enigma of the time, as it has provoked against it a sort of inspiration and enthusiasm singular in modern history? There are literary and philosophical reputations to settle. The name of Swedenborg has in this very time acquired new honors, and the current year has witnessed the appearance, in their first English translation, of his manuscripts. Here is an unsettled account in the book of Fame; a nebula to dim eyes, but which great telescopes may yet resolve into a magnificent system. Here is the standing problem of Natural Science, and the merits of her great interpreters to be determined; the encyclopaedical Humboldt, and the intrepid generalizations collected by the author of the “Vestiges of Creation.” Here is the balance to be adjusted between the exact French school of Cuvier, and the genial catholic theorists, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Goethe, Davy, and Agassis. Will it venture into the thin and difficult air of that school where the secrets of structure are discussed under the topics of mesmerism and the twilights of demonology?

What will easily seem to many a far higher question than any other is that which respects the embodying of the Conscience of the period. Is the age we live in unfriendly to the highest powers; to that blending of the affections with the poetic faculty which has distinguished the Religious Ages? We have a better opinion of the economy of nature than to fear that those varying phases which humanity presents, ever leave out any of the grand springs of human action. Mankind for the moment seem to be in search of a religion. The Jewish cultus is declining; the Divine, or, as some will say, the truly Human, hovers, now seen, now unseen, before us. This period of peace, this hour when the jangle of contending churches is hushing or hushed, will seem only the more propitious to those who believe that man need not fear the want of religion, because they know his religious constitution, — that he must rest on the moral and religious sentiments, as the motion of bodies rests on geometry. In the rapid decay of what was called religion, timid and unthinking people fancy a decay of the hope of man. But the moral and religious sentiments meet us everywhere, alike in markets as in churches. A God starts up behind cotton bales also. The conscience of man is regenerated as is the atmosphere, so that society cannot be debauched. The health which we call Virtue is an equipoise which easily redresses itself, and resembles those rocking-stones which a child’s finger can move, and a weight of many hundred tons cannot overthrow.

With these convictions, a few friends of good letters have thought fit to associate themselves for the conduct of a new journal. We have obeyed the custom and convenience of the time in adopting this form of a Review, as a mould into which all metal most easily runs. But the form shall not be suffered to be an impediment. The name might convey the impression of a book of criticism, and that nothing is to be found here which was not written expressly for the Review; but good readers know that inspired pages are not written to fill a space, but for inevitable utterance; and to such our journal is freely and solicitously open, even though everything else be excluded. We entreat the aid of every lover of truth and right, and let these principles entreat for us. We rely on the talents and industry of good men known to us, but much more on the magnetism of truth, which is multiplying and educating advocates for itself and friends for us. We rely on the truth for and against ourselves.

WOMAN.

A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 20, 1855.

Among those movements which seem to be, now and then, endemic in the public mind, — perhaps we should say, sporadic, — rather than the single inspiration of one mind, is that which has urged on society the benefits of action having for its object a benefit to the position of Woman. And none is more seriously interesting to every healthful and thoughtful mind.

In that race which is now predominant over all the other races of men, it was a cherished belief that women had an oracular nature. They are more delicate than men, — delicate as iodine to light, — and thus more impressionable. They are the best index of the coming hour. I share this belief. I think their words are to be weighed; but it is their inconsiderate word, — according to the rule, ‘take their first advice, not their second:’ as Coleridge was wont to apply to a lady for her judgment in questions of taste, and accept it; but when she added— “I think so, because”— “Pardon me, madam,” he said, “leave me to find out the reasons for myself.” In this sense, as more delicate mercuries of the imponderable and immaterial influences, what they say and think is the shadow of coming events. Their very dolls are indicative. Among our Norse ancestors, Frigga was worshipped as the goddess of women. “Weirdes all,” said the Edda, “Frigga knoweth, though she telleth them never.” That is to say, all wisdoms Woman knows; though she takes them for granted, and does not explain them as discoveries, like the understanding of man. Men remark figure: women always catch the expression. They inspire by a look, and pass with us not so much by what they say or do, as by their presence. They learn so fast and convey the result so fast as to outrun the logic of their slow brother and make his acquisitions poor. ‘T is their mood and tone that is important. Does their mind misgive them, or are they firm and cheerful? ‘T is a true report that things are going ill or well. And any remarkable opinion or movement shared by woman will be the first sign of revolution.

Plato said, Women are the same as men in faculty, only less in degree. But the general voice of mankind has agreed that they have their own strength; that women are strong by sentiment; that the same mental height which their husbands attain by toil, they attain by sympathy with their husbands. Man is the will, and Woman the sentiment In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail: when Woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail. When women engage in any art or trade, it is usually as a resource, not as a primary object. The life of the affections is primary to them, so that there is usually no employment or career which they will not with their own applause and that of society quit for a suitable marriage. And they give entirely to their affections, set their whole fortune on the die, lose themselves eagerly in the glory of their husbands and children. Man stands astonished at a magnanimity he cannot pretend to. Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, one of the heroines of the English Commonwealth, who wrote the life of her husband, the Governor of Nottingham, says, “If he esteemed her at a higher rate than she in herself could have deserved, he was the author of that virtue he doted on, while she only reflected his own glories upon him. All that she was, was him , while he was hers, and all that she is now, at best, but his pale shade.”

As for Plato’s opinion, it is true that, up to recent times, in no art or science, not in painting, poetry, or music, have they produced a master-piece. Till the new education and larger opportunities of very modern times, this position, with the fewest possible exceptions, has always been true. Sappho, to be sure, in the Olympic Games, gained the crown over Pindar. But, in general, no mastery in either of the fine arts — which should, one would say, be the arts of women — has yet been obtained by them, equal to the mastery of men in the same. The part they play in education, in the care of the young and the tuition of older children, is their organic office in the world. So much sympathy as they have, makes them inestimable as the mediators between those who have knowledge and those who want it: besides, their fine organization, their taste, and love of details, makes the knowledge they give better in their hands.

But there is an art which is better than painting, poetry, music, or architecture, — better than botany, geology, or any science; namely, Conversation. Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the last flower of civilization and the best result which life has to offer us, — a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know, is brought into play, and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings.

Women are, by this and their social influence, the civilizers of mankind. What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women. It was Burns’s remark when he first came to Edinburgh that between the men of rustic life and the polite world he observed little difference; that in the former, though unpolished by fashion and unenlightened by science, he had found much observation and much intelligence; but a refined and accomplished woman was a being almost new to him, and of which he had formed a very inadequate idea. I like women,” said a clear-headed man of the world. “they are so finished.” They finish society, manners, language. Form and ceremony are their realm. They embellish trifles. All these ceremonies that hedge our life around are not to be despised, and when we have become habituated to them cannot be dispensed with. No woman can despise them with impunity. Their genius delights in ceremonies, in forms, in decorating life with manners, with proprieties, order and grace. They are, in their nature, more relative; the circumstance must always be fit; out of place they lose half their weight, out of place they are disfranchised. Position, Wren said, is essential to the perfecting of beauty; — a fine building is lost in a dark lane; a statue should stand in the air; much more true is it of woman.

We commonly say that easy circumstances seem somehow necessary to the finish of the female character: but then it is to be remembered that they create these with all their might. They are always making that civilization which they require; that state of art, of decoration, that ornamental life in which they best appear.

The spiritual force of man is as much shown in taste, in his fancy and imagination — attaching deep meanings to things and to arbitrary inventions of no real value, — as in his perception of truth. He is as much raised above the beast by this creative faculty as by any other. The horse and ox use no delays; they run to the river when thirsty, to the corn when hungry, and say no thanks but fight down whatever opposes their appetite. But man invents and adorns all he does with delays and degrees, paints it all over with forms, to please himself better; he invented majesty and the etiquette of courts and drawing-rooms; architecture, curtains, dress, all luxuries and adornments, and the elegance of privacy, to increase the joys of society. He invented marriage; and surrounded by religion, by comeliness, by all manner of dignities and renunciations, the union of the sexes.

And how should we better measure the gulf between the best intercourse of men in old Athens, in London, or in our American capitals, — between this and the hedgehog existence of diggers of worms, and the eaters of clay and offal, — than by signalizing just this department of taste or comeliness? Herein woman is the prime genius and ordainer. There is no grace that is taught by the dancing-master, no style adopted into the etiquette of courts, but was first the whim and mere action of some brilliant woman, who charmed beholders by this new expression, and made it remembered and copied. And I think they should magnify their ritual of manners. Society, conversation, decorum, flowers, dances, colors, forms, are their homes and attendants. They should be found in fit surroundings — with fair approaches, with agreeable architecture, and with all advantages which the means of man collect: —

“The far-fetched diamond finds its home

Flashing and smouldering in her hair.

For her the seas their pearls reveal,

Art and strange lands her pomp supply

With purple, chrome and cochineal,

Ochre and lapis lazuli.

The worm its golden woof presents.

Whatever runs, flies, dives or delves

All doff for her their ornaments,

Which suit her better than themselves.”

There is no gift of nature without some drawback. So, to women, this exquisite structure could not exist without its own penalty. More vulnerable, more infirm, more mortal than men, they could not be such excellent artists in this element of fancy if they did not lend and give themselves to it. They are poets who believe their own poetry. They emit from their pores a colored atmosphere, one would say, wave upon wave of rosy light in which they walk evermore, and see all objects through this warm-tinted mist that envelops them.

But the starry crown of woman is in the power of her affection and sentiment, and the infinite enlargements to which they lead. Beautiful is the passion of love, painter and adorner of youth and early life: but who suspects, in its blushes and tremors, what tragedies, heroisms and immortalities are beyond it? The passion, with all its grace and poetry, is profane to that which follows it. All these affections are only introductory to that which is beyond, and to that which is sublime.

We men have no right to say it, but the omnipotence of Eve is in humility. The instincts of mankind have drawn the Virgin Mother —

“Created beings all in lowliness

Surpassing, as in height above them all.”

This is the Divine Person whom Dante and Milton saw in vision. This is the victory of Griselda, her supreme humility. And it is when love has reached this height that all our pretty rhetoric begins to have meaning. When we see that, it adds to the soul a new soul, it is honey in the mouth, music in the ear and balsam in the heart.

“Far have I clambered in my mind, But nought so great as Love I find. What is thy tent, where dost thou dwell

‘My mansion is humility, Heaven’s vastest capability.’ The further it doth downward tend, The higher up it doth ascend.”

The first thing men think of, when they love, is to exhibit their usefulness and advantages to the object of their affection. Women make light of these, asking only love. They wish it to be an exchange of nobleness.

There is much in their nature, much in their social position which gives them a certain power of divination. And women know, at first sight, the characters of those with whom they converse. There is much that tends to give them a religious height which men do not attain. Their sequestration from affairs and from the injury to the moral sense which affairs often inflict, aids this. And in every remarkable religious development in the world, women have taken a leading part. It is very curious that in the East, where Woman occupies, nationally, a lower sphere, where the laws resist the education and emancipation of women, — in the Mohammedan faith, Woman yet occupies the same leading position, as a prophetess, that she has among the ancient Greeks, or among the Hebrews, or among the Saxons. This power, this religious character, is everywhere to be remarked in them.

The action of society is progressive. In barbarous society the position of women is always low — in the Eastern nations lower than in the West. ‘When a daughter is born,” says the Shiking, the old Sacred Book of China, “she sleeps on the ground, she is clothed with a wrapper, she plays with a tile; she is incapable of evil or of good.” And something like that position, in all low society, is the position of woman; because, as before remarked, she is herself its civilizer. With the advancements of society the position and influence of woman bring her strength or her faults into light. In modern times, three or four conspicuous instrumentalities may be marked. After the deification of Woman in the Catholic Church, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, — when her religious nature gave her, of course, new importance, — the Quakers have the honor of having first established, in their discipline, the equality in the sexes. It is even more perfect in the later sect of the Shakers, wherein no business is broached or counselled without the intervention of one elder and one elderess.

A second epoch for Woman was in France, — entirely civil; the change of sentiment from a rude to a polite character, in the age of Louis XIV., — commonly dated from the building of the Hôeltel de Rambouillet. I think another important step was made by the doctrine of Swedenborg, a sublime genius who gave a scientific exposition of the part played severally by man and woman in the world, and showed the difference of sex to run through nature and through thought. Of all Christian sects this is at this moment the most vital and aggressive.

Another step was the effect of the action of the age in the antagonism to Slavery. It was easy to enlist Woman in this; it was impossible not to enlist her. But that Cause turned out to be a great scholar. He was a terrible metaphysician. He was a jurist, a poet, a divine. Was never a University of Oxford or Göttingen that made such students. It took a man from the plough and made him acute, eloquent, and wise, to the silencing of the doctors. There was nothing it did not pry into, no right it did not explore, no wrong it did not expose. And it has, among its other effects, given Woman a feeling of public duty and an added self-respect.

One truth leads in another by the hand; one right is an accession of strength to take more. And the times are marked by the new attitude of Woman; urging, by argument and by association, her rights of all kinds, — in short, to one-half of the world; — as the right to education, to avenues of employment, to equal rights of property, to equal rights in marriage, to the exercise of the professions and of suffrage.

Of course, this conspicuousness had its inconveniences. But it is cheap wit that has been spent on this subject; from Aristophanes, in whose comedies I confess my dulness to find good joke, to Rabelais, in whom it is monstrous exaggeration of temperament, and not borne out by anything in nature, — down to English Comedy, and, in our day, to Tennyson, and the American newspapers. In all, the body of the joke is one, namely, to charge women with temperament; to describe them as victims of temperament; and is identical with Mahomet’s opinion that women have not a sufficient moral or intellectual force to control the perturbations of their physical structure. These were all drawings of morbid anatomy, and such satire as might be written on the tenants of a hospital or on an asylum for idiots. Of course it would be easy for women to retaliate in kind, by painting men from the dogs and gorillas that have worn our shape. That they have not, is an eulogy on their taste and self-respect. The good easy world took the joke which it liked. There is always the want of thought; there is always credulity. There are plenty of people who believe women to be incapable of anything but to cook, incapable of interest in affairs. There are plenty of people who believe that the world is governed by men of dark complexions, that affairs are only directed by such, and do not see the use of contemplative men, or how ignoble would be the world that wanted them. And so without the affection of women.

But for the general charge: no doubt it is well founded. They are victims of the finer temperament. They have tears, and gaieties, and faintings, and glooms, and devotion to trifles. Nature’s end, of maternity for twenty years, was of so supreme importance that it was to be secured at all events, even to the sacrifice of the highest beauty. They are more personal. Men taunt them that, whatever they do, say, read or write, they are thinking of themselves and their set. Men are not to the same degree temperamented, for there are multitudes of men who live to objects quite out of them, as to politics, to trade, to letters or an art, unhindered by any influence of constitution.

The answer that lies, silent or spoken, in the minds of well-meaning persons, to the new claims, is this: that, though their mathematical justice is not to be denied, yet the best women do not wish these things; they are asked for by people who intellectually seek them, but who have not the support or sympathy of the truest women; and that, if the laws and customs were modified in the manner proposed, it would embarrass and pain gentle and lovely persons with duties which they would find irksome and distasteful. Very likely. Providence is always surprising us with new and unlikely instruments. But perhaps it is because these people have been deprived of education, fine companions, opportunities, such as they wished, — because they feel the same rudeness and disadvantage which offends you, — that they have been stung to say, “It is too late for us to be polished and fashioned into beauty, but, at least, we will see that the whole race of women shall not suffer as we have suffered.”

They have an unquestionable right to their own property. And if a woman demand votes, offices and political equality with men, as among the Shakers an Elder and Elderess are of equal power, — and among the Quakers, — it must not be refused. It is very cheap wit that finds it so droll that a woman should vote. Educate and refine society to the highest point, — bring together a cultivated society of both sexes, in a drawing-room, and consult and decide by voices on a question of taste or on a question of right, and is there any absurdity or any practical difficulty in obtaining their authentic opinions? If not, then there need be none in a hundred companies, if you educate them and accustom them to judge. And, for the effect of it, I can say, for one, that all my points would sooner be carried in the state if women voted. On the questions that are important; — whether the government shall be in one person, or whether representative, or whether democratic; whether men shall be holden in bondage, or shall be roasted alive and eaten, as in Typee, or shall be hunted with blood-hounds, as in this country; whether men shall be hanged for stealing, or hanged at all; whether the unlimited sale of cheap liquors shall be allowed; — they would give, I suppose, as intelligent a vote as the voters of Boston or New York.

We may ask, to be sure, — Why need you vote? If new power is here, of a character which solves old tough questions, which puts me and all the rest in the wrong, tries and condemns our religion, customs, laws, and opens new careers to our young receptive men and women, you can well leave voting to the old dead people. Those whom you teach, and those whom you half teach, will fast enough make themselves considered and strong with their new insight, and votes will follow from all the dull.

The objection to their voting is the same as is urged, in the lobbies of legislatures, against clergymen who take an active part in politics; — that if they are good clergymen they are unacquainted with the expediencies of politics, and if they become good politicians they are worse clergymen. So of women, that they cannot enter this arena without being contaminated and unsexed.

Here are two or three objections; first, a want of practical wisdom; second, a too purely ideal view; and, third, danger of contamination. For their want of intimate knowledge of affairs, I do not think this ought to disqualify them from voting at any town-meeting which I ever attended. I could heartily wish the objection were sound. But if any man will take the trouble to see how our people vote, — how many gentlemen are willing to take on themselves the trouble of thinking and determining for you, and, standing at the door of the polls, give every innocent citizen his ticket as he comes in, informing him that this is the vote of his party; and how the innocent citizen, without further demur, goes and drops it in the ballot-box, — I cannot but think he will agree that most women might vote as wisely.

For the other point, of their not knowing the world, and aiming at abstract right without allowance for circumstances, — that is not a disqualification, but a qualification. Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen. One man is timid and another rash; one would change nothing, and the other is pleased with nothing; one wishes schools, another armies, one gunboats, another public gardens. Bring all these biases together and something is done in favor of them all.

Every one is a half vote, but the next elector behind him brings the other or corresponding half in his hand: a reasonable result is had. Now there is no lack, I am sure, of the expediency, or of the interests of trade or of imperative class-interests being neglected. There is no lack of votes representing the physical wants; and if in your city the uneducated emigrant vote numbers thousands, representing a brutal ignorance and mere animal wants, it is to be corrected by an educated and religious vote, representing the wants and desires of honest and refined persons. If the wants, the passions, the vices, are allowed a full vote through the hands of a half-brutal intemperate population, I think it but fair that the virtues, the aspirations should be allowed a full vote, as an offset, through the purest part of the people.

As for the unsexing and contamination, — that only accuses our existing politics, shows how barbarous we are, — that our policies are so crooked, made up of things not to be spoken, to be understood only by wink and nudge; this man to be coaxed, that man to be bought, and that other to be duped. It is easy to see that there is contamination enough, but it rots the men now, and fills the air with stench. Come out of that: it is like a dance-cellar. The fairest names in this country in literature, in law, have gone into Congress and come out dishonored. And when I read the list of men of intellect, of refined pursuits, giants in law, or eminent scholars, or of social distinction, leading men of wealth and enterprise in the commercial community, and see what they have voted for and suffered to be voted for, I think no community was ever so politely and elegantly betrayed.

I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it. Let the laws be purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs; — and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them, — according to our Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax.

All events of history are to be regarded as growths and offshoots of the expanding mind of the race, and this appearance of new opinions, their currency and force in many minds, is itself the wonderful fact. For whatever is popular is important, shows the spontaneous sense of the hour. The aspiration of this century will be the code of the next. It holds of high and distant causes, of the same influences that make the sun and moon. When new opinions appear, they will be entertained and respected, by every fair mind, according to their reasonableness, and not according to their convenience, or their fitness to shock our customs. But let us deal with them greatly; let them make their way by the upper road, and not by the way of manufacturing public opinion, which lapses continually into expediency, and makes charlatans. All that is spontaneous is irresistible, and forever it is individual force that interests. I need not repeat to you, — your own solitude will suggest it, — that a masculine woman is not strong, but a lady is. The loneliest thought, the purest prayer, is rushing to be the history of a thousand years.

Let us have the true woman, the adorner, the hospitable, the religious heart, and no lawyer need be called in to write stipulations, the cunning clauses of provision, the strong investitures; — for woman moulds the lawgiver and writes the law. But I ought to say, I think it impossible to separate the interests and education of the sexes. Improve and refine the men, and you do the same by the women, whether you will or no. Every woman being the wife or the daughter of a man, — wife, daughter, sister, mother, of a man, she can never be very far from his ear, never not of his counsel, if she has really something to urge that is good in itself and agreeable to nature. Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings. The melioration of manners brought their melioration of course. It could not be otherwise, and hence the new desire of better laws. For there are always a certain number of passionately loving fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who put their might into the endeavor to make a daughter, a wife, or a mother happy in the way that suits best. Woman should find in man her guardian. Silently she looks for that, and when she finds that he is not, as she instantly does, she betakes her to her own defences, and does the best she can. But when he is her guardian, fulfilled with all noble-ness, knows and accepts his duties as her brother, all goes well for both.

The new movement is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman’s heart is prompted to desire, the man’s mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish.

ADDRESS TO KOSSUTH.

Sir , — The fatigue of your many public visits, in such unbroken succession as may compare with the toils of a campaign, forbid us to detain you long. The people of this town share with their countrymen the admiration of valor and perseverance; they, like their compatriots, have been hungry to see the man whose extraordinary eloquence is seconded by the splendor and the solidity of his actions. But, as it is the privilege of the people of this town to keep a hallowed mound which has a place in the story of the country; as Concord is one of the monuments of freedom; we knew beforehand that you could not go by us; you could not take all your steps in the pilgrimage of American liberty, until you had seen with your eyes the ruins of the bridge where a handful of brave farmers opened our Revolution. Therefore, we sat and waited for you.

And now, Sir, we are heartily glad to see you, at last, in these fields. We set no more value than you do on cheers and huzzas. But we think that the graves of our heroes around us throb to-day to a footstep that sounded like their own: —

“The mighty tread

Brings from the dust the sound of liberty.”

Sir, we have watched with attention your progress through the land, and the varying feeling with which you have been received, and the unvarying tone and countenance which you have maintained. We wish to discriminate in our regard. We wish to reserve our honor for actions of the noblest strain. We please ourselves that in you we meet one whose temper was long since tried in the fire, and made equal to all events; a man so truly in love with the greatest future, that he cannot be diverted to any less.

It is our republican doctrine, too, that the wide variety of opinions is an advantage. I believe I may say of the people of this country at large, that their sympathy is more worth, because it stands the test of party. It is not a blind wave; it is a living soul contending with living souls. It is, in every expression, antagonized. No opinion will pass but must stand the tug of war. As you see, the love you win is worth something; for it has been argued through; its foundation searched; it has proved sound and whole; it may be avowed; it will last, and it will draw all opinion to itself.

We have seen, with great pleasure, that there is nothing accidental in your attitude. We have seen that you are organically in that cause you plead. The man of Freedom, you are also the man of Fate. You do not elect, but you are elected by God and your genius to the task. We do not, therefore, affect to thank you. We only see in you the angel of freedom, crossing sea and land; crossing parties, nationalities, private interests and self-esteems; dividing populations where you go, and drawing to your part only the good. We are afraid that you are growing popular, Sir; you may be called to the dangers of prosperity. But, hitherto, you have had in all countries and in all parties only the men of heart. I do not know but you will have the million yet. Then, may your strength be equal to your day. But remember, Sir, that everything great and excellent in the world is in minorities.

Far be from us, Sir, any tone of patronage; we ought rather to ask yours. We know the austere condition of liberty — that it must be reconquered over and over again; yea, day by day; that it is a state of war; that it is always slipping from those who boast it to those who fight for it: and you, the foremost soldier of freedom in this age, — it is for us to crave your judgment; who are we that we should dictate to you? You have won your own. We only affirm it. This country of working-men greets in you a worker. This republic greets in you a republican. We only say, ‘Well done, good and faithful.’ — You have earned your own nobility at home. We admit you ad eundem (as they say at College). We admit you to the same degree, without new trial. We suspend all rules before so paramount a merit. You may well sit a doctor in the college of liberty. You have achieved your right to interpret our Washington. And I speak the sense not only of every generous American, but the law of mind, when I say that it is not those who live idly in the city called after his name, but those who, all over the world, think and act like him, who can claim to explain the sentiment of Washington.

Sir, whatever obstruction from selfishness, indifference, or from property (which always sympathizes with possession) you may encounter, we congratulate you that you have known how to convert calamities into powers, exile into a campaign, present defeat into lasting victory. For this new crusade which you preach to willing and to unwilling ears in America is a seed of armed men. You have got your story told in every palace and log hut and prairie camp, throughout this continent. And, as the shores of Europe and America approach every month, and their politics will one day mingle, when the crisis arrives it will find us all instructed beforehand in the rights and wrongs of Hungary, and parties already to her freedom.

ROBERT BURNS.

SPEECH AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE BURNS CENTENARY, BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1869.

Mr. President and Gentlemen:

I do not know by what untoward accident it has chanced, and I forbear to inquire, that, in this accomplished circle, it should fall to me, the worst Scotsman of all, to receive your commands, and at the latest hour too, to respond to the sentiment just offered, and which indeed makes the occasion. But I am told there is no appeal, and I must trust to the inspirations of the theme to make a fitness which does not otherwise exist. Yet, Sir, I heartily feel the singular claims of the occasion. At the first announcement, from I know not whence, that the 25th of January was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, a sudden consent warmed the great English race, in all its kingdoms, colonies and States, all over the world, to keep the festival. We are here to hold our parliament with love and poesy, as men were wont to do in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might not have had more stateliness and better singers than we, — though that is yet to be known, — but they could not have better reason. I can only explain this singular unanimity in a race which rarely acts together, but rather after their watchword, Each for himself, — by the fact that Robert Burns, the poet of the middle class, represents in the mind of men to-day that great uprising of the middle class against the armed and privileged minorities, that uprising which worked politically in the American and French Revolutions, and which, not in governments so much as in education and social order, has changed the face of the world.

In order for this destiny, his birth, breeding and fortunes were low. His organic sentiment was absolute independence, and resting as it should on a life of labor. No man existed who could look down on him. They that looked into his eyes saw that they might look down the sky as easily. His muse and teaching was common-sense, joyful, aggressive, irresistible. Not Latimer, not Luther struck more telling blows against false theology than did this brave singer. The Confession of Augsburg, the Declaration of Independence, the French Rights of Man, and the Marseillaise , are not more weighty documents in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer that. I find his grand plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters, — Rabelais, Shakspeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add another name, I find it only in a living countryman of Burns.

He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for literature and poetry care for Burns. It was indifferent — they thought who saw him — whether he wrote verse or not: he could have done anything else as well. Yet how true a poet is he! And the poet, too, of poor men, of gray hodden and the guernsey coat and the blouse. He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man’s wine; hardship; the fear of debt; the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thoughts. What a love of nature, and, shall I say it? of middle-class nature. Not like Goethe, in the stars, or like Byron, in the ocean, or Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them, — bleak leagues of pasture and stubble, ice and sleet and rain and snow-choked brooks; birds, hares, field-mice, thistles and heather, which he daily knew. How many “Bonny Doons” and “John Anderson my jo’s” and “Auld lang Synes” all around the earth have his verses been applied to! And his love-songs still woo and melt the youths and maids; the farm-work, the country holiday, the fishing-cobble, are still his debtors to-day.

And as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made the Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art, and filtered of all offence through his beauty. It seemed odious to Luther that the devil should have all the best tunes; he would bring them into the churches; and Burns knew how to take from fairs and gypsies, blacksmiths and drovers, the speech of the market and street, and clothe it with melody. But I am detaining you too long. The memory of Burns, — I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it to leave us anything to say. The west winds are murmuring it. Open the windows behind you, and hearken for the incoming tide, what the waves say of it. The doves perching always on the eaves of the Stone Chapel opposite, may know something about it. Every name in broad Scotland keeps his fame bright. The memory of Burns, — every man’s, every boy’s and girl’s head carries snatches of his songs, and they say them by heart, and, what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth. The wind whispers them, the birds whistle them, the corn, barley, and bulrushes hoarsely rustle them, nay, the music-boxes at Geneva are framed and toothed to play them; the hand-organs of the Savoyards in all cities repeat them, and the chimes of bells ring them in the spires. They are the property and the solace of mankind.

WALTER SCOTT.

REMARKS AT THE CELEBRATION BY THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH, BOSTON, AUGUST 15, 1871.

The memory of Sir Walter Scott is dear to this Society, of which he was for ten years an Honorary Member. If only as an eminent antiquary who has shed light on the history of Europe and of the English race, he had high claims to our regard. But to the rare tribute of a centennial anniversary of his birthday, which we gladly join with Scotland and indeed with Europe to keep, he is not less entitled, — perhaps he alone among the literary men of this century is entitled, — by the exceptional debt which all English-speaking men have gladly owed to his character and genius. I think no modern writer has inspired his readers with such affection to his own personality. I can well remember as far back as when “The Lord of the Isles” was first republished in Boston, in 1815, — my own and my school-fellows’ joy in the book. “Marmion” and “The Lay” had gone before, but we were then learning to spell. In the face of the later novels, we still claim that his poetry is the delight of boys. But this means that when we re-open these old books we all consent to be boys again. We tread over our youthful grounds with joy. Crities have found them to be only rhymed prose. But I believe that many of those who read them in youth, when, later, they come to dismiss finally their school. days’ library, will make some fond exception for Scott as for Byron.

It is easy to see the origin of his poems. His own ear had been charmed by old ballads crooned by Scottish dames at firesides, and written down from their lips by antiquaries; and, finding them now outgrown and dishonored by the new culture, he attempted to dignify and adapt them to the times in which he lived. Just so much thought, so much picturesque detail in dialogue or description as the old ballad required, so much suppression of details and leaping to the event, he would keep and use, but without any ambition to write a high poem after a classic model. He made no pretension to the lofty style of Spenser, or Milton, or Wordsworth. Compared with their purified songs, purified of all ephemeral color or material, his were vers de société. But he had the skill proper to vers de société , — skill to fit his verse to his topic, and not to write solemn pentameters alike on a hero or a spaniel. His good sense probably elected the ballad to make his audience larger. He apprehended in advance the immense enlargement of the reading public, which almost dates from the era of his books, — which his books and Byron’s inaugurated; and which, though until then unheard of, has become familiar to the present time.

If the success of his poems, however large, was partial, that of his novels was complete. The tone of strength in “Waverley” at once announced the master, and was more than justified by the superior genius of the following romances, up to the “Bride of Lammermoor,” which almost goes back to Æschylus for a counterpart, as a painting of Fate, — leaving on every reader the impression of the highest and purest tragedy.

His power on the public mind rests on the singular union of two influences. By nature, by his reading and taste an aristocrat, in a time and country which easily gave him that bias, he had the virtues and graces of that class, and by his eminent humanity and his love of labor escaped its harm. He saw in the English Church the symbol and seal of all social order; in the historical aristocracy the benefits to the State which Burke claimed for it; and in his own reading and research, such store of legend and renown as won his imagination to their cause. Not less his eminent humanity delighted in the sense and virtue and wit of the common people. In his own household and neighbors he found characters and pets of humble class, with whom he established the best relation, — small farmers and tradesmen, shepherds, fishermen, gypsies, peasant-girls, crones, — and came with these into real ties of mutual help and good-will. From these originals he drew so genially his Jeanie Deans, his Dinmonts and Edie Ochiltrees, Caleb Balderstones and Fairservices, Cuddie Headriggs, Dominies, Meg Merrilies and Jenny Rintherouts, full of life and reality; making these, too, the pivots on which the plots of his stories turn; and meantime without one word of brag of this discernment, — nay, this extreme sympathy reaching down to every beggar and beggar’s dog; and horse and cow. In the number and variety of his characters he approaches Shakspeare. Other painters in verse or prose have thrown into literature a few type-figures; as Cervantes, DeFoe, Richardson, Goldsmith, Sterne and Fielding; but Scott portrayed with equal strength and success every figure in his crowded company.

His strong good sense saved him from the faults and foibles incident to poets, — from nervous egotism, sham modesty, or jealousy. He played ever a manly part. With such a fortune and such a genius, we should look to see what heavy toll the Fates took of him, as of Rousseau or Voltaire, of Swift or Byron. But no: he had no insanity, or vice, or blemish. He was a thoroughly upright, wise and great-hearted man, equal to whatever event or fortune should try him. Disasters only drove him to immense exertion. What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.

Under what rare conjunction of stars was this man born, that, wherever he lived, he found superior men, passed all his life in the best company, and still found himself the best of the best! He was apprenticed at Edinburgh to a Writer to the Signet, and became a Writer to the Signet, and found himself in his youth and manhood and age in the society of Mackintosh, Horner, Jeffrey, Playfair, Dugald Stewart, Sydney Smith, Leslie, Sir William Hamilton, Wilson, Hogg, De Quincey, — to name only some of his literary neighbors, and, as soon as he died, all this brilliant circle was broken up.

REMARKS AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION.

Mr. Chairman:

I hardly felt, in finding this house this morning, that I had come into the right hall. I came, as I supposed myself summoned, to a little committee meeting, for some practical end, where I should happily and humbly learn my lesson; and I supposed myself no longer subject to your call when I saw this house. I have listened with great pleasure to the lessons which we have heard. To many, to those last spoken, I have found so much in accord with my own thought that I have little left to say. I think that it does great honor to the sensibility of the committee that they have felt the universal demand in the community for just the movement they have begun. I say again, in the phrase used by my friend, that we began many years ago, — yes, and many ages before that. But I think the necessity very great, and it has prompted an equal magnanimity, that thus invites all classes, all religious men, whatever their connections, whatever their specialties, in whatever relation they stand to the Christian Church, to unite in a movement of benefit to men, under the sanction of religion. We are all very sensible, — it is forced on us every day, — of the feeling that churches are outgrown; that the creeds are outgrown; that a technical theology no longer suits us. It is not the ill-will of people — no, indeed, but the incapacity for confining themselves there. The church is not large enough for the man; it cannot inspire the enthusiasm which is the parent of everything good in history, which makes the romance of history. For that enthusiasm you must have something greater than yourselves, and not less.

The child, the young student, finds scope in his mathematics and chemistry or natural history, because he finds a truth larger than he is; finds himself continually instructed. But, in churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in something less; it is checked, cribbed, confined. And the statistics of the American, the English and the German cities, showing that the mass of the population is leaving off going to church, indicate the necessity, which should have been foreseen, that the Church should always be new and extemporized, because it is eternal and springs from the sentiment of men, or it does not exist. One wonders sometimes that the churches still retain so many votaries, when he reads the histories of the Church. There is an element of childish infatuation in them which does not exalt our respect for man. Read in Michelet, that in Europe, for twelve or fourteen centuries, God the Father had no temple and no altar. The Holy Ghost and the Son of Mary were worshipped, and, in the thirteenth century, the First Person began to appear at the side of his Son, in pictures and in sculpture, for worship, but only through favor of his Son. These mortifying puerilities abound in religious history. But as soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within his own mind, — is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment, then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action.

What strikes me in the sudden movement which brings together to-day so many separated friends, — separated but sympathetic, — and what I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds expression. What is best in the ancient religions was the sacred friendships between heroes, the Sacred Bands, and the relations of the Pythagorean disciples. Our Masonic institutions probably grew from the like origin. The close association which bound the first disciples of Jesus is another example; and it were easy to find more. The soul of our late war, which will always be remembered as dignifying it, was, first, the desire to abolish slavery in this country, and secondly, to abolish the mischief of the war itself, by healing and saving the sick and wounded soldiers, — and this by the sacred bands of the Sanitary Commission. I wish that the various beneficent institutions which are springing up, like joyful plants of wholesomeness, all over this country, should all be remembered as within the sphere of this committee, — almost all of them are represented here, — and that within this little band that has gathered here to-day, should grow friendship. The interests that grow out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the old eternal duties.

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT TEMPLE, FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869.

Friends:

I wish I could deserve anything of the kind expression of my friend, the President, and the kind good-will which the audience signifies, but it is not in my power to-day to meet the natural demands of the occasion, and, quite against my design and my will, I shall have to request the attention of the audience to a few written remarks, instead of the more extensive statement which I had hoped to offer them.

I think we have disputed long enough. I think we might now relinquish our theological controversies to communities more idle and ignorant than we. I am glad that a more realistic church is coming to be the tendency of society, and that we are likely one day to forget our obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel each other in good works. I have no wish to proselyte any reluctant mind, nor, I think, have I any curiosity or impulse to intrude on those whose ways of thinking differ from mine. But as my friend, your presiding officer, has asked me to take at least some small part in this day’s conversation, I am ready to give, as often before, the first simple foundation of my belief, that the Author of Nature has not left himself without a witness in any sane mind: that the moral sentiment speaks to every man the law after which the Universe was made; that we find parity, identity of design, through Nature, and benefit to be the uniform aim: that there is a force always at work to make the best better and the worst good. We have had not long since presented us by Max Müller a valuable paragraph from St. Augustine, not at all extraordinary in itself, but only as coming from that eminent Father in the Church, and at that age, in which St. Augustine writes: “That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.” I believe that not only Christianity is as old as the Creation, — not only every sentiment and precept of Christianity can be paralleled in other religious writings, — but more, that a man of religious susceptibility, and one at the same time conversant with many men, — say a much-travelled man, — can find the same idea in numberless conversations. The religious find religion wherever they associate. When I find in people narrow religion, I find also in them narrow reading. Nothing really is so self-publishing, so divulgatory, as thought. It cannot be confined or hid. It is easily carried; it takes no room; the knowledge of Europe looks out into Persia and India, and to the very Kaffirs. Every proverb, every fine text, every pregnant jest, travels across the line; and you will find it at Cape Town, or among the Tartars. We are all believers in natural religion; we all agree that the health and integrity of man is self-respect, self-subsistency, a regard to natural conscience. All education is to accustom him to trust himself, discriminate between his higher and lower thoughts, exert the timid faculties until they are robust, and thus train him to self-help, until he ceases to be an underling, a tool, and becomes a benefactor. I think wise men wish their religion to be all of this kind, teaching the agent to go alone, not to hang on the world as a pensioner, a permitted person, but an adult, self-searching soul, brave to assist or resist a world: only humble and docile before the source of the wisdom he has discovered within him.

As it is, every believer holds a different creed; that is, all the churches are churches of one member. All our sects have refined the point of difference between them. The point of difference that still remains between churches, or between classes, is in the addition to the moral code, that is, to natural religion, of somewhat positive and historical. I think that to be, as Mr. Abbot has stated it in his form, the one difference remaining. I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous dispensation, — certainly not to the doctrine of Christianity. This claim impairs, to my mind, the soundness of him who makes it, and indisposes us to his communion. This comes the wrong way; it comes from without, not within. This positive, historical, authoritative scheme is not consistent with our experience or our expectations. It is something not in Nature: it is contrary to that law of nature which all wise men recognize; namely, never to require a larger cause than is necessary to the effect. George Fox, the Quaker, said that, though he read of Christ and God, he knew them only from the like spirit in his own soul. We want all the aids to our moral training. We cannot spare the vision nor the virtue of the saints; but let it be by pure sympathy, not with any personal or official claim. If you are childish, and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of logic and out of nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings. It is the praise of our New Testament that its teachings go to the honor and benefit of humanity, — that no better lesson has been taught or incarnated. Let it stand, beautiful and wholesome, with whatever is most like it in the teaching and practice of men; but do not attempt to elevate it out of humanity by saying, “This was not a man,” for then you confound it with the fables of every popular religion, and my distrust of the story makes me distrust the doctrine as soon as it differs from my own belief.

Whoever thinks a story gains by the prodigious, by adding something out of nature, robs it more than he adds. It is no longer an example, a model; no longer a heart-stirring hero, but an exhibition, a wonder, an anomaly, removed out of the range of influence with thoughtful men. I submit that in sound frame of mind, we read or remember the religious sayings and oracles of other men, whether Jew or Indian, or Greek or Persian, only for friendship, only for joy in the social identity which they open to us, and that these words would have no weight with us if we had not the same conviction already. I find something stingy in the unwilling and disparaging admission of these foreign opinions, — opinions from all parts of the world, — by our churchmen, as if only to enhance by their dimness the superior light of Christianity. Meantime, observe, you cannot bring me too good a word, too dazzling a hope, too penetrating an insight from the Jews. I hail every one with delight, as showing the riches of my brother, my fellow-soul, who could thus think and thus greatly feel. Zealots eagerly fasten their eyes on the differences between their creed and yours, but the charm of the study is in finding the agreements, the identities, in all the religions of men.

I am glad to hear each sect complain that they do not now hold the opinions they are charged with. The earth moves, and the mind opens. I am glad to believe society contains a class of humble souls who enjoy the luxury of a religion that does not degrade; who think it the highest worship to expect of Heaven the most and the best; who do not wonder that there was a Christ, but that there were not a thousand; who have conceived an infinite hope for mankind; who believe that the history of Jesus is the history of every man, written large.

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC.

LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH, BOSTON, MARCH 30, 1878.

It is a rule that holds in economy as well as in hydraulics, that you must have a source higher than your tap. The mills, the shops, the theatre and the caucus, the college and the church, have all found out this secret. The sailors sail by chronometers that do not lose two or three seconds in a year, ever since Newton explained to Parliament that the way to improve navigation was to get good watches, and to offer public premiums for a better time-keeper than any then in use. The manufacturers rely on turbines of hydraulic perfection; the carpet-mill, on mordants and dyes which exhaust the skill of the chemist; the calico print, on designers of genius who draw the wages of artists, not of artisans. Wedgwood, the eminent potter, bravely took the sculptor Flaxman to counsel, who said, “Send to Italy, search the museums for the forms of old Etruscan vases, urns, water-pots, domestic and sacrificial vessels of all kinds.” They built great works and called their manufacturing village Etruria. Flaxman, with his Greek taste, selected and combined the loveliest forms, which were executed in English clay; sent boxes of these as gifts to every court of Europe, and formed the taste of the world. It was a renaissance of the breakfast table and china-closet. The brave manufacturers made their fortune. The jewellers imitated the revived models in silver and gold.

The theatre avails itself of the best talent of poet, of painter, and of amateur of taste, to make the ensemble of dramatic effect. The marine insurance office has its mathematical counsellor to settle averages; the life-assurance, its table of annuities. The wine merchant has his analyst and taster, the more exquisite the better. He has also, I fear, his debts to the chemist as well as to the vineyard.

Our modern wealth stands on a few staples, and the interest nations took in our war was exasperated by the importance of the cotton trade. And what is cotton? One plant out of some two hundred thousand known to the botanist, vastly the larger part of which are reckoned weeds. What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered, — every one of the two hundred thousand probably yet to be of utility in the arts. As Bacchus of the vine, Ceres of the wheat, as Arkwright and Whitney were the demi-gods of cotton, so prolific Time will yet bring an inventor to every plant. There is not a property in nature but a mind is born to seek and find it. For it is not the plants or the animals, innumerable as they are, nor the whole magazine of material nature that can give the sum of power, but the infinite applicability of these things in the hands of thinking man, every new application being equivalent to a new material.

Our sleepy civilization, ever since Roger Bacon and Monk Schwartz invented gunpowder, has built its whole art of war, all fortification by land and sea, all drill and military education, on that one compound, — all is an extension of a gun-barrel, — and is very scornful about bows and arrows, and reckons Greeks and Romans and Middle Ages little better than Indians and bow-and-arrow times. As if the earth, water, gases, lightning and caloric had not a million energies, the discovery of any one of which could change the art of war again, and put an end to war by the exterminating forces man can apply.

Now, if this is true in all the useful and in the fine arts, that the direction must be drawn from a superior source or there will be no good work, does it hold less in our social and civil life?

In our popular politics you may note that each aspirant who rises above the crowd, however at first making his obedient apprenticeship in party tactics, if he have sagacity, soon learns that it is by no means by obeying the vulgar weathercock of his party, the resentments, the fears and whims of it, that real power is gained, but that he must often face and resist the party, and abide by his resistance, and put them in fear; that the only title to their permanent respect, and to a larger following, is to see for himself what is the real public interest, and to stand for that; — that is a principle, and all the cheering and hissing of the crowd must by and by accommodate itself to it. Our times easily afford you very good examples.

The law of water and all fluids is true of wit. Prince Metternich said, “Revolutions begin in the best heads and run steadily down to the populace.” It is a very old observation; not truer because Metternich said it, and not less true.

There have been revolutions which were not in the interest of feudalism and barbarism, but in that of society. And these are distinguished not by the numbers of the combatants nor the numbers of the slain, but by the motive. No interest now attaches to the wars of York and Lancaster, to the wars of German, French and Spanish emperors, which were only dynastic wars, but to those in which a principle was involved. These are read with passionate interest and never lose their pathos by time. When the cannon is aimed by ideas, when men with religious convictions are behind it, when men die for what they live for, and the mainspring that works daily urges them to hazard all, then the cannon articulates its explosions with the voice of a man, then the rifle seconds the cannon and the fowling-piece the rifle, and the women make the cartridges, and all shoot at one mark; then gods join in the combat; then poets are born, and the better code of laws at last records the victory.

Now the culmination of these triumphs of humanity — and which did virtually include the extinction of slavery — is the planting of America.

At every moment some one country more than any other represents the sentiment and the future of mankind. None will doubt that America occupies this place in the opinion of nations, as is proved by the fact of the vast immigration into this country from all the nations of Western and Central Europe. And when the adventurers have planted themselves and looked about, they send back all the money they can spare to bring their friends.

Meantime they find this country just passing through a great crisis in its history, as necessary as lactation or dentition or puberty to the human individual. We are in these days settling for ourselves and our descendants questions which, as they shall be determined in one way or the other, will make the peace and prosperity or the calamity of the next ages. The questions of Education, of Society, of Labor, the direction of talent, of character, the nature and habits of the American, may well occupy us, and more the question of Religion.

The new conditions of mankind in America are really favorable to progress, the removal of absurd restrictions and antique inequalities. The mind is always better the more it is used, and here it is kept in practice. The humblest is daily challenged to give his opinion on practical questions, and while civil and social freedom exists, nonsense even has a favorable effect. Cant is good to provoke common sense. The Catholic Church, the trance-mediums, the rebel paradoxes, exasperate the common sense. The wilder the paradox, the more sure is Punch to put it in the pillory.

The lodging the power in the people, as in republican forms, has the effect of holding things closer to common sense; for a court or an aristocracy, which must always be a small minority, can more easily run into follies than a republic, which has too many observers, — each with a vote in his hand, — to allow its head to be turned by any kind of nonsense: since hunger, thirst, cold, the cries of children, and debt, are always holding the masses hard to the essential duties.

One hundred years ago the American people attempted to carry out the bill of political rights to an almost ideal perfection. They have made great strides in that direction since. They are now proceeding, instructed by their success and by their many failures, to carry out, not the bill of rights, but the bill of human duties.

And look what revolution that attempt involves. Hitherto government has been that of the single person or of the aristocracy. In this country the attempt to resist these elements, it is asserted, must throw us into the government not quite of mobs, but in practice of an inferior class of professional politicians, who by means of newspapers and caucuses really thrust their unworthy minority into the place of the old aristocracy on the one side, and of the good, industrious, well-taught but unambitious population on the other, win the posts of power, and give their direction to affairs. Hence liberal congresses and legislatures ordain, to the surprise of the people, equivocal, interested and vicious measures. The men themselves are suspected and charged with lobbying and being lobbied. No measure is attempted for itself, but the opinion of the people is courted in the first place, and the measures are perfunctorily carried through as secondary. We do not choose our own candidate, no, nor any other man’s first choice, — but only the available candidate, whom, perhaps, no man loves. We do not speak what we think, but grope after the practicable and available. Instead of character, there is a studious exclusion of character. The people are feared and flattered. They are not reprimanded. The country is governed in bar-rooms, and in the mind of bar-rooms. The low can best win the low, and each aspirant for power vies with his rival which can stoop lowest, and depart widest from himself.

The partisan on moral, even on religious questions, will choose a proven rogue who can answer the tests, over an honest, affectionate, noble gentleman; the partisan ceasing to be a man that he may be a sectarian.

The spirit of our political economy is low and degrading. The precious metals are not so precious as they are esteemed. Man exists for his own sake, and not to add a laborer to the state. The spirit of our political action, for the most part, considers nothing less than the sacredness of man. Party sacrifices man to the measure.

We have seen the great party of property and education in the country drivelling and huckstering away, for views of party fear or advantage, every principle of humanity and the dearest hopes of mankind; the trustees of power only energetic when mischief could be done, imbecile as corpses when evil was to be prevented.

Our great men succumb so far to the forms of the day as to peril their integrity for the sake of adding to the weight of their personal character the authority of office, or making a real government titular. Our politics are full of adventurers, who having by education and social innocence a good repute in the state, break away from the law of honesty and think they can afford to join the devil’s party. ‘T is odious, these offenders in high life. You rally to the support of old charities and the cause of literature, and there, to be sure, are these brazen faces. In this innocence you are puzzled how to meet them; must shake hands with them, under protest. We feel toward them as the minister about the Cape Cod farm, — in the old time when the minister was still invited, in the spring, to make a prayer for the blessing of a piece of land, — the good pastor being brought to the spot, stopped short: “No, this land does not want a prayer, this land wants manure.”

“T is virtue which they want, and wanting it,

Honor no garment to their backs can fit.”

Parties keep the old names, but exhibit a surprising fugacity in creeping out of one snake-skin into another of equal ignominy and lubricity, and the grasshopper on the turret of Faneuil Hall gives a proper hint of the men below.

Everything yields. The very glaciers are viscous, or regelate into conformity, and the stiffest patriots falter and compromise; so that will cannot be depended on to save us.

How rare are acts of will! We are all living according to custom; we do as other people do, and shrink from an act of our own. Every such act makes a man famous, and we can all count the few cases, — half a dozen in our time, — when a public man ventured to act as he thought, without waiting for orders or for public opinion. John Quincy Adams was a man of an audacious independence that always kept the public curiosity alive in regard to what he might do. None could predict his word, and a whole congress could not gainsay it when it was spoken. General Jackson was a man of will, and his phrase on one memorable occasion, “I will take the responsibility,” is a proverb ever since.

The American marches with a careless swagger to the height of power, very heedless of his own liberty or of other peoples’, in his reckless confidence that he can have all he wants, risking all the prized charters of the human race, bought with battles and revolutions and religion, gambling them all away for a paltry selfish gain.

He sits secure in the possession of his vast domain, rich beyond all experience in resources, sees its inevitable force unlocking itself in elemental order day by day, year by year; looks from his coalfields, his wheat-bearing prairie, his gold-mines, to his two oceans on either side, and feels the security that there can be no famine in a country reaching through so many latitudes, no want that cannot be supplied, no danger from any excess of importation of art or learning into a country of such native strength, such immense digestive power.

In proportion to the personal ability of each man, he feels the invitation and career which the country opens to him. He is easily fed with wheat and game, with Ohio wine, but his brain is also pampered by finer draughts, by political power and by the power in the railroad board, in the mills, or the banks. This elevates his spirits, and gives, of course, an easy self-reliance that makes him self-willed and unscrupulous.

I think this levity is a reaction on the people from the extraordinary advantages and invitations of their condition. When we are most disturbed by their rash and immoral voting, it is not malignity, but recklessness. They are careless of politics, because they do not entertain the possibility of being seriously caught in meshes of legislation. They feel strong and irresistible. They believe that what they have enacted they can repeal if they do not like it. But one may run a risk once too often. They stay away from the polls, saying that one vote can do no good! Or they take another step, and say One vote can do no harm! and vote for something which they do not approve, because their party or set votes for it. Of course this puts them in the power of any party having a steady interest to promote which does not conflict manifestly with the pecuniary interest of the voters. But if they should come to be interested in themselves and in their career, they would no more stay away from the election than from their own counting-room or the house of their friend.

The people are right-minded enough on ethical questions, but they must pay their debts, and must have the means of living well, and not pinching. So it is useless to rely on them to go to a meeting, or to give a vote, if any check from this must-have-the-money side arises. If a customer looks grave at their newspaper, or damns their member of Congress, they take another newspaper, and vote for another man. They must have money, for a certain style of living fast becomes necessary; they must take wine at the hotel, first, for the look of it, and second, for the purpose of sending the bottle to two or three gentlemen at the table; and presently because they have got the taste, and do not feel that they have dined without it.

The record of the election now and then alarms people by the all but unanimous choice of a rogue and brawler. But how was it done? What lawless mob burst into the polls and threw in these hundreds of ballots in defiance of the magistrates? This was done by the very men you know, — the mildest, most sensible, best-natured people. The only account of this is, that they have been scared or warped into some association in their mind of the candidate with the interest of their trade or of their property.

Whilst each cabal urges its candidate, and at last brings, with cheers and street-demonstrations, men whose names are a knell to all hope of progress, the good and wise are hidden in their active retirements, and are quite out of question.

“These we must join to wake, for these are of the strain

That justice dare defend, and will the age maintain.”

Yet we know, all over this country, men of integrity, capable of action and of affairs, with the deepest sympathy in all that concerns the public, mortified by the national disgrace, and quite capable of any sacrifice except of their honor.

Faults in the working appear in our system, as in all, but they suggest their own remedies. After every practical mistake out of which any disaster grows, the people wake and correct it with energy. And any disturbances in politics, in civil or foreign wars, sober them, and instantly show more virtue and conviction in the popular vote. In each new threat of faction the ballot has been, beyond expectation, right and decisive.

It is ever an inspiration, God only knows whence; a sudden, undated perception of eternal right coming into and correcting things that were wrong; a perception that passes through thousands as readily as through one.

The gracious lesson taught by science to this country is, that the history of nature from first to last is incessant advance from less to more, from rude to finer organization, the globe of matter thus conspiring with the principle of undying hope in man. Nature works in immense time, and spends individuals and races prodigally to prepare new individuals and races. The lower kinds are one after one extinguished; the higher forms come in. The history of civilization, or the refining of certain races to wonderful power of performance, is analogous; but the best civilization yet is only valuable as a ground of hope.

Ours is the country of poor men. Here is practical democracy; here is the human race poured out over the continent to do itself justice; all mankind in its shirt-sleeves; not grimacing like poor rich men in cities, pretending to be rich, but unmistakably taking off its coat to hard work, when labor is sure to pay. This through all the country. For really, though you see wealth in the capitals, it is only a sprinkling of rich men in the cities and at sparse points; the bulk of the population is poor. In Maine, nearly every man is a lumberer. In Massachusetts, every twelfth man is a shoemaker, and the rest, millers, farmers, sailors, fishermen.

Well, the result is, instead of the doleful experience of the European economist, who tells us, “In almost all countries the condition of the great body of the people is poor and miserable,” here that same great body has arrived at a sloven plenty, — ham and corn-cakes, tight roof and coals enough have been attained; an unbuttoned comfort, not clean, not thoughtful, far from polished, without dignity in his repose; the man awkward and restless if he have not something to do, but honest and kind for the most part, understanding his own rights and stiff to maintain them, and disposed to give his children a better education than he received.

The steady improvement of the public schools in the cities and the country enables the farmer or laborer to secure a precious primary education. It is care to find a born American who cannot read and write. The facility with which clubs are formed by young men for discussion of social, political and intellectual topics secures the notoriety of the questions.

Our institutions, of which the town is the unit are all educational, for responsibility educates fast. The town meeting is, after the high school, a higher school. The legislature, to which every good farmer goes once on trial, is a superior academy.

The result appears in the power of invention, the freedom of thinking, in the readiness for reforms, eagerness for novelty, even for all the follies of false science; in the antipathy to secret societies, in the predominance of the democratic party in the politics of the Union, and in the voice of the public even when irregular and vicious, — the voice of mobs, the voice of lynch law, — because it is thought to be, on the whole, the verdict, though badly spoken, of the greatest number.

All this forwardness and self-reliance cover self-government; proceed on the belief that as the people have made a government they can make another; that their union and law are not in their memory, but in their blood and condition. If they unmake a law they can easily make a new one. In Mr. Webster’s imagination the American Union was a huge Prince Rupert’s drop, which will snap into atoms if so much as the smallest end be shivered off. Now the fact is quite different from this. The people are loyal, law-abiding. They prefer order, and have no taste for misrule and uproar.

America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent, and so the people made a good start. We began well. No inquisition here, no kings, no nobles, no dominant church. Here heresy has lost its terrors. We have eight or ten religions in every large town, and the most that comes of it is a degree or two on the thermometer of fashion; a pew in a particular church gives an easier entrance to the subscription ball.

We began with freedom, and are defended from shocks now for a century by the facility with which through popular assemblies every necessary measure of reform can instantly be carried. A congress is a standing insurrection, and escapes the violence of accumulated grievance. As the globe keeps its identity by perpetual change, so our civil system, by perpetual appeal to the people and acceptance of its reforms.

The government is acquainted with the opinions of all classes, knows the leading men in the middle class, knows the leaders of the humblest class. The President comes near enough to these; if he does not, the caucus does, the primary ward and town meeting, and what is important does reach him.

The men, the women, all over this land shrill their exclamations of impatience and indignation at what is short-coming or is unbecoming in the government, — at the want of humanity, of morality, — ever on broad grounds of general justice, and not on the class-feeling which narrows the perception of English, French, German people at home.

In this fact, that we are a nation of individuals, that we have a highly intellectual organization, that we can see and feel moral distinctions, and that on such an organization sooner or later the moral laws must tell, to such ears must speak, — in this is our hope. For if the prosperity of this country has been merely the obedience of man to the guiding of nature, — of great rivers and prairies, — yet is there fate above fate, if we choose to speak this language; or, if there is fate in corn and cotton, so is there fate in thought, — this, namely, that the largest thought and the widest love are born to victory, and must prevail.

The revolution is the work of no man, but the eternal effervescence of nature. It never did not work. And we say that revolutions beat all the insurgents, be they never so determined and politic; that the great interests of mankind, being at every moment through ages in favor of justice and the largest liberty, will always, from time to time, gain on the adversary and at last win the day. Never country had such a fortune, as men call fortune, as this, in its geography, its history, and in its majestic possibilities.

We have much to learn, much to correct, — a great deal of lying vanity. The spread eagle must fold his foolish wings and be less of a peacock; must keep his wings to carry the thunderbolt when he is commanded. We must realize our rhetoric and our rituals. Our national flag is not affecting, as it should be, because it does not represent the population of the United States, but some Baltimore or Chicago or Cincinnati or Philadelphia caucus; not union or justice, but selfishness and cunning. If we never put on the liberty-cap until we were freemen by love and self-denial, the liberty-cap would mean something. I wish to see America not like the old powers of the earth, grasping, exclusive and narrow, but a benefactor such as no country ever was, hospitable to all nations, legislating for all nationalities. Nations were made to help each other as much as families were; and all advancement is by ideas, and not by brute force or mechanic force.

In this country, with our practical understanding, there is, at present, a great sensualism, a headlong devotion to trade and to the conquest of the continent, — to each man as large a share of the same as he can carve for himself, — an extravagant confidence in our talent and activity, which becomes, whilst successful, a scornful materialism, — but with the fault, of course, that it has no depth, no reserved force whereon to fall back when a reverse comes.

That repose which is the ornament and ripeness of man is not American. That repose which indicates a faith in the laws of the universe, — a faith that they will fulfil themselves, and are not to be impeded, transgressed, or accelerated. Our people are too slight and vain. They are easily elated and easily depressed. See how fast they extend the fleeting fabric of their trade, — not at all considering the remote reaction and bankruptcy, but with the same abandonment to the moment and the facts of the hour as the Esquimaux who sells his bed in the morning. Our people act on the moment, and from external impulse. They all lean on some other, and this superstitiously, and not from insight of his merit. They follow a fact; they follow success, and not skill. Therefore, as soon as the success stops and the admirable man blunders, they quit him; already they remember that they long ago suspected his judgment, and they transfer the repute of judgment to the next prosperous person who has not yet blundered. Of course this levity makes them as easily despond. It seems as if history gave no account of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart as we see it and feel it in ours. Young men at thirty and even earlier lose all spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprise throw up the game.

The source of mischief is the extreme difficulty with which men are roused from the torpor of every day. Blessed is all that agitates the mass, breaks up this torpor, and begins motion. Corpora non agunt nisi soluta ; the chemical rule is true in mind. Contrast, change, interruption, are necessary to new activity and new combinations.

If a temperate wise man should look over our American society, I think the first danger that would excite his alarm would be the European influences on this country. We buy much of Europe that does not make us better men: and mainly the expensiveness which is ruining that country. We import trifles, dancers, singers, laces, books of patterns, modes, gloves and cologne, manuals of Gothic architecture, steam-made ornaments. America is provincial. It is an immense Halifax. See the secondariness and aping of foreign and English life, that runs through this country, in building, in dress, in eating, in books. Every village, every city has its architecture, its costume, its hotel, its private house, its church, from England.

Our politics threaten her. Her manners threaten us. Life is grown and growing so costly that it threatens to kill us. A man is coming, here as there, to value himself on what he can buy. Worst of all, his expense is not his own, but a far-off copy of Osborne House or the Elysée. The tendency of this is to make all men alike; to extinguish individ ualism and choke up all the channels of inspiration from God in man. We lose our invention and descend into imitation. A man no longer conducts his own life. It is manufactured for him. The tailor makes your dress; the baker your bread; the upholsterer, from an imported book of patterns, your furniture; the Bishop of London your faith.

In the planters of this country, in the seventeenth century, the conditions of the country, combined with the impatience of arbitrary power which they brought from England, forced them to a wonderful personal independence and to a certain heroic planting and trading. Later this strength appeared in the solitudes of the West, where a man is made a hero by the varied emergencies of his lonely farm, and neighborhoods must combine against the Indians, or the horse-thieves, or the river rowdies, by organizing themselves into committees of vigilance. Thus the land and sea educate the people, and bring out presence of mind, self-reliance, and hundred-handed activity. These are the people for an emergency. They are not to be surprised, and can find a way out of any peril. This rough and ready force becomes them, and makes them fit citizens and civilizers. But if we found them clinging to English traditions, which are graceful enough at home, as the English Church, and entailed estates, and distrust of popular election, we should feel this reactionary, and absurdly out of place.

Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for, — exalted manhood. What this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man corn.

They who find America insipid, — they for whom London and Paris have spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for more than there is in the world.

The class of which I speak make themselves merry without duties. They sit in decorated clubhouses in the cities, and burn tobacco and play whist; in the country they sit idle in stores and bar-rooms, and burn tobacco, and gossip and sleep. They complain of the flatness of American life; “America has no illusions, no romance.” They have no perception of its destiny. They are not Americans.

The felon is the logical extreme of the epicure and coxcomb. Selfish luxury is the end of both, though in one it is decorated with refinements, and in the other brutal. But my point now is, that this spirit is not American

Our young men lack idealism. A man for success must not be pure idealist, then he will practically fail; but he must have ideas, must obey ideas, or he might as well be the horse he rides on. A man does not want to be sun-dazzled, sun-blind; but every man must have glimmer enough to keep him from knocking his head against the walls. And it is in the interest of civilization and good society and friendship, that I dread to hear of wellborn, gifted and amiable men, that they have this indifference, disposing them to this despair.

Of no use are the men who study to do exactly as was done before, who can never understand that to-day is a new day. There never was such a combination as this of ours, and the rules to meet it are not set down in any history. We want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality, — namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race, — can act in the interest of civilization; men of elastic, men of moral mind, who can live in the moment and take a step forward. Columbus was no backward-creeping crab, nor was Martin Luther, nor John Adams, nor Patrick Henry, nor Thomas Jefferson; and the Genius or Destiny of America is no log or sluggard, but a man incessantly advancing, as the shadow on the dial’s face, or the heavenly body by whose light it is marked.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power, — the gentleman. What hinders that he be born here? The new times need a new man, the complemental man, whom plainly this country must furnish. Freer swing his arms; farther pierce his eyes; more forward and forthright his whole build and rig than the Englishman’s, who, we see, is much imprisoned in his backbone.

‘T is certain that our civilization is yet incomplete, it has not ended nor given sign of ending in a hero. ‘T is a wild democracy; the riot of mediocrities and dishonesties and fudges. Ours is the age of the omnibus, of the third person plural, of Tammany Hall. Is it that Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it if it is to be multiplied into millions? The beautiful is never plentiful. Then Illinois and Indiana, with their spawning loins, must needs be ordinary.

It is not a question whether we shall be a multitude of people. No, that has been conspicuously decided already; but whether we shall be the new nation, the guide and lawgiver of all nations, as having clearly chosen and firmly held the simplest and best rule of political society.

Now, if the spirit which years ago armed this country against rebellion, and put forth such gigantic energy in the charity of the Sanitary Commission, could be waked to the conserving and creating duty of making the laws just and humane, it were to enroll a great constituency of religious, self-respecting, brave, tender, faithful obeyers of duty, lovers of men, filled with loyalty to each other, and with the simple and sublime purpose of carrying out in private and in public action the desire and need of mankind.

Here is the post where the patriot should plant himself; here the altar where virtuous young men, those to whom friendship is the dearest covenant, should bind each other to loyalty; where genius should kindle its fires and bring forgotten truth to the eyes of men.

It is not possible to extricate yourself from the questions in which your age is involved. Let the good citizen perform the duties put on him here and now. It is not by heads reverted to the dying Demosthenes, or to Luther, or to Wallace, or to George Fox, or to George Washington, that you can combat the dangers and dragons that beset the United States at this time. I believe this cannot be accomplished by dunces or idlers, but requires docility, sympathy, and religious receiving from higher principles; for liberty, like religion, is a short and hasty fruit, and like all power subsists only by new rallyings on the source of inspiration.

Power can be generous. The very grandeur of the means which offer themselves to us should suggest grandeur in the direction of our expenditure. If our mechanic arts are unsurpassed in usefulness, if we have taught the river to make shoes and nails and carpets, and the bolt of heaven to write our letters like a Gillott pen, let these wonders work for honest humanity, for the poor, for justice, genius and the public good. Let us realize that this country, the last found, is the great charity of God to the human race.

America should affirm and establish that in no instance shall the guns go in advance of the present right. We shall not make coups d’état and afterwards explain and pay, but shall proceed like William Penn, or whatever other Christian or humane person who treats with the Indian or the foreigner, on principles of honest trade and mutual advantage. We can see that the Constitution and the law in America must be written on ethical principles, so that the entire power of the spiritual world shall hold the citizen loyal, and repel the enemy as by force of nature. It should be mankind’s bill of rights, or Royal Proclamation of the Intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure that now, once for all, the world shall be governed by common sense and law of morals.

The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation. ‘T is not free institutions, ‘t is not a democracy that is the end, — no, but only the means. Morality is the object of government. We want a state of things in which crime will not pay; a state of things which allows every man the largest liberty compatible with the liberty of every other man.

Humanity asks that government shall not be ashamed to be tender and paternal, but that democratic institutions shall be more thoughtful for the interests of women, for the training of children, and for the welfare of sick and unable persons, and serious care of criminals, than was ever any the best government of the Old World.

The genius of the country has marked out our true policy, — opportunity. Opportunity of civil rights, of education, of personal power, and not less of wealth; doors wide open. If I could have it, — free trade with all the world without toll or customhouses, invitation as we now make to every nation, to every race and skin, white men, red men, yellow men, black men; hospitality of fair field and equal laws to all. Let them compete, and success to the strongest, the wisest and the best. The land is wide enough, the soil has bread for all.

I hope America will come to have its pride in being a nation of servants, and not of the served. How can men have any other ambition where the reason has not suffered a disastrous eclipse? Whilst every man can say I serve, — to the whole extent of my being I apply my faculty to the service of mankind in my especial place, — he therein sees and shows a reason for his being in the world, and is not a moth or incumbrance in it.

The distinction and end of a soundly constituted man is his labor. Use is inscribed on all his faculties. Use is the end to which he exists. As the tree exists for its fruit, so a man for his work. A fruitless plant, an idle animal, does not stand in the universe. They are all toiling, however secretly or slowly, in the province assigned them, and to a use in the economy of the world; the higher and more complex organizations to higher and more catholic service. And man seems to play, by his instincts and activity, a certain part that even tells on the general face of the planet, drains swamps, leads rivers into dry countries for their irrigation, perforates forests and stony mountain-chains with roads, hinders the inroads of the sea on the continent, as if dressing the globe for happier races.

On the whole, I know that the cosmic results will be the same, whatever the daily events may be. Happily we are under better guidance than of statesmen. Pennsylvania coal mines, and New York shipping, and free labor, though not idealists, gravitate in the ideal direction. Nothing less large than justice can keep them in good temper. Justice satisfies everybody, and justice alone. No monopoly must be foisted in, no weak party or nationality sacrificed, no coward compromise conceded to a strong partner. Every one of these is the seed of vice, war and national disorganization. It is our part to carry out to the last the ends of liberty and justice. We shall stand, then, for vast interests; north and south, east and west will be present to our minds, and our vote will be as if they voted, and we shall know that our vote secures the foundations of the state, good-will, liberty and security of traffic and of production, and mutual increase of good-will in the great interests.

Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to their good.

Such and so potent is this high method by which the Divine Providence sends the chiefest benefits under the mask of calamities, that I do not think we shall by any perverse ingenuity prevent the blessing.

In seeing this guidance of events, in seeing this felicity without example that has rested on the Union thus far, I find new confidence for the future. I could heartily wish that our will and endeavor were more active parties to the work. But I see in all directions the light breaking. Trade and government will not alone be the favored aims of mankind, but every useful, every elegant art, every exercise of imagination, the height of reason, the noblest affection, the purest religion will find their home in our institutions, and write our laws for the benefit of men.

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT AND OTHER PAPERS

CONTENTS

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.

I. POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT

II. INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION

III. MEMORY.

BOSTON.

THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT

COUNTRY LIFE

CONCORD WALKS

ART AND CRITICISM

MICHAEL ANGELO.

MILTON.

PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.

I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE.

II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDER. 1

III. PRAYERS.

IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS.

VI. PAST AND PRESENT.

VII. A LETTER.

VIII. THE TRAGIC.

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.

I. POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT

I have used such opportunity as I have had, and lately [1850.] in London and Paris, to attend scientific lectures; and in listening to Richard Owen’s masterly enumeration of the parts and laws of the human body, or Michael Faraday’s explanation of magnetic powers, or the botanist’s descriptions, one could not help admiring the irresponsible security and happiness of the attitude of the naturalist; sure of admiration for his facts, sure of their sufficiency. They ought to interest you; if they do not, the fault lies with you.

Then I thought — could not a similar enumeration be made of the laws and powers of the Intellect, and possess the same claims on the student? Could we have, that is, the exhaustive accuracy of distribution which chemists use in their nomenclature and anatomists in their descriptions, applied to a higher class of facts; to those laws, namely, which are common to chemistry, anatomy, astronomy, geometry, intellect, morals, and social life; — laws of the world?

Why not? These powers and laws are also facts in a Natural History. They also are objects of science, and may be numbered and recorded, like stamens and vertebræ. At the same time they have a deeper interest, as in the order of nature they lie higher and are nearer to the mysterious seat of power and creation.

For at last, it is only that exceeding and universal part which interests us, when we shall read in a true history what befalls in that kingdom where a thousand years is as one day, and see that what is set down is true through all the sciences; in the laws of thought as well as of chemistry.

In all sciences the student is discovering that nature, as he calls it, is always working, in wholes and in every detail, after the laws of the human mind. Every creation, in parts or in particles, is on the method and by the means which our mind approves as soon as it is thoroughly acquainted with the facts; hence the delight. No matter how far or how high science explores, it adopts the method of the universe as fast as it appears; and this discloses that the mind as it opens, the mind as it shall be, comprehends and works thus; that is to say, the Intellect builds the universe and is the key to all it contains. It is not then cities or mountains, or animals, or globes that any longer command us, but only man; not the fact but so much of man as is in the fact.

In astronomy, vast distance, but we never go into a foreign system. In geology, vast duration, but we are never strangers. Our metaphysic should be able to follow the flying force through all transformations, and name the pair identical through all variety.

I believe in the existence of the material world as the expression of the spiritual or the real, and in the impenetrable mystery which hides (and hides through absolute transparency) the mental nature, I await the insight which our advancing knowledge of material laws shall furnish.

Every object in nature is a word to signify some fact in the mind. But when that fact is not yet put into English words, when I look at the tree or the river and have not yet definitely made out what they would say to me, they are by no means unimpressive. I wait for them, I enjoy them before they yet speak. I feel as if I stood by an ambassador charged with the message of his king, which he does not deliver because the hour when he should say it is not yet arrived.

Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as plastic forces; as the soul of a man, the soul of a plant, the genius or constitution of any part of nature, which makes it what it is. The thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has disengaged itself and taken an independent existence.

My belief in the use of a course on philosophy is that the student shall learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind; shall learn its subtle but immense power, or shall begin to learn it; shall come to know that in seeing and in no tradition he must find what truth is; that he shall see in it the source of all traditions, and shall see each one of them as better or worse statement of its revelations; shall come to trust it entirely, as the only true; to cleave to God against the name of God. When he has once known the oracle he will need no priest. And if he finds at first with some alarm how impossible it is to accept many things which the hot or the mild sectarian may insist on his believing, he will be armed by his insight and brave to meet all inconvenience and all resistance it may cost him. He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it.

Yet these questions which really interest men, how few can answer. Here are learned faculties of law and divinity, but would questions like these come into mind when I see them? Here are learned academies and universities, yet they have not propounded these for any prize.

Seek the literary circles, the stars of fame, the men of splendor, of bon-mots, will they afford me satisfaction? I think you could not find a club of men acute and liberal enough in the world. Bring the best wits together, and they are so impatient of each other, so vulgar, there is so much more than their wit, such follies, gluttonies, partialities, age, care, and sleep, that you shall have no academy.

There is really a grievous amount of unavailableness about men of wit. A plain man finds them so heavy, dull and oppressive, with bad jokes and conceit and stupefying individualism, that he comes to write in his tablets, Avoid the great man as one who is privileged to be an unprofitable companion. For the course of things makes the scholars either egotists or worldly and jocose. In so many hundreds of superior men hardly ten or five or two from whom one can hope for a reasonable word.

Go into the scientific club and hearken. Each savant proves in his admirable discourse that he and he only knows now or ever did know anything on the subject: “Does the gentleman speak of anatomy? Who peeped into a box at the Custom House and then published a drawing of my rat?” Or is it pretended discoveries of new strata that are before the meeting? This professor hastens to inform us that he knew it all twenty years ago, and is ready to prove that he knew so much then that all further investigation was quite superfluous; — and poor nature and the sublime law, which is all that our student cares to hear of, are quite omitted in this triumphant vindication.

Was it better when we came to the philosophers, who found everybody wrong; acute and ingenious to lampoon and degrade mankind? And then was there ever prophet burdened with a message to his people who did not cloud our gratitude by a strange confounding in his own mind of private folly with his public wisdom?

But if you like to run away from this besetting sin of sedentary men, you can escape all this insane egotism by running into society, where the manners and estimate of the world have corrected this folly, and effectually suppressed this overweening self-conceit. Here each is to make room for others, and the solidest merits must exist only for the entertainment of all. We are not in the smallest degree helped. Great is the dazzle, but the gain is small. Here they play the game of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.

Yes, ‘t is a great vice in all countries, the sacrifice of scholars to be courtiers and diners-out, to talk for the amusement of those who wish to be amused, though the stars of heaven must be plucked down and packed into rockets to this end. What with egotism on one side and levity on the other we shall have no Olympus.

But there is still another hindrance, namely, practicality. We must have a special talent, and bring something to pass. Ever since the Norse heaven made the stern terms of admission that a man must do something excellent with his hands or feet, or with his voice, eyes, ears, or with his whole body, the same demand has been made in Norse earth.

Yet what we really want is not a haste to act, but a certain piety toward the source of action and knowledge. In fact we have to say that there is a certain beatitude, — I can call it nothing less, — to which all men are entitled, tasted by them in different degrees, which is a perfection of their nature, and to which their entrance must be in every way forwarded. Practical men, though they could lift the globe, cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done, — the availing ourselves of every impulse of genius, an emanation of the heaven it tells of, and the resisting this conspiracy of men and material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of the intellectual nature.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

The laws and powers of the Intellect have, however, a stupendous peculiarity, of being at once observers and observed. So that it is difficult to hold them fast, as objects of examination, or hinder them from turning the professor out of his chair. The wonder of the science of Intellect is that the substance with which we deal is of that subtle and active quality that it intoxicates all who approach it. Gloves on the hands, glass guards over the eyes, wire-gauze masks over the face, volatile salts in the nostrils, are no defence against this virus, which comes in as secretly as gravitation into and through all barriers.

Let me have your attention to this dangerous subject, which we will cautiously approach on different sides of this dim and perilous lake, so attractive, so delusive. We have had so many guides and so many failures. And now the world is still uncertain whether the pool has been sounded or not.

My contribution will be simply historical. I write anecdotes of the intellect; a sort of Farmer’s Almanac of mental moods. I confine my ambition to true reporting of its play in natural action, though I should get only one new fact in a year.

I cannot myself use that systematic form which is reckoned essential in treating the science of the mind. But if one can say so without arrogance, I might suggest that he who contents himself with dotting a fragmentary curve, recording only what facts he has observed, without attempting to arrange them within one outline, follows a system also, — a system as grand as any other, though he does not interfere with its vast curves by prematurely forcing them into a circle or ellipse, but only draws that arc which he clearly sees, or perhaps at a later observation a remote curve of the same orbit, and waits for a new opportunity, well-assured that these observed arcs will consist with each other.

I confess to a little distrust of that completeness of system which metaphysicians are apt to affect. ‘T is the gnat grasping the world. All these exhaustive theories appear indeed a false and vain attempt to introvert and analyze the Primal Thought. That is up-stream, and what a stream! Can you swim up Niagara Falls?

We have invincible repugnance to introversion, to study of the eyes instead of that which the eyes see; and the belief of men is that the attempt is unnatural and is punished by loss of faculty. I share the belief that the natural direction of the intellectual powers is from within outward, and that just in proportion to the activity of thoughts on the study of outward objects, as architecture, or farming, or natural history, ships, animals, chemistry, — in that proportion the faculties of the mind had a healthy growth; but a study in the opposite direction had a damaging effect on the mind.

Metaphysic is dangerous as a single pursuit. We should feel more confidence in the same results from the mouth of a man of the world. The inward analysis must be corrected by rough experience. Metaphysics must be perpetually reinforced by life; must be the observations of a working-man on working-men; must be biography, — the record of some law whose working was surprised by the observer in natural action.

I think metaphysics a grammar to which, once read, we seldom return. ‘T is a Manila full of pepper, and I want only a teaspoonful in a year. I admire the Dutch, who burned half the harvest to enhance the price of the remainder.

I want not the logic but the power, if any, which it brings into science and literature; the man who can humanize this logic, these syllogisms, and give me the results. The adepts value only the pure geometry, the aerial bridge ascending from earth to heaven with arches and abutments of pure reason. I am fully contented if you tell me where are the two termini.

My metaphysics are to the end of use. I wish to know the laws of this wonderful power, that I may domesticate it. I observe with curiosity its risings and settings, illumination and eclipse; its obstructions and its provocations, that I may learn to live with it wisely, court its aid, catch sight of its splendor, feel its approach, hear and save its oracles and obey them. But this watching of the mind, in season and out of season, to see the mechanics of the thing, is a little of the detective. The analytic process is cold and bereaving and, shall I say it? somewhat mean, as spying. There is something surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better form? The poet sees wholes and avoids analysis; the metaphysician, dealing as it were with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of the inspiration; loses that which is the miracle and creates the worship.

I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets. The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, having only reasons for believing.

What I am now to attempt is simply some sketches or studies for such a picture; Mémoires pour servir toward a Natural History of Intellect.

First I wish to speak of the excellence of that element, and the great auguries that come from it, notwithstanding the impediments which our sensual civilization puts in the way.

Next I treat of the identity of the thought with Nature; and I add a rude list of some by-laws of the mind.

Thirdly I proceed to the fountains of thought in Instinct and Inspiration, and I also attempt to show the relation of men of thought to the existing religion and civility of the present time.

I. We figure to ourselves Intellect as an ethereal sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes hither and thither, carrying its whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea every human house has a water front. But this force, creating nature, visiting whom it will and withdrawing from whom it will, making day where it comes and leaving night when it departs, is no fee or property of man or angel. It is as the light, public and entire to each, and on the same terms.

What but thought deepens life, and makes us better than cow or cat? The grandeur of the impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us is surely more valuable than our exact perception of a tub or a table on the ground.

To Be is the unsolved, unsolvable wonder. To Be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. The wonder subsists, and age, though of eternity, could not approach a solution. But the suggestion is always returning, that hidden source publishing at once our being and that it is the source of outward nature. Who are we and what is Nature have one answer in the life that rushes into us.

In my thought I seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes, colors and natures; nor can I much detain them as they pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. But whence they come or whither they go is not told me. Only I have a suspicion that, as geologists say every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic stream. It makes its valley, makes its banks and makes perhaps the observer too. Who has found the boundaries of human intelligence? Who has made a chart of its channel or approached the fountain of this wonderful Nile?

I am of the oldest religion. Leaving aside the question which was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever creating; — that at last Matter is dead Mind; that mind makes the senses it sees with; that the genius of man is a continuation of the power that made him and that has not done making him.

I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too rare for the wings of words. Yet I see that Intellect is a science of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the law of vegetable and animal nature, so he is aware of an Intellect which overhangs his consciousness like a sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within heaven.

Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to light where language fails him. Above the thought is the higher truth, — truth as yet undomesticated and therefore unformulated.

It is a steep stair down from the essence of Intellect pure to thoughts and intellections. As the sun is conceived to have made our system by hurling out from itself the outer rings of diffuse ether which slowly condensed into earths and moons, by a higher force of the same law the mind detaches minds, and a mind detaches thoughts or intellections. These again all mimic in their sphericity the first mind, and share its power.

Life is incessant parturition. There are viviparous and oviparous minds; minds that produce their thoughts complete men, like armed soldiers, ready and swift to go out to resist and conquer all the armies of error, and others that deposit their dangerous unripe thoughts here and there to lie still for a time and be brooded in other minds, and the shell not be broken until the next age, for them to begin, as new individuals, their career.

The perceptions of a soul, its wondrous progeny, are born by the conversation, the marriage of souls; so nourished, so enlarged. They are detached from their parent, they pass into other minds; ripened and unfolded by many they hasten to incarnate themselves in action, to take body, only to carry forward the will which sent them out. They take to themselves wood and stone and iron; ships and cities and nations and armies of men and ages of duration; the pomps of religion, the armaments of war, the codes and heraldry of states; agriculture, trade, commerce; — these are the ponderous instrumentalities into which the nimble thoughts pass, and which they animate and alter, and presently, antagonized by other thoughts which they first aroused, or by thoughts which are sons and daughters of these, the thought buries itself in the new thought of larger scope, whilst the old instrumentalities and incarnations are decomposed and recomposed into new.

Our eating, trading, marrying, and learning are mistaken by us for ends and realities, whilst they are properly symbols only; when we have come, by a divine leading, into the inner firmament, we are apprised of the unreality or representative character of what we esteemed final.

So works the poor little blockhead manikin. He must arrange and dignify his shop or farm the best he can. At last he must be able to tell you it, or write it, translate it all clumsily enough into the new sky-languago he calls thought. He cannot help it, the irresistible meliorations bear him forward.

II. Whilst we consider this appetite of the mind to arrange its phenomena, there is another fact which makes this useful. There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity in the mind and makes it available. This methodizing mind meets no resistance in its attempts. The scattered blocks, with which it strives to form a symmetrical structure, fit. This design following after finds with joy that like design went before. Not only man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row.

It is certain that however we may conceive of the wonderful little bricks of which the world is builded, we must suppose a similarity and fitting and identity in their frame. It is necessary to suppose that every hose in nature fits every hydrant; so only is combination, chemistry, vegetation, animation, intellection possible. Without identity at base, chaos must be forever.

And as mind, our mind or mind like ours reappears to us in our study of nature, nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can well understand, and all the parts, to the most remote, allied or explicable, — therefore our own organization is a perpetual key, and a well-ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of facts a certain divination of that which it shall find.

This reduction to a few laws, to one law, is not a choice of the individual, it is the tyrannical instinct of the mind. There is no solitary flower and no solitary thought. It comes single like a foreign traveller, — but find out its name and it is related to a powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation each to each. We hold them as lanterns to light each other and our present design. Every new thought modifies, interprets old problems. The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a torch applied to a long train of gunpowder. To be isolated is to be sick, and in so far, dead. The life of the All must stream through us to make the man and the moment great.

Well, having accepted this law of identity pervading the universe, we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power; that the lowest only means incipient form, and over it is a higher class in which its rudiments are opened, raised to higher powers; that there is development from less to more, from lower to superior function, steadily ascending to man.

If man has organs for breathing, for sight, for locomotion, for taking food, for digesting, for protection by house-building, by attack and defence, for reproduction and love and care of his young, you shall find all the same in the muskrat. There is a perfect correspondence; or ’tis only man modified to live in a mud-bank. A fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea; a thrush, to fly in the air; and a mollusk is a cheap edition with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oysterbank or among the sea-weed.

If we go through the British Museum or the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, or any cabinet where is some representation of all the kingdoms of nature, we are surprised with occult sympathies; we feel as if looking at our own bone and flesh through coloring and distorting glasses. Is it not a little startling to see with what genius some people take to hunting, with what genius some people fish, — what knowledge they still have of the creature they hunt? The robber, as the policereports say, must have been intimately acquainted with the premises. How lately the hunter was the poor creature’s organic enemy; a presumption inflamed , as the lawyers say, by observing how many faces in the street still remind us of visages in the forest, — the escape from the quadruped type not yet perfectly accomplished.

From whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man. How obvious is the momentum in our mental history! The momentum, which increases by exact laws in falling bodies, increases by the same rate in the intellectual action. Every scholar knows that he applies himself coldly and slowly at first to his task, but, with the progress of the work, the mind itself becomes heated, and sees far and wide as it approaches the end, so that it is the common remark of the student, Could I only have begun with the same fire which I had on the last day, I should have done something.

The affinity of particles accurately translates the affinity of thoughts, and what a modern experimenter calls “the contagious influence of chemical action” is so true of mind that I have only to read the law that its application may be evident: “A body in the act of combination or decomposition enables another body, with which it may be in contact, to enter into the same state.” And if one remembers how contagious are the moral states of men, how much we are braced by the presence and actions of any Spartan soul; it does not need vigor of our own kind, but the spectacle of vigor of any kind, any prodigious power of performance wonderfully arms and recruits us. There are those who disputing will make you dispute, and the nervous and hysterical and animalized will produce a like series of symptoms in you, though no other persons ever evoke the like phenomena, and though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of extension of the diseases of this particular person into you.

The idea of vegetation is irresistible in considering mental activity. Man seems a higher nlant. What happens here in mankind is matched by what happens out there in the history of grass and wheat. This curious resemblance repeats, in the mental function, the germination, growth, state of melioration, crossings, blight, parasites, and in short all the accidents of the plant. Under every leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a newer thought. The plant absorbs much nourishment from the ground in order to repair its own waste by exhalation, and keep itself good. Increase its food and it becomes fertile. The mind is first only receptive. Surcharge it with thoughts in which it delights and it becomes active. The moment a man begins not to be convinced, that moment he begins to convince.

In the orchard many trees send out a moderate shoot in the first summer heat, and stop. They look all summer as if they would presently burst into bud again, but they do not. The fine tree continues to grow. The same thing happens in the man. Every man has material enough in his experience to exhaust the sagacity of Newton in working it out. We have more than we use. I never hear a good speech at caucus or at cattleshow but it helps me, not so much by adding to my knowledge as by apprising me of admirable uses to which what I know can be turned. The commonest remark, if the man could only extend it a little, would make him a genius; but the thought is prematurely checked, and grows no more. All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken their first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

The botanist discovered long ago that Nature loves mixtures, and that nothing grows well on the crab-stock, but the blood of two trees being mixed a new and excellent fruit is produced. And not less in human history aboriginal races are incapable of improvement; the dull, melancholy Pelasgi arrive at no civility until the Phoenicians and lonians come in. The Briton, the Pict, is nothing until the Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, arrives.

It is observed that our mental processes go forward even when they seem suspended. Scholars say that if they return to the study of a new language after some intermission, the intelligence of it is more and not less. A subject of thought to which we return from month to month, from year to year, has always some ripeness of which we can give no account. We say the book grew in the author’s mind.

In unfit company the finest powers are paralyzed. No ambition, no opposition, no friendly attention and fostering kindness, no wine, music or exhilarating aids, neither warm fireside nor fresh air, walking or riding, avail at all to resist the palsy of mis-association. Genius is mute, is dull; there is no genius. Ask of your flowers to open when you have let in on them a freezing wind.

The mechanical laws might as easily be shown pervading the kingdom of mind as the vegetative. A man has been in Spain. The facts and thoughts which the traveller has found in that country gradually settle themselves into a determinate heap of one size and form and not another. That is what he knows and has to say of Spain; he cannot say it truly until a sufficient time for the arrangement of the particles has elapsed.

These views of the source of thought and the mode of its communication lead us to a whole system of ethics, strict as any department of human duty, and open to us the tendencies and duties of men of thought in the present time.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanent wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who being put into certain company or other favorable conditions become wise, as glasses rubbed acquire power for a time.

An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world. An individual mind in like manner is a fixation or momentary eddy in which certain services and powers are taken up and minister in petty niches and localities, and then, being released, return to the unbounded soul of the world.

In this eternal resurrection and rehabilitation of transitory persons, who and what are they? ‘T is only the source that we can see; — the eternal mind, careless of its channels, omnipotent in itself, and continually ejaculating its torrent into every artery and vein and veinlet of humanity. Wherever there is health, that is, consent to the cause and constitution of the universe, there is perception and power.

Each man is a new power in Nature. He holds the keys of the world in his hands. No quality in Nature’s vast magazines he cannot touch, no truth he cannot see. Silent, passive, even sulkily Nature offers every morning her wealth to man. She is immensely rich; he is welcome to her entire goods, but she speaks no word, will not so much as beckon or cough; only this, she is careful to leave all her doors ajar, — towers, hall, storeroom and cellar. If he takes her hint and uses her goods she speaks no word; if he blunders and starves she says nothing. To the idle blockhead Nature is poor, sterile, inhospitable. To the gardener her loam is all strawberries, pears, pineapples. To the miller her rivers whirl the wheel and weave carpets and broadcloth. To the sculptor her stone is soft; to the painter her plumbago and marl are pencils and chromes. To the poet all sounds and words are melodies and rhythms. In her hundred-gated Thebes every chamber is a new door.

But he enters the world by one key. Herein is the wealth of each. His equipment, though new, is complete; his prudence is his own; his courage, his charity, are his own. He has his own defences and his own fangs; his perception and his own mode of reply to sophistries. Whilst he draws on his own he cannot be overshadowed or supplanted.

There are two mischievous superstitions, I know not which does the most harm, one, that “I am wiser than you,” and the other that “You are wiser than I.” The truth is that every man is furnished, if he will heed it, with wisdom necessary to steer his own boat, — if he will not look away from his own to see how his neighbor steers his.

Every man is a new method and distributes things anew. If he could attain full size he would take up, first or last, atom by atom, all the world into a new form. And our deep conviction of the riches proper to every mind does not allow us to admit of much looking over into one another’s virtues. Let me whisper a secret; nobody ever forgives any admiration in you of them, any overestimate of what they do or have. I acquiesce to be that I am, but I wish no one to be civil to me.

Strong men understand this very well. Power fraternizes with power, and wishes you not to be like him but like yourself. Echo the leaders and they will fast enough see that you have nothing for them. They came to you for something they had not.

There is always a loss of truth and power when a man leaves working for himself to work for another. Absolutely speaking I can only work for myself. All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by lessons but by going about my business. When, moved by love, a man teaches his child or joins with his neighbor in any act of common benefit, or spends himself for his friend, or rushes at immense personal sacrifice on some public, self-immolating act, it is not done for others, but to fulfil a high necessity of his proper character. The benefit to others is contingent and not contemplated by the doer.

The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is that they believe in the ideas of others. From this deference comes the imbecility and fatigue of their society, for of course they cannot affirm these from the deep life; they say what they would have you believe, but what they do not quite know. Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character. The temptation is to patronize Providence, to fall into the accepted ways of talking and acting of the good sort of people.

Each has a certain aptitude for knowing or doing somewhat which, when it appears, is so adapted and aimed on that, that it seems a sort of obtuseness to everything else. Well, this aptitude, if he would obey it, would prove a telescope to bring under his clear vision what was blur to everybody else. ‘T is a wonderful instrument, an organic sympathy with the whole frame of things. There is no property or relation in that immense arsenal of forces which the earth is, but some man is at last found who affects this, delights to unfold and work it, as if he were the born publisher and demonstrator of it.

As a dog has a sense that you have not, to find the track of his master or of a fox, and as each tree can secrete from the soil the elements that form a peach, a lemon, or a cocoa-nut, according to its kind, so individual men have secret senses, each some incommunicable sagacity. And men are primary or secondary as their opinions and actions are organic or not.

I know well what a sieve every ear is. Teach me never so much and I hear or retain only that which I wish to hear, what comports with my experience and my desire. Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers. A hunter finds plenty of game on the ground you have sauntered over with idle gun. White huckleberries are so rare that in miles of pasture you shall not find a dozen. But a girl who understands it will find you a pint in a quarter of an hour.

Though the world is full of food we can take only the crumbs fit for us. The air rings with sounds, but only a few vibrations can reach our tympanum. Perhaps creatures live with us which we never see, because their motion is too swift for our vision. The sun may shine, or a galaxy of suns; you will get no more light than your eye will hold. What can Plato or Newton teach, if you are deaf or incapable? A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin, — congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.

II. INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION

In reckoning the sources of our mental power it were fatal to omit that one which pours all the others into its mould; — that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow.

The healthy mind lies parallel to the currents of nature and sees things in place, or makes discoveries. Newton did not exercise more ingenuity but less than another to see the world. Right thought comes spontaneously, comes like the morning wind; comes daily, like our daily bread, to humble service; comes duly to those who look for it. It does not need to pump your brains and force thought to think rightly. O no, the ingenious person is warped by his ingenuity and mis-sees.

Instinct is our name for the potential wit. Each man has a feeling that what is done anywhere is done by the same wit as his. All men are his representatives, and he is glad to see that his wit can work at this or that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted, built, in dark ages; and we are sure that it can do more than ever was done. It was the same mind that built the world. That is Instinct.

Ask what the Instinct declares, and we have little to say. He is no newsmonger, no disputant, no talker. ‘T is a taper, a spark in the great night. Yet a spark at which all the illuminations of human arts and sciences were kindled. This is that glimpse of inextinguishable light by which men are guided; though it does not show objects, yet it shows the way. This is that sense by which men feel when they are wronged, though they do not see how. This is that source of thought and feeling which acts on masses of men, on all men at certain times, with resistless power. Ever at intervals leaps a word or fact to light which is no man’s invention, but the common instinct, making the revolutions that never go back.

This is Instinct, and Inspiration is only this power excited, breaking its silence; the spark bursting into flame. Instinct is a shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or articulating lips or teeth or tongue; Behemoth, disdaining speech, disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as nature, and saying, like poor Topsy, “never was born, growed.” Indifferent to the dignity of its function, it plays the god in animal nature as in human or as in the angelic, and spends its omniscience on the lowest wants. The old Hindoo Gautama says, “Like the approach of the iron to the loadstone is the approach of the new-born child to the breast.” There is somewhat awful in that first approach.

The Instinct begins at this low point, at the surface of the earth, and works for the necessities of the human being; then ascends step by step to suggestions which are when expressed the intellectual and moral laws.

The mythology cleaves close to nature; and what else was it they represented in Pan, god of shepherds, who was not yet completely finished in god-like form, blocked rather, and wanting the extremities; had emblematic horns and feet? Pan, that is, All. His habit was to dwell in mountains, lying on the ground, tooting like a cricket in the sun, refusing to speak, clinging to his behemoth ways. He could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd’s pipe, — silent yet to most, for his pipes make the music of the spheres, which because it sounds eternally is not heard at all by the dull, but only by the mind. He wears a coat of leopard spots or stars. He could terrify by earth-born fears called panics . Yet was he in the secret of nature and could look both before and after. He was only seen under disguises, and was not represented by any outward image; a terror sometimes, at others a placid omnipotence.

Such homage did the Greek, delighting in accurate form, not fond of the extravagant and unbounded, pay to the inscrutable force we call Instinct, or nature when it first becomes intelligent.

The action of the Instinct is for the most part negative, regulative, rather than initiative or impulsive. But it has a range as wide as human nature, running over all the ground of morals, of intellect, and of sense. In its lower function, when it deals with the apparent world, it is commonsense. It requires the performance of all that is needful to the animal life and health. Then it requires a proportion between a man’s acts and his condition, requires all that is called humanity; that symmetry and connection which is imperative in all healthily constituted men, and the want of which the rare and brilliant sallies of irregular genius cannot excuse.

If we could retain our early innocence we might trust our feet uncommanded to take the right path to our friend in the woods. But we have interfered too often; the feet have lost, by our distrust, their proper virtue, and we take the wrong path and miss him. ‘T is the barbarian instinct within us which culture deadens.

We find ourselves expressed in nature, but we cannot translate it into words. But Perception is the armed eye. A civilization has tamed and ripened this savage wit, and he is a Greek. His Aye and No have become nouns and verbs and adverbs. Perception differs from Instinet by adding the Will. Simple percipiency is the virtue of space, not of man.

The senses minister to a mind they do not know. At a moment in our history the mind’s eye opens and we become aware of spiritual facts, of rights, of duties, of thoughts, — a thousand faces of one essence. We call the essence Truth; the particular aspects of it we call thoughts. These facts, this essence, are not new; they are old and eternal, but our seeing of them is new. Having seen them we are no longer brute lumps whirled by Fate, but we pass into the council-chamber and government of nature. In so far as we see them we share their life and sovereignty.

The point of interest is here, that these gates, once opened, never swing back. The observers may come at their leisure, and do at last satisfy themselves of the fact. The thought, the doctrine, the right hitherto not affirmed is published in set propositions, in conversation of scholars and philosophers, of men of the world, and at last in the very choruses of songs. The young hear it, and as they have never fought it, never known it otherwise, they accept it, vote for it at the polls, embody it in the laws. And the perception thus satisfied reacts on the senses, to clarify them, so that it becomes more indisputable.

This is the first property of the Intellect I am to point out; the mind detaches. A man is intellectual in proportion as he can make an object of every sensation, perception and intuition; so long as he has no engagement in any thought or feeling which can hinder him from looking at it as somewhat foreign.

A man of talent has only to name any form or fact with which we are most familiar, and the strong light which he throws on it enhances it to all eyes. People wonder they never saw it before. The detachment consists in seeing it under a new order, not under a personal but under a universal light. To us it had economic, but to the universe it has poetic relations, and it is as good as sun and star now. Indeed this is the measure of all intellectual power among men, the power to complete this detachment, the power of genius to hurl a new individual into the world.

An intellectual man has the power to go out of himself and see himself as an object; therefore his defects and delusions interest him as much as his successes. He not only wishes to succeed in life, but he wishes in thought to know the history and destiny of a man; whilst the cloud of egotists drifting about are only interested in a success to their egotism.

The senses report the new fact or change; the mind discovers some essential copula binding this fact or change to a class of facts or changes, and enjoys the discovery as if coming to its own again. A perception is always a generalization. It lifts the object, whether in material or moral nature, into a type. The animal, the low degrees of intellect, know only individuals. The philosopher knows only laws. That is, he considers a purely mental fact, part of the soul itself. We say with Kenelm Digby, “All things that she knoweth are herself, and she is all that she knoweth.” Insight assimilates the thing seen. Is it only another way of affirming and illustrating this to say that it sees nothing alone, but sees each particular object in just connections, — sees all in God? In all healthy souls is an inborn necessity of presupposing for each particular fact a prior Being which compels it to a harmony with all other natures. The game of Intellect is the perception that whatever befalls or can be stated is a universal proposition; and contrariwise, that every general statement is poetical again by being particularized or impersonated.

A single thought has no limit to its value; a thought, properly speaking, — that is a truth held not from any man’s saying so, or any accidental benefit or recommendation it has in our trade or circumstance, but because we have perceived it is a fact in the nature of things, and in all times and places will and must be the same thing, — is of inestimable value. Every new impression on the mind is not to be derided, but is to be accounted for, and, until accounted for, registered as an indisputable addition to our catalogue of natural facts.

The first fact is the fate in every mental perception, — that my seeing this or that, and that I see it so or so, is as much a fact in the natural history of the world as is the freezing of water at thirty-two degrees of Fahrenheit. My percipiency affirms the presence and perfection of law, as much as all the martyrs. A perception, it is of a necessity older than the sun and moon, and the Father of the Gods. It is there with all its destinies. It is its nature to rush to expression, to rush to embody itself. It is impatient to put on its sandals and be gone on its errand, which is to lead to a larger perception, and so to new action. For thought exists to be expressed. That which cannot externize itself is not thought.

Do not trifle with your perceptions, or hold them cheap. They are your door to the seven heavens, and if you pass it by you will miss your way. Say, what impresses me ought to impress me. I am bewildered by the immense variety of attractions and cannot take a step; but this one thread, fine as gossamer, is yet real; and I hear a whisper, which I dare trust, that it is the thread on which the earth and the heaven of heavens are strung.

The universe is traversed by paths or bridges or stepping-stones across the gulfs of space in every direction. To every soul that is created is its path, invisible to all but itself. Each soul, therefore, walking in its own path walks firmly; and to the astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path, it goes as softly and playfully on its way as if, instead of being a line, narrow as the edge of a sword, over terrific pits right and left, it were a wide prairie.

Genius is a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, adding the power to express them again in some new form. The highest measure of poetic power is such insight and faculty to fuse the circumstances of to-day as shall make transparent the whole web of circumstance and opinion in which the man finds himself, so that he releases himself from the traditions in which he grew, — no longer looks back to Hebrew or Greek or English use or tradition in religion, laws, or life, but sees so truly the omnipresence of eternal cause that he can convert the daily and hourly event of New York, of Boston, into universal symbols. I owe to genius always the same debt, of lifting the curtain from the common and showing me that gods are sitting disguised in every company.

The conduct of Intellect must respect nothing so much as preserving the sensibility. My measure for all subjects of science as of events is their impression on the soul. That mind is best which is most impressionable. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snow-flake, a boy’s willow whistle, or a farmer planting in his field is more suggestive to the mind than the Yosemite gorge or the Vatican would be in another hour. In like mood an old verse, or certain words, gleam with rare significance.

But sensibility does not exhaust our idea of it. That is only half. Genius is not a lazy angel contemplating itself and things. It is insatiable for expression. Thought must take the stupendous step of passing into realization. A master can formulate his thought. Our thoughts at first possess us. Later, if we have good heads, we come to possess them. We believe that certain persons add to the common vision a certain degree of control over these states of mind; that the true scholar is one who has the power to stand beside his thoughts or to hold off his thoughts at arm’s length and give them perspective.

It is not to be concealed that the gods have guarded this privilege with costly penalty. This slight discontinuity which perception effects between the mind and the object paralyzes the will. If you cut or break in two a block or stone and press the two parts closely together, you can indeed bring the particles very near, but never again so near that they shall attract each other so that you can take up the block as one. That indescribably small interval is as good as a thousand miles, and has forever severed the practical unity. Such is the immense deduction from power by discontinuity.

The intellect that sees the interval partakes of it, and the fact of intellectual perception severs once for all the man from the things with which he converses. Affection blends, intellect disjoins subject and object. For weal or woe we clear ourselves from the thing we contemplate. We grieve but are not the grief; we love but are not love. If we converse with low things, with crimes, with mischances, we are not compromised. And if with high things, with heroic actions, with virtues, the interval becomes a gulf and we cannot enter into the highest good. Artist natures do not weep. Goethe, the surpassing intellect of modern times, apprehends the spiritual but is not spiritual.

There is indeed this vice about men of thought, that you cannot quite trust them; not as much as other men of the same natural probity, without intellect; because they have a hankering to play Providence and make a distinction in favor of themselves from the rules they apply to the human race.

The primary rule for the conduct of Intellect is to have control of the thoughts without losing their natural attitudes and action. They are the oracle; we are not to poke and drill and force, but to follow them. Yet the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. You must formulate your thought or ‘t is all sky and no stars. There are men of great apprehension, discursive minds, who easily entertain ideas, but are not exact, severe with themselves, cannot connect or arrange their thoughts so as effectively to report them. A blending of these two — the intellectual perception of truth and the moral sentiment of right — is wisdom. All thought is practical. Wishing is one thing; will another. Wishing is castle-building; the dreaming about things agreeable to the senses, but to which we have no right. Will is the advance to that which rightly belongs to us, to which the inward magnet ever points, and which we dare to make ours. The revelation of thought takes us out of servitude into freedom. So does the sense of right.

Will is the measure of power. To a great genius there must be a great will. If the thought is not a lamp to the will, does not proceed to an act, the wise are imbecile. He alone is strong and happy who has a will. The rest are herds. He uses; they are used. He is of the Maker; they are of the Made.

Will is always miraculous, being the presence of God to men. When it appears in a man he is a hero, and all metaphysics are at fault. Heaven is the exercise of the faculties, the added sense of power.

All men know the truth, but what of that? It is rare to find one who knows how to speak it. A man tries to speak it and his voice is like the hiss of a snake, or rude and chiding. The truth is not spoken but injured. The same thing happens in power to do the right. His rectitude is ridiculous. His organs do not play him true.

There is a meter which determines the constructive power of man, — this, namely, the question whether the mind possesses the control of its thoughts, or they of it. The new sect stands for certain thoughts. We go to individual members for an exposition of them. Vain expectation. They are possessed by the ideas but do not possess them. One meets contemplative men who dwell in a certain feeling and delight which are intellectual but wholly above their expression. They cannot formulate. They impress those who know them by their loyalty to the truth they worship but cannot impart. Sometimes the patience and love are rewarded by the chamber of power being at last opened; but sometimes they pass away dumb, to find it where all obstruction is removed.

By and by comes a facility; some one that can move the mountain and build of it a causeway through the Dismal Swamp, as easily as he carries the hair on his head. Talent is habitual facility of execution. We like people who can do things. The various talents are organic, or each related to that part of nature it is to explore and utilize. Somewhat is to come to the light, and one was created to fetch it, — a vessel of honor or of dishonor. ‘T is of instant use in the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the work the better.

Each of these talents is born to be unfolded and set at work for the use and delight of men, and, in the last result, the man with the talent is the need of mankind; the whole ponderous machinery of the state has really for its aim just to place this skill of each.

But idea and execution are not often entrusted to the same head. There is some incompatibility of good speculation and practice, for example, the failure of monasteries and Brook Farms. To hammer out phalanxes must be done by smiths; as soon as the scholar attempts it he is half a charlatan.

The grasp is the main thing. Most men’s minds do not grasp anything. All slips through their fingers, like the paltry brass grooves that in most country houses are used to raise or drop the curtain, but are made to sell, and will not hold any curtain but cobwebs. I have heard that idiot children are known from their birth by the circumstance that their hands do not close round anything. Webster naturally and always grasps, and therefore retains something from every company and circumstance.

As a talent Dante’s imagination is the nearest to hands and feet that we have seen. He clasps the thought as if it were a tree or a stone, and describes as mathematically. I once found Page the painter modelling his figures in clay, Ruth and Naomi, before he painted them on canvas. Dante, one would say, did the same thing before he wrote the verses.

I have spoken of Intellect constructive. But it is in degrees. How it moves when its pace is accelerated! The pace of Nature is so slow. Why not from strength to strength, from miracle to miracle, and not as now with this retardation — as if Nature had sprained her foot — and plenteous stopping at little stations?

The difference is obvious enough in Talent between the speed of one man’s action above another’s. In debate, in legislature, not less in action; in war or in affairs, alike daring and effective. But I speak of it in quite another sense, namely, in the habitual speed of combination of thought.

The same functions which are perfect in our quadrupeds are seen slower performed in palæontology. Many races it cost them to achieve the completion that is now in the life of one. Life had not yet so fierce a glow.

Shakespeare astonishes by his equality in every play, act, scene or line. One would say he must have been a thousand years old when he wrote his first line, so thoroughly is his thought familiar to him, and has such scope and so solidly worded, as if it were already a proverb and not hereafter to become one. Well, that millenium in effect is really only a little acceleration in his process of thought.

But each power is commonly at the expense of some other. When pace is increased it will happen that the control is in a degree lost. Reason does not keep her firm seat. The Delphian prophetess, when the spirit possesses her, is herself a victim. The excess of individualism, when it is not corrected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, men of one idea, or, as the French say, enfant perdu d’une conviction isolée , which give such a comic tinge to all society. Every man has his theory, true, but ridiculously overstated. We are forced to treat a great part of mankind as if they were a little deranged. We detect their mania and humor it, so that conversation soon becomes a tiresome effort.

You laugh at the monotones, at the men of one idea, but if we look nearly at heroes we may find the same poverty; and perhaps it is not poverty, but power. The secret of power, intellectual or physical, is concentration, and all concentration involves of necessity a certain narrowness. It is a law of nature that he who looks at one thing must turn his eyes from every other thing in the universe. The horse goes better with blinders, and the man for dedication to his task. If you ask what compensation is made for the inevitable narrowness, why, this, that in learning one thing well you learn all things.

Immense is the patience of Nature. You say thought is a penurious rill. Well, we can wait. Nature is immortal, and can wait. Nature having for capital this rill, drop by drop, as it trickles from the rock of ages, — this rill and her patience, — she husbands and hives, she forms reservoirs, were it only a phial or a hair-tube that will hold as it were a drop of attar. Not having enough to support all the powers of a race, she thins her stock and raises a few individuals, or only a pair. Not sufficing to feed all the faculties synchronously, she feeds one faculty and starves all the rest. I am familiar with cases, we meet them daily, wherein the vital force being insufficient for the constitution, everything is neglected that can be spared; some one power fed, all the rest pine. ‘T is like a withered hand or leg on a Hercules. It makes inconvenience in society, for we presume symmetry, and because they know one thing we defer to them in another, and find them really contemptible. We can’t make half a bow and say, I honor and despise you. But Nature can; she whistles with all her winds, and does as she pleases.

It is much to write sentences; it is more to add method and write out the spirit of your life symmetrically. But to arrange general reflections in their natural order, so that I shall have one homogeneous piece, — a Lycidas, an Allegro, a Hamlet, a Midsummer Night’s Dream, — this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. Such concentration of experiences is in every great work, which, though successive in the mind of the master, were primarily combined in his piece.

But what we want is consecutiveness. ‘T is with us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then a flash again. Ah! could we turn these fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican worlds.

I must think this keen sympathy, this thrill of awe with which we watch the performance of genius, a sign of our own readiness to exert the like power. I most think we are entitled to powers far transcending any that we possess; that we have in the race the sketch of a man which no individual comes up to.

Every sincere man is right, or, to make him right, only needs a little larger dose of his own personality. Excellent in his own way by means of not apprehending the gift of another. When he speaks out of another’s mind, we detect it. He can’t make any paint stick but his own. No man passes for that with another which he passes for with himself. The respect and the censure of his brother are alike injurious and irrelevant. We see ourselves; we lack organs to see others, and only squint at them.

Don’t fear to push these individualities to their farthest divergence. Characters and talents are complemental and suppletory. The world stands by balanced antagonisms. The more the peculiarities are pressed the better the result. The air would rot without lightning; and without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency.

The novelist should not make any character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by others. For it is so in life. Nonsense will not keep its unreason if you come into the humorist’s point of view, but unhappily we find it is fast becoming sense, and we must flee again into the distance if we would laugh.

What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but ‘t is likely his trade or politics in quite another. He rows with one hand and with the other backs water, and does not give to any manner of life the strength of his constitution. Hence the perpetual loss of power and waste of human life.

The natural remedy against this miscellany of knowledge and aim, this desultory universality of ours, this immense ground-juniper falling abroad and not gathered up into any columnar tree, is to substitute realism for sentimentalism; a certain recognition of the simple and terrible laws which, seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

You will say this is quite axiomatic and a little too true. I do not find it an agreed point. Literary men for the most part Have a settled despair as to the realization of ideas in their own time. There is in all students a distrust of truth, a timidity about affirming it; a wish to patronize Providence.

We disown our debt to moral evil. To science there is no poison; to botany no weed; to chemistry no dirt. The curses of malignity and despair are important criticism, which must be heeded until he can explain and rightly silence them.

“ Croyez moi, I’erreur aussi a son mérite “ said Voltaire. We see those who surmount by dint of egotism or infatuation obstacles from which the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggeration; and if he falls among other narrow men, or objects which have a brief importance, prefers it to the universe, and seems inspired and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the matter and carry a point. ’Tis the difference between progress by railroad and by walking across the broken country. Immense speed, but only in one direction.

There are two theories of life; one for the demonstration of our talent, the other for the education of the man. One is activity, the busy-body, the following of that practical talent which we have, in the belief that what is so natural, easy and pleasant to us and desirable to others will surely lead us out safely; in this direction lie usefulness, comfort, society, low power of all sorts. The other is trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, entranced waiting, the worship of ideas. This is solitary, grand, secular. They are in perpetual balance and strife. One is talent, the other genius. One is skill, the other character.

We are continually tempted to sacrifice genius to talent, the hope and promise of insight to the lust of a freer demonstration of those gifts we have; and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of general health.

It is the levity of this country to forgive everything to talent. If a man show cleverness, rhetori al skill, bold front in the forum or the senate, people clap their hands without asking more. We have a juvenile love of smartness, of showy speech. We like faculty that can rapidly be coined into money, and society seems to be in conspiracy to utilize every gift prematurely, and pull down genius to lucrative talent. Every kind of meanness and mischief is forgiven to intellect. All is condoned if I can write a good song or novel.

Wide is the gulf between genius and talent. The men we know, poets, wits, writers, deal with their thoughts as jewellers with jewels, which they sell but must not wear. Like the carpenter, who gives up the key of the fine house he has built, and never enters it again.

There is a conflict between a man’s private dexterity or talent and his access to the free air and light which wisdom is; between wisdom and the habit and necessity of repeating itself which belongs to every mind. Peter is the mould into which everything is poured like warm wax, and be it astronomy or railroads or French revolution or theology or botany, it comes out Peter. But there are quick limits to our interest in the personality of people. They are as much alike as their barns and pantries, and are as soon musty and dreary. They entertain us for a time, but at the second or third encounter we have nothing more to learn.

The daily history of the Intellect is this alternating of expansions and concentrations. The expansions are the invitations from heaven to try a larger sweep, a higher pitch than we have yet climbed, and to leave all our past for this enlarged scope. Present power, on the other hand, requires concentration on the moment and the thing to be done.

The condition of sanity is to respect the order of the intellectual world; to keep down talent in its place, to enthrone the instinct. There must be perpetual rallying and self-recovery. Each talent is ambitious and self-asserting; it works for show and for the shop, and the greater it grows the more is the mischief and the misleading, so that presently all is wrong.

No wonder the children love masks and costumes, and play horse, play soldier, play school, play bear, and delight in theatricals. The children have only the instinct of the universe, in which becoming somewhat else is the perpetual game of nature, and death the penalty of standing still. ‘T is not less in thought. I cannot conceive any good in a thought which confines and stagnates. The universe exists only in transit, or we behold it shooting the gulf from the past to the future. We are passing into new heavens in fact by the movement of our solar system, and in thought by our better knowledge. Transition is the attitude of power. A fact is only a fulcrum of the spirit. It is the terminus of a past thought, but only a means now to new sallies of the imagination and new progress of wisdom. The habit of saliency, of not pausing but proceeding, is a sort of importation and domestication of the divine effort into a man. Routine, the rut, is the path of indolence, of cows, of sluggish animal life; as near gravitation as it can go. But wit sees the short way, puts together what belongs together, custom or no custom; in that is organization.

Inspiration is the continuation of the divine effort that built the man. The same course continues itself in the mind which we have witnessed in nature, namely the carrying-on and completion of the metamorphosis from grub to worm, from worm to fly. In human thought this process is often arrested for years and ages. The history of mankind is the history of arrested growth. This premature stop, I know not how, befalls most of us in early youth; as if the growth of high powers, the access to rare truths, closed at two or three years in the child, while all the pagan faculties went ripening on to sixty.

So long as you are capable of advance, so long you have not abdicated the hope and future of a divine sonl. That wonderful oracle will reply when it is consulted, and there is no history or tradition, no rule of life or art or science, on which it is not a competent and the only competent judge.

Man was made for conflict, not for rest. In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. Instantly he is dwarfed by self-indulgence. The truest state of mind rested in becomes false.

The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart, Intellect and morals; one respecting truth, the other the will. One is the man, the other the woman in spiritual nature. One is power, the other is love. These elements always coexist in every normal individual, but one predominates. And as each is easily exalted in our thoughts till it serves to fill the universe and become the synonym of God, the soul in which one predominates is ever watchful and jealous when such immense claims are made for one as seem injurious to the other. Ideal and practical, like ecliptic and equator, are never parallel Each has its vices, its proper dangers, obvious enough when the opposite element is deficient.

Intellect is skeptical, runs down into talent, selfish working for private ends, conceited, ostentatious and malignant. On the other side the clearheaded thinker complains of souls led hither and thither by affections which, alone, are blind guides and thriftless workmen, and in the confusion asks the polarity of intellect. But all great minds and all great hearts have mutually allowed the absolute necessity of the twain.

If the first rule is to obey your genius, in the second place the good mind is known by the choice of what is positive, of what is advancing. We must embrace the affirmative. But the affirmative of affirmatives is love. Quantus amor tantus animus. Strength, enters as the moral element enters. Lovers of men are as safe as the sun. Good will makes insight. Sensibility is the secret readiness to believe in all kinds of power, and the contempt of any experience we have not is the opposite pole. The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere, good and order, analogy, health and benefit, — the love of truth, tendency to be in the right, no fighter for victory, no cockerel.

We have all of us by nature a certain divination and parturient vaticination in our minds of some higher good and perfection than either power or knowledge. Knowledge is plainly to be preferred before power, as being that which guides and directs its blind force and impetus; but Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not reason but something better.

The height of culture, the highest behavior, consists in the identification of the Ego with the universe; so that when a man says I hope, I find, I think, he might properly say, The human race thinks or finds or hopes. And meantime he shall be able continually to keep sight of his biographical Ego, — I have a desk, I have an office, I am hungry, I had an ague, — as rhetoric or offset to his grand spiritual Ego, without impertinence, or ever confounding them.

I may well say this is divine, the continuation of the divine effort. Alas! it seems not to be ours, to be quite independent of us. Often there is so little affinity between the man and his works that we think the wind must have writ them. Also its communication from one to another follows its own law and refuses our intrusion. It is in one, it belongs to all; yet how to impart it?

We need all our resources to lire in the world which is to be used and decorated by us. Socrates kept all his virtues as well as his faculties well in hand. He was sincerely humble, but he utilized his humanity chiefly as a better eyeglass to penetrate the vapors that baffled the vision of other men.

The superiority of the man is in the simplicity of his thought, that he has no obstruction, but looks straight at the pure fact, with no color of option. Profound sincerity is the only basis of talent as of character. The virtue of the Intellect is its own, its courage is of its own kind, and at last it will be justified, though for the moment it seem hostile to what it most reveres.

We wish to sum up the conflicting impressions by saying that all point at last to a unity which inspires all. Our poetry, our religion are its skirts and penumbrae. Yet the charm of life is the hints we derive from this. They overcome us like perfumes from a far-off shore of sweetness, and their meaning is that no tongue shall syllable it without leave; that only itself can name it; that by casting ourselves on it and being its voice it rushes each moment to positive commands, creating men and methods, and ties the will of a child to the love of the First Cause.

III. MEMORY.

Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are imbedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.

We like longevity, we like signs of riches and extent of nature in an individual. And most of all we like a great memory. The lowest life remembers. The sparrow, the ant, the worm, have the same memory as we. If you bar their path, or offer them somewhat disagreeable to their senses, they make one or two trials, and then once for all avoid it.

Every machine must be perfect of its sort. It is essential to a locomotive that it can reverse its movement, and run backward and forward with equal celerity. The builder of the mind found it not less needful that it should have retroaction, and command its past act and deed. Perception, though it were immense and could pierce through the universe, was not sufficient.

Memory performs the impossible for man by the strength of his divine arms; holds together past and present, beholding both, existing in both, abides in the flowing, and gives continuity and dignity to human life. It holds us to our family, to our friends. Hereby a home is possible; hereby only a new fact has value.

Opportunities of investment are useful only to those who have capital. Any piece of knowledge I acquire to-day, a fact that falls under my eyes, a book I read, a piece of news I hear, has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. To-morrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better.

The Past has a new value every moment to the active mind, through the incessant purification and better method of its memory. Once it joined its facts by color and form and sensuous relations. Some fact that had a childish significance to your childhood and was a type in the nursery, when riper intelligence recalls it means more and serves you better as an illustration; and perhaps in your age has new meaning. What was an isolated, unrelated belief or conjecture, our later experience instructs us how to place in just connection with other views which confirm and expand it. The old whim or perception was an augury of a broader insight, at which we arrive later with securer conviction. This is the companion, this the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel It does not lie, cannot be corrupted, reports to you not what you wish but what really befel. You say, “I can never think of some act of neglect, of selfishness, or of passion without pain.” Well, that is as it should be. That is the police of the Universe: the angels are set to punish you, so long as you are capable of such crime. But in the history of character the day comes when you are incapable of such crime. Then you suffer no more, you look on it as heaven looks on it, with wonder at the deed, and with applause at the pain it has cost you.

Memory is not a pocket, but a living instructor, with a prophetic sense of the values which he guards; a guardian angel set there within you to record your life, and by recording to animate you to uplift it. It is a scripture written day by day from the birth of the man; all its records full of meanings which open as he lives on, explaining each other, explaining the world to him and expanding their sense as he advances, until it shall become the whole law of nature and life.

As every creature is furnished with teeth to seize and eat, and with stomach to digest its food, so the memory is furnished with a perfect apparatus. There is no book like the memory, none with such a good index, and that of every kind, alphabetic, systematic, arranged by names of persons, by colors, tastes, smells, shapes, likeness, unlikeness, by all sorts of mysterious hooks and eyes to catch and hold, and contrivances for giving a hint .

The memory collects and re-collects . We figure it as if the mind were a kind of looking-glass, which being carried through the street of time receives on its clear plate every image that passes; only with this difference that our plate is iodized so that every image sinks into it, and is held there. But in addition to this property it has one more, this, namely, that of all the million images that are imprinted, the very one we want reappears in the centre of the plate in the moment when we want it.

We can tell much about it, but you must not ask us what it is. On seeing a face I am aware that I have seen it before, or that I have not seen it before. On hearing a fact told I am aware that I knew it already. You say the first words of the old song, and I finish the line and the stanza. But where I have them, or what becomes of them when I am not thinking of them for months and years, that they should lie so still, as if they did not exist, and yet so nigh that they come on the instant when they are called for, never any man was so sharp-sighted, or could turn himself inside out quick enough to find.

‘T is because of the believed incompatibility of the affirmative and advancing attitude of the mind with tenacious acts of recollection that people are often reproached with living in their memory. Late in life we live by memory, and in our solstices or periods of stagnation; as the starved camel in the desert lives on his humps. Memory was called by the schoolmen vespertina cognitio , evening knowledge, in distinction from the command of the future which we have by the knowledge of causes, and which they called matutina cognitio , or morning knowledge.

Am I asked whether the thoughts clothe themselves in words? I answer, Yes, always; but they are apt to be instantly forgotten. Never was truer fable than that of the Sibyl’s writing on leaves which the wind scatters. The difference between men is that in one the memory with inconceivable swiftness flies after and re-collects the flying leaves, — flies on wing as fast as that mysterious whirlwind, and the envious Fate is baffled.

This command of old facts, the clear beholding at will of what is best in our experience, is our splendid privilege. “He who calls what is vanished back again into being enjoys a bliss like that of creating,” says Niebuhr. The memory plays a great part in settling the intellectual rank of men. We estimate a man by how much he remembers. A seneschal of Parnassus is Mnemosyne. This power will alone make a man remarkable; and it is found in all good wits. Therefore the poets represented the Muses as the daughters of Memory, for the power exists in some marked and eminent degree in men of an ideal determination. Quintilian reckoned it the measure of genius. “Tantum ingenii quantum memoriÆ.”

We are told that Boileau having recited to Daguesseau one day an epistle or satire he had just been composing, Daguesseau tranquilly told him he knew it already, and in proof set himself to recite it from end to end. Boileau, astonished, was much distressed until he perceived that it was only a feat of memory.

The mind disposes all its experience after its affection and to its ruling end; one man by puns and one by cause and effect, one to heroic benefit and one to wrath and animal desire. This is the high difference, the quality of the association by which a man remembers. In the minds of most men memory is nothing but a farm-book or a pocket-diary. On such a day I paid my note; on the next day the cow calved; on the next I cut my finger; on the next the banks suspended payment. But another man’s memory is the history of science and art and civility and thought; and still another deals with laws and perceptions that are the theory of the world.

This thread or order of remembering, this classification, distributes men, one remembering by shoprule or interest; one by passion; one by trifling external marks, as dress or money. And one rarely takes an interest in how the facts really stand, in the order of cause and effect, without self-reference. This is an intellectual man. Nature interests him; a plant, a fish, time, space, mind, being, in their own method and law. Napoleon was such, and that saves him.

But this mysterious power that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions. It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its informations at its will, not at mine. One sometimes asks himself, Is it possible that it is only a visitor, not a resident? Is it some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons which I recognize as having heard before, and she being gone again I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes?

We can help ourselves to the modus of mental processes only by coarse material experiences. A knife with a good spring, a forceps whose lips accurately meet and match, a steel-trap, a loom, a watch, the teeth or jaws of which fit and play perfectly, as compared with the same tools when badly put together, describe to us the difference between a person of quick and strong perception, like Franklin or Swift or Webster or Richard Owen, and a heavy man who witnesses the same facts or shares experiences like theirs. ’Tis like the impression made by the same stamp in sand or in wax. The way in which Burke or Sheridan or Webster or any orator surprises us is by his always having a sharp tool that fits the present use. He has an old story, an odd circumstance, that illustrates the point he is now proving, and is better than an argument. The more he is heated, the wider he sees; he seems to remember all he ever knew; thus certifying us that he is in the habit of seeing better than other people; that what his mind grasps it does not let go. ’Tis the bull-dog bite; you must cut off the head to loosen the teeth.

We hate this fatal shortness of Memory, these docked men whom we behold. We gathered up what a rolling snow-ball as we came along, — much of it professedly for the future, as capital stock of knowledge. Where is it now? Look behind you. I cannot see that your train is any longer than it was in childhood. The facts of the last two or three days or weeks are all you have with you, — the reading of the last month’s books. Your conversation, action, your face and manners report of no more, of no greater wealth of mind. Alas! you have lost something for everything you have gained, and cannot grow. Only so much iron will the load-stone draw; it gains new particles all the way as you move it, but one falls off for every one that adheres.

As there is strength in the wild horse which is never regained when he is once broken by training, and as there is a sound sleep of children and of savages, profound as the hibernation of bears, which never visits the eyes of civil gentlemen and ladies, so there is a wild memory in children and youth which makes what is early learned impossible to forget; and perhaps in the beginning of the world it had most vigor. Plato deplores writing as a barbarous invention which would weaken the memory by disuse. The Rhapsodists in Athens it seems could recite at once any passage of Homer that was desired.

If writing weakens the memory, we may say as much and more of printing. What is the newspaper but a sponge or invention for oblivion? the rule being that for every fact added to the memory, one is crowded out, and that only what the affection animates can be remembered.

The mind has a better secret in generalization than merely adding units to its list of facts. The reason of the short memory is shallow thought. As deep as the thought, so great is the attraction. An act of the understanding will marshal and concatenate a few facts; a principle of the reason will thrill and magnetize and redistribute the whole world.

But defect of memory is not always want of genius. By no means. It is sometimes owing to excellence of genius. Thus men of great presence of mind who are always equal to the occasion do not need to rely on what they have stored for use, but can think in this moment as well and deeply as in any past moment, and if they cannot remember the rule they can make one. Indeed it is remarked that inventive men have bad memories. Sir Isaac Newton was embarrassed when the conversation turned on his discoveries and results; he could not recall them; but if he was asked why things were so or so he could find the reason on the spot.

A man would think twice about learning a new science or reading a new paragraph, if he believed the magnetism was only a constant amount, and that he lost a word or a thought for every word he gained. But the experience is not quite so bad. In reading a foreign language, every new word mastered is a lamp lighting up related words and so assisting the memory. Apprehension of the whole sentence aids to fix the precise meaning of a particular word, and what familiarity has been acquired with the genius of the language and the writer helps in fixing the exact meaning of the sentence. So is it with every fact in a new science: they are mutually explaining, and each one adds transparency to the whole mass.

The damages of forgetting are more than compensated by the large values which new thoughts and knowledge give to what we already know. If new impressions sometimes efface old ones, yet we steadily gain insight; and because all nature has one law and meaning, — part corresponding to part, — all we have known aids us continually to the knowledge of the rest of nature. Thus, all the facts in this chest of memory are property at interest. And who shall set a boundary to this mounting value? Shall we not on higher stages of being remember and understand our early history better?

They say in Architecture, “An arch never sleeps;” I say, the Past will not sleep, it works still. With every new fact a ray of light shoots up from the long buried years. Who can judge the new book? He who has read many books. Who, the new assertion? He who has heard many the like. Who, the new man? He that has seen men. The experienced and cultivated man is lodged in a hall hung with pictures which every new day retouches, and to which every step in the march of the soul adds a more sublime perspective.

We learn early that there is great disparity of value between our experiences; some thoughts perish in the using. Some days are bright with thought and sentiment, and we live a year in a day. Yet these best days are not always those which memory can retain. This water once spilled cannot be gathered. There are more inventions in the thoughts of one happy day than ages could execute, and I suppose I speak the sense of most thoughtful men when I say, I would rather have a perfect recollection of all I have thought and felt in a day or a week of high activity than read all the books that have been published in a century.

The memory is one of the compensations which Nature grants to those who have used their days well; when age and calamity have bereaved them of their limbs or organs, then they retreat on mental faculty and concentrate on that. The poet, the philosopher, lamed, old, blind, sick, yet disputing the ground inch by inch against fortune, finds a strength against the wrecks and decays sometimes more invulnerable than the heyday of youth and talent.

I value the praise of Memory. And how does Memory praise? By holding fast the best. A thought takes its true rank in the memory by surviving other thoughts that were once preferred. Plato remembered Anaxagoras by one of his sayings. If we recall our own favorites we shall usually find that it is for one crowning act or thought that we hold them dear.

Have you not found memory an apotheosis or deification? The poor, short lone fact dies at the birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven, and bathes it in immortal waters. Then a thousand times over it lives and acts again, each time transfigured, ennobled. In solitude, in darkness, we tread over again the sunny walks of youth; confined now in populous streets you behold again the green fields, the shadows of the gray birches; by the solitary river hear again the joyful voices of early companions, and vibrate anew to the tenderness and dainty music of the poetry your boyhood fed upon. At this hour the stream is still flowing, though you hear it not; the plants are still drinking their accustomed life and repaying it with their beautiful forms. But you need not wander thither. It flows for you, and they grow for you, in the returning images of former summers. In low or bad company you fold yourself in your cloak, withdraw yourself entirely from all the doleful circumstance, recall and surround yourself with the best associates and the fairest hours of your life: —

“Passing sweet are the domains of tender memory.”

You may perish out of your senses, but not out of your memory or imagination.

The memory has a fine art of sifting out the pain and keeping all the joy. The spring days when the bluebird arrives have usually only few hours of fine temperature, are sour and unlovely; but when late in autumn we hear rarely a bluebird’s notes they are sweet by reminding us of the spring. Well, it is so with other tricks of memory. Of the most romantic fact the memory is more romantic; and this power of sinking the pain of any experience and of recalling the saddest with tranquillity, and even with a wise pleasure, is familiar. The memory is as the affection. Sampson Reed says, “The true way to store the memory is to develop the affections.” A souvenir is a token of love. Remember me means, Do not cease to love me. We remember those things which we love and those things which we hate. The memory of all men is robust on the subject of a debt due to them, or of an insult inflicted on them. “They can remember,” as Johnson said, “who kicked them last,”

Every artist is alive on the subject of his art. The Persians say, “A real singer will never forget the song he has once Jearned.” Michael Angelo, after having once seen a work of any other artist, would remember it so perfectly that if it pleased him to make use of any portion thereof, he could do so, but in such a manner that none could perceive it.

We remember what we understand, and we understand best what we like; for this doubles our power of attention, and makes it our own. Captain John Brown, of Ossawatomie, said he had in Ohio three thousand sheep on his farm, and could tell a strange sheep in his flock as soon as he saw its face. One of my neighbors, a grazier, told me that he should know again every cow, ox, or steer that he ever saw. Abel Lawton knew every horse that went up and down through Concord to the towns in the county. And in higher examples each man’s memory is in the line of his action.

Nature trains us on to see illusions and prodigies with no more wonder than our toast and omelet at breakfast. Talk of memory and cite me these fine examples of Grotius and Daguesseau, and I think how awful is that power and what privilege and tyranny it must confer. Then I come to a bright school-girl who remembers all she hears, carries thousands of nursery rhymes and all the poetry in all the readers, hymn-books, and pictorial ballads in her mind; and’tis a mere drug. She carries it so carelessly, it seems like the profusion of hair on the shock heads of all the village boys and village dogs; it grows like grass. ’Tis a bushel-basket memory of all unchosen knowledge, heaped together in a huge hamper, without method, yet securely held, and ready to come at call; so that an old scholar, who knows what to do with a memory, is full of wonder and pity that this magical force should be squandered on such frippery.

He is a skilful doctor who can give me a recipe for the cure of a bad memory. And yet we have some hints from experience on this subject. And first, health. It is found that we remember best when the head is clear, when we are thoroughly awake. When the body is in a quiescent state in the absence of the passions, in the moderation of food, it yields itself a willing medium to the intellect. For the true river Lethe is the body of man, with its belly and uproar of appetite and mountains of indigestion and bad humors and quality of darkness. And for this reason, and observing some mysterious continuity of mental operation during sleep or when our will is suspended, ‘t is an old rule of scholars, that which Fuller records, “’Tis best knocking in the nail overnight and clinching it next morning.” Only I should give extension to this rule and say Yes, drive the nail this week and clinch it the next, and drive it this year and clinch it the next.

But Fate also is an artist. We forget also according to beautiful laws. Thoreau said, “of what significance are the things you can forget. A little thought is sexton to all the world.”

We must be severe with ourselves, and what we wish to keep we must once thoroughly possess. Then the thing seen will no longer be what it was, a mere sensuous object before the eye or ear, but a reminder of its law, a possession for the intellect. Then we relieve ourselves of all task in the matter, we put the onus of being remembered on the object, instead of on our will. We shall do as we do with all our studies, prize the fact or the name of the person by that predominance it takes in our mind after near acquaintance. I have several times forgotten the name of Flamsteed, never that of Newton; and can drop easily many poets out of the Elizabethan chronology, but not Shakespeare.

We forget rapidly what should be forgotten. The universal sense of fables and anecdotes is marked by our tendency to forget name and date and geography. “How in the right are children,” said Margaret Fuller, “to forget name and date and place.”

You cannot overstate our debt to the past, but has the present no claim? This past memory is the baggage, but where is the troop? The divine gift is not the old but the new. The divine is the instant life that receives and uses, the life that can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which it makes all things new.

The acceleration of mental process is equivalent to the lengthening of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind you will believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush of many thoughts, of seeming experiences, of spending hours and going through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are surprised to find it was a short nap. The opium-eater says, “I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night.”

You know what is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered from drowning. They relate that their whole life’s history seemed to pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they ever did.

If we occupy ourselves long on this wonderful faculty, and see the natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge calls upon old knowledge — new giving undreamed-of value to old; everywhere relation and suggestion, so that what one had painfully held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part, being a perpetual reminder), — we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of memory only through its use; that there must be a proportion between the power of memory and the amount of knowables; and since the Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large.

With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every deeper insight, its retrospect is also wider. With every new insight into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new possession of the past.

When we live by principles instead of traditions, by obedience to the law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of to-day will shine backward and forward.

Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as after-sight.

BOSTON.

“We are citizens of two fair cities,” said the Genoese gentleman to a Florentine artist, “and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish to be Florentine.” “And I,” replied the artist, “if I were not Florentine.”— “You would wish to be Genoese,” said the other. “No,” replied the artist, “I should wish to be Florentine.”

The rocky nook with hill-tops three Looked eastward from the farms, And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms.

The sea returning day by day Restores the world-wide mart; So let each dweller on the Bay Fold Boston in his heart.

Let the blood of her hundred thousands Throb in each manly vein, And the wits of all her wisest Make sunshine in her brain.

And each shall care for other, And each to each shall bend, To the poor a noble brother, To the good an equal friend.

A blessing through the ages thus Shield all thy roofs and towers! God with the fathers, so with us , Thou darling town of ours!

BOSTON.

The old physiologists said, “There is in the air a hidden food of life;” and they watched the effect of different climates. They believed the air of mountains and the seashore a potent predisposer to rebellion. The air was a good republican, and it was remarked that insulary people are versatile and addicted to change, both in religious and secular affairs.

The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material globe. An aerial fluid streams all day, all night, from every flower and leaf, from every water and soil, from every rock-ledge; and from every stratum a different aroma and air according to its quality. According to quality and according to temperature, it must have effect on manners.

There is the climate of the Sahara: a climate where the sunbeams are vertical; where is day after day, sunstroke after sunstroke, with a frosty shadow between. “There are countries,” said Howell, “where the heaven is a fiery furnace, or a blowing bellows, or a dropping sponge, most parts of the year.” Such is the assimilating force of the Indian climate, that, Sir Erskine Perry says,” the usage and opinion of the Hindoos so invades men of all castes and colors who deal with them that all take a Hindoo tint. Parsee, Mongol, Afghan, Israelite, Christian, have all passed under this influence and exchanged a good part of their patrimony of ideas for the notions, manner of seeing, and habitual tone of Indian society.” He compares it to the geologic phenomenon which the black soil of the Dhakkan offers, — the property, namely, of assimilating to itself every foreign substance introduced into its bosom.

How can we not believe in influences of climate and air, when, as true philosophers, we must believe that chemical atoms also have their spiritual cause why they are thus and not other; that carbon, oxygen, alum and iron, each has its origin in spiritual nature?

Even at this day men are to be found superstitious enough to believe that to certain spots on the surface of the planet special powers attach, and an exalted influence on the genius of man. And it appears as if some localities of the earth, through wholesome springs, or as the habitat of rare plants and minerals, or through ravishing beauties of Nature, were preferred before others. There is great testimony of discriminating persons to the effect that Rome is endowed with the enchanting property of inspiring a longing in men there to live and there to die.

Who lives one year in Boston ranges through all the climates of the globe. And if the character of the people has a larger range and greater versatility, causing them to exhibit equal dexterity in what are elsewhere reckoned incompatible works, perhaps they may thank their climate of extremes, which at one season gives them the splendor of the equator and a touch of Syria, and then runs down to a cold which approaches the temperature of the celestial spaces.

It is not a country of luxury or of pictures; of snows rather, of east-winds and changing skies; visited by icebergs, which, floating by, nip with their cool breath our blossoms. Not a luxurious climate, but wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease. Give me a climate where people think well and construct well, — I will spend six months there, and you may have all the rest of my years.

What Vasari says, three hundred years ago, of the republican city of Florence might be said of Boston; “that the desire for glory and honor is powerfully generated by the air of that place, in the men of every profession; whereby all who possess talent are impelled to struggle that they may not remain in the same grade with those whom they perceive to be only men like themselves, even though they may acknowledge such indeed to be masters; but all labor by every means to be foremost.”

We find no less stimulus in our native air; not less ambition in our blood, which Puritanism has not sufficiently chastised; and at least an equal freedom in our laws and customs, with as many and as tempting rewards to toil; with so many philanthropies, humanities, charities, soliciting us to be great and good.

New England is a sort of Scotland. ‘T is hard to say why. Climate is much; then, old accumulation of the means, — books, schools, colleges, literary society; — as New Bedford is not nearer to the whales than New London or Portland, yet they have all the equipments for a whaler ready, and they hug an oil-cask like a brother.

I do not know that Charles River or Merrimac water is more clarifying to the brain than the Savannah or Alabama rivers, yet the men that drink it get up earlier, and some of the morning light lasts through the day. I notice that they who drink for some little time of the Potomac water lose their relish for the water of the Charles River, of the Merrimac and the Connecticut, — even of the Hudson. I think the Potomac water is a little acrid, and should be corrected by copious infusions of these provincial streams.

Of great cities you cannot compute the influences. In New York, in Montreal, New Orleans and the farthest colonies, — in Guiana, in Guadaloupe, — a middle-aged gentleman is just embarking with all his property to fulfil the dream of his life and spend his old age in Paris; so that a fortune falls into the massive wealth of that city every day in the year. Astronomers come because there they can find apparatus and companions. Chemist, geologist, artist, musician, dancer, because there only are grandees and their patronage, appreciators and patrons. Demand and supply run into every invisible and unnamed province of whim and passion.

Each great city gathers these values and delights for mankind, and comes to be the brag of its age and population. The Greeks thought him unhappy who died without seeing the statue of Jove at Olympia. With still more reason, they praised Athens, the “Violet City.” It was said of Home in its proudest days, looking at the vast radiation of the privilege of Roman citizenship through the then-known world,— “the extent of the city and of the world is the same” ( spatium et urbis et orbis idem ). London now for a thousand years has been in an affirmative or energizing mood; has not stopped growing. Linnæus, like a naturalist, esteeming the globe a big egg, called London the punctum saliens in the yolk of the world.

This town of Boston has a history. It is not an accident, not a windmill, or a railroad station, or cross-roads tavern, or an army-barracks grown up by time and luck to a place of wealth; but a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a sentiment and marching loyally whither that should lead them; so that its annals are great historical lines, inextricably national; part of the history of political liberty. I do not speak with any fondness, but the language of coldest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

A capital fact distinguishing this colony from all other colonies was that the persons composing it consented to come on the one condition that the charter should be transferred from the company in England to themselves; and so they brought the government with them.

On the 3d of November, 1620, King James in-corporated forty of his subjects, Sir F. Gorges and others, the council established at Plymouth in the county of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New England in America. The territory — conferred on the patentees in absolute property, with unlimited jurisdiction, the sole power of legislation, the appointment of all officers and all forms of government — extended from the 40th to the 48th degree of north latitude, and in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

John Smith writes (1624): “Of all the four parts of the world that I have yet seen not inhabited, could I but have means to transplant a colony, I would rather live here than anywhere; and if it did not maintain itself, were we but once indifferently well fitted, let us starve. Here are many isles planted with corn, groves, mulberries, salvage gardens and good harbours. The sea-coast as you pass shows you all along large cornfields and great troops of well-proportioned people.” Massachusetts in particular, he calls “the paradise of these parts,” notices its high mountain, and its river, “which doth pierce many days’ journey into the entrails of that country.” Morton arrived in 1622, in June, beheld the country, and “the more he looked, the more he liked it.”

In sixty-eight years after the foundation of Boston, Dr. Mather writes of it, “The town hath indeed three elder Sisters in this colony, but it hath wonderfully outgrown them all, and her mother, Old Boston in England, also; yea, within a few years after the first settlement it grew to be the metropolis of the whole English America.”

How easy it is, after the city is built, to see where it ought to stand. In our beautiful bay, with its broad and deep waters covered with sails from every port; with its islands hospitably shining in the sun; with its waters bounded and marked by light-houses, buoys and sea-marks; every foot sounded and charted; with its shores trending steadily from the two arms which the capes of Massachusetts stretch out to sea, down to the bottom of the bay where the city domes and spires sparkle through the haze, — a good boatman can easily find his way for the first time to the State House, and wonder that Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth Sands.

But it took ten years to find this out. The colony of 1620 had landed at Plymouth. It was December, and the ground was covered with snow. Snow and moonlight make all places alike; and the weariness of the sea, the shrinking from cold weather and the pangs of hunger must justify them.

But the next colony planted itself at Salem, and the next at Weymouth; another at Medford; before these men, instead of jumping on to the first land that offered, wisely judged that the best point for a city was at the bottom of a deep and islanded bay, where a copious river entered it, and where a bold shore was bounded by a country of rich undulating woodland.

The planters of Massachusetts do not appear to have been hardy men, rather, comfortable citizens, not at all accustomed to the rough task of discoverers; and they exaggerated their troubles. Bears and wolves were many; but early, they believed there were lions; Monadnoc was burned over to kill them. John Smith was stung near to death by the most poisonous tail of a fish, called a sting-ray. In the journey of Rev. Peter Bulkeley and his company through the forest from Boston to Concord they fainted from the powerful odor of the sweetfern in the sun; — like what befell, still earlier, Biorn and Thorfinn, Northmen, in their expedition to the same coast; who ate so many grapes from the wild vines that they were reeling drunk. The lions have never appeared since, — nor before. Their crops suffered from pigeons and mice. Nature has never again indulged in these exasperations. It seems to have been the last outrage ever committed by the sting-rays or by the sweetfern, or by the fox-grapes; they have been of peaceable behavior ever since.

Any geologist or engineer is accustomed to face more serious dangers than any enumerated, excepting the hostile Indians. But the awe was real and overpowering in the superstition with which every new object was magnified. The superstition which hung over the new ocean had not yet been scattered; the powers of the savage were not known; the dangers of the wilderness were unexplored; and, in that time, terrors of witchcraft, terrors of evil spirits, and a certain degree of terror still clouded the idea of God in the mind of the purest.

The divine will descends into the barbarous mind in some strange disguise; its pure truth not to be guessed from the rude vizard under which it goes masquerading. The common eye cannot tell what the bird will be, from the egg, nor the pure truth from the grotesque tenet which sheathes it. But by some secret tie it holds the poor savage to it, and he goes muttering his rude ritual or mythology, which yet conceals some grand commandment; as courage, veracity, honesty, or chastity and generosity.

So these English men, with the Middle Ages still obscuring their reason, were filled with Christian thought. They had a culture of their own. They read Milton, Thomas à Kempis, Bunyan and Flavel with religious awe and delight, not for entertainment. They were precisely the idealists of England; the most religious in a religious era. An old lady who remembered these pious people said of them that “they had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves from being translated.”

In our own age we are learning to look as on chivalry at the sweetness of that ancient piety which makes the genius of St. Bernard, Latimer, Seougal, Jeremy Taylor, Herbert, and Leighton. Who can read the fiery ejaculations of St. Augustine, a man of as clear a sight as almost any other; of Thomas à Kempis, of Milton, of Bunyan even, without feeling how rich and expansive a culture — not so much a culture as a higher life — they owed to the promptings of this sentiment; without contrasting their immortal heat with the cold complexion of our recent wits? Who can read the pious diaries of the Englishmen in the time of the Commonwealth and later, without a sigh that we write no diaries to-day? Who shall restore to us the odoriferous Sabbaths which made the earth and the humble roof a sanctity?

This spirit, of course, involved that of Stoicism, as, in its turn, Stoicism did this. Yet how much more attractive and true that this piety should be the central trait and the stern virtues follow, than that Stoicism should face the gods and put Jove on his defence. That piety is a refutation of every skeptical doubt. These men are a bridge to us between the unparalleled piety of the Hebrew epoch and our own. These ancient men, like great gardens with great banks of flowers, send out their perfumed breath across the great tracts of time. How needful is David, Paul, Leighton, Fénelon, to our devotion. Of these writers, of this spirit which deified them, I will say with Confucius, “If in the morning I hear of the right way, and in the evening die, I can be happy.”

I trace to this deep religious sentiment and to its culture great and salutary results to the people of New England; first, namely, the culture of the intellect, which has always been found in the Calvinistic church. The colony was planted in 1620; in 1638 Harvard College was founded. The General Court of Massachusetts, in 1647, “To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of the forefathers, ordered, that every township, after the Lord has increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and where any town shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a Grammar School, the Masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the University.”

Many and rich are the fruits of that simple statute. The universality of an elementary education in New England is her praise and her power in the whole world. To the schools succeeds the village Lyceum, — now very general throughout all the country towns of New England, — where every week through the winter, lectures are read and debates sustained which prove a college for the young rustic. Hence it happens that the young farmers and mechanics, who work all summer in the field or shop, in the winter often go into a neighboring town to teach the district school arithmetic and grammar. As you know too, New England supplies annually a large detachment of preachers and schoolmasters and private tutors to the interior of the South and West.

New England lies in the cold and hostile latitude which by shutting men up in houses and tight and heated rooms a large part of the year, and then again shutting up the body in flannel and leather, defrauds the human being in some degree of his relations to external nature; takes from the muscles their suppleness, from the skin its exposure to the air; and the New Englander, like every other northerner, lacks that beauty and grace which the habit of living much in the air, and the activity of the limbs not in labor but in graceful exercise, tend to produce in climates nearer to the sun. Then the necessity, which always presses the northerner, of providing fuel and many clothes and tight houses and much food against the long winter, makes him anxiously frugal, and generates in him that spirit of detail which is not grand and enlarging, but goes rather to pinch the features and degrade the character.

As an antidote to the spirit of commerce and of economy, the religious spirit — always enlarging, firing man, prompting the pursuit of the vast, the beautiful, the unattainable — was especially necessary to the culture of New England. In the midst of her laborious and economical and rude and awkward population, where is little elegance and no facility; with great accuracy in details, little spirit of society or knowledge of the world, you shall not unfrequently meet that refinement which no education and no habit of society can bestow; which makes the elegance of wealth look stupid, and unites itself by natural affinity to the highest minds of the world; nourishes itself on Plato and Dante, Michael Angelo and Milton; on whatever is pure and sublime in art, — and, I may say, gave a hospitality in this country to the spirit of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and to the music of Beethoven, before yet their genius had found a hearty welcome in Great Britain.

I do not look to find in England better manners than the best manners here. We can show native examples, and I may almost say (travellers as we are) natives who never crossed the sea, who possess all the elements of noble behavior.

It is the property of the religious sentiment to be the most refining of all influences. No external advantages, no good birth or breeding, no culture of the taste, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, — even no depth of affection that does not rise to a religious sentiment, can bestow that delicacy and grandeur of bearing which belong only to a mind accustomed to celestial conversation. All else is coarse and external; all else is tailoring and cosmetics beside this; for thoughts are expressed in every look or gesture, and these thoughts are as if angels had talked with the child.

[“Come dal fuoco il caldo, esser diviso,

Non puo’l bel dall’ eterno.”

Michael Angelo.

As from fire heat cannot be separated, — neither can beauty from the eternal.]

By this instinct we are lifted to higher ground. The religious sentiment gave the iron purpose and arm. That colonizing was a great and generous scheme, manly meant and manly done. When one thinks of the enterprises that are attempted in the heats of youth, the Zoars, New-Harmonies and Brook - Farms, Oakdales and Phalansteries, which have been so profoundly ventilated, but end in a protracted picnic which after a few weeks or months dismisses the partakers to their old homes, we see with new increased respect the solid, well-calculated scheme of these emigrants, sitting down hard and fast where they came, and building their empire by due degrees.

John Smith says, “Thirty, forty, or fifty sail went yearly in America only to trade and fish, but nothing would be done for a plantation, till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and Leyden went to New Plymouth; whose humorous ignorances caused them for more than a year to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with an infinite patience.”

What should hinder that this America, so long kept in reserve from the intellectual races until they should grow to it, glimpses being afforded which spoke to the imagination, yet the firm shore hid until science and art should be ripe to propose it as a fixed aim, and a man should be found who should sail steadily west sixty-eight days from the port of Palos to find it, — what should hinder that this New Atlantis should have its happy ports, its mountains of security, its gardens fit for human abode where all elements were right for the health, power and virtue of man?

America is growing like a cloud, towns on towns, States on States; and wealth (always interesting, since from wealth power cannot be divorced) is piled in every form invented for comfort or pride.

If John Bull interest you at home, come and see him under new conditions, come and see the Jonathanization of John.

There are always men ready for adventures, — more in an over-governed, over-peopled country, where all the professions are crowded and all character suppressed, than elsewhere. This thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

The American idea, Emancipation, appears in our freedom of intellection, in our reforms, and in our bad politics; it has, of course, its sinister side, which is most felt by the drilled and scholastic, but if followed it leads to heavenly places.

European and American are each ridiculous out of his sphere. There is a Columbia of thought and art and character, which is the last and endless sequel of Columbus’s adventure.

European critics regret the detachment of the Puritans to this country without aristocracy; which a little reminds one of the pity of the Swiss mountaineers when shown a handsome Englishman: “What a pity he has no goitre! The future historian will regard the detachment of the Puritans without aristocracy the supreme fortune of the colony; as great a gain to mankind as the opening of this continent.

There is a little formula, couched in pure Saxon, which you may hear in the corners of streets and in the yard of the dame’s school, from very little republicans: “I’m as good as you be,” which contains the essence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and of the American Declaration of Independence. And this was at the bottom of Plymouth Rock and of Boston Stone; and this could be heard (by an acute ear) in the Petitions to the King, and the platforms of churches, and was said and sung in every tone of the psalmody of the Puritans; in every note of Old Hundred and Hallelujah and Short Particular Metre.

What is very conspicuous is the saucy independence which shines in all their eyes. They could say to themselves, Well, at least this yoke of man, of bishops, of courtiers, of dukes, is off my neck. We are a little too close to wolf and famine than that anybody should give himself airs here in the swamp.

London is a long way off, with beadles and pursuivants and horse-guards. Here in the clambanks and the beech and chestnut forest, I shall take leave to breathe and think freely. If you do not like it, if you molest me, I can cross the brook and plant a new state out of reach of anything but squirrels and wild pigeons.

Bonaparte sighed for his republicans of 1789. The soul of a political party is by no means usually the officers and pets of the party, who wear the honors and fill the high seats and spend the salaries. No, but the theorists and extremists, the men who are never contented and never to be contented with the work actually accomplished, but who from conscience are engaged to what that party professes, — these men will work and watch and rally and never tire in carrying their point. The theology and the instinct of freedom that grew here in the dark in serious men furnished a certain rancor which consumed all opposition, fed the party and carried it, over every rampart and obstacle, to victory.

Boston never wanted a good principle of rebellion in it, from the planting until now; there is always a minority unconvinced, always a heresiarch, whom the governor and deputies labor with but cannot silence. Some new light, some new doctrinaire who makes an unnecessary ado to establish his dogma; some Wheelwright or defender of Wheelwright; some protester against the cruelty of the magistrates to the Quakers; some tender minister hospitable to Whitefield against the counsel of all the ministers; some John Adams and Josiah Quincy and Governor Andrew to undertake and carry the defence of patriots in the courts against the uproar of all the province; some defender of the slave against the politician and the merchant; some champion of first principles of humanity against the rich and luxurious; some adversary of the death penalty; some pleader for peace; some noble protestant, who will not stoop to infamy when all are gone mad, but will stand for liberty and justice, if alone, until all come back to him.

I confess I do not find in our people, with all their education, a fair share of originality of thought; — not any remarkable book of wisdom; not any broad generalization, any equal power of imagination. No Novum Organon; no Mécanique Céleste; no Principle; no Paradise Lost; no Hamlet; no Wealth of Nations; no National Anthem; have we yet contributed.

Nature is a frugal mother and never gives without measure. When she has work to do she qualifies men for that and sends them equipped for that. In Massachusetts she did not want epic poems and dramas yet, but first, planters of towns, fellers of the forest, builders of mills and forges, builders of roads, and farmers to till and harvest corn for the world. Corn, yes, but honest corn; corn with thanks to the Giver of corn; and the best thanks, namely, obedience to his law; this was the office imposed on our Founders and people; liberty, clean and wise. It was to be built on Religion, the Emancipator; Religion which teaches equality of all men in view of the spirit which created man.

The seed of prosperity was planted. The people did not gather where they had not sown. They did not try to unlock the treasure of the world except by honest keys of labor and skill. They knew, as God knew, that command of nature comes by obedience to nature; that reward comes by faithful service; that the most noble motto was that of the Prince of Wales,— “I serve,” — and that he is greatest who serves best. There was no secret of labor which they disdained.

They accepted the divine ordination that man is for use; that intelligent being exists to the utmost use; and that his ruin is to live for pleasure and for show. And when within our memory some flippant senator wished to taunt the people of this country by calling them, “the mudsills of society,” he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks, and the beds of rivers are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State.

The power of labor which belongs to the English race fell here into a climate which befriended it, and into a maritime country made for trade, where was no rival and no envious lawgiver. The sailor and the merchant made the law to suit themselves, so that there was never, I suppose, a more rapid expansion in population, wealth and all the elements of power, and in the citizens’ consciousness of power and sustained assertion of it, than was exhibited here.

Moral values become also money values. When men saw that these people, besides their industry and thrift, had a heart and soul and would stand by each other at all hazards, they desired to come and live here. A house in Boston was worth as much again as a house just as good in a town of timorous people, because here the neighbors would defend each other against bad governors and against troops; quite naturally house-rents rose in Boston.

Besides, youth and health like a stirring town, above a torpid place where nothing is doing. In Boston they were sure to see something going forward before the year was out. For here was the moving principle itself, the primum mobile , a living mind agitating the mass and always afflicting the conservative class with some odious novelty or other; a new religions sect, a political point, a point of honor, a reform in education, a philanthropy.

From Roger Williams and Eliot and Robinson and the Quaker women who for a testimony walked naked into the streets, and as the record tells us “were arrested and publicly whipped, — the baggages that they were;” from Wheelwright the Antinomian and Ann Hutchinson and Whitefield and Mother Ann the first Shaker, down to Abner Kneeland and Father Lamson and William Garrison, there never was wanting some thorn of dissent and innovation and heresy to prick the sides of conservatism.

With all their love of his person, they took immense pleasure in turning out the governor and deputy and assistants, and contravening the counsel of the clergy; as they had come so far for the sweet satisfaction of resisting the Bishops and the King.

The Massachusetts colony grew and filled its own borders with a denser population than any other American State (Kossuth called it the City State), all the while sending out colonies to every part of New England; then South and West, until it has infused all the Union with its blood.

We are willing to see our sons emigrate, as to see our hives swarm. That is what they were made to do, and what the land wants and invites. The towns or countries in which the man lives and dies where he was born, and his son and son’s son live and die where he did, are of no great account.

I know that this history contains many black lines of cruel injustice; murder, persecution, and execution of women for witchcraft.

I am afraid there are anecdotes of poverty and disease in Broad Street that match the dismal statistics of New York and London. No doubt all manner of vices can be found in this, as in every city; infinite meanness, scarlet crime. Granted. But there is yet in every city a certain permanent tone; a tendency to be in the right or in the wrong; audacity or slowness; labor or luxury; giving or parsimony; which side is it on? And I hold that a community, as a man, is entitled to be judged by his best.

We are often praised for what is least ours. Boston too is sometimes pushed into a theatrical attitude of virtue, to which she is not entitled and which she cannot keep. But the genius of Boston is seen in her real independence, productive power and northern acuteness of mind, — which is in nature hostile to oppression. It is a good city as cities go; Nature is good. The climate is electric, good for wit and good for character. What public souls have lived here, what social benefactors, what eloquent preachers, skilful workmen, stout captains, wise merchants; what fine artists, what gifted conversers, what mathematicians, what law-yers, what wits; and where is the middle class so able, virtuous and instructed?

And thus our little city thrives and enlarges, striking deep roots, and sending out boughs and buds, and propagating itself like a banyan over the continent. Greater cities there are that sprung from it, full of its blood and names and traditions. It is very willing to be outnumbered and outgrown, so long as they carry forward its life of civil and religious freedom, of education, of social order, and of loyalty to law. It is very willing to be outrun in numbers, and in wealth; but it is very jealous of any superiority in these, its natural instinct and privilege. You cannot conquer it by numbers, or by square miles, or by counted millions of wealth. For it owes its existence and its power to principles not of yesterday, and the deeper principle will always prevail over whatever material accumulations.

As long as she cleaves to her liberty, her education and to her spiritual faith as the foundation of these, she will teach the teachers and rule the rulers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers will toil better; she will repair mischief; she will furnish what is wanted in the hour of need; her sailors will man the Constitution; her mechanics repair the broken rail; her troops will be the first in the field to vindicate the majesty of a free nation, and remain last on the field to secure it. Her genius will write the laws and her historians record the fate of nations.

In an age of trade and material prosperity, we have stood a little stupefied by the elevation of our ancestors. We praised the Puritans because we did not find in ourselves the spirit to do the like. We praised with a certain adulation the invariable valor of the old war-gods and war-councillors of the Revolution. Washington has seemed an exceptional virtue. This praise was a concession of un-worthiness in those who had so much to say of it. The heroes only shared this power of a sentiment, which, if it now breathes into us, will make it easy to us to understand them, and we shall not longer flatter them. Let us shame the fathers, by superior virtue in the sons.

It is almost a proverb that a great man has not a great son. Bacon, Newton and Washington were childless. But, in Boston, Nature is more indulgent, and has given good sons to good sires, or at least continued merit in the same blood. The elder President Adams has to divide voices of fame with the younger President Adams. The elder Otis could hardly excel the popular eloquence of the younger Otis; and the Quincy of the Revolution seems compensated for the shortness of his bright career in the son who so long lingers among the last of those bright clouds,

“That on the steady breeze of honor sail

In long succession calm and beautiful.”

Here stands to-day as of yore our little city of the rocks; here let it stand forever, on the man-bearing granite of the North! Let her stand fast by herself! She has grown great. She is filled with strangers, but she can only prosper by adhering to her faith. Let every child that is born of her and every child of her adoption see to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun; and in distant ages her motto shall be the prayer of millions on all the hills that gird the town, “As with our Fathers, so God be with us!” SICUT PATRIBUS, SIT DEUS NOBIS!

THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF TUFTS COLLEGE, JULY 10, 1861

BY Sybarites beguiled,

He shall no task decline;

Merlin’s mighty line

Extremes of nature reconciled —

Bereaved a tyrant of his will,

And made the lion mild.

I KNOW the mighty bards,

I listen when they sing,

And now I know

The secret store

Which these explore

When they with torch of genius pierce

The tenfold clouds that cover

The riches of the universe

From God’s adoring lover.

And if to me it is not given

To fetch one ingot hence

Of the unfading gold of Heaven

His merchants may dispense,

Yet well I know the royal mine

And know the sparkle of its ore,

Know Heaven’s truths from lies that shine —

Explored, they teach us to explore.

CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT

I CANNOT consent to wander from the duties of this day into the fracas of politics. The brute noise of cannon has, I know, a most poetic echo in these days when it is an instrument of freedom and the primal sentiments of humanity. Yet it is but representative and a far-off means and servant: but here in the college we are in the presence of the constituency and the principle itself. Here is, or should be, the majesty of reason and the creative cause; and it were a compounding of all gradation and reverence to suffer the flash of swords and the boyish strife of passion and the feebleness of military strength to intrude on this sanctity and omnipotence of Intellectual Law. Against the heroism of soldiers I set the heroism of scholars, which consists in ignoring the other. You shall not put up in your Academy the statue of Caesar or Pompey, of Nelson or Wellington, of Washington or Napoleon, of Garibaldi, but of Archimedes, of Milton, of Newton. Archimedes disdained to apply himself to the useful arts, only to the liberal or the causal arts. Hiero  the king reproached him with his barren studies. Like Thales, he was willing to show him that he was quite able in rude matters, if he could condescend to them, and he conducted the defence of Syracuse against the Romans. Then he returned to his geometry; and when the Roman soldier, at the sack of Syracuse, broke into his study, the philosopher could not rise from his chair and his diagram, and took his death without resistance. Michael Angelo gave himself to art, despising all meaner pursuits. When the war came to his own city, he lent his genius, and defended Florence as long as he was obeyed. Milton congratulates the Parliament that, whilst London is besieged and blocked, the Thames infested, inroads and excursions round, and battle oft rumored to be marching up to her walls and suburb trenches, — yet then are the people, or the greater part, more than at other times wholly taken up with the study of highest and most important matters to be reformed, — they reasoning, reading, inventing, discoursing, even to a rarity and admiration, things not before discoursed or written, and the fact argues a just confidence in the grandeur and self-subsistency of the cause of religious liberty which made all material war an impertinence.

For either science and literature is a hypocrisy, or it is not. If it be, then resign your charter to the Legislature, turn your college into barracks and warehouses, and divert the funds of your founders into the stock of a rope-walk or a candle-factory, a tan-yard or some other undoubted conveniency for the surrounding population. But if the intellectual interest be, as I hold, no hypocrisy, but the only reality, — then it behooves us to enthrone it, obey it; and give it possession of us and ours; to give, among other possessions, the college into its hand casting down every idol, every pretender, every hoary lie, every dignified blunder that has crept into its administration.

At this season, the colleges keep their anniversaries, and in this country where education is a primary interest, every family has a representative in their halls, a son, a brother, or one of our own kindred is there for his training. But even if we had no son or friend therein, yet the college is part of the community, and it is there for us, is training our teachers, civilizers and inspirers. It is essentially the most radiating and public of agencies, like, but better than, the light-house, or the alarm-bell, or the sentinel who fires a signal-cannon, or the telegraph  which speeds the local news over the land. Besides, it deals with a force which it cannot monopolize or confine; cannot give to those who come to it and refuse to those outside. I have no doubt of the force, and for me the only question is, whether the force is inside.

This power which it deals is dear to all. If the colleges were better, if they had any monopoly of it, nay, if they really had it, had the power of imparting valuable thought, creative principles, truths which become powers, thoughts which become talents, — if they could cause that a mind not profound should become profound, — we should all rush to their gates: instead of contriving inducements to draw students, you would need to set police at the gates to keep order in the in-rushing multitude.

These are giddy times, and, you say, the college will be deserted. No, never was it so much needed. But I say, those were the giddy times which went before these, and the new times are the times of arraignment, times of trial and times of judgment. ‘T is because the college was false to its trust, because the scholars did not learn and teach, because they were traders and left their altars and libraries and worship of truth and played the sycophant to presidents and  generals and members of Congress, and gave degrees and literary and social honors to those whom they ought to have rebuked and exposed, incurring the contempt of those whom they ought to have put in fear; then the college is suicidal; ceases to be a school; power oozes out of it just as fast as truth does; and instead of overawing the strong, and upholding the good, it is a hospital for decayed tutors.

This Integrity over all partial knowledge and skill, homage to truth — how rare! Few men wish to know how the thing really stands, what is the law of it without reference to persons. Other men are victims of their means — sanity consists in not being subdued by your means.

Two men cannot converse together on any topic without presently finding where each stands in moral judgment; and each learns whether the other’s view commands, or is commanded by, his own. I presently know whether my companion has more candor or less, more hope for men or less, whether his sense of duty is more or less severe and his generosity larger than mine; whether he stands for ideal justice, or for a timorous expediency.

Society is always idolatrous and exaggerates the merits of those who work to vulgar ends.  But genius may be known by its probity. Never was pure valor — and almost I might say, never pure ability — shown in a bad cause. For ambition makes insane.

Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense and of simple justice, as at a wonderful discovery. Thus, at Mr. Rarey’s mode of taming a horse by kindness, or Garibaldi’s emancipation of Italy for Italy’s sake; at the introduction of gentleness into insane asylums, and of cleanliness and comfort into penitentiaries. A farmer wished to buy an ox. The seller told him how well he had treated the animal. “But,” said my farmer, “I asked the ox, and the ox showed me by marks that could not lie that he had been abused.” We affect to slight England and Englishmen. But I note that we had a vast self-esteem on the subject of Bunker Hill, Yorktown and New Orleans. We should not think it much to beat Indians or Mexicans, — but to beat English! The English newspapers and some writers of reputation disparage America. Meantime I note that the British people are emigrating hither by thousands, which is a very sincere, and apt to be a very seriously considered expression of opinion. The emigration into America of British, as well  as of Continental people, is the eulogy of America by the most competent and sincere arbiters. The hater of property and of government takes care to have his warranty-deed recorded; and the book written against fame and learning has the author’s name on the title-page. …

Gentlemen, I too am an American, and value practical talent. I love results and hate abortions. I delight in people who can do things. I value talent, — perhaps no man more. I value dearly the poet who knows his art so well that, when his voice vibrates, it fills the hearer with sympathetic song, just as a powerful note of an organ sets all tuned strings in its neighborhood in accordant vibration, — the novelist with his romance, the architect with his palace, the composer with his score. I wish you to be eloquent, to grasp the bolt and to hurl it home to the mark. I wish to see that Mirabeau who knows how to seize the heart-strings of the people and drive their hands and feet in the way he wishes them to go, to fill them with himself, to enchant men so that their will and purpose is in abeyance and they serve him with a million hands just as implicitly as his own members obey him. But I value it more when it is legitimate, when the talent is in true  order, subject to genius, subject to the total and native sentiment of the man, and therefore in harmony with the public sentiment of mankind. Such is the patriotism of Demosthenes, of Patrick Henry and of what was best in Cicero and Burke; not an ingenious special pleading, not the making a plausible case, but strong by the strength of the facts themselves. Then the orator is still one of the audience, persuaded by the same reasons which persuade them; not a ventriloquist, not a juggler, not a wire-puller paid to manage the lobby and caucus.

In Demosthenes is this realism of genius. He wins his cause honestly. His doctrine is self-reliance. “If it please you to note it, my counsels to you are not such whereby I should grow great among you, and you become little among the Grecians; but they be of that nature as is sometimes not good for me to give, but are always good for you to follow.”

You, gentlemen, are selected out of the great multitude of your mates, out of those who begun life with you, set apart through some strong persuasion of your own, or of your friends, that you were capable of the high privilege of thought. Need enough there is of such a band of priests of intellect and knowledge; and great  is the office, and well deserving and well paying the last sacrifices and the highest ability. But I wish this were a needless task, to urge upon you scholars the claims of thought and learning. The order of the world educates with care the senses and the understanding.  …

Men are as they think. A certain quantity of power belongs to a certain quantity of truth. And the man who knows any truth not yet discerned by other men is master of all other men, so far as that truth and its wide relations are concerned. Do you suppose that the thunderbolt falls short? Do you imagine that a lie will nourish and work like a truth? … The whole battle is fought in a few heads. A little finer order, a larger angle of vision, commands centuries of facts and millions of thoughtless people. It reverses all rank; “he who discriminates is the father of his father.” …

And yet the world is not saved. With this divine oracle, we somehow do not get instructed. Here are still perverse millions full of passion, crime and blood. Here are bad governors and bad subjects. Nay, in the class called intellectual the men are no better than the uninstructed. They use their wit and learning in the service of the Devil. There are bad books and false  teachers and corrupt judges; and in the institutions of education a want of faith in their own cause. Nay, it happens often that the well-bred and refined, the inhabitants of cities, dwelling amidst colleges, churches, and scientific museums, lectures, poets, libraries, newspapers, and other aids supposed intellectual are more vicious and malignant than the rude country people, and need to have their corrupt voting and violence corrected by the cleaner and wiser suffrages of poor farmers. The poet does not believe in his poetry. Men are ashamed of their intellect.  …

Instinct is the name for the potential wit, that feeling which each has that what is done by any man or agent is done by the same with as his. He looks at all men as his representatives, and is glad to see that his wit can work at that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it; whether it be to build, engineer, carve, paint, sing, heal, or compute, or play chess, or ride, or swim. We feel as if one man wrote all the books, painted, built, in dark ages, and we are sure we can do more than ever was done. It was the same mind that built the world.

The Understanding is the name we give to  the low, limitary power working to short ends, to daily life in house and street. This is the power which the world of men adopt and educate. He is the calculator, he is the merchant, the politician, the worker in the useful; he works by shifts, by compromise, by statute, by bribes. All his activities are to short, personal ends, and he is apt to be a talker, a boaster, a busy-body.

Will you let me say to you what I think is the organic law of learning? It is to observe the order, to keep down the talent, to enthrone the Instinct. There must be the perpetual rallying and self-recovery; each talent links itself so fast with self-love and with petty advantage that it loses sight of its obedience, which is beautiful, and sets up for itself, and makes confusion. Falsehood begins as soon as it disobeys, it works for show, and for the shop, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief and misleading, so that presently all is wrong, talent is mistaken for genius, dogma or system for truth.  …

Now the idea of a college is an assembly of such men, obedient each to this pure light, and drawing from it illumination to that science or art to which his constitution and affections draw  him. And the very highest advantage which a young man of good mind can meet is to find such a teacher. No books, no aids, laboratory, apparatus, prizes, can compare with this. Here is sympathy; here is an order that corresponds to that in his own mind, and in all sound minds, and the hope and impulse imparted. And education is what it should be, a delightful unfolding of the faculties in right order.

I could heartily wish it were otherwise, but there is a certain shyness of genius, of free thought, of a master of art in colleges, which is as old as the rejection of Molière by the French Academy, of Bentley by the pedants of his time, and only the other day, of Arago; in Oxford, the recent rejection of Max Müller. … If the truth must be told, thought is as rare in colleges as in cities. The necessity of a mechanical system is not to be denied. Young men must be classed and employed, not according to the secret needs of each mind but by some available plan that will give weekly and annual results; and a little violence must be done to private genius to accomplish this. Then genius is always its own law, and must be a little impatient and rebellious to this rule, so that, of necessity, a certain hostility and jealousy of genius grows up in the  masters of routine, and unless, by rare good fortune, the professor has a generous sympathy with genius and takes care to interpose a certain relief and cherishing and reverence for the wild poet and dawning philosopher he has detected in his classes, that will happen which has happened so often, that the best scholar, he for whom colleges exist, finds himself a stranger and an orphan therein. ‘T is precisely analogous to what befalls in religious societies. In the romance Spiridion a few years ago, we had what it seems was a piece of accurate autobiography, the story of a young saint who comes into a convent for her education, and not falling into the system and the little parties in the convent, but inspired with an enthusiasm which finds nothing there to feed it, it turns out in a few days that every hand is against this young votary. Piety in a convent accuses every one, from the novice to the abbess. What right have you to be better than your neighbor? Piety comes to be regarded as a spy and a rebel. … And how often we have had repeated the trails of the young man who made no figure at college because his own methods were new and extraordinary, and who only prospered at last because he forsook theirs and took his own.

It is true that the University and the Church, which should be counter balancing institutions to our great material institutions of trade and of territorial power, do not express the sentiment of the popular politics and the popular optimism, whatever it be. Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State Street votes it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted there which goes to adorn Boston Whiggism, — is it geology, astronomy, poetry, antiquities, art, rhetoric. But that which it exists for, to be a fountain of novelties out of heaven, a Delphos uttering warning and ravishing oracles to lift and lead mankind, — that it shall not be permitted to do or to think of.  On the contrary, every generosity of thought is suspect and gets a bad name. And all the youth come out decrepit citizens;  not a prophet, not a poet, not a daimon, but is gagged and stifled or driven away. All that is sought in the instruction is drill; tutors, not inspirers.

I conceive that a college should have no mean ambition, but should aim at a reverent discipline and invitation of the soul, that here, if no-where else in the world, genius should find its home; here Imagination should be greeted with the problems in which it delights; the noblest  tasks to the Muse proposed and the most cordial and honoring rewards; here the highest duties be urged, and enthusiasm for liberty and wisdom should breed enthusiasm and form heroes for the state. The College should hold the profound thought, and the Church the great heart to which the nation should turn, and these two should be counterbalancing to the bad politics and selfish trade. But there is but one institution, and not three. The Church and the College now take their tone from the City, and do not dictate their own. You all well know the downward tendency in literature, the facility with which men renounce their youthful aims and say, the labor is too severe, the prize too high for me; and they accept the employments of the market. …

Ah, gentlemen, it’s only a dream of mine, and perhaps never will be true, — but I thought a college was a place not to train talents, not to train attorneys, and those who say what they please, but to adorn Genius, which only speaks truth, and after the way which truth uses, namely, Beauty; a college was to teach you geometry, or the lovely laws of space and figure; chemistry, botany, zoölogy, the streaming of thought  into form, and the precipitation of atoms which Nature is.

This, then, is the theory of Education, the happy meeting of the young soul, filled with the desire, with the living teacher who has already made the passage from the centre forth, step by step, along the intellectual roads to the theory and practice of special science. Now if there be genius in the scholar, that is, a delicate sensibility to the laws of the world, and the power to express them again in some new form, he is made to find his own way. He will greet joyfully the wise teacher, but colleges and teachers are no wise essential to him; he will find teachers everywhere.

I would have you rely on Nature ever, — wise, omnific, thousand-handed Nature, equal to each emergency, which can do very well without colleges, and, if the Latin, Greek, Algebra or Art were in the parents, it will be in the children, without being pasted on.

If your college and your literature are not felt, it is because the truth is not in them. When you say the times, the persons are prosaic, where is the feudal, or the Saracenic, or Egyptian architecture? where the romantic manners? where the Romish or the Calvinistic  religion, which made a kind of poetry in the air for Milton, or Byron, or Belzoni? but to us it is barren, — you expose your atheism. Is a railroad, or a shoe-factory, or an insurance office, bank or bakery outside of the system and connection of things, or further from God than a sheep-pasture or a clam-bank? Is chemistry suspended? Do not the electricities and the imponderable influences play with all their magic undulations? Do not gravity and polarity keep their unerring watch on a needle and thread, on a cobbler’s lapstone or a switchman’s turntable as on the moon’s orbit? Only bring a deep observer, and he will make light of the new shop or old cathedral — all one to him — or new circumstances that afflict you. He will find the circumstances not altered; as deep a cloud of mystery on the cause, as dazzling a glory on the invincible law. Is it so important whether a man wears a shoe-buckle or ties his shoe-lappet with a string? … Bring the insight, and he will find as many beauties and heroes and astounding strokes of genius close by him as Shakspeare or AEschylus or Dante beheld. It was in a beggarly heath farm, it was in a mean country inn that Burns found his fancy so sprightly. You find the times and  places mean. My friend, stretch a few threads over a common AEolian harp, and put it in your window, and listen to what it says of times and the heart of Nature. I do not think that you will believe that the miracle of Nature is less, the chemical power worn out. Watch the breaking morning, the enchantments of the sunset.

If I had young men to reach, I should say to them, Keep the intellect sacred. Reverse it. Give all to it. Its oracles countervail all. Attention is its acceptable prayer. Sit low and wait long; and know that, next to being its minister, like Aristotle, and perhaps better than that, is the profound reception and sympathy, without ambition which secularizes and trades it. Go sit with the Hermit in you, who knows more than you do. You will find life enhanced, and doors opened to grander entertainments. Yet all comes easily that he does, as snow and vapor, heat, wind and light. Power costs nothing to the powerful. I should say to them, Do what you can do. He that draws on his own talent cannot be overshadowed or supplanted.  … Homage to truth discriminates good and evil. Power never departs from it.

Our colleges may differ much in the scale of requirements, and the examination for admission  and the examination for degrees and honors may be lax in this college and severe in that, and you may find facilities, translations, syllabuses and tutors here or there to coach you through, but ‘t is very certain that an examination is yonder before us and an examining committee that cannot be escaped nor deceived, that every scholar is to be put fairly on his own powers and must hear the questions proposed, and answer them by himself, and receive honor or dishonor according to the fidelity shown. For the men and women of your time, the circle of your friends and employers, your conditions, the invisible world, are the interrogators.  …

When the great painter was told by a dauber, “I have painted five pictures whilst you have made one,” he replied, “Pingo in aeternitatem.” “Study for eternity smiled on me,” says Van Helmont. And it were a good rule to read some lines at least every day that shall not be of the day’s occasion or task, but of study for eternity.

I have detained you too long; but it is the privilege of the moral sentiment to be every moment new and commanding, and old men  cannot see the powers of society, the institutions, the laws under which they have lived, passing, or soon to pass, into the hands of you and your contemporaries, without an earnest wish that you have caught sight of your high calling, your vast possibilities and inspiring duties.

COUNTRY LIFE

THE air is wise, the wind thinks well,

And all through which it blows;

If plant or brain, if egg or shell,

Or bird or biped knows.

What boots it here of Thebes or Rome,

Or lands of Eastern day?

In forests I am still at home

And there I cannot stray.

KEEN ears can catch a syllable,

As if one spoke to another,

In the hemlocks tall, untamable,

And what the whispering grasses smother.

Wonderful verse of the gods,

Of one import, of varied tone;

They chant the bliss of their abodes

To man imprisoned in his own.

COUNTRY LIFE

THE Teutonic race have been marked in all ages by a trait which has received the name of Earth-hunger, a love of possessing land. It is not less visible in that branch of the family which inhabits America. Nor is it confined to farmers, speculators, and filibusters, or conquerors. The land, the care of land, seems to be the calling of the people of this new country, of those, at least, who have not some decided bias, driving them to a particular craft, as a born sailor or machinist. The capable and generous, let them spend their talent on the land. Plant it, adorn it, study it, it will develop in the cultivator the talent it requires.

The avarice of real estate native to us all covers instincts of great generosity, namely, all that is called the love of Nature, comprising the largest use and the whole beauty of a farm or landed estate. Travel and walking have this apology, that Nature has impressed on savage men periodical or secular impulses to emigrate, as upon lemmings, rats and birds. The Indians go in summer to the coast, for fishing; in winter, to the woods. The nomads wander over vast  territory, to find their pasture. Other impulses hold us to other habits. As the increasing population finds new values in the ground, the nomad life is given up for settled homes. But the necessity of exercise and the nomadic instinct are always stirring the wish to travel, and in the spring and summer, it commonly gets the victory. Chaucer notes of the month of April,

“Than longen folk to goon on pilgrymages,

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes.”

And, in the country, Nature is always inviting to the compromise of walking as soon as we are released from severe labor. Linnaeus, early in life, read a discourse at the University of Upsala on the necessity of travelling in one’s own country, based on the conviction that Nature was inexhaustibly rich, and that in every district were swamps, or beaches, or rocks, or mountains, which were now nuisances, but, if explored, and turned to account, were capable of yielding immense benefit. At Upsala, therefore, he instituted what were called herborizations: he summoned his class to go with him on excursions on foot into the country, to collect plants and insects, birds and eggs. These parties started at seven in the morning, and stayed  out till nine in the evening; the Professor was generally attended by two hundred students, and, when they returned, they marched through the streets of Upsala in a festive procession, with flowers in their hats, to the music of drums and trumpets, and with loads of natural productions collected on the way.

Let me remind you what this walker found in his walks. He went into Oland, and found that the farms on the shore were perpetually encroached on by the sea, and ruined by blowing sand. He discovered that the arundo arenaris, or beach-grass, had long firm roots, and he taught them to plant it for the protection of their shores. In Tornea, he found the people suffering every spring from the loss of their cattle, which died by some frightful distemper, to the number of fifty or a hundred in a year. Linnaeus walked out to examine the meadow into which they were first turned out to grass, and found it a bog, where the water-hemlock grew in abundance, and had evidently been cropped plentifully by the animals in feeding. He found the plant also dried in their cut hay. He showed them that the whole evil might be prevented by employing a woman for a month to eradicate the noxious plants. When the ship-yards  were infested with rot, Linnaeus was sent to provide some remedy. He studied the insects that infested the timber, and found that they laid their eggs in the logs within certain days in April and he directed that during ten days, at that time of the year, the logs should be immersed under the water, which being done, the timber was found to be uninjured.

He found that the gout, to which he was subject, was cured by wood-strawberries. He had other remedies. When Kalm returned from America, Linnaeus was laid up with severe gout. But the joy in his return, and the curiosity to see his plants, restored him instantly, and he found an old friend as good as the treatment by wood-strawberries. He learned the secret of making pearls in the river-pearl mussel. He found out that a terrible distemper which sometimes proves fatal in the north of Europe, was occasioned by an animalcule, which he called Furia infernalis, which falls from the air on the face, or hand, or other uncovered part, burrows into it, multiplies and kills the sufferer. By timely attention, it is easily extracted.

He examined eight thousand plants; and examined fishes, insects, birds, quadrupeds; and distributed the animal, vegetable and mineral  kingdoms. And if, instead of running about in the hotels and theatres of Europe, we would, manlike, see what grows, or might grow, in Massachusetts, stock its gardens, drain its bogs, plant its miles and miles of barren waste with oak and pine, and following what is usually the natural suggestion of these pursuits, ponder the moral secrets which, in her solitudes, Nature has to whisper to us, we were better patriots and happier men.

We have the finest climate in the world, for this purpose, in Massachusetts. If we have coarse days, and dogdays, and white days, and days that are like ice-blinks, we have also yellow days, and crystal days, — days which are neither hot nor cold, but the perfection of temperature. New England has a good climate, — yet, in choosing a farm, we like a southern exposure, whilst Massachusetts, it must be owned, is on the northern slope, towards the Arctic circle, and the Pole. Our climate is a series of surprises, and among our many prognostics of the weather, the only trustworthy one that I know is that, when it is warm, it is a sign that it is going to be cold. The climate needs, therefore, to be corrected by a little anthracite coal, — a little coal indoors, during much of the year, and  thick coats and shoes must be recommended to walkers. I own I prefer the solar to the polar climates. “I have no enthusiasm for Nature,” said a French writer, “which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.”

But we cannot overpraise the comfort and the beauty of the climate in the best days of the year. In summer, we have for weeks a sky of Calcutta, yielding the richest growth, maturing plants which require strongest sunshine, and scores of days when the heat is so rich, and yet so tempered, that it is delicious to live.

The importance to the intellect of exposing the body and brain to the fine mineral and imponderable agents of the air makes the chief interest in the subject. “So exquisite is the structure of the cortical glands,” said the old physiologist Malpighi, “that when the atmosphere is ever so slightly vitiated or altered, the brain is the first part to sympathize and to undergo a change of state.” We are very sensible of this, when, in midsummer, we go to the seashore, or to mountains, or when, after much confinement to the house, we go abroad into the landscape, with any leisure to attend to its soothing and expanding influences. The power of the air was the first explanation offered by the early philosophers  of the mutual understanding that men have. “The air,” said Anaximenes, “is the soul, and the essence of life. By breathing it, we become intelligent, and, because we breathe the same air, understand one another.” Plutarch thought it contained the knowledge of the future. “If it be true that souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction, and that the chief cause that excites that faculty is a certain temperature of air and winds,” etc. Even Lord Bacon said, “The Stars inject their imagination or influence into the air.”

The air that we breathe is an exhalation of all the solid material of the globe. … It is the last finish of the work of the Creator. We might say, the Rock of Ages dissolves himself into the mineral air to build up this mystic constitution of man’s mind and body.

Walking has the best value as gymnastics for the mind. “You shall never break down in a speech,” said Sydney Smith, “on the day on which you have walked twelve miles.” In the English universities, the reading men are daily performing their punctual training in the boat-clubs, or a long gallop of many miles in the saddle, or, taking their famed “constitutionals,” walks of eight and ten miles. “Walking,” said  Rousseau, “has something which animates and vivifies my ideas.” And Plato said of exercise that “it would almost cure a guilty conscience.” “For the living out of doors, and simple fare, and gymnastic exercises, and the morals of companions, produce the greatest effect on the way of virtue and of vice.”

Few men know how to take a walk. The qualifications of a professor are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for Nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much. If a man tells me that he has an intense love of Nature, I know, of course, that he has none. Good observers have the manners of trees and animals, their patient good sense, and if they add words, ‘t is only when words are better than silence. But a loud singer, or a story-teller, or a vain talker profanes the river and the forest, and is nothing like so good company as a dog.

There is also an effect on beauty. … De Quincey said, “I have seen Wordsworth’s eyes sometimes affected powerfully in this respect. His eyes are not under any circumstances bright, lustrous or piercing, but, after a long day’s toil in walking, I have seen them assume an appearance the most solemn and spiritual that it is  possible for the human eye to wear. The light which resides in them is at no time a superficial light, but, under favorable accidents, it is a light which seems to come from depths below all depths; in fact, it is more truly entitled to be held ‘the light that never was on land or sea,’ a light radiating from some far spiritual world, than any that can be named.” But De Quincey prefixes to this description of Wordsworth a little piece of advice, which I wonder has not attracted more attention. “The depth and subtlety of the eyes varies exceedingly with the state of the stomach, and, if young ladies were aware of the magical transformations which can be wrought in the depth and sweetness of the eye by a few weeks’ exercise, I fancy we should see their habits in this point altered greatly for the better.”

For walking, you must have a broken country. In Illinois, everybody rides. There is no good walk in that state. The reason is, a square yard of it is as good as a hundred miles. You can distinguish from the cows a horse feeding, at the distance of five miles, with the naked eye. Hence, you have the monotony of Holland, and when you step out of the door can see all that you will have seen when you come home. In  Massachusetts, our land is agreeably broken, and is permeable like a park, and not like some towns in the more broken country of New Hampshire, built on three or four hills having each one side at forty-five degrees and the other side perpendicular: so that if you go a mile, you have only the choice whether you will climb the hill on your way out or on your way back. The more reason we have to be content with the felicity of our slopes in Massachusetts, undulating, rocky, broken and surprising, but without this alpine inconveniency. Twenty years ago in Northern Wisconsing the pinery was composed of trees so big, and so many of them, that it was impossible to walk in the country, and the traveller had nothing for it but to wade in the streams. One more inconveniency, I remember, they showed me in Illinois, that, in the bottom lands, the grass was fourteen feet high. We may well enumerate what compensating advantages we have over that country, for ‘t is a commonplace, which I have frequently heard spoken in Illinois, that it was a manifest leading of the Divine Providence that the New England states should have been first settled, before the Western country was known, or they would never have been settled at all.

The privilege of the countryman is the culture of the land, the laying out of grounds and gardens, the orchard and the forest. The Rosaceous tribe in botany, including the apple, pear, peach and cherry, are coeval with man. The apple is our national fruit. In October, the country is covered with its ornamental harvests. The American sun paints itself in these glowing balls amid the green leaves, the social fruit, in which Nature has deposited every possible flavor; whole zones and climates she has concentrated into apples. I am afraid you do not understand values. Look over the fence at the farmer who stands there. He makes every cloud in the sky, and every beam of the sun, serve him. His trees are full of brandy. He saves every drop of sap, as if it were wine. A few years ago those trees were whipsticks. Now, every one of them is worth a hundred dollars. Observe their form; not a branch nor a twig is to spare. They look as if they were arms and fingers, holding out to you balls of fire and gold. One tree yields the rent of an acre of land. Yonder pear has every property which should belong to a tree. It is hardy, and almost immortal. It accepts every species of nourishment, and yet could live, like an Arab, on air and water.  It grows like the ash Ygdrasil. It seems to me much that I have brought a skilful chemist into my ground, and keep him there overnight, all day, all summer, for an art he has, out of all kinds of refuse rubbish to manufacture Virgaliens, Bergamots, and Seckels, in a manner which no confectioner can approach, and his method of working is no less beautiful than the result.

In old towns there are always certain paradises known to the pedestrian, old and deserted farms, where the neglected orchard has been left to itself, and whilst some of its trees decay, the hardier have held their own. I know a whole district, Estabrook Farm, made up of wide, straggling orchards, where the apple-trees strive with and hold their ground against the native forest-trees: the apple growing with profusion that mocks the pains taken by careful cockneys, who come out into the country, plant young trees and watch them dwindling. Here, no hedges are wanted; the wide distance from any population is fence enough: the fence is a mile wide. Here are varieties of apple not found in Downing or Loudon. The “Tartaric” variety, and “Cow-apple,” and the “Bite-me-if-you-dare,” the “Beware-of-this.” Apples of a kind which I remember in boyhood, each containing  a barrel of wind and half a barrel of cider. But there was a contest between the old orchard and the invading forest-trees, for the possession of the ground, of the whites against the Pequots, and if the handsome savages win, we shall not be losers.  …

According to the common estimate of farmers, the wood-lot yields its gentle rent of six per cent., without any care or thought, when the owner sleeps or travels, and it is subject to no enemy but fire. Evelyn quotes Lord Caernarvon’s saying, “Wood is an excrescence of the earth provided by God for the payment of debts.”

When Nero advertised for a new luxury, a walk in the woods should have been offered. ‘T is one of the secrets for dodging old age. For Nature makes a like impression on age as on youth. Then I recommend it to people who are growing old, against their will. A man in that predicament, if he stands before a mirror, or among young people, is made quite too sensible of the fact; but the forest awakes in him the same feeling it did when he was a boy, and he may draw a moral from the fact that ‘t is the old trees that have all the beauty and grandeur. I admire the taste which makes the avenue to a  house, were the house never so small, through a wood; besides the beauty, it has a positive effect on manners, as it disposes the mind of the inhabitant and of his guests to the deference due to each. Some English reformers  thought the cattle made all this wide space necessary between house and house, and that, if there were no cows to pasture, less land would suffice. But a cow does not need so much land as the owner’s eyes require between him and his neighbor.

Our Aryan progenitors in Asia celebrated the winds as the conveying Maruts, “traversers of places difficult of access. Stable is their birth-place in the sky, but they are agitators of heaven and earth, who shake all around like the top of a tree. Because they drive the clouds, they have harnessed the spotted deer to their chariot; they are coming with weapons, war-cries and decorations. I hear the cracking of the whips in their hands. I praise their sportive resistless strength. They are the generators of speech. They drive before them in their course the long, vast, uninjurable, rain-retaining cloud. Wherever they pass, they fill the way with clamor. Every one hears their noise. The lightning roars like a parent cow that bellows for its  calf, and the rain is set free by the Maruts. Maruts, as you have vigor, invigorate mankind! Aswins (Waters), long-armed, good-looking Aswins! bearers of wealth, guides of men, harness your car! Ambrosia is in you, in you are medicinal herbs.” The Hindoos called fire Agni, born in the woods, bearer of oblations, smoke-bannered and light-shedding, lord of red coursers; the guest of man; protector of people in villages; the sacrificer visible to all, thousand-eyed, all-beholding, of graceful form and whose countenance is turned on all sides.

What uses that we know belong to the forest, and what countless uses that we know not! How an Indian helps himself with fibre of milkweed, or withe-bush, or wild hemp, or root of spruce, black or white, for strings; making his bow of hickory, birch, or even a fir-bough, at a pinch; hemlock bark for his roof, hair-moss or fern for his bed. He goes to a white birch-tree, and can fit his leg with a seamless boot, or a hat for his head. He can draw sugar from the maple, food and antidotes from a hundred plants. He knows his way in a straight line from watercourse to watercourse, and you cannot lose him in the woods. He consults  by way of natural compass, when he travels: (1) large pine-trees, which bear more numerous branches on their southern side; (2) ant-hills, which have grass on their south and whortleberries on the north; (3) aspens, whose bark is rough on the north and smooth on the south side. All his knowledge is for use, and it only appears in use, whilst white men have theirs also for talking purposes.

I am a very indifferent botanist, but I admire that perennial four-petalled flower, which has one gray petal, one green, one red, and one white. I think sometimes how many days could Methuselah go out and find something new! In January the new snow has changed the woods so that he does not know them; has built sudden cathedrals in a night. In the familiar forest he finds Norway and Russia in the masses of overloading snow which break all that they cannot bend. In March, the thaw, and the sounding of the south wind, and the splendor of the icicles. On the pond there is a cannonade of a hundred guns, but it is not in honor of election of any President. He went forth again after the rain; in the cold swamp, the buds are swollen, the ictodes prepares its flower, and the mallows and mouse-ear. The mallows the Greeks held  sacred as giving the first sign of the sympathy of the earth with the celestial influences. The next day the Hylas were piping in every pool, and a new activity among the hardy birds, the premature arrival of the bluebird, and the first northward flight of the geese, who cannot keep their joy to themselves, and fly low over the farms. In May, the bursting of the leaf, — the oak and maple are red with the same colors on the new leaf which they will resume in autumn when it is ripe. In June, the miracle works faster,

Painting with white and red the moors

To draw the nations out of doors.

Man feels the blood of thousands in his body, and pumps the sap of all this forest through his arteries; the loquacity of all birds in the morning; and the immensity of life seems to make the world deep and wide. In August, when the corn is grown to be a resort and protection to woodcocks and small birds, and when the leaves whisper to each other in the wind, we observe already that the leaf is sere, that a change has passed on the landscape. The world has nothing to offer more rich or entertaining than the days which October always bring us, when, after the first frosts, a steady shower of gold  falls in the strong south wind from the chestnuts, maples and hickories: all the trees are wind-harps, filling the air with music; and all men become poets, and walk to the measure of rhymes they make or remember. The dullest churl begins to quaver. The forest in its coat of many colors reflects its varied splendor through the softest haze. The witch-hazel blooms to mark the last hour arrived, and that Nature has played out her summer score. The dry leaves rustle so loud, as we go rummaging through them, that we can hear nothing else. The leaf in our dry climate gets fully ripe, and, like the fruit when fully ripe, acquires fine color, whilst, in Europe, the damper climate decomposes it too soon.

But the pleasures of garden, orchard and wood must be alternated. We know the healing effect on the sick of change of air, — the action of new scenery on the mind is not less fruitful. We must remember that man is a natural nomad, and his old propensities will stir at midsummer, and send him, like an Indian, to the sea. The influence of the ocean on the love of liberty, I have mentioned elsewhere. Its power on the mind in sharpening the perceptions has made the sea the famous educator of our race.  The history of the world, — what is it but the doings about the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic? …

What freedom of grace has the sea with all this might! … The freedom makes the observer feel as a slave. Our expression is so thin and cramped! Can we not learn here a generous eloquence? This was the lesson our starving poverty wanted. … At Niagara, I have noticed, that, as quick as I got out of the wetting of the Fall, all the grandeur changed into beauty. You cannot keep it grand, ‘t is so quickly beautiful; and the sea gave me the same experience. ‘T is great and formidable, when you lie down in it, among the rocks. But, on the shore, at one rod’s distance, ‘t is changed into a beauty as of gems and clouds. Shores in sight of each other in a warm climate make boat-builders; and whenever we find a coast broken up into bays and harbors, we find an instant effect on the intellect and industry of the people.

On the seashore the play of the Atlantic with the coast! What wealth is here! Every wave is a fortune; one thinks of Etzlers and great projectors who will yet turn all this waste strength to account: what strength and fecundity, from the sea-monsters, hugest of animals,  to the primary forms of which it is the immense cradle, and the phosphorescent infusories; — it is one vast rolling bed of life, and every sparkle is a fish. What freedom and grace with all this might! The seeing so excellent a spectacle is a certificate to the mind that all imaginable good shall yet be realized. The sea is the chemist that dissolves the mountain and the rock; pulverizes old continents, and builds new; — forever redistributing the solid matter of the globe; and performs an analogous office in perpetual new transplanting of the races of men over the surface, the Exodus of nations. We may well yield us for a time to its lessons. But the nomad instinct, as I said, persists to drive us to fresh fields and pastures new. Indeed the variety of our moods has an answering variety in the face of the world, and the sea drives us back to the hills.

Dr. Johnson said of the Scotch mountains, “The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care.” The poor blear-eyed doctor was no poet. Like Charles Lamb, he loved the sweet security of streets. It was said of him that “he preferred the Strand to the Garden of the Hesperides.” But this is not the experience of  imaginative men, nor of men with good eyes and susceptible organizations. “For my own part,” says Linnaeus, “I have enjoyed good health, except a slight languor, but as soon as I got upon the Norway Alps I seemed to have acquired a new existence. I felt as if relieved from a heavy burden. Then, spending a few days in the low country of Norway, though without committing the least excess, my languor or heaviness returned. When I again ascended the Alps, I revived as before.” And he celebrates the health and performance of the Laps as the best walkers of Europe. “Not without admiration, I have watched my two Lap companions, in my journey to Finmark, one, my conductor, the other, my interpreter. For after having climbed the Alps, whilst I, a youth of twenty-five years, was spent and tired, like one dead, and lay down as if to die in those ends of the world, these two old men, one fifty, one seventy years, running and playing like boys, felt none of the inconveniences of the road, although they were both loaded heavily enough with my baggage. I saw men more than seventy years old put their heel on their own neck, without any exertion. O holy simplicity of diet, past all praise!”

But beside their sanitary and gymnastic benefit, mountains are silent poets, and a view from a cliff over a wide country undoes a good deal of prose, and reinstates us wronged men in our rights. The imagination is touched. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we are glad to see the world, and what amplitudes it has, of meadow, stream, upland, forest and sea, which yet are lanes and crevices to the great space in which the world shines like a cockboat in the sea.

Of the finer influences, I shall say that they are not less positive, if they are indescribable. If you wish to know the shortcomings of poetry and language, try to reproduce the October picture to a city company, — and see what you make of it.  There is somewhat finer in the sky than we have senses to appreciate. It escapes us, and yet is only just beyond our reach. Is all this beauty to perish? Where is he who is to save the perfect moment, and cause that this beauty shall not be lost? Where is he who has senses fine enough to catch the inspiration of the landscape? The mountains in the horizon acquaint us with finer relations to our friends than any we sustain.

I think ‘t is the best of humanity that goes  out to walk. In happy hours, I think all affairs may be wisely postponed for this walking. Can you hear what the morning says to you, and believe that? Can you bring home the summits of Wachusett, Greylock, and the New Hampshire hills? the Savin groves of Middlesex? the sedgy ripples of the old Colony ponds? the sunny shores of your own bay, and the low Indian hills of Rhode Island? the savageness of pine-woods? Can you bottle the efflux of a June noon, and bring home the tops of Uncanoonuc? The landscape is vast, complete, alive. We step about, dibble and dot, and attempt in poor linear ways to hobble after those angelic radiations. The gulf between our seeing and our doing is a symbol of that between faith and experience. …

Our schools and colleges strangely neglect the general education of the eye. Every acquisition we make in the science of beauty is so sweet that I think it is cheaply paid for by what accompanies it, of course, the prating and affectation of connoisseurship. The facts disclosed by Winkelmann, Goethe, Bell, Greenough, Ruskin, Garbett, Penrose, are joyful possessions, which we cannot spare, and which we rank close beside the disclosures of natural history. There are  probably many in this audience who have tried the experiment on a hilltop, and many who have not, of bending the head so as to look at the landscape with your eyes upside down. What new softness in the picture! It changes the landscape from November into June. My companion and I remarked from the hilltop the prevailing sobriety of color, and agreed that russet was the hue of Massachusetts, but on trying this experiment of inverting the view he said, “There is the Campagna! and Italy is Massachusetts upside down.” The effect is remarkable, and perhaps is not explained. An ingenious friend of mine suggested that it was because the upper part of the eye is little used, and therefore retains more susceptibility than the lower, and returns more delicate impressions.

Dr. Johnson said, “Few men know how to take a walk,” and it is certain that Dr. Johnson was not one of the few. It is a fine art, requiring rare gifts and much experience. No man is suddenly a good walker. Many men begin with good resolution, but they do not hold out, and I have sometimes thought it would be well to publish an Art of Walking, with Easy Lessons for Beginners. These we call apprentices. Those  who persist from year to year, and obtain at last an intimacy with the country, and know all the good points within ten miles, with the seasons for visiting each, know the lakes, the hills, where grapes, berries and nuts, where the rare plants are; where the best botanic ground; and where the noblest landscapes are seen, and are learning all the time; — these we call professors. …

Nature kills egotism and conceit; deals strictly with us; and gives sanity; so that it was the practice of the Orientals, especially of the Persians, to let insane persons wander at their own will out of the towns, into the desert, and, if they liked, to associate with wild animals. In their belief, wild beasts, especially gazelles, collect around an insane person, and live with him on a friendly footing. The patient found something curative in that intercourse, by which he was quieted, and sometimes restored. But there are more insane persons than are called so, or are under treatment in hospitals. The crowd in the cities, at the hotels, theatres, card-tables, the speculators who rush for investment, at ten per cent., twenty per cent., cent. per cent., are all more or less mad, — I need not say it now in the crash of bankruptcy; — these  point the moral, and persuade us to seek in the fields the health of the mind.

I hold all these opinions on the power of the air to be substantially true. The poet affirms them; the religious man, going abroad, affirms them; the patriot on his mountains or his prairie affirms them; the contemplative man affirms them.

Nature tells everything once. Our microscopes are not necessary. She shows every fact in large bodies somewhere. On the seashore, she reveals to the eye, by the sea-line, the true curve of the globe. It does not need a barometer to find the height of mountains. The line of snow is surer than the barometer: and the zones of plants, the savin, the pine, vernal gentian, plum, linnaea and the various lichens and grapes are all thermometers which cannot be deceived, and will not lie. They are instruments by the best maker. The earthquake is the first chemist, goldsmith and brazier: he wrought to purpose in craters, and we borrowed the hint in crucibles. When I look at natural structures, as at a tree, or the teeth of a shark, or the anatomy of an elephant, I know that I am seeing an architecture and carpentry which has no sham, is solid and conscientious, which perfectly answers  its end, and has nothing to spare. But in all works of human art there is deduction to be made for blunder and falsehood. Therefore Goethe, whose whole life was a study of the theory of art, said no man should be admitted to his Republic, who was not versed in Natural History.

The college is not so wise as the mechanic’s shop, nor the quarter-deck as the forecastle. Witness the insatiable interest of the white man about the Indian, the trapper, the hunter and sailor. In a water-party in which many scholars joined, I noted that the skipper of the boat was much the best companion. The scholars made puns. The skipper saw instructive facts on every side, and there was no trifle to him. How startling are the hints of wit we detect in the horse and dog, and in the wild animals! By what compass the geese steer, and the herring migrate, we would so gladly know. What the dog knows, and how he knows it, piques us more than all we heard from the chair of metaphysics.

Is it not an eminent convenience to have in your town a person who knows where arnica grows, or sassafras, or pennyroyal, and the mints, or the scented goldenrod, or punk for  slow-match; or the slippery-elm, or wild cherries, or wild pears? Where are the best hazel-nuts, chestnuts and shagbarks? Where the white grapes? Where are the choice apple-trees? And what are the poisons? Where is the Norway pine, where the beech, where the epigaea, the linnaea, or sanguinaria, or orchis pulcherrima, or sundew, or laurus benzoin, or pink huckleberry? where trout, woodcocks, wild bees, pigeons, where the bittern (stake-driver) can be seen and heard, where the Wilson’s plover can be seen and heard?

The true naturalist can go wherever woods or waters go; almost where a squirrel or a bee can go, he can; and no man is asked for leave. Sometimes the farmer withstands him in crossing his lots, but ‘t is to no purpose; the farmer could as well hope to prevent the sparrows or tortoises. It was their land before it was his, and their title was precedent. My naturalist knew what was on their land, and the farmers did not, and sometimes he brought them ostentatiously gifts of flowers, fruits or rare shrubs they would gladly have paid a price for, and did not tell them that he gathered them in their own woods. Moreover the very time at which he used their land and water (for his boat glided  like a trout everywhere unseen) was in hours when they were sound asleep. Before the sun was up, he went up and down to survey his possessions, and passed onward and left them, before the second owners, as he called them, were awake.

If we should now say a few words on the advantages that belong to the conversation with Nature, I might set them so high as to make it a religious duty. ‘T is the greatest use and the greatest beauty. ‘T is the lesson we were put hither to learn. What truth, and what elegance belong to every fact of Nature, we know. And the study of them awakens the like truth and elegance in the student. One thing, the lover of Nature cannot tell the best thing he knows.  …

What alone possesses interest for us is the naturel of each man. This is that which is the saliency, or principle of levity, the antagonist of matter and gravitation, and as good as they. This is forever a surprise, and engaging, and lovely. We can’t be satiated with knowing it, and about it. It is related to the purest of the world, to gravity, the growth of grass, and the angles of crystals. Nature speaks to the imagination;  first, through her grand style, — the hint of immense force and unity which her works convey; second, because her visible productions and changes are the nouns of language, and our only means of uttering the invisible thought. Every new perception of the method and beauty of Nature gives a new shock of surprise and pleasure; and always for this double reason: first, because they are so excellent in their primary fact, as frost, or cloud, or fire, or animal; and, secondly, because we have an instinct that they express a grander law.

‘T is not easy to say again what Nature says to us. But it is the best part of poetry, merely to name natural objects well. A farmer’s boy finds delight in reading the verses under the Zodiacal vignettes in the Almanac. What is the merit of Thomson’s Seasons but copying a few of the pictures out of this vast book into words, without a hint of what they signify, and the best passages of great poets, old and new, are often simple enumerations of some features of landscape. And as man is the object of Nature, what we study in Nature is man. ‘T is true, that man only interests us. We are not to be imposed upon by the apparatus and the nomenclature of the physiologist. Agassiz  studies year after year fishes and fossil anatomy of saurian, and lizard, and pterodactyl. But whatever he says, we know very well what he means. He pretends to be only busy with the foldings of the yolk of a turtle’s egg. I can see very well what he is driving at; he means men and women. He talks about lizard, shell-fish and squid, he means John and Mary, Thomas and Ann. For Nature is only a mirror in which man is reflected colossally. Swedenborg or Behman or Plato tried to decipher this hieroglyphic, and explain what rock, what sand, what wood, what fire signified in regard to man.

They may have been right or wrong in any particulars of their interpretation, but it is only our ineradicable belief that the world answers to man, and part to part, that gives any interest in the subject. If we believed that Nature was foreign and unrelated, — some rock on which souls wandering in the Universe were shipwrecked, we should think all exploration of it frivolous waste of time. No, it is bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, made of us, as we of it. External Nature is only a half. The geology, the astronomy, the anatomy, are all good, but ‘t is all a half, and — enlarge it by astronomy never so far — remains a half. It requires a  will as perfectly organized, — requires man. Astronomy is a cold, desert science, with all its pompous figures, — depends a little too much on the glass-grinder, too little on the mind. ‘T is of no use to show us more planets and systems. We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify. He can dispose in his thought of more worlds, just as readily as of few, or one. It is his relation to one, to the first, that imports. Nay, I will say, of the two facts, the world and man, man is by much the larger half.

I know that the imagination … is a coy, capricious power, and does not impart its secret to inquisitive persons. Sometimes a parlor in which fine persons are found, with beauty, culture and sensibility, answers our purpose still better. Striking the electric chain with which we are darkly bound, but that again is Nature, and there we have again the charm which landscape gives us, in a finer form; but the persons must have had the influence of Nature, must know her simple, cheap pleasures, must know what Pindar means when he says that “water is the best of things,” and have manners that speak of reality and great elements, or we shall know no Olympus.

Matter, how immensely soever enlarged by the telescope, remains the lesser half. The very science by which it is shown to you argues the force of man. Nature is vast and strong, but as soon as man knows himself as its interpreter, knows that Nature and he are from one source, and that he, when humble and obedient, is nearer to the source, then all things fly into place, then is there a rider to the horse, an organized will, then Nature has a lord.

CONCORD WALKS

NOT many men see beauty in the fogs

Of close, low pine-woods in a river town;

Yet unto me not morn’s magnificence

Nor the red rainbow of a summer’s eve,

Nor Rome, nor joyful Paris, nor the halls

Of rich men, blazing hospitable light,

Nor wit, nor eloquence, — no, nor even the song

Of any woman that is now alive, —

Hath such a soul, such divine influence,

Such resurrection of the happy past,

As is to me when I behold the morn

Ope in such low, moist roadside, and beneath

Peep the blue violets out of the black loam.

THERE is no rood has not a star above it;

The cordial quality of pear or plum

Ascends as gladly in a single tree

As in broad orchards resonant with bees;

And every atom poises for itself,

And for the whole. The gentle deities

Showed me the love of color and of sounds,

The innumerable tenements of beauty,

The miracle of generative force,

Far-reaching concords of astronomy

Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;

Better, the linkèd purpose of the whole.

CONCORD WALKS

WHEN I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks and thrushes, which were not charged in the bill; as little did I guess what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying — what reaches of landscape, and what fields and lanes for a tramp. Neither did I fully consider what an indescribable luxury is our Indian river, the Musketaquid, — which runs parallel with the village street and to which every house on that long street has a back door, which leads down through the garden to the river-bank, when a skiff, or a dory, gives you, all summer, access to enchantments, new every day, and all winter, to miles of ice for the skater.  And because our river is no Hudson or Mississippi I have a problem long waiting for an engineer, — this, — to what height I must build a tower in my garden that shall show me the Atlantic Ocean from its top — the ocean twenty miles away.

Still less did I know what good and true neighbors I was buying, men of thought and virtue, some of them now known the country through for their learning, or subtlety, or active  or patriotic power, but whom I had the pleasure of knowing long before the Country did; and of other men not known widely but known at home, farmers, — not doctors of laws but doctors of land, skilled in turning a swamp or a sand-bank into a fruitful field, and, when witch-grass and nettles grew, causing a forest of apple-trees or miles of corn and rye to thrive.

I did not know what groups of interesting school-boys and fair school-girls were to greet me in the highway, and to take hold of one’s heart at the School Exhibitions.

“Little joy has he who has no garden,” said Saadi. Montaigne took much pains to be made a citizen of Rome; and our people are vain, when abroad, of having the freedom of foreign cities presented to them in a gold box. I much prefer to have the freedom of a garden presented me. When I go into a good garden, I think, if it were mine, I should never go out of it. It requires some geometry in the head to lay it out rightly, and there are many who can enjoy to one that can create it.

Linnaeus, who was professor of the Royal Garden at Upsala, took the occasion of a public ceremony to say, “I thank God, who has ordered my fate, that I live in this time, and so  ordered it that I live happier than the king of the Persians. You know, fathers and citizens, that I live entirely in the Academy Garden; here is my Vale of Tempe, say rather my Elysium. I possess here all that I desire of the spoils of the East and the West, and, unless I am very much mistaken, what is far more beautiful than Babylonian robes, or vases of the Chinese. Here I learn what I teach. Here I admire the wisdom of the Supreme Artist, disclosing Himself by proofs of every kind, and show them to others.” Our people are learning that lesson year by year. As you know, nothing in Europe is more elaborately luxurious than the costly gardens, — as the Boboli at Florence, the Borghese, the Orsini at Rome, the Villa d’ Este at Tivoli; with their greenhouses, conservatories, palm-houses, fish-ponds, sculptured summer-houses and grottoes; but without going into the proud niceties of an European garden, there is happiness all the year round to be had from the square fruit-gardens which we plant in the front or rear of every farmhouse. In the orchard, we build monuments to Van Mons  annually.

The place where a thoughtful man in the country feels the joy of eminent domain is in his wood-lot. If he suffer from accident or low  spirits, his spirits rise when he enters it. He can spend the entire day therein, with hatchet or pruning-shears, making paths, without remorse of wasting time. He can fancy that the birds know him and trust him, and even the trees make little speeches or hint them. Then he remembers that Allah in his allotment of life “does not count the time which the Arab spends in the chase.”

If you can add to the garden a noble luxury, let it be an arboretum. In the arboretum you should have things which are of a solitary excellence, and which people who read of them are hungry to see. Thus plant the Sequoia Gigantea, give it room, and set it on its way of ten or fifteen centuries. Bayard Taylor planted two — one died, but I saw the other looking well. Plant the Banian, the Sandal-tree, the Lotus, the Upas, Ebony, Century Aloes, the Soma of the Vedas — Asclepias Viminalis, the Mandrake and Papyrus, Dittany, Asphodel, Nepenthe, Haemony, Moly, Spikenard, Amomum.  Make a calendar — your own — of the year, that you may never miss your favorites in their month. As Linnaeus made a dial of plants, so shall you of all the objects that guide your walks.

Learn to know the conspicuous planets in  the heavens, and the chief constellations. Thus do not forget the 14th of November, when the meteors come, and on some years drop into your house-yard like sky-rockets. And ‘t is worth remarking, what a man may go through life without knowing, that a common spy-glass, which you carry in your pocket, will show the satellites of Jupiter, and turned on the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, in which most eyes can only count six, — will show many more, — a telescope in an observatory will show two hundred. How many poems have been written, or, at least attempted, on the lost Pleiad! for though that pretty constellation is called for thousands of years the “Seven Stars,” most eyes can only count six.

Horses and carriages are costly toys, but the word park always charms me. I could not find it in my heart to chide the citizen who should ruin himself to buy a patch of heavy oak timber. I admire the taste which makes the avenue to the house — were the house never so small — through a wood; — as it disposes the mind of the inhabitant and of his guest to the deference due to each.

There are two companions, with one or other  of whom ‘t is desirable to go out on a tramp. One is an artist, that is, who has an eye for beauty. If you use a good and skilful companion, you shall see through his eyes; and, if they be of great discernment, you will learn wonderful secrets. In walking with Allston, you shall see what was never before shown to the eye of man. And as the perception of beauty always exhilarates, if one is so happy as to find the company of a true artist, he is a perpetual holiday and benefactor, and ought only to be used like an oriflamme or a garland, for feasts and May-days, and parliaments of wit and love.

The other is a naturalist, for the reason that it is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany, of ornithology and astronomy by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book. There is so much, too, which a book cannot teach which an old friend can. A man should carry Nature in his head — should know the hour of the day or night, and the time of the year, by the sun and stars; should know the solstice and the equinox, the quarter of the moon and the daily tides.

This is my ideal of the powers of wealth. Find out what lake or sea Agassiz wishes to explore, and offer to carry him there, and he  will make you acquainted with all its fishes: or what district Dr. Gray has not found the plants of, — carry him; or when Dr. Wyman wishes to find new anatomic structures or fossil remains; or when Dr. Charles Jackson or Mr. Hall would study chemistry or mines; and you secure the best company and the best teaching with every advantage.

But the countryman, as I said, has more than he paid for; the landscape is his. I am sorry to say the farmers seldom walk for pleasure. It is a fine art; — there are degrees of proficiency, and we distinguish the professors of that science from the apprentices. But there is a manifest increase in the taste for it. ‘T is the consolation of mortal men. It is an old saying that physicians or naturalists are the only professional men who continue their tasks out of study-hours; and the naturalist has no barren places, no winter, and no night, pursuing his researches in the sea, in the ground, in barren moors, in the night even, because the woods exhibit a whole new world of nocturnal animals; in winter, because, remove the snow a little, a multitude of plants live and grow, and there is a perpetual push of buds, so that it is impossible to say when vegetation begins. I think  no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it.

I admire in trees the creation of property so clean of tears, or crime, or even care. No lesson of chemistry is more impressive to me than this chemical fact that “Nineteen twentieths of the timber are drawn from the atmosphere.” We knew the root was sucking juices from the ground. But the top of the tree is also a tap-root thrust into the public pocket of the atmosphere. This is a highwayman, to be sure. And I am always glad to remember that in proportion to the foliation is the addition of wood. Then they grow, when you wake and when you sleep, at nobody’s cost, and for everybody’s comfort. Lord Abercorn, when some one praised the rapid growth of his trees, replied, “Sir, they have nothing else to do!”

That uncorrupted behavior which we admire in the animals, and in young children, belongs also to the farmer, the hunter, the sailor, the man who lives in the presence of Nature. Cities force the growth and make him talkative and entertaining, but they make him artificial. What alone possesses interest for us is the naturel of each, that which is constitutional to  him only. This is forever a surprise, and engaging, and lovely; we can’t be satiated with knowing it, and about it, and this is that which the conversation with Nature goes to cherish and to guard.

The man finds himself expressed in Nature. Yet when he sees this annual reappearance of beautiful forms, the lovely carpet, the lovely tapestry of June, he may well ask himself the special meaning of the hieroglyphic, as well as the sense and scope of the whole — and there is a general sense which the best knowledge of the particular alphabet leaves unexplained.

ART AND CRITICISM

To clothe the fiery thought

In simple words succeeds,

For still the craft of genius is

To mask a king in weeds.

ART AND CRITICISM

LITERATURE is but a poor trick, you will say, when it busies itself to make words pass for things; and yet I am far from thinking this subordinate service unimportant. The secondary services of literature may be classed under the name of Rhetoric, and are quite as important in letters as iron is in war. An enumeration of the few principal weapons of the poet or writer will at once suggest their value.

Writing is the greatest of arts, the subtilest, and of most miraculous effect; and to it the education is costliest. On the writer the choicest influences are concentrated, — nothing that does not go to his costly equipment: a war, an earthquake, revival of letters, the new dispensation by Jesus, or by Angels; Heaven, Hell, power, science, the Néant,  exist to him as colors for his brush.

In this art modern society has introduced a new element, by introducing a new audience. The decline of the privileged orders, all over the world; the advance of the Third Estate; the transformation of the laborer into reader and writer has compelled the learned and the  thinkers to address them. Chiefly in this country, the common school has added two or three audiences: once, we had only the boxes; now, the galleries and the pit.

There is, in every nation, a style which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered. This style is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The polite are always catching modish innovations, and the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better; those who wish for distinction forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is right; but there is a conversation above grossness and below refinement where prosperity resides, and where Shakspeare seems to have gathered his comic dialogue. Goethe valued himself not on his learning or eccentric flights, but that he knew how to write German. And many of his poems are so idiomatic, so strongly rooted in the German soil, that they are the terror of translators, who say they cannot be rendered into any other language without loss of vigor, as we say of any darling passage of  our own masters. “Le style c’est l’homme,” said Buffon; and Goethe said, “Poetry here, poetry there, I have learned to speak German.” And when I read of various extraordinary polyglots, self-made or college-made, who can understand fifty languages, I answer that I shall be glad and surprised to find that they know one. For if I were asked how many masters of English idiom I know, I shall be perplexed to count five.

Ought not the scholar to convey his meaning in terms as short and strong as the smith and the drover use to convey theirs? You know the history of the eminent English writer on gypsies, George Borrow; he had one clear perception, that the key to every country was command of the language of the common people. He therefore mastered the patois of the gypsies, called Romany, which is spoken by them in all countries where they wander, in Europe, Asia, Africa. Yet much of the raw material of the street-talk is absolutely untranslatable into print, and one must learn from Burke how to be severe without being unparliamentary. Rabelais and Montaigne are masters of this Romany, but cannot be read aloud, and so far fall short. Whitman is our American master, but has not got  out of the Fire-Club and gained the entrée of the sitting-rooms. Bacon, if “he could out-cant a London chirurgeon,” must have possessed the Romany under his brocade robes. Luther said, “I preach coarsely; that giveth content to all. Hebrew, Greek and Latin I spare, until we learned ones come together, and then we make it so curled and finical that God himself wondereth at us.” He who would be powerful must have the terrible gift of familiarity, — Mirabeau, Chatham, Fox, Burke, O’Connell, Patrick Henry; and among writers, Swift, De Foe and Carlyle.

Look at this forlorn caravan of travellers who wander over Europe dumb, — never exchange a word, in the mother tongue of either, with prince or peasant; but condemned to the company of a courier and of the padrone when they cannot take refuge in the society of countrymen. A well-chosen series of stereoscopic views would have served a better purpose, which they can explore at home, sauced with joyful discourse and with reference to all the books in your library.

Speak with the vulgar, think with the wise. See how Plato managed it, with an imagination so gorgeous, and a taste so patrician, that Jove,  if he descended, was to speak in his style. Into the exquisite refinement of his Academy, he introduces the low-born Socrates, relieving the purple diction by his perverse talk, his gallipots, and cook, and trencher, and cart-wheels — and steadily kept this coarseness to flavor a dish else too luscious. Everybody knows the points in which the mob has the advantage of the Academy, and all able men have known how to import the petulance of the street into correct discourse. I heard, when a great bank president was expounding the virtues of his party and of the government to a silent circle of bank pensioners, a grave Methodist exclaimed “Fiddle-sticks!” The whole party were surprised and cheered, except the bank president, though it would be difficult to explain the propriety of the expression, as no music or fiddle was so much as thought of.

Not only low style, but the lowest classifying words outvalue arguments; as, upstart, dab, cockney, prig, granny, lubber, puppy, peacock— “A cocktail House of Commons.” I remember when a venerable divine [Dr. Osgood] called the young preacher’s sermon “patty cake.” The sans-culottes at Versailles cried out, “Let our little Mother Mirabeau speak!” Who has  not heard in the street how forcible is bosh, gammon and gas. The short Saxon words with which the people help themselves are better than Latin. The language of the street is always strong. I envy the boys the force of the double negative (no shoes, no money, no nothing), though clean contrary to our grammar rules, and I confess to some titillation of my ears from a rattling oath.

In the infinite variety of talents, ‘t is certain that some men swear with genius. I knew a poet in whose talent Nature carried this freak so far that his only graceful verses were pretty blasphemies. “The better the worse,” you will say; and I own it reminds one of Vathek’s collection of monstrous men with humps of a picturesque peak, and horns of exquisite polish.  What traveller has not listened to the vigor of the Sacre! of the French postilion, the Sia ammazato! of the Italian contadino, or the deep stomach of an English drayman’s execration. I remember an occasion when a proficient in this style came from North Street to Cambridge and drew a crowd of young critics in the college yard, who found his wrath so aesthetic and fertilizing that they took notes, and even over-stayed the hour of the mathematical professor.

‘T is odd what revolutions occur. We were educated in horror of Satan, but Goethe remarked that all men like to hear him named. Burns took him into compassion and expressed a blind wish for his reformation.

“Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken,

Still have a stake.”

And George Sand finds a whole nation who regard him as a personage who has been greatly wronged, and in which he is really the subject of a covert worship. As a study in language, the use of this word is curious, to see how words help us and must be philosophical. The Devil in philosophy is absolute negation, falsehood, nothing; and in the popular mind, the Devil is a malignant person. Yet all our speech expresses the first sense. “The Devil a monk was he,” means, he was no monk, and “The Devil you did!” means you did not. Natural science gives us the inks, the shades; ink of Erebus — night of Chaos.  … Goethe, who had collected all the diabolical hints in men and nature for traits for his Walpurgis Nacht, continued the humor of collecting such horrors after this first occasion had passed, and professed to point his guest to his Walpurgis Sack, or Acherontian Bag, in which, he said, he put all  his dire hints and images, and into which, he said, he should be afraid to fall himself, lest he should be burnt up. Dante is the professor that shall teach both the noble low style, the power of working up all his experience into heaven and hell; also the sculpture of compression.

The next virtue of rhetoric is compression, the science of omitting, which makes good the old verse of Hesiod, “Fools, they did not know that half was better than the whole.” The French have a neat phrase, that the secret of boring you is that of telling all,— “Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire;” which we translate short, “Touch and go.” The silences, pauses, of an orator are as telling as his words.  What the poet omits exalts every syllable that he writes. In good hands it will never become sterility. A good writer must convey the feeling of a flamboyant witness, and at the same time of chemic selection, — as if in his densest period was no cramp, but room to turn a chariot and horses between his valid words. There is hardly danger in America of excess of condensation; there must be no cramp insufficiency, but the superfluous must be omitted. In the Hindoo mythology, “Viswaharmán” placed the sun on his lathe to grind off some of his effulgence, and  in this manner reduced it to an eighth, — more was inseparable. …

In architecture the beauty is increased in the degree in which the material is safely diminished; as when you break up a prose wall, and leave all the strength in the poetry of columns. As soon as you read aloud, you will find what sentences drag. Blot them out, and read again, you will find the words that drag. ‘T is like a pebble inserted in a mosaic. Resolute blotting rids you of all those phrases that sound like something and mean nothing, with which scriptural forms play a large part. Never say, “I beg not to be misunderstood.” It is only graceful in the case when you are afraid that what is called a better meaning will be taken, and you wish to insist on a worse; a man has a right to pass, like Dean Swift, for a worse man than he is, but not for a better.

And I sometimes wish that the Board of Education might carry out the project of a college for graduates of our universities, to which editors and members of Congress and writers of books might repair, and learn to sink what we could best spare of our words; to gazette those Americanisms which offend us in all journals. Some of these are odious. Some as an adverb— “reeled some;” considerable as an adverb for much; “quite a number;” slim for bad; the adjective graphic, which means what is written, — graphic arts and oral arts, arts of writing, and arts of speech and song, — but is used as if it meant descriptive: “Minerva’s graphic thread.” A Mr. Randall, M. C., who appeared before the committee of the House of Commons on the subject of the American mode of closing a debate, said, “that the one-hour rule worked well; made the debate short and graphic.” ‘T is the worst praise you can give a speech that it is as if written.

Never use the word development, and be wary of the whole family of Fero.  Dangerous words in like kind are display, improvement, peruse, circumstances, commence for begin. Vulgarisms to be gazetted, moiety used for a small part;— “nothing would answer but;” “there is none but what”— “there being scarce a person of any note in England but what some time or other paid a visit or sent a present to our Lady of Walsingham” (Bishop Parcy); “might have to go;” “I have been to Europe;” “in our midst;” considerable— “it is considerable of a compliment,” “under considerable of a cloud;” balance for remainder— “spent the balance of his life;” “as a general thing;” “after all.” Confusions of lie and lay, sit and set, shall and will.

Persons have been named from their abuse of certain phrases, as “Pyramid” Lambert, “Finality” Russell, “Humanity” Martin, “Horizon” Turner.

Every age gazettes a quantity of words which it has used up. We are now offended with “Standpoint,”  “Myth,” “Subjective,” “the Good and the True” and “the Cause.”

A list might be made of showy words that tempt young writers: asphodel, harbinger, chalice, flamboyant,  golden, diamond, amethyst, opal and the rest of the precious stones, carcanet, diadem.

But these cardinal rules of rhetoric find best examples in the great masters, and are main sources of the delight they give. Shakspeare might be studied for his dexterity in the use of these weapons, if it were not for his heroic strength. There is no such master of low style as he, and therefore none can securely soar so high. I do not mean that he delights in comedy, exults in bringing the street itself, uproarious with laughter and animal joy, on to the scene, with Falstaff and Touchstone and Trinculo and  the fools; but that in the conduct of the play, and the speech of the heroes, he keeps the level tone which is the tone of high and low alike, and most widely understood. A man of experience altogether, his very sonnets are as solid and close to facts as the Banker’s Gazette; and the only check on the detail of each of his portraits is his own universality, which made bias or fixed ideas impossible — his impartiality is like a sunbeam.

His fun is as wise as his earnest, its foundations are below the frost.  His muse is moral simply from its depth, and I value the intermixture of the common and the transcendental as in Nature. One would say Shakspeare must have been a thousand years old when he wrote his first piece; so thoroughly is his thought familiar to him, so solidly worded, as if it were already a proverb, and not only hereafter to become one. Well, that millennium is really only a little acceleration in his process of thought; his loom is better toothed, cranked and pedalled than other people’s, and he can turn off a hundred yards to their one. Shakspeare is nothing but a large utterance. We cannot find that anything in his age was more worth expression than anything in ours; nor give any account of  his existence, but only the fact that there was a wonderful symbolizer and expressor, who has no rival in all ages and who has thrown an accidental lustre over his time and subject.

My friend thinks the reason why the French mind is so shallow, and still to seek, running into vagaries and blind alleys, is because they do not read Shakspeare; whilst the English and Germans, who read Shakspeare and the Bible, have a great onward march. Shakspeare would have sufficed for the culture of a nation for vast periods. The Chinese have got on so long with their solitary Confucius and Mencius; the Arabs with their Mahomet; the Scandinavians with their Snorre Sturleson; and if the English island had been larger and the Straits of Dover wider, to keep it at pleasure a little out of the imbroglio of Europe, they might have managed to feed on Shakspeare for some ages yet; as the camel in the desert is fed by his humps, in long absence from food.

Montaigne must have the credit of giving to literature that which we listen for in bar-rooms, the low speech, — words and phrases that no scholar coined; street-cries and war-cries; words of the boatman, the farmer and the lord; that have neatness and necessity,  through their use in the vocabulary of work and appetite, like the pebbles which the incessant attrition of the sea has rounded. Every historic autobiographic trait authenticating the man adds to the value of the book. We can’t afford to take the horse out of the Essays; it would take the rider too.

Herrick is a remarkable example of the low style. He is, therefore, a good example of the modernness of an old English writer. So Latimer, so Chaucer, so the Bible. He found his subject where he stood, between his feet, in his house, pantry, barn, poultry-yard, in his village, neighbors’ gossip and scandal. Like Montaigne in this, that his subject cost him nothing, and he knew what he spake of, and did not write up to it, but could write down (a main secret),  and took his level, so that he had all his strength, the easiness of strength; he took what he knew, and “took it easy,” as we say. The Germans praise in Goethe the comfortable stoutness. Herrick’s merit is the simplicity and manliness of his utterance, and, rarely, the weight of his sentence. He has, and knows that he has, a noble, idiomatic English, a perfect, plain style, from which he can soar to a fine, lyric delicacy, or descend to  coarsest sarcasm, without losing his firm footing. This flower of speech is accompanied with an assurance of fame. We have an artist who in this merit of which I speak will easily cope with these celebrities.

In Carlyle as in Byron one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes hard hits all the time. There’s more character than intellect in every sentence — herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson. The best service Carlyle has rendered is to rhetoric, or art of writing. In his books the vicious conventions of writing are all dropped. You have no board interposed between you and the writer’s mind, but he talks flexibly, now high, now low, in loud emphasis, in undertones, then laughs till the walls ring, then calmly moderates, then hints, or raises an eyebrow. He has gone nigher to the wind than any other craft.

Carlyle, with his inimitable ways of saying the thing, is next best to the inventor of the thing, and I think of him when I read the famous inscription on the pyramid, “I King Saib built this pyramid. I, when I had built it, covered it with satin. Let him who cometh after me, and says he is equal to me, cover it with  mats.” What he has said shall be proverb, nobody shall be able to say it otherwise. No book can any longer be tolerable in the old husky Neal-on-the-Puritans model. In short, I think the revolution wrought by Carlyle is precisely parallel to that going forward in picture, by the stereoscope. Until history is interesting, it is not yet written.

Here has come into the country, three months ago, a History of Friedrich, infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written; a book that, one would think, the English people would rise up in a mass to thank him for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with chaplet of oak-leaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a minister extraordinary to offer congratulations of honoring delight to England in acknowledgment of such a donation; a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before — the German Plutarch, now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British biography — with a range, too, of thought and wisdom, so large, so colloquially elastic, that we not so much read  a stereotype page as we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, whilst he is humming and chuckling, with understones, and trumpet-tones, and shrugs, and long commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, wood, hummock and pebble in the long perspective, with its wonderful mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably marked and medalled in the memory by what they were, had and did; and withal a book that is a judgment-day for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times. And this book makes no noise. I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea; but the secret interior wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this Book, which is like these.

After Low Style and Compression what the books call Metonomy is a principal power of rhetoric. It means, using one word or image  for another. It is a low idealism. Idealism regards the world as symbolic, and all these symbols or forms as fugitive and convertible expressions. The power of the poet is in controlling these symbols; in using every fact in Nature, however great and stable, as a fluent symbol, and in measuring his strength by the facility with which he makes the mood of mind give its color to things. The world, history, the powers of Nature, — he can make them speak what sense he will.

All conversation, as all literature, appears to me the pleasure of rhetoric, or, I may say, of metonomy. “To make of motes mountains, and of mountains motes,” Isocrates said, “was the orator’s office.” Well, that is what poetry and thinking do. Whatever new object we see, we perceive to be only a new version of our familiar experience, and we set about translating it at once into our parallel facts. We have hereby our vocabulary.

Everything has two handles. Pindar when the victor in a race by mules offered him a trifling present, pretended to be hurt at thought of writing on demi-asses. When, however, he offered a sufficient present, he composed the poem: —

“Hail, daughters of the tempest-footed horse,

That skims like wind along the course.”

That was the other handle. I passed at one time through a place called New City, then supposed, like each of a hundred others, to be destined to greatness. I fell in with one of the founders who showed its advantages and its river and port and the capabilities: “Sixty houses, sir, were built in a night, like tents.” After Chicago had secured the confluence of the railroads to itself, I chanced to meet my founder again, but now removed to Chicago. He had transferred to that city the magnificent dreams which he had once communicated to me, and no longer remembered his first emporium. “Where is the town? Was there not,” I asked, “a river and a harbor there?” “Oh yes, there was a guzzle out of a sand-bank.” “And the town?” “There are still the sixty houses, but when I passed it, one owl was the only inhabitant.” When Samuel Dexter, long since, argued the claims of South Boston Bridge, he had to meet loud complaints of the shutting out of the coasting-trade by the proposed improvements. “Now,” said he, “I come to the grand charge that we have obstructed the commerce and navigation of Roxbury Ditch.” ‘T is  very easy to call the gracious spring “poor goody herb-wife,” or to represent the farm, which stands for the organization of the gravest needs, as a poor trifle of pea-vines, turnips and hen-roosts. Everything has two handles. Shakspeare says, “A plague of opinion; a man can wear it on both sides, like a leather jerkin.”

Here is my friend E.,  the model of opinionists. He is the April day incarnated and walking, soft sunshine and hailstones, sour east wind and flowery southwest — alternating, and each sovereign, and painting all things its own color. He has it all his own way. He complains of Nature, — too many leaves, too windy and grassy, and I suppose the birds are too feathery and the horses too leggy. He thinks Egypt a humbug, and Palestine used up, and England a flash in the pan; and that the only art is landscape-painting. But when we came, in the woods, to a clump of goldenrod,— “Ah!” he says, “here they are! these things consume a great deal of time. I don’t know but they are of more importance than any other of our investments.” Well, this is the game that goes on every day in all companies; this is the ball that is tossed in every court of law, in every legislature and in literature, and  in the history of every mind by sovereignty of thought to make facts and men obey our present humor or belief.

I designed to speak of one point more, the touching a principal question in criticism in recent times — the Classic and Romantic, or what is classic?

The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man as drawing directly from the soul, and the means or material it uses are also of the soul. It brings man into alliance with what is great and eternal. It discloses to him the variety and splendor of his resources. And there is much in literature that draws us with a sublime charm — the superincumbent necessity by which each writer, an infirm, capricious, fragmentary soul, is made to utter his part in the chorus of humanity, is enriched by thoughts which flow from all past minds, shares the hopes of all existing minds; so that, whilst the world is made of youthful, helpless children of a day, literature resounds with the music of united vast ideas of affirmation and of moral truth.

What is the Classic? Classic art is the art of necessity; organic; modern or romantic bears the stamp of caprice or chance. One is the  product of inclination, of caprice, of haphazard; the other carries its law and necessity within itself.

The politics of monarchy, when all hangs on the accidents of life and temper of a single person, may be called romantic politics. The democratic, when the power proceeds organically from the people and is responsible to them, are classic politics. The classic unfolds, the romantic adds. The classic should, the modern would. The classic is healthy, the romantic is sick. The classic draws its rule from the genius of that which it does, and not from by-ends. It does not make a novel to establish a principle of political economy.

Don’t set out to please; you will displease. The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung deprecates an observatory founded for the benefit of navigation. Nor can we promise that our School of Design will secure a lucrative post to the pupils.

When I read Plutarch, or look at a Greek vase, I incline to accept the common opinion of scholars, that the Greeks had clearer wits than any other people. But there is anything but time in my idea of the antique. A clear or natural expression by word or deed is that which  we mean when we love and praise the antique. In society I do not find it, in modern books, seldom; but when I come into the pastures, I find antiquity again. Once in the fields with the lowing cattle, the birds, trees and waters and satisfying curves of the landscape, and I cannot tell whether this is Thessaly and Enna, or whether Concord and Acton.

A man of genius or a work of love or beauty will not come to order, can’t be compounded by the best rules, but is always a new and incalculable result, like health. Don’t rattle your rules in our ears; we must behave as we can. Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poet, but looks at the order of his thoughts and the essential quality of his mind. Then the critic is poet. ‘T is a question not of talents but of tone; and not particular merits, but the mood of mind into which one and another can bring us.

MICHAEL ANGELO.

Never did sculptor’s dream unfold

A form which marble doth not hold

In its white block; yet it therein shall find

Only the hand secure and bold

Which still obeys the mind.

Michael Angelo’s Sonnets .

New ha l’ottimo artista aicnn concetto,

Ch’un marmo solo in sè non circoseriva

Col sno soverchio, e solo a quello arriva

La man che obbedisce all’ intelletto.

M. Angelo , Sonnetto primo .

[Reprinted from the North American Review, June, 1837.]

Few lives of eminent men are harmonious; few that furnish, in all the facts, an image corresponding with their fame. But all things recorded of Michael Angelo Buonarotti agree together. He lived one life; he pursued one career. He accomplished extraordinary works; he uttered extraordinary words; and in this greatness was so little eccentricity, so true was he to the laws of the human mind, that his character and his works, like Sir Isaac Newton’s, seem rather a part of nature than arbitrary productions of the human will. Especially we venerate his moral fame. Whilst his name belongs to the highest class of genius, his life contains in it no injurious influence. Every line in his biography might be read to the human race with wholesome effect. The means, the materials of his activity, were coarse enough to be appreciated, being addressed for the most part to the eye; the results, sublime and all innocent. A purity severe and even terrible goes out from the lofty productions of his pencil and his chisel, and again from the more perfect sculpture of his own life, which heals and exalts. “He nothing common did, or mean,” and dying at the end of near ninety years, had not yet become old, but was engaged in executing his grand conceptions in the ineffaceable architecture of St. Peter’s.

Above all men whose history we know, Michael Angelo presents us with the perfect image of the artist. He is an eminent master in the four fine arts, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture and Poetry. In three of them by visible means, and in poetry by words, he strove to express the Idea of Beauty. This idea possessed him and determined all his activity. Beauty in the largest sense, beauty inward and outward, comprehending grandeur as a part, and reaching to goodness as its soul, — this to receive and this to impart, was his genius.

It is a happiness to find, amid the falsehood and griefs of the human race, a soul at intervals born to behold and create only beauty. So shall not the indescribable charm of the natural world, the great spectacle of morn and evening which shut and open the most disastrous day, want observers. The ancient Greeks called the world ºyÃ¼¿Â , Beauty ; a name which, in our artificial state of society, sounds fanciful and impertinent. Yet, in proportion as man rises above the servitude to wealth and a pursuit of mean pleasures, he perceives that what is most real is most beautiful, and that, by the contemplation of such objects, he is taught and exalted. This truth, that perfect beauty and perfect goodness are one, was made known to Michael Angelo; and we shall endeavor by sketches from his life to show the direction and limitations of his search after this element.

In considering a life dedicated to the study of Beauty, it is natural to inquire, what is Beauty? Can this charming element be so abstracted by the human mind, as to become a distinct and permanent object? Beauty cannot be defined. Like Truth, it is an ultimate aim of the human being. It does not lie within the limits of the understanding. “The nature of the beautiful,” — we gladly borrow the language of Moritz, a German critic,— “consists herein, that because the understanding in the presence of the beautiful cannot ask, ‘Why is it beautiful?’ for that reason is it so. There is no standard whereby the understanding can determine whether objects are beautiful or otherwise. What other standard of the beautiful exists, than the entire circuit of all harmonious proportions of the great system of nature? All particular beauties scattered up and down in nature are only so far beautiful, as they suggest more or less in themselves this entire circuit of harmonious proportions.” This great Whole, the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But it cannot be defined.

The Italian artists sanction this view of beauty by describing it as il più nell’ uno , “the many in one,” or multitude in unity, intimating that what is truly beautiful seems related to all nature. A beautiful person has a kind of universality, and appears to have truer conformity to all pleasing objects in external nature than another. Every great work of art seems to take up into itself the excellencies of all works, and to present, as it were, a miniature of nature.

In relation to this element of Beauty, the minds of men divide themselves into two classes. In the first place, all men have an organization corresponding more or less to the entire system of nature, and therefore a power of deriving pleasure from Beauty. This is Taste. In the second place, certain minds, more closely harmonized with nature, possess the power of abstracting Beauty from things, and reproducing it in new forms, on any object to which accident may determine their activity; as stone, canvas, song, history. This is Art.

Since Beauty is thus an abstraction of the harmony and proportion that reigns in all nature, it is therefore studied in nature, and not in what does not exist. Hence the celebrated French maxim of Rhetoric, Rien de beau que le vrai; “Nothing is beautiful but what is true.” It has a much wider application than to Rhetoric; as wide, namely, as the terms of the proposition admit. In art, Michael Angelo is himself but a document or verification of this maxim. He labored to express the beautiful, in the entire conviction that it was only to be attained unto by knowledge of the true. The common eye is satisfied with the surface on which it rests. The wise eye knows that it is surface, and, if beautiful, only the result of interior harmonies, which, to him who knows them, compose the image of higher beauty. Moreover, he knew well that only by an understanding of the internal mechanism can the outside be faithfully delineated. The walls of houses are transparent to the architect. The symptoms disclose the constitution to the physician; and to the artist it belongs by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of life and thought, to acquire the power of true drawing. “The human form,” says Goethe, “cannot be comprehended through seeing its surface. It must be stripped of the muscles, its parts separated, its joints observed, its divisions marked, its action and counter action learned; the hidden, the reposing, the foundation of the apparent, must be searched, if one would really see and imitate what moves as a beautiful inseparable whole in living waves before the eye.” Michael Angelo dedicated himself, from his childhood to his death, to a toilsome observation of nature. The first anecdote recorded of him shows him to be already on the right road. Granacci, a painter’s apprentice, having lent him, when a boy, a print of St. Antony beaten by devils, together with some colors and pencils, he went to the fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes of fish. Cardinal Farnese one day found him, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, “I go yet to school that I may continue to learn.” And one of the last drawings in his portfolio is a sublime hint of his own feeling; for it is a sketch of an old man with a long beard, in a go-cart, with an hour-glass before him; and the motto, Ancoraimparo , “I still learn.”

In this spirit he devoted himself to the study of anatomy for twelve years; we ought to say rather, as long as he lived. The depth of his knowledge in anatomy has no parallel among the artists of modern times. Most of his designs, his contemporaries inform us, were made with a pen, and in the style of an engraving on copper or wood; a manner more expressive but not admitting of correction. When Michael Angelo would begin a statue, he made first on paper the skeleton; afterwards, upon another paper, the same figure clothed with muscles. The studies of the statue of Christ in the Church of Minerva at Rome, made in this manner, were long preserved.

Those who have never given attention to the arts of design, are surprised that the artist should find so much to study in a fabric of such limited parts and dimensions as the human body. But reflection discloses evermore a closer analogy between the finite form and the infinite inhabitant. Man is the highest, and indeed the only proper object of plastic art. There needs no better proof of our instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human figure is capable, than the uniform tendency which the religion of every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism, or attributing to the Deity the human form. And behold the effect of this familiar object every day! No acquaintance with the secrets of its mechanism, no degrading views of human nature, not the most swinish compost of mud and blood that was ever misnamed philosophy, can avail to hinder us from doing involuntary reverence to any exhibition of majesty or surpassing beauty in human clay.

Our knowledge of its highest expression we owe to the Fine Arts. Not easily in this age will any man acquire by himself such perceptions of the dignity or grace of the human frame, as the student of art owes to the remains of Phidias, to the Apollo, the Jove, the paintings and statues of Michael Angelo, and the works of Canova. There are now in Italy, both on canvas and in marble, forms and faces which the imagination is enriched by contemplating. Goethe says that he is but half himself who has never seen the Juno in the Rondanini palace at Rome. Seeing these works true to human nature and yet superhuman, “we feel that we are greater than we know.” Seeing these works, we appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo, against the taste and against the admonition of his patrons, to cover the walls of churches with unclothed figures, “improper” says his biographer, “for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his profound knowledge.”

The love of beauty which never passes beyond outline and color, was too slight an object to occupy the powers of his genius. There is a closer relation than is commonly thought between the fine arts and the useful arts; and it is an essential fact in the history of Michael Angelo, that his love of beauty is made solid and perfect by his deep understanding of the mechanic arts. Architecture is the bond that unites the elegant and the economical arts, and his skill in this is a pledge of his capacity in both kinds. His Titanic handwriting in marble and travertine is to be found in every part of Rome and Florence; and even at Venice, on defective evidence, he is said to have given the plan of the bridge of the Rialto. Nor was his a skill in ornament, or confined to the outline and designs of towers and façades, but a thorough acquaintance with all the secrets of the art, with all the details of economy and strength.

When the Florentines united themselves with Venice, England and France, to oppose the power of the Emperor Charles V., Michael Angelo was appointed Military Architect and Engineer, to superintend the erection of the necessary works. He visited Bologna to inspect its celebrated fortifications, and, on his return, constructed a fortification on the heights of San Miniato, which commands the city and environs of Florence. On the 24th of October, 1529, the Prince of Orange, general of Charles V., encamped on the hills surrounding the city, and his first operation was to throw up a rampart to storm the bastion of San Miniato. His design was frustrated by the providence of Michael Angelo. Michael made such good resistance, that the Prince directed the artillery to demolish the tower. The artist hung mattresses of wool on the side exposed to the attack, and by means of a bold projecting cornice, from which they were suspended, a considerable space was left between them and the wall. This simple expedient was sufficient, and the Prince was obliged to turn his siege into a blockade.

After an active and successful service to the city for six months, Michael Angelo was informed of a treachery that was ripening within the walls. He communicated it to the government with his advice upon it; but was mortified by receiving from the government reproaches at his credulity and fear. He replied, “that it was useless for him to take care of the walls, if they were determined not to take care of themselves,” and he withdrew privately from the city to Ferrara, and thence to Venice. The news of his departure occasioned a general concern in Florence, and he was instantly followed with apologies and importunities to return. He did so, and resumed his office. On the 21st of March, 1530, the Prince of Orange assaulted the city by storm. Michael Angelo is represented as having ordered his defence so vigorously, that the Prince was compelled to retire. By the treachery however of the general of the Republic, Malatesta Baglioni, all his skill was rendered unavailing, and the city capitulated on the 9th of August. The excellence of the works constructed by our artist has been approved by Vauban, who visited them and took a plan of them.

In Rome, Michael Angelo was consulted by Pope Paul III. in building the fortifications of San Borgo. He built the stairs of Ara Celi leading to the Church once the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus: he arranged the piazza of the Capitol, and built its porticoes. He was charged with rebuilding the Pons Palatinus over the Tiber. He prepared, accordingly, a large quantity of blocks of travertine, and was proceeding with the work, when, through the intervention of his rivals, this work was taken from him and intrusted to Nanni di Bacio Bigio, who plays but a pitiful part in Michael’s history. Nanni sold the travertine, and filled up the piers with gravel at a small expense. Michael Angelo made known his opinion, that the bridge could not resist the force of the current; and, one day riding over it on horseback, with his friend Vasari, he cried, “George, this bridge trembles under us; let us ride faster lest it fall whilst we are upon it.” It fell, five years after it was built, in 1557, and is still called the “Broken Bridge.”

Versatility of talent in men of undoubted ability always awakens the liveliest interest; and we observe with delight, that, besides the sublimity and even extravagance of Michael Angelo, he possessed an unexpected dexterity in minute mechanical contrivances. When the Sistine Chapel was prepared for him that he might paint the ceiling, he found the platform on which he was to work, suspended by ropes which passed through the ceiling. Michael demanded of San Gallo, the Pope’s architect, how these holes were to be repaired in the picture? San Gallo replied; “That was for him to consider, for the platform could be constructed in no other way.” Michael removed the whole, and constructed a movable platform to rest and roll upon the floor, which is believed to be the same simple contrivance which is used in Rome, at this day, to repair the walls of churches. He gave this model to a carpenter, who made it so profitable as to furnish a dowry for his two daughters. He was so nice in tools, that he made with his own hand the wimbles, the files, the rasps, the chisels and all other irons and instruments which he needed in sculpture; and, in painting, he not only mixed but ground his colors himself, trusting no one.

And not only was this discoverer of Beauty, and its teacher among men, rooted and grounded in those severe laws of practical skill, which genius can never teach, and which must be learned by practice alone, but he was one of the most industrious men that ever lived. His diligence was so great that it is wonderful how he endured its fatigues. The midnight battles, the forced marches, the winter campaigns of Julius Cæsar or Charles XII. do not indicate greater strength of body or of mind. He finished the gigantic painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in twenty months, a fact which enlarges, it has been said, the known powers of man. Indeed he toiled so assiduously at this painful work, that, for a long time after, he was unable to see any picture but by holding it over his head. A little bread and wine was all his nourishment; and he told Vasari that he often slept in his clothes, both because he was too weary to undress, and because he would rise in the night and go immediately to work. “I have found,” says his friend, “some of his designs in Florence, where, whilst may be seen the greatness of his genius, it may also be known that when he wished to take Minerva from the head of Jove, there needed the hammer of Vulcan.” He used to make to a single figure nine, ten, or twelve heads before he could satisfy himself, seeking that there should be in the composition a certain universal grace such as nature makes, saying, that “he needed to have his compasses in his eye, and not in his hand, because the hands work whilst the eye judges.” He was accustomed to say, “Those figures alone are good, from which the labor is scraped off, when the scaffolding is taken away.”

At near eighty years, he began in marble a group of four figures for a dead Christ; because, he said, to exercise himself with the mallet was good for his health.

And what did he accomplish? It does not fall within our design to give an account of his works, yet for the sake of the completeness of our sketch we will name the principal ones. Sculpture, he called his art, and to it he regretted afterwards he had not singly given himself. The style of his paintings is monumental; and even his poetry partakes of that character. In sculpture, his greatest work is the statue of Moses in the Church of Pietro in Vincolo, in Rome. It is a sitting statue of colossal size, and is designed to embody the Hebrew Law. The lawgiver is supposed to gaze upon the worshippers of the golden calf. The majestic wrath of the figure daunts the beholder. In the Piazza del Gran Duca at Florence, stands, in the open air, his David, about to hurl the stone at Goliah. In the Church called the Minerva, at Rome, is his Christ; an object of so much devotion to the people, that the right foot has been shod with a brazen sandal to prevent it from being kissed away. In St. Peter’s, is his Pietà, or dead Christ in the arms of his mother. In the Mausoleum of the Medici at Florence, are the tombs of Lorenzo and Cosmo, with the grand statues of Night and Day, and Aurora and Twilight. Several statues of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome and Florence and Paris.

His Paintings are in the Sistine Chapel, of which he first covered the ceiling with the story of the creation, in successive compartments, with the great series of the Prophets and Sibyls in alternate tablets, and a series of greater and smaller fancy-pieces in the lunettes. This is his capital work painted in fresco. Every one of these pieces, every figure, every hand and foot and finger, is a study of anatomy and design. Slighting the secondary arts of coloring, and all the aids of graceful finish, he aimed exclusively, as a stern designer, to express the vigor and magnificence of his conceptions. Upon the wall, over the altar, is painted the Last Judgment.

Of his designs, the most celebrated is the cartoon representing soldiers coming out of the bath and arming themselves; an incident of the war of Pisa. The wonderful merit of this drawing, which contrasts the extremes of relaxation and vigor, is conspicuous even in the coarsest prints.

Of his genius for Architecture, it is sufficient to say that he built St. Peter’s, an ornament of the earth. He said he would hang the Pantheon in the air; and he redeemed his pledge by suspending that vast cupola, without offence to grace or to stability, over the astonished beholder. He did not live to complete the work; but is there not something affecting in the spectacle of an old man, on the verge of ninety years, carrying steadily onward with the heat and determination of manhood, his poetic conceptions into progressive execution, surmounting by the dignity of his purposes all obstacles and all enmities, and only hindered by the limits of life from fulfilling his designs? Very slowly came he, after months and years, to the dome. At last he began to model it very small in wax. When it was finished, he had it copied larger in wood, and by this model it was built. Long after it was completed, and often since, to this day, rumors are occasionally spread that it is giving way, and it is said to have been injured by unskilful attempts to repair it. Benedict XIV., during one of these panics, sent for the architect Marchese Polini, to come to Rome and examine it. Polini put an end to all the various projects of repairs, by the satisfying sentence; “The cupola does not start, and if it should start, nothing can be done but to pull it down.”

The impulse of his grand style was instantaneous upon his contemporaries. Every stroke of his pencil moved the pencil in Raphael’s hand. Raphael said, “I bless God I live in the times of Michael Angelo.” Sir Joshua Reynolds, two centuries later, declared to the British Institution, “I feel a self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such sensations as he intended to excite.”

A man of such habits and such deeds, made good his pretensions to a perception and to delineation of external beauty. But inimitable as his works are, his whole life confessed that his hand was all inadequate to express his thought. “He alone” he said, “is an artist whose hands can perfectly execute what his mind has conceived;” and such was his own mastery, that men said, “the marble was flexible in his hands.” Yet, contemplating ever with love the idea of absolute beauty, he was still dissatisfied with his own work. The things proposed to him in his imagination were such, that, for not being able with his hands to express so grand and terrible conceptions, he often abandoned his work. For this reason he often only blocked his statue. A little before he died, he burned a great number of designs, sketches, and cartoons made by him, being impatient of their defects. Grace in living forms, except in very rare instances, did not satisfy him. He never made but one portrait (a cartoon of Messer Tommaso di Cavalieri), because he abhorred to draw a likeness unless it were of infinite beauty.

Such was his devotion to art. But let no man suppose that the images which his spirit worshipped were mere transcripts of external grace, or that this profound soul was taken or holden in the chains of superficial beauty. To him, of all men, it was transparent. Through it he beheld the eternal spiritual beauty which ever clothes itself with grand and graceful outlines, as its appropriate form. He called external grace “the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul which he has called into Time.” “As from the fire, heat cannot be divided, no more can beauty from the eternal.” He was conscious in his efforts of higher aims than to address the eye. He sought, through the eye, to reach the soul. Therefore, as, in the first place, he sought to approach the Beautiful by the study of the True, so he failed not to make the next step of progress, and to seek Beauty in its highest form, that of Goodness. The sublimity of his art is in his life. He did not only build a divine temple, and paint and carve saints and prophets. He lived out the same inspiration. There is no spot upon his fame. The fire and sanctity of his pencil breathe in his words. When he was informed that Paul IV. desired he should paint again the side of the chapel where the Last Judgment was painted, because of the indecorous nudity of the figures, he replied, “Tell the Pope that this is easily done. Let him reform the world and he will find the pictures will reform themselves.” He saw clearly that if the corrupt and vulgar eyes, that could see nothing but indecorum in his terrific prophets and angels, could be purified as his own were pure, they would only find occasion for devotion in the same figures. As he refused to undo his work, Daniel di Volterra was employed to clothe the figures; hence ludicrously called Il Braghettone. When the Pope suggested to him that the chapel would be enriched if the figures were ornamented with gold, Michael Angelo replied, “In those days, gold was not worn; and the characters I have painted were neither rich nor desirous of wealth, but holy men, with whom gold was an object of contempt.”

Not until he was in the seventy-third year of his age, he undertook the building of St. Peter’s. On the death of San Gallo, the architect of the church, Paul III. first entreated, then commanded the aged artist, to assume the charge of this great work, which though commenced forty years before, was only commenced by Bramante, and ill continued by San Gallo. Michael Angelo, who believed in his own ability as a sculptor, but distrusted his capacity as an architect, at first refused and then reluctantly complied. His heroic stipulation with the Pope was worthy of the man and the work. He required that he should be permitted to accept this work without any fee or reward, because he undertook it as a religious act; and, furthermore, that he should be absolute master of the whole design, free to depart from the plans of San Gallo and to alter what had been already done.

This disinterestedness and spirit, — no fee and no interference, — reminds one of the reward named by the ancient Persian. When importuned to claim some compensation of the empire for the important services he had rendered it, he demanded, “that he and his should neither command nor obey, but should be free.” However, as it was undertaken, so was it performed. When the Pope, delighted with one of his chapels, sent him one hundred crowns of gold, as one month’s wages, Michael sent them back. The Pope was angry, but the artist was immovable. Amidst endless annoyances from the envy and interest of the office-holders and agents in the work whom he had displaced, he steadily ripened and executed his vast ideas. The combined desire to fulfil, in everlasting stone, the conceptions of his mind, and to complete his worthy offering to Almighty God, sustained him through numberless vexations with unbroken spirit. In answer to the importunate solicitations of the Duke of Tuscany that he would come to Florence, he replies that “to leave St. Peter’s in the state in which it now was, would be to ruin the structure, and thereby be guilty of a great sin;” that he hoped he should shortly see the execution of his plans brought to such a point that they could no longer be interfered with, and this was the capital object of his wishes, “if,” he adds, “I do not commit a great crime, by disappointing the cormorants who are daily hoping to get rid of me.”

A natural fruit of the nobility of his spirit is his admiration of Dante, to whom two of his sonnets are addressed. He shared Dante’s “deep contempt of the vulgar, not of the simple inhabitants of lowly streets or humble cottages, but of that sordid and abject crowd of all classes and all places who obscure, as much as in them lies, every beam of beauty in the universe.” In like manner, he possessed an intense love of solitude. He lived alone, and never or very rarely took his meals with any person. As will be supposed, he had a passion for the country, and in old age speaks with extreme pleasure of his residence with the hermits in the mountains of Spoleto; so much so that he says he is “only half in Rome, since, truly, peace is only to be found in the woods.” Traits of an almost savage independence mark all his history. Although he was rich, he lived like a poor man, and never would receive a present from any person; because it seemed to him that if a man gave him anything, he was always obligated to that individual. His friend Vasari mentions one occasion on which his scruples were overcome. It seems that Michael was accustomed to work at night with a pasteboard cap or helmet on his head, into which he stuck a candle, that his work might be lighted and his hands at liberty. Vasari observed that he did not use wax candles, but a better sort made of the tallow of goats. He therefore sent him four bundles of them, containing forty pounds. His servant brought them after night-fall, and presented them to him. Michael Angelo refused to receive them. “Look you, Messer Michael Angelo,” replied the man, “these candles have well nigh broken my arm, and I will not carry them back; but just here, before your door, is a spot of soft mud, and they will stand upright in it very well, and there I will light them all.”— “Put them down, then,” returned Michael, “since you shall not make a bonfire at my gate.” Meantime he was liberal to profusion to his old domestic Urbino, to whom he gave at one time two thousand crowns, and made him rich in his service.

Michael Angelo was of that class of men who are too superior to the multitude around them to command a full and perfect sympathy. They stand in the attitude rather of appeal from their contemporaries to their race. It has been the defect of some great men, that they did not duly appreciate or did not confess the talents and virtues of others, and so lacked one of the richest sources of happiness and one of the best elements of humanity. This apathy perhaps happens as often from preoccupied attention as from jealousy. It has been supposed that artists more than others are liable to this defect. But Michael Angelo’s praise on many works is to this day the stamp of fame. Michael Angelo said of Masaccio’s pictures that when they were first painted they must have been alive. He said of his predecessor, the architect Bramante, that he laid the first stone of St. Peter’s, clear, insulated, luminous, with fit design for a vast structure. He often expressed his admiration of Cellini’s bust of Altoviti. He loved to express admiration of Titian, of Donatello, of Ghiberti, of Brunelleschi. And it is said that when he left Florence to go to Rome, to build St. Peter’s, he turned his horse’s head on the last hill from which the noble dome of the Cathedral (built by Brunelleschi) is visible, and said, “Like you, I will not build; better than you I cannot.” Indeed, as we have said, the reputation of many works of art now in Italy derives a sanction from the tradition of his praise. It is more commendation to say, “This was Michael Angelo’s favorite,” than to say, “This was carried to Paris by Napoleon.” Michael, however, had the philosophy to say, “Only an inventor can use the inventions of others.”

There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo’s history, which humanizes his character without lessening its loftiness; this is his platonic love. He was deeply enamored of the most accomplished lady of the time, Vittoria Colonna, the widow of the Marquis di Pescara, who, after the death of her husband, devoted herself to letters, and to the writing of religions poetry. She was also an admirer of his genius, and came to Rome repeatedly to see him. To her his sonnets are addressed; and they all breathe a chaste and divine regard, unparalleled in any amatory poetry except that of Dante and Petrarch. They are founded on the thought that beauty is the virtue of the body, as virtue is the beauty of the soul; that a beautiful person is sent into the world as an image of the divine beauty, not to provoke but to purify the sensual into an intellectual and divine love. He enthrones his mistress as a benignant angel, who is to refine and perfect his own character. Condivi, his friend, has left this testimony; “I have often heard Michael Angelo reason and discourse upon love, but never heard him speak otherwise than upon platonic love. As for me, I am ignorant what Plato has said upon this subject; but this I know very well, that, in a long intimacy, I never heard from his mouth a single word that was not perfectly decorous and having for its object to extinguish in youth every improper desire, and that his own nature is a stranger to depravity.” The poems themselves cannot be read without awakening sentiments of virtue. An eloquent vindication of their philosophy may be found in a paper by Signer Radici in the London “Retrospective Review,” and, by the Italian scholar, in the Discourse of Benedetto Varchi upon one sonnet of Michael Angelo, contained in the volume of his poems published by Biagioli, from which, in substance, the views of Radici are taken.

Towards his end, there seems to have grown in him an invincible appetite of dying, for he knew that his spirit could only enjoy contentment after death. So vehement was this desire that, he says, “my soul can no longer be appeased by the wonted seductions of painting and sculpture.” A fine melancholy, not unrelieved by his habitual heroism, pervades his thoughts on this subject. At the age of eighty years, he wrote to Vasari, sending him various spiritual sonnets he had written, and tells him he “is at the end of his life, that he is careful where he bends his thoughts, that he sees it is already twenty-four o’clock, and no fancy arose in his mind but DEATH was sculptured on it.” In conversing upon this subject with one of his friends, that person remarked, that Michael might well grieve that one who was incessant in his creative labors should have no restoration. “No,” replied Michael, “it is nothing; for, if life pleases us, death, being a work of the same master, ought not to displease us.” But a nobler sentiment, uttered by him, is contained in his reply to a letter of Vasari, who had informed him of the rejoicings made at the house of his nephew Lionardo, at Florence, over the birth of another Buonarotti Michael admonishes him that “a man ought not to smile, when all those around him weep; and that we ought not to show that joy when a child is born, which should be reserved for the death of one who has lived well”

Amidst all these witnesses to his independence, his generosity, his purity and his devotion, are we not authorized to say that this man was penetrated with the love of the highest beauty, that is, goodness; that his was a soul so enamored of grace, that it could not stoop to meanness or depravity; that art was to him no means of livelihood or road to fame, but the end of living, as it was the organ through which he sought to suggest lessons of an unutterable wisdom; that here was a man who lived to demonstrate that to the human faculties, on every hand, worlds of grandeur and grace are opened, which no profane eye and no indolent eye can behold, but which to see and to enjoy, demands the severest discipline of all the physical, intellectual and moral faculties of the individual?

The city of Florence, on the river Arno, still treasures the fame of this man. There, his picture hangs in every window; there, the tradition of his opinions meets the traveller in every spot. “Do you see that statue of St. George? Michael Angelo asked it why it did not speak.”— “Do you see this fine church of Santa Maria Novella? It is that which Michael Angelo called ‘his bride.’”— “Look at these bronze gates of the Baptistery, with their high reliefs, cast by Ghiberti five hundred years ago. Michael Angelo said, ‘they were fit to be the gates of Paradise.’” — Here is the church, the palace, the Laurentian library, he built. Here is his own house. In the church of Santa Croce are his mortal remains. Whilst he was yet alive, he asked that he might be buried in that church, in such a spot that the dome of the cathedral might be visible from his tomb when the doors of the church stood open. And there and so is he laid. The innumerable pilgrims whom the genius of Italy draws to the city, duly visit this church, which is to Florence what Westminster Abbey is to England. There, near the tomb of Nicholas Machiavelli, the historian and philosopher; of Galileo, the great-hearted astronomer; of Boccaccio, and of Alfieri, stands the monument of Michael Angelo Buonarotti. Three significant garlands are sculptured on the tomb; they should be four, but that his countrymen feared their own partiality. The forehead of the bust, esteemed a faithful likeness, is furrowed with eight deep wrinkles one above another. The traveller from a distant continent, who gazes on that marble brow, feels that he is not a stranger in the foreign church; for the great name of Michael Angelo sounds hospitably in his ear. He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledge the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.

MILTON.

I framed his tongue to music,

I armed his hand with skill,

I moulded his face to beauty,

And his heart the throne of wil.

[Reprinted from the North American Review, July, 1838.]

The discovery of the lost work of Milton, the treatise “Of the Christian Doctrine,”in 1823, drew a sudden attention to his name. For a short time the literary journals were filled with disquisitions on his genius; new editions of his works, and new compilations of his life, were published. But the new-found book haying in itself less attraction than any other work of Milton, the curiosity of the public as quickly subsided, and left the poet to the enjoyment of his permanent fame, or to such increase or abatement of it only as is incidental to a sublime genius, quite independent of the momentary challenge of universal attention to his claims.

But if the new and temporary renown of the poet is silent again, it is nevertheless true that he has gained, in this age, some increase of permanent praise. The fame of a great man is not rigid and stony like his bust. It changes with time. It needs time to give it due perspective. It was very easy to remark an altered tone in the criticism when Milton re-appeared as an author, fifteen years ago, from any that had been bestowed on the same subject before. It implied merit indisputable and illustrious; yet so near to the modern mind as to be still alive and life-giving. The aspect of Milton, to this generation, will be part of the history of the nineteenth century. There is no name in English literature between his age and ours that rises into any approach to his own. And as a man’s fame, of course, characterizes those who give it, as much as him who receives it, the new criticism indicated a change in the public taste, and a change which the poet himself might claim to have wrought.

The reputation of Milton had already undergone one or two revolutions long anterior to its recent aspects. In his lifetime, he was little or not at all known as a poet, but obtained great respect from his contemporaries as an accomplished scholar and a formidable pamphleteer. His poem fell unregarded among his countrymen. His prose writings, especially the “Defence of the English People,” seem to have been read with avidity. These tracts are remarkable compositions. They are earnest, spiritual, rich with allusion, sparkling with innumerable ornaments; but, as writings designed to gain a practical point, they fail. They are not effective, like similar productions of Swift and Burke; or, like what became also controversial tracts, several masterly speeches in the history of the American Congress. Milton seldom deigns a glance at the obstacles that are to be overcome before that which he proposes can be done. There is no attempt to conciliate, — no mediate, no preparatory course suggested, — but, peremptory and impassioned, he demands, on the instant, an ideal justice. Therein they are discriminated from modern writings, in which a regard to the actual is all but universal.

Their rhetorical excellence must also suffer some deduction. They have no perfectness. These writings are wonderful for the truth, the learning, the subtilty and pomp of the language; but the whole is sacrificed to the particular. Eager to do fit justice to each thought, he does not subordinate it s as to project the main argument. He writes whilst he is heated; the piece shows all the rambles and resources of indignation, but he has never integrated the parts of the argument in his mind. The reader is fatigued with admiration, but is not yet master of the subject.

Two of his pieces may be excepted from this description, one for its faults, the other for its excellence. The “Defence of the People of England,” on which his contemporary fame was founded, is, when divested of its pure Latinity, the worst of his works. Only its general aim, and a few elevated passages, can save it. We could be well content, if the flames to which it was condemned at Paris, at Toulouse, and at London, had utterly consumed it. The lover of his genius will always regret that he should not have taken counsel of his own lofty heart at this, as at other times, and have written from the deep convictions of love and right, which are the foundations of civil liberty. There is little poetry or prophecy in this mean and ribald scolding. To insult Salmasius, not to acquit England, is the main design. What under heaven had Madame de Saumaise, or the manner of living of Saumaise, or Salmasius, or his blunders of grammar, or his niceties of diction, to do with the solemn question whether Charles Stuart had been rightly slain? Though it evinces learning and critical skill, yet, as an historical argument, it cannot be valued with similar disquisitions of Robertson and Hallam, and even less celebrated scholars. But, when he comes to speak of the reason of the thing, then he always recovers himself. The voice of the mob is silent, and Milton speaks. And the peroration, in which he implores his countrymen to refute this adversary by their great deeds, is in a just spirit. The other piece is his “Areopagitica,” the discourse, addressed to the Parliament, in favor of removing the censorship of the press; the most splendid of his prose works. It is, as Luther said of one of Melancthon’s writings, “alive, hath hands and feet, — and not like Erasmus’s sentences, which were made, not grown.” The weight of the thought is equalled by the vivacity of the expression, and it cheers as well as teaches. This tract is far the best known and the most read of all, and is still a magazine of reasons for the freedom of the press. It is valuable in history as an argument addressed to a government to produce a practical end, and plainly presupposes a very peculiar state of society.

But deeply as that peculiar state of society, in which and for which Milton wrote, has engraved itself in the remembrance of the world, it shares the destiny which overtakes everything local and personal in nature; and the accidental facts on which a battle of principles was fought have already passed, or are fast passing, into oblivion. We have lost all interest in Milton as the redoubted disputant of a sect; but by his own innate worth this man has steadily risen in the world’s reverence, and occupies a more imposing place in the mind of men at this hour than ever before.

It is the aspect which he presents to this generation, that alone concerns us. Milton the polemic has lost his popularity long ago; and if we skip the pages of “Paradise Lost” where “God the Father argues like a school divine,” so did the next age to his own. But, we are persuaded, he kindles a love and emulation in us which he did not in foregoing generations. We think we have seen and heard criticism upon the poems, which the bard himself would have more valued than the recorded praise of Dryden, Addison and Johnson, because it came nearer to the mark; was finer and closer apprecia tion; the praise of intimate knowledge and delight; and, of course, more welcome to the poet than the general and vague acknowledgment of his genius by those able but unsympathizing critics. We think we have heard the recitation of his verses by genius which found in them that which itself would say; recitation which told, in the diamond sharpness of every articulation, that now first was such perception and enjoyment possible; the perception and enjoyment of all his varied rhythm, and his perfect fusion of the classic and the English styles. This is a poet’s right; for every masterpiece of art goes on for some ages reconciling the world unto itself, and despotically fashioning the public ear. The opposition to it, always greatest at first, continually decreases and at last ends; and a new race grows up in the taste and spirit of the work, with the utmost advantage for seeing intimately its power and beauty.

But it would be great injustice to Milton to consider him as enjoying merely a critical reputation. It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to inspire. Virtue goes out of him into others. Leaving out of view the pretensions of our contemporaries (always an incalculable influence), we think no man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet, Shakspeare undoubtedly transcends, and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations; but Shakspeare is a voice merely; who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not. Milton stands erect, commanding, still visible as a man among men, and reads the laws of the moral sentiment to the new-born race. There is something pleasing in the affection with which we can regard a man who died a hundred and sixty years ago in the other hemisphere, who, in respect to personal relations, is to us as the wind, yet by an influence purely spiritual makes us jealous for his fame as for that of a near friend. He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race. If hereby we attain any more precision, we proceed to say that we think no man in these later ages, and few men ever, possessed so great a conception of the manly character. Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity, — to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength and of virtue, as poet had not described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France and Germany, have formerly dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakens. Lord Bacon, who has written much and with prodigious ability on this science, shrinks and falters before the absolute and uncourtly Puritan. Bacon’s Essays are the portrait of an ambitious and profound calculator, — a great man of the vulgar sort. Of the upper world of man’s being they speak few and faint words. The man of Locke is virtuous without enthusiasm and intelligent without poetry. Addison, Pope, Hume and Johnson, students, with very unlike temper and success, of the same subject, cannot, taken together, make any pretension to the amount or the quality of Milton’s inspirations. The man of Lord Chesterfield is unworthy to touch his garment’s hem. Franklin’s man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but savors of nothing heroic. The genius of France has not, even in her best days, yet culminated in any one head, — not in Rousseau, not in Pascal, not in Fénelon, — into such perception of all the attributes of humanity as to entitle it to any rivalry in these lists. In Germany, the greatest writers are still too recent to institute a comparison; and yet we are tempted to say that art and not life seems to be the end of their effort. But the idea of a purer existence than any he saw around him, to be realized in the life and conversation of men, inspired every act and every writing of John Milton. He defined the object of education to be, “to fit a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.” He declared that “he who would aspire to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things, not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.” Nor is there in literature a more noble outline of a wise external education, than that which he drew up, at the age of thirty-six, in his Letter to Samuel Hartlib. The muscles, the nerves and the flesh with which this skeleton is to be filled up and covered, exist in his works and must be sought there.

For the delineation of this heroic image of man, Milton enjoyed singular advantages. Perfections of body and of mind are attributed to him by his biographers, that, if the anecdotes had come down from a greater distance of time, or had not been in part furnished or corroborated by political enemies, would lead us to suspect the portraits were ideal, like the Cyrus of Xenophon, the Telemachus of Fénelon, or the popular traditions of Alfred the Great.

Handsome to a proverb, he was called the lady of his college. Aubrey says, “This harmonical and ingenuous soul dwelt in a beautiful and well-proportioned body.” His manners and his carriage did him no injustice. Wood, his political opponent, relates that “his deportment was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness.” Aubrey adds a sharp trait, that “he pronounced the letter R very hard, a certain sign of satirical genius.” He had the senses of a Greek. His eye was quick, and he was accounted an excellent master of his rapier. His ear for music was so acute, that he was not only enthusiastic in his love, but a skilful performer himself; and his voice, we are told, was delicately sweet and harmonious. He insists that music shall make a part of a generous education.

With these keen perceptions, he naturally received a love of nature and a rare susceptibility to impressions from external beauty. In the midst of London, he seems, like the creatures of the field and the forest, to have been tuned in concord with the order of the world; for, he believed, his poetic vein only flowed from the autumnal to the vernal equinox; and, in his essay on Education, he doubts whether, in the fine days of spring, any study can be accomplished by young men. “In those vernal seasons of the year when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature not to go out and see her riches and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.” His sensibility to impressions from beauty needs no proof from his history; it shines through every page. The form and the voice of Leonora Baroni seemed to have captivated him in Rome, and to her he addressed his Italian sonnets and Latin epigrams.

To these endowments it must be added that his address and his conversation were worthy of his fame. His house was resorted to by men of wit, and foreigners came to England, we are told, “to see the Lord Protector and Mr. Milton.” In a letter to one of his foreign correspondents, Emeric Bigot, and in reply apparently to some compliment on his powers of conversation, he writes: “Many have been celebrated for their compositions, whose common conversation and intercourse have betrayed no marks of sublimity or genius. But, as far as possible, I aim to show myself equal in thought and speech to what I have written, if I have written anything well.”

These endowments received the benefit ef a careful and happy discipline. His father’s care, seconded by his own endeavor, introduced him to a profound skill in all the treasures of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Italian tongues; and, to enlarge and enliven his elegant learning, he was sent into Italy, where he beheld the remains of ancient art, and the rival works of Raphael, Michael Angelo and Correggio; where, also, he received social and academical honors from the learned and the great. In Paris, he became acquainted with Grotius; in Florence or Rome, with Galileo; and probably no traveller ever entered that country of history with better right to its hospitality, none upon whom its influences could have fallen more congenially.

Among the advantages of his foreign travel, Milton certainly did not count it the least that it contributed to forge and polish that great weapon of which he acquired such extraordinary mastery, — his power of language. His lore of foreign tongues added daily to his consummate skill in the use of his own. He was a benefactor of the English tongue by showing its capabilities. Very early in life he became conscious that he had more to say to his fellow-men than they had fit words to embody. At nineteen years, in a college exercise, he addresses his native language, saying to it that it would be his choice to leave trifles for a grave argument,

“Such as may make thee search thy coffers round,

Before thou clothe my fancy in fit sound;

Such where the deep transported mind may soar

Above the wheeling poles, and at Heaven’s door

Look in, and see each blissful deity,

How he before the thunderous throne doth lie.”

Michael Angelo calls “him alone an artist, whose hands can execute what his mind has conceived.” The world, no doubt, contains many of that class of men whom Wordsworth denominates “silent poets,” whose minds teem with images which they want words to clothe. But Milton’s mind seems to have no thought or emotion which refused to be recorded. His mastery of his native tongue was more than to use it as well as any other; he cast it into new forms. He uttered in it things unheard before. Not imitating but rivalling Shakspeare, he scattered, in tones of prolonged and delicate melody, his pastoral and romantic fancies; then, soaring into unattempted strains, he made it capable of an unknown majesty, and bent it to express every trait of beauty, every shade of thought; and searched the kennel and Jakes as well as the palaces of sound for the harsh discords of his polemic wrath. We may even apply to his performance on the instrument of language, his own description of music;

“ — Notes, with many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out,

With wanton heed and giddy cunning,

The melting voice through mazes running,

Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony.”

But, whilst Milton was conscious of possessing this intellectual voice, penetrating through ages and propelling its melodious undulations forward through the coming world, he knew that this mastery of language was a secondary power, and he respected the mysterious source whence it had its spring; namely, clear conceptions and a devoted heart. “For me,” he said, in his “Apology for Smectymnnus,” “although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth; and that whose mind soever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things, and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words, by what I can express, like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well-ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.”

But, as basis or fountain of his rare physical and intellectual accomplishments, the man Milton was just and devout. He is rightly dear to mankind, because in him, among so many perverse and partial men of genius, — in him humanity rights itself; the old eternal goodness finds a home in his breast, and for once shows itself beautiful. His gifts are subordinated to his moral sentiments. And his virtues are so graceful that they seem rather talents than labors. Among so many contrivances as the world has seen to make holiness ugly, in Milton at least it was so pure a flame, that the foremost impression his character makes is that of elegance. The victories of the conscience in him are gained by the commanding charm which all the severe and restrictive virtues have for him. His virtues remind us of what Plutarch said of Timoleon’s victories, that they resembled Homer’s verses, they ran so easy and natural. His habits of living were austere. He was abstemious in diet, chaste, an early riser, and industrious. He tells us, in a Latin poem, that the lyrist may indulge in wine and in a freer life; but that he who would write an epic to the nations, must eat beans and drink water. Yet in his severity is no grimace or effort. He serves from love, not from fear. He is innocent and exact, because his taste was so pure and delicate. He acknowledges to his friend Diodati, at the age of twenty-one, that he is enamored, if ever any was, of moral perfection: “For, whatever the Deity may have bestowed upon me in other respects, he has certainly inspired me, if any ever were inspired, with a passion for the good and fair. Nor did Ceres, according to the fable, ever seek her daughter Proserpine with such unceasing solicitude, as I have sought this Ä¿æ º±»¿æ 0´s±½ , this perfect model of the beautiful in all forms and appearances of things.”

When he was charged with loose habits of living, he declares, that “a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem either of what I was or what I might be, and a modesty, kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and plunge himself, that can agree” to such degradation. “His mind gave him,” he said, “that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath of chastity, ought to be born a knight; nor needed to expect the gilt spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up, by his counsel and his arm, to secure and protect” attempted innocence.

He states these things, he says, “to show, that, though Christianity had been but slightly taught him, yet a certain reservedness of natural disposition and moral discipline, learned out of the noblest philosophy, was enough to keep him in disdain of far less incontinences than these,” that had been charged on him. In like spirit, he replies to the suspicious calumny respecting his morning haunts. “Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter, often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labor or devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its perfect fraught; then with useful and generous labors preserving the body’s health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our country’s liberty, when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their stations. These are the morning practices.” This native honor never forsook him. It is the spirit of “Comus,” the loftiest song in the praise of chastity that is in any language. It always sparkles in his eyes. It breathed itself over his decent form. It refined his amusements, which consisted in gardening, in exercise with the sword, and in playing on the organ. It engaged his interest in chivalry, in courtesy, in whatsoever savored of generosity and nobleness. This magnanimity shines in all his life. He accepts a high impulse at every risk, and deliberately undertakes the defence of the English people, when advised by his physicians that he does it at the cost of sight. There is a forbearance even in his polemics. He opens the war and strikes the first blow. When he had cut down his opponents, he left the details of death and plunder to meaner partisans. He said, “he had learned the prudence of the Roman soldier, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath was quite out of the body.”

To this antique heroism, Milton added the genius of the Christian sanctity. Few men could be cited who have so well understood what is peculiar in the Christian ethics, and the precise aid it has brought to men, in being an emphatic affirmation of the omnipotence of spiritual laws, and, by way of marking the contrast to vulgar opinions, laying its chief stress on humility. The indifferency of a wise mind to what is called high and low, and the fact that true greatness is a perfect humility, are revelations of Christianity which Milton well understood. They give an inexhaustible truth to all his compositions. His firm grasp of this truth is his weapon against the prelates. He celebrates in the martyrs, “the unresistible might of weakness.” He told the bishops that “instead of showing the reason of their lowly condition from divine example and command, they seek to prove their high preëminence from human consent and authority.” He advises that in country places, rather than to trudge many miles to a church, public worship be maintained nearer home, as in a house or barn. “For, notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of some still devoted ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured, that he who disdained not to be born in a manger, disdains not to be preached in a barn.” And the following passage, in the “Reason of Church Government,” indicates his own perception of the doctrine of humility. “Albeit I must confess to be half in doubt whether I should bring it forth or no, it being so contrary to the eye of the world, that I shall endanger either not to be regarded, or not to be understood. For who is there, almost, that measures wisdom by simplicity, strength by suffering, dignity by lowliness?” Obeying this sentiment, Milton deserved the apostrophe of Wordsworth:

“Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life’s common way

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”

He laid on himself the lowliest duties. Johnson petulantly taunts Milton with “great promise and small performance,” in returning from Italy because his country was in danger, and then opening a private school. Milton, wiser, felt no absurdity in this conduct. He returned into his revolutionized country, and assumed an honest and useful task, by which he might serve the state daily, whilst he launched from time to time his formidable bolts against the enemies of liberty. He felt the heats of that “love” which “esteems no office mean.” He compiled a logic for boys; he wrote a grammar; and devoted much of his time to the preparing of a Latin dictionary. But the religious sentiment warmed his writings and conduct with the highest affection of faith. The memorable covenant, which in his youth, in the second book of the “Reason of Church Government,” he makes with God and his reader, expressed the faith of his old age. For the first time since many ages, the invocations of the Eternal Spirit in the commencement of his books are not poetic forms, but are thoughts, and so are still read with delight. His views of choice of profession, and choice in marriage, equally expect a divine leading.

Thus chosen, by the felicity of his nature and of his breeding, for the clear perception of all that is graceful and all that is great in man, Milton was not less happy in his times. His birth fell upon the agitated years when the discontents of the English Puritans were fast drawing to a head against the tyranny of the Stuarts. No period has surpassed that in the general activity of mind. It is said that no opinion, no civil, religious, moral dogma can be produced, that was not broached in the fertile brain of that age. Questions that involve all social and personal rights were hasting to be decided by the sword, and were searched by eyes to which the love of freedom, civil and religious, lent new illumination. Milton, gentle, learned, delicately bred in all the elegancy of art and learning, was set down in England in the stern, almost fanatic society of the Puritans. The part he took, the zeal of his fellowship, make us acquainted with the greatness of his spirit as in tranquil times we could not have known it. Susceptible as Burke to the attractions of historical prescription, of royalty, of chivalry, of an ancient church illustrated by old martyrdoms and installed in cathedrals, — he threw himself, the flower of elegancy, on the side of the reeking conventicle; the side of humanity, but unlearned and unadorned. His muse was brave and humane, as well as sweet. He felt the dear love of native land and native language. The humanity which warms his pages begins as it should, at home. He preferred his own English, so manlike he was, to the Latin, which contained all the treasures of his memory. “My mother bore me,” he said, “a speaker of what God made mine own, and not a translator.” He told the Parliament, that “the imprimaturs of Lambeth House had been writ in Latin; for that our English, the language of men ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty, will not easily find servile letters enow to spell such a dictatory presumption.” At one time he meditated writing a poem on the settlement of Britain, and a history of England was one of the three main tasks which he proposed to himself. He proceeded in it no further than to the Conquest. He studied with care the character of his countrymen, and once in the “History,” and once again in the “Reason of Church Government,” he has recorded his judgment of the English genius.

Thus drawn into the great controversies of the times, in them he is never lost in a party. His private opinions and private conscience always distinguish him. That which drew him to the party was his love of liberty, ideal liberty; this therefore he could not sacrifice to any party. Toland tells us, “As he looked upon true and absolute freedom to be the greatest happiness of this life, whether to societies or single persons, so he thought constraint of any sort to be the utmost misery; for which reason he used to tell those about him the entire satisfaction of his mind, that he had constantly employed his strength and faculties in the defence of liberty, and in direct opposition to slavery.” Truly he was an apostle of freedom; of freedom in the house, in the state, in the church; freedom of speech, freedom of the press, yet in his own mind discriminated from savage license, because that which he desired was the liberty of the wise man, containing itself in the limits of virtue. He pushed, as far as any in that democratic age, his ideas of civil liberty. He proposed to establish a republic, of which the federal power was weak and loosely defined, and the substantial power should remain with primary assemblies. He maintained, that a nation may try, judge, and slay their king, if he be a tyrant. He pushed as far his views of ecclesiastical liberty. He taught the doctrine of unlimited toleration. One of his tracts is writ to prove that no power on earth can compel in matters of religion. He maintained the doctrine of literary liberty, denouncing the censorship of the press, and insisting that a book shall come into the world as freely as a man, so only it bear the name of author or printer, and be responsible for itself like a man. He maintained the doctrine of domestic liberty, or the liberty of divorce, on the ground that unfit disposition of mind was a better reason for the act of divorce than infirmity of body, which was good ground in law. The tracts he wrote on these topics are, for the most part, as fresh and pertinent to-day as they were then. The events which produced them, the practical issues to which they tend, are mere occasions for this philanthropist to blow his trumpet for human rights. They are all varied applications of one principle, the liberty of the wise man. He sought absolute truth, not accommodating truth. His opinions on all subjects are formed for man as he ought to be, for a nation of Miltons. He would be divorced when he finds in his consort unfit disposition; knowing that he should not abuse that liberty, because with his whole heart he abhors licentiousness and loves chastity. He defends the slaying of the king, because a king is a king no longer than he governs by the laws; “it would be right to kill Philip of Spain making an inroad into England, and what right the king of Spain hath to govern us at all, the same hath the king Charles to govern tyrannically.” He would remove hirelings out of the church, and support preachers by voluntary contributions; requiring that such only should preach as have faith enough to accept so self-denying and precarious a mode of life, scorning to take thought for the aspects of prudence and expediency. The most devout man of his time, he frequented no church; probably from a disgust at the fierce spirit of the pulpits. And so, throughout all his actions and opinions, is he a consistent spiritualist, or believer in the omnipotence of spiritual laws. He wished that his writings should be communicated only to those who desired to see them. He thought nothing honest was low. He thought he could be famous only in proportion as he enjoyed the approbation of the good. He admonished his friend “not to admire military prowess, or things in which force is of most avail. For it would not be matter of rational wonder, if the wethers of our country should be born with horns that could batter down cities and towns. Learn to estimate great characters, not by the amount of animal strength, but by the habitual justice and temperance of their conduct.”

Was there not a fitness in the undertaking of such a person to write a poem on the subject of Adam, the first man? By his sympathy with all nature; by the proportion of his powers; by great knowledge, and by religion, he would reascend to the height from which our nature is supposed to have descended. From a just knowledge of what man should be, he described what he was. He beholds him as he walked in Eden: —

“His fair large front and eye sublime declared

Absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks

Round from his parted forelock manly hung

Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad.”

And the soul of this divine creature is excellent as his form. The tone of his thought and passion is as healthful, as even, and as vigorous, as befits the new and perfect model of a race of gods.

The perception we have attributed to Milton, of a purer ideal of humanity, modifies his poetic genius. The man is paramount to the poet. His fancy is never transcendent, extravagant; but, as Bacon’s imagination was said to be “the noblest that ever contented itself to minister to the understanding,” so Milton’s ministers to the character. Milton’s sublimest song, bursting into heaven with its peals of melodious thunder, is the voice of Milton still. Indeed, throughout his poems, one may see under a thin veil, the opinions, the feelings, even the incidents of the poet’s life, still reappearing. The sonnets are all occasional poems. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are but a finer autobiography of his youthful fancies at Harefield; the “Comus” a transcript, in charming numbers, of that philosophy of chastity, which, in the “Apology for Smectymnuus,” and in the “Reason of Church Government,” he declares to be his defense and religion. The “Samson Agonistes” is too broad an expression of his private griefs to be mistaken, and is a version of the “Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.” The most affecting passages in “Paradise Lost” are personal allusions; and, when we are fairly in Eden, Adam and Milton are often difficult to be separated. Again, in “Paradise Regained,” we have the most distinct marks of the progress of the poet’s mind, in the revision and enlargement of his religious opinions. This may be thought to abridge his praise as a poet. It is true of Homer and Shakspeare that they do not appear in their poems; that those prodigious geniuses did cast themselves so totally into their song, that their individuality vanishes, and the poet towers to the sky, whilst the man quite disappears. The fact is memorable. Shall we say that in our admiration and joy in these wonderful poems we have even a feeling of regret that the men knew not what they did; that they were too passive in their great service; were channels through which streams of thought flowed from a higher source, which they did not appropriate, did not blend with their own being? Like prophets, they seem but imperfectly aware of the import of their own utterances. We hesitate to say such things, and say them only to the unpleasing dualism, when the man and the poet show like a double consciousness. Perhaps we speak to no fact, but to mere fables, of an idle mendicant Homer, and of a Shakspeare content with a mean and jocular way of life. Be it how it may, the genius and office of Milton were different, namely, to ascend by the aids of his learning and his religion, — by an equal perception, that is, of the past and the future, — to a higher insight and more lively delineation of the heroic life of man. This was his poem; whereof all his indignant pamphlets and all his soaring verses are only single cantos or detached stanzas. It was plainly needful that his poetry should be a version of his own life, in order to give weight and solemnity to his thoughts; by which they might penetrate and possess the imagination and the will of mankind. The creations of Shakspeare are cast into the world of thought to no further end than to delight. Their intrinsic beauty is their excuse for being. Milton, fired “with dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of good things into others,” tasked his giant imagination and exhausted the stores of his intellect for an end beyond, namely, to teach. His own conviction it is which gives such authority to his strain. Its reality is its force. If out of the heart it came, to the heart it must go. What schools and epochs of common rhymers would it need to make a counterbalance to the severe oracles of his muse:

“In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt,

What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so.”

The lover of Milton reads one sense in his prose and in his metrical compositions; and sometimes the muse soars highest in the former, because the thought is more sincere. Of his prose in general, not the style alone but the argument also is poetic; according to Lord Bacon’s definition of poetry, following that of Aristotle, “Poetry, not finding the actual world exactly conformed to its idea of good and fair, seeks to accommodate the shows of things to the desires of the mind, and to create an ideal world better than the world of experience.” Such certainly is the explanation of Milton’s tracts. Such is the apology to be entered for the plea for freedom of divorce; an essay, which, from the first until now, has brought a degree of obloquy on his name. It was a sally of the extravagant spirit of the time, overjoyed, as in the French Revolution, with the sudden victories it had gained, and eager to carry on the standard of truth to new heights. It is to be regarded as a poem on one of the griefs of man’s condition, namely, unfit marriage. And as many poems have been written upon unfit society, commending solitude, yet have not been proceeded against, though their end was hostile to the state; so should this receive that charity which an angelic soul, suffering more keenly than others from the unavoidable evils of human life, is entitled to.

We have offered no apology for expanding to such length our commentary on the character of John Milton; who, in old age, in solitude, in neglect, and blind, wrote the Paradise Lost; a man whom labor or danger never deterred from whatever efforts a love of the supreme interests of man prompted. For are we not the better; are not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery, the purity, the temperance, the toil, the independence and the angelic devotion of this man, who, in a revolutionary age, taking counsel only of himself, endeavored, in his writings and in his life, to carry out the life of man to new heights of spiritual grace and dignity, without any abatement of its strength?

PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.

The tongue is prone to lose the way;

Not so the pen, for in a letter

We have not better things to say,

But surely say them better.

CONTENTS

I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE.

II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDER. 1

III. PRAYERS.

IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS.

VI. PAST AND PRESENT.

VII. A LETTER.

VIII. THE TRAGIC.

I. THOUGHTS ON MODERN LITERATURE.

[The Dial, vol. i. p. 137.]

In our fidelity to the higher truth we need not disown our debt, in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day. When we flout all particular books as initial merely, we truly express the privilege of spiritual nature, but alas, not the fact and fortune of this low Massachusetts and Boston, of these humble Junes and Decembers of mortal life. Our souls are not self-fed, but do eat and drink of chemical water and wheat. Let us not forget the genial miraculous force we have known to proceed from a book. We go musing into the vault of day and night; no constellation shines, no muse descends, the stars are white points, the roses, brick-colored leaves, and frogs pipe, mice cheep, and wagons creak along the road. We return to the house and take up Plutarch or Augustine, and read a few sentences or pages, and lo! the air swims with life, secrets of magnanimity and grandeur invite us on every hand, life is made up of them. Such is our debt to a book. Observe moreover that we ought to credit literature with much more than the bare word it gives us. I have just been reading poems which now in memory shine with a certain steady, warm, autumnal light. That is not in their grammatical construction which they give me. If I analyze the sentences it eludes me, but is the genius and suggestion of the whole. Over every true poem lingers a certain wild beauty, immeasurable; a happiness lightsome and delicious fills the heart and brain, as they say every man walks environed by his proper atmosphere, extending to some distance around him. This beautiful result must be credited to literature also in casting its account.

In looking at the library of the Present Age, we are first struck with the fact of the immense miscellany. It can hardly be characterized by any species of book, for every opinion, old and new, every hope and fear, every whim and folly has an organ. It exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as much solemnity as a new revelation. Along with these it vents books that breathe of new morning, that seem to heave with the life of millions, books for which men and women peak and pine; books which take the rose out of the cheek of him that wrote them, and give him to the midnight a sad, solitary, diseased man; which leave no man where they found him, but make him better or worse; and which work dubiously on society and seem to inoculate it with a venom before any healthy result appears.

In order to any complete view of the literature of the present age, an inquiry should include what it quotes, what it writes and what it wishes to write. In our present attempt to enumerate some traits of the recent literature, we shall have somewhat to offer on each of these topics, but we cannot promise to set in very exact order what we have to say.

In the first place it has all books. It reprints the wisdom of the world. How can the age be a bad one which gives me Plato and Paul and Plutarch, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Chapman, Beaumout and Fletcher, Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, beside its own riches? Our presses groan every year with new editions of all the select pieces of the first of mankind, — meditations, history, classifications, opinions, epics, lyrics, which the age adopts by quoting them. If we should designate favorite studies in which the age delights more than in the rest of this great mass of the permanent literature of the human race, one or two instances would be conspicuous. First; the prodigious growth and influence of the genius of Shakspeare, in the last one hundred and fifty years, is itself a fact of the first importance. It almost alone has called out the genius of the German nation into an activity which spreading from the poetic into the scientific, religious and philosophical domains, has made theirs now at last the paramount intellectual influence of the world, reacting with great energy on England and America. And thus, and not by mechanical diffusion, does an original genius work and spread himself.

The poetry and speculation of the age are marked by a certain philosophic turn, which discriminates them from the works of earlier times. The poet is not content to see how “Fair hangs the apple from the rock,” “What music a sunbeam awoke in the groves,” nor of Hardiknute, how “Stately steppes he east the way, and stately steppes he west,” but he now revolves, What is the apple to me? and what the birds to me? and what is Hardiknute to me? and what am I? And this is called subjectiveness, as the eye is withdrawn from the object and fixed on the subject or mind.

We can easily concede that a steadfast tendency of this sort appears in modern literature. It is the new consciousness of the one mind, which predominates in criticism. It is the uprise of the soul, and not the decline. It is founded on that insatiable demand for unity, the need to recognize one nature in all the variety of objects, which always characterizes a genius of the first order. Accustomed always to behold the presence of the universe in every part, the soul will not condescend to look at any new part as a stranger, but saith,— “I know all already, and what art thou? Show me thy relations to me, to all, and I will entertain thee also.”

There is a pernicious ambiguity in the use of the term subjective. We say, in accordance with the general view I have stated, that the single soul feels its right to be no longer confounded with numbers, but itself to sit in judgment on history and literature, and to summon all facts and parties before its tribunal. And in this sense the age is subjective.

But, in all ages, and now more, the narrow-minded have no interest in anything but in its relation to their personality. What will help them to be delivered from some burden, eased in some circumstance, flattered or pardoned or enriched; what will help to marry or to divorce them, to prolong or to sweeten life, is sure of their interest; and nothing else. Every form under the whole heaven they behold in this most partial light or darkness of intense selfishness, until we hate their being. And this habit of intellectual selfishness has acquired in our day the fine name of subjectiveness.

Nor is the distinction between these two habits to be found in the circumstance of using the first person singular, or reciting facts and feelings of personal history. A man may say I, and never refer to himself as an individual; and a man may recite passages of his life with no feeling of egotism. Nor need a man have a vicious subjective-ness because he deals in abstract propositions.

But the criterion which discriminates these two habits in the poet’s mind is the tendency of his composition; namely, whether it leads us to nature, or to the person of the writer. The great always introduce us to facts; small men introduce us always to themselves. The great man, even whilst he relates a private fact personal to him, is really leading us away from his to an universal experience. His own affection is in nature, in what is , and, of course, all his communication leads outward to it, starting from whatsoever point. The great never with their own consent become a load on the minds they instruct. The more they draw us to them, the farther from them or more independent of them we are, because they have brought us to the knowledge of somewhat deeper than both them and us. The great never hinder us; for their activity is coincident with the sun and moon, with the course of the rivers and of the winds, with the stream of laborers in the street and with all the activity and well-being of the race. The great lead us to nature, and in our age to metaphysical nature, to the invisible awful facts, to moral abstractions, which are not less nature than is a river or a coal-mine, — nay, they are far more nature, — but its essence and soul.

But the weak and wicked, led also to analyze, saw nothing in thought but luxury. Thought for the selfish became selfish. They invited us to contemplate nature, and showed us an abominable self. Would you know the genius of the writer? Do not enumerate his talents or his feats, but ask thyself, What spirit is.he of? Do gladness and hope and fortitude flow from his page into thy heart? Has he led thee to nature because his own soul was too happy in beholding her power and love? Or is his passion for the wilderness only the sensibility of the sick, the exhibition of a talent which only shines whilst you praise it; which has no root in the character, and can thus minister to the vanity but not to the happiness of the possessor; and which derives all its éclat from our conventional education, but would not make itself intelligible to the wise man of another age or country? The water we wash with never speaks of itself, nor does fire or wind or tree. Neither does the noble natural man: he yields himself to your occasion and use, but his act expresses a reference to universal good.

Another element of the modern poetry akin to this subjective tendency, or rather the direction of that same on the question of resources, is the Feeling of the Infinite. Of the perception now fast becoming a conscious fact, — that there is One Mind, and that all the powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all; that I as a man may claim and appropriate whatever of true or fair or good or strong has anywhere been exhibited; that Moses and Confucius, Montaigne and Leibnitz are not so much individuals as they are parts of man and parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my own, — literature is far the best expression. It is true, this is not the only nor the obvious lesson it teaches. A selfish commerce and government have caught the eye and usurped the hand of the masses. It is not to be contested that selfishness and the senses write the laws under which we live, and that the street seems to be built and the men and women in it moving, not in reference to pure and grand ends, but rather to very short and sordid ones. Perhaps no considerable minority, no one man, leads a quite clean and lofty life. What then? We concede in sadness the fact. But we say that these low customary ways are not all that survives in human beings. There is that in us which mutters, and that which groans, and that which triumphs, and that which aspires. There are facts on which men of the world superciliously smile, which are worth all their trade and politics; which drive young men into gardens and solitary places, and cause extravagant gestures, starts, distortions of the countenance, and passionate exclamations; sentiments, which find no aliment or language for themselves on the wharves, in court, or market, but which are soothed by silence, by darkness, by the pale stars, and the presence of nature. All over the modern world the educated and susceptible have betrayed their discontent with the limits of our municipal life, and with the poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy. They betray this impatience by fleeing for resource to a conversation with nature, which is courted in a certain moody and exploring spirit, as if they anticipated a more intimate union of man with the world than has been known in recent ages. Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes. The very child in the nursery prattles mysticism, and doubts and philosophizes. A wild striving to express a more inward and infinite sense characterizes the works of every art. The music of Beethoven is said, by those who understand it, to labor with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before. This feeling of the Infinite has deeply colored the poetry of the period. This new love of the vast, always native in Germany, was imported into France by De Staël, appeared in England in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and finds a most genial climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed themselves on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is objective. In Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it is blind, it sees not its true end — an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a life nourished on absolute beatitudes, descending into nature to behold itself reflected there. His will is perverted, he worships the accidents of society, and his praise of nature is thieving and selfish.

Nothing certifies the prevalence of this taste in the people more than the circulation of the poems, — one would say most incongruously united by some bookseller, — of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. The only unity is in the subjectiveness and the aspiration common to the three writers. Shelley, though a poetic mind, is never a poet. His muse is uniformly imitative; all his poems composite. A good English scholar he is, with ear, taste, and memory; much more, he is a character full of noble and prophetic traits; but imagination, the original, authentic fire of the bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and shares with Richter, Chateaubriand, Manzoni and Wordsworth, the feeling of the infinite, which so labors for expression in their different genius. But all his lines are arbitrary, not necessary. When we read poetry, the mind asks, — Was this verse one of twenty which the author might have written as well; or is this what that man was created to say? But, whilst every line of the true poet will be genuine, he is in a boundless power and freedom to say a million things. And the reason why he can say one thing well, is because his vision extends to the sight of all things, and so he describes each as one who knows many and all.

The fame of Wordsworth is a leading fact in modern literature, when it is considered how hostile his genius at first seemed to the reigning taste, and with what limited poetic talents his great and steadily growing dominion has been established. More than any poet his success has been not his own but that of the idea which he shared with his coevals, and which he has rarely succeeded in adequately expressing. The Excursion awakened in every lover of Nature the right feeling. We saw stars shine, we felt the awe of mountains, we heard the rustle of the wind in the grass, and knew again the ineffable secret of solitude. It was a great joy. It was nearer to Nature than anything we had before. But the interest of the poem ended almost with the narrative of the influences of Nature on the mind of the Boy, in the First Book. Obviously for that passage the poem was written, and with the exception of this and of a few strains of the like character in the sequel, the whole poem was dull. Here was no poem, but here was poetry, and a sure index where the subtle muse was about to pitch her tent and find the argument of her song. It was the human soul in these last ages striving for a just publication of itself. Add to this, however, the great praise of Wordsworth, that more than any other contemporary bard he is pervaded with a reverence of somewhat higher than (conscious) thought. There is in him that property common to all great poets, a wisdom of humanity, which is superior to any talents which they exert. It is the wisest part of Shakspeare and of Milton. For they are poets by the free course which they allow to the informing soul, which through their eyes be-holdeth again and blesseth the things which it hath made. The soul is superior to its knowledge, wiser than any of its works.

With the name of Wordsworth rises to our recollection the name of his contemporary and friend, Walter Savage Landor — a man working in a very different and peculiar spirit, yet one whose genius and accomplishments deserve a wiser criticism than we have yet seen applied to them, and the rather that his name does not readily associate itself with any school of writers. Of Thomas Carlyle, also, we shall say nothing at this time, since the quality and energy of his influence on the youth of this country will require at our hands, erelong, a distinct and faithful acknowledgment.

But of all men he who has united in himself, and that in the most extraordinary degree, the tendencies of the era, is the German poet, naturalist and philosopher, Goethe. Whatever the age inherited or invented, he made his own. He has owed to Commerce and to the victories of the Understanding, all their spoils. Such was his capacity, that the magazines of the world’s ancient or modern wealth, which arts and intercourse and skepticism could command, — he wanted them all. Had there been twice so much, he could have used it as well. Geologist, mechanic, merchant, chemist, king, radical, painter, composer, — all worked for him, and a thousand men seemed to look through his eyes. He learned as readily as other men breathe. Of all the men of this time, not one has seemed so much at home in it as he. He was not afraid to live. And in him this encyclopædia of facts, which it has been the boast of the age to compile, wrought an equal effect. He was knowing; he was brave; he was clean from all narrowness; he has a perfect propriety and taste, — a quality by no means common to the German writers. Nay, since the earth as we said had become a reading-room, the new opportunities seem to have aided him to be that resolute realist he is, and seconded his sturdy determination to see things for what they are. To look at him one would say there was never an observer before. What sagacity, what industry of observation. To read his record is a frugality of time, for you shall find no word that does not stand for a thing, and he is of that comprehension which can see the value of truth. His love of Nature has seemed to give a new meaning to that word. There was never man more domesticated in this world than he. And he is an apology for the analytic spirit of the period, because, of his analysis, always wholes were the result. All conventions, all traditions he rejected. And yet he felt his entire right and duty to stand before and try and judge every fact in nature. He thought it necessary to dot round with his own pen the entire sphere of knowables; and for many of his stories, this seems the only reason: Here is a piece of humanity I had hitherto omitted to sketch; — take this. He does not say so in syllables, — yet a sort of conscientious feeling he had to be up to the universe, is the best account and apology for many of them. He shared also the subjectiveness of the age, and that too in both the senses I have discriminated. With the sharpest eye for form, color, botany, engraving, medals, persons and manners, he never stopped at surface, but pierced the purpose of a thing and studied to reconcile that purpose with his own being. What he could so reconcile was good; what he could not, was false. Hence a certain greatness encircles every fact he treats; for to him it has a soul, an eternal reason why it was so, and not otherwise. This is the secret of that deep realism, which went about among all objects he beheld, to find the cause why they must be what they are. It was with him a favorite task to find a theory of every institution, custom, art, work of art, which he observed. Witness his explanation of the Italian mode of reckoning the hours of the day, as growing out of the Italian climate; of the obelisk of Egypt, as growing out of a common natural fracture in the granite parallelo-piped in Upper Egypt; of the Doric architecture, and the Gothic; of the Venetian music of the gondolier, originating in the habit of the fishers’ wives of the Lido singing on shore to their husbands on the sea; of the amphitheatre, which is the enclosure of the natural cup of heads that arranges itself round every spectacle in the street; of the coloring of Titian and Paul Veronese, which one may verify in common daylight in Venice every afternoon; of the Carnival at Rome; of the domestic rural architecture in Italy; and many the like examples.

But also that other vicious subjectiveness, that vice of the time, infected him also. We are provoked with his Olympian self-complacency, the patronizing air with which he vouchsafes to tolerate the genius and performances of other mortals, “the good Hiller,” “our excellent Kant,” “the friendly Wieland,” c. c. There is a good letter from Wieland to Merck, in which Wieland relates that Goethe read to a select party his journal of a tour in Switzerland with the Grand Duke, and their passage through the Vallais and over the St. Gothard. “It was,” says Wieland,” as good as Xenophon’s Anabasis. The piece is one of the most masterly productions, and is thought and written with the greatness peculiar to him. The fair hearers were enthusiastic at the nature in this piece; I liked the sly art in the composition, whereof they saw nothing, still better. It is a true poem, so concealed is the art too. But what most remarkably in this, as in all his other works, distinguishes him from Homer and Shakspeare, is, that the Me, the Ille ego , everywhere glimmers through, although without any boasting and with an infinite fineness.” This subtle element of egotism in Goethe certainly does not seem to deform his compositions, but to lower the moral influence of the man. He differs from all the great in the total want of frankness. Who saw Milton, who saw Shakspeare, saw them do their best, and utter their whole heart manlike among their brethren. No man was permitted to call Goethe brother. He hid himself, and worked always to astonish, which is egotism, and therefore little.

If we try Goethe by the ordinary canons of criticism, we should say that his thinking is of great altitude, and all level; not a succession of summits, but a high Asiatic table-land. Dramatic power, the rarest talent in literature, he has very little. He has an eye constant to the fact of life and that never pauses in its advance. But the great felicities, the miracles of poetry, he has never. It is all design with him, just thought and instructed expression, analogies, allusion, illustration, which knowledge and correct thinking supply; but of Shakspeare and the transcendent muse, no syllable. Yet in the court and law to which we ordinarily speak, and without adverting to absolute standards, we claim for him the praise of truth, of fidelity to his intellectual nature. He is the king of all scholars. In these days and in this country, where the scholars are few and idle, where men read easy books and sleep after dinner, it seems as if no book could so safely be put in the hands of young men as the letters of Goethe, which attest the incessant activity of this man, to eighty years, in an endless variety of studies, with uniform cheerfulness and greatness of mind. They cannot be read without shaming us into an emulating industry. Let him have the praise of the love of truth. We think, when we contemplate the stupendous glory of the world, that it were life enough for one man merely to lift his hands and cry with St. Augustine, “Wrangle who pleases, I will wonder.” Well, this he did. Here was a man who, in the feeling that the thing itself was so admirable as to leave all comment behind, went up and down, from object to object, lifting the veil from every one, and did no more. What he said of Lavater, may truelier be said of him, that “it was fearful to stand in the presence of one before whom all the boundaries within which Nature has circumscribed our being were laid flat.” His are the bright and terrible eyes which meet the modern student in every sacred chapel of thought, in every public enclosure.

But now, that we may not seem to dodge the question which all men ask, nor pay a great man so ill a compliment as to praise him only in the conventional and comparative speech, let us honestly record our thought upon the total worth and influence of this genius. Does he represent, not only the achievement of that age in which he lived, but that which it would be and is now becoming? And what shall we think of that absence of the moral sentiment, that singular equivalence to him of good and evil in action, which discredit his compositions to the pure? The spirit of his biography, of his poems, of his tales, is identical, and we may here set down by way of comment on his genius the impressions recently awakened in us by the story of Wilhelm Meister.

All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain. They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them. So did Dante, so did Machiavel. Goethe has done this in Meister. We can fancy him saying to himself: — There are poets enough of the Ideal; let me paint the Actual, as, after years of dreams, it will still appear and reappear to wise men. That all shall right itself in the long Morrow, I may well allow, and my novel may wait for the same regeneration. The age, that can damn it as false and falsifying, will see that it is deeply one with the genius and history of all the centuries. I have given my characters a bias to error. Men have the same. I have let mischance befall instead of good fortune. They do so daily. And out of many vices and misfortunes, I have let a great success grow, as I had known in my own and many other examples. Fierce churchmen and effeminate aspirants will chide and hate my name, but every keen beholder of life will justify my truth, and will acquit me of prejudging the cause of humanity by painting it with this morose fidelity. To a profound soul is not austere truth the sweetest flattery?

Yes, O Goethe! but the ideal is truer than the actual. That is ephemeral, but this changes not. Moreover, because nature is moral, that mind only can see, in which the same order entirely obtains. An interchangeable Truth, Beauty and Goodness, each wholly interfused in the other, must make the humors of that eye which would see causes reaching to their last effect and reproducing the world forever. The least inequality of mixture, the excess of one element over the other, in that degree diminishes the transparency of things, makes the world opaque to the observer, and destroys so far the value of his experience. No particular gifts can countervail this defect. In reading Meister, I am charmed with the insight; to use a phrase of Ben Jonson’s, “it is rammed with life.” I find there actual men and women even too faithfully painted. I am moreover instructed in the possibility of a highly accomplished society, and taught to look for great talent and culture under a gray coat. But this is all. The limits of artificial society are never quite out of sight. The vicious conventions, which hem us in like prison walls and which the poet should explode at his touch, stand for all they are worth in the newspaper. We are never lifted above ourselves, we are not transported out of the dominion of the senses, or cheered with an infinite tenderness, or armed with a grand trust.

Goethe, then, must be set down as the poet of the Actual, not of the Ideal; the poet of limitation, not of possibility; of this world, and not of religion and hope; in short, if we may say so, the poet of prose, and not of poetry. He accepts the base doctrine of Fate, and gleans what straggling joys may yet remain out of its ban. He is like a banker or a weaver with a passion for the country; he steals out of the hot streets before sunrise, or after sunset, or on a rare holiday, to get a draft of sweet air and a gaze at the magnificence of summer, but dares not break from his slavery and lead a man’s life in a man’s relation to nature. In that which should be his own place, he feels like a truant, and is scourged back presently to his task and his cell. Poetry is with Goethe thus external, the gilding of the chain, the mitigation of his fate; but the Muse never assays those thunder-tones which cause to vibrate the sun and the moon, which dissipate by dreadful melody all this iron network of circumstance, and abolish the old heavens and the old earth before the freewill or Godhead of man. That Goethe had not a moral perception proportionate to his other powers, is not then merely a circumstance, as we might relate of a man that he had or had not the sense of tune or an eye for colors, but it is the cardinal fact of health or disease; since, lacking this, he failed in the high sense to be a creator, and, with divine endowments, drops by irreversible decree into the common history of genius. He was content to fall into the track of vulgar poets and spend on common aims his splendid endowments, and has declined the office proffered to now and then a man in many centuries in the power of his genius, of a Redeemer of the human mind. He has written better than other poets only as his talent was subtler, but the ambition of creation he refused. Life for him is prettier, easier, wiser, decenter, has a gem or two more on its robe, but its old eternal burden is not relieved; no drop of healthier blood flows yet in its veins. Let him pass. Humanity must wait for its physician still at the side of the road, and confess as this man goes out, that they have served it better who assured it out of the innocent hope in their hearts that a Physician will come, than this majestic Artist, with all the treasuries of wit, of science, and of power at his command.

The criticism, which is not so much spoken as felt in reference to Goethe, instructs us directly in the hope of literature. We feel that a man gifted like him should not leave the world as he found it. It is true, though somewhat sad, that every fine genius teaches us how to blame himself. Being so much, we cannot forgive him for not being more. When one of these grand monads is incarnated whom nature seems to design for eternal men and draw to her bosom, we think that the old weariness of Europe and Asia, the trivial forms of daily life will now end, and a new morning break on us all. What is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated and petrified social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet redeem us from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before the fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart? All that in our sovereign moments each of us has divined of the powers of thought, all the hints of omnipresence and energy which we have caught, this man should unfold, and constitute facts.

And this is the insatiable craving which alternately saddens and gladdens men at this day. The Doctrine of the Life of Man established after the truth through all his faculties; — this is the thought which the literature of this hour meditates and labors to say. This is that which tunes the tongue and fires the eye and sits in the silence of the youth. Verily it will not long want articulate and melodious expression. There is nothing in the heart but comes presently to the lips. The very depth of the sentiment, which is the author of all the cutaneous life we see, is guarantee for the riches of science and of song in the age to come. He who doubts whether this age or this country can yield any contribution to the literature of the world, only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human soul. Has the power of poetry ceased, or the need? Have the eyes ceased to see that which they would have, and which they have not? Have they ceased to see other eyes? Are there no lonely, anxious, wondering children, who must tell their tale? Are we not evermore whipped by thoughts;

“In sorrow steeped, and steeped in love

Of thoughts not yet incarnated.”

The heart beats in this age as of old, and the passions are busy as ever. Nature has not lost one ringlet of her beauty, one impulse of resistance and valor. From the necessity of loving none are exempt, and he that loves must utter his desires. A charm as radiant as beauty ever beamed, a love that fainteth at the sight of its object, is new to-day.

“The world does not run smoother than of old,

There are sad haps that must be told.”

Man is not so far lost but that he suffers ever the great Discontent which is the elegy of his loss and the prediction of his recovery. In the gay saloon he laments that these figures are not what Raphael and Guercino painted. Withered though he stand, and trifler though he be, the august spirit of the world looks out from his eyes. In his heart he knows the ache of spiritual pain, and his thought can animate the sea and land. What then shall hinder the Genius of the time from speaking its thought? It cannot be silent, if it would. It will write in a higher spirit and a wider knowledge and with a grander practical aim than ever yet guided the pen of poet. It will write the annals of a changed world, and record the descent of principles into practice, of love into Government, of love into Trade. It will describe the new heroic life of man, the now unbelieved possibility of simple living and of clean and noble relations with men. Religion will bind again these that were sometime frivolous, customary, enemies, skeptics, self-seekers, into a joyful reverence for the circumambient Whole, and that which was ecstacy shall become daily bread.

II. WALTER SAVAGE LANDER. 1

We sometimes meet in a stage coach in New England an erect, muscular man, with fresh complexion and a smooth hat, whose nervous speech instantly betrays the English traveller; — a man nowise cautious to conceal his name or that of his native country, or his very slight esteem for the persons and the country that surround him. When Mr. Boll rides in an American coach, he speaks quick and strong; he is very ready to confess his ignorance of everything about him, persons, manners, customs, politics, geography. He wonders that the Americans should build with wood, whilst all this stone is lying in the roadside; and is astonished to learn that a wooden house may last a hundred years; nor will he remember the fact as many minutes after it has been told him: he wonders that they do not make elder-wine and cherry-bounce, since here are cherries, and every mile is crammed with elder-bushes. He has never seen a good horse in America, nor a good coach, nor a good inn. Here is very good earth and water and plenty of them; that he is free to allow; to all other gifts of nature or man his eyes are sealed by the inexorable demand for the precise conveniences to which he is accustomed in England. Add to this proud blindness the better quality of great downrightness in speaking the truth, and the love of fair play, on all occasions, and moreover the peculiarity which is alleged of the Englishman, that his virtues do not come out until he quarrels.

Transfer these traits to a very elegant and accomplished mind, and we shall have no bad picture of Walter Savage Landor, who may stand as a favorable impersonation of the genius of his countrymen at the present day. A sharp, dogmatio man, with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride; with, a profound contempt for all that he does not understand; a master of all elegant learning, and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. His partialities and dislikes are by no means culpable, but are often whimsical and amusing; yet they are quite sincere, and, like those of Johnson and Coleridge, are easily separable from the man. What he says of Wordsworth is true of himself, that he delights to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry “Gentlemen, there is a better man than all of you.” Bolivar, Mina and General Jackson will never be greater soldiers than Napoleon and Alexander, let Mr. Landor think as he will; nor will he persuade us to burn Plato and Xenophon, out of our admiration of Bishop Patrick, or “Lucas on Happiness,” or “Lucas on Holiness,” or even Barrow’s Sermons. Yet a man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty. A less pardonable eccentricity is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion of licentious images, not so much the suggestion of merriment as of bitterness. Montaigne assigns as a reason for his license of speech, that he is tired of seeing his Essays on the work-tables of ladies, and he is determined they shall for the future put them out of sight. In Mr. Landor’s coarseness there is a certain air of defiance, and the rude word seems sometimes to arise from a disgust at niceness and over-refinement. Before a well-dressed company he plunges his fingers in a cesspool, as if to expose the whiteness of his hands and the jewels of his ring. Afterward, he washes them in water, he washes them in wine; but you are never secure from his freaks. A sort of Earl Peterborough in literature, his eccentricity is too decided not to have diminished his greatness. He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no book.

But we have spoken all our discontent. Possibly his writings are open to harsher censure; but we love the man, from sympathy as well as for reasons to be assigned; and have no wish, if we were able, to put an argument in the mouth of his critics. Now for twenty years we have still found the “Imaginary Conversations” a sure resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just and generous sentiment and a scourge like that of Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private, — we feel how dignified is this perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world.

Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make good in the nineteenth century the claims of pure literature. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar, receiving from past ages the treasures of wit and enlarging them by his own love, is a friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of Homer and Æschylus; Horace, Ovid and Plutarch; Erasmus, Scaliger and Montaigne; Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton; Dryden and Pope, — we pass at once out of trivial associations and enter into a region of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted all beneath the moon and entered that crystal sphere in which everything in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and immortal. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition. The existence of the poorest play-wright and the humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm attaches to the most inferior names which have in any manner got themselves enrolled in the registers of the House of Fame, even as porters and grooms in the courts; to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and Dennis, Aubrey and Spence. From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we cease to be citizens, creditors, debtors, housekeepers and men of care and fear. What boundless leisure! what original jurisdiction! the old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen; an Elysian light tinges all objects: —

“In the afternoon we came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.”

And this sweet asylum of an intellectual life must appear to have the sanction of nature, as long as so many men are born with so decided an aptitude for reading and writing. Let us thankfully allow every faculty and art which opens new scope to a life so confined as ours. There are vast spaces in a thought: a slave, to whom the religious sentiment is opened, has a freedom which makes his master’s freedom a slavery. Let us not be so illiberal with our schemes for the renovation of society and nature as to disesteem or deny the literary spirit. Certainly there are heights in nature which command this; there are many more which this commands. It is vain to call it a luxury, and as saints and reformers are apt to do, decry it as a species of day-dreaming. What else are sanctities, and reforms, and all other things? Whatever can make for itself an element, means, organs, servants, and the most profound and permanent existence in the hearts and heads of millions of men, must have a reason for its being. Its excellency is reason and vindication enough. If rhyme rejoices us there should be rhyme, as much as if fire cheers us we should bring wood and coals. Each kind of excellence takes place for its hour and excludes everything else. Do not brag of your actions, as if they were better than Homer’s verses or Raphael’s pictures. Raphael and Homer feel that action is pitiful beside their enchantments. They could act too, if the stake was worthy of them: but now all that is good in the universe urges them to their task. Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class; and among these, few men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor. Wherever genius or taste has existed, wherever freedom and justice are threatened, which he values as the element in which genius may work, his interest is sure to be commanded. His love of beauty is passionate, and betrays itself in all petulant and contemptuous expressions.

But beyond his delight in genius and his love of individual and civil liberty, Mr. Landor has a perception that is much more rare, the appreciation of character. This is the more remarkable considered with his intense nationality, to which we have already alluded. He is buttoned in English broadcloth to the chin. He hates the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Scotch, and the Irish. He has the common prejudices of an English landholder; values his pedigree, his acres and the syllables of his name; loves all his advantages, is not insensible to the beauty of his watch-seal, or the Turk’s head on his umbrella; yet with all this miscellaneous pride there is a noble nature within him which instructs him that he is so rich that he can well spare all his trappings, and, leaving to others the painting of circumstance, aspire to the office of delineating character. He draws his own portrait in the costume of a village schoolmaster, and a sailor, and serenely enjoys the victory of nature over fortune. Not only the elaborated story of Normanby, but the whimsical selection of his heads proves this taste. He draws with evident pleasure the portrait of a man who never said anything right and never did anything wrong. But in the character of Pericles he has found full play for beauty and greatness of behavior, where the circumstances are in harmony with the man. These portraits, though mere sketches, must be valued as attempts in the very highest kind of narrative, which not only has very few examples to exhibit of any success, but very few competitors in the attempt. The word Character is in all mouths; it is a force which we all feel; yet who has analyzed it? What is the nature of that subtle and majestic principle which attaches us to a few persons, not so much by personal as by the most spiritual ties? What is the quality of the persons who, without being public men, or literary men, or rich men, or active men, or (in the popular sense) religious men, have a certain salutary omnipresence in all our life’s history, almost giving their own quality to the atmosphere and the landscape? A moral force, yet wholly unmindful of creed and catechism, intellectual, but scornful of books, it works directly and without means, and though it may be resisted at any time, yet resistance to it is a suicide. For the person who stands in this lofty relation to his fellow-men is always the impersonation to them of their conscience. It is a sufficient proof of the extreme delicacy of this element, evanescing before any but the most sympathetic vision, that it has so seldom been employed in the drama and in novels. Mr. Landor, almost alone among living English writers, has indicated his perception of it.

These merits make Mr. Landor’s position in the republic of letters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a grandeur of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of old and unquestionable nobility. We do not recollect an example of more complete independence in literary history. He has no clanship, no friendships that warp him. He was one of the first to pronounce Wordsworth the great poet of the age, yet he discriminates his faults with the greater freedom. He loves Pindar, Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Demosthenes, Virgil, yet with open eyes. His position is by no means the highest in literature: he is not a poet or a philosopher. He is a man full of thoughts, but not, like Coleridge, a man of ideas. Only from a mind conversant with the First Philosophy can definitions be expected. Coleridge has contributed many valuable ones to modern literature. Mr. Landor’s definitions are only enumerations of particulars; the generic law is not seized. But as it is not from the highest Alps or Andes but from less elevated summits that the most attractive landscape is commanded, so is Mr. Landor the most useful and agreeable of critics. He has commented on a wide variety of writers, with a closeness and extent of view which has enhanced the value of those authors to his readers. His Dialogue on the Epicurean philosophy is a theory of the genius of Epicurus. The Dialogue between Barrow and Newton is the best of all criticisms on the essays of Bacon. His picture of Demosthenes in three several Dialogues is new and adequate. He has illustrated the genius of Homer, Æschylus, Pindar, Euripides, Thucydides. Then he has examined before he has expatiated, and the minuteness of his verbal criticism gives a confidence in his fidelity when he speaks the language of meditation or of passion. His acquaintance with the English tongue is unsurpassed. He “hates false words, and seeks with care, difficulty and moroseness those that fit the thing.” He knows the value of his own words. “They are not,” he says, “written on slate.” He never stoops to explanation, nor uses seven words where one will do. He is a master of condensation and suppression, and that in no vulgar way. He knows the wide difference between compression and an obscure elliptical style. The dense writer has yet ample room and choice of phrase, and even a gamesome mood often between his valid words. There is no inadequacy or disagreeable contraction in his sentence, any more than in a human face, where in a square space of a few inches is found room for every possible variety of expression.

Yet it is not as an artist that Mr. Landor commends himself to us. He is not epic or dramatic, he has not the high, overpowering method by which the master gives unity and integrity to a work of many parts. He is too wilful, and never abandons himself to his genius. His books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory, sentiment, and personal history; and what skill of transition he may possess is superficial, not spiritual. His merit must rest, at last, not on the spirit of the dialogue or the symmetry of any of his historical portraits, but on the value of his senteaces. Many of these will secure their own immortality in English literature; and this, rightly considered, is no mean merit. These are not plants and animals, but the genetical atoms of which both are composed. All our great debt to the Oriental world is of this kind, not utensils and statues of the precious metal, but bullion and gold-dust. Of many of Mr. Landor’s sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of Socrates; that they are cubes, which will stand firm, place them how or where you will.

III. PRAYERS.

[The Dial, vol. iii. p. 77.]

“Not with fond shekels of the tested gold,

Nor gems whose rates are either rich or poor

As fancy values them: but with true prayers,

That shall be up at heaven and enter there

Ere sunrise; prayers from preserved souls,

From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate

To nothing temporal.”

Shakspeare

Pythagoras said that the time when men are honestest is when they present themselves before the gods. If we can overhear the prayer we shall know the man. But prayers are not made to be overheard, or to be printed, so that we seldom have the prayer otherwise than it can be inferred from the man and his fortunes, which are the answer to the prayer, and always accord with it. Yet there are scattered about in the earth a few records of these devout hours, which it would edify us to read, could they be collected in a more catholic spirit than the wretched and repulsive volumes which usurp that name. Let us not have the prayers of one sect, nor of the Christian Church, but of men in all ages and religions who have prayed well. The prayer of Jesus is (as it deserves) become a form for the human race. Many men have contributed a single expression, a single word to the language of devotion, which is immediately caught and stereotyped in the prayers of their church and nation. Among the remains of Euripides we have this prayer: “Thou God of all! infuse light into the souls of men, where by they may be enabled to know what is the root from whence all their evils spring, and by what means they may avoid them.” In the Phædrus of Plato, we find this petition in the mouth of Socrates: “O gracious Pan! and ye other gods who preside over this place! grant that I may be beautiful within; and that those external things which I have may be such as may best agree with a right internal disposition of mine; and that I may account him to be rich, who is wise and just.” Wacic the Caliph, who died A.D. 845, ended his life, the Arabian historians tell us, with these words: “O thou whose kingdom never passes away, pity one whose dignity is so transient.” But what led us to these remembrances was the happy accident which in this undevout age lately brought us acquainted with two or three diaries, which attest, if there be need of attestation, the eternity of the sentiment and its equality to itself through all the variety of expression. The first is the prayer of a deaf and dumb boy: —

“When my long-attached friend comes to me, I have pleasure to converse with him, and I rejoice to pass my eyes over his countenance; but soon I am weary of spending my time causelessly and unimproved, and I desire to leave him, (but not in rudeness), because I wished to be engaged in my business. But thou, O my Father, knowest I always delight to commune with thee in my lone and silent heart; I am never full of thee; I am never weary of thee; I am always desiring thee. I hunger with strong hope and affection for thee, and I thirst for thy grace and spirit.

“When I go to visit my friends, I must put on my best garments, and I must think of my manner to please them. I am tired to stay long, because my mind is not free, and they sometimes talk gossip with me. But oh, my Father, thou visitest me in my work, and I can lift up my desires to thee, and my heart is cheered and at rest with thy presence, and I am always alone with thee, and thou dost not steal my time by foolishness. I always ask in my heart, where can I find thee?”

The next is a voice out of a solitude as strict and sacred as that in which nature had isolated this eloquent mute: —

“My Father, when I cannot be cheerful or happy, I can be true and obedient, and I will not forget that joy has been, and may still be. If there is no hour of solitude granted me, still I will commune with thee. If I may not search out and pierce thy thought, so much the more may my living praise thee. At whatever price, I must be alone with thee; this must be the demand I make. These duties are not the life, but the means which enable us to show forth the life. So must I take up this cross, and bear it willingly. Why should I feel reproved when a busy one enters the room? I am not idle, though I sit with folded hands, but instantly I must seek some cover. For that shame I reprove myself. Are they only the valuable members of society who labor to dress and feed it? Shall we never ask the aim of all this hurry and foam, of this aimless activity? Let the purpose for which I live be always before me; let every thought and word go to confirm and illuminate that end; namely, that I must become near and dear to thee; that now I am beyond the reach of all but thee.

“How can we not be reconciled to thy will? I will know the joy of giving to my friend the dearest treasure I have. I know that sorrow comes not at once only. We cannot meet it and say, now it is overcome, but again, and yet again, its flood pours over us, and as full as at first.

“If but this tedious battle could be fought,

Like Sparta’s heroes at one rocky pass,

‘One day be spent in dying,’ men had sought

The spot, and been cut down like mower’s grass.”

The next is in a metrical form. It is the aspiration of a different mind, in quite other regions of power and duty, yet they all accord at last.

“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf Than that I may not disappoint myself, That in my action I may soar as high, As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends, That I may greatly disappoint my friends, Howe’er they think or hope that it may be, They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, And my life practise more than my tongue saith; That my low conduct may not show, Nor my relenting lines, That I thy purpose did not know, Or overrated thy designs.”

The last of the four orisons is written in a singularly calm and healthful spirit, and contains this petition: —

“My Father: I now come to thee with a desire to thank thee for the continuance of our love, the one for the other. I feel that without thy love in me I should be alone here in the flesh. I cannot express my gratitude for what thou hast been and continuest to be to me. But thou knowest what my feelings are. When nought on earth seemeth pleasant to me, thou dost make thyself known to me, and teach that which is needful for me, and dost cheer my travels on. I know that thou hast not created me and placed me here on earth, amidst its toils and troubles and the follies of those around me, and told me to be like thyself when I see so little of thee here to profit by; thou hast not done this, and then left me here to myself, a poor, weak man, scarcely able to earn my bread. No; thou art my Father and I will love thee, for thou didst first love me, and lovest me still. We will ever be parent and child. Wilt thou give me strength to persevere in this great work of redemption. Wilt thou show me the true means of accomplishing it. … I thank thee for the knowledge that I have attained of thee by thy sons who have been before me, and especially for him who brought me so perfect a type of thy goodness and love to men. … I know that thou wilt deal with me as I deserve. I place myself therefore in thy hand, knowing that thou wilt keep me from harm so long as I consent to live under thy protecting care.”

Let these few scattered leaves, which a chance (as men say, but which to us shall be holy) brought under our eye nearly at the same moment, stand as an example of innumerable similar expressions which no mortal witness has reported, and be a sign of the times. Might they be suggestion to many a heart of yet higher secret-experiences which are ineffable! But we must not tie up the rosary on which we have strung these few white beads, without adding a pearl of great price from that book of prayer, the “Confessions of Saint Augustine.”

“And being admonished to reflect upon myself, I entered into the very inward parts of my soul, by thy conduct; and I was able to do it, because now thou wert become my helper. I entered and discerned with the eye of my soul (such as it was), even beyond my soul and mind itself, the Light unchangeable. Not this vulgar light which all flesh may look upon, nor as it were a greater of the same kind, as though the brightness of this should be manifold greater and with its greatness take up all space. Not such was this light, but other, yea, far other from all these. Neither was it so above my understanding as oil swims above water, or as the heaven is above the earth. But it is above me, because it made me; and I am under it, because I was made by it. He that knows truth or verity, knows what that light is, and he that knows it, knows eternity, and it is known by charity. O eternal Verity! and true Charity! and dear Eternity! thou art my God, to thee do I sigh day and night. Thee when I first knew, thou liftedst me up that I might see, there was what I might see, and that I was not yet such as to see. And thou didst beat back my weak sight upon myself, shooting out beams upon me after a vehement manner; and I even trembled between love and horror, and I found myself to be far off, and even in the very region of dissimilitude from thee.”

IV. AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

[The Dial, vol. iii. p. 123.]

In an afternoon in April, after a long walk, I traversed an orchard where boys were grafting apple-trees, and found the Farmer in his corn-field. He was holding the plow, and his son driving the oxen. This man always impresses me with respect, he is so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances, — excellent and re-verable in his old weather-worn cap and blue frock bedaubed with the soil of the field; so honest withal, that he always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself. I still remember with some shame that in some dealing we had together a long time ago, I found that he had been looking to my interest in the affair, and I had been looking to my interest, and nobody had looked to his part. As I drew near this brave laborer in the midst of his own acres, I could not help feeling for him the highest respect. Here is the Cæsar, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day; not like Napoleon, hero of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor; and here he stands, with Atlantic strength and cheer, invincible still. These slight and useless city limbs of ours will come to shame before this strong soldier, for his have done his own work and ours too. What good this man has or has had, he has earned. No rich father or father-in-law left him any inheritance of land or money. He borrowed the money with which he bought his farm, and has bred up a large family, given them a good education, and improved his land in every way year by year, and this without prejudice to himself the landlord, for here he is, a man every inch of him, and reminds us of the hero of the Robin Hood ballad, —

“Much, the miller’s son,

There was no inch of his body

But it was worth a groom.”

Innocence and justice have written their names on his brow. Toil has not broken his spirit. His laugh rings with the sweetness and hilarity of a child; yet he is a man of a strongly intellectual taste, of much reading, and of an erect good sense and independent spirit which can neither brook usurpation nor falsehood in any shape. I walked up and down the field, as he ploughed his furrow, and we talked as we walked. Our conversation naturally turned on the season and its new labors. He had been reading the Report of the Agricultural Survey of the Commonwealth, and had found good things in it; but it was easy to see that he felt toward the author much as soldiers do towards the historiographer who follows the camp, more good-nature than reverence for the gownsman.

The First Report, he said, is better than the last, as I observe the first sermon of a minister is often his best, for every man has one thing which he specially wishes to say, and that comes out at first. But who is this book written for? Not for farmers; no pains are taken to send it to them; it was by accident that this volume came into my hands for a few days. And it is not for them. They could not afford to follow such advice as is given here; they have sterner teachers; their own business teaches them better. No; this was written for the literary men. But in that case, the state should not be taxed to pay for it. Let us see. The account of the maple sugar, — that is very good and entertaining, and, I suppose, true. The story of the farmer’s daughter, whom education had spoiled for everything useful on a farm, — that is good too, and we have much that is like it in Thomas’s Almanack. But why this recommendation of stone houses? They are not so cheap, not so dry, and not so fit for us. Our roads are always changing their direction, and after a man has built at great cost a stone house, a new road is opened, and he finds himself a mile or two from the highway. Then our people are not stationary, like those of old countries, but always alert to better themselves, and will remove from town to town as a new market opens or a better farm is to be had, and do not wish to spend too much on their buildings.

The Commissioner advises the farmers to sell their cattle and their hay in the fall, and buy again in the spring. But we farmers always know what our interest dictates, and do accordingly. We have no choice in this matter; our way is but too plain. Down below, where manure is cheap and hay dear, they will sell their oxen in November; but for me to sell my cattle and my produce in the fall, would be to sell my farm, for I should have no manure to renew a crop in the spring. And thus Necessity farms it; necessity finds out when to go to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. Colman can tell us.

But especially observe what is said throughout these Reports of the model farms and model farmers. One would think that Mr. D. and Major S. were the pillars of the Commonwealth. The good Commissioner takes off his hat when he approaches them, distrusts the value of “his feeble praise,” and repeats his compliments as often as their names are introduced. And yet, in my opinion, Mr. D., with all his knowledge and present skill, would starve in two years on any one of fifty poor farms in this neighborhood, on each of which now a farmer manages to get a good living. Mr. D. inherited a farm, and spends on it every year from other resources; otherwise his farm had ruined him long since; — and as for the Major, he never got rich by his skill in making land produce, but in making men produce. The truth is, a farm will not make an honest man rich in money. I do not know of a single instance in which a man has honestly got rich by farming alone. It cannot be done. The way in which men who have farms grow rich, is either by other resources, or by trade, or by getting their labor for nothing, or by other methods of which I could tell you many sad anecdotes. What does the Agricultural Surveyor know of all this? What can he know? He is the victim of the “Reports,” that are sent him, of particular farms. He cannot go behind the estimates to know how the contracts were made, and how the sales were effected. The true men of skill, the poor farmers, who, by the sweat of their face, without an inheritance and without offence to their conscience have reared a family of valuable citizens and matrons to the state, reduced a stubborn soil to a good farm, — although their buildings are many of them shabby, are the only right subjects of this Report; yet these make no figure in it. These should be holden up to imitation, and their methods detailed; yet their houses are very uninviting and inconspicuous to State Commissioners. So with these premiums to farms, and premiums at cattle-shows. The class that I describe must pay the premium which is awarded to the rich. Yet the premium obviously ought to be given for the good management of a poor farm.

In this strain the Farmer proceeded, adding many special criticisms. He had a good opinion of the Surveyor, and acquitted him of any blame in the matter, but was incorrigible in his skepticism concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture of Massachusetts. I believe that my friend is a little stiff and inconvertible in his own opinions, and that there is another side to be heard; but so much wisdom seemed to lie under all his statement that it deserved a record.

V. EUROPE AND EUROPEAN BOOKS.

[The Dial, vol. iii. p. 511.]

It was a brighter day than we have often known in our literary calendar, when within a twelvemonth a single London advertisement announced a new volume of poems by Wordsworth, poems by Tennyson, and a play by Henry Taylor. Wordsworth’s nature or character has had all the time it needed in order to make its mark and supply the want of talent. We have learned how to read him. We have ceased to expect that which he cannot give. He has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slipshod newspaper style. Many of his poems, as for example the Rylstone Doe, might be all improvised. Nothing of Milton, nothing of Marvell, of Herbert, of Dryden, could be. These are such verses as in a just state of culture should be vers de société , such as every gentleman could write but none would think of printing, or of claiming the poet’s laurel on their merit. The Pindar, the Shakspeare, the Dante, whilst they have the just and open soul, have also the eye to see the dimmest star that glimmers in the Milky Way, the serratures of every leaf, the test-objects of the microscope, and then the tongue to utter the same things in words that engrave them on all the ears of mankind. The poet demands all gifts, and not one or two only.

The poet, like the electric rod, must reach from a point nearer the sky than all surrounding objects, down to the earth, and into the dark wet soil, or neither is of use. The poet must not only converse with pure thought, but he must demonstrate it almost to the senses. His words must be pictures, his verses must be spheres and cubes, to be seen and smelled and handled. His fable must be a good story, and its meaning must hold as pure truth. In the debates on the Copyright Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the coroner, quoted Wordsworth’s poetry in derision, and asked the roaring House of Commons what that meant, and whether a man should have public reward for writing such stuff. Homer, Horace, Milton and Chaucer would defy the coroner. Whilst they have wisdom to the wise, he would see that to the external they have external meaning. Coleridge excellently said of poetry, that poetry must first be good sense; as a palace might well be magnificent, but first it must be a house.

Wordsworth is open to ridicule of this kind. And yet Wordsworth, though satisfied if he can suggest to a sympathetic mind his own mood, and though setting a private and exaggerated value on his compositions; though confounding his accidental with the universal consciousness, and taking the public to task for not admiring his poetry, — is really a master of the English language, and his poems evince a power of diction that is no more rivalled by his contemporaries than is his poetic insight. But the capital merit of Wordsworth is that he has done more for the sanity of this generation than any other writer. Early in life, at a crisis it is said in his private affairs, he made his election between assuming and defending some legal rights, with the chances of wealth and a position in the world, — and the inward promptings of his heavenly genius; he took his part; he accepted the call to be a poet, and sat down, far from cities, with coarse clothing and plain fare to obey the heavenly vision. The choice he had made in his will, manifested itself in every line to be real. We have poets who write the poetry of society, of the patrician and conventional Europe, as Scott and Moore, and others who, like Byron or Bulwer, write the poetry of vice and disease. But Wordsworth threw himself into his place, made no reserves or stipulations; man and writer were not to be divided. He sat at the foot of Helvellyn and on the margin of Windermere, and took their lustrous mornings and their sublime midnights for his theme, and not Marlow, nor Massinger, not Horace, nor Milton, nor Dante. He once for all forsook the styles and standards and modes of thinking of London and Paris, and the books read there, and the aims pursued, and wrote Helvellyn and Windermere, and the dim spirits which these haunts harbored. There was not the least attempt to reconcile these with the spirit of fashion and selfishness, nor to show, with great deference to the superior judgment of dukes and earls, that although London was the home for men of great parts, yet Westmoreland had these consolations for such as fate had condemned to the country life, — but with a complete satisfaction he pitied and rebuked their false lives, and celebrated his own with the religion of a true priest. Hence the antagonism which was immediately felt between his poetry and the spirit of the age, that here not only criticism but conscience and will were parties; the spirit of literature and the modes of living and the conventional theories of the conduct of life were called in question on wholly new grounds, — not from Platonism, not from Christianity, but from the lessons which the country muse taught a stout pedestrian climbing a mountain and following a river from its parent rill down to the sea. The Cannings and Jeffreys of the capital, the Court Journals and Literary Gazettes were not well pleased, and voted the poet a bore. But that which rose in him so high as to the lips, rose in many others as high as to the heart. What he said, they were prepared to hear and confirm. The influence was in the air, and was wafted up and down into lone and into populous places, resisting the popular taste, modifying opinions which it did not change, and soon came to be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last in legislation. In this country it very early found a stronghold, and its effect may be traced on all the poetry both of England and America.

But, notwithstanding all Wordsworth’s grand merits, it was a great pleasure to know that Alfred Tennyson’s two volumes were coming out in the same ship; it was a great pleasure to receive them. The elegance, the wit and subtlety of this writer, his rich fancy, his power of language, his metrical skill, his independence on any living masters, his peculiar topics, his taste for the costly and gorgeous, discriminate the musky poet of gardens and conservatories, of parks and palaces. Perhaps we felt the popular objection that he wants rude truth; he is too fine. In these boudoirs of damask and alabaster, one is farther off from stern nature and human life than in Lalla Rookh and “The Loves of the Angels.” Amid swinging censers and perfumed lamps, amidst velvet and glory we long for rain and frost. Otto-of-roses is good, but wild air is better. A critical friend of ours affirms that the vice which bereaved modern painters of their power, is the ambition to begin where their fathers ended; to equal the masters in their exquisite finish, instead of their religious purpose. The painters are not willing to paint ill enough; they will not paint for their times, agitated by the spirit which agitates their country; so should their picture picture us and draw all men after them; but they copy the technics of their predecessors, and paint for their predecessors’ public. It seems as if the same vice had worked in poetry. Tennyson’s compositions are not so much poems as studies in poetry, or sketches after the styles of sundry old masters. He is not the husband, who builds the homestead after his own necessity, from foundation-stone to chimney-top and turret, but a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint staircases and groined ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary expenditure. The best songs in English poetry are by that heavy, hard, pedantic poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson is rude, and only on rare occasions gay. Tennyson is always fine; but Jonson’s beauty is more grateful than Tennyson’s. It is a natural manly grace of a robust workman. Ben’s flowers are not in pots at a city florist’s, arranged on a flower-stand, but he is a countryman at a harvest-home, attending his ox-cart from the fields, loaded with potatoes and apples, with grapes and plums, with nuts and berries, and stuck with boughs of hemlock and sweet-briar, with ferns and pond lilies which the children have gathered. But let us not quarrel with our benefactors. Perhaps Tennyson is too quaint and elegant. What then? It is long since we have had as good a lyrist; it will be long before we have his superior. “Godiva” is a noble poem that will tell the legend a thousand years. The poem of all the poetry of the present age for which we predict the longest term, is “Abou ben Adhem,” of Leigh Hunt. Fortune will still have her part in every victory, and it is strange that one of the best poems should be written by a man who has hardly written any other. And “Godiva” is a parable which belongs to the same gospel. “Locksley Hall” and “The Two Voices” are meditative poems, which were slowly written to be slowly read. “The Talking Oak,” though a little hurt by its wit and ingenuity, is beautiful, and the most poetic of the volume. “Ulysses” belongs to a high class of poetry, destined to be the highest, and to be more cultivated in the next generation. “Œnone” was a sketch of the same kind. One of the best specimens we have of the class is Wordsworth’s “Laodamia,” of which no special merit it can possess equals the total merit of having selected such a subject in such a spirit.

Next to the poetry, the novels, which come to us in every ship from England, have an importance increased by the immense extension of their circulation through the new cheap press, which sends them to so many willing thousands. We have heard it alleged with some evidence that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer’s romances has proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands of young men in England and America. The effect on manners cannot be less sensible, and we can easily believe that the behavior of the ballroom and of the hotel has not failed to draw some addition of dignity and grace from the fair ideals with which the imagination of a novelist has filled the heads of the most imitative class.

We are not very well versed in these books, yet we have read Mr. Bulwer enough to see that the story is rapid and interesting; he has really seen London society, and does not draw ignorant caricatures. He is not a genius, but his novels are marked with great energy and with a courage of experiment which in each instance had its degree of success. The story of Zanoni was one of those world-fables which is so agreeable to the human imagination that it is found in some form in the language of every country, and is always reappearing in literature. Many of the details of this novel preserve a poetic truth. We read Zanoni with pleasure, because magic is natural. It is implied in all superior culture that a complete man would need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. The eye and the word are certainly far subtler and stronger weapons than either money or knives. Whoever looked on the hero would consent to his will, being certified that his aims were universal, not selfish; and he would be obeyed as naturally as the rain and the sunshine are. For this reason, children delight in fairy tales. Nature is described in them as the servant of man, which they feel ought to be true. But Zanoni pains us and the author loses our respect, because he speedily betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the charm; because the power with which his hero is armed is a toy, inasmuch as the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind, is a power for London; a divine power converted into a burglar’s false key or a highwayman’s pistol to rob and kill with.

But Mr. Bulwer’s recent stories have given us who do not read novels, occasion to think of this department of literature, supposed to be the natural fruit and expression of the age. We conceive that the obvious division of modern romance is into two kinds: first, the novels of costume or of circumstance, which is the old style, and vastly the most numerous. In this class, the hero, without any particular character, is in a very particular circumstance; he is greatly in want of a fortune or of a wife, and usually of both, and the business of the piece is to provide him suitably. This is the problem to be solved in thousands of English romances, including the Porter novels and the more splendid examples of the Edgeworth and Scott Romances.

It is curious how sleepy and foolish we are, that these tales will so take us. Again and again we have been caught in that old foolish trap. Had one noble thought opening the chambers of the intellect, one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, the reader had been made a participator of their triumph; he too had been an invited and eternal guest; but this reward granted them is property, all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and for none other, nay, a preference and cosseting which is rude and insulting to all but the minion.

Except in the stories of Edgeworth and Scott, whose talent knew how to give to the book a thousand adventitious graces, the novels of costume are all one, and there is but one standard English novel, like the one orthodox sermon, which with slight variation is repeated every Sunday from so many pulpits.

But the other novel, of which “Wilhelm Meister” is the best specimen, the novel of character , treats the reader with more respect; the development of character being the problem, the reader is made a partaker of the whole prosperity. Everything good in such a story remains with the reader when the book is closed. A noble book was Wilhelm Meister. It gave the hint of a cultivated society which we found nowhere else. It was founded on power to do what was necessary, each person finding it an indispensable qualification of membership that he could do something useful, as in mechanics or agriculture or other indispensable art; then a probity, a justice was to be its element, symbolized by the insisting that each property should be cleared of privilege, and should pay its full tax to the State. Then a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element of the association, by which each was dignified and all were dignified; then each was to obey his genius to the length of abandonment. They watched each candidate vigilantly, without his knowing that he was observed, and when he had given proof that he was a faithful man, then all doors, all houses, all relations were open to him; high behavior fraternized with high behavior, without question of heraldry, and the only power recognized is the force of character.

The novels of Fashion, of D’Israeli, Mrs. Gore, Mr. Ward, belong to the class of novels of costume, because the aim is purely external success. Of the tales of fashionable life, by far the most agreeable and the most efficient was Vivian Grey. Young men were and still are the readers and victims. Byron ruled for a time, but Vivian, with no tithe of Byron’s genius, rules longer. One can distinguish the Vivians in all companies. They would quiz their father and mother and lover and friend. They discuss sun and planets, liberty and fate, love and death, over the soup. They never sleep, go nowhere, stay nowhere, eat nothing, and know nobody, but are up to anything, though it were the genesis of nature, or the last cataclysm, — Festus-like, Faust-like, Jove-like, and could write an Iliad any rainy morning, if fame were not such a bore. Men, women, though the greatest and fairest, are stupid things; but a rifle, and a mild pleasant gunpowder, a spaniel, and a cheroot, are themes for Olympus. I fear it was in part the influence of such pictures on living society which made the style of manners of which we have so many pictures, as, for example, in the following account of the English fashionist. “His highest triumph is to appear with the most wooden manners, as little polished as will suffice to avoid castigation, nay, to contrive even his civilities so that they may appear as near as may be to affronts; instead of a noble high-bred ease, to have the courage to offend against every restraint of decorum, to invert the relation in which our sex stand to women, so that they appear the attacking, and he the passive or defensive party.”

We must here check our gossip in mid volley and adjourn the rest of our critical chapter to a more convenient season.

VI. PAST AND PRESENT.

[The Dial, vol. iv. p. 96.]

Here is Carlyle’s new poem, his Iliad of English woes, to follow his poem on France, entitled the History of the French Revolution. In its first aspect it is a political tract, and since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it, It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men, groups and disposes them with a master’s mind, and, with a heart full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his brothers. Obviously it is the book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful political signs in England for the last few years, has conversed much on these topics with such wise men of all ranks and parties as are drawn to a scholar’s house, until such daily and nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a system of thoughts; and the topic of English politics becomes the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking, recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels, and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility. It is a brave and just book, and not a semblance. “No new-truth,” say the critics on all sides. Is it so? Truth is very old, but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other. The book makes great approaches to true contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and European system. It is such an appeal to the conscience and honor of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be forgotten. It has the merit which belongs to every honest book, that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching, “comes bounce down into every pew.” Every reader shall carry away something. The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book when they resume their labor.

Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers a believer in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people, and the remedy in honesty and insight. Like every work of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths. As we recall the topics, we are struck with the force given to the plain truths; the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted, the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the rich, enchanted so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain; the exposure of the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities; the proposition that the laborer must have a greater share in his earnings; that the principle of permanence shall be admitted into all contracts of mutual service; that the state shall provide at least schoolmaster’s education for all the citizens; the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the work and not the wages; to the scholar that he shall be there for light; to the idle, that no man shall sit idle; the picture of Abbot Samson, the true governor, who “is not there to expect reason and nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason and nobleness;” and the assumption throughout the book, that a new chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labor, is replacing the old nobilities. These things strike us with a force which reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters, and of no modern book. Truly in these things is great reward. It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvce , that men are to be helped, nor by helping the depraved after their own foolish fashion, but by doing unweariedly the particular work we were born to do. Let no man think himself absolved because he does a generous action and befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his property that a benefit goes from it to all. A man’s diet should be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so private a good. His house should be better, because that is for the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of the traveller. But his speech is a perpetual and public instrument; let that always side with the race and yield neither a lie nor a sneer. His manners, — let them be hospitable and civilizing, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught anything better in canvas or stone; and his acts should be representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in his having, and poor in his want.

It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the contemporary practical questions; not because he then has all men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe fruits. The task is superhuman; and the poet knows well that a little time will do more than the most puissant genius. Time stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. Each man can very well know his own part of duty, if he will; but to bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts the powers of art. The most elaborate history of to-day will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The historian of to-day is yet three ages off. The poet cannot descend into the turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts. Hence that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt. He must stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.

But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher than literary inspiration may succor him. It is a costly proof of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring; and he has added to his love whatever honor his opinions may forfeit. To atone for this departure from the vows of the scholar and his eternal duties to this secular charity, we have at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear. Though they die, they must listen. It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images, all the great classes of English society must read, even those whose existence it proscribes. Poor Queen Victoria, — poor Sir Robert Peel, poor Primate and Bishops, — poor Dukes and Lords! There is no help in place or pride or in looking another way; a grain of wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm, which no curtains or shutters will keep out. Here is a book which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself. What pains, what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading! Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a foot-ball into the air, and kept in the air, with merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal; and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this flaming sword of Cherubim waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.

We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special criticism in the wrong. And we may easily fail in expressing the general objection which we feel. It appears to us as a certain disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the whims of the painter. In this work, as in his former labors, Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant. His humors are expressed with so much force of constitution that his fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of duller men. But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulates. It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture. It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid storm-lights. Every object attitudinizes, to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we have a Martin’s Creation or Judgment Day. A crisis has always arrived which requires a deus ex machinâ. One can hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us, — as of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should appear, — producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendor of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with pride or with regret, (according as he was practical or poetic), that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and color. The revelation of Reason is this of the unchangeableness of the fact of humanity under all its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers, to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial; as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?

And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-coloring of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the love and the courage of the counsellor. This book is full of humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr. Carlyle’s works, than the attitude of the writer. He has the dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and never deviates from his sphere; a continuer of the great line of scholars, he sustains their office in the highest credit and honor. If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for its occasion. One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close. Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye off from that gracious Infinite which enbosoms us.

As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main one that he never wrote one dull line. How well-read, how adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing; with his expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of straw from the cell, — and the respectable Sauerteig, or Teufelsdröckh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveller, says what is put into his mouth, and disappears. That morbid temperament has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character; a luxury to many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were possible on the part of the humorist. Yet it must not be forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes with a whiplash like some renowned charioteers, — in all this glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game. He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the ear for which it is meant. He does not dodge the question, but gives sincerity where it is due.

One word more respecting this remarkable style. We have in literature few specimens of magnificence. Plato is the purple ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains. Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though deficient in depth. Carlyle, in his strange, half-mad way, has entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigor and wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney-play of these times; — the indubitable champion of England. Carlyle is the first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of details, into style. We have been civilizing very fast, building London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New Holland and Oregon, — and it has not appeared in literature; there has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books, Carlyle’s style is the first emergence of all this wealth and labor with which the world has gone with child so long. London and Europe, tunnelled, graded, corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and East and West Indies for dependencies; and America, with the Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in literature. This is the first invasion and conquest. How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a symbol which was never a symbol before. This is the first experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned to so great an achievement. It will be done again and again, sharper, simpler; but fortunate is he who did it first, though never so giant-like and fabulous. This grandiose character pervades his wit and his imagination. We have never had anything in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle. He “shakes with his mountain mirth.” It is like the laughter of the Genii in the horizon. These jokes shake down Parliament-house and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo the dangerous peals. The other particular of magnificence is in his rhymes. Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre. Yet he is full of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but in the burdens, refrains, and grand returns of his sense and music. Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.

VII. A LETTER.

[The Dial, vol. iv. p. 262.]

As we are very liable, in common with the letter-writing world, to fall behind-hand in our correspondence; and a little more liable because in consequence of our editorial function we receive more epistles than our individual share, we have thought that we might clear our account by writing a quarterly catholic letter to all and several who have honored us, in verse or prose, with their confidence, and expressed a curiosity to know our opinion. We shall be compelled to dispose very rapidly of quite miscellaneous topics.

And first, in regard to the writer who has given us his speculations on Rail-roads and Air-roads, our correspondent shall have his own way. To the railway, we must say, — like the courageous lord mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming,— “Let it come, in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.” Very unlooked-for political and social effects of the iron road are fast appearing. It will require an expansion of the police of the old world. When a rail-road train shoots through Europe every day from Brussels to Vienna, from Vienna to Constantinople, it cannot stop every twenty or thirty miles at a German custom-house, for examination of property and passports. But when our correspondent proceeds to flying-machines, we have no longer the smallest taper-light of credible information and experience left, and must speak on a priori grounds.

Shortly then, we think the population is not yet quite fit for them, and therefore there will be none. Our friend suggests so many inconveniences from piracy out of the high air to orchards and lone houses, and also to other high fliers; and the total inadequacy of the present system of defence, that we have not the heart to break the sleep of the good public by the repetition of these details. When children come into the library, we put the inkstand and the watch on the high shelf until they be a little older; and Nature has set the sun and moon in plain sight and use, but laid them on the high shelf where her roystering boys may not in some mad Saturday afternoon pull them down or burn their fingers. The sea and the iron road are safer toys for such ungrown people; we are not yet ripe to be birds.

In the next place, to fifteen letters on Communities, and the Prospects of Culture, and the destinies of the cultivated class, — what answer? Excellent reasons have been shown us why the writers, obviously persons of sincerity and elegance, should be dissatisfied with the life they lead, and with their company. They have exhausted all its benefit, and will not bear it much longer. Excellent reasons they have shown why something better should be tried. They want a friend to whom they can speak and from whom they may hear now and then a reasonable word. They are willing to work, so it be with friends. They do not entertain anything absurd or even difficult. They do not wish to force society into hated reforms, nor to break with society. They do not wish a township, or any large expenditure, or incorporated association, but simply a concentration of chosen people. By the slightest possible concert, persevered in through four or five years, they think that a neighborhood might be formed of friends who would provoke each other to the best activity. They believe that this society would fill up the terrific chasm of ennui, and would give their genius that inspiration which it seems to wait in vain.

But, ‘the selfishness!’ One of the writers relentingly says, “What shall my uncles and aunts do without me?” and desires distinctly to be understood not to propose the Indian mode of giving decrepit relatives as much of the mud of holy Ganges as they can swallow, and more, but to begin the enterprise of concentration by concentrating all uncles and aunts in one delightful village by themselves! — so heedless is our correspondent of putting all the dough into one pan, and all the leaven into another. Another objection seems to have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life, — with life, which is better accepted than calculated? Perhaps so; but let us not be too curiously good. The Buddhist is a practical Necessitarian; the Yankee is not. We do a great many selfish things every day; among them all let us do one thing of enlightened selfishness. It were fit to forbid concert and calculation in this particular, if that were our system, if we were up to the mark of self-denial and faith in our general activity. But to be prudent in all the particulars of life, and in this one thing alone religiously forbearing; prudent to secure to ourselves an injurious society, temptations to folly and despair, degrading examples, and enemies; and only abstinent when it is proposed to provide ourselves with guides, examples, lovers!

We shall hardly trust ourselves to reply to arguments by which we would too gladly be persuaded. The more discontent, the better we like it. It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people are busied with these projects of a better social state, and that sincere persons of all parties are demanding somewhat vital and poetic of our stagnant society. How fantastic and unpresentable soever the theory has hitherto seemed, how swiftly shrinking from the examination of practical men, let us not lose the warning of that most significant dream. How joyfully we have felt the admonition of larger natures which despised our aims and pursuits, conscious that a voice out of heaven spoke to us in that scorn. But it would be unjust not to remind our younger friends that whilst this aspiration has always made its mark in the lives of men of thought, in vigorous individuals it does not remain a detached object, but is satisfied along with the satisfaction of other aims. To live solitary and unexpressed, is painful, — painful in proportion to one’s consciousness of ripeness and equality to the offices of friendship. But herein we are never quite forsaken by the Divine Providence. The loneliest man, after twenty years, discovers that he stood in a circle of friends, who will then show like a close fraternity held by some masonic tie. But we are impatient of the tedious introductions of Destiny, and a little faithless, and would venture something to accelerate them. One thing is plain, that discontent and the luxury of tears will bring nothing to pass. Regrets and Bohemian castles and aesthetic villages are not a very self-helping class of productions, but are the voices of debility. Especially to one importunate correspondent we must say that there is no chance for the aesthetio village. Every one of the villagers has committed his several blunder; his genius was good, his stars consenting, but he was a marplot. And though the recuperative force in every man may be relied on infinitely, it must be relied on before it will exert itself. As long as he sleeps in the shade of the present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources. Whilst he dwells in the old sin, he will pay the old fine.

More letters we have on the subject of the position of young men, which accord well enough with what we see and hear. There is an American disease, a paralysis of the active faculties, which falls on young men of this country as soon as they have finished their college education, which strips them of all manly aims and bereaves them of animal spirits; so that the noblest youths are in a few years converted into pale Caryatides to uphold the temple of conventions. They are in the state of the young Persians, when “that mighty Yezdam prophet” addressed them and said, “Behold the signs of evil days are come; there is now no longer any right course of action, nor any self-devotion left among the Iranis.” As soon as they have arrived at this term, there are no employments to satisfy them, they are educated above the work of their times and country, and disdain it. Many of the more acute minds pass into a lofty criticism of these things, which only embitters their sensibility to the evil and widens the feeling of hostility between them and the citizens at large. Form this cause, companies of the best-educated young men in the Atlantic states every week take their departure for Europe; for no business that they have in that country, but simply because they shall so be hid from the reproachful eyes of their countrymen and agreeably entertained for one or two years, with some lurking hope, no doubt, that something may turn up to give them a decided direction. It is easy to see that this is only a postponement of their proper work, with the additional disadvantage of a two years’ vacation. Add that this class is rapidly increasing by the infatuation of the active class, who, whilst they regard these young Athenians with suspicion and dislike, educate their own children in the same courses, and use all possible endeavors to secure to them the same result.

Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite new and peculiar; though we should not know where to find in literature any record of so much unbalanced intellectuality, such undeniable apprehension without talent, so much power without equal applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt’s account of Frederic Hölderlin’s “Hyperion,” we were not a little struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany, whose tone is still so familiar that we were somewhat mortified to find that it was written in 1799. “Then came I to the” Germans. I cannot conceive of a people more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you shall see, but no man. Is it not like some battle-field, where hands and arms and all members lie scattered about, whilst the life-blood runs away into the sand? Let every man mind his own, you say, and I say the same. Only let him mind it with all his heart, and not with this cold study, literally, hypocritically, to appear that which he passes for, — but in good earnest, and in all love, let him be that which he is; then there is a soul in his deed. And is he driven into a circumstance where the spirit must not live? Let him thrust it from him with scorn, and learn to dig and plough. There is nothing holy which is not desecrated, which is not degraded to a mean end among this people. It is heartrending to see your poet, your artist, and all who still revere genius, who love and foster the Beautiful. The Good! They live in the world as strangers in their own house; they are like the patient Ulysses whilst he sat in the guise of a beggar at his own door, whilst shameless rioters shouted in the hall and asked, Who brought the ragamuffin here? Full of love, talent and hope, spring up the darlings of the muse among the Germans; some seven years later, and they flit about like ghosts, cold and silent; they are like a soil which an enemy has sown with poison, that it will not bear a blade of grass. On earth all is imperfect! is the old proverb of the German. Aye, but if one should say to these God-forsaken, that with them all is imperfect only because they leave nothing pure which they do not pollute, nothing holy which they do not defile with their fumbling hands; that with them nothing prospers because the godlike nature which is the root of all prosperity they do not revere; that with them, truly, life is shallow and anxious and full of discord, because they despise genius, which brings power and nobleness into manly action, cheerfulness into endurance, and love and brotherhood into towns and houses. Where a people honors genius in its artists, there breathes like an atmosphere a universal soul, to which the shy sensibility opens, which melts self-conceit, — all hearts become pious and great, and it adds fire to heroes. The home of all men is with such a people, and there will the stranger gladly abide. But where the divine nature and the artist is crushed, the sweetness of life is gone, and every other planet is better than the earth. Men deteriorate, folly increases, and a gross mind with it; drunkenness comes with a disaster; with the wantonness of the tongue and with the anxiety for a livelihood the blessing of every year becomes a curse, and all the gods depart.”

The steep antagonism between the money-getting and the academic class must be freely admitted, and perhaps is the more violent, that whilst our work is imposed by the soil and the sea, our culture is the tradition of Europe. But we cannot share the desperation of our contemporaries; least of all should we think a preternatural enlargement of the intellect a calamity. A new perception, the smallest new activity given to the perceptive power, is a victory won to the living universe from Chaos and old Night, and cheaply bought by any amounts of hard fare and false social position. The balance of mind and body will redress itself fast enough. Superficialness is the real distemper. In all the cases we have ever seen where people were supposed to suffer from too much wit, or, as men said, from a blade too sharp for the scabbard, it turned out that they had not wit enough. It may easily happen that we are grown very idle, and must go to work, and that the times must be worse before they are better. It is very certain that speculation is no succedaneum for life. What we would know, we must do. As if any taste or imagination could take the place of fidelity! The old Duty is the old God. And we may come to this by the rudest teaching. A friend of ours went five years ago to Illinois to buy a farm for his son. Though there were crowds of emigrants in the roads, the country was open on both sides, and long intervals between hamlets and houses. Now after five years he had just been to visit the young farmer and see how he prospered, and reports that a miracle had been wrought. From Massachusetts to Illinois the land is fenced in and builded over, almost like New England itself, and the proofs of thrifty cultivation abound; — a result not so much owing to the natural increase of population, as to the hard times, which, driving men out of cities and trade, forced them to take off their coats and go to work on the land; which has rewarded them not only with wheat but with habits of labor. Perhaps the adversities of our commerce have not yet been pushed to the wholesomest degree of severity. Apathies and total want of work, and reflection on the imaginative character of American life, etc., etc., are like seasickness, and never will obtain any sympathy if there is a wood-pile in the yard, or an unweeded patch in the garden; not to mention the graver absurdity of a youth of noble aims who can find no field for his energies, whilst the colossal wrongs of the Indian, of the Negro, of the emigrant, remain unmitigated, and the religious, civil and judicial forms of the country are confessedly effete and offensive. We must refer our clients back to themselves, believing that every man knows in his heart the cure for the disease he so ostentatiously bewails.

As far as our correspondents have entangled their private griefs with the cause of American Literature, we counsel them to disengage themselves as fast as possible. In Cambridge orations and elsewhere there is much inquiry for that great absentee American Literature. What can have become of it? The least said is best. A literature is no man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result, and is the affair of a power which works by a prodigality of life and force very dismaying to behold, — every trait of beauty purchased by hecatombs of private tragedy. The pruning in the wild gardens of nature is never forborne. Many of the best must die of consumption, many of despair, and many be stupid and insane, before the one great and fortunate life which they each predicted can shoot up into a thrifty and beneficent existence.

VIII. THE TRAGIC.

[From the course on “Human Life,” read in Boston, 1839–40. Published in The Dial, vol. iv. p. 515.]

He has seen but half the universe who never has been shewn the house of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two-thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity. The conversation of men is a mixture of regrets and apprehensions. I do not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is melancholy. In the dark hours, our existence seems to be a defensive war, a struggle against the encroaching All, which threatens surely to engulf us soon, and is impatient of our short reprieve. How slender the possession that yet remains to us; how faint the animation! how the spirit seems already to contract its domain, retiring within narrower walls by the loss of memory, leaving its planted fields to erasure and annihilation. Already our own thoughts and words have an alien sound. There is a simultaneous diminution of memory and hope. Projects that once we laughed and leapt to execute, find us now sleepy and preparing to lie down in the snow. And in the serene hours we have no courage to spare. We cannot afford to let go any advantages. The riches of body or of mind which we do not need to-day, are the reserved fund against the calamity that may arrive to-morrow. It is usually agreed that some nations have a more sombre temperament, and one would say that history gave no record of any society in which despondency came so readily to heart as we see it and feel it in ours. Melancholy cleaves to the English mind in both hemispheres as closely as to the strings of an Æolian harp. Men and women at thirty years, and even earlier, have lost all spring and vivacity, and if they fail in their first enterprises they throw up the game. But whether we and those who are next to us are more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any right which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease, poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear and death.

What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature? The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, and heedless whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible meaning that lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the CEdipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish, and there is no overgod to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds or thunders, and snatches them up into its terrific system. The same idea makes the paralyzing terror with which the East Indian mythology haunts the imagination. The same thought is the predestination of the Turk. And universally, in uneducated and unreflecting persons on whom too the religious sentiment exerts little force, we discover traits of the same superstition: “If you baulk water you will be drowned the next time; ““if you count ten stars you will fall down dead; ““if you spill the salt;” “if your fork sticks upright in the floor;” “if you say the Lord’s prayer backwards;” — and so on, a several penalty, nowise grounded in the nature of the thing, but on an arbitrary will. But this terror of contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot co-exist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood. It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a part. But in destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the best will that is enacted, but only one particular will. Destiny properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this the only ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.

After reason and faith have introduced a better public and private tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed. There must always remain, however, the hindrance of our private satisfaction by the laws of the world. The law which establishes nature and the human race, continually thwarts the will of ignorant individuals, and this in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity and disunion.

But the essence of tragedy does not seem to me to lie in any list of particular evils. After we have enumerated famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness and loss of friends, we have not yet included the proper tragic element, which is Terror, and which does not respect definite evils but indefinite; an ominous spirit which haunts the afternoon and the night, idleness and solitude.

A low, haggard sprite sits by our side, “casting the fashion of uncertain evils” — a sinister presentiment, a power of the imagination to dislocate things orderly and cheerful and show them in startling array. Hark! what sounds on the night wind, the cry of Murder in that friendly house; see these marks of stamping feet, of hidden riot. The whisper overheard, the detected glance, the glare of malignity, ungrounded fears, suspicions, half-knowledge and mistakes, darken the brow and chill the heart of men. And accordingly it is natures not elear, not of quick and steady perceptions, but imperfect characters from which somewhat is hidden that all others see, who suffer most from these causes. In those persons who move the profoundest pity, tragedy seems to consist in temperament, not in events. There are people who have an appetite for grief, pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain, mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and dishevelled desolation. They mis-hear and mis-behold, they suspect and dread. They handle every nettle and ivy in the hedge, and tread on every snake in the meadow.

“Come bad chance,

And we add to it our strength,

And we teach it art and length,

Itself o’er us to advance.”

Frankly, then, it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer. It looks like an insupportable load under which earth moans aloud. But analyze it; it is not I, it is not you, it is always another person who is tormented. If a man says, Lo! I suffer — it is apparent that he suffers not, for grief is dumb. It is so distributed as not to destroy. That which would rend you falls on tougher textures. That which seems intolerable reproach or bereavement, does not take from the accused or bereaved man or woman appetite or sleep. Some men are above grief, and some below it. Few are capable of love. In phlegmatic natures calamity is unaffecting, in shallow natures it is rhetorical Tragedy must be somewhat which I can respect. A querulous habit is not tragedy. A panic such as frequently in ancient or savage nations put a troop or an army to flight without an enemy; a fear of ghosts; a terror of freezing to death that seizes a man in a winter midnight on the moors; a fright at uncertain sounds heard by a family at night in the cellar or on the stairs, — are terrors that make the knees knock and the teeth clatter, but are no tragedy, any more than seasickness, which may also destroy life. It is full of illusion. As it comes, it has its support. The most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors, paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits. The spirit is true to itself, and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live in what is called calamity as easily as in what is called felicity; as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.

A man should not commit his tranquillity to things, but should keep as much as possible the reins in his own hands, rarely giving way to extreme emotion of joy or grief. It is observed that the earliest works of the art of sculpture are countenances of sublime tranquillity. The Egyptian sphinxes, which sit to-day as they sat when the Greek came and saw them and departed, and when the Roman came and saw them and departed, and as they will still sit when the Turk, the Frenchman and the Englishman, who visit them now, shall have passed by,— “with their stony eyes fixed on the East and on the Nile,” have countenances expressive of complacency and repose, an expression of health, deserving their longevity, and verifying the primeval sentence of history on the permanency of that people, “Their strength is to sit still.” To this architectural stability of the human form, the Greek genius added an ideal beauty, without disturbing the seals of serenity; permitting no violence of mirth, or wrath, or suffering. This was true to human nature. For, in life, actions are few, opinions even few, prayers few; loves, hatreds, or any emissions of the soul. All that life demands of us through the greater part of the day, is an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and the genius of our life. There is a fire in some men which demands an outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience of quiet by an irregular Catali-narian gait; by irregular, faltering, disturbed speech, too emphatic for the occasion. They treat trifles with a tragic air. This is not beautiful. Could they not lay a rod or two of stone wall, and work off this superabundant irritability? When two strangers meet in the highway, what each demands of the other is that the aspect should shew a firm mind, ready for any event of good or ill, prepared alike to give death or to give life, as the emergency of the next moment may require. We must walk as guests in nature; not impassioned, but cool and disengaged. A man should try Time, and his face should wear the expression of a just judge, who has nowise made up his opinion, who fears nothing, and even hopes nothing, but who puts nature and fortune on their merits: he will hear the case out, and then decide. For all melancholy, as all passion, belongs to the exterior life. Whilst a man is not grounded in the divine life by his proper roots, he clings by some tendrils of affection to society — mayhap to what is best and greatest in it, and in calm times it will not appear that he is adrift and not moored; but let any shock take place in society, any revolution of custom, of law, of opinion, and at once his type of permanence is shaken. The disorder of his neighbors appears to him universal disorder; chaos is come again. But in truth he was already a driving wreck, before the wind arose which only revealed to him his vagabond state. If a man is centred, men and events appear to him a fair image or reflection of that which he knoweth beforehand in himself. If any perversity or profligacy break out in society, he will join with others to avert the mischief, but it will not arouse resentment or fear, because he discerns its impassable limits. He sees already in the ebullition of sin the simultaneous redress.

Particular reliefs also, fit themselves to human calamities; for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration.

Time, the consoler, Time, the rich carrier of all changes, dries the freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes, new roads, on our eye, new voices on our ear. As the west wind lifts up again the heads of the wheat which were bent down and lodged in the storm, and combs out the matted and dishevelled grass as it lay in night-locks on the ground, so we let in time as a drying wind into the seed-field of thoughts which are dark and wet and low bent. Time restores to them temper and elasticity. How fast we forget the blow that threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still; the faculties will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affections twine and the broken is whole again.

Time consoles, but Temperament resists the impression of pain. Nature proportions her defence to the assault. Our human being is wonderfully plastic; if it cannot win this satisfaction here, it makes itself amends by running out there and winning that. It is like a stream of water, which if dammed up on one bank, overruns the other, and flows equally at its own convenience over sand, or mud, or marble. Most suffering is only apparent. We fancy it is torture; the patient has his own compensations. A tender American girl doubts of Divine Providence whilst she reads the horrors of “the middle passage;” and they are bad enough at the mildest; but to such as she these crucifixions do not come: they come to the obtuse and barbarous, to whom they are not horrid, but only a little worse than the old sufferings. They exchange a cannibal war for the stench of the hold. They have gratifications which would be none to the civilized girl. The market-man never damned the lady because she had not paid her bill, but the stout Irishwoman has to take that once a month. She however never feels weakness in her back because of the slave-trade. This self-adapting strength is especially seen in disease. “It is my duty,” says Sir Charles Bell, “to visit certain wards of the hospital where there is no patient admitted but with that complaint which most fills the imagination with the idea of insupportable pain and certain death. Yet these wards are not the least remarkable for the composure and cheerfulness of their inmates. The individual who suffers has a mysterious counterbalance to that condition, which, to us who look upon her, appears to be attended with no alleviating circumstance.” Analogous supplies are made to those individuals whose character leads them to vast exertions of body and mind. Napoleon said to one of his friends at St. Helena, “Nature seems to have calculated that I should have great reverses to endure, for she has given me a temperament like a block of marble. Thunder cannot move it; the shaft merely glides along. The great events of my life have slipped over me without making any demand on my moral or physical nature.”

The intellect is a consoler, which delights in detaching or putting an interval between a man and his fortune, and so converts the sufferer into a spectator and his pain into poetry. It yields the joys of conversation, of letters and of science. Hence also the torments of life become tuneful tragedy, solemn and soft with music, and garnished with rich dark pictures. But higher still than the activities of art, the intellect in its purity and the moral sense in its purity are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us into a region whereinto these passionate clouds of sorrow cannot rise.

The Essays

The Old Manse, located on Monument Street in Concord, Massachusetts. The house was built in 1770 for Rev. William Emerson, father of noted minister Rev. William Emerson and the grandfather of the famous Transcendentalist writer. In November 1834, Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to the Old Manse where he lived with his aging step-grandfather Ezra Ripley. While there, he wrote the first draft of Nature, a foundational work of the Transcendentalist movement.

LIST OF ESSAYS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

NATURE

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

AN ADDRESS

LITERARY ETHICS

THE METHOD OF NATURE

MAN THE REFORMER

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES

THE CONSERVATIVE

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

ADDRESS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES (1844)

HISTORY.

SELF-RELIANCE.

COMPENSATION.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

LOVE.

FRIENDSHIP.

PRUDENCE.

HEROISM.

THE OVER-SOUL.

CIRCLES.

INTELLECT.

ART.

THE POET.

EXPERIENCE.

CHARACTER.

MANNERS.

GIFTS.

NATURE.

POLITICS.

NONIMALIST AND REALIST.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

USES OF GREAT MEN.

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.

LAND.

RACE.

ABILITY.

MANNERS.

TRUTH.

CHARACTER.

COCKAYNE.

WEALTH.

ARISTOCRACY.

UNIVERSITIES.

RELIGION.

LITERATURE.

THE “TIMES.”

STONEHENGE.

PERSONAL.

RESULT.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER.

FATE.

POWER.

WEALTH.

CULTURE

BEHAVIOR.

WORSHIP.

CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.

BEAUTY.

ILLUSIONS.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

CIVILIZATION.

ART.

ELOQUENCE.

DOMESTIC LIFE.

FARMING

WORKS AND DAYS.

BOOKS.

CLUBS.

COURAGE.

SUCCESS.

OLD AGE.

POETRY AND IMAGINATION.

SOCIAL AIMS.

ELOQUENCE.

RESOURCES.

THE COMIC.

QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.

PROGRESS OF CULTURE.

PERSIAN POETRY

INSPIRATION.

GREATNESS.

IMMORTALITY.

DEMONOLOGY.

ARISTOCRACY.

PERPETUAL FORCES.

CHARACTER.

EDUCATION.

THE SUPERLATIVE.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.

THE PREACHER.

THE MAN OF LETTERS.

THE SCHOLAR.

PLUTARCH.

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.

MARY MOODY EMERSON.

SAMUEL HOAR.

THOREAU.

CARLYLE.

GEORGE L. STEARNS.

THE LORD’S SUPPER.

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE, AT CONCORD

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD APRIL 19TH, 1867.

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CONCORD ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, AUGUST 1, 1844.

WAR.

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.

THE ASSAULT UPON MR. SUMNER.

SPEECH AT THE KANSAS RELIEF MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE, WEDNESDAY. EVENING, SEPTEMBER 10, 1856.

JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT BOSTON.

JOHN BROWN. SPEECH AT SALEM, JANUARY 6,

THEODORE PARKER.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH. JULY 21, 1865.

EDITORS’ ADDRESS.

WOMAN.

ADDRESS TO KOSSUTH.

ROBERT BURNS.

WALTER SCOTT.

REMARKS AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION.

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT TEMPLE, FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869.

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC.

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.

I. POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT

II. INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION

III. MEMORY.

BOSTON.

THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT

COUNTRY LIFE

CONCORD WALKS

ART AND CRITICISM

MICHAEL ANGELO.

MILTON.

PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.

LIST OF ESSAYS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

ABILITY.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD APRIL 19TH, 1867.

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CONCORD ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE EMANCIPATION OF THE NEGROES IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, AUGUST 1, 1844.

ADDRESS ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES (1844)

ADDRESS TO KOSSUTH.

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

AN ADDRESS

ARISTOCRACY.

ARISTOCRACY.

ART AND CRITICISM

ART.

ART.

BEAUTY.

BEHAVIOR.

BOOKS.

BOSTON.

CARLYLE.

CHARACTER.

CHARACTER.

CHARACTER.

CIRCLES.

CIVILIZATION.

CLUBS.

COCKAYNE.

COMPENSATION.

CONCORD WALKS

CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY.

COUNTRY LIFE

COURAGE.

CULTURE

DEMONOLOGY.

DOMESTIC LIFE.

EDITORS’ ADDRESS.

EDUCATION.

ELOQUENCE.

ELOQUENCE.

EXPERIENCE.

EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.

FARMING

FATE.

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

FRIENDSHIP.

GEORGE L. STEARNS.

GIFTS.

GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER

GREATNESS.

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH. JULY 21, 1865.

HEROISM.

HISTORIC NOTES OF LIFE AND LETTERS IN NEW ENGLAND.

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE, AT CONCORD

HISTORY.

ILLUSIONS.

IMMORTALITY.

INSPIRATION.

INSTINCT AND INSPIRATION

INTELLECT.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE ON THE TIMES

JOHN BROWN. SPEECH AT SALEM, JANUARY 6,

JOHN BROWN: SPEECH AT BOSTON.

LAND.

LITERARY ETHICS

LITERATURE.

LOVE.

MAN THE REFORMER

MANNERS.

MANNERS.

MARY MOODY EMERSON.

MEMORY.

MICHAEL ANGELO.

MILTON.

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC.

NATURE

NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD.

NATURAL HISTORY OF INTELLECT.

NATURE.

NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.

NONIMALIST AND REALIST.

OLD AGE.

PAPERS FROM THE DIAL.

PERPETUAL FORCES.

PERSIAN POETRY

PERSONAL.

PLATO: NEW READINGS

PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER.

PLUTARCH.

POETRY AND IMAGINATION.

POLITICS.

POWER.

POWERS AND LAWS OF THOUGHT

PROGRESS OF CULTURE.

PRUDENCE.

QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY.

RACE.

RELIGION.

REMARKS AT THE MEETING FOR ORGANIZING THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION.

RESOURCES.

RESULT.

ROBERT BURNS.

SAMUEL HOAR.

SELF-RELIANCE.

SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

SOCIAL AIMS.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER.

SPEECH AT THE KANSAS RELIEF MEETING IN CAMBRIDGE, WEDNESDAY. EVENING, SEPTEMBER 10, 1856.

SPEECH AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT TEMPLE, FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869.

SPIRITUAL LAWS.

STONEHENGE.

SUCCESS.

SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

THE “TIMES.”

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

THE ASSAULT UPON MR. SUMNER.

THE CELEBRATION OF INTELLECT

THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.

THE COMIC.

THE CONSERVATIVE

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

THE FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC.

THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW.

THE LORD’S SUPPER.

THE MAN OF LETTERS.

THE METHOD OF NATURE

THE OVER-SOUL.

THE POET.

THE PREACHER.

THE SCHOLAR.

THE SOVEREIGNTY OF ETHICS.

THE SUPERLATIVE.

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

THE YOUNG AMERICAN

THEODORE PARKER.

THOREAU.

TRUTH.

UNIVERSITIES.

USES OF GREAT MEN.

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.

WALTER SCOTT.

WAR.

WEALTH.

WEALTH.

WOMAN.

WORKS AND DAYS.

WORSHIP.

The Letters

28 Cambridge Turnpike, Concord, Massachusetts — Emerson moved into this house, which he called ‘Bush’, with his newly married second wife in 1835. The author remained there for the rest of his life. It was here that he wrote his famous essays “The American Scholar” and “Self Reliance”. The house now serves as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House museum, dedicated to the life and writings of the author.

Emerson’s study at Bush, shortly after his death

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1834-1872

CONTENTS

VOLUME I.

EDITORIAL NOTE

CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON

I. Emerson to Carlyle

II. Carlyle to Emerson

III. Emerson to Carlyle *

IV. Carlyle to Emerson

V. Emerson to Carlyle

VI. Emerson to Carlyle

VII. Carlyle to Emerson

VIII. Carlyle to Emerson

IX. Emerson to Carlyle*

X. Emerson to Carlyle

XI. Carlyle to Emerson

XII. Emerson to Carlyle

XIII. Carlyle to Emerson

XIV. Carlyle to Emerson

XV. Emerson to Carlyle

XVI. Carlyle to Emerson

XVII. Emerson to Carlyle

XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XIX. Carlyle to Emerson

XX. Emerson to Carlyle

XXI. Emerson to Carlyle

XXII. Carlyle to Emerson

XXIII. Emerson to Carlyle*

XXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

XXV. Emerson to Carlyle

XXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

XXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

XXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

XXX. Carlyle to Emerson

XXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

XXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

XXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

XXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle*

XXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

XXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

XXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

XXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

XL. Emerson to Carlyle

XLI. Emerson to Carlyle*

XLII. Carlyle to Emerson

XLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

XLIV. Emerson to Carlyle

XLV. Emerson to Carlyle

XLVI. Carlyle to Emerson

XLVII. Carlyle to Emerson

XLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XLIX. Carlyle to Emerson

L. Carlyle to Emerson

LI. Emerson to Carlyle*

LII. Carlyle to Emerson

LIII. Emerson to Carlyle

LIV. Emerson to Carlyle

LV. Carlyle to Emerson

LVI. Emerson to Carlyle

LVII. Carlyle to Emerson

LVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

LIX. Carlyle to Emerson

LX. Carlyle to Mrs. Emerson

LXI. Emerson to Carlyle

LXII. Emerson to Carlyle

LXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

LXV. Emerson to Carlyle

LXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

LXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

LXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

LXX. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

VOLUME II

LXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXX. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

LXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

LXXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

XC. Emerson to Carlyle

XCI. Carlyle to Emerson

XCII. Carlyle to Emerson

XCIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XCIV. Carlyle to Emerson

XCV. Emerson to Carlyle

XCVI. Carlyle to Emerson

XCVII. Emerson to Carlyle

XCVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

XCIX. Carlyle to Emerson

C. Emerson to Carlyle*

CI. Carlyle to Emerson

CII. Emerson to Carlyle

CIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CIV. Carlyle to Emerson

CV. Carlyle to Emerson

CVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CIX. Carlyle to Emerson

CX. Emerson to Carlyle

CXI. Emerson to Carlyle

CXII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

CXV. Emerson to Carlyle

CXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

CXX. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXX. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

CXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Monday, P.M., 19 June, 1848

CXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

CXL. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 19 July, 1850

CXLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLIV. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLV. Emerson to Carlyle

CXLVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLVII. Emerson to Carlyle

CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CXLIX. Emerson to Carlyle*

CL. Carlyle to Emerson

CLI. Emerson to Carlyle

CLII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle

CLV. Carlyle to Emerson

CLVI. Emerson to Carlyle

CLVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLIX. Carlyle to Emerson

CLX. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXI. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXIV. Emerson to Carlyle*

CLXV. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXIX. Emerson to Carlyle*

CLXX. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXI. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXV. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXX. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXXI. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXXV. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

CLXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

CLXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

CXC. Emerson to Carlyle

CXCI. Carlyle to Emerson

Thomas Carlyle painted by John Everett Millais, c. 1893

VOLUME I.

“To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive.” — Emerson

“What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was.” — Carlyle

EDITORIAL NOTE

The trust of editing the following Correspondence, committed to me several years since by the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a few notes of introduction, and one or two essentially duplicate letters. I cannot but hope that some of the letters now missing may hereafter come to light.

In printing, a dash has been substituted here and there for a proper name, and some passages, mostly relating to details of business transactions, have been omitted. These omissions are distinctly designated. The punctuation and orthography of the original letters have been in the main exactly followed. I have thought best to print much concerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of the material conditions of literature during the middle of the century, as well as of the relations of the two friends. The notes in the two volumes are mine.

My best thanks and those of the readers of this Correspondence are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, for his energetic and successful effort to recover some of Emerson’s early letters which had fallen into strange hands. — Charles Eliot Norton

Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 29, 1883

CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON

At the beginning of his “English Traits,” Mr. Emerson, writing of his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle’s name was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson’s mental attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius, and felt sympathy with it.

The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say. The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. But toward the end of this time a series of articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled “Characteristics,” displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his contemporaries.

He was living solitary, poor, independent, in “desperate hope,” at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his Journal as follows: “I am left here the solitariest, stranded, most helpless creature that I have been for many years….. Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is quite other than an article… In all times there is a word which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The way to speak it when found?” The next entry in his Journal shows that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” the record of Emerson’s unexpected visit. “I shall never forget the visitor,” wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards, “who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day.”

At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances radically different, with views of life and of the universe widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same foundation of principle. In their independence and their sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent, and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference, they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it “the rock-strata, miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one”

Two days after Emerson’s visit Carlyle wrote to his mother: —

“Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner, procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here, entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again. Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner applicant, ‘I cannot, sir; it is let.’ Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d’Eichthal’s nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart’s content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first journey since Noah’s Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful.”

On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland.

“I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature (say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called ‘Characteristics,’ pointed. He replied that he was not competent to state even to himself, — he waited rather to see. My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon, — even Bacon, — are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates, the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; ‘t is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society.” *

 —— * Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58. ——  ——  ——

Twenty-three years later, in his “English Traits,” Emerson once more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of Carlyle.

“From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, ‘not a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of Dunscore’; so that books inevitably made his topics.

“He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. Blackwood’s was the ‘sand magazine’; Fraser’s nearer approach to possibility of life was the ‘mud magazine’; a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was ‘the grave of the last sixpence.’ When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero’s death, Qualis artifex pereo! better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor’s principle was mere rebellion, and that, he feared, was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart’s book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey.

“We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson’s America, an early favorite. Rousseau’s Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted.

“He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.

“He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. ‘Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.’

“We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth’s country. There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle’s fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. ‘Christ died on the tree that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.’

“He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar’s appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker’s boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served.”

Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between Carlyle and Emerson. What place this friendship held in the lives of both, the following Correspondence shows.

I. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, Massachusetts, 14 May, 1884

My Dear Sir, — There are some purposes we delay long to execute simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of writing you an epistle.

Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished (as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound essays of the day, — the works of a man of Faith as well as Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to hope and to speak sincerely. Like somebody in Wilhelm Meister, I said: This person has come under obligations to me and to all whom he has enlightened. He knows not how deeply I should grieve at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always hears the Devil’s whisper, “All these kingdoms will I give thee,” his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age. When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house only to say, “Faint not, — the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails.” Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock. Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much hope of gratifying him, — in the spirit of “If I love you, what is that to you?” Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of happiness; — not that I had the remotest hope that he should so far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. On my arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had seen and heard, and they with joy received it.

In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus, for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, “puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens.” And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And ‘t is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say our, for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an objection to the form. Can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience, and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths. Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths, — truths which lie next to consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit, — when the word will be as simple, and so as resistless, as the thought, — and, in short, when your words will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, “Truth hath the plague in his house”? Yet all men are potentially (as Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.

 ——  ——  —— * This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition of Sartor Resartus have been sold. ——

I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that ‘t is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately espy you as a man, myself as another.

And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and could the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato has erred?

I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent. But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present evils give you less solicitude. In the last six years government in the United States has been fast becoming a job, like great charities. A most unfit person in the Presidency has been doing the worst things; and the worse he grew, the more popular. Now things seem to mend. Webster, a good man and as strong as if he were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them; yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly unseated. I send herewith a volume of Webster’s that you may see his speech on Foot’s Resolutions, a speech which the Americans have never done praising. I have great doubts whether the book reaches you, as I know not my agents. I shall put with it the little book of my Swedenborgian druggist,* of whom I told you. And if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, I shall not fail to give it the same direction.

 ——  ——  ——  — * Observations on the Growth of the Mind, by Sampson Reed, first published in 1825. A fifth edition of this thoughtful little treatise was published in 1865. Mr. Reed was a graduate of Harvard College in 1818; he died in 1880, at the age of eighty. ——  —

I need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a friend. If any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply, I shall rejoice in my sauciness. I am spending the summer in the country, but my address is Boston, care of Barnard, Adams, & Co. Care of O. Rich, London. Please do make my affectionate respects to Mrs. Carlyle, whose kindness I shall always gratefully remember. I depend upon her intercession to insure your writing to me. May God grant you both his best blessing.

Your friend,
        R. Waldo Emerson

II. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 12 August, 1834

My Dear Sir, — Some two weeks ago I received your kind gift from Fraser. To say that it was welcome would be saying little: is it not as a voice of affectionate remembrance, coming from beyond the Ocean waters, first decisively announcing for me that a whole New Continent exists, — that I too have part and lot there! “Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste Earth become a peopled Garden.” Among the figures I can recollect as visiting our Nithsdale hermitage, — all like Apparitions now, bringing with them airs from Heaven or else blasts from the other region, — there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself: so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, as an Apparition should! Never has your Address in my Notebook met my eye but with a friendly influence. Judge if I am glad to know that there, in Infinite Space, you still hold by me.

I have read in both your books at leisure times, and now nearly finished the smaller one. He is a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian Druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be. “Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite.” Webster also I can recognize a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to, and prophesy well of. The sound of him is nowise poetic-rhythmic; it is clear, one-toned, you might say metallic, yet distinct, significant, not without melody. In his face, above all, I discern that “indignation” which, if it do not make “verses,” makes useful way in the world. The higher such a man rises, the better pleased I shall be. And so here, looking over the water, let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two parishes of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes Vivant! vivant! And among the glories of both be Yankee-doodle-doo, and the Felling of the Western Forest, proudly remembered; and for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully take such George Washington or George Guelph as it can get, and bless Heaven! I am weary of hearing it said, “We love the Americans,” “We wish well,” &c., &c. What in God’s name should we do else?

You thank me for Teufelsdrockh; how much more ought I to thank you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment of it! Blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity, and contradiction proclaims to us, Euge! Nothing ever was more ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has been thrown on here; none cries, Good speed to it; the sorriest nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome. For indeed our British periodical critics, and especially the public of Fraser’s Magazine (which I believe I have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. Poor Teufelsdrockh! — Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet “for Friends,” cannot be burnt or lost before his time. I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would rather surprise me. From the British side of the water I have met simply one intelligent response, — clear, true, though almost enthusiastic as your own. My British Friend too is utterly a stranger, whose very name I know not, who did not print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.* Shall I say then, “In the mouth of two witnesses”? In any case, God be thanked, I am done with it; can wash my hands of it, and send it forth; sure that the Devil will get his full share of it, and not a whit more, clutch as he may. But as for you, my Transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it was earnestly meant and written, and contains no voluntary falsehood of mine. For the rest, if you dislike it, say that I wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on the whole (as Fritz the Only said) “will do better another time.” With regard to style and so forth, what you call your “saucy” objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and instructive. You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon. For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, and one may say generally all manner of Pulpits for addressing mankind from, as good as broken and abolished: alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but believed and done, you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it there, but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity were felt to have become a mummery; and so one leaves the pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and Blair’s Lectures, quite behind; and feels only that there is nothing sacred, then, but the Speech of Man to believing Men! This, come what will, was, is, and forever must be sacred; and will one day, doubtless, anew environ itself with fit modes; with solemnities that are not mummeries. Meanwhile, however, is it not pitiable? For though Teufelsdrockh exclaims, “Pulpit! canst thou not make a pulpit by simply inverting the nearest tub?” yet, alas! he does not sufficiently reflect that it is still only a tub, that the most inspired utterance will come from it, inconceivable, misconceivable, to the million; questionable (not of ascertained significance) even to the few. Pity us therefore; and with your just shake of the head join a sympathetic, even a hopeful smile. Since I saw you I have been trying, am still trying, other methods, and shall surely get nearer the truth, as I honestly strive for it. Meanwhile, I know no method of much consequence, except that of believing, of being sincere: from Homer and the Bible down to the poorest Burns’s Song, I find no other Art that promises to be perennial.

 * In his Diary, July 26, 1834, Carlyle writes— “In the midst of innumerable discouragements, all men indifferent or finding fault, let me mention two small circumstances that are comfortable. The first is a letter from some nameless Irishman in Cork to another here, (Fraser read it to me without names,) actually containing a true and one of the friendliest possible recognitions of me. One mortal, then, says I am not utterly wrong. Blessings on him for it! The second is a letter I got today from Emerson, of Boston in America; sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated estimation. Precious is man to man.” Fifteen years later, in his Reminiscences of My Irish Journey, he enters, under date of July 16, 1849: “Near eleven o’clock [at night] announces himself ‘Father O’Shea’! (who I thought had been dead); to my astonishment enter a little gray-haired, intelligent-and-bred-looking man, with much gesticulation, boundless loyal welcome, red with dinner and some wine, engages that we are to meet tomorrow, — and again with explosions of welcomes goes his way. This Father O’Shea, some fifteen years ago, had been, with Emerson of America, one of the two sons of Adam who encouraged poor bookseller Fraser, and didn’t discourage him, to go on with Teufelsdrockh. I had often remembered him since; had not long before re-inquired his name, but understood somehow that he was dead — and now.” ——  —

But now quitting theoretics, let me explain what you long to know, how it is that I date from London. Yes, my friend, it is even so: Craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness, with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it; and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal disruption, are here with our household gods. Censure not; I came to London for the best of all reasons, — to seek bread and work. So it literally stands; and so do I literally stand with the hugest, gloomiest Future before me, which in all sane moments I good-humoredly defy. A strange element this, and I as good as an Alien in it. I care not for Radicalism, for Toryism, for Church, Tithes, or the “Confusion” of useful Knowledge. Much as I can speak and hear, I am alone, alone. My brave Father, now victorious from his toil, was wont to pray in evening worship: “Might we say, We are not alone, for God is with us!” Amen! Amen!

I brought a manuscript with me of another curious sort, entitled The Diamond Necklace. Perhaps it will be printed soon as an Article, or even as a separate Booklet, — a queer production, which you shall see. Finally, I am busy, constantly studying with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the Only Poetry is History, could we tell it right. This truth (if it prove one) I have not yet got to the limitations of; and shall in no way except by trying it in practice. The story of the Necklace was the first attempt at an experiment.

My sheet is nearly done; and I have still to complain of you for telling me nothing of yourself except that you are in the country. Believe that I want to know much and all. My wife too remembers you with unmixed friendliness; bids me send you her kindest wishes. Understand too that your old bed stands in a new room here, and the old welcome at the door. Surely we shall see you in London one day. Or who knows but Mahomet may go to the mountain? It occasionally rises like a mad prophetic dream in me, that I might end in the Western Woods!

From Germany I get letters, messages, and even visits; but now no tidings, no influences, of moment. Goethe’s Posthumous Works are all published; and Radicalism (poor hungry, yet inevitable Radicalism!) is the order of the day. The like, and even more, from France. Gustave d’Eichthal (did you hear?) has gone over to Greece, and become some kind of Manager under King Otho.*

 — * Gustave d’Eichthal, whose acquaintance Emerson had made at Rome, and who had given him an introduction to Carlyle, was one of a family of rich Jewish bankers at Paris. He was an ardent follower of Saint-Simon, and an associate of Enfantin. After the dispersion of the Saint-Simonians in 1832, he traveled much, and continued to devote himself to the improvement of society. ——  ——  —

Continue to love me, you and my other friends; and as packets sail so swiftly, let me know it frequently. All good be with you!

Most faithfully,
             T. Carlyle

Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone. How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result! They are delivering Orations about him, and emitting other kinds of froth, ut mos est. What hurt can it do?

III. Emerson to Carlyle *

Concord, Mass., 20 November, 1834

My Dear Sir, — Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother** in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow. As he passes out of sight, come to me visible as well as spiritual tokens of a fraternal friendliness which, by its own law, transcends the tedious barriers of custom and nation; and opens its way to the heart. This is a true consolation, and I thanked my jealous [Greek] for the godsend so significantly timed. It, for the moment, realizes the hope to which I have clung with both hands, through each disappointment, that I might converse with a man whose ear of faith was not stopped, and whose argument I could not predict. May I use the word, “I thank my God whenever I call you to remembrance.”

 ——  ——  — * This letter was printed in the Athenaeum, London, June 24, 1882. It, as well as three others which appeared in the same journal, is now reprinted, through the courtesy of its editor, from the original.

** Edward Bliss Emerson, his next younger brother, “brother of the brief but blazing star,” of whom Emerson wrote In Memoriam: —

    ”There is no record left on earth,
     Save in tablets of the heart,
     Of the rich, inherent worth,
     Of the grace that on him shone,
     Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
     He could not frame a word unfit,
     An act unworthy to be done.

    On his young promise Beauty smiled,
     Drew his free homage unbeguiled,
     And prosperous Age held out his hand,
     And richly his large future planned,
     And troops of friends enjoyed the tide, —
     All, all was given, and only health denied.”
 ——  ——  —

I receive with great pleasure the wonderful Professor now that first the decent limbs of Osiris are collected.* We greet him well to Cape Cod and Boston Bay. The rigid laws of matter prohibit that the soul imprisoned within the strait edges of these types should add one syllable thereto, or we had adjured the Sage by every name of veneration to take possession by so much as a Salve! of his Western World, but he remained inexorable for any new communications.

 —— * The four copies of Sartor which Carlyle had sent were a “stitched pamphlet,” with a title-page bearing the words: “Sartor Resartus: in Three Books. Reprinted for Friends, from Fraser’s Magazine. London, 1834.” ——

I feel like congratulating you upon the cold welcome which you say Teufelsdrockh* has met. As it is not earthly happy, it is marked of a high sacred sort. I like it a great deal better than ever, and before it was all published I had eaten nearly all my words of objection. But do not think it shall lack a present popularity. That it should not be known seems possible, for if a memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser’s Magazine, who would be the wiser? But this has too much wit and imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a faithful mirror of this very Hour. But you know the proverb, “To be fortunate, be not too wise.” The great men of the day are on a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar. Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always become the last opinion of Society. Truth is ever born in a manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for its kingdom. Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation that followed your eminent friend Goethe. With him I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. It is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. I cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius, that velvet life he led. What incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense “to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals”! Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious Dark. Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent, according to the definition, — mere skill in attaining vulgar ends. A certain wonderful friend of mine said that “a false priest is the falsest of false things.” But what makes the priest? A cassock? O Diogenes! Or the power (and thence the call) to teach man’s duties as they flow from the Superhuman? Is not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who has once intelligently pronounced the words “Self-Renouncement,” “Invisible Leader,” “Heavenly Powers of Sorrow,” and so on, forever the liege of the same?

 ——  ——  —— * Emerson uniformly spells this name “Teufelsdroch.” ——  ——  ——

Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new and worse offence. It implies an intellectual defect also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state. The good word lasts forever: the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God.

May I not call it temporary? for when I ascend into the pure region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as Epictetus and Teufelsdrockh would say), I see that to abide inviolate, although all men fall away from it; yea, though the whole generation of Adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation. So, my friend, live Socrates and Milton, those starch Puritans, for evermore! Strange is it to me that you should not sympathize (yet so you said) with Socrates, so ironical, so true, and who “tramped in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force him into the clouds.” I seem to see him offering the hand to you across the ages which some time you will grasp.

I am glad you like Sampson Reed, and that he has inspired some curiosity respecting his Church. Swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, “The poetry of the Old Church is the reality of the New,” which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part; the animals to be the incarnations of certain affections; and scarce a popular expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simplest statement of fact. Then is their whole theory of social relations — both in and out of the body — most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop. They are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all.

You express a desire to know something of myself. Account me “a drop in the ocean seeking another drop,” or God-ward, striving to keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every point of the concave heaven. Since my return home, I have been left very much at leisure. It were long to tell all my speculations on my profession and my doings thereon; but, possessing my liberty, I am determined to keep it, at the risk of uselessness (which risk God can very well abide), until such duties offer themselves as I can with integrity discharge. One thing I believe, — that Utterance is place enough: and should I attain through any inward revelation to a more clear perception of my assigned task, I shall embrace it with joy and praise. I shall not esteem it a low place, for instance, if I could strengthen your hands by true expressions of the hope and pleasure which your writings communicate to me and to some of my countrymen. Yet the best poem of the Poet is his own mind, and more even than in any of the works I rejoice in the promise of the workman. Now I am only reading and musing, and when I have any news to tell of myself, you shall hear them.

Now as to the welcome hint that you might come to America, it shall be to me a joyful hope. Come and found a new Academy that shall be church and school and Parnassus, as a true Poet’s house should be. I dare not say that wit has better chance here than in England of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it can scarce find competition. Indeed, indeed, you shall have the continent to yourself were it only as Crusoe was king. If you cared to read literary lectures, our people have vast curiosity, and the apparatus is very easy to set agoing. Such ‘pulpit’ as you pleased to erect would at least find no hindrance in the building. A friend of mine and of yours remarked, when I expressed the wish that you would come here, “that people were not here, as in England, sacramented to organized schools of opinion, but were a far more convertible audience.” If at all you can think of coming here, I would send you any and all particulars of information with cheerfulest speed.

I have written a very long letter, yet have said nothing of much that I would say upon chapters of the Sartor. I must keep that, and the thoughts I had upon ‘poetry in history’,’ for another letter, or (might it be!) for a dialogue face to face.

Let me not fail of The Diamond Necklace. I found three greedy receivers of Teufelsdrockh, who also radiate its light. For the sake of your knowing what manner of men you move, I send you two pieces writ by one of them, Frederic Henry Hedge, the article on Swedenborg and that on Phrenology. And as you like Sampson Reed, here are one or two more of his papers. Do read them. And since you study French history do not fail to look at our Yankee portrait of Lafayette. Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of London. If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of John Knox’s daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of God amidst wild men and wild beasts.

Your friend and servant,
                    R. Waldo Emerson

IV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 3 February, 1835

My Dear Sir, — I owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful one; for, in spite of the swift ships of the Americans, our communings pass too slowly. Your letter, written in November, did not reach me till a few days ago; your Books or Papers have not yet come, — though the ever-punctual Rich, I can hope, will now soon get them for me. He showed me his way-bill or invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects “to another gentleman,” and undertook with an air of great fidelity to bring all to a right bearing. On the whole, as the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah’s Dove? Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. Time was when “they that feared the Lord spake often one to another.” A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. “Speech” also, they say, “is cheerfuler than light itself.”

The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of Space and Time. As you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own? I can imagine Boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion. Alas! I can too well fancy one other thing: the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred. Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it. Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. He is, in very deed and truth, with God, — where you and I both are. What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In still nights, as Jean Paul says, “the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin.” Let us turn back into Life.

That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. It is a great truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none. To speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, I like as well to fancy you not preaching to Unitarians a Gospel after their heart. I will say farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in “faint possible Theism,” which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat…. Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till ill health of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the sitting, position is essential, sit still, contented in conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows what we are working, and will show it one day; that such and such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as seeds are scattered, “to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years.” I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive.

Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German Language, with a view towards studying him mainly! I do not assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable fidelity of that man’s mind, and how to him also Duty was infinite, — Knox would have passed on, wondering not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only healthy mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it done): Behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful? On the whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic); but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that one far better. Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet. — And then as to “misery” and the other dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself, — alas! consider whether misery is not ill health too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane, — as Light, the Naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I appeal to Philip sober; — and indeed have hardly said as much about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not “seeking recipes for happiness,” but something far higher, it is not so, and therefore I have spoken and appealed; and hope the new curiosity, if I have awakened any, will do you no mischief.

 ——  ——  —— * Obviously Carlyle’s Specimens of German Romance, of which the fourth volume was devoted to Goethe. ——  ——  ——

But now as to myself; for you will grumble at a sheet of speculation sent so far: I am here still, as Rob Roy was on Glasgow Bridge, biding tryste; busy extremely, with work that will not profit me at all in some senses; suffering rather in health and nerves; and still with nothing like dawn on any quarter of my horizon. The Diamond Necklace has not been printed, but will be, were this French Revolution out; which latter, however, drags itself along in a way that would fill your benevolent heart with pity. I am for three small volumes now, and have one done. It is the dreadfulest labor (with these nerves, this liver) I ever undertook; all is so inaccurate, superficial, vague, in the numberless books I consult; and without accuracy at least, what other good is possible? Add to this that I have no hope about the thing, except only that I shall be done with it: I can reasonably expect nothing from any considerable class here, but at best to be scolded and reproached; perhaps to be left standing “on my own basis,” without note or comment of any kind, save from the Bookseller, who will lose his printing. The hope I have however is sure: if life is lent me, I shall be done with the business; I will write this “History of Sansculottism,” the notablest phenomenon I meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier; after which my part is played. As for the future, I heed it little when so busy; but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming indisputable: that I must seek another craft than literature for these years that may remain to me. Surely, I often say, if ever man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with: quit it in God’s name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead. The truth is, I believe literature to be as good as dead and gone in all parts of Europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations; I do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another dialect than that, in England at least; so that if you determine on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some distinctness. I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me, to feel myself among my brothers. And then, How? Alas! I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay I feel it to be a wretched necessity, unfit for me; Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand Categories under which all English spiritual activity that so much as thinks remuneration possible must range itself. I look around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things; and pray to God only, that as my day, is so my strength may be. What will come out of it is wholly uncertain: for I have possibilities too; the possibilities of London are far from exhausted yet: I have a brave brother, who invites me to come and be quiet with him in Rome; a brave friend (known to you) who opens the door of a new Western world, — and so we will stand considering and consulting, at least till the Book be over. Are all these things interesting to you? I know they are.

As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. What your friend says of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand it. But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry, — little more or little less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or money’s worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a purse-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree one? Or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more substantial; on the whole better? At all events ours is fast becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as near as may be gone: Gagnez de l’argent, et ne vous faites pas pendre, this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and second. So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it will be on no Utopia; but on a conditional piece of ground where some things are to be expected and other things not. I may say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were speaking) is a thing I have always had some hankering after: it seems to me I could really swim in that element, were I once thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in me which struggle violently for development. The great want I have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of a rubric, of a title to name my speech by. Could any one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh’s science,— “Things in general”! To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. However, there is no doubt that were the child born it might be christened; wherefore I will really request you to take the business into your consideration, and give me in the most rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it. How many Discourses; what Towns; the probable Expenses, the probable net Income, the Time, &c., &c.: all that you can suppose a man wholly ignorant might want to know about it. America I should like well enough to visit, much as I should another part of my native country: it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide.

Have I involved you in double postage by this loquacity? or What is your American rule? I did not intend it when I began; but today my confusion of head is very great and words must be multiplied with only a given quantity of meaning.

My wife, who is just gone out to spend the day with a certain “celebrated Mrs. Austin,” (called also the “celebrated Translatress of Puckler-Muskau,”) charged me very specially to send you her love, her good wishes and thanks: I assure you there is no hypocrisy in that. She votes often for taking the Transatlantic scheme into contemplation; declares farther that my Book and Books must and will indisputably prosper (at some future era), and takes the world beside me — as a good wife and daughter of John Knox should. Speaking of “celebrated” persons here, let me mention that I have learned by stern experience, as children do with fire, to keep in general quite out of the way of celebrated persons, more especially celebrated women. This Mrs. Austin, who is half ruined by celebrity (of a kind), is the only woman I have seen not wholly ruined by it. Men, strong men, I have seen die of it, or go mad by it. Good fortune is far worse than bad!

Will you write with all despatch, my dear sir; fancy me a fellow-wayfarer, who cordially bids you God-speed, and would fain keep in sight of you, within sound of you.

Yours with great sincerity,
                     T. Carlyle

V. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 12 March, 1838

My Dear Sir, — I am glad of the opportunity of Mr. Barnard’s* visit to say health and peace be with you. I esteem it the best sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days, that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and highly appreciate the Sartor. Dr. Channing sent to me for it the other day, and I have since heard that he had read it with great interest. As soon as I go into town I shall see him and measure his love. I know his genius does not and cannot engage your attention much. He possesses the mysterious endowment of natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of course, to personal communication. I can see myself that his writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble. But please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the Sartor, born and inveterated as he is in old books. Moreover, he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called The Transcendentalist, as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. So much for our gossip of today.

 * Mr. Henry Barnard, of Hartford, Connecticut, to whom Emerson had given a note of introduction to Carlyle.

But my errand is yet to tell. Some friends here are very desirous that Mr. Fraser should send out to a bookseller here fifty or a hundred copies of the Sartor. So many we want very much; they would be sold at once. If we knew that two or three hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now. But we think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to reproduce it, a naturalized Yankee. The lovers of Teufelsdrockh here are sufficiently enthusiastic. I am an icicle to them. They think England must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle’s fame, am mainly bent on securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods, becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and Levite must do after his kind.

Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give your intimation the binding force of an oracular word! — in a few months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer and life would promise something better than peace. There is a part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher’s distribution it might be physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every debt is paid. And the skill with which the great All maketh clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke, — will I hope make a chapter in your thesis.

I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside. Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has thrown any memorable truths into circulation? So live and rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of many more than your mortal eyes shall see. Especially seek with recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that dwells there and creates all. Have you received a letter from me with a pamphlet sent in December? Fail not, I beg of you, to remember me to Mrs. Carlyle.

Can you not have some Sartors sent? Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are the best publishers in Boston. Or Mr. Rich has connections with Burdett in Boston.

Yours with respect and affection,
                              R. Waldo Emerson

VI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 April, 1835

My Dear Sir, — I received your letter of the 3d of February on the 20th instant, and am sorry that hitherto we have not been able to command a more mercantile promptitude in the transmission of these light sheets. If desire of a letter before it arrived, or gladness when it came, could speed its journey, I should have it the day it was written. But, being come, it makes me sad and glad by turns. I admire at the alleged state of your English reading public without comprehending it, and with a hoping scepticism touching the facts. I hear my Prophet deplore, as his predecessors did, the deaf ear and the gross heart of his people, and threaten to shut his lips; but, happily, this he cannot do, any more than could they. The word of the Lord will be spoken. But I shall not much grieve that the English people and you are not of the same mind if that apathy or antipathy can by any means be the occasion of your visiting America. The hope of this is so pleasant to me, that I have thought of little else for the week past, and having conferred with some friends on the matter, I shall try, in obedience to your request, to give you a statement of our capabilities, without indulging my penchant for the favorable side. Your picture of America is faithful enough: yet Boston contains some genuine taste for literature, and a good deal of traditional reverence for it. For a few years past, we have had, every winter, several courses of lectures, scientific, political, miscellaneous, and even some purely literary, which were well attended. Some lectures on Shakespeare were crowded; and even I found much indulgence in reading, last winter, some Biographical Lectures, which were meant for theories or portraits of Luther, Michelangelo, Milton, George Fox, Burke. These courses are really given under the auspices of Societies, as “Natural History Society,” “Mechanics’ Institutes,” “Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” &c., &c., and the fee to the lecturer is inconsiderable, usually $20 for each lecture. But in a few instances individuals have undertaken courses of lectures, and have been well paid. Dr. Spurzheim* received probably $3,000 in the few months that he lived here. Mr. Silliman, a Professor of Yale College, has lately received something more than that for a course of fifteen or sixteen lectures on Geology. Private projects of this sort are, however, always attended with a degree of uncertainty. The favor of my townsmen is often sudden and spasmodic, and Mr. Silliman, who has had more success than ever any before him, might not find a handful of hearers another winter. But it is the opinion of many friends whose judgment I value, that a person of so many claims upon the ear and imagination of our fashionable populace as the “author of the Life of Schiller,” “the reviewer of Burns’s Life,” the live “contributor to the Edinburgh and Foreign Reviews,” nay, the “worshipful Teufelsdrockh,” the “personal friend of Goethe,” would, for at least one season, batter down opposition, and command all ears on whatever topic pleased him, and that, quite independently of the merit of his lectures, merely for so many names’ sake.

 — * The memory of Dr. Spurzheim has faded, but his name is still known to men of science on both sides of the Atlantic as that of the most ardent and accomplished advocate of the doctrine of Phrenology. He came to the United States in 1832 to advance the cause he had at heart, but he had been only a short time in the country when he died at Boston of a fever. ——

But the subject, you say, does not yet define itself. Whilst it is “gathering to a god,” we who wait will only say, that we know enough here of Goethe and Schiller to have some interest in German literature. A respectable German here, Dr. Follen, has given lectures to a good class upon Schiller. I am quite sure that Goethe’s name would now stimulate the curiosity of scores of persons. On English literature, a much larger class would have some preparedness. But whatever topics you might choose, I need not say you must leave under them scope for your narrative and pictorial powers; yes, and space to let out all the length of all the reins of your eloquence of moral sentiment. What “Lay Sermons” might you not preach! or methinks “Lectures on Europe” were a sea big enough for you to swim in. The only condition our adolescent ear insists upon is, that the English as it is spoken by the unlearned shall be the bridge between our teacher and our tympanum.

Income and Expenses. — All our lectures are usually delivered in the same hall, built for the purpose. It will hold 1,200 persons; 900 are thought a large assembly. The expenses of rent, lights, doorkeeper, &c. for this hall, would be $12 each lecture. The price of $3 is the least that might be demanded for a single ticket of admission to the course, — perhaps $4; $5 for a ticket admitting a gentleman and lady. So let us suppose we have 900 persons paying $3 each, or $2,700. If it should happen, as did in Prof. Silliman’s case, that many more than 900 tickets were sold, it would be easy to give the course in the day and in the evening, an expedient sometimes practised to divide an audience, and because it is a great convenience to many to choose their time. If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of 15,000. They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three miles from Boston, and probably at Philadelphia, thirty-six hours distant.

At New York anything literary has hitherto had no favor. The lectures might be fifteen or sixteen in number, of about an hour each. They might be delivered, one or two in each week. And if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the city. They must be delivered in the winter.

Another plan suggested in addition to this. A gentleman here is giving a course of lectures on English literature to a private class of ladies, at $10 to each subscriber. There is no doubt, were you so disposed, you might turn to account any writings in the bottom of your portfolio, by reading lectures to such a class, or, still better, by speaking.

Expense of Living. — You may travel in this country for $4 to $4.50 a day. You may board in Boston in a “gigmanic” style for $8 per week, including all domestic expenses. Eight dollars per week is the board paid by the permanent residents at the Tremont House, — probably the best hotel in North America. There, and at the best hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays at the rate of $1.50 per day. Twice eight dollars would provide a gentleman and lady with board, chamber, and private parlor, at a fashionable boardinghouse. In the country, of course, the expenses are two thirds less. These are rates of expense where economy is not studied. I think the Liverpool and New York packets demand $150 of the passenger, and their accommodations are perfect. (N.B. — I set down all sums in dollars. You may commonly reckon a pound sterling worth $4.80.) “The man is certain of success,” say those I talk with, “for one winter, but not afterwards.” That supposes no extraordinary merit in the lectures, and only regards you in your leonine aspect. However, it was suggested that, if Mr. C. would undertake a Journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard, — a book to be called The Transcendentalist, or The Spiritual Inquirer, or the like, and of which F.H. Hedge* was to be editor. Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contributions to its pages, until its success could be assured. Hedge is just leaving our neighborhood to be settled as a minister two hundred and fifty miles off, in Maine, and entreats that you will edit the journal. He will write, and I please myself with thinking I shall be able to write under such auspices. Then you might (though I know not the laws respecting literary property) collect some of your own writings and reprint them here. I think the Sartor would now be sure of a sale. Your Life of Schiller, and Wilhelm Meister, have been long reprinted here. At worst, if you wholly disliked us, and preferred Old England to New, you can judge of the suggestion of a knowing man, that you might see Niagara, get a new stock of health, and pay all your expenses by printing in England a book of travels in America.

 ——  ——  —
*Now the Rev. Dr. Hedge, late Professor of German and of
Ecclesiastical History in Harvard College.
 ——  ——  ——

I wish you to know that we do not depend for your eclat on your being already known to rich men here. You are not. Nothing has ever been published here designating you by name. But Dr. Channing reads and respects you. That is a fact of importance to our project. Several clergymen, Messrs. Frothingham, Ripley, Francis, all of them scholars and Spiritualists, (some of them, unluckily, called Unitarian,) love you dearly, and will work heartily in your behalf. Mr. Frothing ham, a worthy and accomplished man, more like Erasmus than Luther, said to me on parting, the other day, “You cannot express in terms too extravagant my desire that he should come.” George Ripley, having heard, through your letter to me, that nobody in England had responded to the Sartor, had secretly written you a most reverential letter, which, by dint of coaxing, be read to me, though he said there was but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. I prayed him, though I thought the letter did him no justice, save to his heart, to send you it or another; and he says he will. He is a very able young man, even if his letter should not show it.* He said he could, and would, bring many persons to hear you, and you should be sure of his utmost aid. Dr. Bradford, a medical man, is of good courage. Mr. Loring,** a lawyer, said,” — Invite Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to spend a couple of months at my house,” (I assured him I was too selfish for that,) “and if our people,” he said, “cannot find out his worth, I will subscribe, with, others, to make him whole of any expense he shall incur in coming.” Hedge promised more than he ought. There are several persons beside, known to me, who feel a warm interest in this thing. Mr. Furness, a popular and excellent minister in Philadelphia, at whose house Harriet Martineau was spending a few days, I learned the other day “was feeding Miss Martineau with the Sartor.” And here some of the best women I know are warm friends of yours, and are much of Mrs. Carlyle’s opinion when she says, Your books shall prosper.

 — * Emerson’s estimate of Mr. Ripley was justified as the years went on. His Life, by Mr. Octavius Frothingham, — like his father, “a worthy and accomplished, man,” but more like Luther than Erasmus, — forms one of the most attractive volumes of the series of Lives of American Men of Letters.

** The late Ellis Gray Loring, a man of high character, well esteemed in his profession, and widely respected. ——  ——  —

On the other hand, I make no doubt you shall be sure of some opposition. Andrews Norton, one of our best heads, once a theological professor, and a destroying critic, lives upon a rich estate at Cambridge, and frigidly excludes the Diderot paper from a Select Journal edited by him, with the remark, “Another paper of the Teufelsdrockh School.” The University perhaps, and much that is conservative in literature and religion, I apprehend, will give you its cordial opposition, and what eccentricity can be collected from the Obituary Notice on Goethe, or from the Sartor, shall be mustered to demolish you. Nor yet do I feel quite certain of this. If we get a good tide with us, we shall sweep away the whole inertia, which is the whole force of these gentlemen, except Norton. That you do not like the Unitarians will never hurt you at all, if possibly you do like the Calvinists. If you have any friendly relations to your native Church, fail not to bring a letter from a Scottish Calvinist to a Calvinist here, and your fortune is made. But that were too good to happen.

Since things are so, can you not, my dear sir, finish your new work and cross the great water in September or October, and try the experiment of a winter in America? I cannot but think that if we do not make out a case strong enough to make you build your house, at least you should pitch your tent among us. The country is, as you say, worth visiting, and to give much pleasure to a few persons will be some inducement to you. I am afraid to press this matter. To me, as you can divine, it would be an unspeakable comfort; and the more, that I hope before that time so far to settle my own affairs as to have a wife and a house to receive you. Tell Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate regards, that some friends whom she does not yet know do hope with me to have her company for the next winter at our house, and shall not cease to hope it until you come.

I have many things to say upon the topics of your letter, but my letter is already so immeasurably long, it must stop. Long as it is, I regret I have not more facts. Dr. Channing is in New York, or I think, despite your negligence of him, I should have visited him on account of his interest in you. Could you see him you would like him. I shall write you immediately on learning anything new bearing on this business. I intended to have despatched this letter a day or two sooner, that it might go by the packet of the 1st of May from New York. Now it will go by that of the 8th, and ought to reach you in thirty days. Send me your thoughts upon it as soon as you can. I jalouse of that new book. I fear its success may mar my project.

Yours affectionately,
               R. Waldo Emerson

VII. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 13 May, 1835

Thanks, my kind friend, for the news you again send me. Good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. As if the “Golden West” seen by Poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! To me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole Existence here below more and more does.

We have seen your Barnard: a most modest, intelligent, compact, hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests from his expedition hither. We expect to see much more of him; to instruct him, to learn of him: especially about that real-imaginary locality of “Concord,” where a kindly-speaking voice lives incarnated, there is much to learn.

That you will take to yourself a wife is the cheerfulest tidings you could send us. It is in no wise meet for man to be alone; and indeed the beneficent Heavens, in creating Eve, did mercifully guard against that. May it prove blessed, this new arrangement! I delight to prophesy for you peaceful days in it; peaceful, not idle; filled rather with that best activity which is the stillest. To the future, or perhaps at this hour actual Mrs. Emerson, will you offer true wishes from two British Friends; who have not seen her with their eyes, but whose thoughts need not be strangers to the Home she will make for you. Nay, you add the most chivalrous summons: which who knows but one day we may actually stir ourselves to obey! It may hover for the present among the gentlest of our day-dreams; mild-lustrous; an impossible possibility. May all go well with you, my worthy Countryman, Kinsman, and brother Man!

This so astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in your New England circle seems to me not only astonishing, but questionable; not, however, to be quarreled with. I may say: If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in Old England whole antiseptic floods of good hop-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new Edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a Sartor: in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, Conservative Younger-brothers, Regent-Street Loungers, Crockford Gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken Reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the idea. Accordingly I realized these four copies from [him,] all he will surrender; and can do no more. Take them with my blessing. I beg you will present one to the honorablest of those “honorable women”; say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of mere sunbeams; to be loved and worshiped; the best of all Transatlantic women! Do at any rate, in a more business like style, offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for I reckoned tolerance had its limits. His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is Best, I knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both.

Finally, on behalf of the British world (which is not all contained in Fraser’s shop) I should tell you that various persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have privately expressed their recognition of this poor Rhapsody, the best the poor Clothes-Professor could produce in the circumstances; nay, I have Scottish Presbyterian Elders who read, and thank. So true is what you say about the aptitude of all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to them. As face answereth to face! Brother, if thou wish me to believe, do thou thyself believe first: this is as true as that of the flere and dolendum; perhaps truer. Wherefore, putting all things together, cannot I feel that I have washed my hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner? Let a man be thankful; and on the whole go along, while he has strength left to go.

This Boston Transcendentalist, whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish! I shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. The Visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the Invisible. Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I construe aright), as the Euthanasia of Metaphysic altogether. May it be sure, may it be speedy! Thou shalt open thy eyes, O Son of Adam; thou shalt look, and not forever jargon about laws of Optics and the making of spectacles! For myself, I rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could I but lay them aside, — with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two. Man lives by Belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live. Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little!

“Why? and WHEREFORE? God wot, simply THEREFORE! Ask not WHY; ‘t is SITH thou hast to care for.”

Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me: the saddest, I think, of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front. By dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume of that miserable French Revolution rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book, defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. A Friend borrowed this volume of Manuscript, — a kind Friend but a careless one, — to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do. One evening about two months ago he came in on us, “distraction (literally) in his aspect”; the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do: at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself: In this mood thou makest no way, writest nothing that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for one complete week! And so it lies, under lock and key. I have digested the whole misery; I say, if thou canst never write this thing, why then never do write it: God’s Universe will go along better — without it. My Belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable: however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement I have got to strive with, and will pity me in it. Bodily exhaustion (and “Diana in the shape of bile”)* I will at least try to exclude from the controversy. By God’s blessing, perhaps the Book shall yet be written; but I find it will not do, by sheer direct force; only by gentler side-methods. I have much else to write too: I feel often as if with one year of health and peace I could write something considerable; — the image of which sails dim and great through my head. Which year of health and peace, God, if He see meet, will give me yet; or withhold from me, as shall be for the best.

 * This allusion to Diana as an obstruction was a favorite one with Carlyle. “Sir Hudibras, according to Butler, was about to do a dreadful homicide, — an all-important catastrophe, — and had drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have done it, had not, says Butler, ‘Diana in the shape of rust’ imperatively intervened. A miracle she has occasionally wrought upon me in other shapes.” So wrote Carlyle in a letter in 1874.

I have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom of London; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. Hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must “set his face like a flint.” Madness rules the world, as it has generally done: one cannot, unhappily, without loss, say to it, Rule then; and yet must say it. — However, in two months more I expect my good Brother from Italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me); we are then for Scotland to gather a little health, to consider ourselves a little. I must have this Book done before anything else will prosper with me.

Your American Pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago; worthy old Rich had them not originally; seemed since to have been oblivious, out of Town, perhaps unwell. I called one day, and unearthed them. Those papers you marked I have read. Genuine endeavor; which may the Heavens forward! — In this poor Country all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics: Ministries tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of “Ignorance and Hunger” weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards — the melting-pot. There will be news from England by and by: many things have reached their term; Destiny “with lame foot” has overtaken them, and there will be a reckoning. O blessed are you where, what jargoning soever there be at Washington, the poor man (ungoverned can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks into the Western Woods, sure of a nourishing Earth and an overarching Sky! It is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness. — That too shall be for good.

I wish I had anything to send you besides these four poor Pamphlets; but I fear there is nothing going. Our Ex-Chancellor has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties, when he with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the Aristocracy; whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized. In Literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still unknown) volume of Wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing. — Did I tell you that I saw Wordsworth this winter? Twice, at considerable length; with almost no disappointment. He is a natural man (which means whole immensities here and now); flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness, — though, as it would not but seem to me, in small quantity, and astonishingly diluted. Franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes I never heard from any man; at least never, whom I could honor for uttering them. I am thankful for Wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual sky-rockets and coruscations, one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle. Southey also I saw; a far cleverer man in speech, yet a considerably smaller man. Shovel-hatted; the shovel-hat is grown to him: one must take him as he is.

The second leaf is done; I must not venture on another. God bless you, my worthy Friend; you and her who is to be yours! My Wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too across the Sea. Perhaps we shall all meet one another some day, — if not Here, then Yonder!

Faithfully always,
                 T. Carlyle

VIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 27 June, 1835

My Dear Friend, — Your very kind Letter has been in my hand these four weeks, — the subject of much meditation, which has not yet cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue. Indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before me: for if the American side of it, thanks to your perspicuous minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the European side continues dubious, too dim for a decision. So much in my own position here is vague, not to be measured; then there is a Brother, coming home to me from Italy, almost daily expected now; whose ulterior resolutions cannot but be influential on mine; for we are Brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one interest and object, and even one purse; and Jack is a good man, for whom I daily thank Heaven, as for one of its principal mercies. He is Traveling Physician to the Countess of Clare, well entreated by her and hers; but, I think, weary of that inane element of “the English Abroad,” and as good as determined to have done with it; to seek work (he sees not well how), if possible, with wages; but even almost without, or with the lowest endurable, if need be. Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one must, in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then. This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be in Paris one of these days; then here speedily; and “the House must resolve itself into a Committee” — of ways and means. Add to all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything: were I to give you my actual view of this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of the Anarch old. Alas! it is all too like Chaos: confusion of dense and rare: I also know what it is to drop plumb, fluttering my pennons vain, — for a series of weeks.

One point only is clear: that you, my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England. Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a house of my own in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering “unfruitful brine”; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous “tissue,” this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from “that roaring Loom of Time,” — miraculous ever as of old! To Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind. Long shall we remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us. My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you too heartily; — which really is very sound doctrine. I write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell.

It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as it is, — were I once fairly started. If so, what an unspeakable relief were it too! Of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often say, is that you cannot utter yourself. The poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it. Imprisoned, enchanted, like the Arabian Prince with half his body marble: it is really bad work. Then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio. Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz the Temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of Heaven he will speak a word or two. Would it were come so far, — if it be ever to come!

On the whole I think the odds are that I shall some time or other get over to you; but that for this winter I ought not to go. My London expedition is not decided hitherto; I have begun various relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut short so soon. That beggarly Book, were there nothing else, hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. To finish it, on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much as to work at it. What am I to do? When my Brother arrives, we go all back to Scotland for some weeks: there, in seclusion, with such calmness as I can find or create, the plan for the winter must be settled. You shall hear from me then; let us hope something more reasonable than I can write at present. For about a month I have gone to and fro utterly idle: understand that, and I need explain no more. The wearied machine refused to be urged any farther; after long spasmodic struggling comes collapse. The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really been a sore business for me. Nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a favor of the Upper Powers: tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new! This monstrous London has taught me several things during the past year; for if its Wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its Folly abounds with lessons, — which one ought to learn. I feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; defeated, yet not altogether disgraced. As the great Fritz said, when the battle had gone against him, “Another time we will do better.”

As to Literature, Politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of existence here, expect me not to say one word. We are a singular people, in a singular condition. Not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of O’Connell and Company (the Tail was a Peacock’s tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic Parliamentary men), one of the company, a “distinguished female” (as we call them), informed my Wife “O’Connell was the master-spirit of this age.” If so, then for what we have received let us be thankful, — and enjoy it without criticism. — It often painfully seems to me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here; as if the crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing rapidly down, down, to its end! Wreckage is swift; rebuilding is slow and distant. Happily another than we has charge of it.

My new American Friends have come and gone. Barnard went off northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and furtherance as I could give him. Professor Longfellow went about the same time; to Sweden, then to Berlin and Germany: we saw him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind greeting as they pass. I inquired considerably about Concord, and a certain man there; one of the fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things. By the bye, how very good you are, in regard to this of Unitarianism! I declare, I am ashamed of my intolerance: — and yet you have ceased to be a Teacher of theirs, have you not? I mean to address you this time by the secular title of Esquire; as if I liked you better so. But truly, in black clothes or in white, by this style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome to me. You will further allow me to fancy that you are now wedded; and offer our united congratulations and kindest good wishes to that new fair Friend of ours, whom one day we shall surely know more of, — if the Fates smile.

My sheet is ending, and I must not burden you with double postage for such stuff as this. By dint of some inquiry I have learnt the law of the American Letter-carrying; and I now mention it for our mutual benefit. There are from New York to London three packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th); the masters of these carry Letters gratis for all men; and put the same into the Post-Office; there are some pence charged on the score of “Ship-letter” there, and after that, the regular postage of the country, if the Letter has to go farther. I put this, for example, into a place called North and South American Coffee-house in the City here, and pay twopence for it, and it flies. Doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its “leather bag” somewhere in New York, and fixed days (probably the same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching, said leather bag: if you deal with the London Packets (so long as I am here) in preference to the Liverpool ones, it will all be well. As for the next Letter, (if you write as I hope you may before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, “Care of John Mill, Esq., India House, London”; and he will forward it directly, should I even be still absent in the North. — Now will you write? and pray write something about yourself. We both love you here, and send you all good prayers. Vale faveque!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

IX. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 7 October, 1835

My Dear Friend, — Please God I will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it.

 — * The original of this letter is missing; what is printed here is from the rough draft. —

I received in August your letter of June, and just then hearing that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, Mrs. Child,* whom I scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit England (invited thither for work’s sake by the African or Abolition Society) and that she begged an introduction to you, I used the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended. I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter written in May, with the four copies of the Sartor, which by a strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the Custom-House. On such provocation I can sit still no longer.

 ——  ——  —— * The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of Philothea was published in this year, 1835.

 ”If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
  ’T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen.”

says Lowell, in his Fable for Critics. —

The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord* (my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated. All three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other’s heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information. Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying. So know now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle.

 ——  ——  — * “A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Published by Request. Concord: G.F. Bemis, Printer. 1835.” 8vo, pp. 52. — A discourse worthy of the author and of the town. It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson’s Works, Boston, 1883. —

I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book. My brother Charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so. Such mischance might well quicken one’s curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it. You have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor. I trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first took life. Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain. And whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue. So do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much. To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication. And yet I hold to a more orthodox immortality too.

This morning in happiest time I have a letter from George Ripley, who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty confidently you will come next summer. Io paean! He tells me also that Alexander Everett (brother of Edward) has sent you the friendly notice that has just appeared in the North American Review, with a letter.* All which I hope you have received. I am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which I am a stranger, and which I supposed might not love you. It must be you shall succeed when Saul prophesies. Indeed, I have heard that you may hear the Sartor preached from some of our best pulpits and lecture-rooms. Don’t think I speak of myself, for I cherish carefully a salutary horror at the German style, and hold off my admiration as long as ever I can. But all my importance is quite at an end. For now that Doctors of Divinity and the solemn Review itself have broke silence to praise you, I have quite lost my plume as your harbinger.

 — * Mr. A.H. Everett’s paper on Sartor Resartus was published in the North American Review for October, 1835. —

I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him.

If virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe we keep your face for the living type. I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other.

X. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 8 April, 1856

My Dear Friend, — I am concerned at not hearing from you. I have written you two letters, one in October, one in November, I believe, since I had any tidings of you.* Your last letter is dated 27 June, 1835. I have counted all the chances of delay and miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have forgotten us. I have looked at the advertising sheet of the booksellers, but it promised nothing of the History. I thought I had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise of your coming, — I was to take possession of a new kingdom of virtue and friendship. Let not the new wine mourn. Speak to me out of the wide silence. Many friends inquire of me concerning you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of this sheet.

 ——  ——  —— * One in August by Mrs. Child, apparently not delivered, and one, the preceding, in October. —

With it goes an American reprint of the Sartor. Five hundred copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy. About one hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for. How it will be received I know not. I am not very sanguine, for I often hear and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style. Certainly, I tell them, it is very odd. Yet I read a chapter lately with great pleasure. I send you also, with Dr. Channing’s regards and good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our great local question of Slavery.

You must have written me since July. I have reckoned upon your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element. Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. Beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell, Salem, courses are given by individuals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, or St. Paul say that cannot be said here? The audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is?

Another thing. I am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lectures; I had written as many last year. And for reading both these and those at places whither I was invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars. Had I, in lieu of receiving a lecturer’s fee, myself advertised that I would deliver these in certain places, these receipts would have been greatly increased. I insert all this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a commercial spirit. If you lose no dollar by us, I shall joyfully trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all other points.

I cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are specially vital at this time except Criticism and Parliamentary Debate. I think this of ours would possess in the hands of a great genius great advantages over both. But what avail any commendations of the form, until I know that the man is alive and well? If you love them that love you, write me straightway of your welfare. My wife desires to add to mine her friendliest greetings to Mrs. Carlyle and to yourself.

Yours affectionately,
                 R. Waldo Emerson

I ought to say that Le-Baron Russell, a worthy young man who studies Engineering, did cause the republication of Teufelsdrockh.* I trust you shall yet see a better American review of it than the North American.

 ——  ——  —— * This first edition of Sartor as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell’s request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it “too commonplace, too much like all prefaces.” —

XI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 29 April, 1836

My Dear Emerson, — Barnard is returning across the water, and must not go back without a flying salutation for you. These many weeks I have had your letter by me; these many weeks I have felt always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and, alas! also that I could give it none. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought, That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing, — which also in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went about possessed with. Have compassion for me! It is really very miserable: but it will end. Some months more, and it is ended; and I am done with French Revolution, and with Revolution and Revolt in general; and look once more with free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the bright Sun, on this green Mother’s-bosom (though the Devil does dwell in it)! For the present, really, it is like a Nessus’ shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all other mischiefs.

I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so “spectral” to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done. My familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, I answer, you are very right; but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help. — In such sort do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.

For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of Schiller, “the very Gods fight against it in vain”; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a Fact in the world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on; — over which Philosophy and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil; — neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in that.

There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone, — a stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much. Coleridge is the Father of all these. Ay de mi!

But to look across the “divine salt-sea.” A letter reached me, some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama; the writer, a kind friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.* I have mislaid, not lost his Letter; and do not at present know his permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at Mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. Will you therefore take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from me; that I see him, and love him in this Letter; and hope we shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any rate, with many a kind thought towards one another.

 ——  ——  — * Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston. ——  ——  —

The North American Review you spoke of never came (I mean that copy of it with the Note in it); but another copy became rather public here, to the amusement of some. I read the article myself: surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]* otherwise, is an original: either a thrice-plied quiz (Sartor’s “Editor” a twice-plied one); or else opening on you a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth.

 —— * The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter. ——

My friend! I must end here. Forgive me till I get done with this Book. Can you have the generosity to write, without an answer? Well, if you cannot, I will answer. Do not forget me. My love and my Wife’s to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all friends. Tell me what you do; what your world does. As for my world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it: —

    ”As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the
heavenly spaces,
     And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests,
     Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or
stormgirt
     So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force,
     Goal, and Time, go still onwards.”

Adieu, my dear friend! Believe me ever Yours,
                                     Thomas Carlyle

XII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Massachusetts, 17 September, 1836

My Dear Friend, — I hope you do not measure my love by the tardiness of my messages. I have few pleasures like that of receiving your kind and eloquent letters. I should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years. Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles,* of whom I have spoken to you, — the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him.

 * Charles Chauncy Emerson, — died May 9, 1836, — whose memory still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain who knew him in life. A few papers of his published in the Dial show to others what he was and what he might have become. —

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. I find now I must hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt. And of you I think much and anxiously since Mrs. Channing, amidst her delight at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness respecting your untempered devotion to study. I am the more disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion to your work, and I know there is no gentle dulness in your temperament to counteract the mischief. I fear Nature has not inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal blade from whetting it through. I write to implore you to be careful of your health. You are the property of all whom you rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as your own. O my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, I will thank God and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits. My wife has been lately an invalid, but she loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays her new carpet without some hopeful reference to Mrs. Carlyle. And in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the History of the French Revolution before it is published, — or at least whilst it is publishing in England, and before it is published here. There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold, and read with great delight by many persons.

This I suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of doing; but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture. If you will come here like a noble brother, you shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of eating and walking; and as I will abstain from you myself, so I will defend you from others. I entreat Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in these space-destroying days a prayer from Boston, Massachusetts, is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one from Edinburgh or Oxford.

I send you a little book I have just now published, as an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and significant.* This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear. I am mortified to learn the ill fate of my former packet containing the Sartor and Dr. Channing’s work. My mercantile friend is vexed, for he says accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a letter. I shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain another copy of our American edition.

 —
* This was Nature, the first clear manifesto of Emerson’s
genius.
 —

I wish I could come to you instead of sending this sheet of paper. I think I should persuade you to get into a ship this Autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun. I have many, many things to learn of you. How melancholy to think how much we need confession!…* Yet the great truths are always at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities. How little of you is in your will! Above your will how intimately are you related to all of us! In God we meet. Therein we are, thence we descend upon Time and these infinitesimal facts of Christendom, and Trade, and England Old and New. Wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the Past serves to contribute nothing to the result.

 — ** Some words appear to be lost here. —

I read Goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest. A friend of mine who studies his life with care would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years after his settlement at Weimar, and what Books there are in Germany about him beside what Mrs. Austin has collected and Heine. Can you tell me?

Write me of your health, or else come.

Yours ever,
      R.W. Emerson.

P.S. — I learn that an acquaintance is going to England, so send the packet by him.

XIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 5 November, 1836

My Dear Friend, — You are very good to write to me in my silence, in the mood you must be in. My silence you may well judge is not forgetfulness; it is a forced silence; which this kind Letter enforces into words. I write the day after your letter comes, lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me.

What a bereavement, my Friend, is this that has overtaken you! Such a Brother, with such a Life opening around him, like a blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye! It is a loss, a sore loss; which God had appointed you. I do not tell you not to mourn: I mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the spirit you have in this sorrow. Oh, I know it well! Often enough in this noisy Inanity of a vision where we still linger, I say to myself, Perhaps thy Buried Ones are not far from thee, are with thee; they are in Eternity, which is a Now and HERE! And yet Nature will have her right; Memory would feel desecrated if she could forget. Many times in the crowded din of the Living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you the Loved Face; and in these turmoiling streets you see the little silent Churchyard, the green grave that lies there so silent, inexpressibly wae. O, perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes! One thing is no Perhaps: surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will, — then is it not better so? Silence, — since in these days we have no speech! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, in any day.

You inquire so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! It is very good, and precious for me.

As for my health, be under no apprehension. I am always sick; I am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present; but it has no deep significance: it is weariness merely; and now, by the bounty of Heaven, I am as it were within sight of land. In two months more, this unblessed Book will be finished; at Newyearday we begin printing: before the end of March, the thing is out; and I am a free man! Few happinesses I have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me. And yet I ought not to call the poor Book unblessed: no, it has girdled me round like a panoply these two years; kept me invulnerable, indifferent, to innumerable things. The poorest man in London has perhaps been one of the freest: the roaring press of gigs and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his. — As for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply zero. It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that have not a Reality within them, which so few have; — testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and low. My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck: “Jack,” I answered, “innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false? At all events, thou seest, I cannot help it. It is the nature of the beast.” So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I. Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the Devil’s wages for it; which one does not incline to do. A disjectum membrum; cut off from relations with men? Verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical: a hopeless-looking man. Yet full of what I call desperate-hope! One does verily stand on the Earth, a Star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad, — what can one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out? — This surely is very idle talk.

As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad Book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man. Yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places: so we will print it, and be done with it; — and try a new turn next time. What I am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain. How gladly would I run to Concord! And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me. That my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me. It is frightful what an impatience I have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures. Their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate. There is no resource but to say: Brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable; — alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying: go thy ways, with my blessing. There are hardly three people among these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in the humor I have. Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit London finally till I have as it were seen it out. In the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one’s self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world: people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you. Some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom I have even learned to love, — though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly. Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do? — the answer is clear so far, “Rest myself awhile”; and all farther is as dark as Chaos. Now for resting, taking that by itself, my Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in Rome. On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that I must come to him, and walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over the Alps next spring!* Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation; — which I incline to think were the wisest course of all. And lastly from over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson’s voice. We will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Glucke.

 ——  ——  ——
* In his Life of Sterling, Carlyle prints a letter from
Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which
Sterling urges him to come “in the first fine days of spring.”
It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter
to Emerson.

I ought to say, however, that about New-year’s-day I will send you an Article on Mirabeau, which they have printed here (for a thing called the London Review), and some kind of Note to escort it. I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England, provided you leave the ends of them open: if I be mistaken, pray instruct Messrs. Barnard to refuse the thing, for it has small value. The Diamond Necklace is to be printed also, in Fraser; inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had; till now Fraser takes it — for L50: not being able to get it for nothing. The Mirabeau was written at the passionate request of John Mill; and likewise for needful lucre. I think it is the first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four years: where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. As for Mill’s London Review (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you. Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! Open it not: a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it. A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see. — Alas! the bottom of the sheet! Take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh: the first too is now in my possession; Brother John went to the Post-Office, and worked it out for a ten shillings. It is a beautiful little Book; and a Preface to it such as no kindest friend could have improved. Thank my kind Editor** very heartily from me.

 * Sir William Molesworth. In his Autobiography Mill gives an interesting account of the founding of this Review, and his quasi-editorial relations to it. “In the beginning,” he says, “it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion.”

** Dr. Le-Baron Russell

My wife was in Scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health; she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong; she sends over to Concord her kindest wishes. If I fly to the Alps or the Ocean, her Mother and she must keep one another company, we think, till there be better news of me. You are to thank Dr. Channing also for his valued gift. I read the Discourse, and other friends of his read it, with great estimation; but the end of that black question lies beyond my ken. I suppose, as usual, Might and Right will have to make themselves synonymous in some way. CANST and SHALT, if they are very well understood, mean the same thing under this Sun of ours. Adieu, my dear Emerson. Gehab’ Dich wohl! Many affectionate regards to the Lady Wife: it is far within the verge of Probabilities that I shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day. But she must not get sick! It is a dreadful thing, sickness; really a thing which I begin frequently to think criminal — at least in myself. Nay, in myself it really is criminal; wherefore I determine to be well one day.

Good be with you and Yours.
                      T. Carlyle

As to Goethe and your Friend: I know not anything out of Goethe’s own works (which have many notices in them) that treats specially of those ten years. Doubtless your Friend knows Jordens’s Lexicon (which dates all the writings, for one thing), the Conversations-Lexicon Supplement, and such like. There is an essay by one Schubarth which has reputation; but it is critical and ethical mainly. The Letters to Zelter, and the Letters to Schiller, will do nothing for those years, but are essential to see. Perhaps in some late number of the Zeitgenossen there may be something? Blackguard Heine is worth very little; Mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser. A very curious Book is Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, just published. No room more!*

 — * Concerning this letter Emerson wrote in his Diary: “January 7, 1837. Received day before yesterday a letter from Thomas Carlyle, dated 5 November; — as ever, a cordial influence. Strong he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our human nature. Quite in consonance with my delight in his eloquent letters I read in Bacon this afternoon this sentence (of Letters): ‘And such as are written from wise men are of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches.’” ——

XIV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 13 February, 1837

My Dear Emerson, — You had promise of a letter to be despatched you about New-year’s-day; which promise I was myself in a condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to delays of printers and certain “Articles” that were to go with it. Six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard animals: however, I will delay no longer for them. Nay, it seems the Articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the Letter; but must fare round by Liverpool or Portsmouth, in a separate conveyance. We will leave them to the bounty of Time.

Your little Book and the Copy of Teufelsdrockh came safely; soon after I had written. The Teufelsdrockh I instantaneously despatched to Hamburg, to a Scottish merchant there, to whom there is an allusion in the Book; who used to be my Speditor (one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my missions and packages to and from Weimar.* The other, former Copy, more specially yours, had already been, as I think I told you, delivered out of durance; and got itself placed in the bookshelf, as the Teufelsdrockh. George Ripley tells me you are printing another edition; much good may it do you! There is now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising here about printing one. I said to myself once, when Bookseller Fraser shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him: “Perhaps after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a Book, after I am dead it may be, — if so seem good to them. Either way!” As it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the more cheerfully. Ripley says farther he has sent me a critique of it by a better hand than the North American: I expect it, but have not got it Yet.** The North American seems to say that he too sent me one. It never came to hand, nor any hint of it, — except I think once before through you. It was not at all an unfriendly review; but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in it that filled one with amazement. Since the Irish Bishop who said there were some things in Gulliver on which he for one would keep his belief suspended, nothing equal to it, on that side, has come athwart me. However, he has made out that Teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious character; which is always something, for an Inquirer into Truth. — Will you, finally, thank Friend Ripley in my name, till I have time to write to him and thank him.

 — * The allusion referred to is the following: “By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget, — the bulky Weissnichtwo packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost.” — Sartor Resartus, Book I. ch. xi.

** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the Christian Examiner. ——  ——  —

Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the “Open Secret” becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine — with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien, which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. You will see what the years will bring you. It is not one of your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly and let the years do their best. He that cannot keep himself quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be like him in that, whatever else it be.

Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you “are the only man in America” who has quietly set himself down on a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will prescribes for him. Pity that you were the only one! But be one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second and a third. It is a poor country where all men are sold to Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of Parliamentary Eloquence! And yet your New England here too has the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe: we too are sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, I pray you, with double pity) Mammon will not pay us, — we, are “Two Million three hundred thousand in Ireland that have not potatoes enough”! I declare, in History I find nothing more tragical. I find also that it will alter; that for me as one it has altered. Me Mammon will pay or not as he finds convenient; buy me he will not. — In fine, I say, sit still at Concord, with such spirit as you are of; under the blessed skyey influences, with an open sense, with the great Book of Existence open round you: we shall see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it.

The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation. Along with these two “Articles” (to be sent by Liverpool; there are two of them, Diamond Necklace and Mirabeau), you will very probably get some stray Proofsheet — of the unutterable French Revolution! It is actually at Press; two Printers working at separate Volumes of it, — though still too slow. In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! You, I hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both. No such spell shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! And yet I ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man’s doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in. Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination I have had; perhaps I shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood. The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying under my feet; a mean imbroglio, which I never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with: welcome and welcome to go wholly its own way; I wholly clear for going mine. Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep. The residue is vague as the wind, — unheeded as the wind. Some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse: any way, — or even no way, if that be it, — I shall be content. There is a scheme here among Friends for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution; but it will not do there, I think. The instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I can teach them, — then we will, most readily, as Burns says, “loose our tinkler jaw”; but not I think till then; were the Institution even Imperial.

America has faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God’s sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, ‘and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! To rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain. — What a pity this poor sheet is done! I had innumerable things to tell you about people whom I have seen, about books, — Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament, Literature and the Life of Man, — the whole of which must lie over till next time. Write to me; do not forget me. My Wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends “kindest remembrances,” “compliments” she expressly does not send. Good be with you always, my dear Friend!

 — T. Carlyle

We send our felicitation to the Mother and little Boy; which latter you had better tell us the name of.

XV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 31 March, 1837

My Dear Friend, — Last night, I said I would write to you forthwith. This morning I received your letter of February 13th, and with it the Diamond Necklace, the Mirabeau, and the olive leaf of a proof-sheet. I write out the sum of my debt as the best acknowledgment I can make. I had already received, about New-Year’s-Day, the preceding letter. It came in the midst of my washbowl-storm of a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For all these gifts and pledges, — thanks. Over the finished History, joy and evergreen laurels. I embrace you with all my heart. I solace myself with the noble nature God has given you, and in you to me, and to all. I had read the Diamond Necklace three weeks ago at the Boston Athenaeum, and the Mirabeau I had just read when my copy came. But the proof-sheet was virgin gold. The Mirabeau I forebode is to establish your kingdom in England. That is genuine thunder, which nobody that wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels. I please myself with thinking that my Angelo has blocked a Colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all competitors. To be sure, that is its least merit, — that nobody can do the like, — yet is it a gag to Cerberus. Its better merit is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources that are in human nature; so I sent it to be read by a brave man who is poor and decried. The doctrine is indeed true and grand which you preach as by cannonade, that God made a man, and it were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and, however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far; a faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all the individuals.

The Diamond Necklace I read with joy, whilst I read with my own eyes. When I read with English or New-English eyes, my joy is marred by the roaring of the opposition. I doubt not the exact story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time; but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics whereby the meaning is conveyed. And for the Gig, — the Gig, — it is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that particular symbol no more.

I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker’s shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it is your own; and it is English; and every word stands for somewhat; and it cheers and fortifies me. And what more can a man ask of his writing fellow-man? Why, all things; inasmuch as a good mind creates wants at every stroke.

The proof-sheet rhymes well with Mirabeau, and has abated my fears from your own and your brother’s account of the new book. I greet it well. Auspicious Babe, be born! The first good of the book is that it makes you free, and as I anxiously hope makes your body sound. A possible good is that it will cause me to see your face. But I seemed to read in Mirabeau what you intimate in your letter, that you will not come westward. Old England is to find you out, and then the New will have no charm. For me it will be the worst; for you, not. A man, a few men, cannot be to you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far to find. Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals. I see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours; that there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere; and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than others. Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie wheat. I have really never believed that you would do us that crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of Oxenstiern’s little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards — provided for them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of newspapers — do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish. If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. So I leave you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say “Go,” why fly to us instantly. Come and spend a year with me, and see if I cannot respect your retirements.

I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class. They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to make, their living is usually weak and hapless. But you are so companionable — God has made you Man as well as Poet — that I lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water. Burns might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one might write Iliads or Hamlets, and yet come short of Truth by infinity, as every written word must; but “the man’s the gowd for a’ that.” And I heartily thank the Lady for her good-will. Please God she may be already well. We all grieve to know of her ill health. People who have seen her never stop with Mr. Carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her. My wife believes in nothing for her but the American voyage. I shall never cease to expect you both until you come.

My boy is five months old, he is called Waldo, — a lovely wonder that made the Universe look friendlier to me.

My Wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards to Mrs. Carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your letters only to that sentence that she would go to Scotland if you came here. My Wife beseeches her to come and possess her new-dressed chamber. Do not cease to write whenever you can spare me an hour. A man named Bronson Alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. Good bye.

 — R.W. Emerson

The second edition of Sartor is out and sells well. I learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered for England. It was very amiable of you, that word about it in Mirabeau.*

 ——  ——  — * This refers to Carlyle’s introducing, in his paper on Mirabeau, a citation from Sartor, with the words, “We quote from a New England Book.” ——  ——  —

XVI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 1 June, 1857

My Dear Friend, — A word must go to Concord in answer to your last kind word. It reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of a most unspeakable day; the day when I, half dead with fret, agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience of London quality people on the subject of German Literature! The heart’s wish of me was that I might be left in deepest oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come. My Printers had only let me go, out of their Treadmill, the day before. However, all that is over now; and I am still here alive to write to you, and hope for better days.

Almost a month ago there went a copy of a Book called French Revolution, with your address on it, over to Red-Lion Square, and thence, as old Rich declared, himself now emeritus, back to one Kennet (I think) near Covent Garden; who professes to correspond with Hilliard and Company, Boston, and undertook the service. The Book is not gone yet, I understand; but Kennet engages that it shall leave Liverpool infallibly on the 5th of June. I wish you a happy reading of it, therefore: it is the only copy of my sending that has crossed the water. Ill printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! But in fine it is off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate nothing or little. Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. We will let it go its way. Beat this thing, I say always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, kill it in God’s name: if thou canst not kill it, why then thou wilt not.

By the by, speaking of dull Publics, I ought to say that I have seen a review of myself in the Christian Examiner (I think that is it) of Boston; the author of which, if you know him, I desire you to thank on my part. For if a dull million is good, then withal a seeing unit or two is also good. This man images back a beautiful idealized Clothes-Philosopher, very satisfactory to look upon; in whose beatified features I did verily detect more similitude to what I myself meant to be, than in any or all the other criticisms I have yet seen written of me. That a man see himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this brotherly improved way: there surely is one of the most legitimate joys of existence. Friend Ripley took the trouble to send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own; there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of; a Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours; and a set of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom I grieved to see confusing himself with that. Progress of the species is a thing I can get no good of at all. These Books, which Miss Martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till three weeks ago or less. I pray you to thank Ripley for them very kindly; which at present I still have not time to do. He seems to me a good man, with good aims; with considerable natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow better, all clearness to grow clearer. Miss Martineau laments that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity, into the Black Controversy; a thing lamentable in the extreme, when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would be could Mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his squash as a stupid Apprentice instead of stupid Slave!

Miss Martineau’s Book on America is out, here and with you. I have read it for the good Authoress’s sake, whom I love much. She is one of the strangest phenomena to me. A genuine little Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that! “God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech,” say the Arabs. Even the English Unitarians were one day to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said. I admire this good lady’s integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes: her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great: the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough. What they say to her Book here I do not well know. I fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant. I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, “in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth,” one of those oceans common at present. Ach Gott! They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of Cloth Figures.

 ——  ——  — * Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler. ——  ——  —

I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I intended. My Wife continues here with her Mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her. She is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough. I rest myself “on the sunny side of hedges” in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort. Once rested, I think of returning to London for another season. Several things are beginning which I ought to see end before taking up my staff again. In this enormous Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a calm than you can elsewhere meet with. Men let you alone, which is an immense thing: they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you. London, or else the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock! We shall see.

I still beg the comfort of hearing from you. I am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a Waldo Emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever. My Wife earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household. May a blessing be in it, on one and all! I do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet. On the contrary, it seems almost certain that I shall. Good be with you.

Yours always,
            T. Carlyle*

 — * Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837: “A letter today from Carlyle rejoiced me. Pleasant would life be with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you cannot have them. If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation.” ——  ——  —

XVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 13 September, 1837

My Dear Friend, — Such a gift as the French Revolution demanded a speedier acknowledgment. But you mountaineers that can scale Andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians. I am ashamed to think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent.

The French Revolution did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since landing. Between many visits received, and some literary haranguing done, I have read two volumes and half the third and I think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original and vast ambition of fun: pleasure and peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach fever and famine to dance and sing. I think you have written a wonderful book, which will last a very long time. I see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. You have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and of other relations than civism. You have broken away from all books, and written a mind. It is a brave experiment, and the success is great. We have men in your story and not names merely; always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have the historic men. We have great facts — and selected facts — truly set down. We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. The soul’s right of wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise and doom awarded, assuredly without cant. Yes, comfort yourself on that particular, O ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never. Finally we have not — a dull word. Never was there a style so rapid as yours, — which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. I suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. Henry VIII loved a Man, and I see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents. And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your contemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever: not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named, person in this thy definite deed.

I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance, — if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the Aurora borealis. However, I find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike terms. This character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake and ale before, though thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest, without defiance or sky-vaulting. I wish I could talk with you face to face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book. I feel assured of its good reception in this country. I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of Sartor have been sold. I have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the History until some space has been given to people to import British copies. I have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. At the present very high rate of exchange, which makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of Exchange; then my books shall come. I am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we should pirate your books. One day we will have a better law, or perhaps you will make our law yours.

I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. Your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and useless. I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth and love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may to the nigh starving youth. So I religiously read lectures every winter, and at other times whenever summoned. Last year, “the Philosophy of History,” twelve lectures; and now I meditate a course on what I call “Ethics.” I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received.

Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland, — what you do, and will do, — tell me that your wife is strong and well again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come hither. I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a day with me, — counting fifteen souls, — each one of whom warmly loves you. So if the French Revolution does not convert the “dull public” of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New England. Yours in love and honor.

 — R. Waldo Emerson

May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City? You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square. Will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed? I wrote him once myself, once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P. Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston, — three times, — to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods.

I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a literary society here, which is now being printed.* Gladly I hear of the Carlylet — so they say — in the new Westminster.

 * This was Emerson’s famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on “The American Scholar.” In his admirable essay on Thoreau, — an essay which might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years, — Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It “was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling.” — My Study Windows, p. 197

XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 2 November, 1837

My Dear Friend, — Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called The Jurist, and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing Sartor themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a bookseller to print the French Revolution. It is to be printed in two volumes of the size of our American Sartor, one thousand copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet, I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take care that your friends here shall know my contract with the bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then, if so good a book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new relation of being your banker and attorney. They have had the wit in the London Examiner, I find, to praise at last; and I mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page. The Westminster they can read themselves. The printers think they can get the book out by Christmas. So it must be long before I can tell you what cheer. Meantime do you tell me, I entreat you, what speed it has had at home. The best, I hope, with the wise and good withal.

I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. I have promised a course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships. The “tender ears,” as George Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak. I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other relation than that of preacher. But I preach in the Lecture-Room and then it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever: two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your pledge? The day before yesterday my little boy was a year old, — no, the day before that, — and I cannot tell you what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God, which I heartily desire you also should see. Good, wise, kind friend, I shall see you one day. Let me hear, when you can write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again.

 — R. Waldo Emerson

XIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837

My Dear Emerson, — How long it is since you last heard of me I do not very accurately know; but it is too long. A very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then. Whenever I delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again, — unweariable in pity.

I did go to Scotland, for almost three months; leaving my Wife here with her Mother. The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look very grave indeed: she continued too weak for traveling: I was worn out as I had never in my life been. So, on the longest day of June, I got back to my Mother’s cottage; threw myself down, I may say, into what we may call the “frightfulest magnetic sleep,” and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men. Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. But indeed all was unearthly in that humor. The gushing of my native brooks, the sough of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly. It did not bring me to rest; yet towards rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again. I have been here since September evidently another little “chapter” or paragraph, not altogether inert, is getting forward. But I must not speak of these things. How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak: not here. Pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me: if I can (in all senses) rightly hold my peace, I think much will yet be well with me. SILENCE is the great thing I worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon. Let a man know rightly how to hold his peace. I love to repeat to myself, “Silence is of Eternity.” Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far, far away! I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of money to get “food and warmth” with, I would shake the mud of London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more. Perhaps it is better as it is.

But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of “Silence”) one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news. There is a man here called John Sterling (Reverend John of the Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again. This Sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive. Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and others, my heart loves the man. He is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now growing dim too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to preach, to preach peace, were it only the spent echo of a peace once preached. He is still only about thirty; young; and I think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps. Do you ever read Blackwood? This John Sterling is the “New Contributor” whom Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month “Crystals from a Cavern,” &c., which it is well worth your while to see. Well, and what then, cry you? — Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little Book Nature lying here; and, across a whole silva silvarum of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart, — and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to Madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors have ordered him. This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by God’s blessing there shall one day be a trio of us: call you that nothing?

And so now by a direct transition I am got to the Oration. My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. It was long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a man’s voice, and I have a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart; — I said to my wife, “There, woman!” She read; and returned, and charges me to return for answer, “that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent.” My brave Emerson! And all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the “vociferous platitude” dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of Thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, “Yes, I am here too.” Miss Martineau tells me, “Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad.” Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a fearful work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest. O for God’s sake keep yourself still quiet! Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man’s praise or censure; know that that is not it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one’s right-hand and one’s left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper; — poor Cooper, he is down in it; and had a climbing faculty too. Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and God speed you well! My space is done.

And so adieu, for this time. You must write soon again. My copy of the Oration has never come: how is this? I could dispose of a dozen well. — They say I am to lecture again in Spring, Ay de mi! The “Book” is babbled about sufficiently in several dialects: Fraser wants to print my scattered Reviews and Articles; a pregnant sign. Teufelsdrockh to precede. The man “screamed” once at the name of it in a very musical manner. He shall not print a line; unless he give me money for it, more or less. I have had enough of printing for one while, — thrown into “magnetic sleep” by it! Farewell my brother.

 — T. Carlyle

O. Rich, it seems, is in Spain. His representative assured me, some weeks since, that the Account was now sent. There is an Article on Sir W. Scott: shocking; invitissima Minerva!*

 ——  ——  —
*Carlyle’s article on Scott published in the London and
Westminster Review, No. 12. Reprinted in his Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays.
 ——  ——  —

Miss Martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and your Lady: her words were kinder than I have room for here. — Can you not, in defect or delay of Letter, send me a Massachusetts Newspaper? I think it costs little or almost nothing now; and I shall know your hand.

XX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 9 February, 1838

My Dear Friend, — It is ten days now — ten cold days — that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to write before. I have just finished — Wednesday evening — a course of lectures which I ambitiously baptized “Human Culture,” and read once a week to the curious in Boston. I could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week’s stated scribbling. Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear. Your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy, — fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge, — fine things from CARLYLE. Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle’s friend. What has life better to offer than such tidings? You may suppose I went directly and got me Blackwood, and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand; — a species of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance. I found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to love him very much. In this romancing of the gentle affections we are children evermore. We forget the age of life, the barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance; and I have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas and conditions — and meet at last. I heartily pray that the Sea and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a Voyager so kind and noble.

For the Oration, I am so elated with your goodwill that I begin to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the praise is not good on Parnassus but only in friendship. I sent it diffidently (I did send it through bookselling Munroe) to you, and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations. Yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a month. A new edition is now printing, and I will send you some copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read.

I have a little budget of news myself. I hope you had my letter — sent by young Sumner — saying that we meant to print the French Revolution here for the Author’s benefit. It was published on the 25th of December. It is published at my risk, the booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies I can get subscriptions for. All the rest they are to sell and to have twenty percent on the retail price for their commission. The selling price of the book is $2.50; the cost of a copy, $1.26; the bookseller’s commission, 50 cts.; so that T.C. only gains 74 cts. on each copy they sell. But we have two hundred subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of freight. You ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in terror of the Philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to the economical Public. We printed one thousand copies: of these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks; and Brown the bookseller talks, as I think, much too modestly, of getting rid of the whole edition in one year. I say six months. The printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months from the day of publication; and I hope the settlement will be the final one. And I confide in sending you seven hundred dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers in the West. Yet, I own, I shake a little at the thought of the bookseller’s account. Whenever I have seen that species of document, it was strange how the hopefulest ideal dwindled away to a dwarfish actual. But you may be assured I shall on this occasion summon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion.

The book has the best success with the best. Young men say it is the only history they have ever read. The middle-aged and the old shake their heads, and cannot make anything of it. In short, it has the success of a book which, as people have not fashioned, has to fashion the people. It will take some time to win all, but it wins and will win. I sent a notice of it to the Christian Examiner, but the editor sent it all back to me except the first and last paragraphs; those he printed. And the editor of the North American declined giving a place to a paper from another friend of yours. But we shall see. I am glad you are to print your Miscellanies; but — forgive our Transatlantic effrontery — we are beforehand of you, and we are already selecting a couple of volumes from the same, and shall print them on the same plan as the History, and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again. I surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection but that I had no choice. If I waited, the bookseller would have done it himself, and carried off the profit. I sent you (to Kennet) a copy of the French Revolution. I regret exceedingly the printer’s blunder about the numbering the Books in the volumes, but he had warranted me in a literal, punctual reprint of the copy without its leaving his office, and I trusted him. I am told there are many errors. I am going to see for myself. I have filled my paper, and not yet said a word of how many things. You tell me how ill was Mrs. C., and you do not tell me that she is well again. But I see plainly that I must take speedily another sheet. I love you always.

 — R.W. Emerson

XXI. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 12 March, 1838

My Dear Friend, — Here in a bookseller’s shop I have secured a stool and corner to say a swift benison. Mr. Bancroft told me that the presence of English Lord Gosford in town would give me a safe conveyance of pamphlets to you, so I send some Orations of which you said so kind and cheering words. Give them to any one who will read them. I have written names in three. You have, I hope, got the letter sent nearly a month ago, giving account of our reprint of the French Revolution, and have received a copy of the same. I learn from the bookseller today that six hundred and fifty copies are sold, and the book continues to sell. So I hope that our settlement at the end of six months will be final, or nearly so.

I had nearly closed my agreement the other day with a publisher for the emission of Carlyle’s Miscellanies, when just in the last hour comes word from E.G. Loring that he has an authentic catalogue from the Bard himself. Now I have that, and could wish Loring had communicated his plan to me at first, or that I had bad wit enough to have undertaken this matter long ago and conferred with you. I designed nothing for you or your friends; but merely a lucrative book for our daily market that would have yielded a pecuniary compensation to you, such as we are all bound to make, and have bought our Socrates a cloak. Loring contemplated something quite different, — a “Complete Works,” etc., — and now clamors for the same thing, and I do not know but I shall have to gratify him and others at the risk of injury to this my vulgar hope of dollars, — that innate idea of the American mind. This I shall settle in a few days. No copyright can be secured here for an English book unless it contain original matter: But my moments are going, and I can only promise to write you quickly, at home and at leisure, for I have just been reading the History again with many, many thoughts, and I revere, wonder at, and love you.

 — R. Waldo Emerson

XXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 16 March, 1838

My Dear Emerson, — Your letter through Sumner was sent by him from Paris about a month ago; the man himself has not yet made his appearance, or been heard of in these parts: he shall be very welcome to me, arrive when he will. The February letter came yesterday, by direct conveyance from Dartmouth. I answer it today rather than tomorrow; I may not for long have a day freer than this. Fronte capillata, post est occasio calva: true either in Latin or English!

You send me good news, as usual. You have been very brisk and helpful in this business of the Revolution Book, and I give you many thanks and commendations. It will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the number of the coins, whether seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the first cash I realize for that piece of work, — Angle-land continuing still insolvent to me! Well, it is a wide Motherland we have here, or are getting to have, from Bass’s Straits all round to Columbia River, already almost circling the Globe: it must be hard with a man if somewhere or other he find not some one or other to take his part, and stand by him a little! Blessings on you, my brother: nay, your work is already twice blessed. — I believe after all, with the aid of my Scotch thrift, I shall not be absolutely thrown into the streets here, or reduced to borrow, and become the slave of somebody, for a morsel of bread. Thank God, no! Nay, of late I begin entirely to despise that whole matter, so as I never hitherto despised it: “Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary that hast chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in the Devil’s name, let us see what is in thee! Will the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years of it, quail before thee?” Better, however, is my good pious Mother’s version of it: “They cannot take God’s Providence from thee; thou hast never wanted yet.”*

 ——  ——  — * In his Diary, May 9, 1838, Emerson wrote: “A letter this morning from T. Carlyle. How should he be so poor? It is the most creditable poverty I know of.” ——  ——  —

But to go on with business; and the republication of books in that Transoceanic England, New and improved Edition of England. In January last, if I recollect right, Miss Martineau, in the name of a certain Mr. Loring, applied to me for a correct List of all my fugitive Papers; the said Mr. Loring meaning to publish them for my behoof. This List she, though not without solicitation, for I had small hope in it, did at last obtain, and send, coupled with a request from me that you should be consulted in the matter. Now it appears you had of yourself previously determined on something of the same sort, and probably are far on with the printing of your Two select volumes. I confess myself greatly better pleased with it on that footing than on another. Who Mr. Loring may be I know not, with any certainty, at first hand; but who Waldo Emerson is I do know; and more than one god from the machine is not necessary. I pray you, thank Mr. Loring for his goodness towards me (his intents are evidently charitable and not wicked); but consider yourself as in nowise bound at all by that blotted Paper he has, but do the best you can for me, consulting with him or not taking any counsel just as you see to be fittest on the spot. And so Heaven prosper you, both in your “aroused Yankee” state, and in all others; — and let us for the present consider that we have enough about Books and Guineas. I must add, however, that Fraser and I have yet made no bargain. We found, on computing, that there would be five good volumes, including Teufelsdrockh. For an edition of Seven hundred and Fifty I demanded L50 a volume, and Fraser refused: the poor man then fell dangerously ill, and there could not be a word farther said on the subject; till very lately, when it again became possible, but has not yet been put in practice. All the world cries out, Why do you publish with Fraser? “Because my soul is sick of Booksellers, and of trade, and deception, and ‘need and greed’ altogether; and this poor Fraser, not worse than the rest of them, has in some sort grown less hideous to me by custom.” I fancy, however, either Fraser will publish these things before long; or some Samaritan here will take me to some bolder brother of the trade that will. Great Samuel Johnson assisted at the beginning of Bibliopoly; small Thomas Carlyle assists at the ending of it: both are sorrowful seasons for a man. For the rest, people here continue to receive that Revolution very much as you say they do there: I am right well quit of it; and the elderly gentlemen on both sides of the water may take comfort, they will not soon have to suffer the like again. But really England is wonderfully changed within these ten years; the old gentlemen all shrunk into nooks, some of them even voting with the young. — The American ill-printed Two and-a-half-dollars Copy shall, for Emerson’s sake, be welcomest to me of all. Kennet will send it when it comes.

The Oration did arrive, with my name on it, one snowy night in January. It is off to Madeira; probably there now. I can dispose of a score of copies to good advantage. Friend Sterling has done the best of all his things in the current Blackwood,— “Crystals from a Cavern,” — which see. He writes kind things of you from Madeira, in expectation of the Speech. I will gratify him with your message; he is to be here in May; better, we hope, and in the way towards safety. Miss Martineau has given you a luminous section in her new Book about America; you are one of the American “Originals,” — the good Harriet!

And now I have but one thing to add and to repeat: Be quiet, be quiet! The fire that is in one’s own stomach is enough, without foreign bellows to blow it ever and anon. My whole heart shudders at the thrice-wretched self-combustion into which I see all manner of poor paper-lanterns go up, the wind of “popularity” puffing at them, and nothing left erelong but ashes and sooty wreck. It is sad, most sad. I shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer’s hodbearer rather. O the “cabriolets, neatflies,” and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor Mrs. Rigmarole to the Devil!* — As for me, I continue doing as nearly nothing as I can manage. I decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a London rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; a London dinner makes me sicker for a week, and I say often, It is better to be even dull than to be witty, better to be silent than to speak.

 ——  —— * This sentence is a variation on one at the beginning of the article on Scott. ——  ——

Curious: your Course of Lectures “on Human Culture” seems to be on the very subject I am to discourse upon here in May coming; but I am to call it “on the History of Literature,” and speak it, not write it. While you read this, I shall be in the agonies! Ah me! often when I think of the matter, how my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue, and by what bayonets of Necessity clapt to my back I am driven into that Lecture-room, and in what mood, and ordered to speak or die, I feel as if my only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering! But that, clearly, will not do. Then again I think it is perhaps better so; who knows? At all events, we will try what is in this Lecturing in London. If something, well; if nothing, why also well. But I do want to get out of these coils for a tune. My Brother is to be home again in May; if he go back to Italy, if our Lecturing proved productive, why might we not all set off thitherward for the winter coming? There is a dream to that effect. It would suit my wife, too: she was alarmingly weak this time twelvemonth; and I can only yet tell you that she is stronger, not strong: she has not ventured out except at midday, and rarely then, since Autumn last; she sits here patiently waiting Summer, and charges me to send you her love. — America also always lies in the background: I do believe, if I live long, I shall get to Concord one day. Your wife must love me. If the little Boy be a well-behaved fellow, he shall ride on my back yet: if not, tell him I will have nothing to do with him, the riotous little imp that he is. And so God bless you always, my dear friend! Your affectionate,

 — T. Carlyle

XXIII. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 10 May, 1838

My Dear Friend, — Yesterday I had your letter of March. It quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you. If it had come earlier I should have been confirmed in my original purpose of publishing Select Miscellanies of T.C. As it is, we are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900 pages) of the papers as they stand in your list. And now I find we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth article. I regret it, because this book will not embrace those papers I chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more. But Loring is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of Nile. I, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the readers we should publish from the last backwards, beginning with the paper on Scott, which has had the best reception ever known. Carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most austere Seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation by applauding this review. I have agreed with the bookseller publishing the Miscellanies that he is to guarantee to you one dollar on every copy he sells; and you are to have the total profit on every copy subscribed for. The retail price [is] to be $2.50. The cost of the work is not yet precisely ascertained. The work will probably appear in six or seven weeks. We print one thousand copies. So whenever it is sold you shall have one thousand dollars.

 ——  ——  — * Printed in the Athenaeum, July 8, 1882. ——  ——  —

The French Revolution continues to find friends and purchasers. It has gone to New Orleans, to Nashville, to Vicksburg. I have not been in Boston lately, but have determined that nearly or quite eight hundred copies should be gone. On the 1st of July I shall make up accounts with the booksellers, and I hope to make you the most favorable returns. I shall use the advice of Barnard, Adams, & Co. in regard to remittances.

When you publish your next book I think you must send it out to me in sheets, and let us print it here contemporaneously with the English edition. The eclat of so new a book would help the sale very much.

But a better device would be, that you should embark in the “Victoria” steamer, and come in a fortnight to New York, and in twenty-four hours more to Concord. Your study arm-chair, fireplace, and bed, long vacant, auguring expect you. Then you shall revise your proofs and dictate wit and learning to the New World. Think of it in good earnest. In aid of your friendliest purpose, I will set down some of the facts. I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God’s earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six percent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich, — rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity, — I call her Asia, — and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night; — these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.

In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year. — But my story is too long already. God grant that you will come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife’s and my mother’s nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to blooming health. My wife sends to her this message: “Come, and I will be to you a sister.” What have you to do with Italy? Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West. Come and live with me a year, and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years (when the History has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you.

I gladly hear what you say of Sterling. I am foolish enough to be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man I have never seen, and who has not seen me. I have not yet got the Blackwood for March, which I long to see, but the other three papers I have read with great satisfaction. They lie here on my table. But he must get well.

As to Miss Martineau, I know not well what to say. Meaning to do me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of justice) she does me a great annoyance, — to take away from me my privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time) into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. I was ashamed to read, and am ashamed to remember. Yet, as you see her, I would not be wanting in gratitude to a gifted and generous lady who so liberally transfigures our demerits. So you shall tell her, if you please, that I read all her book with pleasure but that part, and if ever I shall travel West or South, I think she has furnished me with the eyes. Farewell, dear wise man. I think your poverty honorable above the common brightness of that thorn-crown of the great. It earns you the love of men and the praise of a thousand years. Yet I hope the angelical Beldame, all-helping, all-hated, has given you her last lessons, and, finding you so striding a proficient, will dismiss you to a hundred editions and the adoration of the booksellers.

 — R.W. Emerson

I have never heard from Rich, who, you wrote, had sent his account to me. Let him direct to me at Concord.

A young engineer in Cambridge, by name McKean,* volunteers his services in correcting the proofs of the Miscellanies, — and he has your errata, — for the love of the reading. Shall we have anthracite coal or wood in your chamber? My old mother is glad you are coming.

 — * The late Mr. Henry S. McKean, a son of Professor McKean, and a graduate of Harvard College in 1828. —

XXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 15 June, 1838

My Dear Emerson, — Our correspondence has fallen into a raveled state; which would doubtless clear itself could I afford to wait for your next Letter, probably tumbling over the Atlantic brine about this very moment: but I cannot afford to wait; I must write straightway. Your answer to this will bring matters round again. I have had two irregular Notes of your writing, or perhaps three; two dated March, one by Mr. Bancroft’s Parcel, — bringing Twelve Orations withal; then some ten days later, just in this very time, another Note by Mr. Sumner, whom I have not yet succeeded in seeing, though I have attempted it, and hope soon to do it. The Letter he forwarded me from Paris was acknowledged already, I think. And now if the Atlantic will but float me in safe that other promised Letter!

I got your American French Revolution a good while ago. It seems to me a very pretty Book indeed, wonderfully so for the money; neither does it seem what we can call incorrectly printed so far as I have seen; compared with the last Sartor it is correctness itself. Many thanks to you, my Friend, and much good may it do us all! Should there be any more reprinting, I will request you to rectify at least the three following errors, copied out of the English text indeed; nay, mark them in your own New-English copy, whether there be reprinting or not: Vol. I. p. 81, last paragraph, for September read August; Vol. II. p. 344, first line, for book of prayer read look of prayer; p. 357, for blank read black (2d paragraph, “all black “). And so basta. And let us be well content about this F.R. on both sides of the water, yours as well as mine.

“Too many cooks”! the Proverb says: it is pity if this new apparition of a Mr. Loring should spoil the broth. But I calculate you will adjust it well and smoothly between you, some way or other. How you shall adjust it, or have adjusted it, is what I am practically anxious now to learn. For you are to understand that our English Edition has come to depend partly on yours. After long higgling with the foolish Fraser, I have quitted him, quite quietly, and given “Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street,” the privilege of printing a small edition of Teufelsdrockh (Five Hundred copies), with a prospect of the “Miscellaneous Writings” soon following. Saunders and Ottley are at least more reputable persons, they are useful to me also in the business of Lecturing. Teufelsdrockh is at Press, to be out very soon; I will send you a correct copy, the only one in America I fancy. The enterprise here too is on the “half-profits” plan, which I compute generally to mean equal partition of the oyster-shells and a net result of zero. But the thing will be economically useful to me otherwise; as a publication of the “Miscellaneous” also would be; which latter, however, I confess myself extremely unwilling to undertake the trouble of for nothing. To me they are grown or fast growing obsolete, these Miscellanies, for most part; if money lie not in them, what does lie for me? Now it strikes me you will infallibly edit these things, at least as well as I, and are doing it at any rate; your printing too would seem to be cheaper than ours: I said to Saunders and Ottley, Why not have two hundred or three hundred of this American Edition struck off with “London: Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street,” on the title-page, and sent over hither in sheets at what price they have cost my friends yonder? Saunders of course threw cold water on this project, but was obliged to admit that there would be some profit in it, and that for me it would be far easier. The grand profit for me is that people would understand better what I mean, and come better about me if I lectured again, which seems the only way of getting any wages at all for me here at present. Pray meditate my project, if it be not already too late, hear what your Booksellers say about it, and understand that I will not in any case set to printing till I hear from you in answer to this.

How my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the Lecturing I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. It is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in due time, for I had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. Poverty and Youth may do; Poverty and Age go badly together. — For the rest, I feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick, — ah me! The question as ever is: Rest. But then where? My Brother invites us to come to Rome for the winter; my poor sick Wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, Natty Leatherstocking’s lodge in the Western Wood, I think, were welcomer still. I have a great mind, too, to run off and see my Mother, by the new railways. What we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. Write you always hither, till you hear otherwise.

The Orations were right welcome; my Madeira one, returned thence with Sterling, was circulating over the West of England. Sterling and Harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. I have read, a second or third time. Robert Southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of Lakeland: if he keep his word as to me, he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, “It is German Poetry given out in American Prose.” Friend Emerson ought to be content; — and has now above all things, as I said, to be in no haste. Slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! Also his next work ought to be a concrete thing; not theory any longer, but deed. Let him “live it,” as he says; that is the way to come to “painting of it.” Geometry and the art of Design being once well over, take the brush, and andar con Dios!

Mrs. Child has sent me a Book, Philothea, and a most magnanimous epistle. I have answered as I could. The Book is beautiful, but of a hectic beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking. Such things grow not in the ground, on Mother Earth’s honest bosom, but in hothouses, — Sentimental-Calvinist fire traceable underneath! Bancroft also is of the hothouse partly: I have a Note to send him by Sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about hothouses! But, on the whole, men ought in New England, too to “swallow their formulas”;* there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. Good speed to him. I had to send my Wife’s love: she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to struggle to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too. Adieu, dear Friend; may Good always be with you and yours.

 — T. Carlyle

 — * This was the saying of the old Marquis de Mirabeau concerning his son, Il a hume toutes les formules, and is used as a text by Carlyle in his article on Mirabeau. “Of inexpressible advantage is it that a man have ‘an eye instead of a pair of spectacles merely’; that, seeing through the formulas of things and even ‘making away’ with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it!” ——  ——  —

XXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 30 July, 1838

My Dear Sir, — I am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small. I enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent. I shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet. An exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than I expected, yet, as far as I understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised: at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more Heaven and the subscribers may grant. I shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet.

The Miscellanies is published in two volumes, a copy of which goes to you immediately. Munroe tells me that two hundred and fifty copies of it are already sold. Writing in a bookshop, my dear friend, I have no power to say aught than that I am heartily and always,

Yours,
     R. Waldo Emerson

XXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 6 August, 1838

My Dear Friend, — The swift ships are slow when they carry our letters. Your letter dated the 15th of June arrived here last Friday, the 3d of August. That day I was in Boston, and I have only now got the information necessary to answer it. You have probably already learned from my letter sent by the “Royal William” (enclosing a bill of exchange for L50), that our first two volumes of the Miscellanies are published. I have sent you a copy. The edition consists of one thousand copies. Of these five hundred are bound, five hundred remain in sheets. The title-pages, of course, are all printed alike; but the publishers assure me that new title-pages can be struck off at a trifling expense, with the imprint of Saunders and Ottley. The cost of a copy in sheets or “folded” (if that means somewhat more?) is eighty-nine cents; and bound is $1.15. The retail price is $2.50 a copy; and the author’s profit, $1; and the bookseller’s, 35 cents per copy; according to my understanding of the written contract.

Here I believe you have all the material facts. I think there is no doubt that the book will sell very well here. But if, for the reasons you suggest, you wish any part of it, you can have it as soon as ships can bring your will.

When you see your copy, you will perceive that we have printed half the matter. I should presently begin to print the remainder, inclusive of the Article on Lockhart’s Scott, in two more volumes; but now I think I shall wait until I hear from you. Of those books we will print a larger edition, say twelve hundred and fifty or fifteen hundred, if you want a part of it in London. For I feel confident now that our public here is one thousand strong. Write me therefore by the steam packet your wishes.

I am sure you will like our edition. It has been most carefully corrected by two young gentlemen who successively volunteered their services, (the second when the first was called away,) and who, residing in Cambridge, where the book was printed, could easilier oversee it. They are Henry S. McBean, an engineer, and Charles Stearns Wheeler, a Divinity student, — working both for love of you. To one other gentleman I have brought you in debt, — Rev. Convers Francis* (brother of Mrs. Child), who supplied from his library all the numbers of the Foreign Review from which we printed the work. We could not have done without his books, and he is a noble-hearted man, who rejoices in you. I have sent to all three copies of the work as from you, and I shall be glad if you will remember to sanction this expressly in your next letter.

 ——  ——  — * This worthy man and lover of good books was, from 1842 till his death in 1863, Professor in the Divinity School of Harvard University. ——  ——  —

Thanks for the letter: thanks for your friendliest seeking of friends for the poor Oration. Poor little pamphlet, to have gone so far and so high! I am ashamed. I shall however send you a couple more of the thin gentry presently, maugre all your hopes and cautions. I have written and read a kind of sermon to the Senior Class of our Cambridge Theological School a fortnight ago; and an address to the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College;* for though I hate American pleniloquence, I cannot easily say No to young men who bid me speak also. And both these are now in press. The first I hear is very offensive. I will now try to hold my tongue until next winter. But I am asked continually when you will come to Boston. Your lectures are boldly and joyfully expected by brave young men. So do not forget us: and if ever the scale-beam trembles, I beseech you, let the love of me decide for America. I will not dare to tease you on a matter of so many relations, and so important, and especially as I have written out, I believe, my requests in a letter sent two or three months ago, — but I must see you somewhere, somehow, may it please God! I grieve to hear no better news of your wife. I hoped she was sound and strong ere this, and can only hope still. My wife and I send her our hearty love.

Yours affectionately,
                   R.W. Emerson

 — * The Address at the Cambridge Divinity School was delivered on the 15th of July, and that at Dartmouth College on the 24th of the same month. The title of the latter was “Literary Ethics.” Both are reprinted in Emerson’s Miscellanies. These remarkable discourses excited deep interest and wide attention. They established Emerson’s position as the leader of what was known as the Transcendental movement. They were the expressions of his inmost convictions and his matured thought. The Address at the Divinity School gave rise to a storm of controversy which did not disturb the serenity of its author. “It was,” said Theodore Parker, “the noblest, the most inspiring strain I ever listened to.” To others it seemed “neither good divinity nor good sense.” The Address at Dartmouth College set forth the high ideals of intellectual life with an eloquence made irresistible by the character of the speaker. From this time Emerson’s influence upon thought in America was acknowledged. ——  ——  —

XXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, (Annandale, Scotland) 25 September, 1838

My Dear Emerson, — There cannot any right answer be written you here and now; yet I must write such answer as I can. You said, “by steamship”; and it strikes me with a kind of remorse, on this my first day of leisure and composure, that I have delayed so long. For you must know, this is my Mother’s house, — a place to me unutterable as Hades and the Land of Spectres were; likewise that my Brother is just home from Italy, and on the wing thitherward or somewhither swiftly again; in a word, that all is confusion and flutter with me here, — fit only for silence! My Wife sent me off hitherward, very sickly and unhappy, out of the London dust, several weeks ago; I lingered in Fifeshire, I was in Edinburgh, in Roxburghshire; have some calls to Cumberland, which I believe I must refuse; and prepare to creep homeward again, refreshed in health, but with a head and heart all seething and tumbling (as the wont is, in such cases), and averse to pens beyond all earthly implements. But my Brother is off for Dumfries this morning; you before all others deserve an hour of my solitude. I will abide by business; one must write about that.

Your Bill and duplicate of a Bill for L50, with the two Letters that accompanied them, you are to know then, did duly arrive at Chelsea; and the larger Letter (of the 6th of August) was forwarded to me hither some two weeks ago. I had also, long before that, one of the friendliest of Letters from you, with a clear and most inviting description of the Concord Household, its inmates and appurtenances; and the announcement, evidently authentic, that an apartment and heart’s welcome was ready there for my Wife and me; that we were to come quickly, and stay for a twelvemonth. Surely no man has such friends as I. We ought to say, May the Heavens give us thankful hearts! For, in truth, there are blessings which do, like sun-gleams in wild weather, make this rough life beautiful with rainbows here and there. Indicating, I suppose, that there is a Sun, and general Heart of Goodness, behind all that; — for which, as I say again, let us be thankful evermore.

My Wife says she received your American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a “pathetic feeling” which brought “tears” to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler the well-meant Book is, the more “pathetic” is the whole transaction: and so we will go on, fuller than ever of “desperate hope” (if you know what that is), with a feeling one would not give and could not get for several money-bags; and say or think, Long live true friends and Emersons, and (in Scotch phrase) “May ne’er waur be amang us!” — I will buy something permanent, I think, out of this L50, and call it either Ebenezer or Yankee-doodle-doo. May good be repaid you manifold, my kind Brother! may good be ever with you, my kind Friends all!

But now as to this edition of the Miscellanies (poor things), I really think my Wife is wisest, who says I ought to leave you altogether to your own resources with it, America having an art of making money out of my Books which England is unfortunately altogether without. Besides, till I once see the Two Volumes now under way, and can let a Bookseller see them, there could no bargain be made on the subject. We will let it rest there, therefore. Go on with your second Two Volumes, as if there were no England extant, according to your own good judgment. When I get to London, I will consult some of the blockheads with the Book in my hand: if we do want Two Hundred copies, you can give us them with a trifling loss. It is possible they may make some better proposal about an Edition here: that depends on the fate of Sartor here, at present trying itself; which I have not in the least ascertained. For the present, thank as is meet all friends in your world that have interested themselves for me. Alas! I have nothing to give them but thanks. Henry McKean, Charles Wheeler, Convers Francis; these Names shall, if it please Heaven, become Persons for me, one day. Well! — But I will say nothing more. That too is of the things on which all Words are poor to Silence. Good to the Good and Kind!

A Letter from me must have crossed that descriptive Concord one, on the Ocean, I think. Our correspondence is now standing on its feet. I will write to you again, whether I hear from you or not, so soon as my hand finds its cunning again in London, — so soon as I can see there what is to be done or said. All goes decidedly better, I think. My Wife was and is much healthier than last year, than in any late year. I myself get visibly quieter my preternatural Meditations in Hades, apropos of this Annandale of mine, are calm compared with those of last year. By another Course of Lectures I have a fair prospect of living for another season; nay, people call it a “new profession” I have devised for myself, and say I may live by it as many years as I like. This too is partly the fruit of my poor Book; one should not say that it was worth nothing to me even in money. Last year I fancied my Audience mainly the readers of it; drawn round me, in spite of many things, by force of it. Let us be content. I have Jesuits, Swedenborgians, old Quakeresses, omne cum Proteus, — God help me, no man ever had so confused a public! — I salute you, my dear Friend, and your hospitable circle. May blessings be on your kind household, on your kind hearts!

 — T. Carlyle

A copy of the English Teufelsdrockh has lain with your name on it these two months in Chelsea; waiting an opportunity. It is worth nothing to you: a dingy, ill-managed edition; but correct or nearly correct as to printing; it is right that such should be in your hands in case of need. The New England Pamphlets will be greedily expected. More than one inquires of me, Has that Emerson of yours written nothing else? And I have lent them the little Book Nature, till it is nearly thumbed to pieces. Sterling is gone to Italy for the winter since I left town; swift as a flash! I cannot teach him the great art of sitting still; his fine qualities are really like to waste for want of that.

I read your paragraph to Miss Martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. But I doubt, I doubt, O Ralph Waldo Emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her, — thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! In truth there are bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. Patience and shuffle the cards.

XXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 17 October, 1838

My Dear Friend, — I am quite uneasy that I do not hear from you. On the 21st of July I wrote to you and enclosed a remittance of L50 by a Bill of Exchange on Baring Brothers, drawn by Chandler, Howard, & Co., which was sent in the steamer “Royal William.” On the 2d of August I received your letter of inquiry respecting our edition of the Miscellanies, and wrote a few days later in reply, that we could send you out two or three hundred copies of our first two volumes, in sheets, at eighty-nine cents per copy of two volumes, and the small additional price of the new title-page. I said also that I would wait until I heard from you before commencing the printing of the last two volumes of the Miscellanies, and, if you desired it, would print any number of copies with a title-page for London. This letter went in a steamer — he “Great Western” probably — about the 10th or 12th of August. (Perhaps I misremember the names [of the steamers], and the first should be last.) I have heard nothing from you since. I trust my letters have not miscarried. (A third was sent also by another channel inclosing a duplicate of the Bill of Exchange.) With more fervency, I trust that all goes well in the house of my friend, — and I suppose that you are absent on some salutary errand of repairs and recreation. Use, I pray you, your earliest hour in certifying me of the facts.

One word more in regard to business. I believe I expressed some surprise, in the July letter, that the booksellers should have no greater balance for us at this settlement. I have since studied the account better, and see that we shall not be disappointed in the year of obtaining at least the sum first promised, — seven hundred and sixty dollars; but the whole expense of the edition is paid out of the copies first sold, and our profits depend on the last sales. The edition is almost gone, and you shall have an account at the end of the year.

In a letter within a twelvemonth I have urged you to pay us a visit in America, and in Concord. I have believed that you would come one day, and do believe it. But if, on your part, you have been generous and affectionate enough to your friends here — or curious enough concerning our society — to wish to come, I think you must postpone, for the present, the satisfaction of your friendship and your curiosity. At this moment I would not have you here, on any account. The publication of my Address to the Divinity College (copies of which I sent you) has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my “infidelity,” “pantheism,” and “atheism.” The writers warn all and sundry against me, and against whatever is supposed to be related to my connection of opinion, &c.; against Transcendentalism, Goethe, and Carlyle. I am heartily sorry to see this last aspect of the storm in our washbowl. For, as Carlyle is nowise guilty, and has unpopularities of his own, I do not wish to embroil him in my parish differences. You were getting to be a great favorite with us all here, and are daily a greater with the American public, but just now, in Boston, where I am known as your editor, I fear you lose by the association. Now it is indispensable to your right influence here, that you should never come before our people as one of a clique, but as a detached, that is, universally associated man; so I am happy, as I could not have thought, that you have not yielded yourself to my entreaties. Let us wait a little until this foolish clamor be overblown. My position is fortunately such as to put me quite out of the reach of any real inconvenience from the panic-strikers or the panic-struck; and, indeed, so far as this uneasiness is a necessary result of mere inaction of mind, it seems very clear to me that, if I live, my neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, and perhaps harder to bear.

The article on German Religious Writers in the last Foreign Quarterly Review suits our meridian as well as yours; as is plainly signified by the circumstance that our newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade and no more. Who wrote that paper? And who wrote the paper on Montaigne in the Westminster? I read with great satisfaction the Poems and Thoughts of Archaeus in Blackwood. “The Sexton’s Daughter” is a beautiful poem: and I recognize in them all the Soul, with joy and love. Tell me of the author’s health and welfare; or, will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand? And tell me of yourself, what task of love and wisdom the Muses impose; and what happiness the good God sends to you and yours. I hope your wife has not forgotten me.

Yours affectionately,
                 R.W. Emerson

The Miscellanies, Vols. I. and II., are a popular book. About five hundred copies have been sold. The second article on Jean Paul works with might on the inner man of young men. I hate to write you letters on business and facts like this. There are so few Friends that I think some time I shall meet you nearer, for I love you more than is fit to say. W.H. Channing has written a critique on you, which I suppose he has sent you, in the Boston Review.

XXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 7 November, 1838

My Dear Friend, — It is all right; all your Letters with their inclosures have arrived in due succession: the last, inquiring after the fate of the others, came this morning. I was in Scotland, as you partly conjecture; I wrote to you already (though not without blamable delay), from my Mother’s house in Annandale, a confused scrawl, which I hope has already got to hand, and quieted your kind anxieties. I am as well as usual in health, my Wife better than usual; nothing is amiss, except my negligence and indolence, which has put you to this superfluous solicitude on my account. However, I have an additional Letter by it; you must pardon me, you must not grudge me that undeserved pleasure, the reward of evil-doing. I may well say, you are a blessing to me on this Earth; no Letter comes from you with other than good tidings, — or can come while you live there to love me.

The Bill was thrust duly into Baring’s brass slit “for acceptance,” on my return hither some three weeks ago; and will, no doubt, were the days of grace run, come out in the shape of Fifty Pounds Sterling; a very curious product indeed. Do you know what I think of doing with it? Dyspepsia, my constant attendant in London, is incapable of help in my case by any medicine or appliance except one only, Riding on horseback. With a good horse to whirl me over the world for two hours daily, I used to keep myself supportably well. Here, the maintenance of a Horse far transcends my means; yet it seems hard I should not for a little while be in a kind of approximate health in this Babylon where I have my bread to seek it is like swimming with a millstone round your neck, — ah me! In brief, I am about half resolved to buy myself a sharp little nag with Twenty of these Transatlantic Pounds, and ride him till the other Thirty be eaten: I will call the creature “Yankee,” and kind thoughts of those far away shall be with me every time I mount him. Will not that do? My Wife says it is the best plan I have had for years, and strongly urges it on. My kind friends!

As to those copies of the Carlyle Miscellanies, I unfortunately still can say nothing, except what was said in the former (Scotch) letter, that you must proceed in the business with an eye to America and not to us. My Booksellers, Saunders and Ottley, have no money for me, no definite offer in money to make for those Two Hundred copies, of which you seem likely to make money if we simply leave them alone. I have asked these Booksellers, I have asked Fraser too: What will you give me in ready money for Two Hundred and Fifty copies of that work, sell it afterwards as you can? They answer always, We must see it first. Now the copy long ago sent me has never come to hand; I have asked for it of Kennet, but without success; I have nothing for it but to wait the winds and chances. Meanwhile Saunders and Ottley want forsooth a Sketches of German Literature in three volumes: then a Miscellanies in three volumes: that is their plan of publishing an English edition; and the outlook they hold out for me is certain trouble in this matter, and recompense entirely uncertain. I think on the whole it is extremely likely I shall apply to you for Two Hundred and Fifty copies (that is their favorite number) of these four volumes, (nay, if it be of any moment, you can bind me down to it now, and take it for sure,) but I cannot yet send you the title-page; no bookseller purchasing till “we see it first.” But after all, will it suit America to print an unequal number of your two pairs of volumes? Do not the two together make one work? On the whole, consider that I shall in all likelihood want Two Hundred and Fifty copies, and consider it certain if that will serve the enterprise: we must leave it here today. I will stir in it now, however, and take no rest till in one way or other you do get a title-page from me, or some definite deliverance on the matter. O Athenians, what a trouble I give, having got your applauses!

Kennet the Bookseller gave me yesterday (on my way to “the City” with that Brother of mine, the Italian Doctor who is here at present and a great lover of yours) ten copies of your Dartmouth Oration: we read it over dinner in a chop-house in Bucklersbury, amid the clatter of some fifty stand of knives and forks; and a second time more leisurely at Chelsea here. A right brave Speech; announcing, in its own way, with emphasis of full conviction, to all whom it may concern, that great forgotten truth, Man is still man. May it awaken a pulsation under the ribs of Death! I believe the time is come for such a Gospel. They must speak it out who have it, — with what audience there may be. I have given away two copies this morning; I will take care of the rest. Go on, and speed. — And now where is the heterodox Divinity one, which awakens such “tempest in a washbowl,” brings Goethe, Transcendentalism, and Carlyle into question, and on the whole evinces “what [difference] New England also makes between Pan-theism and Pot-theism”? I long to see that; I expect to congratulate you on that too. Meanwhile we will let the washbowl storm itself out; and Emerson at Concord shall recognize it for a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. As to my share in it, grieve not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pottheism, Mydoxy, Thydoxy, are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon, which I avoid speaking of, decline listening to: Live, for God’s sake, with what Faith thou couldst get; leave off speaking about Faith! Thou knowest it not. Be silent, do not speak. — As to you, my friend, you are even to go on, giving still harder shocks if need be; and should I come into censure by means of you, there or here, think that I am proud of my company; that, as the boy Hazlitt said after hearing Coleridge, “I will go with that man”; or, as our wild Burns has it,

   ”Wi’ sic as he, where’er he be,
     May I be saved or damned!”

Oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is! If it were not [for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be all-too lonely.

This is nothing at all like the letter I meant to write you; but I will write again, I trust, in few days, and the first paragraph shall, if possible, hold all the business. I have much to tell you, which perhaps is as well not written. O that I did see you face to face! But the time shall come, if Heaven will. Why not you come over, since I cannot? There is a room here, there is welcome here, and two friends always. It must be done one way or the other. I will take, care of your messages to Sterling. He is in Florence; he was the Author of Montaigne.* The Foreign Quarterly Reviewer of Strauss I take to be one Blackie, an Advocate in Edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine and other men’s; I guess this, but I have not read the Article: the man Blackie is from Aberdeen, has been roaming over Europe, and carries more sail than ballast. Brother John, spoken of above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for Italy again, we expect, in few days, on a better appointment: know that you have a third friend in him under this roof, — a man who quarrels with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul of him. My Wife demanded to have “room for one line.” What she is to write I know not, except it be what she has said, holding up the pamphlet, “Is it not a noble thing? None of them all but he,” &c., &c. I will write again without delay when the stray volumes arrive; before that if they linger. Commend me to all the kind household of Concord: Wife, Mother, and Son.

Ever yours,
           T. Carlyle

 * See ante, p. 184. Sterling’s essay on Montaigne was his first contribution, in 1837, to the London and Westminster Review. It is reprinted in “Essays and Tales, by John Sterling, collected and edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius Charles Hare,” London, 1848, Vol. I. p. 129. ——  ——  —

“Forgotten you?” O, no indeed! If there were nothing else to remember you by, I should never forget the Visitor, who years ago in the Desert descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day. When I think of America, it is of you, — neither Harriet Martineau nor any one else succeeds in giving me a more extended idea of it. When I wish to see America it is still you, and those that are yours. I read all that you write with an interest which I feel in no other writing but my Husband’s, — or it were nearer the truth to say there is no other writing of living men but yours and his that I can read. God Bless you and Weib and Kind. Surely I shall some day see you all.

Your affectionate
               Jane Carlyle

XXX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 15 November, 1835

Dear Emerson, — Hardly above a week ago, I wrote you in immediate answer to some friendly inquiries produced by negligence of mine: the Letter is probably tumbling on the salt waves at this hour, in the belly of the “Great Western”; or perhaps it may be still on firm land waiting, in which case this will go along with it. I had written before out of Scotland a Letter of mere acknowledgment and postponement; you must have received that before now, I imagine. Our small piece of business is now become articulate, and I will despatch it in a paragraph. Pity my stupidity that I did not put the thing on this footing long ago! It never struck me till the other day that though no copy of our Miscellanies would turn up for inspection here, and no Bookseller would bargain for a thing unseen, I myself might bargain, and leave their hesitations resting on their own basis. In fine, I have rejected all their schemes of printing Miscellaneous Works here, printing Sketches of German Literature, or printing anything whatever on the “half-profits system,” which is like toilsomely scattering seed into the sea: and I settled yesterday with Fraser to give him the American sheets, and let them sell themselves, on clear principles, or remain unsold if they like. I find it infinitely the best plan, and to all appearance the profitablest as to money that could have been devised for me.

What you have to do therefore is to get Two Hundred and Fifty copies (in sheets) of the whole Four Volumes, so soon as the second two are printed, and have them, with the proper title-page, sent off hither to Fraser’s address; the sooner the better. The American title-page, instead of “Boston,” &c. at the bottom, will require to bear, in three lines “London: / James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, / 1839.” Fraser is anxious that you should not spell him with a z; your man can look on the Magazine and beware. I suppose also you should print labels for the backs of the four volumes, to be used by the half-binder; they do the books in that way here now: but if it occasion any difficulty, never mind this; it was not spoken of to Fraser, and is my own conjecture merely; the thing can be managed in various other ways. Two Hundred and Fifty copies, then, of the entire book: there is nothing else to be attended to that you do not understand as well as I. Fraser will announce it in his Magazine: the eager, select public will wait. Probably, there is no chance before the middle of March or so? Do not hurry yourselves, or at all change your rate for us: but so soon as the work is ready in the course of Nature, the earliest conveyance to the Port of London will bring a little cargo which one will welcome with a strange feeling! I declare myself delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of romance and reality: fancy me riding on Yankee withal, at the time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes bread for one beyond the great Ocean-stream, and how a poor man is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere. Allah akbar! God is great; no saying truer than that. — And so now, by the blessing of Heaven, we will talk no more of business this day.

My employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a long chapter; on which I could like so well to talk with you face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery. In these four years, so full of pain and toil, I seem to have lived four decades. By degrees, the creature gets accustomed to its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be of the same temperature with it. Ah me! I feel as if grown old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. And yet perhaps I am not old, only wearied, and there is a stroke or two of work in me yet. For the rest, the fret and agitation of this Babylon wears me down: it is the most unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction which no head can reconcile. Pain and poverty are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison: God deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! On the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as rest? A sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be entirely cherubic, all face and wings. “Mes enfans,” said a French gentleman to the cherubs in the Picture, “Mes enfans, asseyez-vous?”— “Monseigneur,” answer they, “il n’y a pas de quoi!” I rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that I can sit. — But, after all, ought I not to be thankful? I positively can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing I had been for many years ambitious of to no purpose. I shall have to lecture again in spring, Heaven knows on what; it will be a wretched fever for me; but once through it there will be board wages for another year. The wild Ishmael can hunt in this desert too, it would seem. I say, I will be thankful; and wait quietly what farther is to come, or whether anything farther. But indeed, to speak candidly, I do feel sometimes as if another Book were growing in me, — though I almost tremble to think of it. Not for this winter, O no! I will write an Article merely, or some such thing, and read trash if better be not. This, I do believe, is my horoscope for the next season: an Article on something about New-Year’s-day (the Westminster Editor, a good-natured, admiring swan-goose from the North Country, will not let me rest); then Lectures; then — what? I am for some practical subject too; none of your pictures in the air, or aesthetisches Zeug (as Mullner’s wife called it, Mullner of the Midnight Blade): nay, I cannot get up the steam on any such best; it is extremely irksome as well as fruitless at present. In the next Westminster Review, therefore, if you see a small scrub of a paper signed “S.P.” on one Varnhagen a German, say that it is by “Simon Pure,” or by “Scissars and Paste,” or even by “Soaped Pig” — whom no man shall catch! Truly it is a secret which you must not mention: I was driven to it by the Swan-goose above mentioned, not Mill but another. Let this suffice for my winter’s history: may the summer be more productive.

As for Concord and New England, alas! my Friend, I should but deface your Idyllion with an ugly contradiction, did I come in such mood as mine is. I am older in years than you; but in humor I am older by centuries. What a hope is in that ever young heart, cheerful, healthful as the morning! And as for me, you have no conception what a crabbed, sulky piece of sorrow and dyspepsia I am grown; and growing, if I do not draw bridle. Let me gather heart a little! I have not forgotten Concord or the West; no, it lies always beautiful in the blue of the horizon, afar off and yet attainable; it is a great possession to me; should it even never be attained. But I have got to consider lately that it is you who are coming hither first. That is the right way, is it not? New England is becoming more than ever part of Old England; why, you are nearer to us now than Yorkshire was a hundred years ago; this is literally a fact: you can come without making your will. It is one of my calculations that all Englishmen from all zones and hemispheres will, for a good while yet, resort occasionally to the Mother-Babel, and see a thing or two there. Come if you dare; I said there was a room, house-room and heart-room, constantly waiting you here, and you shall see blockheads by the million. Pickwick himself shall be visible; innocent young Dickens reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey’s complexion is still healthy mahogany-brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, “man of genius in the shape of a Cockney,” is my near neighbor, full of quips and cranks, with good humor and no common sense. Old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, will work on you with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf-chin: — This is the Man, O Rogers, that wrote the German Poetry in American Prose; consider him well! — But whither am I running? My sheet is done! My Brother John returns again almost immediately to Italy. He has got appointed Traveling Doctor to a certain Duke of Buccleuch, the chief of our Scotch Dukes: an excellent position for him as far as externals go. His departure will leave me lonelier; but I must reckon it for the best: especially I must begin working. Harriet Martineau is coming hither this evening; with beautiful enthusiasm for the Blacks and others. She is writing a Novel. The first American book proved generally rather wearisome, the second not so; we have since been taught (not I) “How to observe.” Suppose you and I promulgate a treatise next, “How to see”? The old plan was, to have a pair of eyes first of all, and then to open them: and endeavor with your whole strength to look. The good Harriet! But “God,” as the Arabs say, “has given to every people a Prophet (or Poet) in its own speech”: and behold now Unitarian mechanical Formalism was to have its Poetess too; and stragglings of genius were to spring up even through that like grass through a Macadam highway! — Adieu, my Friend, I wait still for your heterodox Speech; and love you always.

 — T. Carlyle

An English Sartor goes off to you this day; through Kennet, to C.C. Little and J. Brown of Boston; the likeliest conveyance. It is correctly printed, and that is all. Its fate here (the fate of the publication, I mean) remains unknown; “unknown and unimportant.”

XXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 2 December, 1838

My Dear Emerson, — Almost the very day after my last Letter went off, the long-expected two volumes of Miscellanies arrived. The heterodox pamphlet has never yet come to hand. I am now to write you again about that Miscellany concern the fourth letter, I do believe; but it is confirmatory of the foregoing three, and will be the last, we may hope.

Fraser is charmed with the look of your two volumes; declares them unsurpassable by art of his; and wishes (what is the main part of this message) that you would send his cargo in the bound state, bound and lettered as these are, with the sole difference that the leaves be not cut, or shaved on the sides, our English fashion being to have them rough. He is impatient that the Book were here; desires further that it be sent to the Port of London rather than another Port, and that it be packed in boxes “to keep the covers of the volumes safe,” — all which I doubt not the Packers and the Shippers of New England have dexterity enough to manage for the best, without desire of his. If you have printed off nothing yet, I will desire for my own behoof that Two hundred and Sixty be the number sent; I find I shall need some ten to give away: if your first sheet is printed off, let the number stand as it was. It would be an improvement if you could print our title-pages on paper a little stronger; that would stand ink, I mean: the fly leaves in the same, if you have such paper convenient; if not, not. Farther as to the matter of the title-page, it seems to me your Printer might give a bolder and a broader type to the words “Critical and Miscellaneous,” and add after “Essays” with a colon (:), the line “Collected and Republished,” with a colon also; then the “By,” &c. “In Four Volumes, Vol. I.,” &c. I mean that we want, in general, a little more ink and decisiveness: show your man the title-page of the English French Revolution, or look at it your self, and you will know. R.W.E.’s “Advertisement,” friendly and good, as all his dealings are to me ward, will of course be suppressed in the English copies. I see not that with propriety I can say anything by way of substitute: silence and the New England imprint will tell the story as eloquently as there is need.

For the rest you must tell Mr. Loring, and all men who had a hand in it along with you, that I am altogether right well pleased with this edition, and find it far beyond my expectation. To my two young Friends, Henry S. McKean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a great service had I known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, “We think”s, &c., &c., common in Jeffrey’s time in the Edinburgh Review) and London misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. It is extremely correct printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. I have not the other Articles by me at present; I think they are of themselves a little more correct; at all events there are nothing but misprints to deal with; — the Editors, by this time, had got bound up to let me alone. In the Life of Scott, fourth page of it (p. 296 of our edition), there is a sentence to be deleted. “It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know”: out with this, for it is nonsense, and was marked for erasure in the manuscript, I dare say. I know with certainty no more at present.

Fraser is to sell the Four Volumes at Two Guineas here. On studying accurately your program of the American mercantile method, I stood amazed to contrast it with our English one. The Bookseller here admits that he could, by diligent bargaining, get up such a book for something like the same cost or a little more; but the “laws of the trade” deduct from the very front of the selling price — how much think you — forty percent and odd, when your man has only fifteen; for the mere act of vending! To cover all, they charge that enormous price. (A man, while I stood consulting with Fraser, came in and asked for Carlyle’s Revolution; they showed it him, he asked the price; and exclaimed, “Guinea and a half! I can get it from America for nine shillings!” and indignantly went his way; not without reason.) There are “laws of the trade” which ought to be repealed; which I will take the liberty of contravening to all lengths by all opportunities — if I had but the power! But if this joint-stock American plan prosper, it will answer rarely. Fraser’s first French Revolution, for instance, will be done, he calculates, about New-Year’s-day; and a second edition wanted; mine to do with what I like. If you in America wanted more also — ? I leave you to think of this. — And now enough, enough!

My Brother went from us last Tuesday; ought to be in Paris yesterday. I am yet writing nothing; feel forsaken, sad, sick, — not unhappy. In general Death seems beautiful to me; sweet and great. But Life also is beautiful, is great and divine, were it never to be joyful any more. I read Books, my wife sewing by me, with the light of a sinumbra, in a little apartment made snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all, — though many men love me rather, ungrateful that I am. My present book is Horace Walpole; I get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. An old blind Schoolmaster in Annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, “But are ye sure he’s not a Dunce?” It is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed (if we will candidly understand it) all else is presupposed in that. Horace Walpole is no dunce, not a fibre of him is duncish.

Your Friend Sumner was here yesterday, a good while, for the first time: an ingenious, cultivated, courteous man; a little sensitive or so, and with no other fault that I discerned. He borrowed my copy of your Dartmouth business, and bound himself over to return with it soon. Some approve of that here, some condemn: my Wife and another lady call it better even than the former, I not so good. And now the Heterodox, the Heterodox, where is that? Adieu, my dear Friend. Commend me to the Concord Household; to the little Boy, to his Grandmother, and Mother, and Father; we must all meet some day, — or some no-day then (as it shall please God)! My Wife heartily greets you all.

Ever yours,
         T. Carlyle

I sent your book, message, and address to Sterling; he is in Florence or Rome. Read the article Simonides by him in the London and Westminster — brilliant prose, translations — wooden? His signature is L (Pounds Sterling!). — Now you are to write soon? I always forgot to tell you, there came long since two packages evidently in your hand, marked “One printed sheet,” and “one Newspaper,” for which the Postman demanded about Fifteen shillings: rejected. After considerable correspondence the Newspaper was again offered me at ten pence; the sheet unattainable altogether: “No,” even at tenpence. The fact is, it was wrong wrapped, that Newspaper. Leave it open at the ends, and try me again, once; I think it will come almost gratis. Steam and Iron are making all the Planet into one Village. — A Mr. Dwight wrote to me about the dedicating of some German translations: Yes. What are they or he?* — Your Sartor is off through Kennet. Could you send me two copies of the American Life of Schiller, if the thing is fit for making a present of, and easy to be got? If not, do not mind it at all. — Addio!

 —— * Mr. John S. Dwight, whose volume of Select Minor Poems from the German of Goethe and Schiller, published in 1839, was dedicated to Carlyle. It was the third volume of Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, edited by George Ripley. Beside Mr. Dwight’s own excellent versions, it contained translations by Mr. Bancroft, Dr. Hedge, Dr. Frothingham, and others. For many years Mr. Dwight rendered a notable public service as the editor of Dwight’s Journal of Music, — a publication which did more than any other to raise and to maintain high the standard of musical taste and culture in America.

XXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 13 January, 1839

My Dear Friend, — I am not now in any Condition to write a letter, having neither the facts from the booksellers which you would know touching our future plans, nor yet a satisfactory account balanced and settled of our past dealings; and lastly, no time to write what I would say, — as my poor lectures are in full course, and absorb all my wits; but as the “Royal William” will not wait, and as I have a hundred pounds to send on account of the sales of the French Revolution, I must steal a few minutes to send my salutation. I have received all your four good letters: and you are a good and generous man to write so many. Two came on the 2d and 3d of January, and the last on the 9th. If the bookselling Munroe had answered me yesterday, as he ought, I should be able to satisfy you as to the time when to expect our cargo of Miscellanies. The third and fourth volumes are now printing: ‘t is a fortnight since we began. You shall have two hundred and fifty copies, — I am not quite sure you can have more, — bound, and entitled, and directed as you desire, at least according to the best ability of our printer as far as the typography is concerned, and we will speed the work as fast as we can; but as we have but a single copy of Fraser’s Magazine — we do not get on rapidly. The French Revolution was all sold more than a month since. We should be glad of more copies, but the bookseller thinks not of enough copies to justify a new edition yet. I should not be surprised, however, to see that some bold brother of the trade had undertaken it. Now, what does your question point at in reference to your new edition, asking “if we want more”? Could you send us out a part of your edition at American prices, and at the same time to your advantage? I wish I knew the precise answer to this question, then perhaps I could keep all pirates out of our bay.

I shall convey in two days your message to Stearns Wheeler, who is now busy in correcting the new volumes. He is now Greek Tutor in Harvard College.* — Kindest thanks to Jane Carlyle for her generous remembrances, which I will study to deserve. Has the heterodoxy arrived in Chelsea, and quite destroyed us even in the charity of our friend? I am sorry to have worried you so often about the summer letter. Now am I your debtor four times. The parish commotion, too, has long ago subsided here, and my course of Lectures on “Human Life” finds a full attendance. I wait for the coming of the Westminster, which has not quite yet arrived here, though I have seen the London advertisement. It sounds prosperously in my ear what you say of Dr. Carlyle’s appointments. I was once very near the man in Rome, but did not see him. I will atone as soon as I can for this truncated epistle. You must answer it immediately, so far as to acknowledge the receipt of the enclosed bill of exchange, and soon I will send you the long promised account of the French Revolution, and also such moral account of the same as is over due.

Yours affectionately,
                R.W. Emerson

 * This promising young scholar edited with English notes the first American edition of Herodotus. He went to Europe to pursue his studies, and died, greatly regretted, at Rome, of a fever, in 1848.

XXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 February, 1859

My Dear Friend, — Your welcome little Letter, with the astonishing inclosure, arrived safe four days ago; right welcome, as all your Letters are, and bringing as these usually do the best news I get here. The miraculous draught of Paper I have just sent to a sure hand in Liverpool, there to lie till in due time it have ripened into a crop of a hundred gold sovereigns! On this subject, which gives room for so many thoughts, there is little that can be said, that were not an impertinence more or less. The matter grows serious to me, enjoins me to be silent and reflect. I will say, at any rate, there never came money into my hands I was so proud of; the promise of a blessing looks from the face of it; nay, it will be twice blessed. So I will ejaculate, with the Arabs, Allah akbar! and walk silent by the shore of the many-sounding Babel-tumult, meditating on much. Thanks to the mysterious all-bounteous Guide of men, and to you my true Brother, far over the sea! — For the rest, I showed Fraser this Nehemiah document, and said I hoped he would blush very deep; — which indeed the poor creature did, till I was absolutely sorry for him.

But now first as to this question, What I mean? You must know poor Fraser, a punctual but most pusillanimous mortal, has been talking louder and louder lately of a “second edition” here; whereupon, as labor-wages are not higher here than with you, and printing-work, if well bargained for, ought to be about the same price, it struck me that, as in the case of the Miscellanies, so here inversely the supply of both the New and the Old England might be profitably combined. Whether aught can come of this, now that it is got close upon us, I yet know not. Fraser has only seventy-five copies left; but when these will be done his prophecy comprehends not,— “surely within the year”! For the present I have set him to ascertain, and will otherwise ascertain for myself, what the exact cost of stereotyping the Book were, in the same letter and style as yours; it is not so much more than printing, they tell me: I should then have done with it forever and a day. You on your side, and we on ours, might have as many copies as were wanted for all time coming. This is, in these very days, under inquisition; but there are many points to be settled before the issue.

I have not yet succeeded in finding a Bookseller of any fitness, but am waiting for one always. And even had I found such a one, I mean an energetic seller that would sell on other terms than forty percent for his trouble, it were still a question whether one ought to venture on such a speculation: “quitting the old highways,” as I say, “in indignation at the excessive tolls, with hope that you will arrive cheaper in the steeple-chase way!” It is clear, however, that said highways are of the corduroy sort, said tolls an anomaly that must be remedied soon; and also that in all England there is no Book in a likelier case to adventure it with than this same, — which did not sell at all for two months, as I hear, which all Booksellers got terrified for, and which has crept along mainly by its own gravitation ever since. We will consider well, we shall see. You can understand that such a thing, for your market too, is in agitation; if any pirate step in before us in the meanwhile, we cannot help it.

Thanks again for your swift attention to the Miscellanies; poor Fraser is in great haste to see them; hoping for his forty-per-cent division of the spoil. If you have not yet got to the very end with your printing, I will add a few errata; if they come too late, never mind; they are of small moment….

This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont; and, as for my particular case, uses me not worse, but better, than of old. Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for me. For example, the other night, a massive portmanteau of Books, sent according to my written list, from the Cambridge University Library, from certain friends there whom I have never seen; a gratifying arrival. For we have no Library here, from which we can borrow books home; and are only in these weeks striving to get one:* think of that! The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine. The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where Fate tethers me in life! If Fate always tether me; — but if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge, and only visit it now and then! Yet perhaps it is the proper place after all, seeing all places are improper: who knows? Meanwhile I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself, — too rare a case of late. The ground of my existence is black as Death; too black, when all void too but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold and rainbow and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal I am very much of a fool. — Some people will have me write on Cromwell, which I have been talking about. I do read on that and English subjects, finding that I know nothing and that nobody knows anything of that: but whether anything will come of it remains to be seen. Mill, the Westminster friend, is gone in bad health to the Continent, and has left a rude Aberdeen Longear, a great admirer of mine too, with whom I conjecture I cannot act at all: so good-bye to that. The wisest of all, I do believe, were that I bought my nag Yankee and set to galloping about the elevated places here! A certain Mr. Coolidge,** a Boston man of clear iron visage and character, came down to me the other day with Sumner; he left a newspaper fragment, containing “the Socinian Pope’s denunciation of Emerson.”

 * The beginning of the London Library, a most useful institution, from which books may be borrowed. It served Carlyle well in later years, and for a long time he was President of it.

** The late Mr. Joseph Coolidge.

The thing denounced had not then arrived, though often asked for at Kennet’s; it did not arrive till yesterday, but had lain buried in bales of I know not what. We have read it only once, and are not yet at the bottom of it. Meanwhile, as I judge, the Socinian “tempest in a washbowl” is all according to nature, and will be profitable to you, not hurtful. A man is called to let his light shine before men; but he ought to understand better and better what medium it is through, what retinas it falls on: wherefore look there. I find in this, as in the two other Speeches, that noblest self-assertion, and believing originality, which is like sacred fire, the beginning of whatsoever is to flame and work; and for young men especially one sees not what could be more vivifying. Speak, therefore, while you feel called to do it; and when you feel called. But for yourself, my friend, I prophesy it will not do always: a faculty is in you for a sort of speech which is itself action, an artistic sort. You tell us with piercing emphasis that man’s soul is great; show us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man’s Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized, depictured by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself. If these Orations balk me of this, how profitable soever they be for others. I will not love them. — And yet, what am I saying? How do I know what is good for you, what authentically makes your own heart glad to work in it? I speak from without, the friendliest voice must speak from without; and a man’s ultimate monition comes only from within. Forgive me, and love me, and write soon. A Dieu!

 — T. Carlyle

My Wife, very proud of your salutation, sends a sick return of greeting. After a winter of unusual strength, she took cold the other day, and coughs again; though she will not call it serious yet. One likes none of these things. She has a brisk heart and a stout, but too weak a frame for this rough life of mine. I will not get sad about it.

One of the strangest things about these New England Orations is a fact I have heard, but not yet seen, that a certain W. Gladstone, an Oxford crack Scholar, Tory M.P., and devout Churchman of great talent and hope, has contrived to insert a piece of you (first Oration it must be) in a work of his on Church and State, which makes some figure at present! I know him for a solid, serious, silent-minded man; but how with his Coleridge Shovel-Hattism he has contrived to relate himself to you, there is the mystery. True men of all creeds, it would seem, are Brothers.

To write soon!

XXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 15 March, 1839

My Dear Friend, — I will spare you my apologies for not writing, they are so many. You have been very generous, I very promising and dilatory. I desired to send you an Account of the sales of the History, thinking that the details might be more intelligible to you than to me, and might give you some insight into literary and social, as well as bibliopolical relations. But many details of this account will not yet settle themselves into sure facts, but do dance and mystify me as one green in ledgers. Bookseller says nine hundred and ninety-one copies came from Binder, nine remaining imperfect, and so not bound. But in all my reckonings of the particulars of distribution I make either more or less than nine hundred and ninety-one copies. And some of my accounts are with private individuals at a distance, and they have their uncertainties and misrememberings also. But the facts will soon show themselves, and I count confidently on a small balance against the world to your credit.

 ——  ——  — * This letter appeared in the Athenaeum, July 22, 1882. ——  ——  —

The Miscellanies go forward too slowly, at about the rate of seventy-two pages a week, as I understand. Of the Fraser articles and of some others we have but a single copy, (such are the tough limits of some English immortalities and editorial renowns,) but we expect the end of the printing in six weeks. The first two volumes, with title-pages, are gone to the binder — two hundred and sixty copies — with strait directions; and I presume will go to sea very soon. We shall send the last two volumes by a later ship. You will pay nothing for the books we send except freight. We shall deduct the cost of the books from the credit side of your account here. We print of the second series twelve hundred and fifty copies, with the intention of printing a second edition of the first series of five hundred, if we see fit hereafter to supply the place of the emigrating portion of the first. You express some surprise at the cheapness of our work. The publishers, I believe, generally get more profits. They grumbled a little at the face of the account on the 1st of January; so in the new contract for the new volumes I have allowed them nine cents more on each copy sold by them. So that you should receive ninety-one cents on a copy instead of one dollar. When the two hundred and fifty copies of our first two volumes are gone to you, I think they will have but about one hundred copies more to sell.

Your books are read. I hear, I think, more gratitude expressed for the Miscellanies than for the History. Young men at all our colleges study them in closets, and the Copernican is eradicating the Ptolemaic lore. I have frequent and cordial testimonies to the good working of the leaven, and continual inquiry whether the man will come hither. Speriamo.

I was a fool to tell you once you must not come if I did tell you so. I knew better at the time, and did steadily believe, as far as I was concerned, that no polemical mud, however much was thrown, could by any possibility stick to me; for I was purely an observer; had not the smallest personal or partial interest; and merely spoke to the question as a historian; and I knew whoever could see me must see that. But, at the moment, the little pamphlet made much stir and excitement in the newspapers; and the whole thousand copies were bought up. The ill wind has blown over. I advertised, as usual, my winter course of Lectures, and it prospered very well. Ten Lectures: I. Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on “Human Life.” Now I am well again. — But, as I said, as I could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that I could mix your cause with mine and hurt you. Nothing is more certain than that you shall have all our ears, whenever you wish for them, and free from that partial position which I deprecated. Yet I cannot regret my letter, which procured me so affectionate and magnanimous a reply.

Thanks, too, for your friendliest invitation. But I have a new reason why I should not come to England, — a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old, — a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite piques me.

Yet how gladly should I be near you for a time. The months and years make me more desirous of an unlimited conversation with you; and one day, I think, the God will grant it, after whatever way is best. I am lately taken with The Onyx Ring, which seemed to me full of knowledge, and good, bold, true drawing. Very saucy, was it not? in John Sterling to paint Collins; and what intrepid iconoclasm in this new Alcibiades to break in among your Lares and disfigure your sacred Hermes himself in Walsingham.* To me, a profane man, it was good sport to see the Olympic lover of Frederica, Lili, and so forth, lampooned. And by Alcibiades too, over whom the wrath of Pericles must pause and brood ere it falls. I delight in this Sterling, but now that I know him better I shall no longer expect him to write to me. I wish I could talk to you on the grave questions, graver than all literature, which the trifles of each day open. Our doing seems to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our nondoing. I wish, too, you could know my friends here. A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation is possible. He is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does.

 ——  —— * Collins and Walsingham, two characters in The Onyx Ring, are partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe. In his Life of Sterling, Carlyle says of the story: “A tale still worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various friends of Sterling’s are shadowed forth not always in the truest manner.” It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling’s Essays and Tales, edited by Julius Hare.

As I hear not yet of your reception of the bill of exchange, which went by the “Royal William” in January, I enclose the duplicate. And now all success to the Lectures of April or May! A new Kingdom with new extravagances of power and splendor I know. Unless you can keep your own secret better in Rahel, &c., you must not give it me to keep. The London Sartor arrived in my hands March 5th, dated the 15th of November, so long is the way from Kennet to Little & Co. The book is welcome, and awakens a sort of nepotism in me, — my brother’s child.

 — R.W. Emerson

I rejoice in the good accounts you give me of your household; in your wife’s health; in your brother’s position. My wife wishes to be affectionately remembered to you and yours. And the lady must continue to love her old Transatlantic friend.

XXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 19 March, 1839

My Dear Friend, — Only last Saturday I despatched a letter to you containing a duplicate of the bill of exchange sent in January, and all the facts I knew of our books; and now comes to me a note from Wheeler, at Cambridge, saying that the printers, on reckoning up their amount of copy, find that nowise can they make 450 pages per volume, as they have promised, for these two last of the Miscellanies. They end the third volume with page 390, and they have not but 350 or less pages for the fourth. They ask, What shall be done? Nothing is known to me but to give them Rahel, though I grudge it, for I vastly prefer to end with Scott. Rahel, I fancy, cost you no night and no morning, but was writ in that gentle after-dinner hour so friendly to good digestion. Stearns Wheeler dreams that it is possible to draw at this eleventh hour some possible manuscript out of the unedited treasures of Teufelsdrockh’s cabinets. If the manuscripts were ready, all fairly copied out by foreseeing scribes in your sanctuary at Chelsea, the good goblin of steam would — with the least waiting, perhaps a few days — bring the packet to our types in time. I have little hope, almost none, from a sally so desperate on possible portfolios; but neither will I be wanting to my sanguine co-editor, your good friend. So I told him I would give you as instant notice as Mr. Rogers at the Merchants’ Exchange Bar can contrive, and tell you plainly that we shall proceed to print Rahel when we come so far on; and with that paper end; unless we shall receive some contrary word from you. And if we can obtain any manuscript from you before we have actually bound our book, we will cancel our last sheets and insert it. And so may the friendly Heaven grant a speedy passage to my letter and to yours! I fear the possibility of our success is still further reduced by the season of the year, as the Lectures must shortly be on foot. Well, the best speed to them also. When I think of you as speaking and not writing them, I remember Luther’s words, “He that can speak well, the same is a man.”

I hope you liked John Dwight’s translations of Goethe, and his notes. He is a good, susceptible, yearning soul, not so apt to create as to receive with the freest allowance, but I like his books very much.

Do think to say in a letter whether you received from me a copy of our edition of your French Revolution. I ordered a copy sent to you, — probably wrote your name in it, — but it does not appear in the bookseller’s account. Farewell.

 — R.W. Emerson

XXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 13 April, 1839

My Dear Emerson, — Has anything gone wrong with you? How is it that you do not write to me? These three or four weeks, I know not whether duly or not so long, I have been in daily hope of some sign from you; but none comes; not even a Newspaper, — open at the ends. The German Translator, Mr. Dwight, mentioned, at the end of a Letter I had not long ago, that you had given a brilliant course of Lectures at Boston, but had been obliged to intermit it on account of illness. Bad news indeed, that latter clause; at the same time, it was thrown in so cursorily I would not let myself be much alarmed; and since that, various New England friends have assured me here that there was nothing of great moment in it, that the business was all well over now, and you safe at Concord again. Yet how is it that I do not hear? I will tell you my guess is that those Boston Carlylean Miscellanies are to blame. The Printer is slack and lazy as Printers are; and you do not wish to write till you can send some news of him? I will hope and believe that only this is it, till I hear worse.

I sent you a Dumfries Newspaper the other week, for a sign of my existence and anxiety. A certain Mr. Ellis of Boston is this day packing up a very small memorial of me to your Wife; a poor Print rolled about a bit of wood: let her receive it graciously in defect of better. It comes under your address. Nay, properly it is my Wife’s memorial to your Wife. It is to be hung up in the Concord drawing-room. The two Households, divided by wide seas, are to understand always that they are united nevertheless.

My special cause for writing this day rather than another is the old story, book business. You have brought that upon yourself, my friend; and must do the best you can with it. After all, why should not Letters be on business too? Many a kind thought, uniting man with man, in gratitude and helpfulness, is founded on business. The speaker at Dartmouth College seems to think it ought to be so. Nor do I dissent. — But the case is this, Fraser and I are just about bargaining for a second edition of the Revolution. He will print fifteen hundred for the English market, in a somewhat closer style, and sell them here at twenty-four shillings a copy. His first edition is all gone but some handful; and the man is in haste, and has taken into a mood of hope, — for he is weak and aguish, alternating from hot to cold; otherwise, I find, a very accurate creature, and deals in his unjust trade as justly as any other will. He has settled with me; his half-profits amount to some L130, which by charging me for every presentation copy he cuts down to somewhere about L110; not the lion’s share in the gross produce, yet a great share compared with an expectancy no higher than zero! We continue on the same system for this second adventure; I cannot go hawking about in search of new terms; I might go farther and fare worse. And now comes your part of the affair; in which I would fain have had your counsel; but must ask your help, proceeding with my own light alone. After Fraser’s fifteen hundred are printed off, the types remain standing, and I for my own behoof throw off five hundred more, designed for your market. Whether five hundred are too many or too few, I can only guess; if too many, we can retain them here and turn them to account; if too few, there is no remedy. At all events, costing me only the paper and press-work, there is surely no Pirate in the Union that can undersell us! Nay, it seems they have a drawback on our taxed paper, sufficient or nearly so to land the cargo at Boston without more charge. You see, therefore, how it is. Can you find me a Bookseller, as for yourself; he and you can fix what price the ware will carry when you see it. Meanwhile I must have his Title-page; I must have his directions (if any be needed); nay, for that matter, you might write a Preface if you liked, — though I see not what you have to say, and recommend silence rather! The book is to be in three volumes duodecimo, and we will take care it be fit to show its face in your market. A few errors of the press; and one correction (about the sinking of the Vengeur, which I find lately to be an indisputable falsehood); these are all the changes. We are to have done printing, Fraser predicts, “in two months”; — say two and a half! I suppose you decipher the matter out of this plastering and smearing; and will do what is needful in it. “Great inquiry” is made for the Miscellanies, Fraser says; though he suspects it may perhaps be but one or two men inquiring often, — the dog!

I am again upon the threshold of extempore lecturing: on “the Revolutions of Modern Europe”; Protestantism, 2 lectures; Puritanism, 2; French Revolution, 2. I almost regret that I had undertaken the thing this year at all, for I am no longer driven by Poverty as heretofore. Nay, I am richer than I have been for ten years; and have a kind of prospect, for the first time this great while, of being allowed to subsist in this world for the future: a great blessing, perhaps the greatest, when it comes as a novelty! However, I thought it right to keep this Lecture business open, come what might. I care less about it than I did; it is not agony and wretched trembling to the marrow of the bone, as it was the last two times. I believe, in spite of all my perpetual indigestions and nervous woes, I am actually getting into better health; the weary heart of me is quieter; I wait in silence for the new chapter, — feeling truly that we are at the end of one period here. I count it two in my autobiography: we shall see what the third is; [if] third there be. But I am in small haste for a third. How true is that of the old Prophets, “The word of the Lord came unto” such and such a one! When it does not come, both Prophet and Prosaist ought to be thankful (after a sort), and rigorously hold their tongue. — Lord Durham’s people have come over with golden reports of the Americans, and their brotherly feelings. One Arthur Buller preaches to me, with emphasis, on a quite personal topic till one explodes in laughter to hear him, the good soul: That I, namely, am the most esteemed, &c., and ought to go over and Lecture in all great towns of the Union, and make, &c., &c.! I really do begin to think of it in this interregnum that I am in. But then my Lectures must be written; but then I must become a hawker, — ach Gott!

The people are beginning to quote you here: tant pis pour eux! I have found you in two Cambridge books. A certain Mr. Richard M. Milnes, M.P., a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and politician whom I love much, applied to me for Nature (the others he has) that he might write upon it. Somebody has stolen Nature from me, or many have thumbed it to pieces; I could not find a copy. Send me one, the first chance you have. And see Miss Martineau in the last Westminster Review: — these things you are old enough to stand? They are even of benefit? Emerson is not without a select public, the root of a select public on this side of the water too. — Popular Sumner is off to Italy, the most popular of men, — inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left. We preferred Coolidge to him in this circle; a square-cut iron man, yet with clear symptoms of a heart in him. Your people will come more and more to their maternal Babylon, will they not, by the steamers? — Adieu, my dear friend. My Wife joins me in all good prayers for you and yours.

 — Thomas Carlyle

XXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 17 April, 1839

Dear Friend, — Some four days ago I wrote you a long Letter, rather expressive of anxiety about you; it will probably come to hand along with this. I had heard vaguely that you were unwell, and wondered why you did not write. Happily, that point is as good as settled now, even by your silence about it. I have, half an hour ago, received your Concord Letter of the 19th of March. The Letter you speak of there as “written last Saturday” has not yet made its appearance, but may be looked for now shortly: as there is no mention here of any mischance, except the shortcoming of Printers’ copy, I infer that all else is in a tolerably correct state; I wait patiently for the “last Saturday” tidings, and will answer as to the matters of copy, in good heart, without loss of a moment.

There is nothing of the manuscript sort in Teufelsdrockh’s repositories that would suit you well; nothing at all in a completed state, except a long rigmarole dissertation (in a crabbed sardonic vein) about the early history of the Teutonic Kindred, wriggling itself along not in the best style through Proverb lore, and I know not what, till it end (if my memory serve) in a kind of Essay on the Minnesingers. It was written almost ten years ago, and never contented me well. It formed part of a lucklessly projected History of German Literature, subsequent portions of which, the Nibelungen and Reinecke Fox, you have already printed. The unfortunate “Cabinet Library Editor,” or whatever his title was, broke down; and I let him off, — without paying me; and this alone remains of the misventure; a thing not fit for you, nor indeed at bottom for anybody, though I have never burnt it yet. My other Manuscripts are scratchings and scrawlings; — children’s infant souls weeping because they never could be born, but were left there whimpering in limine primo!

On this side, therefore, is no help. Nevertheless, it seems to me, otherwise there is. Varnhagen may be printed I think without offence, since there is need of it: if that will make up your fourth volume to a due size, why not? It is the last faint murmur one gives in Periodical Literature, and may indicate the approach of silence and slumber. I know no errors of the Press in Varnhagen: there is one thing about Jean Paul F. Richter’s want of humor in his speech, which somehow I could like to have the opportunity of uttering a word on, though what word I see not very well. My notion is partly that V. overstates the thing, taking a Berlin propos de salon for a scientifically accurate record; and partly farther that the defect (if any) was creditable to Jean Paul, indicating that he talked from the abundance of the heart, not burning himself off in miserable perpetual sputter like a Town-wit, but speaking what he had to say, were it dull, were it not dull, — for his own satisfaction first of all! If you in a line or two could express at the right point something of that sort, it were well; yet on the whole, if not, then is almost no matter. Let the whole stand then as the commencement of slumber and stertorous breathing!

Varnhagen himself will not bring up your fourth volume to the right size; hardly beyond 380 pages, I should think; yet what more can be done? Do you remember Fraser’s Magazine for October, 1832, and a Translation there, with Notes, of a thing called Goethe’s Mahrchen? It is by me; I regard it as a most remarkable piece, well worthy of perusal, especially by all readers of mine. The printing of your third volume will of course be finished before this letter arrive; nevertheless I have a plan: that you (as might be done, I suppose, by cancelling and reprinting the concluding leaf or leaves) append the said Translated Tale, in a smaller type, to that volume. It is 21 or 22 pages of Fraser, and will perhaps bring yours up to the mark. Nay, indeed there are two other little Translations from Goethe which I reckon good, though of far less interest than the Mahrchen; I think they are in the Frasers almost immediately preceding; one of them is called Fragment from Goethe (if I remember); in his Works, it is Novelle; it treats of a visit by some princely household to a strange Mountain ruin or castle, and the catastrophe is the escape of a show-lion from its booth in the neighboring Market-Town. I have not the thing here, — alas, sinner that I am, it now strikes me that the “two other things” are this one thing, which my treacherous memory is making into two! This however you will find in the Number immediately, or not far from immediately, preceding that of the Mahrchen; along with which, in the same type with which, it would give us letter-press enough. It ought to stand before the Mahrchen: read it, and say whether it is worthy or not worthy. Will this Appendix do, then? I should really rather like the Mahrchen to be printed, and had thoughts of putting [it] at the end of the English Sartor. The other I care not for, intrinsically, but think it very beautiful in its kind. — Some rubbish of my own, in small quantity, exists here and there in Fraser; one story, entitled Cruthers and Jonson,* was written sixteen years ago, and printed somewhere early (probably the second year) in that rubbish heap, with several gross errors of the press (mares for maces was one!): it is the first thing I wrote, or among the very first; — otherwise a thing to be kept rather secret, except from the like of you! This or any other of the “original” immaturities I will not recommend as an Appendix; I hope the Mahrchen, or the Novelle and Mahrchen, will suffice. But on the whole, to thee, O Friend, and thy judgment and decision, without appeal, I leave it altogether. Say Yes, say No; do what seemeth good to thee. — Nay now, writing with the speed of light, another consideration strikes me: Why should Volume Third be interfered with if it is finished? Why will not this Appendix do, these Appendixes, to hang to the skirts of Volume Four as well? Perhaps better! the Mahrchen in any case closing the rear. I leave it all to Emerson and Stearns Wheeler, my more than kind Editors: E. knows it better than I; be his decision irrevocable.

 —
* “Cruthers and Jonson; or, The Outskirts of Life. A True
Story.” Fraser’s Magazine, January, 1831.
 ——  ——  ——

This letter is far too long, but I had not time to make it shorter. — I got your French Revolution, and have seen no other: my name is on it in your hand. I received Dwight’s Book, liked it, and have answered him: a good youth, of the kind you describe; no Englishman, to my knowledge, has yet uttered as much sense about Goethe and German things. I go this day to settle with Fraser about printers and a second edition of the Revolution Book, — as specified in the other Letter: five hundred copies for America, which are to cost he computes about 2/7, and your Bookseller will bind them, and defy Piracy. My Lectures come on, this day two weeks: O Heaven! I cannot “speak”; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables, — being forced to it by want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then — ! Shall it be Switzerland, shall it be Scotland, nay, shall it be America and Concord?

Ever your affectionate
                   T. Carlyle

All love from both of us to the Mother and Boy. My Wife is better than usual; rejoices in the promise of summer now at last visible after a spring like Greenland. Scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. God help them! In man as yet is small help. There will be work yet, before that account is liquidated; a generation or two of work! Miss Martineau is gone to Switzerland, after emitting Deerwood [sic], a Novel.* How do you like it? people ask. To which there are serious answers returnable, but few so good as none. Ah me! Lady Bulwer too has written a Novel, in satire of her Husband. I saw the Husband not long since; one of the wretchedest Phantasms, it seemed to me, I had yet fallen in with, — many, many, as they are here.

The L100 Sterling Bill came, in due time, in perfect order; and will be payable one of these days. I forget dates; but had well calculated that before the 19th of March this piece of news and my gratitude for it had reached you.

 ——  —— * Deerbrook ——  ——

XXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 20 April, 1839

My Dear Friend, — Learning here in town that letters may go today to the “Great Western,” I seize the hour to communicate a bookseller’s message. I told Brown, of C.C. Little & Co., that you think of stereotyping the History. He says that he can make it profitable to himself and to you to use your plates here in this manner (which he desires may be kept secret here, and I suppose with you also). You are to get your plates made and proved, then you are to send them out here to him, having first insured them in London, and he is to pay you a price for every copy he prints from them. As soon as he has printed a supply for our market, — and we want, he says, five hundred copies now, — he will send them back to you. I told him I thought he had better fix the price per copy to be paid by him, and I would send it to you as his offer. He is willing to do so, but not today. It was only this morning I informed him of your plan. I think in a fortnight I shall need to write again, — probably to introduce to you my countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick, the writer of affectionate New England tales and the like, who is about to go to Europe for a year or more. I will then get somewhat definite from Brown as to rates and prices. Brown thought you might better send the plates here first, as we are in immediate want of copies; and afterwards print with them in London. He is quite sure that it would be more profitable to print them in this manner than to try to import and sell here the books after being manufactured in London.

On the 30th of April we shall ship at New York the first two volumes of the Miscellanies, two hundred and sixty copies. In four weeks, the second two volumes will be finished, unless we wait for something to be added by yourself, agreeably to a suggestion of Wheeler’s and mine. Two copies of Schiller’s Life will go in the same box. We send them to the port of London. When these are gone, only one hundred copies remain unsold of the first two volumes (Miscellanies).

Brown said it was important that the plates should be proved correct at London by striking off impressions before they were sent hither. This is the whole of my present message. I shall have somewhat presently to reply to your last letter, received three weeks since. And may health and peace dwell with you and yours!

 — R.W. Emerson

XXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 25 April, 1839

My Dear Friend, — Behold my account! A very simple thing, is it not! A very mouse, after such months, almost years, of promise! Despise it not, however; for such is my extreme dulness at figures and statements that this nothing has been a fear to me, a long time, how to extract it from the bookseller’s promiscuous account with me, and from obscure records of my own. You see that it promises yet to pay you between $60 and $70 more, if Mr. Fuller (a gentleman of Providence, who procured many subscribers for us there) and Mr. Owen (who owes us also for copies subscribed for) will pay us our demand. They have both been lately reminded of their delinquency. Herrick and Noyes, you will see credited for eight copies, $18. They are booksellers who supplied eight subscribers, and charged us $2 for their trouble and some alleged damage to a copy. One copy you will see is sold to Ann Pomeroy for $3. This lady bought the copy of me, and preferred sending me $3 to sending $2.50 for so good a book. You will notice one or two other variations in the prices, in each of which I aimed to use a friend’s discretion. Add lastly, that you must revise all my figures, as I am a hopeless blunderer, and quite lately made a brilliant mistake in regard to the amount of 9 multiplied by 12.

Have I asked you whether you received from me a copy of the History? I designated a copy to go, and the bookseller’s boy thinks he sent one, but there is none charged in their account. The account of the Miscellanies does not prosper quite so well….

Thanks for your too friendly and generous expectations from my wit. Alas! my friend, I can do no such gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters; suburban men. But in God we are all great, all rich, each entitled to say, All is mine. I hope the advancing season has restored health to your wife, and, if benedictions will help her, tell her we send them on every west wind. My wife and babes are well.

 — R.W.E.

XL. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 28 April, 1839

My Dear Friend, — I received last night C.C. Little & Co.’s proposition in reference to the stereotyping the History. Their offer is based on my statement that you proposed to print the book in two volumes similar to ours. They say, “We should be willing to pay three hundred dollars for the use of plates for striking off five hundred copies of the two volumes, with the farther agreement that, if we wished to strike off another five hundred in nine months after the publication of the first five hundred, we should have the liberty to do so, paying the same again; that is, another three hundred dollars for the privilege of printing another five hundred copies; — the plates to be furnished us ready for use and free of expense.” They add, “Should Mr. Carlyle send the plates to this country, he should be particular to ship them to this port direct.” I am no judge of the liberality of this offer, as I know nothing of the expense of the plates. The men, Little and Brown, are fair in their dealings, and the most respectable book-selling firm in Boston. When you have considered the matter, I hope you will send me as early an answer as you can. For as we have no protection from pirates we must use speed.

I ought to have added to my account and statement sent by Miss Sedgwick one explanation. You will find in the account a credit of $13.75, agreed on with Little & Co., as compensation for lost subscribers. We had a little book, kept in the bookshop, into which were transferred the names of subscribers from all lists which were returned from various places. These names amounted to two hundred, more or less. When we came to settle the account, this book could not be found. They expressed much regret, and made much vain searching. Their account with me recorded only one hundred and thirty-four copies delivered to subscribers. Thus, a large number, say sixty-six, had been sold by them to our subscribers, and our half-dollar on each copy put in their pocket as commission, expressly contrary to treaty! With some ado, I mustered fifty-five names of subscribers known to me as such, not recorded on their books as having received copies, and demanded $27.50. They replied that they also had claims; that they had sent the books to distant subscribers in various States, and had charged no freight (with one or two exceptions, when the books went alone); that other booksellers had, no doubt, in many cases, sold the copies to subscribers for which I claimed the half-dollar; and lastly, which is indeed the moving reason, that they had sent twenty copies up the Mississippi to a bookseller (in Vicksburg, I think), who had made them no return. On these grounds they proposed that they should pay half my demand, and so compromise. They said, however, that, if I insisted, they would pay the whole. I was so glad to close the affair with mutual goodwill that I said with the unjust steward, write $13.75. So are we all pleased at your expense. [Greek] I think I will not give you any more historiettes, — they take too much room; but as I write this time only on business, you are welcome to this from your friend,

 — R.W. Emerson

XLI. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 15 May, 1839.

My Dear Friend, — Last Saturday, 11th instant, I had your two letters of 13th and 17th April. Before now, you must have one or two notes of mine touching the stereotype plates: a proposition superseded by your new plan. I have also despatched one or two sheets lately containing accounts. Now for the new matter. I was in Boston yesterday, and saw Brown, the bookseller. He accedes gladly, to the project of five hundred American copies of the History. He says, that the duty is the same on books in sheets and books in boards; and desires, therefore, that the books may come out bound. You bind yours in cloth? Put up his in the same style as those for your market, only a little more strongly than is the custom with London books, as it will only cost a little more. He would be glad also to have his name added in the titlepage (London: Published by J. Fraser; and Boston: by C.C. Little and James Brown, 112 Washington St.), or is not this the right way? He only said he should like to have his name added. He threatens to charge me 20 percent commission. If, as he computes from your hint of 2/7, the work costs you, say, 70 cents per copy, unbound; he reckons it at a dollar, when bound; then 75 cents duty in Boston, $1.75. He thinks we cannot set a higher price on it than $3.50, because we sold our former edition for $2.50. On that price, his commissions would be 70 cents; and $1.05 per copy will to you. If when we see the book, we venture to put a higher price on it, your remainder shall be more. I confess, when I set this forth on paper, it looks as bad as your English trade, — this barefaced 20 percent; but their plea is, We guarantee the sales; we advertise; we pay you when it is sold, though we give our customers six months’ credit. I have made no final bargain with the man, and perhaps before the books arrive I shall be better advised, and may get better terms from him. Meantime, give me the best advice you can; and despatch the books with all speed, and if you send six hundred, I think, we will sell them.

 ——  ——  —— * In the first edition of this Correspondence a portion of this letter was printed from a rough draft, such as Emerson was accustomed to make of his letters to Carlyle. I owe the original to the kindness of the editor of the Athenaeum, in the pages of which it was printed. —

I went to the Athenaeum, and procured the Frasers’ and will print the Novelle and the Mahrchen at the end of the Fourth Volume, which has been loitering under one workman for a week or two past, awaiting this arrival. Now we will finish at once. Cruthers and Jonson I read gladly. It is indispensable to such as would see the fountains of Nile: but I incline to what seems your opinion, that it will be better in the final edition of your Works than in this present First Collection of them. I believe I could find more matter now of yours if we should be pinched again. The Cat-Raphael? and Mirabeau and Macaulay? Stearns Wheeler is very faithful in his loving labor, — has taken a world of pains with the sweetest smile. We are very fortunate in having him to friend. — For the Miscellanies once more, the two boxes containing two hundred and sixty copies of the first series went to sea in the “St. James,” Captain Sebor, addressed to Mr. Fraser. (I hope rightly addressed; yet I saw a memorandum at Munroe’s in which he was named John Fraser.)

Arthur Buller has my hearty thanks for his good and true witnessing. And now that our old advice is indorsed by John Bull himself, you will believe and come. Nothing can be better. As soon as the lectures are over, let the trunks be packed. Only my wife and my blessed sister dear — Elizabeth Hoar, betrothed in better times to my brother Charles, — my wife and this lovely nun do say that Mrs. Carlyle must come hither also; that it will make her strong, and lengthen her days on the earth, and cheer theirs also. Come, and make a home with me; and let us make a truth that is better than dreams. From this farm-house of mine you shall sally forth as God shall invite you, and “lecture in the great cities.” You shall do it by proclamation of your own, or by the mediation of a committee, which will readily be found. Wife, mother, and sister shall nurse thy wife meantime, and you shall bring your republican laurels home so fast that she shall not sigh for the Old England. Eyes here do sparkle at the very thought. And my little placid Musketaquid River looked gayer today in the sun. In very sooth and love, my friend, I shall look for you in August. If aught that we know not must forbid your wife at present, you will still come. In October, you shall lecture in Boston; in November, in New York; in December, in Philadelphia; in January, in Washington. I can show you three or four great natures, as yet unsung by Harriet Martineau or Anna Jameson, that content the heart and provoke the mind. And for yourself, you shall be as cynical and headstrong and fantastical as you can be.

I rejoice in what you say of better health and better prospects. I was glad to hear of Milnes, whose Poems already lay on my table when your letter came. Since the little Nature book is not quite dead, I have sent you a few copies, and wish you would offer one to Mr. Milnes with my respects. I hope before a great while I may have somewhat better to send him. I am ashamed that my little books should be “quoted” as you say.

My affectionate salutations to Mrs. Carlyle, who is to sanction and enforce all I have written on the migration. In the prospect of your coming I feel it to be foolish to write. I have very much to say to you. But now only Good Bye.

 — R.W. Emerson

XLII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 29 May, 1839

My Dear Emerson, — Your Letter, dated Boston, 20th April, has been here for some two weeks. Miss Sedgwick, whom it taught us to expect in “about a fortnight,” has yet given no note of herself, but shall be right welcome whenever she appears. Miss Martineau’s absence (she is in Switzerland this summer) will probably be a loss to the fair Pilgrim; — which of course the rest of us ought to exert ourselves to make good…. My Lectures are happily over ten days ago; with “success” enough, as it is called; the only valuable part of which is some L200, gained with great pain, but also with great brevity: — economical respite for another solar year! The people were boundlessly tolerant; my agitation beforehand was less this year, my remorse afterwards proportionally greater. There was but one moderately good Lecture, the last, — on Sausculottism, to an audience mostly Tory, and rustling with the beautifulest quality silks! Two things I find: first that I ought to have had a horse; I had only three incidental rides or gallops, hired rides; my horse Yankee is never yet purchased, but it shall be, for I cannot live, except in great pain, without a horse. It was sweet beyond measure to escape out of the dustwhirlpool here, and fly, in solitude, through the ocean of verdure and splendor, as far as Harrow and back again; and one’s nerves were clear next day, and words lying in one like water in a well. But the second thing I found was, that extempore speaking, especially in the way of Lecture, is an art or craft, and requires an apprenticeship, which I have never served. Repeatedly it has come into my head that I should go to America, this very Fall, and belecture you from North to South till I learn it! Such a thing does lie in the bottom-scenes, should hard come to hard; and looks pleasant enough. — On the whole, I say sometimes, I must either begin a Book, or do it. Books are the lasting thing; Lectures are like corn ground into flour; there are loaves for today, but no wheat harvests for next year. Rudiments of a new Book (thank Heaven!) do sometimes disclose themselves in me. Festina lente. It ought to be better than the French Revolution; I mean better written. The greater part of that Book, as I read proof-sheets of it in these weeks, does nothing but disgust me. And yet it was, as nearly as was good, the utmost that lay in me. I should not like to be nearer killed with any other Book! — Books too are a triviality. Life alone is great; with its infinite spaces, its everlasting times, with its Death, with its Heaven and its Hell. Ah me!

Wordsworth is here at present; a garrulous, rather watery, not wearisome old man. There is a freshness as of brooks and mountain breezes in him; one says of him: Thou art not great, but thou art genuine; well speed thou. Sterling is home from Italy, recovered in health, indeed very well could he but sit still. He is for Clifton, near Bristol, for the next three months. I hear him speak of some sonnet or other he means to address to you: as for me he knows well that I call his verses timber toned, without true melody either in thought, phrase or sound. The good John! Did you ever see such a vacant turnip-lantern as that Walsingham Goethe? Iconoclast Collins strikes his wooden shoe through him, and passes on, saying almost nothing. — My space is done! I greet the little maidkin, and bid her welcome to this unutterable world. Commend her, poor little thing, to her little Brother, to her Mother and Father; — Nature, I suppose, has sent her strong letters of recommendation, without our help, to them all. Where I shall be in six weeks is not very certain; likeliest in Scotland, whither our whole household, servant and all, is pressingly invited, where they have provided horses and gigs. Letters sent hither will still find me, or lie waiting for me, safe: but perhaps the speediest address will be “Care of Fraser, 215 Regent Street.” My Brother wants me to the Tyrol and Vienna; but I think I shall not go. Adieu, dear friend. It is a great treasure to me that I have you in this world. My Wife salutes you all. —

Yours ever and ever,
               T. Carlyle

XLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 24 June, 1833

Dear Friend, — Two Letters from you were brought hither by Miss Sedgwick last week. The series of post Letters is a little embroiled in my head; but I have a conviction that all hitherto due have arrived; that up to the date of my last despatch (a Proof-sheet and a Letter), which ought to be getting into your hands in these very days, our correspondence is clear. That Letter and Proof-sheet, two separate pieces, were sent to Liverpool some three weeks ago, to be despatched by the first conveyance thence; as I say, they are probably in Boston about this time. The Proof-sheet was one of the forty-seven such which the new French Revolution is to consist of: with this, as with a correct sample, you were to act upon some Boston Bookseller, and make a bargain for me, — or at least report that none was to be made. A bad bargain will content me now, my hopes are not at all high.

For the present, I am to announce on the part of Bookseller Fraser that the First Portion of our celebrated Miscellanies have been hovering about on these coasts for several weeks, have lain safe “in the River” for some two weeks, and ought at last to be safe in Fraser’s shop today or else to morrow. I will ask there, and verify, before this Letter go. The reason of these “two weeks in the river” is that the packages were addressed “John Fraser, London,” and the people had tried all the Frasers in London before they attempted the right individual, James, of 215 Regent Street. Of course, the like mistake in the second case will be avoided. A Letter, put ashore at Falmouth, and properly addressed, but without any signature, had first of all announced that the thing was at the door, and so with this “John Fraser,” it has been knocking ever since, finding difficult admission. In the present instance, such delay has done no ill, for Fraser will not sell till the Second Portion come; and with this the mistake will be avoided. What has shocked poor James much more is a circumstance which your Boston Booksellers have no power to avoid: the “enormousness” of the charges in our Port here! He sends me the account of them last Saturday, with eyes — such as drew Priam’s curtains: L31 and odd silver, whereof L28 as duty on Books at L5 per cwt. is charged by the rapacious Custom-house alone! What help, O James? I answer: we cannot bombard the British Custom-house, and sack it, and explode it; we must yield, and pay it the money; thankful for what is still left. — On the whole, one has to learn by trying. This notable finance-expedient, of printing in the one country what is to be sold in the other, did not take Vandalic custom-houses into view, which nevertheless do seem to exist. We must persist in it for the present reciprocal pair of times, having started in it for these: but on future occasions always, we can ask the past; and see whether it be not better to let each side of the water stand on its own basis.

As for your “accounts,” my Friend, I find them clear as day, verifiable to the uttermost farthing. You are a good man to conquer your horror of arithmetic; and, like hydrophobic Peter of Russia making himself a sailor, become an Accountant for my sake. But now will you forgive me if I never do verify this same account, or look at it more in this world except as a memento of affection, its arithmetical ciphers so many hierograms, really sacred to me! A reflection I cannot but make is that at bottom this money was all yours; not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful Friendship. I feel as if I could not examine it without a kind of crime. For the rest, you may rejoice to think that, thanks to you and the Books, and to Heaven over all, I am for the present no longer poor; but have a reasonable prospect of existing, which, as I calculate, is literally the most that money can do for a man. Not for these twelve years, never since I had a house to maintain with money, have I had as much money in my possession as even now. Allah kerim! We will hope all that is good on that side. And herewith enough of it.

You tell me you are but “a reporter”: I like you for thinking so. And you will never know that it is not true, till you have tried. Meanwhile, far be it from me to urge you to a trial before your time come. Ah, it will come, and soon enough; much better, perhaps, if it never came! — A man has “such a baptism to be baptized withal,” no easy baptism; and is “straitened till it be accomplished.” As for me I honor peace before all things; the silence of a great soul is to me greater than anything it will ever say, it ever can say. Be tranquil, my friend; utter no word till you cannot help it; — and think yourself a “reporter,” till you find (not with any great joy) that you are not altogether that!

We have not yet seen Miss Sedgwick: your Letters with her card were sent hither by post we went up next day, but she was out; no meeting could be arranged earlier than tomorrow evening, when we look for her here. Her reception, I have no doubt, will be abundantly flattering in this England. American Notabilities are daily becoming notabler among us; the ties of the two Parishes, Mother and Daughter, getting closer and closer knit. Indissoluble ties: — I reckon that this huge smoky Wen may, for some centuries yet, be the best Mycale for our Saxon Panionium, a yearly meeting-place of “All the Saxons,” from beyond the Atlantic, from the Antipodes, or wherever the restless wanderers dwell and toil. After centuries, if Boston, if New York, have become the most convenient “All-Saxondom,” we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival, and leave the Wen. — Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notabest of all your Notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such Limbs we make in Yankeeland! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed: — I have not traced as much of silent Berserkir-rage, that I remember of, in any other man. “I guess I should not like to be your nigger!” — Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding: a man worthy of the best reception from us; and meeting such, I understand. He did not speak much with me that morning, but seemed not at all to dislike me: I meditate whether it is fit or not fit that I should seek out his residence, and leave my card too, before I go? Probably not; for the man is political, seemingly altogether; has been at the Queen’s levee, &c., &c.: it is simply as a mastiff-mouthed man that he is interesting to me, and not otherwise at all.

In about seven days hence we go to Scotland till the July heats be over. That is our resolution after all. Our address there, probably till the end of August, is “Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, N. B.,” — the residence of my Mother-in-law, within a day’s drive of my Mother’s. Any Letter of yours sent by the old constant address (Cheyne Row, Chelsea) will still find me there; but the other, for that time, will be a day or two shorter. We all go, servant and all. I am bent on writing something; but have no faith that I shall be able. I must try. There is a thing of mine in Fraser for July, of no account, about the “sinking of the Vengeur” as you will see. The French Revolution printing is not to stop; two thirds of it are done; at this present rate, it ought to finish, and the whole be ready, within three weeks hence. A Letter will be here from you about that time, I think: I will print no title-page for the Five Hundred till it do come. “Published by Fraser and Little” would, I suppose, be unobjectionable, though Fraser is the most nervous of creatures: but why put him in at all, since these Five hundred copies are wholly Little’s and yours? Adieu, my Friend. Our blessings are with you and your house. My wife grows better with the hot weather; I, always worse.

Yours ever,
      T. Carlyle

I say not a word about America or Lecturing at present; because
I mean to consider it intently in Scotland, and there to decide.
My Brother is to be at Ischl (not far from Salzburg) during
Summer: he was anxious to have me there, and I to have gone;
but — but — Adieu.

Fraser’s Shop. Books not yet come, but known to be safe, and expected soon. Nay, the dexterous Fraser has argued away L15 of the duty, he says! All is right therefore. N.B. he says you are to send the second Portion in sheets, the weight will be less. This if it be still time. — Basta.

 — T.C.

XLIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 4 July, 1839

I hear tonight, O excellent man! that, unless I send a letter to Boston tomorrow with the peep of day, it will miss the Liverpool steamer, which sails earlier than I dreamed of. O foolish Steamer! I am not ready to write. The facts are not yet ripe, though on the turn of the blush. Couldst not wait a little? Hurry is for slaves; — and Aristotle, if I rightly remember only that little from my college lesson, affirmed that the high-minded man never walked fast. O foolish Steamer! wait but a week, and we will style thee Megalopsyche, and hang thee by the Argo in the stars. Meantime I will not deny the dear and admirable man the fragments of intelligence I have. Be it known unto you then, Thomas Carlyle, that I received yesterday morning your letter by the “Liverpool” with great contentment of heart and mind, in all respects, saving that the American Hegira, so often predicted on your side and prayed on ours, is treated with a most unbecoming levity and oblivion; and, moreover, that you do not seem to have received all the letters I seem to have sent. With the letter came the proof-sheet safe, and shall be presently exhibited to Little and Brown. You must have already the result of our first colloquy on that matter. I can now bring the thing nearer to certainty. But you must print their names as before advised on the title-page.

Nearly four weeks ago Ellis sent me the noble Italian print for my wife.* She is in Boston at this time, and I believe will be glad that I have written without her aid or word this time, for she was so deeply pleased with the gift that she said she never could write to you. It came timely to me at least. It is a right morning thought, full of health and flowing genius, and I rejoice in it. It is fitly framed and tomorrow is to be hung in the parlor.

 ——  —— * Morghen’s engraving of Guido’s Aurora. ——  ——

Our Munroe’s press, you must believe, was of Aristotle’s category of the high-minded and slow. Chiding would do no good. They still said, “We have but one copy, and so but one hand at work”! At last, on the 1st of July, the book appeared in the market, but does not come from the binder fast enough to supply the instant demand; and therefore your two hundred and sixty copies cannot part from New York until the 20th of July. They will be on board the London packet which sails on that day. The publisher has his instructions to bind the volumes to match the old ones. Our year since the publication of the Vols. I. and II. is just complete, and I have set the man on the account, but doubt if I get it before twelve or fourteen days. All the edition is gone except forty copies, he told me; and asked me if I would not begin to print a small edition of this First Series, five hundred, as we have five hundred of the new Series too many, with that view. But I am now so old a fox that I suspend majestically my answer until I have his account. For on the 21st of July I am to pay $462 for the paper of this new book: and by and by the printer’s bill, — whose amount I do not yet know; and it is better to be “slow and high-minded” a little more, since we have been so much, and not go deeper into these men’s debt until we have tasted somewhat of their credit. We are to get, as you know, by contract, near a thousand dollars from these first two volumes; yet a month ago I was forced to borrow two hundred dollars for you on interest, such advances had the account required. But the coming account will enlighten us all.

I am very happy in the “success” of the London lectures. I have no word to add tonight, only that Sterling is not timber-toned, that I love his poetry, that I admire his prose with reservations here and there. What he knows he writes manly and well. Now and then he puts in a pasteboard man; but all our readers here take Blackwood for his sake, and lately seek him in vain. I am getting on with some studies of mine prosperously for me, have got three essays nearly done, and who knows but in the autumn I shall have a book? Meantime my little boy and maid, my mother and wife, are well, and the two ladies send to you and yours affectionate regards, — they would fain say urgent invitations. My mother sends tonight, my wife always.

I shall send you presently a copy of a translation published here of Eckermann, by Margaret Fuller, a friend of mine and of yours, for the sake of its preface mainly. She is a most accomplished lady, and her culture belongs rather to Europe than to America. Good bye.

 — R.W. Emerson

XLV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 8 August, 1839

Dear Friend, — This day came the letter dated 24 June, with “steam packet” written by you on the outside, but no paddles wheeled it through the sea. It is forty-five days old, and too old to do its errand even had it come twenty days sooner — so far as printer and bookbinder are concerned. I am truly grieved for the mischance of the John Fraser, and will duly lecture the sinning bookseller. I noticed the misnomer in a letter of his New York correspondent, and, I believe, mentioned to you in a letter my fear of such a mischance. I am more sorry for the costliness of this adventure to you, though in a gracious note to me you cut down the fine one half. The new books, tardily printed, were tardily bound and tardily put to sea on the packet ship “Ontario,” which left New York for London on the 1st of August. At least this was the promise of Munroe & Co. I stood over the boxes in which they were packing them in the latter days of July. I hope they have not gone to John again, but you must keep an eye to both names….

I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have seen my brave Senator, and seen him as I see him. All my days I have wished that he should go to England, and never more than when I listened two or three times to debates in the House of Commons. We send out usually mean persons as public agents, mere partisans, for whom I can only hope that no man with eyes will meet them; and now those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions, have fallen full on the great forehead which I followed about all my young days, from court-house to senate-chamber, from caucus to street. He has his own sins no doubt, is no saint, is a prodigal. He has drunk this rum of Party too so long, that his strong head is soaked, sometimes even like the soft sponges, but the “man’s a man for a’ that.” Better, he is a great boy, — as wilful, as nonchalant and good-humored. But you must hear him speak, not a show speech which he never does well, but with cause he can strike a stroke like a smith. I owe to him a hundred fine hours and two or three moments of Eloquence. His voice in a great house is admirable. I am sorry if you decided not to visit him. He loves a man, too. I do not know him, but my brother Edward read law with him, and loved him, and afterwards in sick and unfortunate days received the steadiest kindness from him.

Well, I am glad you are to think in earnest in Scotland of our Cisatlantic claims. We shall have more rights over the wise and brave, I believe before many years or months. We shall have more men and a better cause than has yet moved on our stagnant waters. I think our Church, so called, must presently vanish. There is a universal timidity, conformity, and rage; and on the other hand the most resolute realism in the young. The man Alcott bides his time. I have a young poet in this village named Thoreau, who writes the truest verses. I pine to show you my treasures; and tell your wife, we have women who deserve to know her.

 — R.W. Emerson

The Yankees read and study the new volumes of Miscellanies even more than the old. The “Sam Johnson” and “Scott” are great favorites. Stearns Wheeler corrected proofs affectionately to the last. Truth and Health be with you alway!

XLVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839

Dear Emerson, — A cheerful and right welcome Letter of yours, dated 4th July, reached me here, duly forwarded, some three weeks ago; I delayed answering till there could some definite statement, as to bales of literature shipped or landed, or other matter of business forwarded a stage, be made. I am here, with my Wife, rusticating again, these two months; amid diluvian rains, Chartism, Teetotalism, deficient harvest, and general complaint and confusion; which not being able to mend, all that I can do is to heed them as little as possible. “What care I for the house? I am only a lodger.” On the whole, I have sat under the wing of Saint Swithin; uncheery, sluggish, murky, as the wettest of his Days; — hoping always, nevertheless, that blue sky, figurative and real, does exist, and will demonstrate itself by and by. I have been the stupidest and laziest of men. I could not write even to you, till some palpable call told me I must.

Yesternight, however, there arrives a despatch from Fraser, apprising me that the American Miscellanies, second cargo, are announced from Portsmouth, and “will probably be in the River tomorrow”; where accordingly they in all likelihood now are, a fair landing and good welcome to them! Fraser “knows not whether they are bound or not”; but will soon know. The first cargo, of which I have a specimen here, contented him extremely; only there was one fatality, the cloth of the binding was multiplex, party-colored, some sets done in green, others in red, blue, perhaps skyblue! Now if the second cargo were not multiplex, party-colored, nay multiplex, in exact concordance with the first, as seemed almost impossible — ? — Alas, in that case, one could not well predict the issue! — Seriously, it is a most handsome Book you have made; and I have nothing to return but thanks and again thanks. By the bye, if you do print a small second edition of the First Portion, I might have had a small set of errata ready: but where are they? The Book only came into my hand here a few days ago; and I have been whipt from post to pillar without will of my own, without energy to form a will! The only glaring error I recollect at this moment is one somewhere in the second article on Jean Paul: “Osion” (I think, or some such thing) instead of “Orson”: it is not an original American error, but copied from the English; if the Printer get his eye upon it, let him rectify; if not, not, I deserve to have it stand against me there. Fraser’s joy, should the Books prove either unbound or multiplex in the right way, will be great and unalloyed; he calculates on selling all the copies very soon. He has begun reprinting Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister too, the Apprenticeship and Travels under one; and hopes to remunerate himself for that by and by: whether there will then remain any small peculium for me is but uncertain; meanwhile I correct the press, nothing doubting. One of these I call my best Translation, the other my worst; I have read that latter, the Apprenticeship, again in these weeks; not without surprise, disappointment, nay, aversion here and there, yet on the whole with ever new esteem. I find I can pardon all things in a man except purblindness, falseness of vision, — for, indeed, does not that presuppose every other kind of falseness?

But let me hasten to say that the French Revolution, five hundred strong for the New England market, is also, as Fraser advises, “to go to sea in three days.” It is bound in red cloth, gilt; a pretty book, James says; which he will sell for twenty-five shillings here; — nay, the London brotherhood have “subscribed” for one hundred and eighty at once, which he considers great work. I directed him to consign to Little and Brown in Boston, the property of the thing yours, with such phraseology and formalities as they use in those cases. I paid him for it yesterday (to save discount) L95; that is the whole cost to me, twenty or thirty pounds more than was once calculated on. Do the best with it you can, my friend; and never mind the result. If the thing fail, as is likely enough, we will simply quit that transport trade, and my experience must be paid for. The Title-page was “Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown,” then in a second line and smaller type, “London James Fraser”; to which arrangement James made not the slightest objection, or indeed rather seemed to like it. — So much for trade matters: is it not enough? I declare I blush sometimes, and wonder where the good Emerson gets all his patience. We shall be through the affair one day, and find something better to speak about than dollars and pounds. And yet, as you will say, why not even of dollars? Ah, there are leaden-worded [bills] of exchange I have seen which have had an almost sacred character to me! Pauca verba.

Doubt not your new utterances are eagerly waited for here; above all things the “Book” is what I want to see. You might have told me what it was about. We shall see by and by. A man that has discerned somewhat, and knows it for himself, let him speak it out, and thank Heaven. I pray that they do not confuse you by praises; their blame will do no harm at all. Praise is sweet to all men; and yet alas, alas, if the light of one’s own heart go out, bedimmed with poor vapors and sickly false glitterings and flashings, what profit is it! Happier in darkness, in all manner of mere outward darkness, misfortune and neglect, “so that thou canst endure,” — which however one cannot to all lengths. God speed you, my Brother! I hope all good things of you; and wonder whether like Phoebus Apollo you are destined to be a youth forever. — Sterling will be right glad to hear your praises; not unmerited, for he is a man among millions that John of mine, though his perpetual mobility wears me out at times. Did he ever write to you? His latest speculation was that he should and would; but I fancy it is among the clouds again. I hear from him the other day, out of Welsh villages where he passed his boyhood, &c., all in a flow of “lyrical recognition,” hope, faith, and sanguine unrest; I have even some thoughts of returning by Bristol (in a week or so, that must be), and seeing him. The dog has been reviewing me, he says, and it is coming out in the next Westminster! He hates terribly my doctrine of “Silence.” As to America and lecturing, I cannot in this torpid condition venture to say one word. Really it is not impossible; and yet lecturing is a thing I shall never grow to like; still less lionizing, Martineau-ing: Ach Gott! My Wife sends a thousand regards; she will never get across the ocean, you must come to her; she was almost dead crossing from Liverpool hither, and declares she will never go to sea for any purpose whatsoever again. Never till next time! My good old Mother is here, my Brother John (home with his Duke from Italy); all send blessings and affection to you and yours. Adieu till I get to London.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

XLVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1839

My Dear Emerson, — What a time since we have written to one another! was it you that defalcated? Alas, I fear it was myself; I have had a feeling these nine or ten weeks that you were expecting to hear from me; that I absolutely could not write. Your kind gift of Fuller’s Eckermann* was handed in to our Hackney coach, in Regent Street, as we wended homewards from the railway and Scotland, on perhaps the 8th of September last; a welcome memorial of distant friends and doings: nay, perhaps there was a Letter two weeks prior to that: — I am a great sinner! But the truth is, I could not write; and now I can and do it!

 ——  ——  — * “Conversations with Goethe. Translated from the German of Eckermann. By S.M. Fuller.” Boston, 1839. This was the fourth volume in the series of “Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature,” edited by George Ripley. The book has a characteristic Preface by Miss Fuller, in which she speaks of Carlyle as “the only competent English critic” of Goethe. ——  ——  —

Our sojourn in Scotland was stagnant, sad; but tranquil, well let alone, — an indispensable blessing to a poor creature fretted to fiddle-strings, as I grow to be in this Babylon, take it as I will. We had eight weeks of desolate rain; with about eight days bright as diamonds intercalated in that black monotony of bad weather. The old Hills are the same; the old Streams go gushing along as in past years, in past ages; but he that looks on them is no longer the same: and the old Friends, where are they? I walk silent through my old haunts in that country; sunk usually in inexpressible reflections, in an immeasurable chaos of musings and mopings that cannot be reflected or articulated. The only work I had on hand was one that would not prosper with me: an Article for the Quarterly Review on the state of the Working Classes here. The thoughts were familiar to me, old, many years old; but the utterance of them, in what spoken dialect to utter them! The Quarterly Review was not an eligible vehicle, and yet the eligiblest; of Whigs, abandoned to Dilettantism and withered sceptical conventionality, there was no hope at all; the London-and-Westminster Radicals, wedded to their Benthamee Formulas, and tremulous at their own shadows, expressly rejected my proposal many months ago: Tories alone remained; Tories I often think have more stuff in them, in spite of their blindness, than any other class we have; — Walter Scott’s sympathy with his fellow creatures, what is it compared with Sydney Smith’s, with a Poor Law Commissioner’s! Well: this thing would not prosper with me in Scotland at all; nor here at all, where nevertheless I had to persist writing; writing and burning, and cursing my destiny, and then again writing. Finally the thing came out, as an Essay on Chartism; was shown to Lockhart, according to agreement; was praised by him, but was also found unsuitable by him; suitable to explode a whole fleet of Quarterlies into sky-rockets in these times! And now Fraser publishes it himself, with some additions, as a little Volume; and it will go forth in a week or two on its own footing; and England will see what she has to say to it, whether something or nothing; and one man, as usual, is right glad that he has nothing more to do with it. This is the reason why I could not write. I mean to send you the Proof-sheets of this thing, to do with as you see cause; there will be but some five or six, I think. It is probable my New England brothers may approve some portions of it; may be curious to see it reprinted; you ought to say Yes or No in regard to that. I think I will send all the sheets together; or at farthest, at two times.

Fraser, when we returned hither, had already received his Miscellanies; had about despatched his five hundred French Revolutions, insured and so, forth, consigned, I suppose, to your protection and the proper booksellers; probably they have got over from New York into your neighborhood before now. Much good may they do you! The Miscellanies, with their variegated binding, proved to be in perfect order; and are now all sold; with much regret from poor James that we had not a thousand more of them! This thousand he now sets about providing by his own industry, poor man; I am revising the American copy in these days; the printer is to proceed forthwith. I admire the good Stearns Wheeler as I proceed; I write to him my thanks by this post, and send him by Kennet a copy of Goethe’s Meister, for symbol of acknowledgment. Another copy goes off for you, to the care of Little and Company. Fraser has got it out two weeks ago; a respectable enough book, now that the version is corrected somewhat. Tell me whether you dislike it less; what you do think of it? By the by, have you not learned to read German now? I rather think you have. It is three months spent well, if ever months were, for a thinking Englishman of this age. — I hope Kennet will use more despatch than he sometimes does. Thank Heaven for these Boston Steamers they project! May the Nereids and Poseidon favor them! They will bring us a thousand miles nearer, at one step; by and by we shall be of one parish after all.

During Autumn I speculated often about a Hegira into New England this very year: but alas! my horror of Lecturing continues great; and what else is there for me to do there? These several years I have had no wish so pressing as to hold my peace. I begin again to feel some use in articulate speech; perhaps I shall one day have something that I want to utter even in your side of the water. We shall see. Patience, and shuffle the cards. — I saw no more of Webster; did not even learn well where he was, till lately I noticed in the Newspapers that he had gone home again. A certain Mr. Brown (I think) brought me a letter from you, not long since; I forwarded him to Cambridge and Scotland: a modest inoffensive man. He said he had never personally met with Emerson. My Wife recalled to him the story of the Scotch Traveler on the top of Vesuvius: “Never saw so beautiful a scene in the world!”— “Nor I,” replied a stranger standing there, “except once; on the top of Dunmiot, in the Ochil Hills in Scotland.”— “Good Heavens! That is a part of my Estate, and I was never there! I will go thither.” Yes, do! — We have seen no other Transoceanic that I remember. We expect your Book soon! We know the subject of your Winter Lectures too; at least Miss Martineau thinks she does, and makes us think so. Heaven speed the work! Heaven send my good Emerson a clear utterance, in all right ways, of the nobleness that dwells in him! He knows what silence means; let him know speech also, in its season the two are like canvas and pigment, like darkness and light-image painted thereon; the one is essential to the other, not possible without the other.

Poor Miss Martineau is in Newcastle-on-Tyne this winter; sick, painfully not dangerously; with a surgical brother-in-law. Her meagre didacticalities afflict me no more; but also her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more. We wish she were back. This silence, I calculate, forced silence, will do her much good. If I were a Legislator, I would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours: it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow. Such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, — like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice! Silence, silence! Sterling sent you a Letter from Clifton, which I set under way here, having added the address. He is not well again, the good Sterling; talks of Madeira this season again: but I hope otherwise. You of course read his sublime “article”? I tell him it was — a thing untellable!

Mr. Southey has fallen, it seems, into a mournful condition: oblivion, mute hebetation, loss of all faculty. He suffered greatly, nursing his former wife in her insanity, for years till her relief by death; suffered, worked, and made no moan; the brunt of the task over, he sank into collapse in the hands of a new wife he had just wedded. What a lot for him; for her especially! The most excitable but most methodic man I have ever seen. [Greek] that is a word that awaits us all. — I have my brother here at present; though talking of Lisbon with his Buccleuchs. My Wife seems better than of late winters. I actually had a Horse, nay actually have it, though it has gone to the country till the mud abate again! It did me perceptible good; I mean to try it farther. I am no longer so desperately poor as I have been for twelve years back; sentence of starvation or beggary seems revoked at last, a blessedness really very considerable. Thanks, thanks! We send a thousand regards to the two little ones, to the two mothers. Valete nostrum memores.

 — T. Carlyle

XLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 12 December, 1839

My Dear Friend, — Not until the 29th of November did the five hundred copies of the French Revolution arrive in Boston. Fraser unhappily sent them to New York, whence they came not without long delays. They came in perfectly good order, not in the pretty red you told us of, but in a sober green; — not so handsome and salable a back, our booksellers said, as their own; but in every other respect a good book. The duties at the New York Custom House on these and a quantity of other books sent by Fraser amounted to $400.36, whereof, I understand, the French Revolution pays for its share $243. No bill has been brought us for freight, so we conclude that you have paid it. I confided the book very much to the conscience and discretion of Little and Brown, and after some ciphering they settle to sell it at $3.75 per copy, wherefrom you are to get the cost of the book, and (say) $1.10 per copy profit, and no more. The booksellers eat the rest. The book is rather too dear for our market of cheap manufactures, and therefore we are obliged to give the booksellers a good percentage to get it off at all: for we stand in daily danger of a cheap edition from some rival neighbor. I hope to give you good news of its sale soon, although I have been assured today that no book sells, the times are so bad. Brown had disposed of fifty or sixty copies to the trade, and twelve at retail. He doubted not to sell them all in six months….

Several persons have asked me to get some copies of the German Romance sent over here for sale. Last week a gentleman desired me to say he wanted four copies, and today I have been charged to procure another. I think, if you will send me by Little and Brown, through Longman, six copies, we can find an immediate market.

It gives me great joy to write to my friend once more, slow as you may think me to use the privilege. For a good while I dared believe you were coming hither, and why should I write? — and now for weeks I have been absorbed in my foolish lectures, of which only two are yet delivered and ended. There should be eight more; subject, “The Present Age.” Out of these follies I remember you with glad heart. Lately I had Sterling’s letter, which, since I have read his article on you, I am determined to answer speedily. I delighted in the spirit of that paper, loving you so well and accusing you so conscientiously. What does he at Clifton? If you communicate with him, tell him I thank him for his letter, and hold him dear. I am very happy lately in adding one or two new friends to my little circle, and you may be sure every friend of mine is a friend of yours. So when you come here you shall not be lonely. A new person is always to me a great event, and will not let me sleep. — I believe I was not wise to volunteer myself to this fever fit of lecturing again. I ought to have written instead in silence and serenity. Yet I work better under this base necessity, and then I have a certain delight (base also?) in speaking to a multitude. But my joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this publication of myself. — After ten or twelve weeks I think I shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture.

I beg you will write to me and tell me what you do, and give me good news of your wife and your brother. Can they not see the necessity of your coming to look after your American interests? My wife and mother love both you and them. A young man of New York told me the other day he was about getting you an invitation from an Association in that city to give them a course of lectures on such terms as would at least make you whole in the expenses of coming thither. We could easily do that in Boston.

 — R.W. Emerson

What manner of person is Heraud? Do you read Landor, or know him, O seeing man? Farewell!

XLIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 6 January, 1840

My Dear Emerson, — It is you, I surely think, that are in my debt now;* nevertheless I must fling you another word: may it cross one from you coming hither — as near the Lizard Point as it likes!

 * The preceding letter had not yet arrived.

Some four sheets making a Pamphlet called Chartism addressed to you at Concord are, I suppose, snorting along through the waters this morning, part of the Cargo of the “British Queen.” At least I gave them to Mr. Brown (your unseen friend) about ten days ago, who promised to dispose of them; the “British Queen,” he said, was the earliest chance. The Pamphlet itself (or rather booklet, for Fraser has gilt it, &c., and asks five shillings for it as a Book) is out since then; radicals and others yelping considerably in a discordant manner about it; I have nothing other to say to you about it than what I said last time, that the sheets were yours to do with as you saw good, — to burn if you reckoned that fittest. It is not entirely a Political Pamphlet; nay, there are one or two things in it which my American Friends specially may like: but the interests discussed are altogether English, and cannot be considered as likely to concern New-Englishmen very much. However, it will probably be itself in your hand before this sheet, and you will have determined what is fit.

A copy of Wilhelm Meister, two copies, one for Stearns Wheeler, are probably in some of the “Line Ships” at this time too: good voyage to them! The French Revolutions were all shipped, invoiced, &c.; they have, I will suppose, arrived safe, as we shall hear by and by. What freightages, landings, and embarkments! For only two days ago I sent you off, through Kennet, another Book: John Sterling’s Poems, which he has collected into a volume. Poor John has overworked himself again, or the climate without fault on his side has proved too hard for him: he sails for Madeira again next week! His Doctors tell me there is no intrinsic danger; but they judge the measure safe as one of precaution. It is very mortifying he had nestled himself down at Clifton, thinking he might now hope to continue there; and lo! he has to fly again. — Did you get his letter? The address to him now will be, for three months to come, “Edward Sterling, Esq., South Place, Knightsbridge, London,” his Father’s designation.

Farther I must not omit to say that Richard Monckton Milnes purposes, through the strength of Heaven, to review you! In the next Number of the London and Westminster, the courageous youth will do this feat, if they let him. Nay, he has already done it, the Paper being actually written he employed me last week in negotiating with the Editors about it; and their answer was, “Send us the Paper, it promises very well.” We shall see whether it comes out or not; keeping silence till then. Milnes is a Tory Member of Parliament; think of that! For the rest, he describes his religion in these terms: “I profess to be a Crypto-Catholic.” Conceive the man! A most bland-smiling, semi-quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianized little man, who has long olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society! Let us hear now what he will say, of the American Vates.*

 * The end of this letter has been cut off.

L. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 17 January, 1840

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter of the 12th of December, greatly, to my satisfaction, has arrived; the struggling Steamship, in spite of all hurricanes, has brought it safe across the waters to me. I find it good to write you a word in return straightway; though I think there are already two, or perhaps even three, messages of mine to you flying about unacknowledged somewhere under the moon; nay, the last of them perhaps may go by the same packet as this, — having been forwarded, as this will be, to Liverpool, after the “British Queen” sailed from London.

Your account of the French Revolution packages, and prognosis of what Little and Brown will do with them, is altogether as it should be. I apprised Fraser instantly of his invoiceless Books, &c.; he answers, that order has been taken in that long since, “instructions” sent, and, I conclude, arrangements for bills least of all forgotten. I mentioned what share of the duty was his; and that your men meant to draw on him for it. That is all right. As to the French Revolution, I agree with your Booksellers altogether about it; the American Edition actually pleases myself better for looking at; nor do I know that this new English one has much superiority for use: it is despicably printed, I fear, so far as false spellings and other slovenlinesses can go. Fraser “finds the people like it”; credat Judaeus; — as for me, I have told him I will not print any more with that man, but with some other man. Curious enough, the price Little and Brown have fixed upon was the price I remember guessing at beforehand, and the result they propose to realize for me corresponds closely with my prophecy too. Thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the trouble you never grudge to take. We shall get ourselves handsomely out of this export and import speculation; and know, taught at a rather cheap rate, not to embark in the like again.

There went off a Wilhelm Meister for you, and a letter to announce it, several weeks ago; that was message first. Your traveling neighbor, Brown, took charge of a Pamphlet named Chartism, to be put into the “British Queen’s” Letter-bag (where I hope, and doubt not, he did put it, though I have seen nothing of him since); that and a letter in reference to it was message second. Thirdly, I sent off a volume of Poems by Sterling, likewise announced in that letter. And now this that I actually write is the fourth (it turns out to be) and last of all the messages. Let us take Arithmetic along with us in all things. — Of Chartism I have nothing farther to say, except that Fraser is striking off another One Thousand copies to be called Second Edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative Sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a Tory, — thank Heaven. The Miscellanies are at press; at two presses; to be out, as Hope asseverates, in March: five volumes, without Chartism; with Hoffmann and Tieck from German Romance, stuck in somewhere as Appendix; with some other trifles stuck in elsewhere, chiefly as Appendix; and no essential change from the Boston Edition. Fraser, “overwhelmed with business,” does not yet send me his net result of those Two Hundred and Fifty Copies sold off some time ago; so soon as he does, you shall hear of it for your satisfaction. — As to German Romance, tell my friends that it has been out of print these ten years; procurable, of late not without difficulty, only in the Old-Bookshops. The comfort is that the best part of it stands in the new Wilhelm Meister: Fraser and I had some thought of adding Tieck’s and Richter’s parts, had they suited for a volume; the rest may without detriment to anybody perish.

Such press-correctings and arrangings waste my time here, not in the agreeablest way. I begin, though in as sulky a state of health as ever, to look again towards some new kind of work. I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. Meanwhile I read rubbish of Books; Eichhorn, Grimm, &c.; very considerable rubbish; one grain in the cart load worth pocketing. It is pity I have no appetite for lecturing! Many applications have been made to me here; — none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine, innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers’ shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to me. — For you, good friend, I account you luckier; I do verily: lecture there what innumerable things you have got to say on “The Present Age”; — yet withal do not forget to write either, for that is the lasting plan after all. I have a curious Note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a Scotch Mr. Erskine (famed among the saints here) by a Madame Necker, Madame de Stael’s kinswoman, to whom he, the said Mr. Erskine, had lent your first Pamphlet at Geneva. She regards you with a certain love, yet a shuddering love. She says, “Cela sent l’Americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu’on doit de meme conquerir le monde intellectuel”! What R.M. Milnes will say of you we hope also to see. — I know both Heraud and Landor; but alas, what room is here! Another sheet with less of “Arithmetic” in it will soon be allowed me. Adieu, dear friend.

Yours, ever and ever,
                T. Carlyle

LI. Emerson to Carlyle*

New York, 18 March, 1840

My Dear Friend, — I have just seen the steamer “British Queen” enter the harbor from sea, and here lies the “Great Western,” to sail tomorrow. I will not resist hints so broad upon my long procrastinations. You shall have at least a tardy acknowledgment that I received in January your letter of December, which I should have answered at once had it not found me absorbed in writing foolish lectures which were then in high tide. I had written you, a little earlier, tidings of the receipt of your French Revolution. Your letter was very welcome, as all your letters are. I have since seen tidings of the Essay on Chartism in an English periodical, but have not yet got my proof-sheets. They are probably still rolling somewhere outside of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest passages: only one has come in for many a week. We will be as patient as we can.

 ——  —— * This letter appeared in the Athenaeum, for July 22, 1882 ——  ——

I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour’s sail. The city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls. And how they multiply! They estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. But I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other’s secret and each to keep the other’s madness in countenance. You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason. I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground. Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an universal workman. He solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body. I wish I may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope. And yet I am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I never shall. We will see.

Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American verses and prose of good intent? My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good will if written at all. I saw some poetical fragments which charmed me, — if only the writer consents to give them to the public.

I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself. I ended in the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age. They are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and Sapience. I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen. We shall have many Richmonds in the field presently. I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance. I left my wife, and boy, and girl, — the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house, — well at home a week ago. The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer when I am tired. Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy. I brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. All these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years.

My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for your London disciples. May love and truth inspire them! I can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores. Our saintly Dr. T — , I am told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron’s daughter, informing the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends’ brains, and him the very monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years. But do come in one of Mr. Cunard’s ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. If they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will pay for. Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife’s also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful Guido.

You told me to send you no more accounts. But I certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers’ accounts and long delays, by sharing them. I have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. Farewell.

 — R.W.E.

LII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840

My Dear Emerson, — A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a D’Orsay Portrait of myself, I see not what there is! Do you read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world. Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you would. — As to the D’Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity: Count D’Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature likeness of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte’s Marshals, and is, alas, — Count D’Orsay! The Portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to undergo any more eight-o’clock dinners for such an object. — Now if I do not send you the Portrait, after all?

Fraser’s account of the Miscellanies stood legibly extended over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to look upon. I trouble you only with the result. Two Hundred and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two “imperfect”): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November, he told me he was “holding back,” not to run entirely out. Well, of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that belonged to me was L239, — the L261 had been the expense of handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in the coin for it! “Rules of the Trade”; — it is a Trade, one would surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However, — not to spend an instant polluting one’s eyesight with that side of it, — let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America, that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams visit it; — mud and sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old consisted of. — I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good-news that James is altogether content with the “progress” of all these Books, including even the well-abused Chartism Book. We are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the Miscellanies; of which I hope to send you a copy before long.

And now why do not you write to me? Your Lectures must be done long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is determined by what we do not write! There is nothing truer than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He whom it concerns can consider it. — You have doubtless seen Milnes’s review of you. I know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of Emerson, to hit the nail on the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is gently, not unlovingly done; — and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of a man.

You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as “wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing.” To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still — with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty — out of Bedlam. He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to “List the Music of the spheres.” He escapes assassination, as I calculate, chiefly by being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant. — You cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. John Mill said, “I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the h’s!” Really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, “The highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible.”— “That is precisely what I am doing!” answered the aspiring, unaspirating.* — Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding, — expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right, — as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and sides of an object are all that he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy, with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that! They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion’s-providers; but consider them a worthless species. — When will you write, then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to give “On Heroes and Hero-worship,” — from Odin to Robert Burns! My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household!

Yours ever,
         T. Carlyle

 ——  —— * There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the Dial for October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively with Carlyle’s sketch. ——  ——

LIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 21 April, 1840

My Dear Friend, — Three weeks ago I received a letter from you following another in the week before, which I should have immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr. Grinnell — a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence, R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and, though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such — is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle, I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters, and companions’ sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more.

Your letter announces Wilhelm Meister, Sterling’s Poems, and Chartism. I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no Mercury. Wilhelm and Sterling have not yet made their appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived.

Chartism arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it. Their estimate is: —

    Printing page for page with copy ……. $63.35
     Paper ……………………………….44.00
     Binding ……………………………. 90.00
     Total ……………………………… $197.35

Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound. The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller’s commission twenty percent on the Retail price. The author’s profit fifteen cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published, — no unlikely event, — to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days. I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am expecting hourly from Munroe’s clerk an entire account of R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful experiments myself.

I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger. — I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings. I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face.

22 April. — Last evening came true the promised account drawn up by Munroe’s clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I sent you, viz. of French Revolution, ended, with a balance of $9.53 in your favor…. I send you also a paper which Munroe drew up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the first and second volumes [of the Miscellanies] were concerned, the result had accorded with the promise that you should have $1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper, but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend of yours in Fraser’s shop at work on this paper, and see if this statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm, — chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner, — and yet it is a duty to understand one’s own affair. When I ask, at each six months’ reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary if it comes to good, — the account of the London five hundred French Revolution is not yet six months old, and so does not come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first and second volumes of the Miscellanies, for the same reason. They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend Margaret Fuller’s Journal — after many false baptisms now saying it will be called The Dial, and which is to appear in July — will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else: but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time. There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books, least of all on his books; but in a lecture on Literature, in my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you? I know not.

A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people in England have a school called “Alcott House” after my friend. At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I will release your eyes.

Yours always,
         R.W. Emerson

LIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 June, 1840

My Dear Carlyle, — Since I wrote a couple of letters to you, — I know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago, — there has come to me Wilhelm Meister in three volumes, goodly to see, good to read, — indeed quite irresistible; — for though I thought I knew it all, I began at the beginning and read to the end of the Apprenticeship, and no doubt shall despatch the Travels, on the earliest holiday. My conclusions and inferences therefrom I will spare you now, since I appended them to a piece I had been copying fairly for Margaret Fuller’s Dial,— “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” and which is the substance of a lecture in my last winter’s course. But I learn that my paper is crowded out of the first Number, and is not to appear until October. I will not reckon the accidents that threaten the ghost of an article through three months of pre-existence! Meantime, I rest your glad debtor for the good book. With it came Sterling’s Poems, which, in the interim, I have acknowledged in a letter to him. Sumner has since brought me a gay letter from yourself, concerning, in part, Landor and Heraud; in which as I know justice is not done to the one I suppose it is not done to the other. But Heraud I give up freely to your tender mercies: I have no wish to save him. Landor can be shorn of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for me to admire. Many years ago I have read a hundred fine memorable things in the Imaginary Conversations, though I know well the faults of that book, and the Pericles and Aspasia within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the man Landor when I was in Florence, and he was very kind to me in answering a multitude of questions. His speech, I remember, was below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, I own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and terminated sometimes by a sudden tumble. I suspect you of very short and dashing reading in his books; and yet I should think you would like him, — both of you such glorious haters of cant. Forgive me, I have put you two together twenty times in my thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and vivacity. But you must leave me to my bad taste and my perverse and whimsical combinations.

I have written to Mr. Milnes who sent me by Sumner a copy of his article with a note. I addressed my letter to him at “London,” — no more. Will it ever reach him? I told him that if I should print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash, unwhipped generalization. For my journals, which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures. I ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid?

I shall try and persuade Mr. Calvert, who has sent to me for a letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph portrait of our Concord “Battle-field,” so called, and village, that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in which we walk and love you. The view includes my Grandfather’s house (under the trees near the Monument), in which I lived for a time until I married and bought my present house, which is not in the scope of this drawing. I will roll up two of them, and, as Sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, I beg you will send him also this particle of foreign parts.

With this, or presently after it, I shall send a copy of the Dial. It is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and I have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which I wish Sterling and Milnes to see. In this number what say you to the Elegy written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me, — Henry Thoreau? A criticism on Persius is his also. From the papers of my brother Charles, I gave them the fragments on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke: and my brother Edward wrote the little Farewell, when last he left his home. The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know. I am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown. They promised it at this time. It will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany it. But I am determined, if I can, to send one letter which is not on business. Send me some word of the Lectures. I have yet seen only the initial notices. Surely you will send me some time the D’Orsay portrait. Sumner thinks Mrs. Carlyle was very well when he saw her last, which makes me glad. — I wish you both to love me, as I am affectionately Yours,

 — R.W. Emerson

LV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 2 July, 1840

My Dear Emerson, — Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent Arithmetic you sent me! It is many weeks, perhaps it is months, since the worthy citizen — your Host as I understood you in some of your Northern States — stept in here, one mild evening, with his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into France. Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours, beautiful Disciples of yours: — I pray you forgive me! I have been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in all ways. Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got the Bibliopoliana back from Fraser; to whom, as you recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand such things, had straightway handed them for examination. I always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken. I did not urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin.

Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of money. A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade; mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. So he thinks. The only point on which I heard him make any criticism was on what he called, if I remember, “the number of Copies delivered,” — that is to say, delivered by the Printer and Binder as actually available for sale. The edition being of a Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are “waste.” Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of adding one for every fifty beforehand, whereby the waste is usually made good, and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some dozen called “Author’s copies” over and above. Fraser supposes your Printers have a different custom. That is all. The rest is apparently every-way right; is to be received with faith; with faith, charity, and even hope, — and packed into the bottom of one’s drawer, never to be looked at more except on the outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men! In that capacity it shall lie there.

My Lectures were in May, about Great Men. The misery of it was hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful. I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience; as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them. At times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak. The beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager attention. I meant to tell them, among other things, that man was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour, — Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on Mahomet (“the Hero as Prophet”) astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his “bastard Christianity,” than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than almost any of you! — Not so much as Oliver Cromwell (“the Hero as King”) would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted to be and to have been Nothing, chaff that would not grow: my poor Mahomet “was wheat with barn sweepings”; Nature had tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the wheat, behold she had said Yes to it, and it was growing! — On the whole, I fear I did little but confuse my esteemed audience: I was amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill; — gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest speech of a man’s heart goes into men’s hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. Withal I regretted that I had not six months of preaching, whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! In the fire of the moment I had all but decided on setting out for America this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion there. Quit your paper formulas, my brethren, — equivalent to old wooden idols, undivine as they: in the name of God, understand that you are alive, and that God is alive! Did the Upholsterer make this Universe? Were you created by the Tailor? I tell you, and conjure you to believe me literally, No, a thousand times No! Thus did I mean to preach, on “Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic”; in America too. Alas! the fire of determination died away again: all that I did resolve upon was to write these Lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. Two of them accordingly are actually written; the Third to be begun on Monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of May. Whether I go to preach them a second time extempore in America rests once more with the Destinies. It is a shame to talk so much about a thing, and have it still hang in nubibus: but I was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than I had ever before been. A month or two now, I suppose, will bring us back to the old nonentity again. Is there, at bottom, in the world or out of it, anything one would like so well, with one’s whole heart well, as PEACE? Is lecturing and noise the way to get at that? Popular lecturer! Popular writer! If they would undertake in Chancery, or Heaven’s Chancery, to make a wise man Mahomet Second and Greater, “Mahomet of Saxondom,” not reviewed only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all Bulldom, Yankee-doodle-doodom, Felondom New Zealand, under the Tropics and in part of Flanders, — would he not rather answer: Thank you; but in a few years I shall be dead, twelve Centuries will have become Eternity; part of Flanders Immensity: we will sit still here if you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! Enough of this.

Richard Milnes had a Letter from you, one morning lately, when I met him at old Rogers’s. He is brisk as ever; his kindly Dilettantism looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of Earnest by and by. He has a new volume of Poems out: I advised him to try Prose; he admitted that Poetry would not be generally read again in these ages, — but pleaded, “It was so convenient for veiling commonplace!” The honest little heart! — We did not know what to make of the bright Miss — here; she fell in love with my wife; — the contrary, I doubt, with me: my hard realism jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. Is not all that very morbid, — unworthy the children of Odin, not to speak of Luther, Knox, and the other Brave? I can do nothing with vapors, but wish them condensed. Kennet had a copy of the English Miscellanies for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was just a day or two before your advice to try Green henceforth. Has the Meister ever arrived? I received a Controversial Volume from Mr. Ripley: pray thank him very kindly. Somebody borrowed the Book from me; I have not yet read it. I did read a Pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. Norton* surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are jarring about become? As healthy worshiping Paganism is to Seneca and Company, so is healthy worshiping Christianity to — I had rather not work the sum! — Send me some swift news of yourself, dear Emerson. We salute you and yours, in all heartiness of brotherhood.

Yours ever and always —
                  T. Carlyle

 * Professor Andrews Norton. The controversy was that occasioned by Professor Norton’s Discourse on “The Latest Form of Infidelity.”

LVI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 August, 1840

My Dear Carlyle, — I fear, nay I know, that when I wrote last to you, about the 1st of July, I promised to follow my sheet immediately with a bookseller’s account. The bookseller did presently after render his account, but on its face appeared the fact — which with many and by me unanswerable reasons they supported — that the balance thereon credited to you was not payable until the 1st of October. The account is footed “Net sales of French Revolution to 1 July, 1840, due October 1, $249.77.” Let us hope then that we shall get, not only a new page of statement, but also some small payment in money a month hence. Having no better story to tell, I told nothing.

But I will not let the second of the Cunard boats leave Boston without a word to you. Since I wrote by Calvert came your letter describing your lectures and their success: very welcome news, for a good London newspaper, which I consulted, promised reports, but gave none. I have heard so oft of your projected trip to America, that my ear would now be dull, and my faith cold, but that I wish it so much. My friend, your audience still waits for you here willing and eager, and greatly larger no doubt than it would have been when the matter was first debated.

Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism, and the Dial, poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public. But they would hardly be able to fasten on so huge a man as you are any party badge. We must all hear you for ourselves. But beside my own hunger to see and know you, and to hear you speak at ease and at large under my own roof, I have a growing desire to present you to three or four friends, and them to you. Almost all my life has been passed alone. Within three or four years I have been drawing nearer to a few men and women whose love gives me in these days more happiness than I can write of. How gladly I would bring your Jovial light upon this friendly constellation, and make you too know my distant riches! We have our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. I sometimes fancy our cipher is larger and easier to read than that of your English society.

You will naturally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this, — I who have leisure, and write. No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility, — anything but history. And yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible, and challenges a painter. I can brag little of my diligence or achievement this summer. I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick kiln instead of a house. — Consider, however, that all summer I see a good deal of company, — so near as my fields are to the city. But next winter I think to omit lectures, and write more faithfully. Hope for me that I shall get a book ready to send you by New-Year’s-day.

Sumner came to see me the other day. I was glad to learn all the little that he knew of you and yours. I do not wonder you set so lightly by my talkative countryman. He has brought nothing home but names, dates, and prefaces. At Cambridge last week I saw Brown for the first time. I had little opportunity to learn what he knew. Mr. Hume has never yet shown his face here. He sent me his Poems from New York, and then went South, and I know no more of him.

My Mother and Wife send you kind regards and best wishes, — to you and all your house. Tell your wife that I hate to hear that she cannot sail the seas. Perhaps now she is stronger she will be a better sailor. For the sake of America will she not try the trip to Leith again? It is only twelve days from Liverpool to Boston. Love, truth, and power abide with you always!

 — R.W.E.

LVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 26 September, 1840

My Dear Emerson, — Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions, uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me, even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as my wont is, I was half asleep: — perhaps you do not know the combination of these two predicables in one and the same unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I must speak.

According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I do not go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker’s fairy shoes, “in a moment of enthusiasm.” The nervous flutter of May Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for me; that I ought devoutly to thank Heaven there is no absolute compulsion laid on me at present to speak! My notion in general was but an absurd one: I fancied I might go across the sea, open my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the Union like a very lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months; — till I had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to come, or forever and a day perhaps! That was my poor little day dream; — incapable of being realized. It appears, I have to stay here, in this brick Babylon; tugging at my chains, which will not break for me: the less I tug, the better. Ah me! On the whole, I have written down my last course of lectures, and shall probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to America! It is truly very weak to speak about that matter so often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come. Frey ist das Herz, as Goethe says, doch ist der Fuss gebunden. After innumerable projects, and invitations towards all the four winds, for this summer, I have ended about a week ago by — simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged Mother, but sitting still here under the Autumn sky such as I have it; in these vacant streets I am lonelier than elsewhere, have more chance for composure than elsewhere! With Sterne’s starling I repeat to myself, “I can’t get out.” — Well, hang it, stay in then; and let people alone of it!

I have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, I came to the conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not enough of good to warrant such equestrianism: so I plunged out, into green England, in the end of July, for a whole week of riding, an explosion of riding, therewith to end the business, and send off my poor quadruped for sale. I rode over Surrey, — with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose Guesses at Truth you perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan’s stithy and hammer, at Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the nose; — finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or am like to have. I am now over head and ears in Cromwellian Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man. Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve months, actually, as it were, to see that this Cromwell was one of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate Baresark; very interesting to me. I grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for some time.

The Dial No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest; it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet — you know me — for me it is too ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. I have a body myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings, even Hebrew ones, — Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History is there the parallel of that, — a true worship rising at this hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction surely, incipience of the “final deliration” enters upon the poor old English Formulism that has called itself for some two centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen’s, and insist on saying, Le roi le veut! — I read last night the wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism on myself, in the Quarterly Review. It seems to be by one Sewell, an Oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the Pusey-and-Newman Corporation. A good man, and with good notions, whom I have noted for some years back. He finds me a very worthy fellow; “true, most true,” — except where I part from Puseyism, and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then I am false, most false. As the Turks say, Allah akbar!

I forget altogether what I said of Landor; but I hope I did not put him in the Heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing; a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true, is another. He has not been in town, this year; Milnes describes him as eating greatly at Bath, and perhaps even cooking! Milnes did get your Letter: I told you? Sterling has the Concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and remind me of many things. Sterling is busy writing; he is to make Falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with Italy. He cannot away with my doctrine of Silence; the good John. My Wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver again as winter draws nigh. Adieu, dear Emerson. Good be with you and yours. I must be far gone when I cease to love you. “The stars are above us, the graves are under us.” Adieu.

 — T. Carlyle

LVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 October, 1840

My Dear Friend, — My hope is that you may live until this creeping bookseller’s balance shall incline at last to your side. My rude ciphering, based on the last account of this kind which I sent you in April from J. Munroe & Co., had convinced me that I was to be in debt to you at this time L40 or more; so that I actually bought L40 the day before the “Caledonia” sailed to send you; but on giving my new accounts to J.M. & Co., to bring the statement up to this time, they astonished me with the above written result. I professed absolute incredulity, but Nichols* labored to show me the rise and progress of all my blunders. Please to send the account with the last to your Fraser, and have it sifted. That I paid, a few weeks since, $481.34, and again, $28.12, for printing and paper respectively, is true. — C.C. Little & Co. acknowledge the sale of 82 more copies of the London Edition French Revolution since the 187 copies of July 1; but these they do not get paid for until January 1, and we it seems must wait as long. We will see if the New-Year’s-day will bring us more pence.

 * Partner in the firm of J. Munroe & Co.

I received by the “Acadia” a letter from you, which I acknowledge now, lest I should not answer it more at large on another sheet, which I think to do. If you do not despair of American booksellers send the new proofs of the Lectures when they are in type to me by John Green, 121 Newgate Street (I believe), to the care of J. Munroe & Co. He sends a box to Munroe by every steamer. I sent a Dial, No. 2, for you, to Green. Kennet, I hear, has failed. I hope he did not give his creditors my Miscellanies, which you told me were there. I shall be glad if you will draw Cromwell, though if I should choose it would be Carlyle. You will not feel that you have done your work until those devouring eyes and that portraying hand have achieved England in the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps you cannot do it until you have made your American visit. I assure you the view of Britain is excellent from New England.

We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.* One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.

 — * Preliminary to the experiment of Brook Farm, in 1841. —

I am ashamed to tell you, though it seems most due, anything of my own studies, they seem so desultory, idle, and unproductive. I still hope to print a book of essays this winter, but it cannot be very large. I write myself into letters, the last few months, to three or four dear and beautiful persons, my country-men and women here. I lit my candle at both ends, but will now be colder and scholastic. I mean to write no lectures this winter. I hear gladly of your wife’s better health; and a letter of Jane Tuckerman’s, which I saw, gave the happiest tidings of her. We do not despair of seeing her yet in Concord, since it is now but twelve and a half days to you.

I had a letter from Sterling, which I will answer. In all love and good hope for you and yours, your affectionate

 — R.W. Emerson

LIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 9 December, 1840

Dear Emerson, — My answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless Book-conveyer, Kennet, in reference to that copy of the Miscellanies. I was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come. My first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the Book, not to you, luckless man, but to Lydia Emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy Green now has lying by him, waiting for the January Steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the New Year has got out of infancy the Lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance. And now as to Kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic Fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic Kennet: namely, that the said Kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical Book directed to Munroe’s care, duly booked and engaged for, in May last, but left to repose itself in the Covent-Garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men! Fraser has brought back the Book, and you have lost it; — and the Library of my native village in Scotland is to get it; and not Kennet any more in this world, but Green ever henceforth is to be our Book Carrier. There is a history. Green, it seems, addresses also to Munroe; but the thing, I suppose, will now shift for itself without watching.

As to the bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism, — when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing as true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. Of the truth of Waldo Emerson’s heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, no doubt at all.

My Hero-Lectures lie still in Manuscript. Fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though I rather feel of late as if it were clearing. To fly in the teeth of English Puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as I am pretty sure of, is questionable: yet at bottom why not? Dost thou not as entirely reject this new Distraction of a Puseyism as man can reject a thing, — and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it, — were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being beheaded, with axe and block on Tower Hill, two centuries ago? I think it were as well to tell Puseyism that it has something of good, but also much of bad and even worst. We shall see. If I print the thing, we shall surely take in America again; either by stereotype or in some other way. Fear not that! — Do you attend at all to this new Laudism of ours? It spreads far and wide among our Clergy in these days; a most notable symptom, very cheering to me many ways; whether or not one of the fatalest our poor Church of England has ever exhibited, and betokening swifter ruin to it than any other, I do not inquire. Thank God, men do discover at last that there is still a God present in their affairs, and must be, or their affairs are of the Devil, naught, and worthy of being sent to the Devil! This once given, I find that all is given; daily History, in Kingdom and in Parish, is an experimentum crucis to show what is the Devil’s and what not. But on the whole are we not the formalest people ever created under this Sun? Cased and overgrown with Formulas, like very lobsters with their shells, from birth upwards; so that in the man we see only his breeches, and believe and swear that wherever a pair of old breeches are there is a man! I declare I could both laugh and cry. These poor good men, merciful, zealous, with many sympathies and thoughts, there do they vehemently appeal to me, Et tu, Brute? Brother, wilt thou too insist on the breeches being old, — not ply a needle among us here? — To the naked Caliban, gigantic, for whom such breeches would not be a glove, who is stalking and groping there in search of new breeches and accoutrements, sure to get them, and to tread into nonentity whoever hinders him in the search, — they are blind as if they had no eyes. Sartorial men; ninth-parts of a man: — enough of them.

The second Number of the Dial has also arrived some days ago. I like it decidedly better than the first; in fact, it is right well worth being put on paper, and sent circulating; — I find only, as before that it is still too much of a soul for circulating as it should. I wish you could in future contrive to mark at the end of each Article who writes it, or give me some general key for knowing. I recognize Emerson readily; the rest are of [Greek] for most part. But it is all good and very good as a soul; wants only a body, which want means a great deal! Your Paper on Literature is incomparably the worthiest thing hitherto; a thing I read with delight. Speak out, my brave Emerson; there are many good men that listen! Even what you say of Goethe gratifies me; it is one of the few things yet spoken of him from personal insight, the sole kind of things that should be spoken! You call him actual, not ideal; there is truth in that too; and yet at bottom is not the whole truth rather this: The actual well-seen is the ideal? The actual, what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no less, do all lie there! Ah yes! one day you will find that this sunny-looking, courtly Goethe held veiled in him a Prophetic sorrow deep as Dante’s, — all the nobler to me and to you, that he could so hold it. I believe this; no man can see as he sees, that has not suffered and striven as man seldom did. — Apropos of this, Have you got Miss Martineau’s Hour and Man? How curious it were to have the real History of the Negro Toussaint, and his black Sansculottism in Saint Domingo, — the most atrocious form Sansculottism could or can assume! This of a “black Wilberforce-Washington,” as Sterling calls it, is decidedly something. Adieu, dear Emerson: time presses, paper is done. Commend me to your good wife, your good Mother, and love me as well as you can. Peace and health under clear winter skies be with you all.

 — T. Carlyle

My Wife rebukes me sharply that I have “forgot her love.” She is much better this winter than of old.

Having mentioned Sterling I should say that he is at Torquay
(Devonshire) for the winter, meditating new publication of Poems.
I work still in Cromwellism; all but desperate of any feasible
issue worth naming. I “enjoy bad health” too, considerably!

LX. Carlyle to Mrs. Emerson

Chelsea, London, 21 February, 1841

Dear Mrs. Emerson, — Your Husband’s Letter shall have answer when some moment of leisure is granted me; he will wait till then, and must. But the beautiful utterance which you send over to me; melodious as the voice of flutes, of Aeolian Harps borne on the rude winds so far, — this must have answer, some word or growl of answer, be there leisure or none! The “Acadia,” it seems, is to return from Liverpool the day after tomorrow. I shove my paper-whirlpools aside for a little, and grumble in pleased response.

You are an enthusiast; make Arabian Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you; — nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the essential gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long may the talent abide with you; long may I abide to have it exercised on me! Except the Annandale Farm where my good Mother still lives, there is no House in all this world which I should be gladder to see than the one at Concord. It seems to stand as only over the hill, in the next Parish to me, familiar from boyhood. Alas! and wide-waste Atlantics roll between; and I cannot walk over of an evening! — I never give up the hope of getting thither some time. Were I a little richer, were I a little healthier; were I this and that — ! — One has no Fortunatus’ “Time-annihilating” or even “Space-annihilating Hat”: it were a thing worth having in this world.

My Wife unites with me in all kindest acknowledgments: she is getting stronger these last two years; but is still such a sailor as the Island hardly parallels: had she the Space-annihilating Hat, she too were soon with you. Your message shall reach Miss Martineau; my Dame will send it in her first Letter. The good Harriet is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart. She lives by the shore of the beautiful blue Northumbrian Sea; a “many-sounding” solitude which I often envy her. She writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. You saw her Toussaint l’Ouverture: how she has made such a beautiful “black Washington,” or “Washington-Christ-Macready,” as I have heard some call it, of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semi-articulate gabbling Negro; and of the horriblest phasis that “Sansculottism” can exhibit, of a Black Sansculottism, a musical Opera or Oratorio in pink stockings! It is very beautiful. Beautiful as a child’s heart, — and in so shrewd a head as that. She is now writing express Children’s-Tales, which I calculate I shall find more perfect.

Some ten days ago there went from me to Liverpool, perhaps there will arrive at Concord by this very “Acadia,” a bundle of Printed Sheets directed to your Husband: pray apprise the man of that. They are sheets of a Volume called Lectures on Heroes; the Concord Hero gets them without direction or advice of any kind. I have got some four sheets more ready for him here; shall perhaps send them too, along with this. Some four again more will complete the thing. I know not what he will make of it; — perhaps wry faces at it?

Adieu, dear Mrs. Emerson. We salute you from this house. May all good which the Heavens grant to a kind heart, and the good which they never refuse to one such, abide with you always. I commend myself to your and Emerson’s good Mother, to the mischievous Boys and — all the Household. Peace and fair Spring-weather be there!

Yours with great regard,
                   T. Carlyle

LXI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 28 February, 1841

My Dear Carlyle, — Behold Mr. George Nichols’s new digest and exegesis of his October accounts. The letter seems to me the most intelligible of the two papers, but I have long been that man’s victim, semi-annually, and never dare to make head against his figures. You are a brave man, and out of the ring of his enchantments, and withal have magicians of your own who can give spell for spell, and read his incantations backward. I entreat you to set them on the work, and convict his figures if you can. He has really taken pains, and is quite proud of his establishment of his accounts. In a month it will be April, and be will have a new one to fender. Little and Brown also in April promise a payment on French Revolution, — and I suppose something is due from Chartism. We will hope that a Bill of Exchange will yet cross from us to you, before our booksellers fail.

I hoped before this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* Expect nothing more of my powers of construction, — no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. I read to some Mechanics’ Apprentices a long lecture on Reform, one evening, a little while ago. They asked me to print it, but Margaret Fuller asked it also, and I preferred the Dial, which shall have the dubious sermon, and I will send it to you in that. — You see the bookseller reverendizes me notwithstanding your laudable perseverance to adorn me with profane titles, on the one hand, and the growing habit of the majority of my correspondents to clip my name of all titles on the other. I desire that you and your wife will keep your kindness for

 — R. W. Emerson

 ——  ——  — * The first series of Essays. ——  ——  —

LXII. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 30 April, 1841

My Dear Carlyle, — Above you have a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds sterling drawn by T.W. Ward & Co. on the Messrs. Barings, payable at sight. Let us hope it is but the first of a long series. I have vainly endeavored to get your account to be rendered by Munroe & Co. to the date of the 1st of April. It was conditionally promised for the day of the last steamer (15 April). It is not ready for that which sails tomorrow and carries this. Little & Co. acknowledge a debt of $607.90 due to you 1st of April, and just now paid me; and regret that their sales have been so slow, which they attribute to the dulness of all trade among us for the last two years. You shall have the particulars of their account from Munroe’s statement of the account between you and me. Munroe & Co. have a long apology for not rendering their own account; their book keeper left them at a critical moment, they were without one six weeks, &c.; — but they add, if we could give you it, to what use, since we should be utterly unable to make you any payment at this time? To what use, surely? I am too much used to similar statements from our booksellers and others in the last few years to be much surprised; nor do I doubt their readiness or their power to pay all their debts at last; but a great deal of mutual concession and accommodation has been the familiar resort of our tradesmen now for a good while, a vice which they are all fain to lay at the doors of the Government, whilst it belongs in the first instance, no doubt, to the rashness of the individual traders. These men I believe to be prudent, honest, and solvent, and that we shall get all our debt from them at last. They are not reckoned as rich as Little and Brown. By the next steamer they think they can promise to have their account ready. I am sorry to find that we have been driven from the market by the New York Pirates in the affair of the Six Lectures.* The book was received from London and for sale in New York and Boston before my last sheets arrived by the “Columbia.” Appleton in New York braved us and printed it, and furthermore told us that he intends to print in future everything of yours that shall be printed in London, — complaining in rude terms of the monopoly your publishers here exercise, and the small commissions they allow to the trade, &c., &c. Munroe showed me the letter, which certainly was not an amiable one. In this distress, then, I beg you, when you have more histories and lectures to print, to have the manuscript copied by a scrivener before you print at home, and send it out to me, and I will keep all Appletons and Corsairs whatsoever out of the lists. Not only these men made a book (of which, by the by, Munroe sends you by this steamer a copy, which you will find at John Green’s, Newgate Street), but the New York newspapers print the book in chapters, and you circulate for six cents per newspaper at the corners of all streets in New York and Boston; gaining in fame what you lose in coin. — The book is a good book, and goes to make men brave and happy. I bear glad witness to its cheering and arming quality.

 * “Heroes and Hero-Worship.”

I have put into Munroe’s box which goes to Green a Dial No. 4 also, which I could heartily wish were a better book. But Margaret Fuller, who is a noble woman, is not in sufficiently vigorous health to do this editing work as she would and should, and there is no other who can and will.

Yours affectionately,
                   R.W. Emerson

LXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 May, 1841

My Dear Emerson, — Your last letter found me on the southern border of Yorkshire, whither Richard Milnes had persuaded me with him, for the time they call “Easter Holidays” here. I was to shake off the remnants of an ugly Influenza which still hung about me; my little portmanteau, unexpectedly driven in again by perverse accidents, had stood packed, its cowardly owner, the worst of all travelers, standing dubious the while, for two weeks or more; Milnes offering to take me as under his cloak, I went with Milnes. The mild, cordial, though something dilettante nature of the man distinguishes him for me among men, as men go. For ten days I rode or sauntered among Yorkshire fields and knolls; the sight of the young Spring, new to me these seven years, was beautiful, or better than beauty. Solitude itself, the great Silence of the Earth, was as balm to this weary, sick heart of mine; not Dragons of Wantley (so they call Lord Wharncliffe, the wooden Tory man), not babbling itinerant Barrister people, fox-hunting Aristocracy, nor Yeomanry Captains cultivating milk-white mustachios, nor the perpetual racket, and “dinner at eight o’clock,” could altogether countervail the fact that green Earth was around one and unadulterated sky overhead, and the voice of waters and birds, — not the foolish speech of Cockneys at all times! — On the last morning, as Richard and I drove off towards the railway, your Letter came in, just in time; and Richard, who loves you well, hearing from whom it was, asked with such an air to see it that I could not refuse him. We parted at the “station,” flying each his several way on the wings of Steam; and have not yet met again. I went over to Leeds, staid two days with its steeple-chimneys and smoke-volcano still in view; then hurried over to native Annandale, to see my aged excellent Mother yet again in this world while she is spared to me. My birth-land is always as the Cave of Trophonius to me; I return from it with a haste to which the speed of Steam is slow, — with no smile on my face; avoiding all speech with men! It is not yet eight-and-forty hours since I got back; your Letter is among the first I answer, even with a line; your new Book — But we will not yet speak of that….

My Friend, I thank you for this Volume of yours; not for the copy alone which you send to me, but for writing and printing such a Book. Euge! say I, from afar. The voice of one crying in the desert; — it is once more the voice of a man. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own; as if the rest were all hearsays, melodious or unmelodious echoes; as if this alone were true and alive. My blessing on you, good Ralph Waldo! I read the Book all yesterday; my Wife scarcely yet done with telling me her news. It has rebuked me, it has aroused and comforted me. Objections of all kinds I might make, how many objections to superficies and detail, to a dialect of thought and speech as yet imperfect enough, a hundred-fold too narrow for the Infinitude it strives to speak: but what were all that? It is an Infinitude, the real vision and belief of one, seen face to face: a “voice of the heart of Nature” is here once more. This is the one fact for me, which absorbs all others whatsoever. Persist, persist; you have much to say and to do. These voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls, and censure sometimes for having no body, — how can they have a body? They are light-rays darting upwards in the East; they will yet make much and much to have a body! You are a new era, my man, in your new huge country: God give you strength, and speaking and silent faculty, to do such a work as seems possible now for you! And if the Devil will be pleased to set all the Popularities against you and evermore against you, — perhaps that is of all things the very kindest any Angel could do.

Of myself I have nothing good to report. Years of sick idleness and barrenness have grown wearisome to me. I do nothing. I waver and hover, and painfully speculate even now as to health, and where I shall spend the summer out of London! I am a very poor fellow; — but hope to grow better by and by. Then this alluvies of foul lazy stuff that has long swum over me may perhaps yield the better harvest. Esperons! — Hail to all of you from both of us.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

LXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 21 May, 1841

My Dear Emerson, — About a week ago I wrote to you, after too long a silence. Since that there has another Letter come, with a Draft of L100 in it, and other comfortable items not pecuniary; a line in acknowledgment of the money is again very clearly among my duties. Yesterday, on my first expedition up to Town, I gave the Paper to Fraser; who is to present the result to me in the shape of cash tomorrow. Thanks, and again thanks. This L100, I think, nearly clears off for me the outlay of the second French Revolution; an ill-printed, ill-conditioned publication, the prime cost of which, once all lying saved from the Atlantic whirlpools and hard and fast in my own hand, it was not perhaps well done to venture thitherward again. To the new trouble of my friends withal! We will now let the rest of the game play itself out as it can; and my friends, and my one friend, must not take more trouble than their own kind feelings towards me will reward.

The Books, the Dial No. 4, and Appleton’s pirated Lectures, are still expected from Green. In a day or two he will send them: if not, we will jog him into wakefulness, and remind him of the Parcels Delivery Company, which carries luggage of all kinds, like mere letters, many times a day, over all corners of our Babylon. In this, in the universal British Penny Post, and a thing or two of that sort, men begin to take advantage of their crowded ever-whirling condition in these days, which brings such enormous disadvantages along with it unsought for. — Bibliopolist Appleton does not seem to be a “Hero,” — except after his own fashion. He is one of those of whom the Scotch say, “Thou wouldst do little for God if the Devil were dead!” The Devil is unhappily dead, in that international bibliopolic province, and little hope of his reviving for some time; whereupon this is what Squire Appleton does. My respects to him even in the Bedouin department, I like to see a complete man, a clear decisive Bedouin.

For the rest, there is one man who ought to be apprised that I can now stand robbery a little better; that I am no longer so very poor as I once was. In Fraser himself there do now lie vestiges of money! I feel it a great relief to see, for a year or two at least, the despicable bugbear of Beggary driven out of my sight; for which small mercy, at any rate, be the Heavens thanked. Fraser himself, for these two editions, One thousand copies each, of the Lectures and Sartor, pays me down on the nail L150; consider that miracle! Of the other Books which he is selling on a joint-stock basis, the poor man likewise promises something, though as yet, ever since New-Year’s-day, I cannot learn what, owing to a grievous sickness of his, — for which otherwise I cannot but be sorry, poor Fraser within the Cockney limits being really a worthy, accurate, and rather friendly creature. So you see me here provided with bread and water for a season, — it is but for a season one needs either water or bread, — and rejoice with me accordingly. It is the one useful, nay, I will say the one innoxious, result of all this trumpeting, reviewing, and dinner-invitationing; from which I feel it indispensable to withdraw myself more and more resolutely, and altogether count it as a thing not there. Solitude is what I long and pray for. In the babble of men my own soul goes all to babble: like soil you were forever screening, tumbling over with shovels and riddles; in which soil no fruit can grow! My trust in Heaven is, I shall yet get away “to some cottage by the sea-shore”; far enough from all the mad and mad making things that dance round me here, which I shall then look on only as a theatrical phantasmagory, with an eye only to the meaning that lies hidden in it. You, friend Emerson, are to be a Farmer, you say, and dig Earth for your living? Well; I envy you that as much as any other of your blessednesses. Meanwhile, I sit shrunk together here in a small dressing-closet, aloft in the back part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and, looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St. Paul’s visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke’s very long-winded Book. I think of innumerable things; steal out westward at sunset among the Kensington lanes; would this May weather last, I might be as well here as in any attainable place. But June comes; the rabid dogs get muzzles; all is brown-parched, dusty, suffocating, desperate, and I shall have to run! Enough of all that. On my paper there comes, or promises to come, as yet simply nothing at all. Patience; — and yet who can be patient?

Had you the happiness to see yourself not long ago, in Fraser’s Magazine, classed nominatim by an emphatic earnest man, not without a kind of splay-footed strength and sincerity, — among the chief Heresiarchs of the — world? Perfectly right. Fraser was very anxious to know what I thought of the Paper,— “by an entirely unknown man in the country.” I counseled “that there was something in him, which he ought to improve by holding his peace for the next five years.”

Adieu, dear Emerson; there is not a scrap more of Paper. All copies of your Essays are out at use; with what result we shall perhaps see. As for me I love the Book and man, and their noble rustic herohood and manhood: — one voice as of a living man amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: Ach Gott!

Yours evermore,
          T. Carlyle

LXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 80 May, 1841

My Dear Friend, — In my letter written to you on the 1st of May (enclosing a bill of exchange of L100 sterling, which, I hope, arrived safely) I believe I promised to send you by the next steamer an account for April. But the false tardy Munroe & Co. did not send it to me until one day too late. Here it is, as they render it, compiled from Little and Brown’s statement and their own. I have never yet heard whether you have received their Analysis or explanation of the last abstract they drew up of the mutual claims between the great houses of T.C. and R.W.E., and I am impatient to know whether you have caused it to be examined, and whether it was satisfactory. This new one is based on that, and if that was incorrect, this must be also. I am daily looking for some letter from you, which is perhaps near at hand. If you have not written, write me exactly and immediately on this subject, I entreat you. You will see that in this sheet I am charged with a debt to you of $184.29. I shall tomorrow morning pay to Mr. James Brown (of Little and Brown), who should be the bearer of this letter, $185.00, which sum he will pay you in its equivalent of English coin. I give Mr. Brown an introductory letter to you, and you must not let slip the opportunity to make the man explain his own accounts, if any darkness hang on them. In due time, perhaps, we can send you Munroe, and Nichols also, and so all your factors shall render direct account of themselves to you. I believe I shall also make Brown the bearer of a little book written some time since by a young friend of mine in a very peculiar frame of mind, — thought by most persons to be mad, — and of the publication of which I took the charge.* Mr. Very requested me to send you a copy. — I had a letter from Sterling, lately, which rejoiced me in all but the dark picture it gave of his health. I earnestly wish good news of him. When you see him, show him these poems, and ask him if they have not a grandeur.

 * Essays and Poems, by Jones Very, — a little volume, the work of an exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it contains are as if written by a George Herbert who had studied Shakespeare, read Wordsworth, and lived in America.

When I wrote last, I believe all the sheets of the Six Lectures had not come to me. They all arrived safely, although the last package not until our American pirated copy was just out of press in New York. My private reading was not less happy for this robbery whereby the eager public were supplied. Odin was all new to me; and Mahomet, for the most part; and it was all good to read, abounding in truth and nobleness. Yet, as I read these pages, I dream that your audience in London are less prepared to hear, than is our New England one. I judge only from the tone. I think I know many persons here who accept thoughts of this vein so readily now, that, if you were speaking on this shore, you would not feel that emphasis you use to be necessary. I have been feeble and almost sick during all the spring, and have been in Boston but once or twice, and know nothing of the reception the book meets from the Catholic Carlylian Church. One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come, — Henry Thoreau, — a poet whom you may one day be proud of; — a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong. My mother, my wife, my boy and girl, are all in usual health, and according to their several ability salute you and yours. Do not cease to tell me of the health of your wife and of the learned and friendly physician.

Yours,
   R.W. Emerson

LXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 25 June, 1841

Dear Emerson, — Now that there begins again to be some program possible of my future motions for some time, I hastily despatch you some needful outline of the same.

After infinite confused uncertainty, I learn yesternight that there has been a kind of country-house got for us, at a place called Annan, on the north shore of the Solway Frith, in my native County of Dumfries. You passed through the little Burgh, I suppose, in your way homeward from Craigenputtock: it stands about midway, on the great road, between Dumfries and Carlisle. It is the place where I got my schooling; — consider what a preternatural significance such a scene has now got for me! It is within eight miles of my aged Mother’s dwelling-place; within riding distance, in fact, of almost all the Kindred I have in the world. — The house, which is built since my time, and was never yet seen by me, is said to be a reasonable kind of house. We get it for a small sum in proportion to its value (thanks to kind accident); the three hundred miles of travel, very hateful to me, will at least entirely obliterate all traces of this Dust-Babel; the place too being naturally almost ugly, as far as a green leafy place in sight of sea and mountains can be so nicknamed, the whole gang of picturesque Tourists, Cockney friends of Nature, &c., &c., who penetrate now by steam, in shoals every autumn, into the very centre of the Scotch Highlands, will be safe over the horizon! In short, we are all bound thitherward in few days; must cobble up some kind of gypsy establishment; and bless Heaven for solitude, for the sight of green fields, heathy moors; for a silent sky over one’s head, and air to breathe which does not consist of coal-smoke, finely powdered flint, and other beautiful etceteras of that kind among others! God knows I have need enough to be left altogether alone for some considerable while (forever, as it at present seems to me), to get my inner world, and my poor bodily nerves, both all torn to pieces, set in order a little again! After much vain reluctance therefore; disregarding many considerations, — disregarding finance in the front of these, — I am off; and calculate on staying till I am heartily sated with country, till at least the last gleam of summer weather has departed. My way of life has all along hitherto been a resolute staying at home: I find now, however, that I must alter my habits, cost what it may; that I cannot live all the year round in London, under pain of dying or going rabid; — that I must, in fact, learn to travel, as others do, and be hanged to me! Wherefore, in brief, my Friend, our address for the next two or three months is “Newington Lodge, Annan, Scotland,” — where a letter from Emerson will be a right pleasant visitor! Faustum sit.

My second piece of news, not less interesting I hope, is that Emerson’s Essays, the Book so called, is to be reprinted here; nay, I think, is even now at press, — in the hands of that invaluable Printer, Robson, who did the Miscellanies. Fraser undertakes it, “on half-profits”; — T. Carlyle writing a Preface,* — which accordingly he did (in rather sullen humor, — not with you!) last night and the foregoing days. Robson will stand by the text to the very utmost; and I also am to read the Proof sheets. The edition is of Seven Hundred and Fifty; which Fraser thinks he will sell. With what joy shall I then sack up the small Ten Pounds Sterling perhaps of “Half-Profits,” and remit them to the man Emerson; saying: There, Man! Tit for tat, the reciprocity not all on one side! — I ought to say, moreover, that this was a volunteer scheme of Fraser’s; the risk is all his, the origin of it was with him: I advised him to have it reviewed, as being a really noteworthy Book; “Write you a Preface,” said he, “and I will reprint it”; — to which, after due delay and meditation; I consented. Let me add only, on this subject, the story of a certain Rio,** a French Breton, with long, distracted, black hair. He found your Book at Richard Milnes’s, a borrowed copy, and could not borrow it; whereupon he appeals passionately to me; carries off my Wife’s copy, this distracted Rio; and is to “read it four times” during this current autumn, at Quimperle, in his native Celtdom! The man withal is a Catholic, eats fish on Friday; — a great lion here when he visits us; one of the naivest men in the world: concerning whom nevertheless, among fashionables, there is a controversy, “Whether he is an Angel, or partially a Windbag and Humbug?” Such is the lot of loveliness in the World! A truer man I never saw; how windless, how windy, I will not compute at present. Me he likes greatly (in spite of my unspeakable contempt for his fish on Friday); likes, — but withal is apt to bore.

 ——  ——  —
* The greater part of this interesting Preface is reprinted in
Mr. George Willis Cooke’s excellent book on the Life, Writings,
and Philosophy of Emerson, Boston, 1881, p. 109.

** The author of a book once much admired, De ‘l’Art Chretien. In a later work entitled Epilogue a l’Art Chretien, but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of his intercourse with Carlyle. ——  ——  —

Enough, dear Emerson; and more than enough for a day so hurried. Our Island is all in a ferment electioneering: Tories to come in; — perhaps not to come in; at all events not to stay long, without altering their figure much! I sometimes ask myself rather earnestly, What is the duty of a citizen? To be as I have been hitherto, a pacific Alien? That is the easiest, with my humor! — Our brave Dame here, just rallying for the remove, sends loving salutations. Good be with you all always. Adieu, dear Emerson.

 — T. Carlyle

Appleton’s Book of Hero-Worship has come; for which pray thank Mr. Munroe for me: it is smart on the surface; but printed altogether scandalously!

LXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 July, 1841

My Dear Carlyle, — Eight days ago — when I had gone to Nantasket Beach, to sit by the sea and inhale its air and refresh this puny body of mine — came to me your letter, all bounteous as all your letters are, generous to a fault, generous to the shaming of me, cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor little arid book, — which is as sand to my eyes, — and now in this you tell me it shall be printed in London, and graced with a preface from the man of men. I can only say that I heartily wish the book were better, and I must try and deserve so much favor from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to come; such as may perchance one day relax and invigorate this cramp hand of mine, and teach it to draw some grand and adequate strokes, which other men may find their own account and not their good-nature in repeating. Yet I think I shall never be killed by my ambition. I behold my failures and shortcomings there in writing, wherein it would give me much joy to thrive, with an equanimity which my worst enemy might be glad to see. And yet it is not that I am occupied with better things. One could well leave to others the record, who was absorbed in the life. But I have done nothing. I think the branch of the “tree of life” which headed to a bud in me, curtailed me somehow of a drop or two of sap, and so dwarfed all my florets and drupes. Yet as I tell you I am very easy in my mind, and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy — which is very real — teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet — for any spiritualist — in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue. I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me, — and at some rate get off the numb palsy, and feel the new blood sting and tingle in my fingers’ ends. Well, sure I am that the right word will be spoken though I cut out my tongue. Thanks, too, to your munificent Fraser for his liberal intention to divide the profits of the Essays. I wish, for the encouragement of such a bookseller, there were to be profits to divide. But I have no faith in your public for their heed to a mere book like mine. There are things I should like to say to them, in a lecture-room or in a “steeple house,” if I were there. Seven hundred and fifty copies! Ah no!

And so my dear brother has quitted the roaring city, and gone back in peace to his own land, — not the man he left it, but richer every way, chiefly in the sense of having done something valiantly and well, which the land, and the lands, and all that wide elastic English race in all their dispersion, will know and thank him for. The holy gifts of nature and solitude be showered upon you! Do you not believe that the fields and woods have their proper virtue, and that there are good and great things which will not be spoken in the city? I give you joy in your new and rightful home, and the same greetings to Jane Carlyle! with thanks and hopes and loves to you both.

 — R.W. Emerson

As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges, nine days hence.* You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse. O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! Besides, I always am lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys. I hope Brown did not fail to find you, with thirty-eight sovereigns (I believe) which he should carry you.

 ——  ——  —
* “The Method of Nature. An Address to the Society of the
Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.”
 ——  ——  —

LXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841

My Dear Emerson, — Two days ago your Letter, direct from Liverpool, reached me here; only fifteen days after date on the other side of the Ocean: one of the swiftest messengers that have yet come from you. Steamers have been known to come, they say, in nine days. By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another. What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece, — a place to hold your [Greek] in? A meeting of All the English ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians; — and as Homeric “equal ships” are to Bristol steamers, so, or somewhat so, may New York and New Holland be to Ephesus and Crete, with their distances, relations, and etceteras! — Few things on this Earth look to me greater than the Future of that Family of Men.

It is some two months since I got into this region; my Wife followed me with her maid and equipments some five weeks ago. Newington Lodge, when I came to inspect it with eyes, proved to be too rough an undertaking: upholsterers, expense and confusion, — the Cynic snarled, “Give me a whole Tub rather! I want nothing but shelter from the elements, and to be let alone of all men.” After a little groping, this little furnished cottage, close by the beach of the Solway Frith, was got hold of: here we have been, in absolute seclusion, for a month, — no company but the corn-fields and the everlasting sands and brine; mountains, and thousand-voiced memories on all hands, sending their regards to one, from the distance. Daily (sometimes even nightly!) I have swashed about in the sea; I have been perfectly idle, at least inarticulate; I fancy I feel myself considerably sounder of body and of mind. Deeply do I agree with you in the great unfathomable meaning of a colloquy with the dumb Ocean, with the dumb Earth, and their eloquence! A Legislator would prescribe some weeks of that annually as a religious duty for all mortals, if he could. A Legislator will prescribe it for himself, since he can! You too have been at Nantasket; my Friend, this great rough purple sea-flood that roars under my little garret-window here, this too comes from Nantasket and farther, — swung hitherward by the Moon and the Sun.

It cannot be said that I feel “happy” here, which means joyful; — as far as possible from that. The Cave of Trophonius could not be grimmer for one than this old Land of Graves. But it is a sadness worth any hundred “happinesses.” N’en parlons plus. By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function “view-hunting” is. Analogous to “philanthropy,” “pleasures of virtue,” &c., &c. I for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. Black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no Cockney to exclaim, “How charming it is!”

One of the last things I did in London was to pocket Bookseller Brown’s L38: a very honest-looking man, that Brown; whom I was sorry I could not manage to welcome better. You asked in that Letter about some other item of business, — Munroe’s or Brown’s account to acknowledge? — something or other that I was to do: I only remember vaguely that it seemed to me I had as good as done it. Your Letter is not here now, but at Chelsea.

Three sheets of the Essays lay waiting me at my Mother’s, for correction; needing as good as none. The type and shape is the same as that of late Lectures on Heroes. Robson the Printer, who is a very punctual intelligent man, a scholar withal, undertook to be himself the corrector of the other sheets. I hope you will find them “exactly conformable to the text, minus mere Typographical blunders and the more salient American spellings (labor for labour, &c.).” The Book is perhaps just getting itself subscribed in these very days. It should have been out before now: but poor Fraser is in the country, dangerously ill, which perhaps retards it a little; and the season, at any rate, is at the very dullest. By the first conveyance I will send a certain Lady two copies of it. Little danger but the Edition will sell; Fraser knows his own Trade well enough, and is as much a “desperado” as poor Attila Schmelzle was! Poor James, I wish he were well again; but really at times I am very anxious about him. — The Book will sell; will be liked and disliked. Harriet Martineau, whom I saw in passing hitherward, writes with her accustomed enthusiasm about it. Richard Milnes too is very warm. John Sterling scolds and kisses it (as the manner of the man is), and concludes by inquiring, whether there is any procurable Likeness of Emerson? Emerson himself can answer. There ought to be.

 — Good Heavens! Here came my Wife, all in tears, pointing out to me a poor ship, just tumbled over on a sand-bank on the Cumberland coast; men still said to be alive on it, — a Belfast steamer doing all it can to get in contact with it! Moments are precious (say the people on the beach), the flood runs ten miles an hour. Thank God, the steamer’s boat is out: “eleven men,” says a person with a glass, “are saved: it is an American timber-ship, coming up without a Pilot.” And now — in ten minutes more — there lies the melancholy mass alone among the waters, wreck-boats all hastening towards it, like birds of prey; the poor Canadians all up and away towards Annan. What an end for my Letter, which nevertheless must end! Adieu, dear Emerson. Address to Chelsea next time. I can say no more.

Yours ever,
        T.C.

LXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 October, 1841

My Dear Carlyle, — I was in Boston yesterday, and found at Munroe’s your promised packet of the two London Books. They are very handsome, — that for my wife is beautiful, — and I am not so old or so cold but that I can feel the hope and the pleasure that lie in this gift. It seems I am to speak in England — great England — fortified by the good word of one whose word is fame. Well, it is a lasting joy to be indebted to the wise and generous; and I am well contented that my little boat should swim, whilst it can, beside your great galleys, nor will I allow my discontent with the great faults of the book, which the rich English dress cannot hide, to spoil my joy in this fine little romance of friendship and hope. I am determined — so help me all Muses — to send you something better another day.

But no more printing for me at present. I have just decided to go to Boston once more, with a course of lectures, which I will perhaps baptize “On the Times,” by way of making once again the experiment whether I cannot, not only speak the truth, but speak it truly, or in proportion. I fancy I need more than another to speak, with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders; somebody asked me “if I built of medals.” Besides, I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room, — so free and so unpretending a platform, — a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, — rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession. I should love myself wonderfully better if I could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart and not in a paper.

When I was in Boston I saw the booksellers, the children of Tantalus, — no, but they who trust in them are. This time, Little and Brown render us their credit account to T.C. $366 (I think it was), payable in three months from 1 October. They had sold all the London French Revolutions but fifteen copies. May we all live until 1 January. J. Munroe & Co. acknowledge about $180 due and now rightfully payable to T.C., but, unhappily, not yet paid. By the help of brokers, I will send that sum more or less in some English Currency, by the next steamship, which sails in about a fortnight, and will address it, as you last bade me, to Chelsea.

What news, my dear friend, from your study? what designs ripened or executed? what thoughts? what hopes? you can say nothing of yourself that will not greatly interest us all. Harriet Martineau, whose sicknesses may it please God to heal! wrote me a kind, cheerful letter, and the most agreeable notice of your health and spirit on a visit at her house. My little boy is five years old today, and almost old enough to send you his love.

With kindest greetings to Jane Carlyle, I am her and your friend,

 — R.W.E.

LXX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 14 November, 1841

My Dear Carlyle, — Above, you have a bill of exchange for forty pounds sterling, with which sum you must credit the Munroe account. The bill, I must not fail to notice, is drawn by a lover of yours who expresses great satisfaction in doing us this courtesy; and courtesy I must think it when he gives me a bill at sight, whilst of all other merchants I have got only one payable at some remote day. —— is a beautiful and noble youth, of a most subtle and magnetic nature, made for an artist, a painter, and in his art has made admirable sketches, but his criticism, I fancy, was too keen for his poetry (shall I say?); he sacrificed to Despair, and threw away his pencil. For the present, he buys and sells. I wrote you some sort of letter a fortnight ago, promising to send a paper like this. The hour when this should be despatched finds me by chance very busy with little affairs. I sent you by an Italian, Signor Gambardella,* — who took a letter to you with good intent to persuade you to sit to him for your portrait, — a Dial, and some copies of an oration I printed lately. If you should have any opportunity to send one of them to Harriet Martineau, my debts to her are great, and I wish to acknowledge her abounding kindness by a letter, as I must. I am now in the rage of preparation for my Lectures “On the Times;” which begin in a fortnight. There shall be eight, but I cannot yet accurately divide the topics. If it were eighty, I could better. In fear lest this sheet should not safely and timely reach its man, I must now write some duplicate.

Farewell, dear friend.
                 R.W. Emerson

 ——  —— * Spiridione Gambardella was born at Naples. He was a refugee from Italy, having escaped, the story was, on board an American man-of-war. He had been educated as a public singer, but he had a facile genius, and turned readily to painting as a means of livelihood. He painted some excellent portraits in Boston, between 1835 and 1840, among them one of Dr. Channing, and one of Dr. Follen; both of these were engraved. He had some success for a time as a portrait-painter in London. ——  ——  —

LXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1841

Dear Emerson, — Since that going down of the American Timber-ship on one of the Banks of the Solway under my window, I do not remember that you have heard a word of me. I only added that the men were all saved, and the beach all in agitation, certain women not far from hysterics; — and there ended. I did design to send you some announcement of our return hither; but fear there is no chance that I did it! About ten days ago the Signor Gambardella arrived, with a Note and Books from you: and here now is your Letter of October 30th; which, arriving at a moment when I have a little leisure, draws forth an answer almost instantly.

The Signor Gambardella, whom we are to see a second time tonight or tomorrow, amuses and interests us not a little. His face is the very image of the Classic God Pan’s; with horns, and cloven feet, we feel that he would make a perfect wood-god; — really, some of Poussin’s Satyrs are almost portraits of this brave Gambardella. I will warrant him a right glowing mass of Southern-Italian vitality, — full of laughter, wild insight, caricature, and every sort of energy and joyous savagery: a most profitable element to get introduced (in moderate quantity), I should say, into the general current of your Puritan blood over in New England there! Gambardella has behaved with magnanimity in that matter of the Portrait: I have already sat, to men in the like case, some four times, and Gambardella knows it is a dreadful weariness; I directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one Laurence, a man of real parts, whom I wished Gambardella to know, — and whom I wished to know Gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a good picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness. Well: Gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that Laurence’s picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in America or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to Laurence, not to Gambardella, — which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, Be it far from me! The brave Gambardella! if I can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his Visit to the Community of Shakers, and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me. Inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in Gambardella’s vision of that Phenomenon, — the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue. — Alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present. True laughter is as rare as any other truth, — the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams. I know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than Christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once.

Your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your English Book are such as I too am very thankful for. I understand them well. May worse guest never visit the Drawing-room at Concord than that bound Book. Tell the good Wife to rejoice in it: she has all the pleasure; — to her poor Husband it will be increase of pain withal: nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it! A man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it: some of it is wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any trial to digest it. A thinker, I take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue alone; — alone: “silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves”! The clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much. The Book of Essays, however, does decidedly “speak to England,” in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate “sensation” here. Reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut; — of small value mostly; as you might see by the two Newspaper specimens I sent you. (Did you get those two Newspapers?) The worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed. Newspapers are busy with extracts; — much complaining that it is “abstruse,” neological, hard to get the meaning of. All which is very proper. Still better, — though poor Fraser, alas, is dead, (poor Fraser!), and no help could come from industries of the Bookshop, and Books indeed it seems were never selling worse than of late months, — I learn that the “sale of the Essays goes very steadily forward,” and will wind itself handsomely up in due time, we may believe! So Emerson henceforth has a real Public in Old England as well as New. And finally, my Friend, do not disturb yourself about turning better, &c., &c.; write as it is given you, and not till it be given you, and never mind it a whit.

The new Adelphi piece seems to me, as a piece of Composition, the best written of them all. People cry over it: “Whitherward? What, What?” In fact, I do again desiderate some concretion of these beautiful abstracta. It seems to me they will never be right otherwise; that otherwise they are but as prophecies yet, not fulfilments.

The Dial too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealis like. Will no Angel body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee man, with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back! These things I say: and yet, very true, you alone can decide what practical meaning is in them. Write you always as it is given you, be it in the solid, in the aeriform, or whatsoever way. There is no other rule given among men. — I have sent the criticism on Landor* to an Editorial Friend of L.’s, by whom I expect it will be put into the Newspapers here, for the benefit of Walter Savage; he is not often so well praised among us, and deserves a little good praise.

 ——  —— * From the Dial for October, 1841. ——  ——

You propose again to send me Moneys, — surprising man! I am glad also to hear that that beggarly misprinted French Revolution is nearly out among you. I only hope farther your Booksellers will have an eye on that rascal Appleton, and not let him reprint and deface, if more copies of the Book turn out to be wanted. Adieu, dear Emerson! Good speed to you at Boston, and in all true things. I hope to write soon again.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

LXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 6 December, 1841

Dear Emerson, — Though I wrote to you very lately, and am in great haste today, I must lose no time in announcing that the Letter with the L40 draught came to hand some mornings ago; and now, this same morning, a second Letter round by Dumfriesshire, which had been sent as a duplicate, or substitute in case of accident, for the former. It is all right, my friend — — ‘s paper has got itself changed into forty gold sovereigns, and lies here waiting use; thanks, many thanks! Sums of that kind come always upon me like manna out of the sky; surely they, more emphatically than any others, are the gift of Heaven. Let us receive, use, and be thankful. I am not so poor now at all; Heaven be praised: indeed, I do not know, now and then when I reflect on it, whether being rich were not a considerably harder problem. With the wealth of Rothschild what farther good thing could one get, — if not perhaps some but to live in, under free skies, in the country, with a horse to ride and have a little less pain on? Angulus ille ridet! — I will add, for practical purposes in the future, that it is in general of little or no moment whether an American Bill be at sight or after a great many days; that the paper can wait as conveniently here as the cash can, — if your New England House and Baring of Old England will forbear bankruptcy in the mean while. By the bye, will you tell me some time or other in what American funds it is that your funded money, you once gave me note of, now lies? I too am creditor to America, — State of Illinois or some such State: one thousand dollars of mine, which some years ago I had no use for, now lies there, paying I suppose for canals, in a very obstructed condition! My Brother here is continually telling me that I shall lose it all, — which is not so bad; but lose it all by my own unreason, — which is very bad. It struck me I would ask where Emerson’s money lies, and lay mine there too, let it live or perish as it likes!

Your Adelphi went straightway off to Miss Martineau with a message. Richard Milnes has another; John Sterling is to have a third, — had certain other parties seen it first. For the man Emerson is become a person to be seen in these times. I also gave a Morning-Chronicle Editor your brave eulogy on Landor, with instructions that it were well worth publishing there, for Landor’s and others’ sake. Landor deserves more praise than he gets at present; the world too, what is far more, should hear of him oftener than it does. A brave man after his kind, — though considerably “flamed on from the Hell beneath.” He speaks notable things; and at lowest and worst has the faculty too of holding his peace.

The “Lectures on the Times” are even now in progress? Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech. Your Country is luckier than most at this time; it has still real Preaching; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere — cant, and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence! That must alter everywhere the human tongue is no wooden watchman’s-rattle or other obsolete implement; it continues forever new and useful, nay indispensable.

As for me and my doings — Ay de mi!*

 ——  — * The signature has been cut off. ——  —

LXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

New York, 28 February, 1842

My Dear Friend, — I enclose a bill of exchange for forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by Baring Brothers & Co. after sixty days from the 25th of February.

This Sum is part of a payment from Little and Brown on account of sales of your London French Revolution and of Chartism. As another part of their payment they asked me if they might not draw on the estate of James Fraser for a balance due from his house to them, and pay you so. I, perhaps unwisely, consented to make the proffer to you, with the distinct stipulation, however, that if it should not prove perfectly agreeable to you, and exactly as available as another form of money, you should instantly return it to me, and they shall pay me the amount, $41.57, or L8 12s. 5d. in cash. My mercantile friend, Abel Adams, did not admire my wisdom in accepting this bill of Little and Brown; so I told them I should probably bring it back to them, and if there is a shadow of inconvenience in it you will send it back to me by the next steamer. For they have no claims on us. I decide not to enclose the Little and Brown bill in this sheet, — but to let it accompany this letter in the same packet.

I grieve to hear that you have bought any of our wretched Southern Stocks. In New England all Southern and Southwestern debt is usually regarded as hopeless, unless the debtor is personally known. Massachusetts stock is in the best credit of any public stock. Ward told me that it would be safest for you to keep your Illinois stock, although he could say nothing very good of it.

Our city banks in Boston are in better credit than the banks in any other city here, yet one in which a large part of my own property is invested has failed, for the two last half-years, to pay any dividend, and I am a poor man until next April, when, I hope, it will not fail me again. If you wish to invest money here, my friend Abel Adams, who is the principal partner in one of our best houses, Barnard, Adams, & Co., will know how to give you the best assistance and action the case admits.

My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life.* You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina. — We have two babes yet, — one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy’s I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain. Lidian, the poor Lidian, moans at home by day and by night. You too will grieve for us, afar. I believe I have two letters from you since I wrote last. I shall write again soon, for Bronson Alcott will probably go to London in about a month, and him I shall surely send to you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller one, that have craved to see you. Give me early advice of receiving these Bills of Exchange.

 * The memory of this Boy, “born for the future, to the future lost;” is enshrined in the heart of every lover of childhood and of poetry by his father’s impassioned Threnody. —

Tell Jane Carlyle our sorrowing story with much love, and with all good hope for her health and happiness. Tell us when you write, with as much particularity as you can, how it stands with you, and all your household; with the Doctor, and the friends; what you do, and propose to do, and whether you will yet come to America, one good day?

Yours with love,
         R. Waldo Emerson

LXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, Scotland 28 March, 1842

My Dear Friend, — This is heavy news that you send me; the heaviest outward bereavement that can befall a man has overtaken you. Your calm tone of deep, quiet sorrow, coming in on the rear of poor trivial worldly businesses, all punctually despatched and recorded too, as if the Higher and Highest had not been busy with you, tells me a sad tale. What can we say in these cases? There is nothing to be said, — nothing but what the wild son of Ishmael, and every thinking heart, from of old have learned to say: God is great! He is terrible and stern; but we know also He is good. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” Your bright little Boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away from you; but of very truth he is with God, even as we that yet live are, — and surely in the way that was best for him, and for you, and for all of us. — Poor Lidian Emerson, poor Mother! To her I have no word. Such poignant unspeakable grief, I believe, visits no creature as that of a Mother bereft of her child. The poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its young; how much more the human soul of one’s Friend! I cannot bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. May good Influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. As the Hebrew David said, “We shall go to him, he will not return to us.”

I also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by Death. A sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor Wife (for what am I but like a spectator in comparison?): she has lost unexpectedly her good Mother, her sole surviving Parent, and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. The manner too was almost tragic. We had heard of illness here, but only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. The Doctor himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no danger: his poor Patient, in whose character the like of that intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor Daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own; why alarm her, make her wretched? The danger itself did seem over; the Doctor accordingly obeyed. Our first intimation of alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one. My poor Wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready, set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the morrow morning at her Uncle’s door in Liverpool she is met by tidings that all is already ended. She broke down there; she is now home again at Chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger Jane Welsh to nurse her: the tone of her Letters is still full of disconsolateness. I had to proceed hither, and have to stay here till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks of it in some seemly manner swept away. It is above three weeks that I have been here; not till eight days ago could I so much as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. I lead a strange life; full of sadness, of solemnity, not without a kind of blessedness. I say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one’s own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient Earth round one, the everlasting Heaven over one, and what one can make of these. Poor rustic businesses, subletting of Farms, disposal of houses, household goods: these strangely intervene, like matter upon spirit, every day; — wholesome this too perhaps. It is many years since I have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of Earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of Death and of Life. Yesterday, one of, the stillest Sundays, I sat long by the side of the swift river Nith; sauntered among woods all vocal only with rooks and pairing birds.* The hills are often white with snow-powder, black brief spring-tempests rush fiercely down from them, and then again the sky looks forth with a pale pure brightness, — like Eternity from behind Time. The Sky, when one thinks of it, is always blue, pure changeless azure; rains and tempests are only for the little dwellings where men abide. Let us think of this too. Think of this, thou sorrowing Mother! Thy Boy has escaped many showers.

 * “Templand has a very fine situation; old Walter’s walk, at the south end of the house, was one of the most picturesque and pretty to be found in the world. Nith valley (river half a mile off, winding through green holms, now in its border of clean shingle, now lost in pleasant woods and rushes) lay patent to the South. “Carlyle’s Reminiscences,” Vol. II. p. 137.

In some three weeks I shall probably be back at Chelsea. Write thitherward so soon as you have opportunity; I will write again before long, even if I do not hear from you. The moneys, &c. are all safe here as you describe: if Fraser’s’ Executors make any demur, your Bookseller shall soon hear of it.

I had begun to write some Book on Cromwell: I have often begun, but know not how to set about it; the most unutterable of all subjects I ever felt much meaning to lie in. There is risk yet that, with the loss of still farther labor, I may have to abandon it; — and then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken forever; gathered to the mighty Silent of the Earth; for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. To him small matter.

Adieu, my good kind Friend, ever dear to me, dearer now in sorrow. My Wife when she hears of your affliction will send a true thought over to you also. The poor Lidian! — John Sterling is driven off again, setting out I think this very day for Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples. Farewell, and better days to us.

Your affectionate
            T. Carlyle

LXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 81 March, 1842

My Dear Carlyle, — I wrote you a letter from my brother’s office in New York nearly a month ago to tell you how hardly it had fared with me here at home, that the eye of my home was plucked out when that little innocent boy departed in his beauty and perfection from my sight. Well, I have come back hither to my work and my play, but he comes not back, and I must simply suffer it. Doubtless the day will come which will resolve this, as everything gets resolved, into light, but not yet.

I write now to tell you of a piece of life. I wish you to know that there is shortly coming to you a man by the name of Bronson Alcott. If you have heard his name before, forget what you have heard. Especially if you have ever read anything to which this name was attached, be sure to forget that; and, inasmuch as in you lies, permit this stranger when he arrives at your gate to make a new and primary impression. I do not wish to bespeak any courtesies or good or bad opinion concerning him. You may love him, or hate him, or apathetically pass by him, as your genius shall dictate; only I entreat this, that you do not let him go quite out of your reach until you are sure you have seen him and know for certain the nature of the man. And so I leave contentedly my pilgrim to his fate.

I should tell you that my friend Margaret Fuller, who has edited our little Dial with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. The second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? You should know that, if its interior and spiritual life has been ill fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. Its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. Unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. I had not the cruelty to kill it, and so must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its new life. Perhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroitness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation, but the Dial has certain charms to me as an opportunity, which I grudge to destroy. Lately at New York I found it to be to a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion. You cannot believe it?

Mr. Lee,* who brings you this letter, is the son of one of the best men in Massachusetts, a man whose name is a proverb among merchants for his probity, for his sense and his information. The son, who bears his father’s name, is a favorite among all the young people for his sense and spirit, and has lived always with good people.

 * Mr. Henry Lee. ——  ——

I have read at New York six out of eight lectures on the Times which I read this winter in Boston. I found a very intelligent and friendly audience. The penny papers reported my lectures, somewhat to my chagrin when I tried to read them; many persons came and talked with me, and I felt when I came away that New York is open to me henceforward whenever my Boston parish is not large enough. This summer, I must try to set in order a few more chapters from these rambling lectures, one on “The Poet” and one on “Character” at least. And now will you not tell me what you read and write? Is it Cromwell still? For I supposed from the Westminster piece that the laborer must be in that quarter.

I send herewith a new Dial, No. 8, and the last of this dispensation. I hope you have received every number. They have been sent in order. I have written no line in this Number. I send a letter for Sterling, as I do not know whether his address is still at Falmouth. Is he now a preacher? By the “Acadia” you should have received a letter of exchange on the Barings, and another on James Fraser’s estate.

With constant good hope for yourself and for your wife, I am your friend,

 — R.W. Emerson

VOLUME II

“To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive.” — Emerson

“What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was.” — Carlyle

LXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 1 July, 1842

My Dear Carlyle, — I have lately received from our slow friends, James Munroe & Co., $246 on account of their sales of the Miscellanies, — and I enclose a bill of Exchange for L51, which cost $246.50. It is a long time since I sent you any sketch of the account itself, and indeed a long time since it was posted, as the booksellers say; but I will find a time and a clerk also for this.

I have had no word from you for a long space. You wrote me a letter from Scotland after the death of your wife’s mother, and full of pity for me also; and since, I have heard nothing. I confide that all has gone well and prosperously with you; that the iron Puritan is emerging from the Past, in shape and stature as he lived; and you are recruited by sympathy and content with your picture; and that the sure repairs of time and love and active duty have brought peace to the orphan daughter’s heart. My friend Alcott must also have visited you before this, and you have seen whether any relation could subsist betwixt men so differently excellent. His wife here has heard of his arrival on your coast, — no more.

I submitted to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism, — I know not what else to call it, — and took charge of our thankless little Dial, here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any laborer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed and circulated; and always we are waiting when somebody shall come and make it good. But I took it, as I said, and it took me, and a great deal of good time, to a small purpose. I am ashamed to compute how many hours and days these chores consume for me. I had it fully in my heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings opened by prayer or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse, a chapter on Poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation; but now it is July, and my chapter is rudest beginnings. Yet when I go out of doors in the summer night, and see how high the stars are, I am persuaded that there is time enough, here or somewhere, for all that I must do; and the good world manifests very little impatience.

Stearns Wheeler, the Cambridge tutor, a good Grecian, and the editor, you will remember, of your American Editions, is going to London in August probably, and on to Heidelberg, &c. He means, I believe, to spend two years in Germany, and will come to see you on his way; a man whose too facile and good-natured manners do some injustice to his virtues, to his great industry and real knowledge. He has been corresponding with your Tennyson, and editing his Poems here. My mother, my wife, my two little girls, are well; the youngest, Edith, is the comfort of my days. Peace and love be with you, with you both, and all that is yours.

 — R. W. Emerson

In our present ignorance of Mr. Alcott’s address I advised his wife to write to your care, as he was also charged to keep you informed of his place. You may therefore receive letters for him with this.

LXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 19 July, 1842

My Dear Emerson, — Lest Opportunity again escape me, I will take her, this time, by the forelock, and write while the matter is still hot. You have been too long without hearing of me; far longer, at least, than I meant. Here is a second Letter from you, besides various intermediate Notes by the hands of Friends, since that Templand Letter of mine: the Letter arrived yesterday; my answer shall get under way today.

First under the head of business let it be authenticated that the Letter enclosed a Draft for L51; a new, unexpected munificence out of America; which is ever and anon dropping gifts upon me, — to be received, as indeed they partly are, like Manna dropped out of the sky; the gift of unseen Divinities! The last money I got from you changed itself in the usual soft manner from dollars into sovereigns, and was what they call “all right,” — all except the little Bill (of Eight Pounds and odds, I think) drawn on Fraser’s Executors by Brown (Little and Brown?); which Bill the said Executors having refused for I know not what reason, I returned it to Brown with note of the dishonor done it, and so the sum still stands on his Books in our favor. Fraser’s people are not now my Booksellers, except in the matter of your Essays and a second edition of Sartor; the other Books I got transferred to a certain pair of people named “Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand”; which operation, though (I understand) it was transacted with great and vehement reluctance on the part of the Fraser people, yet produced no quarrel between them and me, and they still forward parcels, &c., and are full of civility when I see them: — so that whether this had any effect or none in their treatment of Brown and his Bill I never knew; nor indeed, having as you explained it no concern with Brown’s and their affairs, did I ever happen to inquire. I avoid all Booksellers; see them rarely, the blockheads; study never to think of them at all. Book-sales, reputation, profit, &c., &c.; all this at present is really of the nature of an encumbrance to me; which I study, not without success, to sweep almost altogether out of my head. One good is still possible to me in Life, one only: To screw a little more work out of myself, my miserable, despicable, yet living, acting, and so far imperial and celestial self; and this, God knows, is difficulty enough without any foreign one!

You ask after Cromwell: ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad. There he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under two hundred years of Cant, Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind: through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction. The likelihood still is that I may abandon the task undone. I have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; I have visited Naseby Field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; I have &c., &c.: — alas, what a talent have I for getting into the Impossible! Meanwhile my studies still proceed; I even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; I have the strangest fellowship with that huge Genius of DEATH (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed ulterior regions, — blessed, but as yet altogether silent. There is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply today and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is ours: the dead ought to bury their dead, ought they not? In short, I am very unfortunate, and deserve your prayers, — in a quiet kind of way! If you lose tidings of me altogether, and never hear of me more, — consider simply that I have gone to my natal element, that the Mud Nymphs have sucked me in; as they have done several in their time!

Sterling was here about the time your Letters to him came: your American reprint of his pieces was naturally gratifying him much.* He seems getting yearly more restless; necessitated to find an outlet for himself, unable as yet to do it well. I think he will now write Review articles for a while; which craft is really, perhaps, the one he is fittest for hitherto. I love Sterling: a radiant creature; but very restless; — incapable either of rest or of effectual motion: aurora borealis and sheet lightning; which if it could but concentrate itself, as I [say] always — ! — We had much talk; but, on the whole, even his talk is not much better for me than silence at present. Me miserum!

 ——  —— * “The Poetical Works of John Sterling,” Philadelphia, 1842. ——  ——

Directly about the time of Sterling’s departure came Alcott, some two weeks after I had heard of his arrival on these shores. He has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night. He is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!….

My poor Wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow: her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow’s mite; for except her good Mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends — they are not rife in this world. — God be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant! Have I not a Friend, and Friends, though they too are in sorrow? Good be with you all.

 — T. Carlyle.

By far the valuablest thing that Alcott brought me was the Newspaper report of Emerson’s last Lectures in New York. Really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the morning; a thing worth reading; which accordingly I clipped from the Newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many. — I cannot bid you quit the Dial, though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! Perge, perge, nevertheless. — And so now an end.

 — T. C.

LXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 29 August, 1842

My Dear. Emerson, — This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the gods and steam-demons! I already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former Letter, — acknowledging the manna-gift of the L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself. Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me, and a precious; — and when I mourn over the impotence of Human Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand dumb, cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I could soonest try to speak with, — were I within reach of him! Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a man’s meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse’s meaning; a very poor expression indeed!

 * This letter of 15th August is missing.

Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute with the Manes, as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write two Books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the Irishman’s bird: “Nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!” For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth worthless except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! Heaven help me. — I believe at least that I ought to hold my tongue; more especially at present.

Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the Dial. Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head, — march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!) — some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the Dial. In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your Dial, and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like, — into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof. Surely I could wish you returned into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it; — that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so easy to screw one’s self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!— “Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!” — Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, “Be damned!” It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you; — and so for the present will “stamp” no more….

Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more. My Wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for Suffolk. I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon, and various Cromwelliana. My blessings on the Concord Household now and always. Commend me expressly to your Wife and your Mother. Farewell, dear friend.

 — T. Carlyle

LXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 October, 1842

My Dear Carlyle, — I am in your debt for at least two letters since I sent you any word. I should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day’s post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby certify that I love you well and prize all your messages. I read with special interest what you say of these English studies, and I doubt not the Book is in steady progress again. We shall see what change the changed position of the author will make in the book. The first History expected its public; the second is written to an expecting people. The tone of the first was proud, — to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the master’s temper. This time he has a hero, and we shall have a sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who writes. Well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on the Mount of Vision which commands the Centuries, and the book shall be an indispensable Benefit to men, which is the surest fame. Let me know all that can be told of your progress in it. You shall see in the last Dial a certain shadow or mask of yours, “another Richmond,” who has read your lectures and profited thereby.* Alcott sent me the paper from London, but I do not know the name of the writer.

As for Alcott, you have discharged your conscience of him manfully and knightly; I absolve you well… He is a great man and was made for what is greatest, but I now fear that he has already touched what best he can, and through his more than a prophet’s egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the wilderness. As you do not seem to have seen in him his pure and noble intellect, I fear that it lies under some new and denser clouds.

 ——  —— * An article on Cromwell, in the Dial for October, 1842. ——  ——

For the Dial and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history, that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers, — the boys that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. Perhaps, one of these days, a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed.

The booksellers have sent me accounts lately, but — I know not why — no money. Little and Brown from January to July had sold very few books. I inquired of them concerning the bill of exchange on Fraser’s Estate, which you mention, and they said it had not been returned to them, but only some information, as I think, demanded by Fraser’s administrator, which they had sent, and, as they heard nothing again, they suppose that it is allowed and paid to you. Inform me on this matter.

Munroe & Co. allow some credits, but charge more debits for binding, &c., and also allege few sales in the hard times. I have got a good friend of yours, a banking man, to promise that he will sift all the account and see if the booksellers have kept their promises. But I have never yet got all the papers in readiness for him. I am looking to see if I have matter for new lectures, having left behind me last spring some half-promises in New York. If you can remember it, tell me who writes about Loyola and Xavier in the Edinburgh. Sterling’s papers — if he is near you — are all in Mr. Russell’s hands.* I played my part of Fadladeen with great rigor, and sent my results to Russell, but have not now written to J. S.

Yours,
   R.W.E.

 ——  ——  —
* Mr. A.L. Russell, who had been instrumental in procuring the
American edition of Sterling’s Poetical Works.

LXXX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1842

My Dear Emerson, — Your Letter finds me here today; busied with many things, but not likely to be soon more at leisure; wherefore I may as well give myself the pleasure of answering it on the spot. The Fraser Bill by Brown and Little has come all right; the Dumfries Banker apprises me lately that he has got the cash into his hands. Pray do not pester yourself with these Bookseller unintelligibilities: I suppose their accounts are all reasonably correct, the cheating, such as it is, done according to rule: what signifies it at any rate? I am no longer in any vital want of money; alas, the want that presses far heavier on me is a want of faculty, a want of sense; and the feeling of that renders one comparatively very indifferent to money! I reflect many times that the wealth of the Indies, the fame of ten Shakespeares or ten Mahomets, would at bottom do me no good at all. Let us leave these poor slaves of the Ingot and slaves of the Lamp to their own courses, — within a certain extent of halter!

What you say of Alcott seems to me altogether just. He is a man who has got into the Highest intellectual region, — if that be the Highest (though in that too there are many stages) wherein a man can believe and discern for himself, without need of help from any other, and even in opposition to all others: but I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His “more than prophetic egoism,” — alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, — in very high, and in the highest regions, for that matter. Sect-founders withal are a class I do not like. No truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards, as I often say, ever founded a Sect, — I mean wilfully intended founding one. What a view must a man have of this Universe, who thinks “he can swallow it all,” who is not doubly and trebly happy that he can keep it from swallowing him! On the whole, I sometimes hope we have now done with Fanatics and Agonistic Posture-makers in this poor world: it will be an immense improvement on the Past; and the “New Ideas,” as Alcott calls them, will prosper greatly the better on that account! The old gloomy Gothic Cathedrals were good; but the great blue Dome that hangs over all is better than any Cologne one. — On the whole, do not tell the good Alcott a word of all this; but let him love me as he can, and live on vegetables in peace; as I, living partly on vegetables, will continue to love him!

The best thing Alcott did while he staid among us was to circulate some copies of your Man the Reformer.* I did not get a copy; I applied for one, so soon as I knew the right fountain; but Alcott, I think, was already gone. And now mark, — for this I think is a novelty, if you do not already know it: Certain Radicals have reprinted your Essay in Lancashire, and it is freely circulating there, and here, as a cheap pamphlet, with excellent acceptance so far as I discern. Various Newspaper reviews of it have come athwart me: all favorable, but all too shallow for sending to you. I myself consider it a truly excellent utterance; one of the best words you have ever spoken. Speak many more such. And whosoever will distort them into any “vegetable” or other crotchet, — let it be at his own peril; for the word itself is true; and will have to make itself a fact therefore; though not a distracted abortive fact, I hope! Words of that kind are not born into Facts in the seventh month; well if they see the light full-grown (they and their adjuncts) in the second century; for old Time is a most deliberate breeder! — But to speak without figure, I have been very much delighted with the clearness, simplicity, quiet energy and veracity of this discourse; and also with the fact of its spontaneous appearance here among us. The prime mover of the Printing, I find, is one Thomas Ballantyne, editor of a Manchester Newspaper, a very good, cheery little fellow, once a Paisley weaver as he informs me, — a great admirer of all worthy things.

 ——  ——  —
* “A Lecture read before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library
Association, Boston, January 25, 1841.”
 ——  ——  —

My paper is so fast failing, let me tell you of the writer on Loyola. He is a James Stephen, Head Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office, — that is to say, I believe, real governor of the British Colonies, so far as they have any governing. He is of Wilberforce’s creed, of Wilberforce’s kin; a man past middle age, yet still in full vigor; reckoned an enormous fellow for “despatch of business,” &c., especially by Taylor (van Artevelde) and others who are with him or under him in Downing Street…. I regard the man as standing on the confines of Genius and Dilettantism, — a man of many really good qualities, and excellent at the despatch of business. There we will leave him. — A Mrs. Lee of Brookline near you has made a pleasant Book about Jean Paul, chiefly by excerpting.* I am sorry to find Gunderode & Co. a decided weariness!** Cromwell — Cromwell? Do not mention such a word, if you love me! And yet — Farewell, my Friend, tonight!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

I will apprise Sterling before long: he is at Falmouth, and well; urging me much to start a Periodical here!

Gambardella promises to become a real Painter; there is a glow of real fire in the wild southern man: next to no articulate intellect or the like, but of inarticulate much, or I mistake. He has tried to paint me for you; but cannot, he says!

 * “Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter. Compiled from various Sources. Together with his Autobiography. Translated from the German.” In Two Volumes. Boston, 1842. This book, which is one of the best in English concerning Jean Paul, was the work of the late Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Buckminster) Lee.

** In the Dial, for January, 1842, is an article by Miss Fuller on “Bettine Brentano and Gunderode,” — a decided weariness. The Canoness Gunderode was a friend of Bettine’s, older and not much wiser than herself.

LXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 11 March, 1848

Dear Emerson, — I know not whose turn it is to write; though a suspicion has long attended me that it was yours, and above all an indisputable wish that you would do it: but this present is a cursory line, all on business, — and as usual all on business of my own.

I have finished a Book, and just set the Printer to it; one solid volume (rather bigger than one of the French Revolution Volumes, as I compute); it is a somewhat fiery and questionable “Tract for the Times,” not by a Puseyite, which the terrible aspect of things here has forced from me, — I know not whether as preliminary to Oliver or not; but it had gradually grown to be the preliminary of anything possible for me: so there it is written; and I am a very sick, but withal a comparatively very free man. The Title of the thing is to be Past and Present: it is divided into Four Books, “Book I. Proem,” “Book II. The Ancient Monk,” “Book III. The Modern Worker,” and “Book IV. Horoscope” (or some such thing): — the size of it I guessed at above.

The practical business, accordingly, is: How to cut out that New York scoundrel, who fancies that because there is no gallows it is permitted to steal? I have a distinct desire to do that; — altogether apart from the money to be gained thereby. A friend’s goodness ought not to be frustrated by a scoundrel destitute of gallows. — You told me long since how to do the operation; and here, according to the best way I had of fitting your scheme into my materials, is my way of attempting it.

The Book will not be out here for six good weeks from this date; it could be kept back for a week or two longer, if that were indispensable: but I hope it may not. In three weeks, half of it will be printed; I, in the meanwhile, get a correct manuscript Copy of the latter half made ready: joining the printed sheets and this manuscript, your Bookseller will have a three weeks’ start of any rival, if I instantly despatch the Parcel to him. Will this do? this with the announcement of the Title as given above? Pray write to me straightway, and say. Your answer will be here before we can publish; and the Packet of Proof-sheets and Manuscript may go off whether there be word from you or none. — And so enough of Past and Present. And indeed enough of all things, for my haste is excessive in these hours.

The last Dial came to me about three weeks ago as a Post-Letter, charged something like a guinea of postage, if I remember; so it had to be rejected, and I have not yet seen that Number; but will when my leeway is once brought up a little again. The two preceding Numbers were, to a marked extent, more like life than anything I had seen before of the Dial. There was not indeed anything, except the Emersonian Papers alone, which I know by the first ring of them on the tympanum of the mind, that I properly speaking liked; but there was much that I did not dislike, and did half like; and I say, “I fausto pede; that will decidedly do better!” By the bye, it were as well if you kept rather a strict outlook on Alcott and his English Tail, — I mean so far as we here have any business with it. Bottomless imbeciles ought not to be seen in company with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has already men listening to him on this side of the water. The “Tail” has an individual or two of that genus, — and the rest is mainly yet undecided. For example, I knew old — myself; and can testify, if you will believe me, that few greater blockheads (if “blockhead” may mean “exasperated imbecile” and the ninth part of a thinker) broke the world’s bread in his day. Have a care of such! I say always to myself, — and to you, which you forgive me.

Adieu, my dear Emerson. May a good Genius guide you; for you are alone, alone; and have a steep pilgrimage to make, — leading high, if you do not slip or stumble!

Ever your affectionate,
                  T. Carlyle

LXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 1 April, 1843

My Dear Carlyle, — Along with this Letter there will go from Liverpool, on the 4th instant, the promised Parcel, complete Copy of the Book called Past and Present, of which you already had two simultaneous announcements.* The name of the Steam Packet, I understand, is the “Britannia.” I have addressed the Parcel to the care of “Messrs. Little and Brown, Booksellers, Boston,” with your name atop: I calculate it will arrive safe enough.

 * The letter making the second announcement, being very similar to the preceding, is omitted.

About one hundred pages of the Manuscript Copy have proved superfluous, the text being there also in a printed shape; I had misestimated the Printer’s velocity; I was anxious too that there should be no failure as to time. The Manuscript is very indifferent in that section of it; the damage therefore is smaller: your press-corrector can acquaint himself with the hand, &c. by means of it. A poor young governess, confined to a horizontal posture, and many sad thoughts, by a disease of the spine, was our artist in that part of the business: her writing is none of the distinctest; but it was a work of Charity to give it her. I hope the thing is all as correct as I could make it. I do not bethink me of anything farther I have to add in the way of explanation.

In fact, my prophecy rather is at present that the gibbetless thief at New York, will beat us after all! Never mind if be do. To say truth, I myself shall almost be glad: there has been a botheration in this anxious arrangement of parts correcting of scrawly manuscript copies of what you never wished to read more, and insane terror withal of having your own Manuscript burnt or lost, — that has exceeded my computation. Not to speak of this trouble in which I involve you, my Friend; which, I truly declare, makes me ashamed! True one is bound to resist the Devil in all shapes; if a man come to steal from you, you will put on what locks and padlocks are at hand, and not on the whole say, “Steal, then!” But if the locks prove insufficient, and the thief do break through, — that side of the alternative also will suit you very well; and, with perhaps a faint prayer for gibbets when they are necessary, you will say to him, next time, “Macte virtute, my man.”

All is in a whirl with me here today; no other topic but this very poor one can be entered upon. I hope for a letter from your own hand soon, and some news about still more interesting matters.

Adieu, my Friend; I feel still as if, in several senses, you stood alone with me under the sky at present!*

 — * The signature to this letter has been cut off. —

LXXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 29 April, 1843

My Dear Carlyle, — It is a pleasure to set your name once more at the head of a sheet. It signifies how much gladness, how much wealth of being, that the good, wise, man-cheering, man-helping friend, though unseen, lives there yonder, just out of sight. Your star burns there just below our eastern horizon, and fills the lower and upper air with splendid and splendescent auroras. By some refraction which new lenses or else steamships shall operate, shall I not yet one day see again the disk of benign Phosphorus? It is a solid joy to me, that whilst you work for all, you work for me and with me, even if I have little to write, and seldom write your name.

Since I last wrote to you, I found it needful, if only for the household’s sake, to set some new lectures in order, and go to new congregations of men. I live so much alone, shrinking almost cowardly from the contact of worldly and public men, that I need more than others to quit home sometimes, and roll with the river of travelers, and live in hotels. I went to Baltimore, where I had an invitation, and read two lectures on New England. On my return, I stopped at Philadelphia, and, my Course being now grown to four lectures, read them there. At New York, my snowball was larger, and I read five lectures on New England. 1. Religion; 2. Trade; 3. Genius, Manners and Customs; 4. Recent literary and spiritual influences from abroad; 5. Domestic spiritual history. — Perhaps I have not quite done with them yet, but may make them the block of a new and somewhat larger structure for Boston, next winter. The newspaper reports of them in New York were such offensive misstatements, that I could not send you, as I wished, a sketch. Between my two speeches at Baltimore, I went to Washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. The two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to Canada, and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. Yet one feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there. I think, in the higher societies of the Universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating.

But I must not delay to acknowledge the arrival of your Book. It came ten or eleven days ago, in the “Britannia,” with the three letters of different dates announcing it. — I have read the superfluous hundred pages of manuscript, and find it only too popular. Beside its abundance of brilliant points and proverbs, there is a deep, steady tide taking in, either by hope or by fear, all the great classes of society, — and the philosophic minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the phenomenon. It is true contemporary history, which other books are not, and you have fairly set solid London city aloft, afloat in bright mirage in the air. I quarrel only with the popular assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the Humor itself, that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same thing in the days of Rabelais and of Aristophanes, as of Carlyle. Orators always allow something to masses, out of love to their own art, whilst austere philosophy will only know the particles. This were of no importance, if the historian did not so come to mix himself in some manner with his erring and grieving nations, and so saddens the picture; for health is always private and original, and its essence is in its unmixableness. — But this Book, with all its affluence of wit, of insight, and of daring hints, is born for a longevity which I will not now compute. — In one respect, as I hinted above, it is only too good, so sure of success, I mean, that you are no longer secure of any respect to your property in our freebooting America.

You must know that the cheap press has, within a few months, made a total change in our book markets. Every English book of any name or credit is instantly converted into a newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a hundred boys in the streets of all of our cities for 25, 18, or 12 cents; Dickens’s Notes for 12 cents, Blackwood’s Magazine for 18 cents, and so on. Three or four great New York and Philadelphia printing-houses do this work, with hot competition. One prints Bulwer’s novel yesterday, for 35 cents; and already, in twenty-four hours, another has a coarser edition of it for 18 cents, in all thoroughfares. — What to do with my sealed parcel of manuscripts and proofs? No bookseller would in these perilous circumstances offer a dollar for my precious parcel. I inquired of the lawyers whether I could not by a copyright protect my edition from piracy until an English copy arrived, and so secure a sale of a few weeks. They said, no; yet advised the taking a certificate of copyright, that we might try the case if we wished. After much consulting and balancing for a few hours, I decided to print, as heretofore, on our own account, an edition, but cheap, to make the temptation less, to retail at seventy-five cents. I print fifteen hundred copies, and announce to the public that it is your edition, and all good men must buy this. I have written to the great Reprinters, namely to Park Benjamin, and to the Harpers, of New York, to request their forbearance; and have engaged Little and Brown to publish, because, I think, they have something more of weight with Booksellers, and are a little less likely to be invaded than Munroe. If we sell a thousand copies at seventy-five cents, it will only yield you about two hundred dollars; if we should be invaded, we can then afford to sell the other five hundred copies at twenty-five cents, without loss. In thus doing, I involve you in some risk; but it was the best course that occurred. — Hitherto, the Miscellanies have not been reprinted in the cheap forms; and in the last year, James Munroe & Co. have sold few copies; all books but the cheapest being unsold in the hard times; something has however accrued to your credit there. J.M. & Co. fear that, if the new book is pirated at New York and the pirate prospers, instantly the Miscellanies will be plundered. We will hope better, or at least exult in that which remains, to wit, a Worth unplunderable, yet infinitely communicable.

I have hardly space left to say what I would concerning the Dial. I heartily hoped I had done with it, when lately our poor, good, publishing Miss Peabody,… wrote me that its subscription would not pay its expenses (we all writing for love). But certain friends are very unwilling it should die, and I a little unwilling, though very unwilling to be the life of it, as editor. And now that you are safely through your book, and before the greater Sequel rushes to its conclusion, send me, I pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points. Let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the Dial, and this too Elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor. — Let Jane Carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden one. I think to send you a duplicate of the last number of the Dial by Mr. Mann,* who with his bride (sister of the above-mentioned Miss Peabody) is going to London and so to Prussia. He is little known to me, but greatly valued as a philanthropist in this State. I must go to work a little more methodically this summer, and let something grow to a tree in my wide straggling shrubbery. With your letters came a letter from Sterling, who was too noble to allude to his books and manuscript sent hither, and which Russell all this time has delayed to print; I know not why, but discouraged, I suppose, in these times by booksellers. I must know precisely, and write presently to J.S.

Farewell.
   R.W. Emerson**

 — * The late Horace Mann.

** The following passages from Emerson’s Diary relating to Past and Present seem to have been written a few days after the preceding letter:— “How many things this book of Carlyle gives us to think! It is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but Literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists. The gods are come among us in the likeness of men. An honest Iliad of English woes. Who is he that can trust himself in the fray? Only such as cannot be familiarized, but nearest seen and touched is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere, bring him here and environ him, as the Ambassador carries his country with him. Love protects him from profanation. What a book this in its relation to English privileged estates! How shall Queen Victoria read this? how the Primate and Bishops of England? how the Lords? how the Colleges? how the rich? and how the poor? Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lord and lordship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless rebounds and kicks, and yet not a word in the book is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal, and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, — this flaming sword of cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon and shows to the eyes of the Universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservation and impressing the reader with the conviction that Carlyle himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes. Gulliver among the Lilliputians…

“Carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. What a man’s book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. A masterly criticism on the times. Fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of today. The poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e.g. dwarf British Debt and raise Nature and social life.

“But everything must be done well once; even bulletins and almanacs must have one excellent and immortal bulletin and almanac. So let Carlyle’s be the immortal newspaper.” ——  ——  —

LXXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

27 August, 1843

Dear Emerson, — The bearer of this is Mr. Macready, our celebrated Actor, now on a journey to America, who wishes to know you. In the pauses of a feverish occupation which he strives honestly to make a noble one, this Artist, become once more a man, would like well to meet here and there a true American man. He loves Heroes as few do; and can recognize them, you will find, whether they have on the Cothurnus or not. I recommend him to you; bid you forward him as you have opportunity, in this department of his pilgrimage.

Mr. Macready’s deserts to the English Drama are notable here to all the world; but his dignified, generous, and every-way honorable deportment in private life is known fully, I believe, only to a few friends. I have often said, looking at him as a manager of great London theatres, “This Man, presiding over the unstablest, most chaotic province of English things, is the one public man among us who has dared to take his stand on what he understood to be the truth, and expect victory from that: he puts to shame our Bishops and Archbishops.” It is literally so.

With continued kind wishes, yours as of old.
                                       T. Carlyle

LXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 October, 1843

My Dear Friend, — I seize the occasion of having this morsel of paper for twenty-five pounds sterling from the booksellers to send you, (and which fail not to find enclosed, as clerks say,) to inquire whether you still exist in Chelsea, London, and what is the reason that my generous correspondent has become dumb for weary months. I must go far back to resume my thread. I think in April last I received your Manuscript, &c. of the Book, which I forthwith proceeded to print, after some perplexing debate with the booksellers, as I fully informed you in my letter of April or beginning of May. Since that time I have had no line or word from you. I must think that my letter did not reach you, or that you have written what has never come to me. I assure myself that no harm has befallen you, not only because you do not live in a corner, and what chances in your dwelling will come at least to my ears, but because I have read with great pleasure the story of Dr. Francia,* which gave the best report of your health and vivacity.

 ——  ——  —
* Carlyle’s article on Dr. Francia in the Foreign Quarterly
Review, No. 62. Reprinted in his Miscellanies.
 ——  ——  —

I wrote you in April or May an account of the new state of things which the cheap press has wrought in our book market, and specially what difficulties it put in the way of our edition of Past and Present. For a few weeks I believed that the letters I had written to the principal New York and Philadelphia booksellers, and the Preface, had succeeded in repelling the pirates. But in the fourth or fifth week appeared a mean edition in New York, published by one Collyer (an unknown person and supposed to be a mask of some other bookseller), sold for twelve and one half cents, and of this wretched copy several thousands were sold, whilst our seventy-five cents edition went off slower. There was no remedy, and we must be content that there was no expense from our edition, which before September had paid all its cost, and since that time has been earning a little, I believe. I am not fairly entitled to an account of the book from the publishers until the 1st of January…. I have never yet done what I have thought this other last week seriously to do, namely, to charge the good and faithful E.P. Clark, a man of accounts as he is a cashier in a bank, with the total auditing and analyzing of these accounts of yours. My hesitation has grown from the imperfect materials which I have to offer him to make up so long a story. But he is a good man, and, do you know it? a Carlylese of that intensity that I have often heard he has collected a sort of album of several volumes, containing illustrations of every kind, historical, critical, &c., to the Sartor. I must go to Boston and challenge him. Once when I asked him, he seemed willing to assume it. No more of accounts tonight.

I send you by this ship a volume of translations from Dante, by Doctor Parsons of Boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist. It is his gift to you. Lately went Henry James to you with a letter from me. He is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as I learn. He carried a volume of poems from my friend and nearest neighbor, W. Ellery Channing, whereof give me, I pray you, the best opinion you can. I am determined he shall be a poet, and you must find him such.* I have too many things to tell you to begin at the end of this sheet, which after all this waiting I have been compelled to scribble in a corner, with company waiting for me. Send me instant word of yourself if you love me, and of those whom you love, and so God keep you and yours.

 — R. Waldo Emerson

 ——  ——  — * In the second number of the Dial, in October, 1840, Emerson had published, under the title of “New Poetry,” an article warmly commending Mr. Channing’s then unpublished poems. ——  ——  —

LXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 31 October, 1843

My Dear Emerson, — It is a long weary time since I have had the satisfaction of the smallest dialogue with you. The blame is all my own; the reasons would be difficult to give, — alas, they are properly no-reasons, children not of Something, but of mere Idleness, Confusion, Inaction, Inarticulation, of Nothing in short! Let us leave them there, and profit by the hour which yet is.

I ran away from London into Bristol and, South Wales, when the heats grew violent, at the end of June. South Wales, North Wales, Lancashire, Scotland: I roved about everywhere seeking some Jacob’s-pillow on which to lay my head, and dream of things heavenly; — yes, that at bottom was my modest prayer, though I disguised it from myself and the result was, I could find no pillow at all; but sank into ever meaner restlessness, blacker and blacker biliary gloom, and returned in the beginning of September thoroughly eclipsed and worn out, probably the weariest of all men living under the sky. Sure enough I have a fatal talent of converting all Nature into Preternaturalism for myself: a truly horrible Phantasm-Reality it is to me; what of heavenly radiances it has, blended in close neighborhood, in intimate union, with the hideousness of Death and Chaos; — a very ghastly business indeed! On the whole, it is better to hold one’s peace about it. I flung myself down on sofas here, — for my little Wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and I had only to lie down: there, in reading books, and other make-believe employments, I could at least keep silence, which was an infinite relief. Nay, gradually, as indeed I anticipated, the black vortexes and deluges have subsided; and now that it is past, I begin to feel myself better for my travels after all. For one thing, articulate speech having returned to me, — you see what use I make of it.

On the table of the London Library, voted in by some unknown benefactor whom I found afterwards to be Richard Milnes, there lay one thing highly gratifying to me: the last two Numbers of the Dial. It is to be one of our Periodicals henceforth; the current Number lies on the Table till the next arrive; then the former goes to the Binder; we have already, in a bound volume, all of it that Emerson has had the editing of. This is right. Nay, in Edinburgh, and indeed wherever ingenuous inquisitive minds were met with, I have to report that the said Emerson could number a select and most loving public; select, and I should say fast growing: for good and indifferent reasons it may behove the man to assure himself of this. Farther, to the horror of poor Nickerson (Bookseller Fraser’s Successor), a certain scoundrel interloper here has reprinted Emerson’s Essays on grayish paper, to be sold at two shillings, — distracting Nickerson with the fear of change! I was glad at this, if also angry: it indicates several things. Nickerson has taken his measures, will reduce the price of his remaining copies; indeed, he informs me the best part of his edition was already sold, and he has even some color of money due from England to Emerson through me! With pride enough will I transmit this mournful, noble peculium: and after that, as I perceive, such chivalrous international doings must cease between us. Past and Present, some one told me, was, in spite of all your precautions, straightway sent forth in modest gray, and your benevolent speculation ruined. Here too, you see, it is the same. Such chivalries, therefore, are now impossible; for myself I say, “Well, let them cease; thank God they once were, the Memory of that can never cease with us!”

In this last Number of the Dial which by the bye your Bookseller never forwarded to me, I found one little Essay, a criticism on myself,* which, if it should do me mischief, may the gods forgive you for! It is considerably the most dangerous thing I have read for some years. A decided likeness of myself recognizable in it, as in the celestial mirror of a friend’s heart; but so enlarged, exaggerated, all transfigured, — the most delicious, the most dangerous thing! Well, I suppose I must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one’s own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome nonentity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! “The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day,” says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you! — I have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it to my Mother: one of the indubitablest benefits I could think of in regard to it.

 * A criticism by Emerson of Past and Present, in the Dial for July, 1843. It embodies a great part of the extract from Emerson’s Diary given in a preceding note, and is well worth reading in full for its appreciation of Carlyle’s powers and defects.

There have been two friends of yours here in these very days: Dr. Russell, just returning from Paris; Mr. Parker, just bound thither.* We have seen them rather oftener than common, Sterling being in town withal. They are the best figures of strangers we have had for a long time; possessions, both of them, to fall in with in this pilgrimage of life. Russell carries friendliness in his eyes, a most courteous, modest, intelligent man; an English intelligence too, as I read, the best of it lying unspoken, not as a logic but as an instinct. Parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom I like much. They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion!

 ——  ——  —— * Dr. Le Baron Russell; Theodore Parker. ——  ——  ——

As for myself, dear Emerson, you must ask me no questions till — alas, till I know not when! After four weary years of the most unreadable reading, the painfulest poking and delving, I have come at last to the conclusion — that I must write a Book on Cromwell; that there is no rest for me till I do it. This point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, That a Book on Cromwell is impossible. Literally so: you would weep for me if you saw how, between these two adamantine certainties, I am whirled and tumbled. God only knows what will become of me in the business. Patience, Patience!

By the bye, do you know a “Massachusetts Historical Society,” and a James Bowdoin, seemingly of Boston? In “Vol. II. third series” of their Collections, lately I met with a disappointment almost ludicrous. Bowdoin, in a kind of dancing, embarrassed style, gives long-winded, painfully minute account of certain precious volumes, containing “Notes of the Long Parliament,” which now stand in the New York Library; poises them in his assaying balance, speculates, prophesies, inquires concerning them: to me it was like news of the lost Decades of Livy. Good Heavens, it soon became manifest that these precious Volumes are nothing whatever but a wretched broken old dead manuscript copy of part of our printed Commons Journals! printed since 1745, and known to all barbers! If the Historical Society desired it, any Member of Parliament could procure them the whole stock, Lords and Commons, a wheelbarrowful or more, with no cost but the carriage. Every Member has the right to demand a copy, and few do it, few will let such a mass cross their door-threshold! This of Bowdoin’s is a platitude of some magnitude. — Adieu, dear Emerson. Rest not, haste not; you have work to do.

 — T. Carlyle

LXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 17 November, 1843

Dear Emerson, — About this time probably you will be reading a Letter I hurried off for you by Dr. Russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. Had I kept silence so very long? I knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! It behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that I have safely received your Letter of the 30th October, safely the Bill for L25 it contained; — that you are a brave, friendly man, of most serene, beneficient way of life; and that I — God help me! —

By all means appoint this Mr. Clark to the honorary office of Account-keeper — if he will accept it! By Parker’s list of questions from him, and by earlier reminiscences recalled on that occasion, I can discern that he is a man of lynx eyesight, of an all-investigating curiosity: if he will accept this sublime appointment, it will be the clearest case of elective affinity. Accounts to you must be horrible; as they are to me: indeed, I seldom read beyond the last line of them, if I can find the last; and one of the insupportabilities of Bookseller Accounts is that nobody but a wizard, or regular adept in such matters, can tell where the last line, and final net result of the whole accursed babblement, is to be found! By all means solicit Clark; — at all events, do you give it up, I pray you, and let the Booksellers do their own wise way. It really is not material; let the poor fellows have length of halter. Every new Bill from America comes to me like a kind of heavenly miracle; a reaping where I never sowed, and did not expect to reap: the quantity of it is a thing I can never bring in question. — For your English account with Nickerson I can yet say nothing more; perhaps about Newyear’s-day the poor man will enable me to say something. I hear however that the Pirate has sold off, or nearly so, his Two-shillings edition of the Essays, and is preparing to print another; this, directly in the teeth of Cash and double-entry book-keeping, I take to be good news.

James is a very good fellow, better and better as we see him more. Something shy and skittish in the man; but a brave heart intrinsically, with sound, earnest sense, with plenty of insight and even humor. He confirms an observation of mine, which indeed I find is hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer. Hammond l’Estrange says, “Who ever heard of a stammering man that was a fool?” Really there is something in that. — James is now off to the Isle of Wight; will see Sterling at Ventnor there; see whether such an Isle or France will suit better for a winter residence.

W.E. Channing’s Poems are also a kind gift from you. I have read the pieces you had cut up for me: worthy indeed of reading! That Poem on Death is the utterance of a valiant, noble heart, which in rhyme or prose I shall expect more news of by and by. But at bottom “Poetry” is a most suspicious affair for me at present! You cannot fancy the oceans of Twaddle that human Creatures emit upon me, in these times; as if, when the lines had a jingle in them, a Nothing could be Something, and the point were gained! It is becoming a horror to me, — as all speech without meaning more and more is. I said to Richard Milnes, “Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative before the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for God’s sake let me have it the shortest way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the omission of the jingle at the end: cannot I do without that!” — Milnes answered, “Ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have no thought, or almost none; a little thought goes a great way when you put it into rhyme!” Let a man try to the very uttermost to speak what he means, before singing is had recourse to. Singing, in our curt English speech, contrived expressly and almost exclusively for “despatch of business,” is terribly difficult. Alfred Tennyson, alone of our time, has proved it to be possible in some measure. If Channing will persist in melting such obdurate speech into music he shall have my true wishes, — my augury that it will take an enormous heat from him! — Another Channing,* whom I once saw here, sends me a Progress-of-the-Species Periodical from New York. Ach Gott! These people and their affairs seem all “melting” rapidly enough, into thaw-slush or one knows not what. Considerable madness is visible in them. Stare super antiquas vias: “No,” they say, “we cannot stand, or walk, or do any good whatever there; by God’s blessing, we will fly, — will not you! — here goes!” And their flight, it is as the flight of the unwinged, — of oxen endeavoring to fly with the “wings” of an ox! By such flying, universally practised, the “ancient ways” are really like to become very deep before long. In short, I am terribly sick of all that; — and wish it would stay at home at Fruitland, or where there is good pasture for it. Friend Emerson, alone of all voices, out of America, has sphere-music in him for me, — alone of them all hitherto; and is a prophecy and sure dayspring in the East; immeasurably cheering to me. God long prosper him; keep him duly apart from that bottomless hubbub which is not, at all cheering! And so ends my Litany for this day.

 ——  —— * The Reverend William Henry Channing. ——  ——

The Cromwell business, though I punch daily at it with all manner of levers, remains immovable as Ailsa Crag. Heaven alone knows what I shall do with it. I see and say to myself, It is heroical; Troy Town was probably not a more heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people, — must it be dead forever? — Perhaps yes, — and kill me too into the bargain. Really I think it very shocking that we run to Greece, to Italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. Were I absolute Sovereign and Chief Pontiff here, there should be a study of the Old English ages first of all. I will pit Odin against any Jupiter of them; find Sea-kings that would have given Jason a Roland for his Oliver! We are, as you sometimes say, a book-ridden people, — a phantom-ridden people. — All this small household is well; salutes you and yours with love old and new. Accept this hasty messenger; accept my friendliest farewell, dear Emerson.

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

LXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 December, 1843

My Dear Friend, — I have had two good letters from you, and it is fully my turn to write, so you shall have a token on this latest day of the year. I rejoice in this good will you bear to so many friends of mine, — if they will go to you, you must thank yourself. Best when you are mutually contented. I wished lately I might serve Mr. Macready, who sent me your letter. — I called on him and introduced him to Sam G. Ward, my friend and the best man in the city, and, besides all his personal merits, a master of all the offices of hospitality. Ward was to keep himself informed of Macready’s times, and bring me to him when there was opportunity. But he stayed but a few days in Boston, and, Ward said, was in very good hands, and promised to see us when he returns by and by. I saw him in Hamlet, but should much prefer to see him as Macready.

I must try to entice Mr. Macready out here into my pines and alder bushes. Just now the moon is shining on snow-drifts, four, five, and six feet high, but, before his return, they will melt; and already this my not native but ancestral village, which I came to live in nearly ten years ago because it was the quietest of farming towns, and off the road, is found to lie on the directest line of road from Boston to Montreal, a railroad is a-building through our secretest woodlands, and, tomorrow morning, our people go to Boston in two hours instead of three, and, next June, in one. This petty revolution in our country matters was very odious to me when it began, but it is hard to resist the joy of all one’s neighbors, and I must be contented to be carted like a chattel in the cars and be glad to see the forest fall. This rushing on your journey is plainly a capital invention for our spacious America, but it is more dignified and man-like to walk barefoot. — But do you not see that we are getting to be neighbors? a day from London to Liverpool; twelve or eleven to Boston; and an hour to Concord; and you have owed me a visit these ten years.

I mean to send with your January Dial a copy of the number for Sterling, as it contains a review of his tragedy and poems, by Margaret Fuller. I have not yet seen the article, and the lady affirms that it is very bad, as she was ill all the time she was writing; but I hope and believe better. She, Margaret Fuller, is an admirable person, whose writing gives feeble account of her. But I was to say that I shall send this Dial for J.S. to your care, as I know not the way to the Isle of Wight.

Enclosed in this letter I send a bill of exchange for L32 8s. 2d. payable by Baring & Co. It happens to represent an exact balance on Munroe’s books, and that slow mortal should have paid it before. I have not yet got to Clark, I who am a slow mortal, but have my eye fixed on him. Remember me and mine with kindest salutations to your wife and brother.

Ever yours,
       R.W. Emerson

LXXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 31 January, 1844

Dear Emerson, Some ten days ago came your Letter with a new Draft of L32 and odd money in it: all safe; the Draft now gone into the City to ripen into gold and silver, the Letter to be acknowledged by some hasty response now and here. America, I say to myself looking at these money drafts, is a strange place; the highest comes out of it and the lowest! Sydney Smith is singing dolefully about doleful American repudiation, “disowning of the soft impeachment”; and here on the other hand is an American man, in virtue of whom America has become definable withal as a place from which fall heavenly manna-showers upon certain men, at certain seasons of history, when perhaps manna-showers were not the unneedfulest things! — We will take the good and the evil, here as elsewhere, and heartily bless Heaven.

But now for the Draft at the top of this leaf. One Colman,* a kind of Agricultural Missionary, much in vogue here at present, has given it me; it is Emerson’s, the net produce hitherto (all but two cents) of Emerson’s Essays. I enclose farther the Bookseller’s hieroglyph papers; unintelligible as all such are; but sent over to you for scrutiny by the expert. I gather only that there are some Five Hundred and odd of the dear-priced edition sold, some Two Hundred and odd still to sell, which the Bookseller says are (in spite of pirates) slowly selling; and that the half profit upon the whole adventure up to this date has been L24 15s. 11d. sterling, — equal, as I am taught, at $4.88 per pound sterling, to $121.02, for which, all but the cents, here is a draft on Boston, payable at sight. Pray have yourself straightway paid; that if there be any mistake or delay I may rectify it while time yet is. — I add, for the intelligence of the Bookseller-Papers, that Fraser, with whom the bargain originally stood, was succeeded by Nickerson; these are the names of the parties. And so, dear Friend; accept this munificent sum of Money; and expect a blessing with it if good wishes from the heart of man can give one. So much for that.

 * The Reverend Henry Colman.

Did you receive a Dumfries Newspaper with a criticism in it? The author is one Gilfillan, a young Dissenting Minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a Preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. He has written in that same Newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; Godwin, Corn-law Elliott and I know not all whom: if he publish the Book, I will take care to send it you.* I saw the man for the first time last autumn, at Dumfries; as I said, his being a Calvinist Dissenting Minister, economically fixed, and spiritually with such germinations in him, forces me to be very reserved to him.

 — * The sketches were published the next year in a volume under the title of The Gallery of Literary Portraits. —

John Sterling’s Dial shall be forwarded to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, whenever it arrives. He was here, as probably I told you, about two months ago, the old unresting brilliantly radiating man. He is now much richer in money than he was, and poorer by the loss of a good Mother and good Wife: I understand he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a poem. He flings too much “sheet-lightning” and unrest into me when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always longs for him back again: “No doing with him or without him,” the dog!

My thrice unfortunate Book on Cromwell, — it is a real descent to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos! I feel oftenest as if it were possibler to die one’s self than to bring it into life. Besides, my health is in general altogether despicable, my “spirits” equal to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor! One needs to be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or sunless, or it will never do. The planet Earth, says Voss, — take four hexameters from Voss:

Journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces;
Joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests;
Falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour:
So thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, March!

I have not a moment more tonight; — and besides am inclined to write unprofitables if I persist. Adieu, my friend; all blessings be with you always.

Yours ever truly,
             T. Carlyle

XC. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 29 February, 1844

My Dear Carlyle, — I received by the last steamer your letter, and its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which order I sent to Ward, who turned it at once into money. Thanks, dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me this pleasing and most unlooked for result. And I beg you, if you know any family representative of Mr. Fraser, to express my sense of obligation to that departed man. I feel a kindness not without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred Englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany. I shall not fail to send them a new collection, which I hope they will like better. My faith in the Writers, as an organic class, increases daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which shall be parallel with nature. Yet without any effort I fancy I make progress also in the doctrine of Indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. It is a poor second thought, this literary activity.

Perhaps I am not made obnoxious to much suffering, but I have had happy hours enough in gazing from afar at the splendors of the Intellectual Law, to overpay me for any pains I know. Existence may go on to be better, and, if it have such insights, it never can be bad. You sometimes charge me with I know not what sky-blue, sky-void idealism. As far as it is a partiality, I fear I may be more deeply infected than you think me. I have very joyful dreams which I cannot bring to paper, much less to any approach to practice, and I blame myself not at all for my reveries, but that they have not yet got possession of my house and barn. But I shall not lose my love for books. I only worship Eternal Buddh in the retirements and intermissions of Brahma. — But I must not egotize and generalize to the end of my sheet, as I have a message or two to declare.

I enclose a bill of exchange on the Barings for thirty-six pounds; which is the sum of two recent payments of Munroe and of Little and Brown, whereof I do not despair you shall yet have some account in booksellers’ figures. I have got so far with Clark as to have his consent to audit the accounts when I shall get energy and time enough to compile them out of my ridiculous Journal. Munroe begs me to say what possibly I have already asked for him, that, when the History of Cromwell is ready to be seen of men, you will have an entire copy of the Manuscript taken, and sent over to us. Then will he print a cheap edition such as no one will undersell, and secure such a share of profit to the author as the cheap press allows. Perhaps only thirty or forty pounds would make it worth while to take the trouble. A valued friend of mine wishes to know who wrote (perhaps three years ago) a series of metaphysical articles in Blackwood on Consciousness. Can you remember and tell me? And now I commend you to the good God, you and your History, and the true kind wife who is always good to the eager Yankees, and am yours heartily,

 — R.W. Emerson

XCI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 8 April, 1844

Dear Emerson, — Till within five minutes of the limit of my time, I had forgotten that this was the 3d of the Month; that I had a Letter to write acknowledging even money! Take the acknowledgment, given in all haste, not without a gratitude that will last longer: the Thirty-six pounds and odd shillings came safe in your Letter, a new unlooked-for Gift. America, I think, is like an amiable family teapot; you think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable implement yields you another cup, and another! Many thanks to you, who are the heart of America to me.

Republishing for one’s friend’s sake, I find on consulting my Bookseller, is out here; we have Pirates waiting for every American thing of mark, as you have for every British; to the tender mercies of these, on both sides, I fancy the business must be committed. They do good too; as all does, even carrion: they send you faster abroad, if the world have any use for you; — oftenest it only thinks it has. Your Essays, the Pirated Essays, make an ugly yellow tatter of a Pamphlet, price 1s. 6d.; but the edition is all sold, I understand: and even Nickerson has not entirely ceased to sell. The same Pirate who pounced upon you made an attempt the other day on my poor Life of Schiller, but I put the due spoke in his wheel. They have sent me Lowell’s Poems; they are bringing out Jean Paul’s Life, &c., &c.; the hungry Canaille. It is strange that men should feel themselves so entirely at liberty to steal, simply because there is no gallows to hang them for doing it. Your new Book will be eagerly waited for by that class of persons; and also by another class which is daily increasing here.

The only other thing I am “not to forget” is that of the Essay on Consciousness in Blackwood. The writer of those Papers is one Ferrier, a Nephew of the Edinburgh Miss Ferrier who wrote Marriage and some other Novels; Nephew also of Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and married to one of his daughters. A man of perhaps five-and-thirty; I remember him in boyhood, while he was boarded with an Annandale Clergyman; I have seen him since manhood, and liked him well: a solid, square-visaged, dark kind of man, more like your Theodore Parker than any mutual specimen I can recollect.

He got the usual education of an Edinburgh Advocate; but found no practice at the Bar, nor sought any with due anxiety, I believe; addicted himself to logical meditations; — became, the other year, Professor of Universal History, or some such thing, in the Edinburgh University, and lectures with hardly any audience: a certain young public wanted me to be that Professor there, but I knew better, — Is this enough about Ferrier?

I will not add another word; the time being past, irretrievable except by half-running!

Write us your Book; and be well and happy always!*

 ——  — * The signature has been cut off. ——  —

XCII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 5 August, 1844

Dear Emerson, — There had been a long time without direct news from you, till four days ago your Letter arrived. This day I understand to be the ultimate limit of the American Mail; yesterday, had it not been Sunday, would have been the limit: I write a line, therefore, though in very great haste.

Poor Sterling, even I now begin to fear, is in a very bad way. He had two successive attacks of spitting of blood, some three months ago or more; the second attack of such violence, and his previous condition then so weak, that the Doctor as good as gave up hope, — the poor Patient himself had from the first given it up. Our poor Friend has had so many attacks of that nature, and so rapidly always rallied from them, I gave no ear to these sinister prognostics; but now that I see the summer influences passing over him without visible improvement, and our good weather looking towards a close without so much strength added as will authorize even a new voyage to Madeira; — I too am at last joining in the general discouragement; all the sadder to me that I shut it out so long. Sir James Clark, our best-accredited Physician for such diseases, declares that Life, for certain months, may linger, with great pain; but that recovery is not to be expected. Great part of the lungs, it appears, is totally unserviceable for respiration; from the remainder, especially in times of coughing, it is with the greatest difficulty that breath enough is obtained. Our poor Patient passes the night in a sitting posture; cannot lie down: that fact sticks with me ever since I heard it! He is very weak, very pale; still “writes a great deal daily”; but does not wish to see anybody; declines to “see even Carlyle,” who offered to go to him. His only Brother, Anthony Sterling, a hardy soldier, lately withdrawn from the Army, and settled in this quarter, whom we often communicate with, is about going down to the Isle of Wight this week: he saw John four days ago, and brings nothing but bad news, — of which indeed this removal of his to the neighborhood of the scene is a practical testimony. The old Father, a Widower for the last two years, and very lonely and dispirited, seems getting feebler and feebler: he was here yesterday: a pathetic kind of spectacle to us. Alas, alas! But what can be said? I say Nothing; I have written only one Note to Sterling: I feel it probable that I shall never see him more, — nor his like again in this world. His disease, as I have from of old construed it, is a burning of him up by his own fire. The restless vehemence of the man, struggling in all ways these many years to find a legitimate outlet, and finding, except for transitory, unsatisfactory coruscations, none, has undermined its Clay Prison in the weakest point (which proves to be the lungs), and will make outlet there. My poor Sterling! It is an old tragedy; and very stern whenever it repeats itself of new.

Today I get answer about Alfred Tennyson: all is right on that side. Moxon informs me that the Russell Books and Letter arrived duly, and were duly forwarded and safely received; nay, farther, that Tennyson is now in Town, and means to come and see me. Of this latter result I shall be very glad: Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me; — a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother! — However, I doubt he will not come; he often skips me, in these brief visits to Town; skips everybody indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom, — carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos!

Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman Farmer, I think; indeed, you see in his verses that he is a native of “moated granges,” and green, fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law or Church; being master of a small annuity on his Father’s decease, he preferred clubbing with his Mother and some Sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade’s rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; — smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic, — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech, and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe! — We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic, — his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon. (O Paper!)

I trust there is now joy in place of pain in the House at Concord, and a certain Mother grateful again to the Supreme Powers! We are all in our customary health here, or nearly so; my Wife has been in Lancashire, among her kindred there, for a month lately: our swollen City is getting empty and still; we think of trying an Autumn here this time. — Get your Book ready; there are readers ready for it! And be busy and victorious!

Ever Yours,
        T. Carlyle

My History is frightful! If I live, it is like to be completed; but whether I shall live, and not rather be buried alive, broken-hearted, in the Serbonian Quagmires of English Stupidity, and so sleep beside Cromwell, often seems uncertain. Erebus has no uglier, brutaler element. Let us say nothing of it. Let us do it, or leave it to the Devils. Ay de mi!

XCIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 1 September, 1844

My Dear Carlyle, — I have just learned that in an hour Mr. Wilmer’s mail-bag for London, by the “Acadia,” closes, and I will not lose the occasion of sending you a hasty line: though I had designed to write you from home on sundry matters, which now must wait. I send by this steamer some sheets, to the bookseller John Chapman, — proofsheets of my new book of Essays. Chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to send him some manuscript that had not yet been published in America, and he thought he could make an advantage from printing it, and even, in some conditions, procure a copyright, and he would publish for me on the plan of half-profits. The request was so timely, since I was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet (an Address to citizens of some thirteen towns who celebrated in Concord the negro Emancipation on 1st August last), that I came to town yesterday, and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs of all the Address, and of more than half the book. If you can give Chapman any counsel, or save me from any nonsense by enjoining on him careful correction, you shall.

I looked eagerly for a letter from you by the last steamer, to give me exact tidings of Sterling. None came; but I received a short note from Sterling himself, which intimated that he had but a few more days to live. It is gloomy news. I beg you will write me everything you can relate of him, by the next mail. If you can learn from his friends whether the packet of his Manuscripts and printed papers, returned by Russell and sent by me through Harnden’s Express to Ventnor, arrived safely, it would be a satisfaction.

Yours affectionately,
               R.W. Emerson

XCIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 29 September, 1844

Dear Emerson, — There should a Letter have come for you by that Steamer; for I wrote one duly, and posted it in good time myself: I will hope therefore it was but some delay of some subaltern official, such as I am told occasionally chances, and that you got the Letter after all in a day or two. It would give you notice, more or less, up to its date, of all the points you had inquired about there is now little to be added; except concerning the main point, That the catastrophe has arrived there as we foresaw, and all is ended.

John Sterling died at his house in Ventnor on the night of Wednesday, 18th September, about eleven o’clock; unexpectedly at last, and to appearance without pain. His Sister-in-law, Mrs. Maurice; had gone down to him from this place about a week before; other friends were waiting as it were in view of him; but he wished generally to be alone, to continue to the last setting his house and his heart more and more in order for the Great Journey. For about a fortnight back he had ceased to have himself formally dressed; had sat only in his dressing-gown, but I believe was still daily wheeled into his Library, and sat very calmly sorting and working there. He sent me two Notes, and various messages, and gifts of little keepsakes to my Wife and myself: the Notes were brief, stern and loving; altogether noble; never to be forgotten in this world. His Brother Anthony, who had been in the Isle of Wight within call for several weeks, had now come up to Town again; but, after about a week, decided that he would run down again, and look. He arrived on the Wednesday night, about nine o’clock; found no visible change; the brave Patient calm as ever, ready to speak as ever, — to say, in direct words which he would often do, or indirectly as his whole speech and conduct did, “God is Great.” Anthony and he talked for a while, then took leave for the night; in few minutes more, Anthony was summoned to the bedside, and at eleven o’clock, as I said, the curtain dropt, and it was all ended. — Euge!

Whether the American Manuscripts had arrived I do not yet know, but probably shall before this Letter goes; for Anthony is to return hither on Tuesday, and I will inquire. Our Friend is buried in Ventnor Churchyard; four big Elms overshadow the little spot; it is situated on the southeast side of that green Island, on the slope of steep hills (as I understand it) that look toward the Sun, and are close within sight and hearing of the Sea. There shall he rest, and have fit lullaby, this brave one. He has died as a man should; like an old Roman, yet with the Christian Bibles and all newest revelations present to him. He refused to see friends; men whom I think he loved as well as any, — me for one when I obliquely proposed it, he refused. He was even a little stern on his nearest relatives when they came to him: Do I need your help to die? Phocion-like he seemed to feel degraded by physical decay; to feel that he ought to wrap his mantle round him, and say, “I come, Persephoneia; it is not I that linger!” — His Sister-in-law, Anthony’s Wife, probably about a month ago, while they were still in Wight, had begged that she might see him yet once; her husband would be there too, she engaged not to speak. Anthony had not yet persuaded him, when she, finding the door half open, went in: his pale changed countenance almost made her shriek; she stept forward silently, kissed his brow in silence; he burst into tears. Let us speak no more of this. — A great quantity of papers, I understand, are left for my determination; what is to be done with them I will sacredly endeavor to do.

I have visited your Bookseller Chapman; seen the Proof-sheets lying on his table; taken order that the reprint shall be well corrected, — indeed, I am to read every sheet myself, and in that way get acquainted with it, before it go into stereotype. Chapman is a tall, lank youth of five-and-twenty; full of good will, but of what other equipment time must yet try. By a little Book of his, which I looked at some months ago, he seemed to me sunk very deep in the dust-hole of extinct Socinianism; a painful predicament for a man! He is not sure of saving much copyright for you; but he will do honestly what in that respect is doable; and he will print the Book correctly, and publish it decently, I saying imprimatur if occasion be, — and your ever-increasing little congregation here will do with the new word what they can. I add no more today; reserving a little nook for the answer I hope to get two days hence. Adieu, my Friend: it is silent Sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beer-shops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubric-mummeries, — a much more audacious feat than beer! We have wet wind at Northeast, and a sky somewhat of the dreariest: — Courage! a little way above it reigns mere blue, and sunshine eternally! — T.C.

Wednesday, October 2d. — The Letter had to wait till today, and is still in time. Anthony Sterling, who is yet at Ventnor, apprises me this morning that according to his and the Governess’s belief the Russell Manuscripts arrived duly, and were spoken of more than once by our Friend. — On Monday I received from this same Anthony a big packet by Post; it contains among other things all your Letters to John, wrapt up carefully, and addressed in his hand, “Emerson’s Letters, to be returned through the hands of Carlyle”: they shall go towards you next week, by Mr. James, who is about returning. Among the other Papers was one containing seven stanzas of verse addressed to T. Carlyle, 14th September; full of love and enthusiasm; — the Friday before his death: I was visiting the old City of Winchester that day, among the tombs of Canutes and eldest noble ones: you may judge how sacred the memory of those hours now is!

I have read your Slavery Address; this morning the first half-sheet, in Proof, of the Essays has come: perfectly correct, and right good reading.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

XCV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 September, 1844 My Dear Friend, — I enclose a bill of exchange for thirty pounds sterling which I procured in town today at $5 each pound, or $150; so high, it seems, is the rate at present, higher, they said, than for years. It is good booksellers’ money from Little and Brown, and James Munroe & Co., in unequal proportions. If you wish for more accurate information and have a great deal of patience, there is still hope that you may obtain it before death; for I this day met E.P. Clark in Washington Street, and he reported some progress in auditing of accounts, and said that when presently his family should return to town for the winter, he would see to the end of them, i.e. the accounts.

I received with great satisfaction your letter of July, which came by a later steamer than it was written for, but gave me exact and solid information on what I most wished to know. May you live forever, and may your reports of men and things be accessible to me whilst I live! Even if, as now in Sterling’s case, the news are the worst, or nearly so, yet let whatever comes for knowledge be precise, for the direst tragedy that is accurately true must share the blessing of the Universe. I have no later tidings from Sterling, and I must still look to you to tell me what you can. I dread that the story should be short. May you have much good to tell of him, and for many a day to come! The sketch you drew of Tennyson was right welcome, for he is an old favorite of mine, — I owned his book before I saw your face; — though I love him with allowance. O cherish him with love and praise, and draw from him whole books full of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps.

I have much regretted a sudden note I wrote you just before the steamer of 1 September sailed, entreating you to cumber yourself about my proofsheets sent to the London bookseller. I heartily absolve you from all such vexations. Nothing could be more inconsiderate. Mr. Chapman is undoubtedly amply competent to ordinary correction, and I much prefer to send you my little book in decent trim than in rags and stains and deformities more than its own. I have just corrected and sent to the steamer the last sheets for Mr. Chapman, who is to find English readers if he can. I shall ask Mr. Chapman to send you a copy, for his edition will be more correct than mine. What can I tell you better? Why even this, that this house rejoices in a brave boy, now near three months old. Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. When shall I show him to you? And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and wood-lot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond? One of these days, if I should have any money, I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the tree-tops, and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me.

Yours with love,
            R.W. Emerson

XCVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 3 November, 1844

Dear Emerson, — By the clearest law I am bound to write you a word today, were my haste even greater than it is. The last American fleet or ship, about the middle of last month, brought me a Draft for Thirty Pounds; which I converted into ready cash, and have here, — and am now your grateful debtor for, as of old. There seems to be no end to those Boston Booksellers! I think the well is dry; and straightway it begins to run again. Thanks to you: — it is, I dare say, a thing you too are grateful for. We will recognize it among the good things of this rather indifferent world. — By the way, if that good Clark like his business, let him go on with it; but if not, stop him, poor fellow! It is to me a matter of really small moment whether those Booksellers’ accounts be ever audited in this world, or left over to the General Day of Audit. I myself shudder at the sight of such things; and make my bargain here so always as to have no trade with them, but to be netto from the first. Why should I plague poor Clark with them, if it be any plague to him? The Booksellers will never know but we examine them! The very terror of Clark’s name will be as the bark of chained Mastiff, — and no need for actual biting! Have due pity on the man.

Your English volume of Essays, as Chapman probably informs you by this Post, was advertised yesterday, “with a Preface from me.” That is hardly accurate, that latter clause. My “Preface” consists only of a certificate that the Book is correctly printed, and sent forth by a Publisher of your appointment, whom therefore all readers of yours ought to regard accordingly. Nothing more. There proves, I believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only Chapman asserts that he has obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into Chancery, — which has a terrible sound; and indeed the Act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no Sergeant Talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. The sound of “Chancery,” the stereotype character of this volume, and its cheap price, may perhaps deter pirates, — who are but a weak body in this country as yet. I judged it right to help in that; and impertinent, at this stage of affairs, to go any farther. The Book is very fairly printed, onward. at least to the Essay New England Politics, where my “perfect-copy” of the sheets as yet stops. I did not read any of the Proofs except two; finding it quite superfluous, and a sad waste of time to the hurried Chapman himself. I have found yet but one error, and that a very correctable one, “narvest” for “harvest”; — no other that I recollect at present.

The work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right chance yet — not till I get it in the bound state, and read it all at once — to produce its due impression on me. But I will say already of it, It is a sermon to me, as all your other deliberate utterances are; a real word, which I feel to be such, — alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot pass with me for words! This is a praise far beyond any “literary” one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison. For the rest, I have to object still (what you will call objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a Speaker indeed, but as it were a Soliloquizer on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible, — whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, “Why won’t you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do life-pictures, passions, facts, — which transcend all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering! To which he answers that he won’t, can’t, and doesn’t want to (as the Cockneys have it): and so I leave him, and say, “You Western Gymnosophist! Well, we can afford one man for that too. But — ! — By the bye, I ought to say, the sentences are very brief; and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me. Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty — But they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers: the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square bag of duck-shot held together by canvas! I will try them again, with the Book deliberately before me. — There are also one or two utterances about “Jesus,” “immortality,” and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes here and there. I do not say it was wrong to utter them; a man obeys his own Daemon in these cases as his supreme law. I dare say you are a little bored occasionally with “Jesus,” &c., — as I confess I myself am, when I discern what a beggarly Twaddle they have made of all that, what a greasy Cataplasm to lay to their own poltrooneries;- -and an impatient person may exclaim with Voltaire, in serious moments: “Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme-la! I have had enough of him; — I tell you I am alive too!”

Well, I have scribbled at a great rate; regardless of Time’s flight! — My Wife thanks many times for M. Fuller’s Book. I sent by Mr. James a small Packet of your letters — which will make you sad to look at them! Adieu, dear friend.

 — T. Carlyle

XCVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 December, 1844

My Dear Friend, — I have long owed you a letter and have much to acknowledge. Your two letters containing tidings, the first of the mortal illness, and the second of the death of Sterling, I had no heart to answer. I had nothing to say. Alas! as in so many instances heretofore, I knew not what to think. Life is somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable qualities. That which we call faith seems somewhat stoical and selfish, if we use it as a retreat from the pangs this ravishment inflicts. I had never seen him, but I held him fast; now I see him not, but I can no longer hold him. Who can say what he yet is and will be to me? The most just and generous can best divine that. I have written in vain to James to visit me, or to send me tidings. He sent me, without any note, the parcel you confided to him, and has gone to Albany, or I know not whither.

I have your notes of the progress of my London printing, and, at last, the book itself. It was thoughtless in me to ask your attention to the book at all in the proof state; the printer might have been fully trusted with corrected printed pages before him. Nor should Chapman have taxed you for an advertisement; only, I doubt not he was glad of a chance to have business with you; and, of course, was too thankful for any Preface. Thanks to you for the kind thought of a “Notice,” and for its friendly wit. You shall not do this thing again, if I should send you any more books. A Preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme, a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. I fancy my readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class, — men and women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else mystical, and by no means including the great literary and fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your books. If you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers try to read me, and with false expectations. I had rather have fewer readers and only such as belong to me.

I doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected and inconsecutive is just. Your words are very gentle. I should describe it much more harshly. My knowledge of the defects of these things I write is all but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all. I am only a sort of lieutenant here in the deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as thinking it a better homage than universal silence. You Londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country lyceums. But of what you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of Congress. And though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. Since I am not to see you from year to year, is there never an Englishman who knows you well, who comes to America, and whom you can send to me to answer all my questions? Health and love and joy to you and yours.

 — R.W. Emerson

XCVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 January, 1845

My Dear Carlyle, — Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, booksellers, have lately proposed to buy the remainder of our Boston edition of your Miscellanies, or to give you a bonus for sanctioning an edition of the same, which they propose to publish. On inquiry, I have found that only thirteen entire sets of four volumes remain to us unsold; whilst we have 226 copies of Volume III., and 243 copies of Volume IV., remaining.

In replying to Mr. Carey, I proposed that, besides the proposed bonus, he should buy of me these old volumes, which are not bound but folded, at 25 cents a volume, (Monroe having roughly computed the cost at 40 cents a volume,) but this he declines to do, and offers fifty pounds sterling for his bonus. I decided at once to accept his offer, thinking it a more favorable winding up of our account than I could otherwise look for; as Mr. Carey knows much better how to defend himself from pirates than I do. So I am to publish that his edition is edited with your concurrence. Our own remaining copies of entire sets I shall sell at once to Monroe, at a reduced price, and the odd volumes I think to dispose of by giving them a new and independent title-page. In the circumstances of the trade here, I think Mr. Carey’s offer a very liberal one, and he is reputed in his dealings eminently just and generous.

My friend William Furness, who has corresponded with me on Carey’s behalf, has added now another letter to say that Mr. Carey wishes to procure a picture of Mr. Carlyle to be engraved for this edition. “He understands there is a good head by Laurence, and he wishes to employ some London artist to make a copy of it in oil or water colors, or in any way that will suffice for the engraver; and he proposes to apply to Mr. Carlyle for permission through Inman the American artist who is now in England.” Furness goes on to ask for my “good word” with you in furtherance of this design. Well, I heartily hope you will not resist so much good nature and true love; for Mr. Furness and Mr. Griswold, and others who compose a sort of advising committee to Mr. Carey, are sincere lovers of yours. One more opportunity this crisis in our accounts will give to that truest of all Carlylians, E.P. Clark, to make his report. I called at his house two nights ago, in Boston; he promised immediate attention, but quickly drew me aside to his “Illustrations of Carlyle,” an endless train of books, and portfolios, and boxes of prints, in which every precious word of that master is explained or confirmed.

Affectionately yours,
                 R.W. Emerson

XCIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 16 February, 1845

Dear Emerson, — By the last Packet, which sailed on the 3d of the month, I forgot to write to you, though already in your debt one Letter; and there now has another Letter arrived, which on the footing of mere business demands to be answered. I write straightway; not knowing how the Post-Office people will contrive the conveyance, or whether it can be sooner than by the next Steam ship, but willing to give them a chance.

You have made another brave bargain for me with the Philadelphia people; to all of which I can say nothing but “Euge! Papae!” It seems to me strange, in the present state of Copyright, how my sanction or the contrary can be worth L50 to any American Bookseller; but so it is, to all appearance; let it be so, therefore, with thanks and surprise. The Messrs. Carey and Lea distinguish themselves by the beauty of their Editions; a poor Author does not go abroad among his friends in dirty paper, full of misprints, under their guidance; this is as handsome an item of the business as any. As to the Portrait too, I will be as “amiable” as heart could wish; truly it will be worth my while to take a little pains that the kind Philadelphia Editors do once for all get a faithful Portrait of me, since they are about it, and so prevent counterfeits from getting into circulation. I will endeavor to do in that matter whatsoever they require of me; to the extent even of sitting two days for a Crayon Sketch such as may be engraved, — though this new sacrifice of patience will not be needed as matters are. It stands thus: there is no Painter, of the numbers who have wasted my time and their own with trying, that has indicated any capability of catching a true Likeness, but one Samuel Lawrence; a young Painter of real talent, not quite so young now, but still only struggling for complete mastership in the management of colors. He does crayon sketches in a way to please almost himself; but his oil paintings, at least till within a year or two, have indicated only a great faculty still crude in that particular. His oil portrait of me, which you speak of, is almost terrible to behold! It has the look of a Jotun, of a Scandinavian Demon, grim, sad, as the angel of Death; — and the coloring is so brickish, the finishing so coarse, it reminds you withal of a flayed horse’s head! “Dinna speak o’t.” But the preparatory crayon-sketch of this, still in existence, is admired by some judges; poor John Sterling bought it from the Painter, and it is now here in the hands of his Brother, who will readily allow any authorized person to take a drawing of it. Lawrence himself, I imagine, would be the fittest man to employ; or your Mr. Ingham [Inman], if he be here and a capable person: one or both of these might superintend the Engraving of it here, and not part with the plate till it were pronounced satisfactory. In short, I am willing to do “anything in reason”! Only if a Portrait is to be, I confess I should rather avoid going abroad under the hands of bunglers, at least of bunglers sanctioned by myself. There is a Portrait of me in some miserable farrago called Spirit of the Age;* a farrago unknown to me, but a Portrait known, for poor Lawrence brought it down to me with sorrow in his face; it professes to be from his painting; is a “Lais without the beauty” (as Charles Lamb used to say); a flayed horse’s head without the spiritualism, good or bad, — and simply figures on my mind as a detestability; which I had much rather never have seen. These poor Spirit of the Age people applied to me; I described myself as “busy,” &c.; shoved them off me; and this monster of iniquity, resembling Nothing in the Earth or under it, is the result. In short, I am willing, I am willing; and so let us not waste another drop of ink on it at present! — On the whole, are not you a strange fellow? You apologize as if with real pain for “trouble” I had, or indeed am falsely supposed to have had, with Chapman here; and forthwith engage again in correspondences, in speculations, and negotiations, and I know not what, on my behalf! For shame, for shame! Nay, you have done one very ingenious thing; to set Clark upon the Boston Booksellers’ accounts: it is excellent; Michael Scott setting the Devil to twist ropes of sand, “There, my brave one; see if you don’t find work there for a while!” I never think of this Clark without love and laughter. Once more, Euge! Chapman is fast selling your Books here; striking off a new Five Hundred from his Stereotypes. You are wrong as to your Public in this Country; it is a very pretty public; extends pretty much, I believe, through all ranks, and is a growing one, — and a truly aristocratic, being of the bravest inquiring minds we have. All things are breaking up here, like Swedish Frost in the end of March; gachis epouvantable. Deep, very serious eternal instincts, are at work; but as yet no serious word at all that I hear, except what reaches me from Concord at intervals. Forward, forward! And you do not know what I mean by calling you “unpractical,” “theoretic.” 0 caeca corda! But I have no room for such a theme at present.

 ——  ——  —
* “A new Spirit of the Age. Edited by R.H. Horne.” In Two
Volumes. London, 1844.
 ——  ——  —

The reason I tell you nothing about Cromwell is, alas, that there is nothing to be told. I am day and night, these long months and years, very miserable about it, — nigh broken-hearted often. Such a scandalous accumulation of Human Stupidity in every form never lay before on such a subject. No history of it can be written to this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, God-forgetting generation. How can you explain men to Apes by the Dead Sea?* And I am very sickly too, and my Wife is ill all this cold weather, — and I am sunk in the bowels of Chaos, and scarce once in the three months or so see so much as a possibility of ever getting out! Cromwell’s own Letters and Speeches I have gathered together, and washed clean from a thousand ordures: these I do sometimes think of bringing out in a legible shape; — perhaps soon. Adieu, dear friend, with blessings always.

 — T. Carlyle

Poor Sydney Smith is understood to be dying; water on the chest; past hope of Doctors. Alas!

 * The dwellers by the Dead Sea who were changed to apes are referred to in various places by Carlyle. He tells the story of the metamorphosis, which he got from the introduction to Sale’s Koran, in Past and Present, Book III. Ch. 3.

C. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, June 29, 1845

My Dear Friend, — I grieve to think of my slackness in writing, which suffers steamer after steamer to go without a letter. But I have still hoped, before each of the late packets sailed, that I should have a message to send that would enforce a letter. I wrote you some time ago of Mr. Carey’s liberal proposition in relation to your Miscellanies. I wrote, of course, to Furness, through whom it was made to me, accepting the proposition; and I forwarded to Mr. Carey a letter from me to be printed at the beginning of the book, signifying your good-will to the edition, and acknowledging the justice and liberality of the publishers. I have heard no more from them, and now, a fortnight since, the newspaper announces the death of Mr. Carey. He died very suddenly, though always an invalid and extremely crippled. His death is very much regretted in the Philadelphia papers, where he bore the reputation of a most liberal patron of good and fine arts. I have not heard from Mr. Furness, and have thought I should still expect a letter from him. I hope our correspondence will stand as a contract which Mr. Carey’s representatives will feel bound to execute. They had sent me a little earlier a copy of Mr. Sartain’s engraving from their water-color copy of Laurence’s head of you. They were eager to have the engraving pronounced a good likeness. I showed it to Sumner, and Russell, and Theodore Parker, who have seen you long since I had, and they shook their heads unanimously and declared that D’Orsay’s profile was much more like.

 ** From the rough draft.

I creep along the roads and fields of this town as I have done from year to year. When my garden is shamefully overgrown with weeds, I pull up some of them. I prune my apples and pears. I have a few friends who gild many hours of the year. I sometimes write verses. I tell you with some unwillingness, as knowing your distaste for such things, that I have received so many applications from readers and printers for a volume of poems that I have seriously taken in hand the collection, transcription, or scription of such a volume, and may do the enormity before New Year’s day. Fear not, dear friend, you shall not have to read one line. Perhaps I shall send you an official copy, but I shall appeal to the tenderness of Jane Carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, for the benefit of us both. Where all writing is such a caricature of the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious? Meantime, I think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments. I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs. Now I have Plato, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind. What news of Naseby and Worcester?

CI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 29 August, 1845

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter, which had been very long expected, has been in my hand above a month now; and still no answer sent to it. I thought of answering straightway; but the day went by, days went by; — and at length I decided to wait till my insupportable Burden (the “Stupidity of Two Centuries” as I call it, which is a heavy load for one man!) were rolled off my shoulders, and I could resume the habit of writing Letters, which has almost left me for many months. By the unspeakable blessing of Heaven that consummation has now arrived, about four days ago I wrote my last word on Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches; and one of the earliest uses I make of my recovered freedom is to salute you again. The Book is nearly printed: two big volumes; about a half of it, I think, my own; the real utterances of the man Oliver Cromwell once more legible to earnest men. Legible really to an unexpected extent: for the Book took quite an unexpected figure in my hands; and is now a kind of Life of Oliver, the best that circumstances would permit me to do: — whether either I or England shall be, in my time, fit for a better, remains submitted to the Destinies at present. I have tied up the whole Puritan Paper-Litter (considerable masses of it still unburnt) with tight strings, and hidden it at the bottom of my deepest repositories: there shall it, if Heaven please, lie dormant for a time and times. Such an element as I have been in, no human tongue can give account of. The disgust of my Soul has been great; a really pious labor: worth very little when I have done it; but the best I could do; and that is quite enough. I feel the liveliest gratitude to the gods that I have got out of it alive. The Book is very dull, but it is actually legible: all the ingenious faculty I had, and ten times as much would have been useful there, has been employed in elucidation; in saying, and chiefly in forbearing to say, — in annihilating continents of brutal wreck and dung: Ach Gott! — But in fact you will see it by and by; and then form your own conclusions about it. They are going to publish it in October, I find: I tried hard to get you a complete copy of the sheets by this Steamer; but it proves to be flatly impossible; — perhaps luckily; for I think you would have been bothering yourself with some new Bookseller negotiation about it; and that, as copyright and other matters now stand, is a thing I cannot recommend. — Enough of it now: only let all my silences and other shortcomings be explained thereby. I am now off for the North Country, for a snatch still at the small remnants of Summer, and a little free air and sunshine. I am really far from well, though I have been riding diligently for three months back, and doing what I could to help myself.

Very glad shall I be, my Friend, to have some new utterances from you either in verse or in prose! What you say about the vast imperfection of all modes of utterance is most true indeed. Let a man speak and sing, and do, and sputter and gesticulate as he may, — the meaning of him is most ineffectually shown forth, poor fellow; rather indicated as if by straggling symbols, than spoken or visually expressed! Poor fellow! So the great rule is, That he have a good manful meaning, and then that he take what “mode of utterance” is honestly the readiest for him. — I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; and give us a History of him, — make an artistic bronze statue (in good words) of his Life and him! I do indeed. — But speak of what you will, you are welcome to me. Once more I say, No other voice in this wide waste world seems to my sad ear to be speaking at all at present. The more is the pity for us.

I forbid you to plague yourself any farther with those Philadelphia or other Booksellers. If you could hinder them to promulgate any copy of that frightful picture by Lawrence, or indeed any picture at all, I had rather stand as a shadow than as a falsity in the minds of my American friends: but this too we are prepared to encounter. And as for the money of these men, — if they will pay it, good and welcome; if they will not pay it, let them keep it with what blessing there may be in it! I have your noble offices in that and in other such matters already unforgetably sure to me; and, in real fact, that is almost exactly the whole of valuable that could exist for me in the affair. Adieu, dear Friend. Write to me again; I will write again at more leisure.

Yours always,
          T. Carlyle

CII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 September, 1845

My Dear Friend, — I have seen Furness of Philadelphia, who was, last week, in Boston, and inquired of him what account I should send you of the new Philadelphia edition. “Has not Mr. Carey paid you?” he said. — No. “Then has he not paid Carlyle directly?” No, as I believe, or I should have heard of it. — Furness replied, that the promised fifty pounds were sure, and that the debt would have been settled before this time, if Mr. Carey had lived. So as this is no longer a Three Blind Callenders’ business of Arabian Nights, I shall rest secure. I have doubted whether the bad name which Philadelphia has gotten in these times would not have disquieted you in this long delay. If you have ever heard directly from Carey and Hart, you will inform me.

I am to read to a society in Boston presently some lectures, — on Plato, or the Philosopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Sceptic; Shakespeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World; — if I dare, and much lecturing makes us incorrigibly rash. Perhaps, before I end it, my list will be longer, and the measure of presumption overflowed. I may take names less reverend than some of these, — but six lectures I have promised. I find this obligation usually a good spur to the sides of that dull horse I have charge of. But many of its advantages must be regarded at a long distance.

I have heard nothing from you for a long time, — so may your writing prosper the more. I wish to hear, however, concerning you, and your house, and your studies, when there is little to tell. The steamers come so fast — to exchange cards would not be nothing. My wife and children and my mother are well. Peace and love to your household.

 — R.W. Emerson

CIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 September, 1845

My Dear Friend, — I had hardly sent away my letter by the last steamer, when yours full of good news arrived. I greet you heartily on the achievement of your task, and the new days of freedom obtained and deserved. Happiest, first, that you can work, which seems the privilege of the great, and then, also, that thereby you can come at the sweetness of victory and rest. Yes, flee to the country, ride, run, leap, sit, spread yourself at large; and in all ways celebrate the immense benevolence of the Universe towards you; and never complain again of dyspepsia, crosses, or the folly of men; for in giving you this potent concentration, what has been withholden? I am glad with all men that a new book is made, that the gentle creation as well as the grosser goes ever on. Another month will bring it to me, and I shall know the secrets of these late silent years. Welcome the child of my friend! Why should I regret that I see you not, when you are forced thus intimately to discover yourself beyond the intimacy of conversation?

But you should have sent me out the sheets by the last steamer, or a manuscript copy of the book. I do not know but Munroe would have printed it at once, and defied the penny press. And slow Time might have brought in his hands a most modest reward.

I wrote you the other day the little I had to say on affairs. Clark, the financial Conscience, has never yet made any report, though often he promised. Half the year he lives out of Boston, and unless I go to his Bank I never see his face. I think he will not die till he have disburdened himself of this piece of arithmetic. I pray you to send me my copy of this book at the earliest hour, and to offer my glad congratulations to Jane Carlyle, on an occasion, I am sure, of great peace and relief to her spirit. And so farewell.

 — R.W. Emerson

CIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 11 November, 1846

My Dear Emerson, — I have had two Letters from you since I wrote any; the latest of them was lying here for me when I returned, about three weeks ago; the other I had received in Scotland: it was only the last that demanded a special answer; — which, alas, I meant faithfully to give it, but did not succeed! With meet despatch I made the Bookseller get ready for you a Copy of the unpublished Cromwell Book; hardly complete as yet, it was nevertheless put together, and even some kind of odious rudiments of a Portrait were bound up with it; and the Packet inscribed with your address was put into Wiley and Putnam’s hands in time for the Mail Steamer; — and I hope has duly arrived? If it have not, pray set the Booksellers a-hunting. Wiley and Putnam was the Carrier’s name; this is all the indication I can give, but this, I hope, if indeed any prove needful, will be enough. One may hope you have the Book already in your hands, a fortnight before this reaches you, a month before any other Copy can reach America. In which case the Parcel, without any Letter, must have seemed a little enigmatic to you! The reason was this: I miscounted the day of the month, unlucky that I was. Sitting down one morning with full purpose to write at large, and all my tools round me, I discover that it is no longer the third of November; that it is already the fourth, and the American Mail-Packet has already lifted anchor! Irrevocable, irremediable! Nothing remained but to wait for the 18th; — and now, as you see, to take Time by the forelock, — queue, as we all know, he has none.

My visit to Scotland was wholesome for me, tho’ full of sadness, as the like always is. Thirty years mow away a Generation of Men. The old Hills, the old Brooks and Houses, are still there; but the Population has marched away, almost all; it is not there any more. I cannot enter into light talk with the survivors and successors; I withdraw into silence, and converse with the old dumb crags rather, in a melancholy and abstruse manner. — Thank God, my good old Mother is still there; old and frail, but still young of heart; as young and strong there, I think, as ever. It is beautiful to see affection survive where all else is submitting to decay; the altar with its sacred fire still burning when the outer walls are all slowly crumbling; material Fate saying, “They are mine!” — I read some insignificant Books; smoked a great deal of tobacco; and went moping about among the hills and hollow water-courses, somewhat like a shade in Hades. The Gospel which this World of Fact does preach to one differs considerably from the sugary twaddle one gets the offer of in Exeter-Hall and other Spouting-places! Of which, in fact, I am getting more and more weary; sometimes really impatient. It seems to me the reign of Cant and Spoonyism has about lasted long enough. Alas, in many respects, in this England I too often feel myself sorrowfully in a “minority of one”; — if in the whole world, it amount to a minority of two, that is something! These words of Goethe often come into my mind, “Verachtung ja Nicht-achtung.” Lancashire, with its Titanic Industries, with its smoke and dirt, and brutal stupor to all but money and the five mechanical Powers, did not excite much admiration in me; considerably less, I think, than ever! Patience, and shuffle the cards!

The Book on Cromwell is not to come out till the 22d of this month. For many weeks it has been a real weariness to me; my hope, always disappointed, that now is the last time I shall have any trade with it. Even since I began writing, there has been an Engraver here, requiring new indoctrination, — poor fellow! Nay, in about ten days it must be over: let us not complain. I feel it well to be worth nothing, except for the little fractions or intermittent fits of pious industry there really were in it; and my one wish is that the human species would be pleased to take it off my hands, and honestly let me hear no more about it! If it please Heaven, I will rest awhile still, and then try something better.

In three days hence, my Wife and I are off to the Hampshire coast for a winter visit to kind friends there, if in such a place it will prosper long with us. The climate there is greatly better than ours; they are excellent people, well affected to us; and can be lived with, though of high temper and ways! They are the Lord Ashburtons, in fact; more properly the younger stratum of that house; partly a kind of American people, — who know Waldo Emerson, among other fine things, very well! I think we are to stay some three weeks: the bustle of moving is already begun.

You promise us a new Book soon? Let it be soon, then. There are many persons here that will welcome it now. To one man here it is ever as an articulate voice amid the infinite cackling and cawing. That remains my best definition of the effect it has on me. Adieu, my friend. Good be with you and your Household always. Vale.

 — T.C.

CV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 3 January, 1846

Dear Emerson, — I received your Letter* by the last Packet three or four days ago: this is the last day of answering, the monthly Packet sails towards you again from Liverpool tomorrow morning; and I am in great pressure with many writings, elsewhither and thither: therefore I must be very brief. I have just written to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia; his Draft (as I judge clearly by the Banker’s speech and silence) is accepted, all right; and in fact, means money at this time: for which I have written to thank him heartily. Do you very heartily thank Mr. Furness for me; — Furness and various friends, as Transatlantic matters now are, must accept a silent gratitude from me. The speech of men and American hero-worshipers is grown such a babblement: in very truth, silence is the thing that chiefly has meaning, — there or here….

 * Missing

To my very great astonishment, the Book Cromwell proves popular here; and there is to be another edition very soon. Edition with improvements — for some fifty or so of new (not all insignificant) Letters have turned up, and I must try to do something rational with them; — with which painful operation I am again busy. It will make the two volumes about equal perhaps, — which will be one benefit! If any American possibility lie in this, I will take better care of it. — Alas, I have not got one word with you yet! Tell me of your Lectures; — of all things. Ever yours, T. Carlyle

We returned from Hampshire exactly a week ago; never passed six so totally idle weeks in our lives. — Better in health a little? Perhaps.

CVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 3 February, 1848

Dear Emerson, — One word to you before the Packet sail; — on business of my own, once more; in such a state of haste as could hardly be greater. The Printers are upon me, and I have not a moment.

Contrary to all human expectation, this Book on Cromwell proves salable to mankind here, and a second Edition is now going forward with all speed. The publication of the First has brought out from their recesses a new heap of Cromwell Letters; — which have been a huge embarrassment to me; for they are highly unimportant for most part, and do not tend to alter or materially modify anything. Some Fifty or Sixty new Letters in all (many of them from Printed Books that had escaped me) the great majority, with others yet that may come in future time, I determine to print simply as an Appendix; but several too, I think about twenty in all, are to be fitted into the Text, chiefly in the early part of the First Volume, as tending to bring some matters into greater clearness there. I am busy with that even now; sunk deep into the Dust-abysses again! — Of course I have made what provision I could for printing a Supplement, &c. to the possessors of the First Edition: but I find this Second will be the Final standing Edition of the Book; decidedly preferable to the First; not to be touched by me again, except on very good cause indeed. New letters, except they expressly contradict me, shall go at once into the back apartment, or Appendix, in future.

The Printers have sent me some five or six sheets, they send me hitherto a sheet daily; but perhaps there are not above three or two in a perfect state: so I trouble you with none of them by this Packet. But by next Packet (3d of March), unless I hear to the contrary, I will send you all the Sheets that are ready; and so by the following Packets, till we are out of it; — that you, on the scene there, may do with them once for all whatsoever you like. If nothing can be done with them, believe me I shall be very glad of that result. But if you can so much as oblige any honest Bookseller of your or my acquaintance by the gift of them, let it be done; let Pirates and ravenous Bipeds of Prey be excluded from participating: that of itself will be a comfortable and a proper thing! — You are hereby authorized to promulgate in any way you please, That the Second Edition will be augmented, corrected, as aforesaid; and that Mr. (Any Son of Adam you please to name) is, so far as I have any voice in the matter, appointed by me, to the exclusion of all and sundry others on what pretext soever, to print and vend the same to my American Friends. And so it stands; and the Sheets (probably near thirty in number) will be out with the March Packet: — and if nothing can come of it, I for one shall be very glad! The Book is to be in Three Volumes now; the first ends at p. 403, Vol. I.; the third begins at p. 155, Vol. II., of the present edition.

What are you doing? Write to me: how the Lectures went, how all things went and go! We are over head and ears in Anti-Corn-Law here; the Aristocracy struck almost with a kind of horror at sight of that terrible Millocracy, rising like a huge hideous Frankenstein up in Lancashire, — seemingly with boundless ready-money in its pocket, and a very fierce humor in its stomach! To me it is as yet almost uglier than the Aristocracy; and I will not fire guns when this small victory is gained; I will recommend a day of Fasting rather, that such a victory required such gaining.

Adieu, my Friend. Is it likely we shall meet in “Oregon,” think you? That would be a beautiful affair, on the part of the most enlightened Nation!

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

CVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 3 March, 1846

Dear Emerson, — I must write you a word before this Packet go, tho’ my haste is very great. I received your two Newspapers (price only twopence); by the same Ship there came, and reached me some days later, a Letter from Mr. Everett enclosing the Cromwell portions of the same printed-matter, clipt out by scissors; written, it appeared, by Mr. Everett’s nephew; some of whose remarks, especially his wish that I might once be in New England, and see people “praying,” amused me much! The Cotton Letter, &c., I have now got to the bottom of; Birch’s copy is in the Museum here, — a better edition than I had. Of “Levered” and the other small American Documents — alas, I get cartloads of the like or better tumbled down at my door, and my chief duty is to front them resolutely with a shovel. “Ten thousand tons” is but a small estimate for the quantity of loose and indurated lumber I have had to send sounding, on each hand of me, down, down to the eternal deeps, never to trouble me more! The jingle of it, as it did at last get under way, and go down, was almost my one consolation in those unutterable operations. — I am again over head and ears; but shall be out soon: never to return more.

By this Packet, according to volunteer contract, there goes out by the favor of your Chapman a number of sheets, how many I do not exactly know, of the New Edition: Chapman First and Chapman Second (yours and mine) have undertaken to manage the affair for this month and for the following months; — many thanks to them both for taking it out of my hands. What you are to do with the Article you already know. If no other customer present himself, can you signify to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia that the sheets are much at his service, — his conduct on another occasion having given him right to such an acknowledgment from me? Or at any rate, you will want a new Copy of this Book; and can retain the sheets for that object. — Enough of them.

From Mr. Everett I learn that your Boston Lectures have been attended with renown enough: when are the Lectures themselves to get to print? I read, last night, an Essay on you, by a kind of “Young Scotland,” as we might call it, in an Edinburgh Magazine; very fond of you, but shocked that you were Antichristian: — really not so bad. The stupidities of men go crossing one another; and miles down, at the bottom of all, there is a little veinlet of sense found running at last!

If you see Mr. Everett, will you thank him for his kind remembrance of me, till I find leisure (as I have vainly hoped today to do) to thank him more in form. A dignified, compact kind of man; whom I remember with real pleasure.

Jargon abounds in our Newspapers and Parliament Houses at present; — with which “the present Editor,” and indeed I think the Public at large, takes little concern, beyond the regret of being bored by it. The Corn-Laws are going very quietly the way of all deliriums; and then there will at least be one delirium less, and we shall start upon new ones.

Not a word more today, but my blessings and regards. God be with you and yours always.

Ever your affectionate,
                   T. Carlyle

CVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 April, 1846

Dear Emerson, — Your two Letters* have both come to hand, the last of them only three days ago. One word in answer before the Packet sail; one very hasty word, rather than none.

 — * Missing. ——  ——  —

You have made the best of Bargains for me; once again, with the freest contempt of trouble on my behalf; which I cannot sufficiently wonder at! Apparently it is a fixed-idea of yours that the Bibliopolic Genus shall not cheat me; and you are decided to make it good. Very well: let it be so, in as far as the Fates will.

Certainly I will conform in all points to this Wiley-and-Putnam Treaty, and faithfully observe the same. The London Wileys have not yet sent me any tidings; but when they do, I will say Your terms on the other side of the sea are the Law to us, and it is a finished thing. — No sheets, I think, will go by this mid-month Packet, the Printer and Bookseller were bidden not mind that: but by the Packet of May 3d, I hope the Second Volume will go complete; and, if the Printers make speed, almost the whole remainder may go by the June one. There is to be a “Supplement to the First Edition,” containing all the new matter that is separable: of this too the Wileys shall have their due Copy to reprint: it is what I could do to keep my faith with purchasers of the First Edition here; but, on the whole, there will be no emulating of the Second Edition except by a reprint of the whole of it; changes great and small have had to introduce themselves everywhere, as these new Letters were woven in. — I hope before May 3d I shall have ascertained whether it will not be the simplest way (as with my present light it clearly appears) to give the sheets direct to the Wiley and Putnam here, and let them send them? In any case, the cargo shall come one way or other.

Furthermore, — Yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness, as the sun shall please to paint it: there has often been talk of getting me to that establishment, but I never yet could go. If it be possible, we will have this also ready for the 3d of May. Provided you, as you promise, go and do likewise! A strange moment that, when I look upon your dead shadow again; instead of the living face, which remains unchanged within me, enveloped in beautiful clouds, and emerging now and then into strange clearness! Has your head grown grayish? On me are “gray hairs here and there,” — and I do “know it.” I have lived half a century in this world, fifty years complete on the 4th of December last: that is a solemn fact for me! Few and evil have been the days of the years of thy servant, — few for any good that was ever done in them. Ay de mi!

Within late weeks I have got my Horse again; go riding through the loud torrent of vehiculatory discords, till I get into the fields, into the green lanes; which is intrinsically a great medicine to me. Most comfortless riding it is, with a horse of such kangaroo disposition, till I do get to the sight of my old ever-young green-mantled mother again; but for an hour there, it is a real blessing to me. I have company sometimes, but generally prefer solitude, and a dialogue with the trees and clouds. Alas, the speech of men, especially the witty-speech of men, is oftentimes afflictive to me: “in the wide Earth,” I say sometimes with a sigh, “there is none but Emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!” All “Literature” too is become I cannot tell you how contemptible to me. On the whole, one’s blessedness is to do as Oliver: Work while the sun is up; work well as if Eternities depended on it; and then sleep, — if under the guano-mountains of Human Stupor, if handsomely forgotten all at once, that latter is the handsome thing! I have often thought what W. Shakespeare would say, were he to sit one night in a “Shakespeare Society,” and listen to the empty twaddle and other long-eared melody about him there! — Adieu, my Friend. I fear I have forgotten many things: at all events, I have forgotten the inexorable flight of the minutes, which are numbered out to me at present.

Ever yours,
        T. Carlyle

I think I recognize the Inspector of Wild-beasts, in the little Boston Newspaper you send!* A small hatchet-faced, gray-eyed, good-humored Inspector, who came with a Translated Lafontaine; and took his survey not without satisfaction? Comfortable too how rapidly he fathomed the animal, having just poked him up a little. Ach Gott! Man is forever interesting to men; — and all men, even Hatchet-faces, are globular and complete!

 * This probably refers to a letter of Mr. Elizur Wright’s, describing a visit to Carlyle.

CIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 30 April, 1846

Dear Emerson, — Here is the Photograph going off for you by Bookseller Munroe of Boston; the Sheets of Cromwell, all the second and part of the last volume, are to go direct to New York: both Parcels by the Putnam conveyance. For Putnam has been here since I wrote, making large confirmations of what you conveyed to me; and large Proposals of an ulterior scope, — which will involve you in new trouble for me. But it is trouble you will not grudge, inasmuch as it promises to have some issue of moment; at all events the negotiation is laid entirely into your hands: therefore I must with all despatch explain to you the essentials of it, that you may know what Wiley says when he writes to you from New York.

Mr. Putnam, really a very intelligent, modest, and reputable-looking little fellow, got at last to sight of me about a week ago; — explained with much earnestness how the whole origin of the mistake about the First Edition of Cromwell had lain with Chapman, my own Bookseller (which in fact I had already perceived to be the case); and farther set forth, what was much more important, that he and his Partner were, and had been, ready and desirous to make good said mistake, in the amplest, most satisfactory manner, — by the ready method of paying me now ten percent on the selling-price of all the copies of Cromwell sent into the market by them; and had (as I knew already) covenanted with you to do so, in a clear, bona-fide, and to you satisfactory manner, in regard to that First Edition: in consequence of which you had made a bargain with them of like tenor in regard to the Second. To all which I could only answer, that such conduct was that of men of honor, and would, in all manner of respects, be satisfactory to me. Wherefore the new Sheets of Cromwell should now go by his Package direct to New York, and the other little Parcel for you he could send to Munroe: — that as one consequence? “Yes, surely,” intimated he; but there were other consequences, of more moment, behind that.

Namely, that they wanted (the Wiley & Putnam house did) to publish certain other Books of mine, the List of which I do not now recollect; under similar conditions: viz. that I was to certify, in a line or two prefixable to each Book, that I had read it over in preparation for their Printer, and did authorize them to print and sell it; — in return for which Ten percent on the sale-price (and all manner of facilities, volunteered to convince even Clark of Boston, the Lynx-eyed Friend now busy for me looking through millstones, that all was straight, and said Ten percent actually paid on every copy sold); This was Putnam’s Offer, stated with all transparency, and in a way not to be misunderstood by either of us.

To which I answered that the terms seemed clear and square and every way good, and such as I could comply with heartily, — so far as I was at liberty, but not farther. Not farther: for example, there was Hart of Philadelphia (I think the Wileys do not want the Miscellanies), there were Munroe, Little and Brown, &c.; — in short, there was R.W. Emerson, who knew in all ways how far I was free and not free, and who would take care of my integrity and interest at once, and do what was just and prudent; and to him I would refer the whole question, and whatever he engaged for, that and no other than that I would do. So that you see how it is, and what a coil you have again got into! Mr. Putnam would have had some “Letter,” some “exchange of Letters,” to the effect above-stated: but I answered, “It was better we did not write at all till the matter was clear and liquid with you, and then we could very swiftly write, — and act. I would apprise you how the matter stood, and expect your answer, and bid you covenant with Mr. Wiley what you found good, prompt I to fulfil whatever you undertook for me.” — This is a true picture of the affair, the very truest I can write in haste; and so I leave it with you — Ach Gott!

If your Photograph succeed as well as mine, I shall be almost tragically glad of it. This of me is far beyond all pictures; really very like: I got Laurence the Painter to go with me, and he would not let the people off till they had actually made a likeness. My Wife has got another, which she asserts to be much “more amiable-looking,” and even liker!* O my Friend, it is a strange Phantasmagory of a Fact, this huge, tremendous World of ours, Life of ours! Do you bethink you of Craigenputtock, and the still evening there? I could burst into tears, if I had that habit: but it is of no use. The Cromwell business will be ended about the end of May, — I do hope!

You say not a word of your own affairs: I have vaguely been taught to look for some Book shortly; — what of it? We are well, or tolerably well, and the summer is come: adieu. Blessings on you and yours.

 — T.C.

 ——  ——  —
* The engraved portrait in the first volume of this
Correspondence is from a photograph taken from this daguerrotype.
 ——  ——  —

CX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 14 May, 1846

Dear Friend, — I daily expect the picture, and wonder — so long as I have wished it — I had never asked it before. I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the house-mates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous. I must sit again; or, as true Elizabeth Hoar said, I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre and iodine delight in. I am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, I must sit to a good crayon sketcher, Mr. Cheney, and send you his draught….

Good rides to you and the longest escapes from London streets. I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had, — a wood-lot. Last fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond, — a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons. My lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily. In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures.

My two little girls know the road now, though it is nearly two miles from my house, and find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove, and with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties, all overgrown with mullein, which the Irish who built the railroad left behind them. At a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. Thereon I think to place a hut; perhaps it will have two stories and be a petty tower, looking out to Monadnoc and other New Hampshire Mountains. There I hope to go with book and pen when good hours come. I shall think there, a fortnight might bring you from London to Walden Pond. — Life wears on, and do you say the gray hairs appear? Few can so well afford them. The black have not hung over a vacant brain, as England and America know; nor, white or black, will it give itself any Sabbath for many a day henceforward, as I believe. What have we to do with old age? Our existence looks to me more than ever initial. We have come to see the ground and look up materials and tools. The men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitring. We shall yet have a right work, and kings for competitors. With ever affectionate remembrance to your wife, your friend,

 — R.W. Emerson

CXI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 May, 1846

My Dear Friend, — It is late at night and I have postponed writing not knowing but that my parcel would be ready to go, — and now a public meeting and the speech of a rarely honest and eloquent man have left me but a span of time for the morning’s messenger.

The photograph came safely, to my thorough content. I have what I have wished. This head is to me out of comparison more satisfying than any picture. I confirm my recollections and I make new observations; it is life to life. Thanks to the Sun. This artist remembers what every other forgets to report, and what I wish to know, the true sculpture of the features, the angles, the special organism, the rooting of the hair, the form and the placing of the head. I am accustomed to expect of the English a securing of the essentials in their work, and the sun does that, and you have done it in this portrait, which gives me much to think and feel.* I was instantly stirred to an emulation of your love and punctuality, and, last Monday, which was my forty-third birthday, I went to a new Daguerreotypist, who took much pains to make his picture right. I brought home three shadows not agreeable to my own eyes. The machine has a bad effect on me. My wife protests against the imprints as slanderous. My friends say they look ten years older, and, as I think, with the air of a decayed gentleman touched with his first paralysis. However I got yesterday a trusty vote or two for sending one of them to you, on the ground that I am not likely to get a better. But it now seems probable that it will not get cased and into the hands of Harnden in time for the steamer tomorrow. It will then go by that of the 16th.

 * From Emerson’s Diary, May 23, 1846:— “In Carlyle’s head (photograph), which came last night, how much appears! How unattainable this truth to any painter! Here have I the inevitable traits which the sun forgets not to copy, and which I thirst to see, but which no painter remembers to give me. Here have I the exact sculpture, the form of the head, the rooting of the hair, thickness of the lips, the man that God made. And all the Laurences and D’Orsays now serve me well as illustration. I have the form and organism, and can better spare the expression and color. What would I not give for a head of Shakespeare by the same artist? of Plato? of Demosthenes? Here I have the jutting brow, and the excellent shape of the head. And here the organism of the eye full of England, the valid eye, in which I see the strong executive talent which has made his thought available to the nations, whilst others as intellectual as he are pale and powerless. The photograph comes dated 25 April, 1846, and he writes, ‘I am fifty years old.”’

I am heartily glad that you are in direct communication with these really energetic booksellers, Wiley and Putnam. I understood from Wiley’s letter to me, weeks ago, that their ambition was not less than to have a monopoly of your books. I answered, it is very desirable for us too; saving always the rights of Mr. Hart in Philadelphia. — I told him you had no interest in Munroe’s Sartor, which from the first was his own adventure, and Little and Brown had never reprinted Past and Present or Chartism. The French Revolution, Past and Present, Chartism, and the Sartor, I see no reason why they should not have. Munroe and L. & B. have no real claims, and I will speak to them. But there is one good particular in Putnam’s proffer to you, which Wiley has not established in his (first and last) agreement with me, namely, that you shall have an interest in what is already sold of their first edition of Cromwell. By all means close with Putnam of the good mind, exempting only Hart’s interest. I have no recent correspondence with Wiley and Putnam. And I greatly prefer that they should deal directly with you. Yet it were best to leave an American reference open for audit and umpirage to the stanch E.P. Clark of the New England Bank.

Ever yours,
        R.W. Emerson

CXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 June, 1846

Dear Emerson, — I have had two letters of yours, the last of them (31st May) only two days, and have seen a third written to Wiley of New York. Yesterday Putnam was here, and we made our bargain, — and are to have it signed this day at his Shop: two copies, one of which I mean to insert along with this, and give up to your or E.P. Clark’s keeping. For, as you will see, I have appointed Clark my representative, economic plenipotentiary and factotum, if he will consent to act in that sublime capacity, — subject always to your advice, to your control in all ultra-economic respects, of which you alone are cognizant of the circumstances or competent to give a judgment. Pray explain this with all lucidity to Mr. Clark: and endeavor to impress upon him that it is (to all appearance) a real affair of business we are now engaged in; that I would have him satisfy his own sharp eyes (by such methods as he finds convenient and sufficient, by examination at New York or how he can) that the conditions of this bargain are fairly complied with by the New York Booksellers, — who promise “every facility for ascertaining how many copies are printed,” &c., &c.; and profess to be of the integrity of Israelites indeed, in all respects whatever! If so, it may be really useful to us. And I would have Mr. Clark, if he will allow me to look upon him as my man of business in this affair, take reasonable pains, be at any reasonable expense, &c. (by himself or by deputy) to ascertain that it is so in very fact! In that case, if something come of it, we shall get the something and be thankful; if nothing come of it, we shall have the pleasure of caring nothing about it. — I have given Putnam two Books (Heroes and Sartor) ready, corrected; the others I think will follow in the course of next month; — F. Revolution waits only for an Index which my man is now busy with. The Cromwell, Supplement and all, he has now got, — published two days ago, after sorrowful delays. Your Copy will be ready this afternoon, — too late, I fear, by just one day: it will lie, in that case, for a fortnight, and then come. Wiley will find that he has no resource but to reprint the Book; he will reprint the Supplement too, in justice to former purchasers; but this is the final form of the Book, this second edition; and to this all readers of it will come at last.

We expect the Daguerreotype by next Steamer; but you take good care not to prepossess us on its behalf! In fact, I believe, the only satisfactory course will be to get a Sketch done too; if you have any Painter that can manage it tolerably, pray set about that, as the true solution of the business — out of the two together we shall make a likeness for ourselves that will do. Let the Lady Wife be satisfied with it; then we shall pronounce it genuine! —

I envy you your forest-work, your summer umbrages, and clear silent lakes. The weather here is getting insupportable to us for heat. Indeed, if rain do not come within two weeks, I believe we must wind up our affairs, and make for some shady place direct: — Scotland is perhaps likeliest; but nothing yet is fixed: you shall duly hear. — Directly after this, I set off for Putnam’s in Waterloo Place; sign his paper there; stick one copy under a cover for you, and despatch. — Send me word about all that you are doing and thinking. Be busy, be still and happy.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 July, 1846

My Dear Carlyle, — I received by the last steamer your letter with the copy of the covenant with Wiley and Putnam, which seems unexceptionable. I like the English side of those men very well; that is, Putnam seems eager to stand well and rightly with his fellow-men. Wiley at New York it was who provoked me, last winter, to write him an angry letter when he declared his intention to reprint our new matter without paying for it. When he thought better of it, and came to terms, I had not got so far as to be affectionate, and have never yet resumed the correspondence I had with him a year ago, about my own books. I hope you found my letter to them, though I do not remember which, properly cross. I believe I only enumerated difficulties. I have talked with Little and Brown about their editions of Chartism, and Past and Present; they have made no new sales of the books since they were printed on by the pirates, and say that the books lie still on their shelves, as also do a few copies of the London and Boston edition of French Revolution. I prayed them immediately to dispose of these things by auction, or at their trade sales, at whatever prices would sell them, and leave the market open for W. & P.; which they promise to do.

To Munroe I went, and learn that he has bought the stereotype-plates of the New York pirate edition of Sartor, and means to print it immediately. He is willing to stop if W. & P. will buy of him his plates at their cost. I wrote so to them, but they say no. And I have not spoken again with Munroe. I was in town yesterday, and carried the copy of the Covenant to E.P. Clark, and read him your message. His Bank occupies him entirely just now, for his President is gone to Europe, and Clark’s duties are the more onerous. But finding that the new responsibilities delegated to him are light and tolerable, and, at any rate, involve no retrospection, he very cheerfully signified his readiness to serve you, and I graciously forbore all allusions to my heap of booksellers’ accounts which he has had in keeping now — for years, I believe. He told me that he hopes at no distant day to have a house of his own, — he and his wife are always at board, — and, whenever that happens, he intends to devote a chamber in it to his “Illustrations of Mr. Carlyle’s Writings,” which, I believe, I have told you before, are a very large and extraordinary collection of prints, pictures, books, and manuscripts. I sent you the promised Daguerrotype with all unwillingness, by the steamer, I think of 16 June. On 1 August, Margaret Fuller goes to England and the Continent; and I shall not fail to write to you by her, and you must not fail to give a good and faithful interview to this wise, sincere, accomplished, and most entertaining of women. I wish to bespeak Jane Carlyle’s friendliest ear to one of the noblest of women. We shall send you no other such.

I was lately inquired of again by an agent of a huge Boston society of young men, whether Mr. Carlyle would not come to America and read Lectures, on some terms which they could propose. I advised them to make him an offer, and a better one than they had in view. Joy and Peace to you in your new freedom.

 — R.W.E.

CXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 17 July, 1846

Dear Emerson, — Since I wrote last to you, I think, with the Wiley-and-Putnam Covenant enclosed, — the Photograph, after some days of loitering at the Liverpool Custom-house, came safe to hand. Many thanks to you for this punctuality: this poor Shadow, it is all you could do at present in that matter! But it must not rest there, no. This Image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! First of all, it is a bad Photograph; no eyes discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favorable lights then, alas, Time itself and Oblivion must have been busy. I could not at first, nor can I yet with perfect decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old Emerson, that lighted on us from the Blue, at Craigenputtock, long ago, — eheu! Here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, full of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, good humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades, as of the valley of Death; seems smiling on me as if in mockery. “Dost know me, friend? I am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee; — I belong already to the Eternities, and thou recognizest me not!” On the whole, it is the strangest feeling I have: — and practically the thing will be, that you get us by the earliest opportunity some living pictorial sketch, chalk-drawing or the like, from a trustworthy hand; and send it hither to represent you. Out of the two I shall compile for myself a likeness by degrees: but as for this present, we cannot put up with it at all; to my Wife and me, and to sundry other parties far and near that have interest in it, there is no satisfaction in this. So there will be nothing for you but compliance, by the first fair chance you have: furthermore, I bargain that the Lady Emerson have, within reasonable limits, a royal veto in the business (not absolute, if that threaten extinction to the enterprise, but absolute within the limits of possibility); and that she take our case in hand, and graciously consider what can and shall be done. That will answer, I think.

Of late weeks I have been either idle, or sunk in the sorrowfulest cobbling of old shoes again; sorrowfully reading over old Books for the Putnams and Chapmans, namely. It is really painful, looking in one’s own old face; said “old face” no longer a thing extant now! — Happily I have at last finished it; the whole Lumber-troop with clothes duly brushed (French Revolution has even got an Index too) travels to New York in the Steamer that brings you this. Quod faustum sit: — or indeed I do not much care whether it be faustum or not; I grow to care about an astonishingly small number of things as times turn with me! Man, all men seem radically dumb; jabbering mere jargons and noises from the teeth outwards; the inner meaning of them, — of them and of me, poor devils, — remaining shut, buried forever. If almost all Books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), I sometimes in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with us! Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of them altogether, — their fortunate successors would find a most improved world to start upon! For Cant does lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an Augean Stable with the poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our eyes again! When I see painful Professors of Greek, poring in their sumptuous Oxfords over dead Greek for a thousand years or more, and leaving live English all the while to develop itself under charge of Pickwicks and Sam Wellers, as if it were nothing and the other were all things: this, and the like of it everywhere, fills me with reflections! Good Heavens, will the people not come out of their wretched Old-Clothes Monmouth-Streets, Hebrew and other; but lie there dying of the basest pestilence, — dying and as good as dead! On the whole, I am very weary of most “Literature”: — and indeed, in very sorrowful, abstruse humor otherwise at present.

For remedy to which I am, in these very hours, preparing for a sally into the green Country and deep silence; I know not altogether how or whitherward as yet; only that I must tend towards Lancashire; towards Scotland at last. My Wife already waits me in Lancashire; went off, in rather poor case, much burnt by the hot Town, some ten days ago; and does not yet report much improvement. I will write to you somewhere in my wanderings. The address, “Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B.,” if you chance to write directly or soon after this arrives, will, likely, be the shortest: at any rate, that, or “Cheyne Row” either, is always sure enough to find me in a day or two after trying.

By a kind of accident I have fallen considerably into American History in these days; and am even looking out for American Geography to help me. Jared Sparks, Marshall, &c. are hickory and buckskin; but I do catch a credible trait of human life from them here and there; Michelet’s genial champagne froth, — alas, I could find no fact in it that would stand handling; and so have broken down in the middle of La France, and run over to hickory and Jared for shelter! Do you know Beriah Green?* A body of Albany newspapers represent to me the people quarreling in my name, in a very vague manner, as to the propriety of being “governed,” and Beriah’s is the only rational voice among them. Farewell, dear Friend. Speedy news of you!

 — T. Carlyle

 * The Reverend Beriah Green, President for some years of Oneida Institute, a manual-labor school at Whitesboro, N.Y. He was an active reformer, and a leading member of the National Convention which met in Philadelphia, December 4th, 1833, to form the American Antislavery Society. He died in 1874, seventy-nine years old.

CXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 July, 1846

My Dear Friend, — The new edition of Cromwell in its perfect form and in excellent dress, and the copy of the Appendix, came munificently safe by the last steamer. When thought is best, then is there most, — is a faith of which you alone among writing men at this day will give me experience. If it is the right frankincense and sandal-wood, it is so good and heavenly to give me a basketful and not a pinch. I read proudly, a little at a time, and have not yet got through the new matter. But I think neither the new letters nor the commentary could be spared. Wiley and Putnam shall do what they can, and we will see if New England will not come to reckon this the best chapter in her Pentateuch.

I send this letter by Margaret Fuller, of whose approach I believe I wrote you some word. There is no foretelling how you visited and crowded English will like our few educated men or women, and in your learned populace my luminaries may easily be overlooked. But of all the travelers whom you have so kindly received from me, I think of none, since Alcott went to England, whom I so much desired that you should see and like, as this dear old friend of mine. For two years now I have scarcely seen her, as she has been at New York, engaged by Horace Greeley as a literary editor of his Tribune newspaper. This employment was made acceptable to her by good pay, great local and personal conveniences of all kinds, and unbounded confidence and respect from Greeley himself, and all other parties connected with this influential journal (of 30,000 subscribers, I believe). And Margaret Fuller’s work as critic of all new books, critic of the drama, of music, and good arts in New York, has been honorable to her. Still this employment is not satisfactory to me. She is full of all nobleness, and with the generosity native to her mind and character appears to me an exotic in New England, a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate. She is, I suppose, the earliest reader and lover of Goethe in this Country, and nobody here knows him so well. Her love too of whatever is good in French, and specially in Italian genius, give her the best title to travel. In short, she is our citizen of the world by quite special diploma. And I am heartily glad that she has an opportunity of going abroad that pleases her.

Mr. Spring, a merchant of great moral merits, (and, as I am informed, an assiduous reader of your books,) has grown rich, and resolves to see the world with his wife and son, and has wisely invited Miss Fuller to show it to him. Now, in the first place, I wish you to see Margaret when you are in special good humor, and have an hour of boundless leisure. And I entreat Jane Carlyle to abet and exalt and secure this satisfaction to me. I need not, and yet perhaps I need say, that M.F. is the safest of all possible persons who ever took pen in hand. Prince Metternich’s closet not closer or half so honorable. In the next place, I should be glad if you can easily manage to show her the faces of Tennyson and of Browning. She has a sort of right to them both, not only because she likes their poetry, but because she has made their merits widely known among our young people. And be it known to my friend Jane Carlyle, whom, if I cannot see, I delight to name, that her visitor is an immense favorite in the parlor, as well as in the library, in all good houses where she is known. And so I commend her to you.

Yours affectionately,
                R.W. Emerson

CXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 December, 1846

Dear Emerson, — This is the 18th of the month, and it is a frightful length of time, I know not how long, since I wrote to you, — sinner that I am! Truly we are in no case for paying debts at present, being all sick more or less, from the hard cold weather, and in a state of great temporary puddle but, as the adage says, “one should own debt, and crave days”; — therefore accept a word from me, such as it may be.

I went, as usual, to the North Country in the Autumn; passed some two extremely disconsolate months, — for all things distress a wretched thin-skinned creature like me, — in that old region, which is at once an Earth and a Hades to me, an unutterable place, now that I have become mostly a ghost there! I saw Ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed the Devil’s leading, listened namely to blustering shallow-violent Impostors and Children of Darkness, saying, “Yes, we know you, you are Children of Light!” — and so has fallen all out at elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its potatoes is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot, — say into the Medea’s-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid dissolution; whether into new youth, into sound healthy life, or into eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know! Daniel O’Connell stood bodily before me, in his green Mullaghmart Cap; haranguing his retinue of Dupables: certainly the most sordid Humbug I have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the miseries that can befall a Nation. I also conversed with Young Ireland in a confidential manner; for Young Ireland, really meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O’Connellism and the Old Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with lies; but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a tongue, people used to know! — Ireland was not the place to console my sorrows. I returned home very sad out of Ireland; — and indeed have remained one of the saddest, idlest, most useless of Adam’s sons ever since; and do still remain so. I care not to write anything more, — so it seems to me at present. I am in my vacant interlunar cave (I suppose that is the truth); — and I ought to wrap my mantle round me, and lie, if dark, silent also. But, alas, I have wasted almost all your poor sheet first! —

Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the Springs too were favorites. But, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that Gospel of Fraternity, Benevolence, and new Heaven-on-Earth, preached forth by all manner of “advanced” creatures, from George Sand to Elihu Burritt, in these days; that in fact the said Carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as poisonous cant, — sweetness of sugar-of-lead, — a detestable phosphorescence from the dead body of a Christianity, that would not admit itself to be dead, and lie buried with all its unspeakable putrescences, as a venerable dead one ought! — Surely detestable enough. — To all which Margaret listened with much good nature; though of course with sad reflections not a few.* — She is coming back to us, she promises. Her dialect is very vernacular, — extremely exotic in the London climate. If she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of New-Era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connection here, and be very useful to herself and others. I could not show her Alfred (he has been here since) nor Landor: but surely if I can I will, — that or a hundred times as much as that, — when she returns. — They tell me you are about collecting your Poems. Well, though I do not approve of rhyme at all, yet it is impossible Emerson in rhyme or prose can put down any thought that was in his heart but I should wish to get into mine. So let me have the Book as fast as may be. And do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound’s sake! And excuse the Critic who seems to you so unmusical; and say, It is the nature of beast! Adieu, dear Friend: write to me, write to me.

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

 ——  —— * Miss Fullers impressions of Carlyle, much to this effect, may be found in the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” Boston, 1852, Vol. II. pp. 184-190.

CXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 January, 1847

My Dear Carlyle, — Your letter came with a blessing last week. I had already learned from Margaret Fuller, at Paris, that you had been very good and gentle to her; — brilliant and prevailing, of course, but, I inferred, had actually restrained the volleys and modulated the thunder, out of true courtesy and goodness of nature, which was worthy of all praise in a spoiled conqueror at this time of day. Especially, too, she expressed a true recognition and love of Jane Carlyle; and thus her visit proved a solid satisfaction; to me, also, who think that few people have so well earned their pleasures as she.

She wrote me a long letter; she has been very happy in England, and her time and strength fully employed. Her description of you and your discourse (which I read with lively curiosity also) was the best I have had on that subject.

I tried hard to write you by the December steamer, to tell you how forward was my book of Poems; but a little affair makes me much writing. I chanced to have three or four items of business to despatch, when the steamer was ready to go, and you escaped hearing of them. I am the trustee of Charles Lane, who came out here with Alcott and bought land, which, though sold, is not paid for.

Somebody or somebodies in Liverpool and Manchester* have proposed once or twice, with more or less specification, that I should come to those cities to lecture. And who knows but I may come one day? Steam is strong, and Liverpool is near. I should find my account in the strong inducement of a new audience to finish pieces which have lain waiting with little hope for months or years.

 ——  ——  — * Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had made the acquaintance of Emerson at Edinburgh, in 1833, was his Manchester correspondent. His memorial volume on Emerson contains an interesting record of their relations. ——  ——  —

Ah then, if I dared, I should be well content to add some golden hours to my life in seeing you, now all full-grown and acknowledged amidst your own people, — to hear and to speak is so little yet so much. But life is dangerous and delicate. I should like to see your solid England. The map of Britain is good reading for me. Then I have a very ignorant love of pictures, and a curiosity about the Greek statues and stumps in the British Museum. So beware of me, for on that distant day when I get ready I shall come.

Long before this time you ought to have received from John Chapman a copy of Emerson’s Poems, so called, which he was directed to send you. Poor man, you need not open them. I know all you can say. I printed them, not because I was deceived into a belief that they were poems, but because of the softness or hardness of heart of many friends here who have made it a point to have them circulated.* Once having set out to print, I obeyed the solicitations of John Chapman, of an ill-omened street in London, to send him the book in manuscript, for the better securing of copyright. In printing them here I have corrected the most unpardonable negligences, which negligences must be all stereotyped under his fair London covers and gilt paper to the eyes of any curious London reader; from which recollection I strive to turn away.

 * In the rough draft the following sentence comes in here “I reckon myself a good beginning of a poet, very urgent and decided in my bent, and in some coming millennium I shall yet sing.”

Little and Brown have just rendered me an account, by which it appears that we are not quite so well off as was thought last summer, when they said they had sold at auction the balance of your books which had been lying unsold. It seems now that the books supposed to be sold were not all taken, and are returned to them; one hundred Chartism, sixty-three Past and Present. Yet we are to have some eighty-three dollars ($83.68), which you shall probably have by the next steamer.

Yours affectionately,
                 R.W. Emerson

CXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 2 March, 1847

Dear Emerson, — The Steamer goes tomorrow; I must, though in a very dim condition, have a little word for you conveyed by it. In the miscellaneous maw of that strange Steamer shall lie, among other things, a friendly word!

Your very kind Letter lay waiting me here, some ten days ago; doubly welcome, after so long a silence. We had been in Hampshire, with the Barings, where we were last year; — some four weeks or more; totally idle: our winter had been, and indeed still is, unusually severe; my Wife’s health in consequence was sadly deranged; but this idleness, these Isle-of-Wight sea-breezes, have brought matters well round again; so we cannot grudge the visit or the idleness, which otherwise too might have its uses. Alas, at this time my normal state is to be altogether idle, to look out upon a very lonely universe, full of grim sorrow, full of splendor too; and not to know at all, for the moment, on what side I am to attack it again! — I read your Book of Poems all faithfully, at Bay House (our Hampshire quarters); where the obstinate people, — with whom you are otherwise, in prose, a first favorite, — foolishly refused to let me read aloud; foolishly, for I would have made it mostly all plain by commentary: — so I had to read for myself; and can say, in spite of my hard-heartedness, I did gain, though under impediments, a real satisfaction and some tone of the Eternal Melodies sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in my ear! This is fact; a truth in Natural History; from which you are welcome to draw inferences. A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily far of, as it were) of a valiant, genuine Human Soul: this, even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for. But indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing radiances which affect me like the light of the stars. It is so: I wish you would become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way; but under any form I must put up with you; that is my lot. — Chapman’s edition, as you probably know, is very beautiful. I believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers in England to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study the same: as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly call it “unintelligible moonshine,” and so will probably hold their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of Tradition, and mere “Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith,” as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger; — in a word, that Goethe-and-Schiller’s “Kunst” has far more brotherhood with Pusey-and-Newman’s Shovelhattery, and other the like deplorable phenomena, than it is in the least aware of! I beg you take warning: I am more serious in this than you suppose. But no, you will not; you whistle lightly over my prophecies, and go your own stiff-necked road. Unfortunate man! —

I had read in the Newspapers, and even heard in speech from Manchester people, that you were certainly coming this very summer to lecture among us: but now it seems, in your Letter, all postponed into the vague again. I do not personally know your Manchester negotiators, but I know in general that they are men of respectability, insight, and activity; much connected with the lecturing department, which is a very growing one, especially in Lancashire, at present; — men likely, for the rest, to fulfil whatsoever they may become engaged for to you. My own ignorant though confident guess, moreover, is, that you would, in all senses of the word, succeed there; I think, also rather confidently, we could promise you an audience of British aristocracy in London here, — and of British commonalty all manner of audiences that you liked to stoop to. I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called — bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the City, one evening, — upon Universal Peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. In a word, I do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: Much prurient curiosity, with some ingenuous love of wisdom, an element of real reverence for the same: everywhere a perfect openness to any man speaking in any measure things manful. Come, therefore; gird yourself together, and come. With little or no peradventure, you will realize what your modest hope is, and more; — and I, for my share of it, shall see you once again under this Sun! O Heavens, there might be some good in that! Nay, if you will travel like a private quiet person, who knows but I, the most unlocomotive of mortals, might be able to escort you up and down a little; to look at many a thing along with you, and even to open my long-closed heart and speak about the same? — There is a spare-room always in this House for you, — in this heart, in these two hearts, the like: bid me hope in this enterprise, in all manner of ways where I can; and on the whole, get it rightly put together, and embark on it, and arrive!

The good Miss Fuller has painted us all en beau, and your smiling imagination has added new colors. We have not a triumphant life here; very far indeed from that, ach Gott! — as you shall see. But Margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here. Since she went, I have been reading some of her Papers in a new Book we have got: greatly superior to all I knew before; in fact the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic mind; — altogether unique, so far as I know, among the Writing Women of this generation; rare enough too, God knows, among the writing Men. She is very narrow, sometimes; but she is truly high: honor to Margaret, and more and more good-speed to her. — Adieu dear Emerson. I am ever yours,

 — T.C.

CXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 March, 1847

Dear Emerson, — Yesterday morning, setting out to breakfast with Richard Milnes (Milnes’s breakfast is a thing you will yet have to experience) I met, by the sunny shore of the Thames, a benevolent Son of Adam in blue coat and red collar, who thrust into my hand a Letter from you. A truly miraculous Son of Adam in red collar, in the Sunny Spring Morning! — The Bill of Seventeen Pounds is already far on its way to Dumfries, there to be kneaded into gold by the due artists: today is American Post-day; and already in huge hurry about many things, I am scribbling you some word of answer…. The night before Milnes’s morning, I had furthermore seen your Manchester Correspondent, Ireland, — an old Edinborough acquaintance too, as I found. A solid, dark, broad, rather heavy man; full of energy, and broad sagacity and practicality; — infinitely well affected to the man Emerson too. It was our clear opinion that you might come at any time with ample assurance of “succeeding,” so far as wages went, and otherwise; that you ought to come, and must, and would, — as he, Ireland, would farther write to you. There is only one thing I have to add of my own, and beg you to bear in mind, — a date merely. Videlicet, That the time for lecturing to the London West-End, I was given everywhere to understand, is from the latter end of April (or say April altogether) to the end of May: this is a fixed Statistic fact, all men told me: of this you are in all arrangements to keep mind. For it will actually do your heart good to look into the faces, and speak into minds, of really Aristocratic Persons, — being one yourself, you Sinner, — and perhaps indeed this will be the greatest of all the novelties that await you in your voyage. Not to be seen, I believe, at least never seen by me in any perfection, except in London only. From April to the end of May; during those weeks you must be here, and free: remember that date. Will you come in Winter then, next Winter, — or when? Ireland professed to know you by the Photograph too; which I never yet can. — I wrote by last Packet: enough here. Your friend Cunningham has not presented himself; shall be right welcome when he does, — as all that in the least belong to you may well hope to be. Adieu. Our love to you all.

Ever Yours,
         T. Carlyle

CXX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 April, 1847

My Dear Carlyle, — I have two good letters from you, and until now you have had no acknowledgment. Especially I ought to have told you how much pleasure your noble invitation in March gave me. This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. At home, no man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience I address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say. Whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that can be heard. Of course, I have only myself to please, and my work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. It is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of your English culture would scare the most desultory of Yankees into precision and fidelity; and perhaps I am not yet too old to be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud privilege. If you shall fright me into labor and concentration, I shall win my game; for I can well afford to pay any price to get my work well done. For the rest, I hesitate, of course, to rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to me. No reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe: — I — much more, — who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until now. — I hear nothing again from Mr. Ireland. So I will let the English Voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the East, and mind my apples and pears for the present.

You are to know that in these days I lay out a patch of orchard near my house, very much to the improvement, as all the household affirm, of our homestead. Though I have little skill in these things, and must borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of the garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will eat up days and weeks, and a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments. For the present, I stay in the new orchard.

Duyckinck, a literary man in New York, who advises Wiley and Putnam in their publishing enterprises, wrote me lately, that they had $600 for you, from Cromwell. So may it be.

Yours,
     R.W.E.

CXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 May, 1847

Dear Emerson, — ….My time is nearly up today; but I write a word to acknowledge your last Letter (30 April), and various other things. For example, you must tell Mr. Thoreau (is that the exact name? for I have lent away the printed pages) that his Philadelphia Magazine with the Lecture* in two pieces was faithfully delivered here, about a fortnight ago; and carefully read, as beseemed, with due entertainment and recognition. A vigorous Mr. Thoreau, — who has formed himself a good deal upon one Emerson, but does not want abundant fire and stamina of his own; — recognizes us, and various other things, in a most admiring great-hearted manner; for which, as for part of the confused voice from the jury bog (not yet summed into a verdict, nor likely to be summed till Doomsday, nor needful to sum), the poor prisoner at the bar may justly express himself thankful! In plain prose, I like Mr. Thoreau very well; and hope yet to hear good and better news of him: — only let him not “turn to foolishness”; which seems to me to be terribly easy, at present, both in New England and Old! May the Lord deliver us all from Cant; may the Lord, whatever else he do or forbear, teach us to look Facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing them over with our despicable and damnable palaver, into irrecognizability, and so falsifying the Lord’s own Gospels to his unhappy blockheads of children, all staggering down to Gehenna and the everlasting Swine’s-trough for want of Gospels. — O Heaven, it is the most accursed sin of man; and done everywhere, at present, on the streets and high places, at noonday! Very seriously I say, and pray as my chief orison, May the Lord deliver us from it. —

 ——  ——  —
* On Carlyle, published in Graham’s Magazine in March and
April, 1847.
 ——  ——  —

About a week ago there came your neighbor Hoar; a solid, sensible, effectual-looking man, of whom I hope to see much more. So soon as possible I got him under way for Oxford, where I suppose he was, last week; — both Universities was too much for the limits of his time; so he preferred Oxford; — and now, this very day, I think, he was to set out for the Continent; not to return till the beginning of July, when he promises to call here again. There was something really pleasant to me in this Mr. Hoar: and I had innumerable things to ask him about Concord, concerning which topic we had hardly got a word said when our first interview had to end. I sincerely hope he will not fail to keep his time in returning.

You do very well, my Friend, to plant orchards; and fair fruit shall they grow (if it please Heaven) for your grandchildren to pluck; — a beautiful occupation for the son of man, in all patriarchal and paternal times (which latter are patriarchal too)! But you are to understand withal that your coming hither to lecture is taken as a settled point by all your friends here; and for my share I do not reckon upon the smallest doubt about the essential fact of it, simply on some calculation and adjustment about the circumstantials. Of Ireland, who I surmise is busy in the problem even now, you will hear by and by, probably in more definite terms: I did not see him again after my first notice of him to you; but there is no doubt concerning his determinations (for all manner of reasons) to get you to Lancashire, to England; — and in fact it is an adventure which I think you ought to contemplate as fixed, — say for this year and the beginning of next? Ireland will help you to fix the dates; and there is nothing else, I think, which should need fixing. — Unquestionably you would get an immense quantity of food for ideas, though perhaps not at all in the way you anticipate, in looking about among us: nay, if you even thought us stupid, there is something in the godlike indifference with which London will accept and sanction even that verdict, — something highly instructive at least! And in short, for the truth must be told, London is properly your Mother City too, — verily you have about as much to do with it, in spite of Polk and Q. Victory, as I had! And you ought to come and look at it, beyond doubt; and say to this land, “Old Mother, how are you getting on at all?” To which the Mother will answer, “Thankee, young son, and you?” — in a way useful to both parties! That is truth.

Adieu, dear Emerson; good be with you always. Hoar gave me your American Poems: thanks. Vale et me ama.

 — T. Carlyle

CXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 4 June, 1847

Dear Carlyle, — I have just got your friendliest letter of May 18, with its varied news and new invitations. Really you are a dangerous correspondent with your solid and urgent ways of speaking. No affairs and no studies of mine, I fear, will be able to make any head against these bribes. Well, I will adorn the brow of the coming months with this fine hope; then if the rich God at last refuses the jewel, no doubt he will give something better — to both of us. But thinking on this project lately, I see one thing plainly, that I must not come to London as a lecturer. If the plan proceed, I will come and see you, — thankful to Heaven for that mercy, should such a romance looking reality come to pass, — I will come and see you and Jane Carlyle, and will hear what you have to say. You shall even show me, if you will, such other men and women as will suffer themselves to be seen and heard, asking for nothing again. Then I will depart in peace, as I came.

At Mr. Ireland’s “Institutes,” I will read lectures; and possibly in London too, if, when there, you looking with your clear eyes shall say that it is desired by persons who ought to be gratified. But I wish such lecturing to be a mere contingency, and nowise a settled purpose. I had rather stay at home, and forego the happiness of seeing you, and the excitement of England, than to have the smallest pains taken to collect an audience for me. So now we will leave this egg in the desert for the ostrich Time to hatch it or not.

It seems you are not tired of pale Americans, or will not own it. You have sent our Country-Senator* where he wanted to go, and to the best hospitalities as we learn today directly from him. I cannot avoid sending you another of a different stamp. Henry Hedge is a recluse but Catholic scholar in our remote Bangor, who reads German and smokes in his solitary study through nearly eight months of snow in the year, and deals out, every Sunday, his witty apothegms to the lumber-merchants and township-owners of Penobscot River, who have actually grown intelligent interpreters of his riddles by long hearkening after them. They have shown themselves very loving and generous lately, in making a quite munificent provision for his traveling. Hedge has a true and mellow heart,… and I hope you will like him.

 ——  —— * The Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar. ——  ——

I have seen lately a Texan, ardent and vigorous, who assured me that Carlyle’s Writings were read with eagerness on the banks of the Colorado. There was more to tell, but it is too late.

Ever yours,
        R.W. Emerson

CXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 31 July, 1847

Dear Carlyle, — In my old age I am coming to see you. I have written this day, in answer to sundry letters brought me by the last steamer, from Mr. Ireland and Mr. Hudson of Leeds, that I mean in good earnest to sail for Liverpool or for London about the first of October; and I am disposing my astonished household — astonished at such a Somerset of the sedentary master — with that view.

My brother William was here this week from New York, and will come again to carry my mother home with him for the winter; my wife and children three are combining for and against me; at all events, I am to have my visit. I pray you to cherish your good nature, your mercy. Let your wife cherish it, — that I may see, I indolent, this incredible worker, whose toil has been long since my pride and wonder, — that I may see him benign and unexacting, — he shall not be at the crisis of some over-labor. I shall not stay but an hour. What do I care for his fame? Ah! how gladly I hoped once to see Sterling as mediator and amalgam, when my turn should come to see the Saxon gods at home: Sterling, who had certain American qualities in his genius; — and now you send me his shade. I found at Munroe’s shop the effigy, which, he said, Cunningham, whom I have not seen or heard from, had left there for me; a front face, and a profile, both — especially the first — a very welcome satisfaction to my sad curiosity, the face very national, certainly, but how thoughtful and how friendly! What more belongs to this print — whether you are editing his books, or yourself drawing his lineaments — I know not.

I find my friends have laid out much work for me in Yorkshire and Lancashire. What part of it I shall do, I cannot yet tell. As soon as I know how to arrange my journey best, I shall write you again.

Yours affectionately,
                 R.W. Emerson

CXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Rawdon, Near Leeds, Yorkshire 31 August, 1847

Dear Emerson, — Almost ever since your last Letter reached me, I have been wandering over the country, enveloped either in a restless whirl of locomotives, view-hunting, &c., or sunk in the deepest torpor of total idleness and laziness, forgetting, and striving to forget, that there was any world but that of dreams; — and though at intervals the reproachful remembrance has arisen sharply enough on me, that I ought, on all accounts high and low, to have written you an answer, never till today have I been able to take pen in hand, and actually begin that operation! Such is the naked fact. My Wife is with me; we leave no household behind us but a servant; the face of England, with its mad electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so abstruse and unspeakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time one had got into the country of the Lotos-Eaters, and it made no matter what became of anything and all things. In good truth, it is a wearied man, at least a dreadfully slothful and slumberous man, eager for sleep in any quantity, that now addresses you! Be thankful for a few half-dreaming words, till we awake again.

As to your visit to us, there is but one thing to be said and repeated: That a prophet’s chamber is ready for you in Chelsea, and a brotherly and sisterly welcome, on whatever day at whatever hour you arrive: this, which is all of the Practical that I can properly take charge of, is to be considered a given quantity always. With regard to Lecturing, &c., Ireland, with whom I suppose you to be in correspondence, seems to have awakened all this North Country into the fixed hope of hearing you, — and God knows they have need enough to hear a man with sense in his head; — it was but the other day I read in one of their Newspapers, “We understand that Mr. Emerson the distinguished &c. is certainly &c. this winter,” all in due Newspaper phrase, and I think they settled your arrival for “October” next. May it prove so! But on the whole there is no doubt of your coming; that is a great fact. And if so, I should say, Why not come at once, even as the Editor surmises? You will evidently do no other considerable enterprise till this voyage to England is achieved. Come therefore; — and we shall see; we shall hear and speak! I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him: if I speak to you, it will be a breaking of my silence for the last time perhaps, — perhaps for the first time, on some points! Allons. I shall not always be so roadweary, lifeweary, sleepy, and stony as at present. I even think there is yet another Book in me; “Exodus from Houndsditch” (I think it might be called), a peeling off of fetid Jewhood in every sense from myself and my poor bewildered brethren: one other Book; and, if it were a right one, rest after that, the deeper the better, forevermore. Ach Gott! —

Hedge is one of the sturdiest little fellows I have come across for many a day. A face like a rock; a voice like a howitzer; only his honest kind gray eyes reassure you a little. We have met only once; but hope (mutually, I flatter myself) it may be often by and by. That hardy little fellow too, what has he to do with “Semitic tradition” and the “dust-hole of extinct Socinianism,” George-Sandism, and the Twaddle of a thousand Magazines? Thor and his Hammer, even, seem to me a little more respectable; at least, “My dear Sir, endeavor to clear your mind of Cant.” Oh, we are all sunk, much deeper than any of us imagines. And our worship of “beautiful sentiments,” &c., &c. is as contemptible a form of long-ears as any other, perhaps the most so of any. It is in fact damnable. — We will say no more of it at present. Hedge came to me with tall lank Chapman at his side, — an innocent flail of a creature, with considerable impetus in him: the two when they stood up together looked like a circle and tangent, — in more senses than one.

Jacobson, the Oxford Doctor, who welcomed your Concord Senator in that City, writes to me that he has received (with blushes, &c.) some grand “Gift for his Child” from that Traveler; whom I am accordingly to thank, and blush to, — Jacobson not knowing his address at present. The “address” of course is still more unknown to me at present: but we shall know it, and the man it indicates, I hope, again before long. So, much for that.

And now, dear Emerson, Adieu. Will your next Letter tell us the when? O my Friend! We are here with Quakers, or Ex-Quakers rather; a very curious people, “like water from the crystal well”; in a very curious country too, most beautiful and very ugly: but why write of it, or of anything more, while half asleep and lotos-eating! Adieu, my Friend; come soon, and let us meet again under this Sun.

Yours,
    T. Carlyle

CXXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 September, 1847

My Dear Carlyle, — The last steamer brought, as ever, good tidings from you, though certainly from a new habitat, at Leeds, or near it. If Leeds will only keep you a little in its precinct, I will search for you there; for it is one of the parishes in the diocese which Mr. Ireland and his friends have carved out for me on the map of England.

I have taken a berth in the packet-ship “Washington Irving,” which leaves Boston for Liverpool next week, 5 October; having decided, after a little demurring and advising, to follow my inclination in shunning the steamer. The owners will almost take oath that their ship cannot be out of a port twenty days. At Liverpool and Manchester I shall take advice of Ireland and his officers of the “Institutes,” and perhaps shall remain for some time in that region, if my courage and my head are equal to the work they offer me. I will write you what befalls me in the strange city. Who knows but I may have adventures — I who had never one, as I have just had occasion to write to Mrs. Howitt, who inquired what mine were?

Well, if I survive Liverpool, and Manchester, and Leeds, or rather my errands thither, I shall come some fine day to see you in your burly city, you in the centre of the world, and sun me a little in your British heart. It seems a lively passage that I am entering in the old Dream World, and perhaps the slumbers are lighter and the Morning is near. Softly, dear shadows, do not scatter yet. Knit your panorama close and well, till these rare figures just before me draw near, and are greeted and known.

But there is no more time in this late night — and what need? since I shall see you and yours soon.

Ever yours,
         R.W.E.

CXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 15 October, 1847

My Dear Emerson, — Your Letter from Concord, of the 31st of July, had arrived duly in London; been duly forwarded to my transient address at Buxton in Derbyshire, — and there, by the faithless Postmaster, retained among his lumber, instead of given to me when I called on him! We staid in Buxton only one day and night; two Newspapers, as I recollect, the Postmaster did deliver to me on my demand; but your Letter he, with scandalous carelessness, kept back, and left me to travel forwards without: there accordingly it lay, week after week, for a month or more; and only by half-accident and the extraordinary diligence and accuracy of our Chelsea Postman, was it recovered at all, not many days ago, after my Wife’s return hither. Consider what kind of fact this was and has been for us! For now, if all have gone right, you are approaching the coast of England; Chelsea and your fraternal House hidden under a disastrous cloud to you; and I know not so much as whitherward to write, and send you a word of solution. It is one of the most unpleasant mistakes that ever befell me; I have no resource but to enclose this Note to Mr. Ireland, and charge him by the strongest adjurations to have it ready for you the first thing when you set foot upon our shores.*

 ——  ——  —— * Mr. Ireland, in his Recollections of Emerson’s Visit to England, p. 59, prints Carlyle’s note to himself, enclosing this letter, and adds: “The ship reached Liverpool on the 22d of October, and Mr. Emerson at once proceeded to Manchester. After spending a few hours in friendly talk, he was ‘shot up,’ as Carlyle had desired, to Chelsea, and at the end of a week returned to Manchester, to begin his lectures.”

Know then, my Friend, that in verity your Home while in England is here; and all other places, whither work or amusement may call you, are but inns and temporary lodgings. I have returned hither a day or two ago, and free from any urgent calls or businesses of any kind; my Wife has your room all ready; — and here surely, if anywhere in the wide Earth, there ought to be a brother’s welcome and kind home waiting you! Yes, by Allah! — An “Express Train” leaves Liverpool every afternoon; and in some six hours will set you down here. I know not what your engagements are; but I say to myself, Why not come at once, and rest a little from your sea-changes, before going farther? In six hours you can be out of the unstable waters, and sitting in your own room here. You shall not be bothered with talk till you repose; and you shall have plenty of it, hot and hot, when the appetite does arise in you. “No. 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea”: come to the “London Terminus,” from any side; say these magic words to any Cabman, and by night or by day you are a welcome apparition here, — foul befall us otherwise! This is the fact: what more can I say? I make my affidavit of the same; and require you in the name of all Lares and Penates, and Household Gods ancient and modern which are sacred to men, to consider it and take brotherly account of it! —

Shall we hear of you, then, in a day or two: shall we not perhaps see you in a day or two! That depends on the winds and the chances; but our affection is independent of such. Adieu; au revoir, it now is! Come soon; come at once.

Ever yours,
       T. Carlyle

Extracts from Emerson’s Diary

October, 1847

“I found at Liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle, addressed to ‘R.W.E. on the instant when he lands in England,’ conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth. And finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the Lecture-rooms I came down to London on Monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left them at Craigenputtock. ‘Well,’ said Carlyle, ‘here we are shoveled together again.’ The floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a plentiful stream. We had a wide talk that night until nearly one o’clock, and at breakfast next morning again. At noon or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. My few hours discourse with him, long ago, in Scotland, gave me not enough knowledge of him; and I have now at last been taken by surprise by him.”

“C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines.”

“I had a good talk with C. last night. He says over and over, for months, for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; and he, too, says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about ‘Kunst,’ also, in Germans, or English, or Americans;* and has a huge respect for the Duke of Wellington, as the only Englishman, or the only one in the Aristocracy, who will have nothing to do with any manner of lie.”

 ——  ——  — * See English Traits, Ch. XVI.; and Life of Sterling, Part II. Ch. VII. “Among the windy gospels addressed to our poor century there are few louder than this of Art.” ——  ——  —

The following sentences are of later date than the preceding: —

“Carlyle had all the kleinstadtlich traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which made light of the British Islands.”

“Carlyle has a hairy strength which makes his literary vocation a mere chance, and what seems very contemptible to him. I could think only of an enormous trip-hammer with an ‘Aeolian attachment.”’

“In Carlyle as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson.”

“England makes what a step from Dr. Johnson to Carlyle! what wealth of thought and science, what expansion of views and profounder resources does the genius and performance of this last imply! If she can make another step as large, what new ages open!”

CXXVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Mrs. Massey’s, Manchester, 2 Fenny Place, Fenny St.
November 5, 1847

Ah! my dear friend, all these days have gone, and you have had no word from me, when the shuttles fly so swiftly in your English loom, and in so few hours we may have tidings of the best that live. At last, and only this day for the first day, I am stablished in my own lodgings on English ground, and have a fair parlor and chamber, into both of which the sun and moon shine, into which friendly people have already entered.

Hitherto I have been the victim of trifles, — which is the fate and the chief objection to traveling. Days are absorbed in precious nothings. But now that I am in some sort a citizen, of Manchester, and also of Liverpool (for there also I am to enter on lodgings tomorrow, at 56 Stafford Street, Islington), perhaps the social heart of this English world will include me also in its strong and healthful circulations. I get the best letters from home by the last steamers, and was much occupied in Liverpool yesterday in seeing Dr. Nichol of Glasgow, who was to sail in the “Acadia,” and in giving him credentials to some Americans. I find here a very kind reception from your friends, as they emphatically are, — Ireland, Espinasse, Miss Jewsbury, Dr. Hodgson, and a circle expanding on all sides outward, — and Mrs. Paulet at Liverpool. I am learning there also to know friendly faces, and a certain Roscoe Club has complimented me with its privileges. The oddest part of my new position is my alarming penny correspondence, which, what with welcomes, invitations to lecture, proffers of hospitality, suggestions from good Swedenborgists and others for my better guidance touching the titles of my discourses, &c., &c., all requiring answers, threaten to eat up a day like a cherry. In this fog and miscellany, and until the heavenly sun shall give me one beam, will not you, friend and joy of so many years, send me a quiet line or two now and then to say that you still smoke your pipe in peace, side by side with wife and brother also well and smoking, or able to smoke? Now that I have in some measure calmed down the astonishment and consternation of seeing your dreams change into realities, I mean, at my next approximation or perihelion, to behold you with the most serene and sceptical calmness.

So give my thanks and true affectionate remembrance to Jane Carlyle, and my regards also to Dr. Carlyle, whose precise address please also to send me.

Ever your loving
                  R.W.E.

The address at the top of this note is the best for the present, as I mean to make this my centre.

CXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 13 November, 1847

Dear Emerson, — Your Book-parcels were faithfully sent off, directly after your departure: in regard to one of them I had a pleasant visit from the proprietor in person, — the young Swedenborgian Doctor, whom to my surprise I found quite an agreeable, accomplished secular young gentleman, much given to “progress of the species,” &c., &c.; from whom I suppose you have yourself heard. The wandering umbrella, still short of an owner, hangs upon its peg here, without definite outlook. Of yourself there have come news, by your own Letter, and by various excerpts from Manchester Newspapers. Gluck zu! —

This Morning I received the Enclosed, and send it off to you without farther response. Mudie, if I mistake not, is some small Bookseller in the Russell-Square region; pray answer him, if you think him worthy of answer. A dim suspicion haunts me that perhaps he was the Republisher (or Pirate) of your first set of Essays: but probably he regards this as a mere office of untutored friendship on his part. Or possibly I do the poor man wrong by misremembrance? Chapman could tell.

I am sunk deep here, in effete Manuscripts, in abstruse meditations, in confusions old and new; sinking, as I may describe myself, through stratum after stratum of the Inane, — down to one knows not what depth! I unfortunately belong to the Opposition Party in many points, and am in a minority of one. To keep silence, therefore, is among the principal duties at present.

We had a call from Bancroft, the other evening. A tough Yankee man; of many worthy qualities more tough than musical; among which it gratified me to find a certain small under-current of genial humor, or as it were hidden laughter, not noticed heretofore.

My Wife and all the rest of us are well; and do all salute you with our true wishes, and the hope to have you here again before long. Do not bother yourself with other than voluntary writing to me, while there is so much otherwise that you are obliged to write. If on any point you want advice, information, or other help that lies within the limits of my strength, command me, now and always. And so Good be with you; and a happy meeting to us soon again.

Yours ever truly,
            T. Carlyle

CXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 30 November, 1847

Dear Emerson, — Here is a word for you from Miss Fuller; I send you the Cover also, though I think there is little or nothing in that. It contained another little Note for Mazzini; who is wandering in foreign parts, on paths unknown to me at present. Pray send my regards to Miss Fuller, when you write.

We hear of you pretty often, and of your successes with the Northern populations. We hope for you in London again before long. — I am busy, if at all, altogether inarticulately in these days. My respect for silence, my distrust of Speech, seem to grow upon me. There is a time for both, says Solomon; but we, in our poor generation, have forgotten one of the “times.”

Here is a Mr. Forster* of Rawdon, or Bradford, in Yorkshire; our late host in the Autumn time; who expects and longs to be yours when you come into those parts.

I am busy with William Conqueror’s Domesday Book and with the commentaries of various blockheads on it: — Ah me!

All good be with you, and happy news from those dear to you.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

 — * Now the Rt. Hon. W E. Forster, M.P. —

CXXX. Emerson to Carlyle

2 Fenny Street, Higher Broughton, Manchester 28 December, 1847

Dear Carlyle, — I am concerned to discover that Margaret Fuller in the letter which you forwarded prays me to ask you and Mrs. Carlyle respecting the Count and Countess Pepoli, who are in Rome for the winter, whether they would be good for her to know? — That is pretty nearly the form of her question. As one third of the winter is gone, and one half will be, before her question can be answered, I fear, it will have lost some of its pertinence. Well, it will serve as a token to pass between us, which will please me if it do not Margaret. — I have had nothing to send you tidings of. Yet I get the best accounts from home of wife and babes and friends. I am seeing this England more thoroughly than I had thought was possible to me. I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors. I have received everywhere the kindest hospitality from a great variety of persons. I see many intelligent and well-informed persons, and some fine geniuses. I have every day a better opinion of the English, who are a very handsome and satisfactory race of men, and, in the point of material performance, altogether incomparable. I have made some vain attempts to end my lectures, but must go on a little longer. With kindest regards to the Lady Jane,

Your friend,
          R.W.E.

Margaret Fuller’s address, if anything is to be written, is, Care of Maquay, Pakenham & Co., Rome.

CXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 30 December, 1847

My Dear Emerson, — We are very glad to see your handwriting again, and learn that you are well, and doing well. Our news of you hitherto, from the dim Lecture-element, had been satisfactory indeed, but vague. Go on and prosper.

I do not much think Miss Fuller would do any great good with the Pepolis, — even if they are still in Rome, and not at Bologna as our advices here seemed to indicate. Madam Pepoli is an elderly Scotch lady, of excellent commonplace vernacular qualities, hardly of more; the Count, some years younger, and a much airier man, is on all sides a beautiful Dilettante, — little suitable, I fear, to the serious mind that can recognize him as such! However, if the people are still in Rome, Miss Fuller can easily try: Bid Miss Fuller present my Wife’s compliments, or mine, or even yours (for they know all our domesticities here, and are very intimate, especially Madam with My dame); upon which the acquaintance is at once made, and can be continued if useful.

This morning Richard Milnes writes to me for your address; which I have sent. He is just returned out of Spain; home swiftly to “vote for the Jew Bill”; is doing hospitalities at Woburn Abbey; and I suppose will be in Yorkshire (home, near Pontefract) before long. See him if you have opportunity: a man very easy to see and get into flowing talk with; a man of much sharpness of faculty, well tempered by several inches of “Christian fat” he has upon his ribs for covering. One of the idlest, cheeriest, most gifted of fat little men.

Tennyson has been here for three weeks; dining daily till he is near dead; — setting out a Poem withal. He came in to us on Sunday evening last, and on the preceding Sunday: a truly interesting Son of Earth, and Son of Heaven, — who has almost lost his way, among the will-o’-wisps, I doubt; and may flounder ever deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that abound! I like him well; but can do next to nothing for him. Milnes, with general co-operation, got him a Pension; and he has bread and tobacco: but that is a poor outfit for such a soul. He wants a task; and, alas, that of spinning rhymes, and naming it “Art” and “high Art,” in a Time like ours, will never furnish him.

For myself I have been entirely idle, — I dare not even say, too abstrusely occupied; for I have merely been looking at the Chaos even, not by any means working in it. I have not even read a Book, — that I liked. All “Literature” has grown inexpressibly unsatisfactory to me. Better be silent than talk farther in this mood.

We are going off, on Saturday come a week, into Hampshire, to certain Friends you have heard me speak of. Our address, till the beginning of February, is “Hon. W.B. Baring, Alverstoke, Gosport, Hants.” My Wife sends you many kind regards; remember us across the Ocean too; — and be well and busy till we meet.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

Last night there arrived No. 1 of the Massachusetts Review: beautiful paper and print; and very promising otherwise. In the Introduction I well recognized the hand; in the first Article too, — not in any of the others. Faustum sit.

CXXXII. Emerson to Carlyle

Ambleside, 26 February, 1848

My Dear Carlyle, — I am here in Miss Martineau’s house, and having seen a good deal of England, and lately a good deal of Scotland too, I am tomorrow to set forth again for Manchester, and presently for London. Yesterday, I saw Wordsworth for a good hour and a half, which he did not seem to grudge, for he talked freely and fast, and — bating his cramping Toryism and what belongs to it — wisely enough. He is in rude health, and, though seventy-seven years old, says he does not feel his age in any particular. Miss Martineau is in excellent health and spirits, though just now annoyed by the hesitations of Murray to publish her book;* but she confides infinitely in her book, which is the best fortune. But I please myself not a little that I shall in a few days see you again, and I will give you an account of my journey. I have heard almost nothing of your late weeks, — but that is my fault, — only I heard with sorrow that your wife had been ill, and could not go with you on your Christmas holidays. Now may her good days have come again! I say I have heard nothing of your late days; of your early days, of your genius, of your influence, I cease not to hear and to see continually, yea, often am called upon to resist the same with might and main. But I will not pester you with it now. — Miss Martineau, who is most happily placed here, and a model of housekeeping, sends kindest remembrances to you both.

Yours ever,
        R. W. Emerson.

 * “Eastern Life, Past and Present.”

CXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 28 February, 1848

Dear Emerson, — We are delighted to hear of you again at first hand: our last traditions represented you at Edinburgh, and left the prospect of your return hither very vague. I have only time for one word tonight: to say that your room is standing vacant ever since you quitted it, — ready to be lighted up with all manner of physical and moral fires that the place will yield; and is in fact your room, and expects to be accounted such. — I know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big Babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done. Write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all already managed.

Jane has never yet got out since the cold took her; but she has at no time been so ill as is frequent with her in these winter disorders; she is now steadily improving, and we expect will come out with the sun and the green leaves, — as she usually does. I too caught an ugly cold, and, what is very uncommon with me, a kind of cough, while down in Hampshire; which, with other inarticulate matters, has kept me in a very mute abstruse condition all this while; so that, for many weeks past, I have properly had no history, — except such as trees in winter, and other merely passive objects may have. That is not an agreeable side of the page; but I find it indissolubly attached to the other: no historical leaf with me but has them both! Reading does next to nothing for me at present, neither will thinking or even dreaming rightly prosper; of no province can I be quite master except of the silent one, in such a case. One feels there, at last, as if quite annihilated; and takes up arms again (the poor goose-quill is no great things of a weapon to arm with!) as if in a kind of sacred despair.

All people are in a sort of joy-dom over the new French Republic, which has descended suddenly (or shall we say, ascended alas?) out of the Immensities upon us; showing once again that the righteous Gods do yet live and reign! It is long years since I have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public event. Adieu: come soon; and warn us when.

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

CXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

2 Fenny St., Manchester, 2 March, Thursday

Dear Friend, — I hope to set forward today for London, and to arrive there some time tonight. I am to go first to Chapman’s house, where I shall lodge for a time. If it is too noisy, I shall move westward. But I hope you are to be at home tomorrow, for if I prosper, I shall come and beg a dinner with you, — is it not at five o’clock? I am sorry you have no better news to tell me of your health, — your own and your wife’s. Tell her I shall surely report you to Alcott, who will have his revenge. Thanks that you keep the door so wide open for me still. I shall always come in.

Ever yours,
        R.W.E.

CXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle
Monday, P.M., 19 June, 1848

Dear Carlyle, — Mrs. Crowe of Edinburgh, an excellent lady, known to you and to many good people, wishes me to go to you with her.

I tell her that I believe you relax the reins of labor as early as one hour after noon, and I propose one o’clock on Thursday for the invasion. If you are otherwise engaged, you must send me word. Otherwise, we shall come.

It was sad to hear no good news last evening from Jane Carlyle. I heartily hope the night brought sleep, and the morning better health to her.

Yours always,
         R.W. Emerson

CXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 20 June, 1848

Dear Emerson, — We shall be very glad to become acquainted with Mrs. Crowe, of whom already by report we know many favorable things. Brown (of Portobello, Edinburgh) had given us intimation of her kind purposes towards Chelsea; and now on Thursday you (please the Pigs) shall see the adventure achieved. Two o’clock, not one, is the hour when labor ceases here, — if, alas, there be any “labor” so much as got begun; which latter is often enough the sad case. But at either hour we shall be ready for you.

I hope you penetrated the Armida Palace, and did your devoir to the sublime Duchess and her Luncheon yesterday! I cannot without a certain internal amusement (foreign enough to my present humor) represent to myself such a conjunction of opposite stars! But you carry a new image off with you, and are a gainer, you. Allons.

My Papers here are in a state of distraction, state of despair!
I see not what is to become of them and me.

Yours ever truly,
            T. Carlyle

My Wife arose without headache on Monday morning; but feels still a good deal beaten; — has not had “such a headache” for several years.

CXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, Friday [23 June, 1848]

Dear Emerson, — I forgot to say, last night, that you are to dine with us on Sunday; that after our call on the Lady Harriet* we will take a stroll through the Park, look at the Sunday population, and find ourselves here at five o’clock for the above important object. Pray remember, therefore, and no excuse! In haste.

Yours ever truly,
             T. Carlyle

 —— * Lady Ashburton ——

CXXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 6 December, 1848

Dear Emerson, — We received your Letter* duly, some time ago, with many welcomes; and have as you see been too remiss in answering it. Not from forgetfulness, if you will take my word; no, but from many causes, too complicated to articulate, and justly producing an indisposition to put pen to paper at all! Never was I more silent than in these very months; and, with reason too, for the world at large, and my own share of it in small, are both getting more and more unspeakable with any convenience! In health we of this household are about as well as usual; — and look across to the woods of Concord with more light than we had, realizing for ourselves a most mild and friendly picture there. Perhaps it is quite as well that you are left alone of foreign interference, even of a Letter from Chelsea, till you get your huge bale of English reminiscences assorted a little. Nobody except me seems to have heard from you; at least the rest, in these parts, all plead destitution when I ask for news. What you saw and suffered and enjoyed here will, if you had once got it properly warehoused, be new wealth to you for many years. Of one impression we fail not here: admiration of your pacific virtues, of gentle and noble tolerance, often sorely tried in this place! Forgive me my ferocities; you do not quite know what I suffer in these latitudes, or perhaps it would be even easier for you. Peace for me, in a Mother of Dead Dogs like this, there is not, was not, will not be, — till the battle itself end; which, however, is a sure outlook, and daily growing a nearer one.

 ——  ——  — * The letter is missing, but a fragment of the rough draft of it exists, dated Concord, 2 October, 1848. Emerson had returned home in July, and he begins: “‘T is high time, no doubt, long since, that you heard from me, and if there were good news in America for you, you would be sure to hear. All goes at heavy trot with us… I fell again quickly into my obscure habits, more fit for me than the fine things I had seen. I made my best endeavor to praise the rich country I had seen, and its excellent, energetic, polished people. And it is very easy for me to do so. England is the country of success, and success has a great charm for me, more than for those I talk with at home. But they were obstinate to know if the English were superior to their possessions, and if the old religion warmed their hearts, and lifted a little the mountain of wealth. So I enumerated the list of brilliant persons I had seen, and the [break in MS.]. But the question returned. Did you find kings and priests? Did you find sanctities and beauties that took away your memory, and sent you home a changed man with new aims, and with a discontent of your old pastures?”

Here the fragment ends. Emerson’s answer to these questions may be found in the chapter entitled “Results,” in his English Traits. ——  ——  —

Nay, there is another practical question, — but it is from the female side of the house to the female side, — and in fact concerns Indian meal, upon which Mrs. Emerson, or you, or the Miller of Concord (if he have any tincture of philosophy) are now to instruct us! The fact is, potatoes having vanished here, we are again, with motives large and small, trying to learn the use of Indian meal; and indeed do eat it daily to meat at dinner, though hitherto with considerable despair. Question first, therefore: Is there by nature a bitter final taste, which makes the throat smart, and disheartens much the apprentice in Indian meal; — or is it accidental, and to be avoided? We surely anticipate the latter answer; but do not yet see how. At first we were taught the meal, all ground on your side of the water, had got fusty, raw; an effect we are well used to in oaten and other meals but, last year, we had a bushel of it ground here, and the bitter taste was there as before (with the addition of much dirt and sand, our millstones I suppose being too soft); — whereupon we incline to surmise that there is, perhaps, as in the case of oats, some pellicle or hull that ought to be rejected in making the meal? Pray ask some philosophic Miller, if Mrs. Emerson or you do not know; — and as a corollary this second question: What is the essential difference between white (or brown-gray-white) Indian Meal and yellow (the kind we now have; beautiful as new Guineas, but with an ineffaceable tastekin of soot in it)? — And question third, which includes all: How to cook mush rightly, at least without bitter? Long-continued boiling seems to help the bitterness, but does not cure it. Let some oracle speak! I tell all people, our staff of life is in the Mississippi Valley henceforth; — and one of the truest benefactors were an American Minerva who could teach us to cook this meal; which our people at present (I included) are unanimous in finding nigh uneatable, and loudly exclaimable against! Elihu Burritt had a string of recipes that went through all newspapers three years ago; but never sang there oracle of longer ears than that, — totally destitute of practical significance to any creature here!

And now enough of questioning. Alas, alas, I have a quite other batch of sad and saddest considerations, — on which I must not so much as enter at present! Death has been very busy in this little circle of ours within these few days. You remember Charles Buller, to whom I brought you over that night at the Barings’ in Stanhope Street? He died this day week, almost quite unexpectedly; a sore loss to all that knew him personally, and his gladdening sunny presence in many circles here; a sore loss to the political people too, for he was far the cleverest of all Whig men, and indeed the only genial soul one can remember in that department of things.* We buried him yesterday; and now see what new thing has come. Lord Ashburton, who had left his mother well in Hampshire ten hours before, is summoned from poor Buller’s funeral by telegraph; hurries back, finds his mother, whom he loved much, already dead! She was a Miss Bingham, I think, from Pennsylvania, perhaps from Philadelphia itself. You saw her; but the first sight by no means told one all or the best worth that was in that good Lady. We are quite bewildered by our own regrets, and by the far painfuler sorrow of those closely related to these sudden sorrows. Of which let me be silent for the present; — and indeed of all things else, for speech, inadequate mockery of one’s poor meaning, is quite a burden to me just now!

 * The reader of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, and of Froude’s volumes of his biography, is familiar with the close relations that had existed between Buller and Carlyle. ——  ——  —

Neuberg* comes hither sometimes; a welcome, wise kind of man. Poor little Espinasse still toils cheerily at the oar, and various friends of yours are about us. Brother John did send through Chapman all the Dante, which we calculate you have received long ago: he is now come to Town; doing a Preface, &c., which also will be sent to you, and just about publishing. — Helps, who has been alarmingly ill, and touring on the Rhine since we were his guests, writes to me yesterday from Hampshire about sending you a new Book of his. I instructed him How.

Adieu, dear Emerson; do not forget us, or forget to think as kindly as you can of us, while we continue in this world together.

Yours ever affectionately,
                     T. Carlyle

 * Mr. Ireland, in his Recollections, p. 62, gives an interesting account of Mr. Neuberg, — a highly cultivated German, who assisted Carlyle in some of the later literary labors of his life. Neuberg died in 1867, and in a letter to his sister of that year Carlyle says: “No kinder friend had I in this world; no man of my day, I believe, had so faithful, loyal, and willing a helper as he generously was to me for the last twenty or more years.” —

CXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, 28 January, 1849

My Dear Carlyle, — Here in Boston for the day, though in no fit place for writing, you shall have, since the steamer goes tomorrow, a hasty answer to at least one of your questions….

You tell me heavy news of your friends, and of those who were friendly to me for your sake. And I have found farther particulars concerning them in the newspapers. Buller I have known by name ever since he was in America with Lord Durham, and I well remember his face and figure at Mr. Baring’s. Even England cannot spare an accomplished man.

Since I had your letter, and, I believe, by the same steamer, your brother’s Dante,* complete within and without, has come to me, most welcome. I heartily thank him. ‘T is a most workmanlike book, bearing every mark of honest value. I thank him for myself, and I thank him, in advance, for our people, who are sure to learn their debt to him, in the coming months and years. I sent the book, after short examination, the same day, to New York, to the Harpers, lest their edition should come out without Prolegomena. But they answered, the next day, that they had already received directly the same matter; — yet have not up to this time returned my book. For the Indian corn, — I have been to see Dr. Charles T. Jackson (my wife’s brother, and our best chemist, inventor of etherization), who tells me that the reason your meal is bitter is, that all the corn sent to you from us is kiln-dried here, usually at a heat of three hundred degrees, which effectually kills the starch or diastase (?) which would otherwise become sugar. This drying is thought necessary to prevent the corn from becoming musty in the contingency of a long voyage. He says, if it should go in the steamer, it would arrive sound without previous drying. I think I will try that experiment, shortly on a box or a barrel of our Concord maize, as Lidian Emerson confidently engages to send you accurate recipes for johnny-cake, mush, and hominy.

 * The Inferno of Dante, a translation in prose by John Carlyle; an excellent piece of work, still in demand.

Why did you not send me word of Clough’s hexameter poem, which I have now received and read with much joy.* But no, you will never forgive him his metres. He is a stout, solid, reliable man and friend, — I knew well; but this fine poem has taken me by surprise. I cannot find that your journals have yet discovered its existence. With kindest remembrances to Jane Carlyle, and new thanks to John Carlyle, your friend,

 — R.W. Emerson

 ——  ——  — * “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich.” ——  ——  —

CXL. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 19 April, 1849

My Dear Emerson, — Today is American Postday; and by every rule and law, — even if all laws but those of Cocker were abolished from this universe, — a word from me is due to you! Twice I have heard since I spoke last: prompt response about the Philadelphia Bill; exact performance of your voluntary promise, — Indian Corn itself is now here for a week past….

Still more interesting is the barrel of genuine Corn ears, — Indian Cobs of edible grain, from the Barn of Emerson himself! It came all safe and right, according to your charitable program; without cost or trouble to us of any kind; not without curious interest and satisfaction! The recipes contained in the precedent letter, duly weighed by the competent jury of housewives (at least by my own Wife and Lady Ashburton), were judged to be of decided promise, reasonable-looking every one of them; and now that the stuff itself is come, I am happy to assure you that it forms a new epoch for us all in the Maize department: we find the grain sweet, among the sweetest, with a touch even of the taste of nuts in it, and profess with contrition that properly we have never tasted Indian Corn before. Millers of due faculty (with millstones of iron) being scarce in the Cockney region, and even cooks liable to err, the Ashburtons have on their resources undertaken the brunt of the problem one of their own Surrey or Hampshire millers is to grind the stuff, and their own cook, a Frenchman commander of a whole squadron, is to undertake the dressing according to the rules. Yesterday the Barrel went off to their country place in Surrey, — a small Bag of select ears being retained here, for our own private experimenting; — and so by and by we shall see what comes of it. — I on my side have already drawn up a fit proclamation of the excellences of this invaluable corn, and admonitions as to the benighted state of English eaters in regard to it; — to appear in Fraser’s Magazine, or I know not where, very soon. It is really a small contribution towards World-History, this small act of yours and ours: there is no doubt to me, now that I taste the real grain, but all Europe will henceforth have to rely more and more upon your Western Valleys and this article. How beautiful to think of lean tough Yankee settlers, tough as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubduable fire in their belly, steering over the Western Mountains, to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the Posterity of Adam! The Pigs in about a year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles round: a most judicious function on the part of the Pigs. Behind the Pigs comes Jonathan with his all-conquering ploughshare, — glory to him too! Oh, if we were not a set of Cant-ridden blockheads, there is no Myth of Athene or Herakles equal to this fact; — which I suppose will find its real “Poets” some day or other; when once the Greek, Semitic, and multifarious other Cobwebs are swept away a little! Well, we must wait. — For the rest, if this skillful Naturalist and you will make any more experiments on Indian Corn for us, might I not ask that you would try for a method of preserving the meal in a sound state for us? Oatmeal, which would spoil directly too, is preserved all year by kiln-drying the grain before it is ground, — parching it till it is almost brown, sometimes the Scotch Highlanders, by intense parching, can keep their oatmeal good for a series of years. No Miller here at present is likely to produce such beautiful meal as some of the American specimens I have seen: — if possible, we must learn to get the grain over in the shape of proper durable meal. At all events, let your Friend charitably make some inquiry into the process of millerage, the possibilities of it for meeting our case; — and send us the result some day, on a separate bit of paper. With which let us end, for the present.

Alas, I have yet written nothing; am yet a long way off writing, I fear! Not for want of matter, perhaps, but for redundance of it; I feel as if I had the whole world to write yet, with the day fast bending downwards on me, and did not know where to begin, — in what manner to address the deep-sunk populations of the Theban Land. Any way my Life is very grim, on these terms, and is like to be; God only knows what farther quantity of braying in the mortar this foolish clay of mine may yet need! — They are printing a third Edition of Cromwell; that bothered me for some weeks, but now I am over with that, and the Printer wholly has it: a sorrowful, not now or ever a joyful thing to me, that. The stupor of my fellow blockheads, for Centuries back, presses too heavy upon that, — as upon many things, O Heavens! People are about setting up some Statue of Cromwell, at St. Ives, or elsewhere: the King-Hudson Statue is never yet set up; and the King himself (as you may have heard) has been discovered swindling. I advise all men not to erect a statue for Cromwell just now. Macaulay’s History is also out, running through the fourth edition: did I tell you last time that I had read it, — with wonder and amazement? Finally, it seems likely Lord John Russell will shortly walk out (forever, it is hoped), and Sir R. Peel come in; to make what effort is in him towards delivering us from the pedant method of treating Ireland. The beginning, as I think, of salvation (if he can prosper a little) to England, and to all Europe as well. For they will all have to learn that man does need government, and that an able-bodied starving beggar is and remains (whatever Exeter Hall may say to it) a Slave destitute of a Master; of which facts England, and convulsed Europe, are fallen foundly ignorant in these bad ages, and will plunge ever deeper till they rediscover the same. Alas, alas, the Future for us is not to be made of butter, as the Platforms prophesy; I think it will be harder than steel for some ages! No noble age was ever a soft one, nor ever will or can be. — Your beautiful curious little discourse (report of a discourse) about the English was sent me by Neuberg; I thought it, in my private heart, one of the best words (for hidden genius lodged in it) I had ever heard; so sent it to the Examiner, from which it went to the Times and all the other Papers: an excellent sly little word.

Clough has gone to Italy; I have seen him twice, — could not manage his hexameters, though I like the man himself, and hope much of him. “Infidelity” has broken out in Oxford itself, — immense emotion in certain quarters in consequence, virulent outcries about a certain “Sterling Club,” altogether a secular society!

Adieu, dear Emerson; I had much more to say, but there is no room. O, forgive me, forgive me all trespasses, — and love me what you can!

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

CXLI. Carlyle to Emerson

Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B., 13 August, 1849

Dear Emerson, — By all laws of human computation, I owe you a letter, and have owed, any time these seven weeks: let me now pay a little, and explain. Your second Barrel of Indian Corn arrived also perfectly fresh, and of admirable taste and quality; the very bag of new-ground meal was perfect; and the “popped corn” ditto, when it came to be discovered: with the whole of which admirable materials such order was taken as promised to secure “the greatest happiness to the greatest number”; and due silent thanks were tendered to the beneficence of the unwearied Sender: — but all this, you shall observe, had to be done in the thick of a universal packing and household bustle; I just on the wing for a “Tour in Ireland,” my Wife too contemplating a run to Scotland shortly after, there to meet me on my return. All this was seven good weeks ago: I hoped somewhere in my Irish wayfarings to fling you off a Letter; but alas, I reckoned there quite without my host (strict “host,” called Time), finding nowhere half a minute left to me; and so now, having got home to my Mother, not to see my Wife yet for some days, it is my earliest leisure, after all, that I employ in this purpose. I have been terribly knocked about too, — jolted in Irish cars, bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash, above all kept on dreadfully short allowance of sleep; — so that now first, when fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the uncomfortable one, “that I am not Caliban, but a Cramp”: terribly cramped indeed, if I could tell you everything!

What the other results of this Irish Tour are to be for me I cannot in the least specify. For one thing, I seem to be farther from speech on any subject than ever: such masses of chaotic ruin everywhere fronted me, the general fruit of long-continued universal falsity and folly; and such mountains of delusion yet possessing all hearts and tongues I could do little that was not even noxious, except admire in silence the general “Bankruptcy of Imposture” as one there finds and sees it come to pass, and think with infinite sorrow of the tribulations, futile wrestlings, tumults, and disasters which yet await that unfortunate section of Adam’s Posterity before any real improvement can take place among them. Alas, alas! The Gospels of Political Economy, of Laissez-faire, No-Government, Paradise to all comers, and so many fatal Gospels, — generally, one may say, all the Gospels of this blessed “New Era,” — will first have to be tried, and found wanting. With a quantity of written and uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one sinks fairly dumb to estimate! A kind of comfort it is, however, to see that “Imposture” has fallen openly “bankrupt,” here as everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human tinkering, with all the Parliamentary Eloquence and Elective Franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go many yards more; but that its goings and currencies in this Earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! God is great; all Lies do now, as from the first, travel incessantly towards Chaos, and there at length lodge! In some parts of Ireland (the Western “insolvent Unions,” some twenty-seven of them in all), within a trifle of one half of the whole population are on Poor-Law rations (furnished by the British Government, L1,100 a week furnished here, L1,300 there, L800 there); the houses stand roofless, the lands unstocked, uncultivated, the landlords hidden from bailiffs, living sometimes “on the hares of their domain”: such a state of things was never witnessed under this sky before; and, one would humbly expect, cannot last long! — What is to be done? asks every one; incapable of hearing any answer, were there even one ready for imparting to him. “Blacklead these two million idle beggars,” I sometimes advised, “and sell them in Brazil as Niggers, — perhaps Parliament, on sweet constraint, will allow you to advance them to be Niggers!” In fact, the Emancipation Societies should send over a deputation or two to look at these immortal Irish “Freemen,” the ne plus ultra of their class it would perhaps moderate the windpipe of much eloquence one hears on that subject! Is not this the most illustrious of all “ages”; making progress of the species at a grand rate indeed? Peace be with it.

Waiting for me here, there was a Letter from Miss Fuller in Rome, written about a month ago; a dignified and interesting Letter; requesting help with Booksellers for some “History of the late Italian Revolution” she is about writing; and elegiacally recognizing the worth of Mazzini and other cognate persons and things. I instantly set about doing what little seemed in my power towards this object, — with what result is yet hidden, and have written to the heroic Margaret: “More power to her elbow!” as the Irish say. She has a beautiful enthusiasm; and is perhaps in the right stage of insight for doing that piece of business well. — Of other persons or interests I will say nothing till a calmer opportunity; which surely cannot be very long in coming.

In four days I am to rejoin my wife; after which some bits of visits are to be paid in this North Country; necessary most of them, not likely to be profitable almost any. In perhaps a month I expect to be back in Chelsea; whither direct a word if you are still beneficent enough to think of such a Castaway!

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

I got Thoreau’s Book; and meant well to read it, but have not yet succeeded, though it went with me through all Ireland: tell him so, please. Too Jean-Paulish, I found it hitherto.

CXLII. Carlyle to Emerson
Chelsea, 19 July, 1850

My Dear Emerson, My Friend, my Friend, — You behold before you a remorseful man! It is well-nigh a year now since I despatched some hurried rag of paper to you out of Scotland, indicating doubtless that I would speedily follow it with a longer letter; and here, when gray Autumn is at hand again, I have still written nothing to you, heard nothing from you! It is miserable to think of: — and yet it is a fact, and there is no denying of it; and so we must let it lie. If it please Heaven, the like shall not occur again. “Ohone Arooh!” as the Irish taught me to say, “Ohone Arooh!”

The fact is, my life has been black with care and toil, — labor above board and far worse labor below; — I have hardly had a heavier year (overloaded too with a kind of “health” which may be called frightful): to “burn my own smoke” in some measure, has really been all I was up to; and except on sheer immediate compulsion I have not written a word to any creature. — Yesternight I finished the last of these extraordinary Pamphlets; am about running off somewhither into the deserts, of Wales or Scotland, Scandinavia or still remoter deserts; — and my first signal of revived reminiscence is to you.

Nay I have not at any time forgotten you, be that justice done the unfortunate: and though I see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world, — I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock-strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one. Poor devils! — Nay if there were no point of agreement at all, and I were more intolerant “of ways of thinking” than I even am, — yet has not the man Emerson, from old years, been a Human Friend to me? Can I ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly of the man Emerson? No more of this. Write to me in your first good hour; and say that there is still a brother-soul left to me alive in this world, and a kind thought surviving far over the sea! — Chapman, with due punctuality at the time of publication, sent me the Representative Men; which I read in the becoming manner: you now get the Book offered you for a shilling, at all railway stations; and indeed I perceive the word “representative man”’ (as applied to the late tragic loss we have had in Sir Robert Peel) has been adopted by the Able-Editors, and circulates through Newspapers as an appropriate household word, which is some compensation to you for the piracy you suffer from the Typographic Letter-of-marque men here. I found the Book a most finished clear and perfect set of Engravings in the line manner; portraitures full of likeness, and abounding in instruction and materials for reflection to me: thanks always for such a Book; and Heaven send us many more of them. Plato, I think, though it is the most admired by many, did least for me: little save Socrates with his clogs and big ears remains alive with me from it. Swedenborg is excellent in likeness; excellent in many respects; — yet I said to myself, on reaching your general conclusion about the man and his struggles: “Missed the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at it, and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam, — which is a terrible miss, if it were never so near! A miss fully as good as a mile, I should say!” — In fact, I generally dissented a little about the end of all these Essays; which was notable, and not without instructive interest to me, as I had so lustily shouted “Hear, hear!” all the way from the beginning up to that stage. — On the whole, let us have another Book with your earliest convenience: that is the modest request one makes of you on shutting this.

I know not what I am now going to set about: the horrible barking of the universal dog-kennel (awakened by these Pamphlets) must still itself again; my poor nerves must recover themselves a little: — I have much more to say; and by Heaven’s blessing must try to get it said in some way if I live. —

Bostonian Prescott is here, infinitely lionized by a mob of gentlemen; I have seen him in two places or three (but forbore speech): the Johnny-cake is good, the twopence worth of currants in it too are good; but if you offer it as a bit of baked Ambrosia, Ach Gott! —

Adieu, dear Emerson, forgive, and love me a little.

Yours ever,
      T. Carlyle

CXLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 14 November, 1850

Dear Emerson, — You are often enough present to my thoughts; but yesterday there came a little incident which has brought you rather vividly upon the scene for me. A certain “Mr.— “ from Boston sends us, yesterday morning by post, a Note of yours addressed to Mazzini, whom he cannot find; and indicates that he retains a similar one addressed to myself, and (in the most courteous, kindly, and dignified manner, if Mercy prevent not) is about carrying it off with him again to America! To give Mercy a chance, I by the first opportunity get under way for Morley’s Hotel, the address of Mr. — ; find there that Mr. — , since morning, has been on the road towards Liverpool and America, and that the function of Mercy is quite extinct in this instance! My reflections as I wandered home again were none of the pleasantest. Of this Mr. — I had heard some tradition, as of an intelligent, accomplished, and superior man; such a man’s acquaintance, of whatever complexion he be, is and was always a precious thing to me, well worth acquiring where possible; not to say that any friend of yours, whatever his qualities otherwise, carries with him an imperative key to all bolts and locks of mine, real or imaginary. In fact I felt punished; — and who knows, if the case were seen into, whether I deserve it? What “business” it was that deprived me of a call from Mr. — , or of the possibility of calling on him, I know very well, — and — , the little dog, and others know! But the fact in that matter is very far different indeed from the superficial semblance; and I appeal to all the gentlemen that are in America for a candid interpretation of the same. “Eighteen million bores,” — good Heavens don’t I know how many of that species we also have; and how with us, as with you, the difference between them and the Eighteen thousand noble-men and non-bores is immeasurable and inconceivable; and how, with us as with you, the latter small company, sons of the Empyrean, will have to fling the former huge one, sons of Mammon and Mud, into some kind of chains again, reduce them to some kind of silence again, — unless the old Mud-Demons are to rise and devour us all? Truly it is so I construe it: and if — and the Eighteen millions are well justified in their anger at me, and the Eighteen thousand owe me thanks and new love. That is my decided opinion, in spite of you all! And so, along with — , probably in the same ship with him, there shall go my protest against the conduct of — ; and the declaration that to the last I will protest! Which will wind up the matter (without any word of yours on it) at this time. — For the rest, though — sent me his Pamphlet, it is a fact I have not read a word of it, nor shall ever read. My Wife read it; but I was away, with far other things in my head; and it was “lent to various persons” till it died! — Enough and ten times more than enough of all that. Let me on this last slip of paper give you some response to the Letter* I got in Scotland, under the silence of the bright autumn sun, in my Mother’s house, and read there.

 ——  —— * This letter is missing. ——  ——

You are bountiful abundantly in your reception of those Latter Day Pamphlets; and right in all you say of them; — and yet withal you are not right, my Friend, but I am! Truly it does behove a man to know the inmost resources of this universe, and, for the sake both of his peace and of his dignity, to possess his soul in patience, and look nothing doubting (nothing wincing even, if that be his humor) upon all things. For it is most indubitable there is good in all; — and if you even see an Oliver Cromwell assassinated, it is certain you may get a cartload of turnips from his carcass. Ah me, and I suppose we had too much forgotten all this, or there had not been a man like you sent to show it us so emphatically! Let us well remember it; and yet remember too that it is not good always, or ever, to be “at ease in Zion”; good often to be in fierce rage in Zion; and that the vile Pythons of this Mud-World do verily require to have sun-arrows shot into them and red-hot pokers struck through them, according to occasion: woe to the man that carries either of these weapons, and does not use it in their presence! Here, at this moment, a miserable Italian organ-grinder has struck up the Marseillaise under my window, for example: was the Marseillaise fought out on a bed of down, or is it worth nothing when fought? On those wretched Pamphlets I set no value at all, or even less than none: to me their one benefit is, my own heart is clear of them (a benefit not to be despised, I assure you!) — and in the Public, athwart this storm of curses, and emptyings of vessels of dishonor, I can already perceive that it is all well enough there too in reference to them; and the controversy of the Eighteen millions versus the Eighteen thousands, or Eighteen units, is going on very handsomely in that quarter of it, for aught I can see! And so, Peace to the brave that are departed; and, Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new! —

I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus’s old “College” (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far from Merthyr Tydvil, Cyclops’ Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; went through the Severn Valley; at Bath stayed a night with Landor (a proud and high old man, who charged me with express remembrances for you); saw Tennyson too, in Cumberland, with his new Wife; and other beautiful recommendable and ‘questionable things; — and was dreadfully tossed about, and torn almost to tatters by the manifold brambles of my way: and so at length am here, a much-lamed man indeed! Oh my Friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me; you know not quite (I imagine) what a burden mine is, or perhaps you would find this duty, which you always do, a little easier done! Be happy, be busy beside your still waters, and think kindly of me there. My nerves, health I call them, are in a sad state of disorder: alas, that is nine tenths of all the battle in this world. Courage, courage! — My Wife sends salutations to you and yours. Good be with you all always.

Your affectionate,
             T. Carlyle

CXLIV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 8 July, 1851

Dear Emerson, — Don’t you still remember very well that there is such a man? I know you do, and will do. But it is a ruinously long while since we have heard a word from each other; — a state of matters that ought immediately to cease. It was your turn, I think, to write? It was somebody’s turn! Nay I heard lately you complained of bad eyes; and were grown abstinent of writing. Pray contradict me this. I cannot do without some regard from you while we are both here. Spite of your many sins, you are among the most human of all the beings I now know in the world; — who are a very select set, and are growing ever more so, I can inform you!

In late months, feeling greatly broken and without heart for anything weighty, I have been upon a Life of John Sterling; which will not be good for much, but will as usual gratify me by taking itself off my hands: it was one of the things I felt a kind of obligation to do, and so am thankful to have done. Here is a patch of it lying by me, if you will look at a specimen. There are four hundred or more pages (prophesies the Printer), a good many Letters and Excerpts in the latter portion of the volume. Already half printed, wholly written; but not to come out for a couple of months yet, — all trade being at a stand till this sublime “Crystal Palace” go its ways again. — And now since we are upon the business, I wish you would mention it to E.P. Clark (is not that the name?) next time you go to Boston: if that friendly clear-eyed man have anything to say in reference to it and American Booksellers, let him say and do; he may have a Copy for anybody in about a month: if he have nothing to say, then let there be nothing anywhere said. For, mark O Philosopher, I expressly and with emphasis prohibit you at this stage of our history, and henceforth, unless I grow poor again. Indeed, indeed, the commercial mandate of the thing (Nature’s little order on that behalf) being once fulfilled (by speaking to Clark), I do not care a snuff of tobacco how it goes, and will prefer, here as elsewhere, my night’s rest to any amount of superfluous money.

This summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us, and productive of little, — the “Wind-dust-ry of all Nations” involving everything in one inane tornado. The very shopkeepers complain that there is no trade. Such a sanhedrim of windy fools from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one city before. But they will go their ways again, they surely will! One sits quiet in that faith; — nay, looks abroad with a kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal Children’s Ball which the British Nation in these extraordinary circumstances is giving it self! Silence above all, silence is very behoveful! I read lately a small old brown French duodecimo, which I mean to send you by the first chance there is. The writer is a Capitaine Bossu; the production, a Journal of his experiences in “La Louisiane,” “Oyo” (Ohio), and those regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to me, like some fractional Odyssey or letter.* Only a hundred years ago, and the Mississippi has changed as never valley did: in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than Balbec or Nineveh! Say what we will, Jonathan is doing miracles (of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing. — Do you know Bartram’s Travels? This is of the Seventies (1770) or so; treats of Florida chiefly, has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurably old. All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of future biblical article. — Finally on this head, can you tell me of any good Book on California? Good: I have read several bad. But that too is worthy of some wonder; that too, like the Old Bucaniers, hungers and thirsts (in ingenuous minds) to have some true record and description given of it.

 ——  ——  — * Bossu wrote two books which are known to the student of the history of the settlement of America; one, “Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales,” Paris, 1768; the other, “Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amerique septentrionale,” Amsterdam (Paris), 1777. ——  ——  —

And poor Miss Fuller, was there any Life ever published of her? or is any competent hand engaged on it? Poor Margaret, I often remember her; and think how she is asleep now under the surges of the sea. Mazzini, as you perhaps know, is with us this summer; comes across once in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my Wife, all his news. The Roman revolution has made a man of him, — quite brightened up ever since; — and the best friend he ever saw, I believe, was that same Quack-President of France, who relieved him while it was still time.

My Brother is in Annandale, working hard over Dante at last; talks of coming up hither shortly; I am myself very ill and miserable in the liver regions; very tough otherwise, — though I have now got spectacles for small print in the twilight. Eheu fugaces, — and yet why Eheu? In fact it is better to be silent. — Adieu, dear Emerson; I expect to get a great deal brisker by and by, — and in the first place to have a Missive from Boston again. My Wife sends you many regards. I am as ever, — affectionately Yours,

 — T. Carlyle

CXLV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 28 July, 1851

My Dear Carlyle, — You must always thank me for silence, be it never so long, and must put on it the most generous interpretations. For I am too sure of your genius and goodness, and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. There is very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my love of your letters, I think it the kind part to defend you from our imbecilities, — my own, and other men’s. Besides, my eyes are bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper.

And yet I owe you all my story, if story I have. I have been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio River to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky, — walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams, — and lost one day’s light; then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands.

“The Far West” is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call “moral” value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the “Iron” City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west. — I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara.

No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more’s the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret Fuller, or my part in one; — for Channing and Ward are to do theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New York Tribune, and, a few days after, was on the point of writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in Rufus Griswold’s Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E. possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about contents of Sterling’s letters to me, or that I had letters, this paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, I know not. He once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known Margaret Fuller in New York; but probably never saw any letter of Sterling’s or heard the contents of any. I have not read again Sterling’s letters, which I keep as good Lares in a special niche, but I have no recollection of anything that would be valuable to you. For the American Public for the Book, I think it important that you should take the precise step of sending Phillips and Sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. I saw them, and also E.P. Clark, and put them in communication, and Clark is to write you at once.

Having got so far in my writing to you, I do not know but I shall gain heart, and write more letters over sea. You will think my sloth suicidal enough. So many men as I learned to value in your country, — so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse, — and I lose them all by silence. Arthur Helps is a chief benefactor of mine. I wrote him a letter by Ward, — who brought the letter back. I ought to thank John Carlyle, not only for me, but for a multitude of good men and women here who read his Inferno duly. W.E. Forster sent me his Penn Pamphlet; I sent it to Bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought Forster might have made a still stronger case. Clough I prize at a high rate, the man and his poetry, but write not. Wilkinson I thought a man of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which school-boys and school-girls often show, — and we stop their mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion. But there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue. Kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your house, and health and strength and victory to you.

Your affectionate,
             Waldo Emerson

CXLVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Great Malvern, Worcestershire, 25 August, 1851

Dear Emerson, — Many thanks for your Letter, which found me here about a week ago, and gave a full solution to my bibliopolic difficulties. However sore your eyes, or however taciturn your mood, there is no delay of writing when any service is to be done by it! In fact you are very good to me, and always were, in all manner of ways; for which I do, as I ought, thank the Upper Powers and you. That truly has been and is one of the possessions of my life in this perverse epoch of the world….

I have sent off by John Chapman a Copy of the Life of Sterling, which is all printed and ready, but is not to appear till the first week of October…. Along with the Sheets was a poor little French Book for you, — Book of a poor Naval Mississippi Frenchman, one “Bossu,” I think; written only a Century ago, yet which already seemed old as the Pyramids in reference to those strange fast-growing countries. I read it as a kind of defaced romance; very thin and lean, but all true, and very marvelous as such.

It is above three weeks since my Wife and I left London, (the Printer having done,) and came hither with the purpose of a month of what is called “Water Cure”; for which this place, otherwise extremely pleasant and wholesome, has become celebrated of late years. Dr. Gully, the pontiff of the business in our Island, warmly encouraged my purpose so soon as he heard of it; nay, urgently offered at once that both of us should become his own guests till the experiment were tried: and here accordingly we are; I water-curing, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sad steepages, and other singular procedures; my Wife not meddling for her own behoof, but only seeing me do it. These have been three of the idlest weeks I ever spent, and there is still one to come: after which we go northward to Lancashire, and across the Border where my good old Mother still expects me; and so, after some little visiting and dawdling, hope to find ourselves home again before September end, and the inexpressible Glass Palace with its noisy inanity have taken itself quite away again. It was no increase of ill-health that drove me hither, rather the reverse; but I have long been minded to try this thing: and now I think the result will be, — zero pretty nearly, and one imagination the less. My long walks, my strenuous idleness, have certainly done me good; nor has the “water” done me any ill, which perhaps is much to say of it. For the rest, it is a strange quasi-monastic — godless and yet devotional — way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. I foresee, this “Water Cure,” under better forms, will become the Ramadhan of the overworked unbelieving English in time coming; an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while! — We had Twisleton* here (often speaking of you), who is off to America again; will sail, I think, along with this Letter; a semi-articulate but solid-minded worthy man. We have other officials and other litterateurs (T.B. Macaulay in his hired villa for one): but the mind rather shuns than seeks them, one finds solitary quasi-devotion preferable, and [Greek], as Pindar had it!

 — * The late Hon. Edward Twisleton, a man of high character and large attainments, and with a personal disposition that won the respect and affection of a wide circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the author of a curious and learned treatise entitled “The Tongue not Essential to Speech,” and his remarkable volume on “The Handwriting of Junius” seems to have effectually closed a long controversy.

Richard Milnes is married, about two weeks ago, and gone to Vienna for a jaunt. His wife, a Miss Crewe (Lord Crewe’s sister), about forty, pleasant, intelligent, and rather rich: that is the end of Richard’s long first act. Alfred Tennyson, perhaps you heard, is gone to Italy with his wife: their baby died or was dead-born; they found England wearisome: Alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here. Item Thackeray; who is coming over to lecture to you: a mad world, my Masters! Your Letter to Mazzini was duly despatched; and we hear from him that he will write to you, on the subject required, without delay. Browning and his wife, home from Florence, are both in London at present; mean to live in Paris henceforth for some time. They had seen something both of Margaret and her d’Ossoli, and appeared to have a true and lively interest in them; Browning spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the subject: I think it was I that had introduced poor Margaret to them. I said he ought to send these reminiscences to America, — that was the night before we left London, three weeks ago; his answer gave me the impression there had been some hindrance somewhere. Accordingly, when your Letter and Mazzini’s reached me here, I wrote to Browning urgently on the subject: but he informs me that they have sent all their reminiscences, at the request of Mr. Story; so that it is already all well. — Dear Emerson, you see I am at the bottom of my paper. I will write to you again before long; we cannot let you lie fallow in that manner altogether. Have you got proper spectacles for your eyes? I have adopted that beautiful symbol of old age, and feel myself very venerable: take care of your eyes!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CXLVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 14 April, 1852

My Dear Carlyle, — I have not grown so callous by my sulky habit, but that I know where my friends are, and who can help me, in time of need. And I have to crave your good offices today, and in a matter relating once more to Margaret Fuller…. You were so kind as to interest yourself, many months ago, to set Mazzini and Browning on writing their Reminiscences for us. But we never heard from either of them. Lately I have learned, by way of Sam Longfellow, in Paris, brother of our poet Longfellow, that Browning assured him that he did write and send a memoir to this country, — to whom, I know not. It never arrived at the hands of the Fullers, nor of Story, Channing, or me; — though the book was delayed in the hope of such help. I hate that his paper should be lost.

The little French Voyage, &c. of Bossu, I got safely, and compared its pictures with my own, at the Mississippi, the Illinois, and Chicago. It is curious and true enough, no doubt, though its Indians are rather dim and vague, and “Messieurs Sauvages” Good Indians we have in Alexander Henry’s Travels in Canada, and in our modern Catlin, and the best Western America, perhaps, in F.A. Michaux, Voyage a l’ouest des monts Alleghanis, and in Fremont. But it was California I believe you asked about, and, after looking at Taylor, Parkman, and the rest, I saw that the only course is to read them all, and every private letter that gets into the newspapers. So there was nothing to say.

I rejoiced with the rest of mankind in the Life of Sterling, and now peace will be to his Manes, down in this lower sphere. Yet I see well that I should have held to his opinion, in all those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the palms. It is said: here, that you work upon Frederick the Great?? However that be, health, strength, love, joy, and victory to you.

 — R.W. Emerson

CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 7 May, 1852

Dear Emerson, — I was delighted at the sight of your hand again. My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow, — as if I could have helped growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether; — and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by! To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically human. God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog-kennel of a world! And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less, — considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take! Nevertheless Marchons, — and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking…. Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl. Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her “mountain me” indeed: — but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, a toute epreuve. — Your Copy of the Book* came to me at last (to my joy): I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges. The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band; — which is not the plan at all! — What can have become of Mazzini’s Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable. Still less in the case of Browning: for Browning and his Wife did also write; I myself in the end of last July, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor Margaret and her Husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it, — at the request of Mrs. Story, I think. His address at present is, “No. 138 Avenue des Champs Elysees, a Paris,” if your American travelers still thought of inquiring. — Adieu, dear Emerson, till next week.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

 ——  —— * “The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.” ——  ——

CXLIX. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, May [?], 1852

You make me happy with your loving thoughts and meanings towards me. I have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. And the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous good-will, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me.

 ——  —— * From an imperfect rough draft. ——  ——

It is good to be born in good air and outlook, and not less with a civilization, that is, with one poet still living in the world. O yes, and I feel all the solemnity and vital cheer of the benefit. — If only the mountains of water and of land and the steeper mountains of blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. It is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. I like that Thor should make comets and thunder, as well as Iduna apples, or Heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. Nor is it your fault that you do a hero’s work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. Pity me, O strong man! I am of a puny constitution half made up, and as I from childhood knew, — not a poet but a lover of poetry, and poets, and merely serving as writer, &c. in this empty America, before the arrival of the poets. You must not misconstrue my silences, but thank me for them all, as a true homage to your diligence which I love to defend…

She* had such reverence and love for Landor that I do not know but at any moment in her natural life she would have sunk in the sea, for an ode from him; and now this most propitious cake is offered to her Manes. The loss of the notes of Browning and of Mazzini, which you confirm, astonishes me.

 * Margaret Fuller. The break in continuity is in the rough draft.

CL. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 25 June, 1852

Dear Emerson…… You are a born enthusiast, as quiet as you are; and it will continue so, at intervals, to the end. I admire your sly low-voiced sarcasm too; — in short, I love the sternly-gentle close-buttoned man very well, as I have always done, and intend to continue doing! — Pray observe therefore, and lay it to heart as a practical fact, that you are bound to persevere in writing to me from time to time; and will never get it given up, how sulky soever you grow, while we both remain in this world. Do not I very well understand all that you say about “apathized moods,” &c.? The gloom of approaching old age (approaching, nay arriving with some of us) is very considerable upon a man; and on the whole one contrives to take the very ugliest view, now and then, of all beautifulest things; and to shut one’s lips with a kind of grim defiance, a kind of imperial sorrow which is almost like felicity, — so completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods! These too are necessary, moods to a man. But the Earth withal is verdant, sun-beshone; and the Son of Adam has his place on it, and his tasks and recompenses in it, to the close; — as one remembers by and by, too. On the whole, I am infinitely solitary; but not more heavy laden than I have all along been, perhaps rather less so; I could fancy even old age to be beautiful, and to have a real divineness: for the rest, I say always, I cannot part with you, however it go; and so, in brief, you must get into the way of holding yourself obliged as formerly to a kind of dialogue with me; and speak, on paper since not otherwise, the oftenest you can. Let that be a point settled.

I am not writing on Frederic the Great; nor at all practically contemplating to do so. But, being in a reading mood after those furious Pamphlets (which have procured me showers of abuse from all the extensive genus Stupid in this country, and not done me any other mischief, but perhaps good), and not being capable of reading except in a train and about some object of interest to me, — I took to reading, near a year ago, about Frederick, as I had twice in my life done before; and have, in a loose way, tumbled up an immense quantity of shot rubbish on that field, and still continue. Not with much decisive approach to Frederick’s self, I am still afraid! The man looks brilliant and noble to me; but how love him, or the sad wreck he lived and worked in? I do not even yet see him clearly; and to try making others see him — ? — Yet Voltaire and he are the celestial element of the poor Eighteenth Century; poor souls. I confess also to a real love for Frederick’s dumb followers: the Prussian Soldiery. — I often say to myself, “Were not here the real priests and virtuous martyrs of that loud-babbling rotten generation!” And so it goes on; when to end, or in what to end, God knows.

Adieu, dear Emerson. A blockhead (by mistake) has been let in, and has consumed all my time. Good be ever with you and yours.

 — T. Carlyle

CLI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 19 April, 1853

My Dear Friend, — As I find I never write a letter except at the dunning of the Penny Post, — which is the pest of the century, — I have thought lately of crossing to England to excuse to you my negligence of your injunction, which so flattered me by its affectionateness a year ago. I was to write once a month. My own disobedience is wonderful, and explains to me all the sins of omission of the whole world. The levity with which we can let fall into disuse such a sacrament as the exchange of greeting at short periods, is a kind of magnanimity, and should be an astonishing argument of the “Immortality”; and I wonder how it has escaped the notice of philosophers. But what had I, dear wise man, to tell you? What, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness; — but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret, — none whatever. I scribble always a little, — much less than formerly, — and I did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on Fate, which — if we all live long enough, that is, you, and I, and the chapter — I hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself — as you will — you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea.

But I was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. They are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray… I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes, — for it yields to no engineering, — are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. ‘T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. “The beautiful is never plentiful.” On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succumb.

Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants…. I have written hundreds of pages about England and America, and may send them to you in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to Jane Carlyle.

Ever yours,
       R.W. Emerson

CLII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 13 May, 1853

Dear Emerson, — The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically Old Age had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one’s mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I have often said, was the unique among my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: the solitude one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs! — The truth is, moreover, I bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle-light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! “The buying of your first pair of spectacles,” I said to an old Scotch gentleman, “is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor.”— “Yes,” answered he, “but not quite so joyful perhaps!” — Well, well, I have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal snoring hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, what of the night? —

Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the epic in them, — ganz nach meinem Sinne. I see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of unpeaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a “republic of the Mediocrities,” and always was; — you may see what its “universal suffrage” is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now is: the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of the sincerest heart-tongue-and-hand “suffrage” they could give about it, poor devils! — I was much struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy: mere Latter-Day Pamphlet saxa et faces (read faeces, if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods! — I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated: — alas, the reverse of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world, — and will reappear conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy “Uncle Tommery” is got all well put by! Which will take some time yet, I think. — And so we will leave it.

I went to Germany last autumn; not seeking anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them, — and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left! — In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image of calm power (to say nothing of its other properties) I find I had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your despatch-of-business talents, — a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two of Fritz’s Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. Schiller’s death-chamber, Goethe’s sad Court-environment; above all, Luther’s little room in the Wartburg (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present so holy a spot as that same. Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all, — such my sad fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him. But on the whole Universal Puseyism seemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers; — and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind, — unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent silence, with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing, — Ach Gott! Never, never. — Clough is coming home, I hope. — Write soon, if you be not enchanted!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 10 August, 1853

My Dear Carlyle, — Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to, — perhaps it was May, — I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts — and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking — outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture — rare enough here — with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, “Eh bien, messieurs, il n’y a qu’une bete de plus!” And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come — the gay deceiver — once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. I beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat.

I have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness, — which I hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge, — and mainly in the case of Miss Bacon, who has a private history that entitles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her Shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. Bancroft was to have given her letters to Hallam, but gave one to Sir H. Ellis. Everett, I believe, gave her one to Mr. Grote; and when I told her what I remembered hearing of Spedding, she was eager to see him; which access I knew not how to secure, except through you. She wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet Spedding at your house. But do not fancy that I send any one to you heedlessly; for I value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than I give. I shall not send you any more people without good reason.

Your visit to Germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, I am preparing to read your history of Frederic. You are an inveterate European, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and I have long since forborne to importune you with America, as if it were a humorous repetition of Johnson’s visit to Scotland. And yet since Thackeray’s adventure, I have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. I was at New York, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. I am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. I hope to see him, if he comes again. New York would interest you, as I am told it did him; you both less and more. The “society” there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of Boston, and a very modest opinion of London. There is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. A new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. All Spanish America discovers that only in the U. States, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to New York. The Southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that Boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. Of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beatitudes, — and Thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. Have you a physician that can? Are you a physician, and will you come? If you will come, cities will go out to meet you.

And now I see I have so much to say to you that I ought to write once a month, and I must begin at this point again incontinently.

Ever yours,
      R.W. Emerson

CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 9 September, 1853

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! You ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. If we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. Alas, I do not find as I grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! I am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together.

I have not quitted Town this year at all; have resisted calls to Scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the Ashburtons are gone to John of Groat’s House, or the Scottish Thule, to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!) — I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year’s locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts settle (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place at all in these months, — with its long clean streets, green parks, and nobody in them, or nobody one has ever seen before. Out of La Trappe, which does not suit a Protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. I might study even but, as I said, there are noises going on; a last desperate spasmodic effort of building, — a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one “spacious room” (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be air ad libitum, light from the sky, and no sound, not even that of the Cremorne Cannons, shall find access to me any more! Such is the prophecy; may the gods grant it! We shall see now in about a month; — then adieu to mortar-tubs to all Eternity: — I endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as I can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if I liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of German inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this, this is here of its own will, and for a purpose! Seriously, I had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but Chelsea, as London generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; a good builder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm I set him to. My notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. Alas, this is not the kind of silence I could have coveted, and could once get, — with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! But one must take such as can be had, — and thank the gods. Even so, my friend. In the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, I hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact I am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circumstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. What a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! Enough, enough; there will be all Eternity to rest in, as Arnauld said: “Why in such a fuss, little sir?”

You “apologize” for sending people to me: O you of little faith! Never dream of such a thing nay, whom did you send? The Cincinnati Lecturer* I had provided for with Owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the Cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the Albemarle Street rooms; — and he never came to hand. As for Miss Bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragically quixotic as her Shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can; — which is far more than she asks of me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul); — but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far.

 * Mr. O.M. Mitchell, the astronomer.

Clough is settled in his Office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. I see little of him hitherto; I did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but I think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. Of America, at least of New England, I can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression, — especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the Earth. More power to his elbow! — Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne superadded), of enormous appetite withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his outer breeding, which is fixed enough, and perfect according to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. A big, fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. Ay de mi! But I must end, I must end. Your Letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. I said to myself: Well, if I live to finish this Frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not I go, in my old days, and see Concord, Yankeeland, and that man again, after all! — Adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always.

 — T. Carlyle

CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 11 March, 1854

My Dear Carlyle, — The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For you, — I have too much constitutional regard and — , not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the maxim which the French stole from our Indians, — and it was worth stealing,— “Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship.” Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp in all men, — most in myself.

And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel Laurence; for I lately looked into Jesuitism, a Latter-Day Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in 1850. And to do this alone. — You must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats — wheat or whale — they like, without criticism.

I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world; — I too, — though I know its meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River, Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. It is very necessary that we should have mothers, — we that read and write, — to keep us from becoming paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think of home the heart is taken out.

Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife’s; and I have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter, — copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about you, and I have not written to him since his return to England. You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach Milwaukee; “the world there was done up in large lots,” as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin. He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails.

Greeley of the New York Tribune is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day, — multitudes of them in these very parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man. “There are no singing birds in the prairie,” I truly heard. All the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land.

One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other shore, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep. My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you.

Faithfully yours,
            R.W. Emerson

CLV. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 8 April, 1854

Dear Emerson, — It was a morning not like any other which lay round it, a morning to be marked white, that one, about a week ago, when your Letter came to me; a word from you yet again, after so long a silence! On the whole, I perceive you will not utterly give up answering me, but will rouse yourself now and then to a word of human brotherhood on my behalf, so long as we both continue in this Planet. And I declare, the Heavens will reward you; and as to me, I will be thankful for what I get, and submissive to delays and to all things: all things are good compared with flat want in that respect. It remains true, and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. That is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me. The solitude, the silence of my poor soul, in the centre of this roaring whirlpool called Universe, is great, always, and sometimes strange and almost awful. I have two million talking bipeds without feathers, close at my elbow, too; and of these it is often hard for me to say whether the so-called “wise” or the almost professedly foolish are the more inexpressibly unproductive to me. “Silence, Silence!” I often say to myself: “Be silent, thou poor fool; and prepare for that Divine Silence which is now not far!” — On the whole, write to me whenever you can; and be not weary of well-doing.

I have had sad things to do and see since I wrote to you: the loss of my dear and good old Mother, which could not be spared me forever, has come more like a kind of total bankruptcy upon me than might have been expected, considering her age and mine. Oh those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true, pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over; and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred; — and the all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay not cruel altogether, let me say: huge, profound, unspeakable, that is the word. — You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before. — Forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be helped. “Paradise is under the shadow of our swords,” said the Emir: “Forward!” —

I make no way in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct German shadows, — who answer nothing but mumblings. And on the whole Fritz himself is not sufficiently divine to me, far from it; and I am getting old, and heavy of heart; — and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent; and “bear my indigence with dignity,” as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically lies THERE; — and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of writing about him; for as to him, he with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere. — Pity me, pity me; I know not on what hand to turn; and have such a Chaos filling all my Earth and Heaven as was seldom seen in British or Foreign Literature! Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature itself, is not growing more venerable to me, but less and ever less: good Heavens, I feel often as if there were no madder set of bladders tumbling on the billows of the general Bedlam at this moment than even the Literary ones, — dear at twopence a gross, I should say, unless one could annihilate them by purchase on those easy terms! But do not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family secret.

I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your American speculations, and wild dashing portraitures of things as they are with you; and recognize well, under your light caricature, the outlines of a right true picture, which has often made me sad and grim in late years. Yes, I consider that the “Battle of Freedom and Slavery” is very far from ended; and that the fate of poor “Freedom” in the quarrel is very questionable indeed! Alas, there is but one Slavery, as I wrote somewhere; and that, I think, is mounting towards a height, which may bring strokes to bear upon it again! Meanwhile, patience; for us there is nothing else appointed. — Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called “pictures” at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and don’t loiter! —

Miss Bacon has fled away to St. Alban’s (the Great Bacon’s place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all evidence from Museums or Archives; I have not had an answer from her since before Christmas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady: I sometimes silently wish she were safe home again; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured. Adieu, my Friend; I must stop short here. Write soon, if you have any charity. Good be with you ever.

 — T. Carlyle

CLVI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 17 April, 1855

My Dear Friend, — On this delicious spring day, I will obey the beautiful voices of the winds, long disobeyed, and address you; nor cloud the hour by looking at the letters in my drawer to know if a twelvemonth has been allowed to elapse since this tardy writing was due. Mr. Everett sent me one day a letter he had received from you, containing a kind message to me, which gave me pleasure and pain. I returned the letter with thanks, and with promises I would sin no more. Instantly, I was whisked, by “the stormy wing of Fate,” out of my chain, and whirled, like a dry leaf, through the State of New York.

Now at home again, I read English Newspapers, with all the world, and claim an imaginary privilege over my compatriots, that I revolve therein my friend’s large part. Ward said to me yesterday, that Carlyle’s star was daily rising. For C. had said years ago, when all men thought him mad, that which the rest of mortals, including the Times Newspaper, have at last got near enough to see with eyes, and therefore to believe. And one day, in Philadelphia, you should have heard the wise young Philip Randolph defend you against objections of mine. But when I have such testimony, I say to myself, the high-seeing austerely exigent friend whom I elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. Yet I have not changed. I have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the Genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. And I see well what a piece of Providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo Soprano to balance the roar of the Orchestra. The solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows. — And have I not put him into my Chapter of “English Spiritual Tendencies,” with all thankfulness to the Eternal Creator, — though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk?

‘T is fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. We shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. I follow, I find, the fortunes of my Country, in my privatest ways. An American is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on Saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. We admire the [Greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. No leisure except for the strong, the nimble have none. — I ought to tell you what I do, or I ought to have to tell you what I have done. But what can I? the same concession to the levity of the times, the noise of America comes again. I have even run on wrong topics for my parsimonious Muse, and waste my time from my true studies. England I see as a roaring volcano of Fate, which threatens to roast or smother the poor literary Plinys that come too near for mere purpose of reporting.

I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Antony Wood; — which, and the like of which, I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. Yet this is measuring after appearance, measuring on hours and days; the true measure is quite other, for life takes its color and quality not from the days, but the dawns. The lucid intervals are like drowning men’s moments, equivalent to the foregoing years. Besides, Nature uses us. We live but little for ourselves, a good deal for our children, and strangers. Each man is one more lump of clay to hold the world together. It is in the power of the Spirit meantime to make him rich reprisals, — which he confides will somewhere be done. — Ah, my friend, you have better things to send me word of, than these musings of indolence. Is Frederic recreated? Is Frederic the Great?

Forget my short-comings and write to me. Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. I have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success! Kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother.

Yours faithfully,
             R.W. Emerson

CLVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 18 May, 1855

Dear Emerson, — Last Sunday, Clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of Letters you were grown; when, next morning, your Letter itself made its appearance. Thanks, thanks. You know not in the least, I perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your Letters are to me. How you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of Adam who, I felt, completely understood what I was saying; and answered with a truly human voice, — inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one’s soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the “Silences,” which is of a very abstruse nature! — Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! As the beneficent Presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and I will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all.

This last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time. I did not go to the Country at all in summer or winter; refused even my Christmas at The Grange with the Ashburtons, — it was too sad an anniversary for me; — I have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet must be done. These are truly the terms. I never had such a business in my life before. Frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern Muses as given hitherto. No man of genius ever saw him with eyes, except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time. And the wretched Books have no indexes, no precision of detail; and I am far away from Berlin and the seat of information; — and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days; and (in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if I can before I die. This of obstinacy is the one quality I still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will complain no more at present. General Washington gained the freedom of America — chiefly by this respectable quality I talk of; nor can a history of Frederick be written, in Chelsea in the year 1855, except as against hope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner.

We are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me! “Balaklava,” I can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the English language henceforth: it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in English life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all a Balaklava these many years. A Balaklava now yielding, under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs, — towards the bottomless Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one. Altum Silentium, what else can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on, without any general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff. Ach Gott! Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business? We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only housebreaker qualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones, or go to the Devil); and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued a thief in all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling a General as Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri, — we have got into a very strange problem indeed! — But there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. They have not done yet, I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating often), — and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again. Pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls! — Before my paper quite end, I must in my own name, and that of a select company of others, inquire rigorously of R.W.E. why he does not give us that little Book on England he has promised so long? I am very serious in saying, I myself want much to see it; — and that I can see no reason why we all should not, without delay. Bring it out, I say, and print it, tale quale. You will never get it in the least like what you wish it, clearly no! But I venture to warrant, it is good enough, — far too good for the readers that are to get it. Such a pack of blockheads, and disloyal and bewildered unfortunates who know not their right hand from their left, as fill me with astonishment, and are more and more forfeiting all respect from me. Publish the Book, I say; let us have it and so have done! Adieu, my dear friend, for this time. I had a thousand things more to write, but have wasted my sheet, and must end. I will take another before long, whatever you do. In my lonely thoughts you are never long absent: Valete all of you at Concord!

 — T. Carlyle

CLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 6 May, 1856

Dear Carlyle, — There is no escape from the forces of time and life, and we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys, landlords, and tenants. But the planes and platforms on which all stand remain the same, and we are ever expecting the descent of the heavens, which is to put us into familiarity with the first named. When I ceased to write to you for a long time, I said to myself, — If anything really good should happen here, — any stroke of good sense or virtue in our politics, or of great sense in a book, — I will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but I will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. Thank me for my resolution, and for keeping it through the long night. — One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American, — which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again, I shall. It is called Leaves of Grass, — was written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer’s inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it.

By tomorrow’s steamer goes Mrs. — to Liverpool, and to Switzerland and Germany, by the advice of physicians, and I cannot let her go without praying you to drop your pen, and shut up German history for an hour, and extend your walk to her chambers, wherever they may be. There’s a piece of republicanism for you to see and hear! That person was, ten or fifteen years ago, the loveliest of women, and her speech and manners may still give you some report of the same. She has always lived with good people, and in her position is a centre of what is called good society, wherein her large heart makes a certain glory and refinement. She is one of nature’s ladies, and when I hear her tell I know not what stories of her friends, or her children, or her pensioners, I find a pathetic eloquence which I know not where to match. But I suppose you shall never hear it. Every American is a little displaced in London, and, no doubt, her company has grown to her. Her husband is a banker connected in business with your — , and is a man of elegant genius and tastes, and his house is a resort for fine people. Thorwaldsen distinguished Mrs. — in Rome, formerly, by his attentions. Powers the sculptor made an admirable bust of her; Clough and Thackeray will tell you of her. Jenny Lind, like the rest, was captivated by her, and was married at her house. Is not Henry James in London? he knows her well. If Tennyson comes to London, whilst she is there, he should see her for his “Lays of Good Women.” Now please to read these things to the wise and kind ears of Jane Carlyle, and ask her if I have done wrong in giving my friend a letter to her? I could not ask more than that each of those ladies might appear to the other what each has appeared to me.

I saw Thackeray, in the winter, and he said he would come and see me here, in April or May; but he is still, I believe, in the South and West. Do not believe me for my reticency less hungry for letters. I grieve at the want and loss, and am about writing again, that I may hear from you.

Ever affectionately yours,
                    R.W. Emerson

CLIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 20 July, 1856

Dear Emerson; — Welcome was your Letter to me, after the long interval; as welcome as any human Letter could now well be. These many months and years I have been sunk in what disastrous vortexes of foreign wreck you know, till I am fallen sick and almost broken-hearted, and my life (if it were not this one interest, of doing a problem which I see to be impossible, and of smallish value if found doable!) is burdensome and without meaning to me. It is so rarely I hear the voice of a magnanimous Brother Man addressing any word to me: ninety-nine hundredths of the Letters I get are impertinent clutchings of me by the button, concerning which the one business is, How to get handsomely loose again; What to say that shall soonest end the intrusion, — if saying Nothing will not be the best way. Which last I often in my sorrow have recourse to, at what ever known risks. “We must pay our tribute to Time”: ah yes, yes; — and yet I will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a potential Letter coming out of New England for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb. — The best is, I am about going into Scotland, in two days, into deep solitude, for a couple of months beside the Solway sea: I absolutely need to have the dust blown out of me, and my mad nerves rested (there is nothing else quite gone wrong): this unblest Life of Frederick is now actually to get along into the Printer’s hand; — a good Book being impossible upon it, there shall a bad one be done, and one’s poor existence rid of it: — for which great object two months of voluntary torpor are considered the fair preliminary. In another year’s time, (if the Fates allow me to live,) I expect to have got a great deal of rubbish swept into chaos again. Unlucky it should ever have been dug up, much of it! —

Your Mrs. — should have had our best welcome, for the sake of him who sent her, had there been nothing more: but the Lady never showed face at all; nor could I for a long time get any trace — and then it was a most faint and distant one as if by double reflex — of her whereabout: too distant, too difficult for me, who do not make a call once in the six months lately. I did mean to go in quest (never had an address); but had not yet rallied for the Enterprise, when Mrs. — herself wrote that she had been unwell, that she was going directly for Paris, and would see us on her return. So be it: — pray only I may not be absent next! I have not seen or distinctly heard of Miss Bacon for a year and half past: I often ask myself, what has become of that poor Lady, and wish I knew of her being safe among her friends again. I have even lost the address (which at any rate was probably not a lasting one); perhaps I could find it by the eye, — but it is five miles away; and my non-plus-ultra for years past is not above half that distance. Heigho!

My time is all up and more; and Chaos come again is lying round me, in the shape of “packing,” in a thousand shapes! — Browning is coming tonight to take leave. Do you know Browning at all? He is abstruse, but worth knowing. — And what of the Discourse on England by a certain man? Shame! We always hear of it again as “out”; and it continues obstinately in. Adieu, my friend.

Ever yours,
        T. Carlyle

CLX. Carlyle to Emerson

The Gill, Cummertrees, Annan, N.B. 28 August, 1856

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter alighted here yesterday;* like a winged Mercury, bringing “airs from Heaven” (in a sense) along with his news. I understand very well your indisposition to write; we must conform to it, as to the law of Chronos (oldest of the gods); but I will murmur always, “It is such a pity as of almost no other man!” — You are citizen of a “Republic,” and perhaps fancy yourself republican in an eminent degree: nevertheless I have remarked there is no man of whom I am so certain always to get something kingly: — and whenever your huge inarticulate America gets settled into kingdoms, of the New Model, fit for these Ages which are all upon the Moult just now, and dreadfully like going to the Devil in the interim, — then will America, and all nations through her, owe the man Emerson a debt, far greater than either they or he are in the least aware of at present! That I consider (for myself) to be an ascertained fact. For which I myself at least am thankful and have long been.

 * It is missing now.

It pleases me much to know that this English [book], so long twinkling in our expectations and always drawn back again, is at last verily to appear: I wish I could get hold of my copy: there is no Book that would suit me better just now. But we must wait for four weeks till we get back to Chelsea, — unless I call find some trusty hand to extract it from the rubbish that will have accumulated there, and forward it by post. You speak as if there were something dreadful said of my own sacred self in that Book: Courage, my Friend, it will be a most miraculous occurrence to meet with anything said by you that does me ill; whether the immediate taste of it be sweet or bitter, I will take it with gratitude, you may depend, — nay even with pleasure, what perhaps is still more incredible. But an old man deluged for half a century with the brutally nonsensical vocables of his fellow-creatures (which he grows to regard soon as rain, “rain of frogs” or the like, and lifts his umbrella against with indifference), — such an old gentleman, I assure you, is grateful for a word that he can recognize perennial sense in; as in this case is his sure hope. And so be the little Book thrice welcome; and let all England understand (as some choice portion of England will) that there has not been a man talking about us these very many years whose words are worth the least attention in comparison.

“Post passing!” I must end, in mid-course; so much still untouched upon. Thanks for Sampson & Co., and let them go their course upon me. If I can see Mrs. — about the end of September or after, I shall be right glad: — but I fear she will have fled before that? —

I am here in my native Country, riding, seabathing, living on country diet, — uttering no word, — now into the fifth week; have had such a “retreat” as no La Trappe hardly could have offered me. A “retreat” without cilices, thistle-mattresses; and with silent devotions (if any) instead of blockhead spoken ones to the Virgin and others! There is still an Excursion to the Highlands ahead, which cannot be avoided; — then home again to peine forte et dure. Good be with you always, dear friend.

 — T. Carlyle

CLXI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 2 December, 1856

Dear Emerson, — I am really grieved to have hurt the feelings of Mr. Phillips;* a gentleman to whom I, on my side, had no feelings but those of respect and good will! I pray you smooth him down again, by all wise methods, into at least good-natured indifference to me. He may depend upon it I could not mean to irritate him; there lay no gain for me in that! Nor is there anything of business left now between us. It is doubly and trebly evident those Stereotype Plates are not to him worth their prime cost here, still less, their prime cost plus any vestige of definite motive for me to concern myself in them: — whereupon the Project falls on its face, and vanishes forever, with apologies all round. For as to that other method, that is a game I never thought, and never should think of playing at! You may also tell him this little Biographical fact, if you think it will any way help. Some ten or more years ago, I made a similar Bargain with a New York House (known to you, and now I believe extinct): “10” or something “percent,” of selling price on the Copies Printed, was to be my return — not for four or five hundred pounds money laid out, but for various things I did, which gratis would by no means have been done; in fine, it was their own Offer, made and accepted in due form; “10 percent on the copies printed.”

 * This refers to a proposed arrangement, which fell through, for the publication in America by Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, of Boston, of a complete edition of Carlyle’s works, to be printed from the stereotype plates of the English edition then in course of issue by Messrs. Chapman and Hall.

And how many were “printed,” thinks Mr. Phillips? I saw one set; dreadfully ugly Books, errors in every page; — and to this hour I have never heard of any other! The amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy “printed,” the ugly one sent to myself, which I instantly despatched again somewhither! On second thought perhaps you had better not tell Mr. Phillips this story, at least not in this way. His integrity I would not even question by insinuation, nor need I, at the point where we now are. I perceive he sees in extraordinary brilliancy of illumination his own side of the bargain; and thinks me ignorant of several things which I am well enough informed about. In brief, make a perfect peace between us, O friend, and man of peace; and let the wampums be all wrapped up, and especially the tomahawks entirely buried, and the thing end forever! To you also I owe apologies; but not to you do I pay them, knowing from of old what you are to me. Enough, enough!

I got your Book by post in the Highlands; and had such a day over it as falls rarely to my lot! Not for seven years and more have I got hold of such a Book; — Book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things, in the heart of him. Such Books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century. In fact I believe it to be worth all the Books ever written by New England upon Old. Franklin might have written such a thing (in his own way); no other since! We do very well with it here, and the wise part of us best. That Chapter on the Church is inimitable; “the Bishop asking a troublesome gentleman to take wine,” — you should see the kind of grin it awakens here on our best kind of faces. Excellent the manner of that, and the matter too dreadfully true in every part. I do not much seize your idea in regard to “Literature,” though I do details of it, and will try again. Glad of that too, even in its half state; not “sorry” at any part of it, — you Sceptic! On the whole, write again, and ever again at greater length: there lies your only fault to me. And yet I know, that also is a right noble one, and rare in our day.

O my friend, save always for me some corner in your memory; I am very lonely in these months and years, — sunk to the centre of the Earth, like to be throttled by the Pythons and Mudgods in my old days; — but shall get out again, too; and be a better boy! No “hurry” equals mine, and it is in permanence.

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

CLXII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 17 May, 1858

My Dear Carlyle, — I see no way for you to avoid the Americans but to come to America. For, first or last, we are all embarking, and all steering straight to your door. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Longworth of Cincinnati are going abroad on their travels. Possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. Their father, Nicholas Longworth, is one of the founders of the city of Cincinnati, a bigger town than Boston, where he is a huge land lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. And his family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in the Ohio Valley, as people who have well used their great wealth. His chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement of German planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to the general benefit. His son Joseph is a well-bred gentleman of literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely hospitable. His wife is a very attractive and excellent woman, and they are good friends of mine. It seems I have at some former time told her that, when she went to England, she should see you. And they are going abroad, soon, for the first time. If you are in London, you must be seen of them.

But I hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward. Please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong. Tell me what is become of Frederic, for whose appearance I have watched every week for months? I am better ready for him, since one or two books about Voltaire, Maupertuis, and company, fell in my way.

Yet that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a liber veritatis, a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men. All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is. And I say this to you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers. Every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown. The variations to be allowed for in the surveyor’s compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book. And a friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions, survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony, and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe touching the problems of man and fate and the Cause of causes, — a friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more comely and profitable than anything I have read of love. Such a dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial panoramic styles.

So, if ever I hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the perpendicular, I shall hasten to believe you are shearing your prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the citadel, and I may come in the first steamer to drop in of evenings and hear the central monosyllables.

Be good now again, and send me quickly — though it be the shortest autograph certificate of….*

 ——  —— * The end of this letter is lost. ——  ——

CLXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 2 June, 1858

Dear Emerson, — Glad indeed I am to hear of you on any terms, on any subject. For the last eighteen months I have pretty much ceased all human correspondence, — writing no Note that was not in a sense wrung from me; my one society the Nightmares (Prussian and other) all that while: — but often and often the image of you, and the thoughts of old days between us, has risen sad upon me; and I have waited to get loose from the Nightmares to appeal to you again, — to edacious Time and you. Most likely in a couple of weeks you would have heard from me again at any rate. — Your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time. Nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score. — If only these Cincinnati Patricians can find me here when they come? For I am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native Scotland probably) so soon as I can shake the final tag rags of Printer people off me;— “surely within three weeks now!” I say to myself. But I shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will stand to her point, I hope.

That book on Friedrich of Prussia — first half of it, two swoln unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his Father, &c., and leave him at his accession — is just getting out of my hands. One packet more of Proofs, and I have done with it, — thanks to all the gods! No job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out for me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad negative one, “Shall we be beaten in our old days, then?” — But it has thoroughly humbled me, — trampled me down into the mud, there to wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of Mankind, German, English, French, and other, for all have borne a hand in these sad centuries; — and here I emerge at last, not killed, but almost as good. Seek not to look at the Book, — nay in fact it is “not to be published till September” (so the man of affairs settles with me yesterday, “owing to the political &c., to the season,” &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days I should be utterly out of it, — not to hear of it again till the Day of Judgment, and if possible not even then! In fact it is a bad book, poor, misshapen, feeble, nearly worthless (thanks to past generations and to me); and my one excuse is, I could not make it better, all the world having played such a game with it. Well, well! — How true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras! Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much. And in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write, — unless sheer Fate force him to do it; — and then he ought (if not of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. That is deliberately my opinion, — or far nearer it than you will believe.

Once or twice I caught some tone of you in some American Magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the only thing that is speech at all among my fellow-creatures in this time. For the years that remain, I suppose we must continue to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind: what can we do, at this late stage? But in the real “Model Republic,” it would have been different with two good boys of this kind! —

Though shattered and trampled down to an immense degree, I do not think any bones are broken yet, — though age truly is here, and you may engage your berth in the steamer whenever you like. In a few months I expect to be sensibly improved; but my poor Wife suffers sadly the last two winters; and I am much distressed by that item of our affairs. Adieu, dear Emerson: I have lost many things; let me not lose you till I must in some way!

Yours ever,
        T. Carlyle

P.S. If you read the Newspapers (which I carefully abstain from doing) they will babble to you about Dickens’s “Separation from Wife,” &c., &c.; fact of Separation I believe is true; but all the rest is mere lies and nonsense. No crime or misdemeanor specifiable on either side; unhappy together, these good many years past, and they at length end it. — Sulzer said, “Men are by nature good.” “Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Er kennt nicht diese verdammte Race,” ejaculated Fritz, at hearing such an axiom.

CLXIII.* Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 9 April, 1859

Dear Emerson, — Long months ago there was sent off for you a copy of Friedrich of Prussia, two big red volumes (for which Chapman the Publisher had found some “safe, swift” vehicle); and now I have reason to fear they are still loitering somewhere, or at least have long loitered sorrow on them! This is to say: If you have not yet got them, address a line to “Saml. F. Flower, Esq, Librarian of Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.” (forty miles from you, they say), and that will at once bring them. In the Devil’s name! I never in my life was so near choked; swimming in this mother of Dead Dogs, and a long spell of it still ahead! I profoundly pity myself (if no one else does). You shall hear of me again if I survive, — but really that is getting beyond a joke with me, and I ought to hold my peace (even to you), and swim what I can. Your little touch of Human Speech on Burns’* was charming; had got into the papers here (and been clipt out by me) before your copy came, and has gone far and wide since. Newberg was to give it me in German, from the Allgemeine Zeitung, but lost the leaf. Adieu, my Friend; very dear to me, tho’ dumb.

 — T. Carlyle (in such haste as seldom was).**

* Emerson’s fine speech was made at the celebration of the Burns
Centenary, Boston, January 25, 1859. See his Miscellanies
(Works, vol. xi.), p. 363.

** The preceding letter was discovered in 1893, in a little package of letters put aside by Mr. Emerson and marked “Autographs.”

CLXIV. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 1 May, 1859

Dear Carlyle, — Some three weeks ago came to me a note from Mr. Haven of Worcester, announcing the arrival there of “King Friedrich,” and, after a fortnight, the good book came to my door. A week later, your letter arrived. I was heartily glad to get the crimson Book itself. I had looked for it with the first ships. As it came not, I had made up my mind to that hap also. It was quite fair: I had disentitled myself. He, the true friend, had every right to punish me for my sluggish contumacy, — backsliding, too, after penitence. So I read with resignation our blue American reprint, and I enclose to you a leaf from my journal at the time, which leaf I read afterwards in one of my lectures at the Music Hall in Boston. But the book came from the man himself. He did not punish me. He is loyal, but royal as well, and, I have always noted, has a whim for dealing en grand monarque. The book came, with its irresistible inscription, so that I am all tenderness and all but tears. The book too is sovereignly written. I think you the true inventor of the stereoscope, as having exhibited that art in style, long before we had heard of it in drawing.

 ——  — * This letter and the Extract from the Diary are printed from a copy of the original supplied to me by the kindness of Mr. Alexander Ireland, who first printed a portion of the letter in his “Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Biographical Sketch,” London, 1882. One or two words missing in the copy are inserted from the rough draft, which, as usual, varies in minor points from the letter as sent. ——  ——

The letter came also. Every child of mine knows from far that handwriting, and brings it home with speed. I read without alarm the pathetical hints of your sad plight in the German labyrinth. I know too well what invitations and assurance brought you in there, to fear any lack of guides to bring you out. More presence of mind and easy change from the microscopic to the telescopic view does not exist. I await peacefully your issue from your pretended afflictions.

What to tell you of my coop and byre? Ah! you are a very poor fellow, and must be left with your glory. You hug yourself on missing the illusion of children, and must be pitied as having one glittering toy the less. I am a victim all my days to certain graces of form and behavior, and can never come into equilibrium. Now I am fooled by my own young people, and grow old contented. The heedless children suddenly take the keenest hold on life, and foolish papas cling to the world on their account, as never on their own. Out of sympathy, we make believe to value the prizes of their ambition and hope. My, two girls, pupils once or now of Agassiz, are good, healthy, apprehensive, decided young people, who love life. My boy divides his time between Cicero and cricket, knows his boat, the birds, and Walter Scott — verse and prose, through and through, — and will go to College next year. Sam Ward and I tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the new comers a marked improvement on their parents. There, I flatter myself, I see some emerging of our people from the prison of their politics. The insolvency of slavery shows and stares, and we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black-vomit extirpated by mere dying and planting.

I am so glad to find myself speaking once more to you, that I mean to persist in the practice. Be as glad as you have been. You and I shall not know each other on this platform as long as we have known. A correspondence even of twenty-five years should not be disused unless through some fatal event. Life is too short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow such sacrifices. Eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest, — and I cannot spare what on noble terms is offered me.

With congratulations to Jane Carlyle on the grandeur of the Book,

Yours affectionately,
                     R.W. Emerson

Extract From Diary*

Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a History of Frederick, infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written, — a book that one would think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to England, in acknowledgment of this donation, — a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before; — the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective. With its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modeled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times.

 * In the first edition, this extract was printed from the original Diary; it is now printed according to the copy sent abroad. ——  ——

And this book makes no noise; I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas has been instructed to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration. But the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these.

CLXV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 16 April, 1860

My Dear Carlyle, — Can booksellers break the seal which the gods do not, and put me in communication again with the loyalest of men? On the ground of Mr. Wight’s honest proposal to give you a benefit from his edition,* I, though unwilling, allowed him to copy the Daguerre of your head. The publishers ask also some expression of your good will to their work….

 ——  —— * Mr. O.W. Wight of New York, an upright “able editor,” who, had just made arrangements for the publication of a very satisfactory edition of Carlyle’s Miscellaneous Essays. ——  ——

I commend you to the gods who love and uphold you, and who do not like to make their great gifts vain, but teach us that the best life-insurance is a great task. I hold you to be one of those to whom all is permitted, and who carry the laws in their hand. Continue to be good to your old friends. ‘T is no matter whether they write to you or not. If not, they save your time. When Friedrich is once despatched to gods and men, there was once some talk that you should come to America! You shall have an ovation such, and on such sincerity, as none have had.

Ever affectionately yours,
                              R.W. Emerson

I do not know Mr. Wight, but he sends his open letter, which I fear is already old, for me to write in: and I will not keep it, lest it lose another steamer.

CLXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 30 April, 1860

Dear Emerson, — It is a special favor of Heaven to me that I hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word de Profundis. It is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this Stygian Abyss of a Friedrich (should I ever get through it alive) that I shall then begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! For I feel always, what I have some times written, that there is (in a sense) but one completely human voice to me in the world; and that you are it, and have been, — thanks to you, whether you speak or not! Let me say also, while I am at it, that the few words you sent me about those first Two volumes are present with me in the far more frightful darknesses of these last Two; and indeed are often almost my one encouragement. That is a fact, and not exaggerated, though you think it is. I read some criticisms of my wretched Book, and hundreds of others I in the gross refused to read; they were in praise, they were in blame; but not one of them looked into the eyes of the object, and in genuine human fashion responded to its human strivings, and recognized it, — completely right, though with generous exaggeration! That was well done, I can tell you: a human voice, far out in the waste deeps, among the inarticulate sea-krakens and obscene monsters, loud-roaring, inexpressibly ugly, dooming you as if to eternal solitude by way of wages,— “hath exceeding much refreshment in it,” as my friend Oliver used to say.

Having not one spare moment at present, I will answer to you only the whole contents of that letter; you in your charity will convey to Mr. Wight what portion belongs to him. Wight, if you have a chance of him, is worth knowing; a genuine bit of metal, too thin and ringing for my tastes (hammered, in fact, upon the Yankee anvils), but recognizably of steel and with a keen fire-edge. Pray signify to him that he has done a thing agreeable to me, and that it will be pleasant if I find it will not hurt him. Profit to me out of it, except to keep his own soul clear and sound (to his own sense, as it always will be to mine), is perfectly indifferent; and on the whole I thank him heartily for showing me a chivalrous human brother, instead of the usual vulturous, malodorous, and much avoidable phenomenon, in Transatlantic Bibliopoly! This is accurately true; and so far as his publisher and he can extract encouragement from this, in the face of vested interests which I cannot judge of, it is theirs without reserve….

Adieu, my friend; I have not written so much in the Letter way, not, I think, since you last heard of me. In my despair it often seems as if I should never write more; but be sunk here, and perish miserably in the most undoable, least worthy, most disgusting and heart breaking of all the labors I ever had. But perhaps also not, not quite. In which case —

Yours ever truly at any rate,
                        T. Carlyle

No time to re-read. I suppose you can decipher.

CLXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 29 January, 1861

Dear Emerson, — The sight of my hand-writing will, I know, be welcome again. Though I literally do not write the smallest Note once in a month, or converse with anything but Prussian Nightmares of a hideous [nature], and with my Horse (who is human in comparison), and with my poor Wife (who is altogether human, and heroically cheerful to me, in her poor weak state), — I must use the five minutes, which have fallen to me today, in acknowledgment, due by all laws terrestrial and celestial, of the last Book* that has come from you.

 ——  —— * “The Conduct of Life.” ——  ——

I read it a great while ago, mostly in sheets, and again read it in the finely printed form, — I can tell you, if you do not already guess, with a satisfaction given me by the Books of no other living mortal. I predicted to your English Bookseller a great sale even, reckoning it the best of all your Books. What the sale was or is I nowhere learned; but the basis of my prophecy remains like the rocks, and will remain. Indeed, except from my Brother John, I have heard no criticism that had much rationality, — some of them incredibly irrational (if that matter had not altogether become a barking of dogs among us); — but I always believe there are in the mute state a great number of thinking English souls, who can recognize a Thinker and a Sayer, of perennially human type and welcome him as the rarest of miracles, in “such a spread of knowledge” as there now is: — one English soul of that kind there indubitably is; and I certify hereby, notarially if you like, that such is emphatically his view of the matter. You have grown older, more pungent, piercing; — I never read from you before such lightning-gleams of meaning as are to be found here. The finale of all, that of “Illusions” falling on us like snow-showers, but again of “the gods sitting steadfast on their thrones” all the while, — what a Fiat Lux is there, into the deeps of a philosophy, which the vulgar has not, which hardly three men living have, yet dreamt of! Well done, I say; and so let that matter rest.

I am still twelve months or so from the end of my Task; very uncertain often whether I can, even at this snail’s pace, hold out so long. In my life I was never worn nearly so low, and seem to get weaker monthly. Courage! If I do get through, you shall hear of me, again.

Yours forever,
         T. Carlyle

CLXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 16 April, 1861

My Dear Carlyle, — …I have to thank you for the cordial note which brought me joy, many weeks ago. It was noble and welcome in all but its boding account of yourself and your task. But I have had experience of your labors, and these deplorations I have long since learned to distrust. We have settled it in America, as I doubt not it is settled in England, that Frederick is a history which a beneficent Providence is not very likely to interrupt. And may every kind and tender influence near you and over you keep the best head in England from all harm.

Affectionately,
         R.W. Emerson

CLXIX. Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 8 December, 1862

My Dear Friend, — Long ago, as soon as swift steamers could bring the new book across the sea, I received the third volume of Friedrich, with your autograph inscription, and read it with joy. Not a word went to the beloved author, for I do not write or think. I would wait perhaps for happier days, as our President Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such. But he waited in vain for his triumph, nor dare I in my heavy months expect bright days. The book was heartily grateful, and square to the author’s imperial scale. You have lighted the glooms, and engineered away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, according to the high Italian rule, and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. First, I read it honestly through for the history; then I pause and speculate on the Muse that inspires, and the friend that reports it. ‘T is sovereignly written, above all literature, dictating to all mortals what they shall accept as fated and final for their salvation. It is Mankind’s Bill of Rights and Duties, the royal proclamation of Intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure, that, hereafter, as heretofore, and now once for all, the World shall be governed by Common Sense and law of Morals, or shall go to ruin.

 * Portions of this and of the following letter of Emerson have been printed by Mr. Alexander Ireland in his “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of his Visits to England,” &c. London, 1882. ——  ——  —

But the manner of it! — the author sitting as Demiurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and bantering them, amused with their good performance, patting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls when they misbehave; and communicating his mind ever in measure, just as much as the young public can understand; hinting the future, when it would be useful; recalling now and then illustrative antecedents of the actor, impressing, the reader that he is in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he descends too on the petty plot of Prussia from higher and cosmical surveys. Better I like the sound sense and the absolute independence of the tone, which may put kings in fear. And, as the reader shares, according to his intelligence, the haughty coup d’oeil of this genius, and shares it with delight, I recommend to all governors, English, French, Austrian, and other, to double their guards, and look carefully to the censorship of the press. I find, as ever in your books, that one man has deserved well of mankind for restoring the Scholar’s profession to its highest use and dignity.* I find also that you are very wilful, and have made a covenant with your eyes that they shall not see anything you do not wish they should. But I was heartily glad to read somewhere that your book was nearly finished in the manuscript, for I could wish you to sit and taste your fame, if that were not contrary to law of Olympus. My joints ache to think of your rugged labor. Now that you have conquered to yourself such a huge kingdom among men, can you not give yourself breath, and chat a little, an Emeritus in the eternal university, and write a gossiping letter to an old American friend or so? Alas, I own that I have no right to say this last, — I who write never.

 ——  —— * As long before as 1843 Emerson wrote in his Diary: “Carlyle in his new book” (Past and Present), “as everywhere, is a continuer of the great line of scholars in the world, of Horace, Varro, Pliny, Erasmus, Scaliger, Milton, and well sustains their office in ample credit and honor.”

Here we read no books. The war is our sole and doleful instructor. All our bright young men go into it, to be misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn, — to hate slavery, teterrima causa. But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. ‘T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to peace at the cost of replacing the South in the status ante bellum, we can, with something more of courage, leave the problem to another score of years, — free labor to fight with the Beast, and see if bales and barrels and baskets cannot find out that they pass more commodiously and surely to their ports through free hands, than through barbarians.

I grieved that the good Clough, the generous, susceptible scholar, should die. I read over his Bothie again, full of the wine of youth at Oxford. I delight in Matthew Arnold’s fine criticism in two little books. Give affectionate remembrances from me to Jane Carlyle, whom— ‘s happiness and accurate reporting restored to me in brightest image.

Always faithfully yours,
                   R.W. Emerson

CLXX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 8 March, 1864

Dear Emerson, — This will be delivered to you by the Hon. Lyulph Stanley, an excellent, intelligent young gentleman whom I have known ever since his infancy, — his father and mother being among my very oldest friends in London; “Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley” (not of Knowesley, but a cadet branch of it), whom perhaps you did not meet while here.

My young Friend is coming to look with his own eyes at your huge and hugely travailing Country; — and I think will agree with you, better than he does with me, in regard to that latest phenomenon. At all events, he regards “Emerson” as intelligent Englishmen all do; and you will please me much by giving him your friendliest reception and furtherance, — which I can certify that he deserves for his own sake, not counting mine at all.

Probably he may deliver you the Vol. IV. of Frederic; he will tell you our news (part of which, what regards my poor Wife, is very bad, though God be thanked not yet the worst); — and, in some six months, he may bring me back some human tidings from Concord, a place which always inhabits my memory, — though it is so dumb latterly!

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CLXXI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 26 September, 1864

Dear Carlyle, — Your friend, young Stanley, brought me your letter now too many days ago. It contained heavy news of your household, — yet such as in these our autumnal days we must await with what firmness we can. I hear with pain that your Wife, whom I have only seen beaming goodness and intelligence, has suffered and suffers so severely. I recall my first visit to your house, when I pronounced you wise and fortunate in relations wherein best men are often neither wise nor fortunate. I had already heard rumors of her serious illness. Send me word, I pray you, that there is better health and hope. For the rest, the Colonna motto would fit your letter, “Though sad, I am strong.”

I had received in July, forwarded by Stanley, on his flight through Boston, the fourth Volume of Friedrich, and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks my only reading: One fact was paramount in all the good I drew from it, that whomsoever many years had used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of your force: — a pure joy to me, who abhor the inroads which time makes on me and on my friends. To live too long is the capital misfortune, and I sometimes think, if we shall not parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our morals some bolder control of the facts. I read once, that Jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which — if he should entertain them — would put him to death: and perhaps we have weapons in our intellectual armory that are to save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the world we live in. But this book will excuse you from any unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness. I found joy and pride in it, and discerned a golden chain of continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me that one good head and great heart remained in England, — immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perversities, nay, wearing these, I can well believe, as a jaunty coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better securing his own peace, and the very ends which the idlers fancy he resists. England’s lease of power is good during his days.

I have in these last years lamented that you had not made the visit to America, which in earlier years you projected or favored. It would have made it impossible that your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind. Ten days’ residence in this country would have made you the organ of the sanity of England and of Europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities and aspirations which struggle up in our Free States, which, as yet, have no organ to others, and are ill and unsteadily articulated here. In our today’s division of Republican and Democrat, it is certain that the American nationality lies in the Republican party (mixed and multiform though that party be); and I hold it not less certain, that, viewing all the nationalities of the world, the battle for Humanity is, at this hour, in America. A few days here would show you the disgusting composition of the Party which within the Union resists the national action. Take from it the wild Irish element, imported in the last twenty-five year’s into this country, and led by Romish Priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength. A man intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side. Ah! how gladly I would enlist you, with your thunderbolt, on our part! How gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England! We want England and Europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency. Are English of this day incapable of a great sentiment? Can they not leave caviling at petty failures, and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men? This war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it; and the foolish terrors, “What shall we do with the negro?” “The entire black population is coming North to be fed,” &c., have strangely ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally and soldier of the Republic, in that climate; now takes the place of two hundred thousand white soldiers; and will be, as the conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns. Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their wishes and perhaps beliefs; and our people, generals, and politicians have carried the like, at first, to the war, until corrected by irresistible experience. I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, — breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. The dismal Malthus, the dismal DeBow, have had their night.

Our Census of 1860, and the War, are poems, which will, in the next age, inspire a genius like your own. I hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, ‘t is wonderful what sublime lessons I have once and again read on the Bulletin-boards in the streets. Everybody has been wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of an Ideal right.

I thank you for sending to me so gracious a gentleman as Mr. Stanley, who interested us in every manner, by his elegance, his accurate information of that we wished to know, and his surprising acquaintance with the camp and military politics on our frontier. I regretted that I could see him so little. He has used his time to the best purpose, and I should gladly have learned all his adventures from so competent a witness. Forgive this long writing, and keep the old kindness which I prize above words. My kindest salutations to the dear invalid!

 — R.W. Emerson

CLXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

Cummertrees, Annan, Scotland, 14 June, 1865

Dear Emerson, — Though my hand is shaking (as you sadly notice) I determine to write you a little Note today. What a severance there has been these many sad years past! — In the first days of February I ended my weary Book; a totally worn-out man, got to shore again after far the ugliest sea he had ever swam in. In April or the end of March, when the book was published, I duly handed out a Copy for Concord and you; it was to be sent by mail; but, as my Publisher (a new Chapman, very unlike the old) discloses to me lately an incredible negligence on such points, it is quite possible the dog may not, for a long while, have put it in the Post-Office (though he faithfully charged me the postage of it, and was paid), and that the poor waif may never yet have reached you! Patience: it will come soon enough, — there are two thick volumes, and they will stand you a great deal of reading; stiff rather than “light.”

Since February last, I have been sauntering about in Devonshire, in Chelsea, hither, thither; idle as a dry bone, in fact, a creature sinking into deeper and deeper collapse, after twelve years of such mulish pulling and pushing; creature now good for nothing seemingly, and much indifferent to being so in permanence, if that be the arrangement come upon by the Powers that made us. Some three or four weeks ago, I came rolling down hither, into this old nook of my Birthland, to see poor old Annandale again with eyes, and the poor remnants of kindred and loved ones still left me there; I was not at first very lucky (lost sleep, &c.); but am now doing better, pretty much got adjusted to my new element, new to me since about six years past, — the longest absence I ever had from it before. My Work was getting desperate at that time; and I silently said to myself, “We won’t return till it is done, or you are done, my man!”

This is my eldest living sister’s house; one of the most rustic Farmhouses in the world, but abounding in all that is needful to me, especially in the truest, silently-active affection, the humble generosity of which is itself medicine and balm. The place is airy, on dry waving knolls cheerfully (with such water as I never drank elsewhere, except at Malvern) all round me are the Mountains, Cheviot and Galloway (three to fifteen miles off), Cumberland and Yorkshire (say forty and fifty, with the Solway brine and sands intervening). I live in total solitude, sauntering moodily in thin checkered woods, galloping about, once daily, by old lanes and roads, oftenest latterly on the wide expanses of Solway shore (when the tide is out!) where I see bright busy Cottages far off, houses over even in Cumberland, and the beautifulest amphitheatre of eternal Hills, — but meet no living creature; and have endless thoughts as loving and as sad and sombre as I like. My youngest Brother (whom on the whole I like best, a rustic man, the express image of my Father in his ways of living and thinking) is within ten miles of me; Brother John “the Doctor” has come down to Dumfries to a sister (twelve miles off), and runs over to me by rail now and then in few minutes. I have Books; but can hardly be troubled with them. Pitiful temporary babble and balderdash, in comparison to what the Silences can say to one. Enough of all that: you perceive me sufficiently at this point of my Pilgrimage, as withdrawn to Hades for the time being; intending a month’s walk there, till the muddy semi-solutions settle into sediment according to what laws they have, and there be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. I have to go deeper into Scotland by and by, perhaps to try sailing, which generally agrees with me; but till the end of September I hope there will be no London farther. My poor Wife, who is again poorly since I left (and has had frightful sufferings, last year especially) will probably join me in this region before I leave it. And see here, This is authentically the way we figure in the eye of the Sun; and something like what your spectacles, could they reach across the Ocean into these nooks, would teach you of us. There are three Photographs which I reckon fairly like; these are properly what I had to send you today, — little thinking that so much surplusage would accumulate about them; to which I now at once put an end. Your friend Conway,* who is a boundless admirer of yours, used to come our way regularly now and then; and we always liked him well. A man of most gentlemanly, ingenious ways; turn of thought always loyal and manly, though tending to be rather winged than solidly ambulatory. He talked of coming to Scotland too; but it seems uncertain whether we shall meet. He is clearly rather a favorite among the London people, — and tries to explain America to them; I know not if with any success. As for me, I have entirely lost count and reckoning of your enormous element, and its enormous affairs and procedures for some time past; and can only wish (which no man more heartily does) that all may issue in as blessed a way as you hope. Fat — (if you know and his fat commonplace at all) amused me much by a thing he had heard of yours in some lecture a year or two ago. “The American Eagle is a mighty bird; but what is he to the American Peacock.” At which all the audience had exploded into laughter. Very good. Adieu, old Friend.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

 * Mr. Moncure D. Conway.

CLXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 7 January, 1866

Dear Carlyle, — Is it too late to send a letter to your door to claim an old right to enter, and to scatter all your convictions that I had passed under the earth? You had not to learn what a sluggish pen mine is. Of course, the sluggishness grows on me, and even such a trumpet at my gate as a letter from you heralding-in noble books, whilst it gives me joy, cannot heal the paralysis. Yet your letter deeply interested me, with the account of your rest so well earned. You had fought your great battle, and might roll in the grass, or ride your pony, or shout to the Cumberland or Scotland echoes, with largest leave of men and gods. My lethargies have not dulled my delight in good books. I read these in the bright days of our new peace, which added a lustre to every genial work. Now first we had a right to read, for the very bookworms were driven out of doors whilst the war lasted. I found in the book no trace of age, which your letter so impressively claimed. In the book, the hand does not shake, the mind is ubiquitous. The treatment is so spontaneous, self-respecting, defiant, — liberties with your hero as if he were your client, or your son, and you were proud of him, and yet can check and chide him, and even put him in the corner when he is not a good boy, freedoms with kings, and reputations, and nations, yes, and with principles too, — that each reader, I suppose, feels complimented by the confidences with which he is honored by this free-tongued, masterful Hermes. — Who knows what the [Greek] will say next? This humor of telling the story in a gale, — bantering, scoffing, at the hero, at the enemy, at the learned reporters, — is a perpetual flattery to the admiring student, — the author abusing the whole world as mad dunces, — all but you and I, reader! Ellery Channing borrowed my Volumes V. and VI., worked slowly through them, — midway came to me for Volumes I., II., III., IV., which he had long already read, and at last returned all with this word, “If you write to Mr. Carlyle, you may say to him, that I have read these books, and they have made it impossible for me to read any other books but his.”

‘T is a good proof of their penetrative force, the influence on the new Stirling, who writes “The Secret of Hegel.” He is quite as much a student of Carlyle to learn treatment, as of Hegel for his matter, and plays the same game on his essence-dividing German, which he has learned of you on Friedrich. I have read a good deal in this book of Stirling’s, and have not done with it.

One or two errata I noticed in the last volumes of Friedrich, though the books are now lent, and I cannot indicate the pages. Fort Pulaski, which is near Savannah, is set down as near Charleston. Charleston, South Carolina, your printer has twice called Charlestown, which is the name of the town in Massachusetts in which Bunker Hill stands. — Bancroft told me that the letters of Montcalm are spurious. We always write and say Ticonderoga.

I am sorry that Jonathan looks so unamiable seen from your island. Yet I have too much respect for the writing profession to complain of it. It is a necessity of rhetoric that there should be shades, and, I suppose, geography and government always determine, even for the greatest wits, where they shall lay their shadows. But I have always ‘the belief that a trip across the sea would have abated your despair of us. The world is laid out here in large lots, and the swing of natural laws is shared by the population, as it is not — or not as much — in your feudal Europe. My countrymen do not content me, but they are susceptible of inspirations. In the war it was humanity that showed itself to advantage, — the leaders were prompted and corrected by the intuitions of the people, they still demanding the more generous and decisive measure, and giving their sons and their estates as we had no example before. In this heat, they had sharper perceptions of policy, of the ways and means and the life of nations, and on every side we read or heard fate-words, in private letters, in railway cars, or in the journals. We were proud of the people and believed they would not go down from this height. But Peace came, and every one ran back into his shop again, and can hardly be won to patriotism more, even to the point of chasing away the thieves that are stealing not only the public gold, but the newly won rights of the slave, and the new muzzles we had contrived to keep the planter from sucking his blood.

Very welcome to me were the photographs, — your own, and Jane Carlyle’s. Hers, now seen here for the first time, was closely scanned, and confirmed the better accounts that had come of her improved health. Your earlier tidings of her had not been encouraging. I recognized still erect the wise, friendly presence first seen at Craigenputtock. Of your own — the hatted head is good, but more can be read in the head leaning on the hand, and the one in a cloak.

At the end of much writing, I have little to tell you of myself. I am a bad subject for autobiography. As I adjourn letters, so I adjourn my best tasks…. My wife joins me in very kind regards to Mrs. Carlyle. Use your old magnanimity to me, and punish my stony ingratitudes by new letters from time to time.

Ever affectionately and gratefully yours,
                                     R.W. Emerson

CLXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 16 May, 1866

My Dear Carlyle, — I have just been shown a private letter from Moncure Conway to one of his friends here, giving some tidings of your sad return to an empty home. We had the first news last week. And so it is. The stroke long threatened has fallen at last, in the mildest form to its victim, and relieved to you by long and repeated reprieves. I must think her fortunate also in this gentle departure, as she had been in her serene and honored career. We would not for ourselves count covetously the descending steps after we have passed the top of the mount, or grudge to spare some of the days of decay. And you will have the peace of knowing her safe, and no longer a victim. I have found myself recalling an old verse which one utters to the parting soul, —

    ”For thou hast passed all chance of human life,
     And not again to thee shall beauty die.”

It is thirty-three years in July, I believe, since I first saw her, and her conversation and faultless manners gave assurance of a good and happy future. As I have not witnessed any decline, I can hardly believe in any, and still recall vividly the youthful wife, and her blithe account of her letters and homages from Goethe, and the details she gave of her intended visit to Weimar, and its disappointment. Her goodness to me and to my friends was ever perfect, and all Americans have agreed in her praise. Elizabeth Hoar remembers her with entire sympathy and regard.

I could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. Your friends, I know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and I can believe that labor — all whose precious secrets you know — will prove a consoler, — though it cannot quite avail, for she was the rest that rewarded labor. It is good that you are strong, and built for endurance. Nor will you shun to consult the awful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. If to any, to you.

I rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at Edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. It was a right manly speech to be so made, and is a voucher of unbroken strength, — and the surroundings, as I learn, were all the happiest, — with no hint of change.

I pray you bear in mind your own counsels. Long years you must still achieve, and, I hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you “join the dim choir of the bards that have been,” until you have written the book I wish and wait for, — the sincerest confessions of your best hours.

My wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy and affection.

Ever yours faithfully,
                   R.W. Emerson

CLXXV. Carlyle to Emerson

Mentone, France, Alpes Maritimes 27 January, 1867

My Dear Emerson, — It is along time since I last wrote to you; and a long distance in space and in fortune, — from the shores of the Solway in summer 1865, to this niche of the Alps and Mediterranean today, after what has befallen me in the interim. A longer interval, I think, and surely by far a sadder, than ever occurred between us before, since we first met in the Scotch moors, some five and thirty years ago. You have written me various Notes, too, and Letters, all good and cheering to me, — almost the only truly human speech I have heard from anybody living; — and still my stony silence could not be broken; not till now, though often looking forward to it, could I resolve on such a thing. You will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart; — and indeed I am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with “Death, Judgment, and Eternity” (dialogue mute on both sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me; and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. But the truth is, I was nearly killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich, — twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras; — nearly killed, and had often thought I should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished! This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther. By the calamity of April last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a home for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment, — as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been quid plura? I should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this.

All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of worship; the only devout time I had had for a great while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die: — but such continues still mainly my employment, — so many hours every forenoon; what I call the “work” of my day; — to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set about writing my own Life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow me; for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the canaille of mankind extant and to come. “Immortal glory,” is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs and Literary Gazettes of our improved Epoch? — I did not leave London, except for fourteen days in August, to a fine and high old Lady-friend’s in Kent; where, riding about the woods and by the sea-beaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, I felt sadder than ever, though a little less miserably so, than in the intrusive babblements of London, which I could not quite lock out of doors. We read, at first, Tennyson’s Idyls, with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of vacancy, — and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson’s English Traits; and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing Heaven that there were still Books for grown-up people too! That truly is a Book all full of thoughts like winged arrows (thanks to the Bowyer from us both): — my Lady-friend’s name is Miss Davenport Bromley; it was at Wooton, in her Grandfather’s House, in Staffordshire, that Rousseau took shelter in 1760; and one hundred and six years later she was reading Emerson to me with a recognition that would have pleased the man, had he seen it.

About that same time my health and humors being evidently so, the Dowager Lady Ashburton (not the high Lady you saw, but a Successor of Mackenzie-Highland type), who wanders mostly about the Continent since her widowhood, for the sake of a child’s health, began pressing and inviting me to spend the blade months of Winter here in her Villa with her; — all friends warmly seconding and urging; by one of whom I was at last snatched off, as if by the hair of the head, (in spite of my violent No, no!) on the eve of Christmas last, and have been here ever since, — really with improved omens. The place is beautiful as a very picture, the climate superlative (today a sun and sky like very June); the hospitality of usage beyond example. It is likely I shall be here another six weeks, or longer. If you please to write me, the address is on the margin; and I will answer. Adieu.

 — T. Carlyle

CLXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 18 November, 1869

Dear Emerson, — It is near three years since I last wrote to you; from Mentone, under the Ligurian Olive and Orange trees, and their sombre foreign shadows, and still more sombre suggestings and promptings; the saddest, probably, of all living men. That you made no answer I know right well means only, “Alas, what can I say to him of consolatory that he does not himself know!” Far from a fault, or perhaps even a mistake on your part; — nor have I felt it otherwise. Sure enough, among the lights that have gone out for me, and are still going, one after one, under the inexorable Decree, in this now dusky and lonely world, I count with frequent regret that our Correspondence (not by absolute hest of Fate) should have fallen extinct, or into such abeyance: but I interpret it as you see; and my love and brotherhood to you remain alive, and will while I myself do. Enough of this. By lucky chance, as you perceive, you are again to get one written Letter from me, and I a reply from you, before the final Silence come. The case is this.

For many years back, a thought, which I used to check again as fond and silly, has been occasionally present to me, — Of testifying my gratitude to New England (New England, acting mainly through one of her Sons called Waldo Emerson), by bequeathing to it my poor Falstaf Regiment, latterly two Falstaf Regiments of Books, those I purchased and used in writing Cromwell, and ditto those on Friedrich the Great. “This could be done,” I often said to myself; “this could perhaps; and this would be a real satisfaction to me. But who then would march through Coventry with such a set!” The extreme insignificance of the Gift, this and nothing else, always gave me pause.

Last Summer, I was lucky enough to meet with your friend C.E. Norton, and renew many old Massachusetts recollections, in free talk with [him]….; to him I spoke of the affair; candidly describing it, especially the above questionable feature of it, so far as I could; and his answer, then, and more deliberately afterwards, was so hopeful, hearty, and decisive, that — in effect it has decided me; and I am this day writing to him that such is the poor fact, and that I need farther instructions on it so soon as you two have taken counsel together.

To say more about the infinitesimally small value of the Books would be superfluous: nay, in truth, many or most of them are not without intrinsic value, one or two are even excellent as Books; and all of them, it may perhaps be said, have a kind of symbolic or biographic value; and testify (a thing not useless) on what slender commissariat stores considerable campaigns, twelve years long or so, may be carried on in this world. Perhaps you already knew of me, what the Cromwell and Friedrich collection might itself intimate, that much buying of Books was never a habit of mine, — far the reverse, even to this day!

Well, my Friend, you will have a meeting with Norton so soon as handy; and let me know what is next to be done. And that, in your official capacity, is all I have to say to you at present.

Unofficially there were much, — much that is mournful, but perhaps also something that is good and blessed, and though the saddest, also the highest, the lovingest and best; as beseems Time’s sunset, now coming nigh. At present I will say only that, in bodily health, I am not to be called Ill, for a man who will be seventy-four next month; nor, on the spiritual side, has anything been laid upon me that is quite beyond my strength. More miserable I have often been; though as solitary, soft of heart, and sad, of course never.

Publisher Chapman, when I question him whether you for certain get your Monthly Volume of what they call “The Library Edition,” assures me that “it is beyond doubt”: — I confess I should still like to be better assured. If all is right, you should, by the time this Letter arrives, be receiving or have received your thirteenth Volume, last of the Miscellanies. Adieu, my Friend.

Ever truly yours,
             T. Carlyle

CLXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 4 January, 1870

Dear Emerson, — A month ago or more I wrote, by the same post, to you and to Norton about those Books for Harvard College; and in late days have been expecting your joint answer. From Norton yesternight I receive what is here copied for your perusal; it has come round by Florence as you see, and given me real pleasure and instruction. From you, who are possibly also away from home, I have yet nothing; but expect now soon to have a few words. There did arrive, one evening lately, your two pretty volumes of Collected Works, a pleasant salutation from you — which set me upon reading again what I thought I knew well before: — but the Letter is still to come.

Norton’s hints are such a complete instruction to me that I see my way straight through the business, and might, by Note of “Bequest” and memorandum for the Barings, finish it in half an hour: nevertheless I will wait for your Letter, and punctually do nothing till your directions too are before me. Pray write, therefore; all is lying ready here. Since you heard last, I have got two Catalogues made out, approximately correct; one is to lie here till the Bequest be executed; the other I thought of sending to you against the day? This is my own invention in regard to the affair since I wrote last. Approve of it, and you shall have your copy by Book-post at once. “Approximately correct”; absolutely I cannot get it to be. But I need not doubt the Pious Purpose will be piously and even sacredly fulfilled; — and your Catalogue will be a kind of evidence that it is. Adieu, dear Emerson, till your Letter come.

Yours ever,
       Thomas Carlyle

CLXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 23 January, 1870*

My Dear Carlyle,— ‘T is a sad apology that I have to offer for delays which no apology can retrieve. I received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned, and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate, and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed, for I only write by spasms, and these ever more rare, — and daemons that have no ears. Meantime the publication day was announced, and the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, invita Minerva.

 * This letter is printed from an imperfect rough draft.

I could not write in my book, and I could not write a letter. Tomorrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs, — which always come when they should not. For one thing — I have just sold a house which I once built opposite my own. But I will leave the bad month, which I hope will not match itself in my lifetime. Only ‘t is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of yours, especially, a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile.

Heartily I delight in your proposed disposition of the books. It has every charm of surprise, and nobleness, and large affection. The act will deeply gratify a multitude of good men, who will see in it your real sympathy with the welfare of the country. I hate that there should be a moment of delay in the completing of your provisions, — and that I of all men should be the cause! Norton’s letter is perfect on his part, and needs no addition, I believe, from me. You had not in your first letter named Cambridge, and I had been meditating that he would probably have divided your attention between Harvard and the Boston Public Library, — now the richest in the country, at first founded by the gifts of Joshua Bates (of London), and since enriched by the city and private donors, Theodore Parker among them. But after conversation with two or three friends, I had decided that Harvard College was the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers and readers in America, and because a College is a seat of sentiment and cosmical relations. The Library is outgrown by other libraries in the Country, counts only 119,000 bound volumes in 1868; the several departments of Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Natural Science in the University having special libraries, that together add some 40,000 more. The College is newly active (with its new President Eliot, a cousin of Norton’s) and expansive in all directions. And the Library will be relieved through subscriptions now being collected among the Alumni with the special purpose of securing to it an adequate fund for annual increase.

I shall then write to Norton at once that I concur with him in the destination of the books to Harvard College, and approve entirely his advices in regard to details. And so soon as you send me the Catalogue I shall, if you permit, communicate your design to President Eliot and the Corporation.

One thing I shall add to the Catalogue now or later (perhaps only by bequest), your own prized gift to me, in 1848, of Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, which I have lately had rebound, and in which every pen and pencil mark of yours is notable.

The stately books of the New Edition have duly come from the unforgetting friend. I have Sartor, Schiller, French Revolution, 3 vols., Miscellanies, Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, — ten volumes in all, excellently printed and dressed, and full of memories and electricity.

I have much to say, but of things not opportune at this moment, and in spite of my long contumacy dare believe that I shall quickly write again my proper letter to my friend, whose every word I watchfully read and remember.

CLXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Melchet Court, Romsey, 14 February, 1870

Dear Emerson, — Three days ago I at last received your Letter; with very great pleasure and thankfulness, as you may suppose. Indeed, it is quite strangely interesting to see face to face my old Emerson again, not a feature of him changed, whom I have known all the best part of my life.

I am very glad, withal, to find that you agree completely with
Norton and myself in regard to that small Harvard matter.

This is not Chelsea, as you perceive, this is a hospitable mansion in Hampshire; but I expect to be in Chelsea within about a week; once there, I shall immediately despatch to you one of the three Catalogues I have, with a more deliberate letter than I at present have the means of writing or dictating.

Yours ever truly,
            T. Carlyle

CLXXX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 24 February, 1870

Dear Emerson, — At length I have got home from those sumptuous tumults (“Melchet Court” is the Dowager Lady Ashburton’s House, whose late Husband, an estimable friend of mine, and half American, you may remember here); and I devote to ending of our small Harvard Business, small enough, but true and kindly, — the first quiet hour I have.

Your Copy of the Catalogue, which accompanies by Book-Post of today, is the correctest I could manage to get done; all the Books mentioned in it I believe to be now here (and indeed, except five or six tiny articles, have seen them all, in one or other of the three rooms where my Books now stand, and where I believe the insignificant trifle of “tinies” to be): all these I can expect will be punctually attended to when the time comes, and proceeded with according to Norton’s scheme and yours; — and if any more “tinies,” which I could not even remember, should turn up (which I hardly think there will), these also will class themselves (as Cromwelliana or Fredericana), and be faith fully sent on with the others. For benefit of my Survivors and Representatives here, I retain an exact Copy of the Catalogue now put into your keeping; so that everything may fall out square between them and you when the Time shall arrive.

I mean to conform in every particular to the plan sketched out by Norton and you, — unless, in your next Letter, you have something other or farther to advise: — and so soon as I hear from you that Harvard accepts my poor widow’s mite of a Bequest, I will proceed to put it down in due form, and so finish this small matter, which for long years has hovered in my thoughts as a thing I should like to do. And so enough for this time.

I meant to write a longish Letter, touching on many other points, — though you see I am reduced to pencil, and “write” with such difficulty (never yet could learn to “dictate,” though my little Niece here is promptitude itself, and is so swift and legible, — useful here as a cheerful rushlight in this now sombre element, sombre, sad, but also beautiful and tenderly solemn more and more, in which she bears me company, good little “Mary”!). But, in bar of all such purposes, Publisher Chapman has come in, with Cromwell Engravings and their hindrances, with money accounts, &c., &c.; and has not even left me a moment of time, were nothing else needed!

Vol. XIV. (Cromwell, I.) ought to be at Concord about as soon as this. In our Newspapers I notice your Book announced, “half of the Essays new,” — which I hope to get quam primum, and illuminate some evenings with, — so as nothing else can, in my present common mood.

Adieu, dear old Friend. I am and remain yours always,

 — T. Carlyle

CLXXXI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 21 March, 1870

My Dear Carlyle, — On receiving your letter and catalogue I wrote out a little history of the benefaction and carried it last Tuesday to President Eliot at Cambridge, who was heartily gratified, and saw everything rightly, and expressed an anxiety (most becoming in my eyes after my odious shortcomings) that there should be no moment of delay on our part. “The Corporation would not meet again for a fortnight: — but he would not wait, — would call a special meeting this week to make the communication to them.” He did so: the meeting was held on Saturday and I have received this (Monday) morning from him enclosed letter and record.

It is very amiable and noble in you to have kept this surprise for us in your older days. Did you mean to show us that you could not be old, but immortally young? and having kept us all murmuring at your satires and sharp homilies, will now melt us with this manly and heart-warming embrace? Nobody could predict and none could better it. And you shall even go your own gait henceforward with a blessing from us all, and a trust exceptional and unique. I do not longer hesitate to talk to such good men as I see of this gift, and it has in every ear a gladdening effect. People like to see character in a gift, and from rare character the gift is more precious. I wish it may be twice blest in continuing to give you the comfort it will give us.

I think I must mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. I doubt not I shall have much to tell you, could I overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as sixty-six (nearly sixty-seven) years enforce. I shall have to prate of my daughters; — Edith Forbes, with her two children at Milton; Ellen Emerson at home, herself a godsend to this house day by day; and my son Edward studying medicine in Boston, — whom I have ever meant and still mean to send that he may see your face when that professional curriculum winds up.

I manage to read a few books and look into more. Herman Grimm sent me lately a good one, Goethe’s Unterhaltungen with Muller, — which set me on Varnhagen and others. My wife sends old regards, and her joy in this occasion.

Yours ever,
       R.W. Emerson

P.S. Mr. Eliot took my rough counting of Volumes as correct. When he sends me back the catalogue, I will make it exact. — I sent you last week a little book by book-post.

CLXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 24 March, 1870

My Dear Emerson, — The day before yesterday, I heard incidentally of an unfortunate Mail Steamer, bound for America, which had lost its screw or some essential part of it; and so had, instead of carrying its Letters forward to America, been drifting about like a helpless log on the shores of Ireland till some three days ago, when its Letters and Passengers were taken out, and actually forwarded, thither. By industrious calculation, it appears probable to us here that my Letter to you may have been tumbling about in that helpless Steamer, instead of getting to Concord; where, if so, said Letter cannot now arrive till the lingering of it have created some astonishment there.

I hastily write this, however, to say that a Letter was duly forwarded a few days after yours [of January 23] arrived, — enclosing the Harvard Catalogue, with all necessary et ceteras; indorsing all your proposals; and signifying that the matter should be authentically completed the instant I should hear from you again. I may add now that the thing is essentially completed, — all signed and put on paper, or all but a word or two, which, for form’s sake, waits the actual arrival of your Letter.

I have never yet received your Book;* and, if it linger only a few days more, mean to provide myself with a copy such as the Sampson and Low people have on sale everywhere.

I had from Norton, the other day, a very kind and friendly Letter.

This is all of essential that I had to say. I write in utmost haste. But am always, dear Emerson,

Yours sincerely,
            T. Carlyle

 ——  —— * “Society and Solitude.” ——  ——

CLXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, 6 April, 1870

Dear Emerson, — The day before yesterday your welcome Letter came to hand, with the welcome news in it; yesterday I put into my poor Document here the few words still needed; locked everything into its still repository (your Letter, President Eliot’s, Norton’s, &c., &c.); and walked out into the sunshine, piously thankful that a poor little whim, which had long lain fondly in my heart, had realized itself with an emphasis I could never hope, and was become (thanks to generous enthusiasm on New England’s part) a beautiful little fact, lying done there, so far as I had to do with it. Truly your account of matters threw a glow of life into my thoughts which is very rare there now; altogether a gratifying little Transaction to me, — and I must add a surprising, for the enthusiasm of good-will is evidently great, and the occasion is almost infinitesimally small! Well, well; it is all finished off and completed, — (you can tell Mr. Eliot, with many thanks from me, that I did introduce the proper style, “President and Fellows,” &c., and have forgotten nothing of what he said, or of what he did); — and so we will say only, Faustum sit, as our last word on the subject; — and to me it will be, for some days yet, under these vernal skies, something that is itself connected with THE SPRING in a still higher sense; a little white and red-lipped bit of Daisy pure and poor, scattered into TIME’s Seedfield, and struggling above ground there, uttering its bit of prophecy withal, among the ox-hoofs and big jungles that are everywhere about and not prophetic of much! —

One thing only I regret, that you have spoken of the affair! For God’s sake don’t; and those kindly people to whom you have,- -swear them to silence for love of me! The poor little Daisykin will get into the Newspapers, and become the nastiest of Cabbages: — silence, silence, I beg of you to the utmost stretch of your power! Or is the case already irremediable? I will hope not. Talk about such things, especially Penny Editor’s talk, is like vile coal-smoke filling your poor little world; silence alone is azure, and has a sky to it. — But, enough now.

The “little Book” never came; and, I doubt, never will: it is a fate that seems to await three fourths of the Books that attempt to reach me by the American Post; owing to some informality in wrapping (I have heard); — it never gave me any notable regret till now. However, I had already bought myself an English copy, rather gaudy little volume (probably intended for the railways, as if it were a Book to be read there), but perfectly printed, ready to be read anywhere by the open eye and earnest mind; — which I read here, accordingly, with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. It seems to me you are all your old self here, and something more. A calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful epic humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but notices only the huge new opulences (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theologies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And then the “style,” the treatment and expression, — yes, it is inimitable, best — Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well; and many will know it ever better by degrees. — Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the “Over-Soul,” the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of friction and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, unfathomable as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me. —

Let me not forget to thank you for that fourth page of your Note; I should say it was almost the most interesting of all. News from yourself at first hand; a momentary glimpse into the actual Household at Concord, face to face, as in years of old! True, I get vague news of you from time to time; but what are these in comparison? — If you will, at the eleventh hour, turn over a new leaf, and write me Letters again, — but I doubt you won’t. And yet were it not worth while, think you? [Greek] — will be here anon. — My kindest regards to your wife. Adieu, my ever-kind Old Friend.

Yours faithfully always,
                    T. Carlyle

CLXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 17 June, 1870

My Dear Carlyle, — Two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or I shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition. You are of the Anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution. Well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of us, by charges of electricity.

 ——  —— * One seems to be missing. ——  ——

Your letter of April came, as ever-more than ever, if possible — full of kindness, and making much of our small doings and writings, and seemed to drive me to instant acknowledgment; but the oppressive engagement of writing and reading eighteen lectures on Philosophy to a class of graduates in the College, and these in six successive weeks, was a task a little more formidable in prospect and in practice than any foregoing one. Of course, it made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, and justice, and held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also.

Well, it is now ended, and has no shining side but this one, that materials are collected and a possibility shown me how a repetition of the course next year — which is appointed — will enable me partly out of these materials, and partly by large rejection of these, and by large addition to them, to construct a fair report of what I have read and thought on the subject. I doubt the experts in Philosophy will not praise my discourses; — but the topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations and experiences with the accepted masters, and also the lessons I have learned from the hidden great. I have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. To great results of thought and morals the steps are not many, and it is not the masters who spin the ostentatious continuity.

I am glad to hear that the last sent book from me arrived safely. You were too tender and generous in your first notice of it, I fear. But with whatever deductions for your partiality, I know well the unique value of Carlyle’s praise. Many things crowd to be said on this little paper. Though I could see no harm in the making known the bequest of books to Cambridge, — no harm, but sincere pleasure, and honor of the donor from all good men, — yet on receipt of your letter touching that, I went back to President Eliot, and told him your opinion on newspapers. He said it was necessarily communicated to the seven persons composing the Corporation, but otherwise he had been very cautious, and it would not go into print.

You are sending me a book, and Chapman’s Homer it is? Are you bound by your Arabian bounty to a largess whenever you think of your friend? And you decry the book too. ‘T-is long since I read it, or in it, but the apotheosis of Homer, in the dedication to Prince Henry, “Thousands of years attending,” &c., is one of my lasting inspirations. The book has not arrived yet, as the letter always travels faster, but shall be watched and received and announced.

But since you are all bounty and care for me, where are the new volumes of the Library Edition of Carlyle? I received duly, as I wrote you in a former letter, nine Volumes, — Sartor; Life of Schiller; five Vols. of Miscellanies; French Revolution; these books oddly addressed to my name, but at Cincinnati, Massachusetts. Whether they went to Ohio, and came back to Boston, I know not. Two volumes came later, duplicates of two already received, and were returned at my request by Fields & Co. with an explanation. But no following volume has come. I write all this because you said in one letter that Mr. Chapman assured you that every month a book was despatched to my address.

But what do I read in our Boston Newspapers twice in the last three days? That “Thomas Carlyle is coming to America,” and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point. Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. Was I not once promised a visit? This house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and dwell in it. My wife and Ellen and Edward E. are thoroughly acquainted with your greatness and your loveliness. And it is but ten days of healthy sea to pass.

So wishes heartily and affectionately,
                                 R.W. Emerson

CLXXXV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 28 September, 1870

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter, dated 15 June, never got to me till about ten days ago; when my little Niece and I returned out of Scotland, and a long, rather empty Visit there! It had missed me here only by two or three days; and my highly infelicitous Selectress of Letters to be forwarded had left it carefully aside as undeserving that honor, — good faithful old Woman, one hopes she is greatly stronger on some sides than in this literary-selective one. Certainly no Letter was forwarded that had the hundredth part of the right to be so; certainly, of all the Letters that came to me, or were left waiting here, this was, in comparison, the one which might not with propriety have been left to lie stranded forever, or to wander on the winds forever! —

One of my first journeys was to Chapman, with vehement rebuke of this inconceivable “Cincinnati-Massachusetts” business. Stupiditas stupiditatum; I never in my life, not even in that unpunctual House, fell in with anything that equaled it. Instant amendment was at once undertaken for, nay it seems had been already in part performed: “Ten volumes, following the nine you already had, were despatched in Field & Co.’s box above two months ago,” so Chapman solemnly said and asseverated to me; so that by this time you ought actually to have in hand nineteen volumes; and the twentieth (first of Friedrich), which came out ten days ago, is to go in Field & Co.’s Box this week, and ought, not many days after the arrival of this Letter, to be in Boston waiting for you there. The Chapman’s Homer (two volumes) had gone with that first Field Packet; and would be handed to you along with the ten volumes which were overdue. All this was solemnly declared to me as on Affidavit; Chapman also took extract of the Massachusetts passage in your Letter, in order to pour it like ice-cold water on the head of his stupid old Chief-Clerk, the instant the poor creature got back from his rustication: alas, I am by no means certain that it will make a new man of him, nor, in fact, that the whole of this amendatory programme will get itself performed to equal satisfaction! But you must write to me at once if it is not so; and done it shall be in spite of human stupidity itself. Note, withal, these things: Chapman sends no Books to America except through Field & Co.; he does not regularly send a Box at the middle of the month; but he does “almost monthly send one Bog”; so that if your monthly Volume do not start from London about the 15th, it is due by the very next Chapman-Field box; and if it at any time don’t come, I beg of you very much to make instant complaint through Field & Co., or what would be still more effectual, direct to myself. My malison on all Blockheadisms and torpid stupidities and infidelities; of which this world is full! —

Your Letter had been anxiously enough waited for, a month before my departure; but we will not mention the delay in presence of what you were engaged with then. Faustum sit; that truly was and will be a Work worth doing your best upon; and I, if alive, can promise you at least one reader that will do his best upon your Work. I myself, often think of the Philosophies precisely in that manner. To say truth, they do not otherwise rise in esteem with me at all, but rather sink. The last thing I read of that kind was a piece by Hegel, in an excellent Translation by Stirling, right well translated, I could see, for every bit of it was intelligible to me; but my feeling at the end of it was, “Good Heavens, I have walked this road before many a good time; but never with a Cannon-ball at each ankle before!” Science also, Science falsely so called, is — But I will not enter upon that with you just now.

The Visit to America, alas, alas, is pure Moonshine. Never had I, in late years, the least shadow of intention to undertake that adventure; and I am quite at a loss to understand how the rumor originated. One Boston Gentleman (a kind of universal Undertaker, or Lion’s Provider of Lecturers I think) informed me that “the Cable” had told him; and I had to remark, “And who the devil told the Cable?” Alas, no, I fear I shall never dare to undertake that big Voyage; which has so much of romance and of reality behind it to me; zu spat, zu spat. I do sometimes talk dreamily of a long Sea-Voyage, and the good the Sea has often done me, — in times when good was still possible. It may have been some vague folly of that kind that originated this rumor; for rumors are like dandelion-seeds; and the Cable I dare say welcomes them all that have a guinea in their pocket.

Thank you for blocking up that Harvard matter; provided it don’t go into the Newspapers, all is right. Thank you a thousand times for that thrice-kind potential welcome, and flinging wide open your doors and your hearts to me at Concord. The gleam of it is like sunshine in a subterranean place. Ah me, Ah me! May God be with you all, dear Emerson.

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle

CLXXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 15 October, 1870

My Dear Carlyle, — I am the ignoblest of all men in my perpetual short-comings to you. There is no example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble challenge. But “the strong hours conquer us,” and I am the victim of miscellany, — miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination.

Already many days before your letter came, Fields sent me a package from you, which he said he had found a little late, because they were covered up in a box of printed sheets of other character, and this treasure was not at first discovered. They are, — Life of Sterling; Latter Day Pamphlets; Past and Present; Heroes; 5 Vols. Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. Unhappily, Vol. II. of Cromwell is wanting, and there is a duplicate of Vol. V. instead of it. Now, two days ago came your letter, and tells me that the good old gods have also inspired you to send me Chapman’s Homer! and that it came — heroes with heroes — in the same enchanted box. I went to Fields yesterday and demanded the book. He ignored all, — even to the books he had already sent me; called Osgood to council, and they agreed that it must be that all these came in a bog of sheets of Dickens from Chapman, which was sent to the Stereotypers at Cambridge; and the box shall be instantly explored. We will see what tomorrow shall find. As to the duplicates, I will say here, that I have received two: first, the above-mentioned Vol. II. of Cromwell; and, second, long before, a second copy of Sartor Resartus, apparently instead of the Vol. I. of the French Revolution, which did not come. I proposed to Fields to send back to Chapman these two duplicates. But he said, “No, it will cost as much as the price of the books.” I shall try to find in New York who represents Chapman and sells these books, and put them to his credit there, in exchange for the volumes I lack. Meantime, my serious thanks for all these treasures go to you, — steadily good to my youth and my age.

Your letter was most welcome, and most in that I thought I read, in what you say of not making the long-promised visit hither, a little willingness to come. Think again, I pray you, of that Ocean Voyage, which is probably the best medicine and restorative which remains to us at your age and mine. Nine or ten days will bring you (and commonly with unexpected comfort and easements on the way) to Boston. Every reading person in America holds you in exceptional regard, and will rejoice in your arrival. They have forgotten your scarlet sins before or during the war. I have long ceased to apologize for or explain your savage sayings about American or other republics or publics, and am willing that anointed men bearing with them authentic charters shall be laws to themselves as Plato willed. Genius is but a large infusion of Deity, and so brings a prerogative all its own. It has a right and duty to affront and amaze men by carrying out its perceptions defiantly, knowing well that time and fate will verify and explain what time and fate have through them said. We must not suggest to Michel Angelo, or Machiavel, or Rabelais, or Voltaire, or John Brown of Osawatomie (a great man), or Carlyle, how they shall suppress their paradoxes and check their huge gait to keep accurate step with the procession on the street sidewalk. They are privileged persons, and may have their own swing for me.

I did not mean to chatter so much, but I wish you would come out hither and read our possibilities now being daily disclosed, and our actualities which are not nothing. I shall like to show you my near neighbors, topographically or practically. A near neighbor and friend, E. Rockwood Hoar, whom you saw in his youth, is now an inestimable citizen in this State, and lately, in President Grant’s Cabinet, Attorney-General of the United States. He lives in this town and carries it in his hand. Another is John M. Forbes, a strictly private citizen, of great executive ability, and noblest affections, a motive power and regulator essential to our City, refusing all office, but impossible to spare; and these are men whom to name the voice breaks and the eye is wet. A multitude of young men are growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty of my youth with the power on which these draw. The Lowell race, again, in our War yielded three or four martyrs so able and tender and true, that James Russell Lowell cannot allude to them in verse or prose but the public is melted anew. Well, all these know you well, have read and will read you, yes, and will prize and use your benefaction to the College; and I believe it would add hope, health, and strength to you to come and see them.

In my much writing I believe I have left the chief things unsaid.
But come! I and my house wait for you.

Affectionately,
            R.W. Emerson

CLXXXVIa. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 10 April, 1871

My Dear Friend, — I fear there is no pardon from you, none from myself, for this immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. Yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! Believe that the American climate is unmanning, or that one American whom you know is severely taxed by Lilliput labors. The last hot summer enfeebled me till my young people coaxed me to go with Edward to the White Hills, and we climbed or were dragged up Agiocochook, in August, and its sleet and snowy air nerved me again for the time. But the booksellers, whom I had long ago urged to reprint Plutarch’s Morals, claimed some forgotten promise, and set me on reading the old patriarch again, and writing a few pages about him, which no doubt cost me as much time and pottering as it would cost you to write a History. Then an “Oration” was due to the New England Society in New York, on the 250th anniversary of the Plymouth Landing, — as I thought myself familiar with the story, and holding also some opinions thereupon. But in the Libraries I found alcoves full of books and documents reckoned essential; and, at New York, after reading for an hour to the great assembly out of my massy manuscript, I refused to print a line until I could revise and complete my papers; — risking, of course, the nonsense of their newspaper reporters. This pill swallowed and forgotten, it was already time for my Second “Course on Philosophy” at Cambridge, — which I had accepted again that I might repair the faults of the last year. But here were eighteen lectures, each to be read sixteen miles away from my house, to go and come, — and the same work and journey twice in each week, — and I have just got through the doleful ordeal.

I have abundance of good readings and some honest writing on the leading topics, — but in haste and confusion they are misplaced and spoiled. I hope the ruin of no young man’s soul will here or hereafter be charged to me as having wasted his time or confounded his reason.

Now I come to the raid of a London bookseller, Hotten, (of whom I believe I never told you,) on my forgotten papers in the old Dials, and other pamphlets here. Conway wrote me that he could not be resisted, — would certainly steal good and bad, — but might be guided in the selection. I replied that the act was odious to me, and I promised to denounce the man and his theft to any friends I might have in England; but if, instead of printing then, he would wait a year, I would make my own selection, with the addition of some later critical papers, and permit the book. Mr. Ireland in Manchester, and Conway in London, took the affair kindly in hand, and Hotten acceded to my change. And that is the next task that threatens my imbecility. But now, ten days ago or less, my friend John M. Forbes has come to me with a proposition to carry me off to California, the Yosemite, the Mammoth trees, and the Pacific, and, after much resistance, I have surrendered for six weeks, and we set out tomorrow. And hence this sheet of confession, — that I may not drag a lengthening chain. Meantime, you have been monthly loading me with good for evil. I have just counted twenty-three volumes of Carlyle’s Library Edition, in order on my shelves, besides two, or perhaps three, which Ellery Channing has borrowed. Add, that the precious Chapman’s Homer came safely, though not till months after you had told me of its departure, and shall be guarded henceforward with joy.

Wednesday, 13, Chicago. — Arrived here and can bring this little sheet to the post-office here. My daughter Edith Forbes, and her husband William H. Forbes, and three other friends, accompany me, and we shall overtake Mr. Forbes senior tomorrow at Burlington, Iowa.

The widow of one of the noblest of our young martyrs in the War, Col. Lowell,* cousin [nephew] of James Russell Lowell, sends me word that she wishes me to give her a note of introduction to you, confiding to me that she has once written a letter to you which procured her the happiest reply from you, and I shall obey her, and you will see her and own her rights. Still continue to be magnanimous to your friend,

 — R.W. Emerson

 * Charles Russell Lowell, to be remembered always with honor in company with his brother James Jackson Lowell and his cousin William Lowell Putnam, — a shining group among the youths who have died for their country.

CLXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 4 June, 1871

Dear Emerson, — Your Letter gave me great pleasure. A gleam of sunshine after a long tract of lowering weather. It is not you that are to blame for this sad gap in our correspondence; it is I, or rather it is my misfortunes, and miserable inabilities, broken resolutions, etc., etc. The truth is, the winter here was very unfriendly to me; broke ruinously into my sleep; and through that into every other department of my businesses, spiritual and temporal; so that from about New-Year’s Day last I have been, in a manner, good for nothing, — nor am yet, though I do again feel as if the beautiful Summer weather might perhaps do something for me. This it was that choked every enterprise; and postponed your Letter, week after week, through so many months. Let us not speak of it farther!

Note, meanwhile, I have no disease about me; nothing but the gradual decay of any poor digestive faculty I latterly had, — or indeed ever had since I was three and twenty years of age. Let us be quiet with it; accept it as a mode of exit, of which always there must be some mode.

I have got done with all my press-correctings, editionings, and paltry bother of that kind: Vol. 30 will embark for you about the middle of this month; there are then to follow (“uniform,” as the printers call it, though in smaller type) a little volume called General Index; and three more volumes of Translations from the German; after which we two will reckon and count; and if there is any lacuna on the Concord shelf, at once make it good. Enough, enough on that score.

The Hotten who has got hold of you here is a dirty little pirate, who snatches at everybody grown fat enough to yield him a bite (paltry, unhanged creature); so that in fact he is a symbol to you of your visible rise in the world here; and, with Conway’s vigilance to help, will do you good and not evil. Glad am I, in any case, to see so much new spiritual produce still ripening around you; and you ought to be glad, too. Pray Heaven you may long keep your right hand steady: you, too, I can perceive, will never, any more than myself, learn to “write by dictation” in a manner that will be supportable to you. I rejoice, also, to hear of such a magnificent adventure as that you are now upon. Climbing the backbone of America; looking into the Pacific Ocean too, and the gigantic wonders going on there. I fear you won’t see Brigham Young, however? He also to me is one of the products out there; — and indeed I may confess to you that the doings in that region are not only of a big character, but of a great; — and that in my occasional explosions against “Anarchy,” and my inextinguishable hatred of it, I privately whisper to myself, “Could any Friedrich Wilhelm, now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what is America’s essential task at present faster or more completely than ‘anarchic America’ herself is now doing?” Such “Anarchy” has a great deal to say for itself, — (would to Heaven ours of England had as much!) — and points towards grand anti-Anarchies in the future; in fact, I can already discern in it huge quantities of Anti-Anarchy in the “impalpable-powder” condition; and hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from it, in my private mind!

Good Mrs. — has never yet made her appearance; but shall be welcome whenever she does.

Did you ever hear the name of an aged, or elderly, fantastic fellow-citizen of yours, called J. Lee Bliss, who designates himself O.F. and A.K., i.e. “Old Fogey” and “Amiable Kuss”? He sent me, the other night, a wonderful miscellany of symbolical shreds and patches; which considerably amused me; and withal indicated good-will on the man’s part; who is not without humor, in sight, and serious intention or disposition. If you ever did hear of him, say a word on the subject next time you write.

And above all things write. The instant you get home from California, or see this, let me hear from you what your adventures have been and what the next are to be. Adieu, dear Emerson.

Yours ever affectionately,
                      T. Carlyle

Mrs. — sends a note from Piccadilly this new morning (June 5th); call to be made there today by Niece Mary, card left, etc., etc. Promises to be an agreeable Lady.

Did you ever hear of such a thing as this suicidal Finis of the French “Copper Captaincy”; gratuitous Attack on Germany, and ditto Blowing-up of Paris by its own hand! An event with meanings unspeakable, — deep as the. Abyss. —

If you ever write to C. Norton in Italy, send him my kind remembrances.

 — T. C. (with about the velocity of Engraving — on lead!)*

 * The letter was dictated, but the postscript, from the first signature, was written in a tremulous hand by Carlyle himself.

CLXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 June, 1871

My Dear Carlyle,— ‘T is more than time that you should hear from me whose debts to you always accumulate. But my long journey to California ended in many distractions on my return home. I found Varioloid in my house… and I was not permitted to enter it for many days, and could only talk with wife, son, and daughter from the yard…. I had crowded and closed my Cambridge lectures in haste, and went to the land of Flowers invited by John M. Forbes, one of my most valued friends, father of my daughter Edith’s husband. With him and his family and one or two chosen guests, the trip was made under the best conditions of safety, comfort, and company, I measuring for the first time one entire line of the Country.

California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific sea; Steam brings the near neighborhood of Asia; and South America at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its six hundred miles of latitude producing all our Northern fruits, and also the fig, orange, and banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me. The Almanac said April; but the day said June; — and day after day for six weeks uninterrupted sunshine. November and December are the rainy months. The whole Country, was covered with flowers, and all of them unknown to us except in greenhouses. Every bird that I know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes.

On the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, gophers, — even elks, and one pair of wolves on the plains; the grizzly bear only in a cage. We crossed one region of the buffalo, but only saw one captive. We found Indians at every railroad station, — the squaws and papooses begging, and the “bucks,” as they wickedly call them, lounging. On our way out, we left the Pacific Railroad for twenty-four hours to visit Salt Lake; called on Brigham Young — just seventy years old — who received us with quiet uncommitting courtesy, at first, — a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man with plain manners. He took early occasion to remark that “the one-man-power really meant all-men’s-power.” Our interview was peaceable enough, and rather mended my impression of the man; and, after our visit, I read in the Descret newspaper his Speech to his people on the previous Sunday. It avoided religion, but was full of Franklinian good sense. In one point, he says: “Your fear of the Indians is nonsense. The Indians like the white men’s food. Feed them well, and they will surely die.” He is clearly a sufficient ruler, and perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but I found that the San Franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive Brigham.

I have been surprised — but it is months ago — by a letter from Lacy Garbett, the Architect, whom I do not know, but one of whose books, about “Design in Architecture,” I have always valued. This letter, asking of me that Americans shall join Englishmen in a Petition to Parliament against pulling down Ancient Saxon buildings, is written in a way so wild as to suggest insanity, and I have not known how to answer it. At my “Saturday Club” in Boston I sat at dinner by an English lord, — whose name I have forgotten, — from whom I tried to learn what laws Parliament had passed for the repairs of old religious Foundations, that could make them the victims of covetous Architects. But he assured me there were none such, and that he himself was President of a Society in his own County for the protection of such buildings. So that I am left entirely in the dark in regard to the fact and Garbett’s letter. He claims to speak both for Ruskin and himself.

I grieve to hear no better account of your health than your last letter gives. The only contradiction of it, namely, the power of your pen in this reproduction of thirty books, — and such books, — is very important and very consoling to me. A great work to be done is the best insurance, and I sleep quietly, notwithstanding these sad bulletins, — believing that you cannot be spared.

Fare well, dear friend,
                  R.W. Emerson

CLXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 4 September, 1871

My Dear Carlyle, — I hope you will have returned safely from the Orkneys in time to let my son Edward W.E. see your face on his way through London to Germany, whither he goes to finish his medical studies, — no, not finish, but prosecute. Give him your blessing, and tell him what he should look for in his few days in London, and what in your Prussia. He is a good youth, and we can spare him only for this necessity. I should like well to accompany him as far as to your hearthstone, if only so I could persuade you that it is but a ten-days ride for you thence to mine, — a little farther than the Orkneys, and the outskirts of land as good, and bigger. I read gladly in your letters some relentings toward America, — deeper ones in your dealing with Harvard College; and I know you could not see without interest the immense and varied blossoming of our possibilities here, — of all nationalities, too, besides our own. I have heard from Mrs. — twice lately, who exults in your kindness to her.

Always affectionately, Yours,
                         R.W. Emerson

CXC. Emerson to Carlyle

Baltimore, Md., 5 January, 1872

My Dear Carlyle, — I received from you through Mr. Chapman, just before Christmas, the last rich instalment of your Library Edition; viz. Vols. IV.-X. Life of Friedrich; Vols. L-III. Translations from German; one volume General Index; eleven volumes in all, — and now my stately collection is perfect. Perfect too is your Victory. But I clatter my chains with joy, as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts. Happy man you should be, to whom the Heaven has allowed such masterly completion. You shall wear your crown at the Pan-Saxon Games with no equal or approaching competitor in sight, — well earned by genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations for your pupils and praisers. I count it my eminent happiness to have been so nearly your contemporary, and your friend, — permitted to detect by its rare light the new star almost before the Easterners had seen it, and to have found no disappointment, but joyful confirmation rather, in coming close to its orb. Rest, rest, now for a time; I pray you, and be thankful. Meantime, I know well all your perversities, and give them a wide berth. They seriously annoy a great many worthy readers, nations of readers sometimes, — but I heap them all as style, and read them as I read Rabelais’s gigantic humors which astonish in order to force attention, and by and by are seen to be the rhetoric of a highly virtuous gentleman who swears. I have been quite too busy with fast succeeding jobs (I may well call them), in the last year, to have read much in these proud books; but I begin to see daylight coming through my fogs, and I have not lost in the least my appetite for reading, — resolve, with my old Harvard professor, “to retire and read the Authors.”

I am impatient to deserve your grand Volumes by reading in them with all the haughty airs that belong to seventy years which I shall count if I live till May, 1873. Meantime I see well that you have lost none of your power, and I wish that you would let in some good Eckermann to dine with you day by day, and competent to report your opinions, — for you can speak as well as you can write, and what the world to come should know…

Affectionately,
             R.W. Emerson

CXCI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 2 April, 1872

Dear Emerson, — I am covered with confusion, astonishment, and shame to think of my long silence. You wrote me two beautiful letters; none friendlier, brighter, wiser could come to me from any quarter of the world; and I have not answered even by a sign. Promptly and punctually my poor heart did answer; but to do it outwardly, — as if there had lain some enchantment on me, — was beyond my power. The one thing I can say in excuse or explanation is, that ever since Summer last, I have been in an unusually dyspeptic, peaking, pining, and dispirited condition; and have no right hand of my own for writing, nor, for several months, had any other that was altogether agreeable to me. But in fine I don’t believe you lay any blame or anger on me at all; and I will say no more about it, but only try to repent and do better next time.

Your letter from the Far West was charmingly vivid and free; one seemed to attend you personally, and see with one’s own eyes the notabilia, human and other, of those huge regions, in your swift flight through them to and from. I retain your little etching of Brigham Young as a bit of real likeness; I have often thought of your transit through Chicago since poor Chicago itself vanished out of the world on wings of fire. There is something huge, painful, and almost appalling to me in that wild Western World of yours; — and especially I wonder at the gold-nuggeting there, while plainly every gold-nuggeter is no other than a criminal to Human Society, and has to steal the exact value of his gold nugget from the pockets of all the posterity of Adam, now and for some time to come, in this world. I conclude it is a bait used by All-wise Providence to attract your people out thither, there to build towns, make roads, fell forests (or plant forests), and make ready a Dwelling-place for new Nations, who will find themselves called to quite other than nugget-hunting. In the hideous stew of Anarchy, in which all English Populations present themselves to my dismal contemplation at this day, it is a solid consolation that there will verily, in another fifty years, be above a hundred million men and women on this Planet who can all read Shakespeare and the English Bible and the (also for a long time biblical and noble) history of their Mother Country, — and proceed again to do, unless the Devil be in them, as their Forebears did, or better, if they have the heart! —

Except that you are a thousand times too kind to me, your second
Letter also was altogether charming….

Do you read Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, which he cheerily tells me gets itself reprinted in America? If you don’t, do, I advise you. Also his Munera Pulveris, Oxford-Lectures on Art, and whatever else he is now writing, — if you can manage to get them (which is difficult here, owing to the ways he has towards the bibliopolic world!). There is nothing going on among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man; one might say a weak man rather; and has not the least prudence of management; though if he can hold out for another fifteen years or so, he may produce, even in this way, a great effect. God grant it, say I. Froude is coming to you in October. You will find him a most clear, friendly, ingenious, solid, and excellent man; and I am very glad to find you among those who are to take care of him when he comes to your new Country. Do your best and wisest towards him, for my sake, withal. He is the valuablest Friend I now have in England, nearly though not quite altogether the one man in talking with whom I can get any real profit or comfort. Alas, alas, here is the end of the paper, dear Emerson; and I had still a whole wilderness of things to say. Write to me, or even do not write, and I will surely write again.

I remain as ever Your Affectionate Friend,
                                       T. Carlyle

In November, 1872, Emerson went to England, and the two friends met again. After a short stay he proceeded to the Continent and Egypt, returning to London in the spring of 1873. For the last time Carlyle and he saw each other. In May, Emerson returned home. After this time no letters passed between him and Carlyle. They were both old men. Writing had become difficult to them; and little was left to say.

Carlyle died, eighty-five years old, on the 5th of February, 1881. Emerson died, seventy-nine years old, on the 27th of April, 1882.

The Journals

Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, which Emerson attended and in October 1826 he was “approbated to preach”.  Years later, on July 15, 1838, the famous lecturer was invited back to Divinity Hall for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his "Divinity School Address".

SELECTED JOURNALS

In October 1817, aged 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president. Midway through his junior year, he began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would later be titled “Wide World”. The keeping of a journal from that point would become a lifetime commitment for the young man.

Twenty years later, when he befriended Henry David Thoreau in 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” The question went on to have a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau, who also produced a large collection of journals charting the various stages of his own life.

In 1867 Emerson’s health was declining and due to this he wrote much less in his journals. Beginning as early as the summer of 1871, Emerson suffered memory problems and by 1879 the problem was so serious that he occasionally forgot his own name, making him unable to write as fluidly or succinctly as he was able to in earlier times. Nevertheless, the remaining sixty-seven journals bear witness to one of the most original and gifted minds of American literature, recording innovative, revealing and inspirational studies of nature, philosophy and the beauty of ordinary life, which some critics have now declared as being in fact Emerson’s greatest literary achievement.

Emerson’s complete journals fill sixteen large volumes in the definitive Harvard University Press edition published between 1960 and 1982. This Delphi edition of Emerson’s works provides a comprehensive selection from Emerson’s early, middle and last journals.

Emerson in later years

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by Edward W. Emerson.

Selection of Early Journals: 1820-1823

JOURNAL I

JOURNAL II

JOURNAL III

JOURNAL IV

JOURNAL V

JOURNAL VI

JOURNAL VII

JOURNAL VIII

JOURNAL IX

JOURNAL X

Selection of Middle Journals: 1841-1843

JOURNAL XXXII

JOURNAL XXXIII

JOURNAL XXXIV

Selection of Last Journals: 1869-1876

JOURNAL LX

JOURNAL LXI

JOURNAL LXII

JOURNAL LXIII

JOURNAL LXIV

JOURNAL LXV

JOURNAL LXVI

JOURNAL LXVII

INTRODUCTION by Edward W. Emerson.

IN the year 1902 Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company asked me whether Mr. Emerson’s journals could not be published, to follow the annotated edition of the Works which they were to bring out in honour of the approaching Centenary. This question was referred to Mr. Cabot, whom Mr. Emerson, trusting to his good judgment and taste, had made his literary executor. Mr. Cabot, after a little consideration, said “Yes.” Many persons, he agreed, would gladly see Emerson’s first record of his thoughts, come nearer to the man than in the essays carefully purged of personality, and also trace the growth of his powers of expression in prose or rhyme, and the expansion of his mind during the fifty years or more that the journals cover.

Mr. Cabot said that he was too old to undertake further literary work, and expressed his wish that I should be the editor: “Only take time enough,” he said; “do not allow yourself to be hurried.” A few months later, Mr. Cabot died. I was deprived of his important and valued counsel.

The journals were postponed until the Centenary Edition with its additions and notes was published; then the consideration of them began. Mr. Emerson’s grandson, Mr. Waldo Emerson Forbes, expressed his willingness to share the labour of editing the journals. This aid has been of great importance.

At first the plan included only the journals from the time of Mr. Emerson’s new departure in life and writing after his return from his first visit to Europe in the autumn of 1833; but, on carefully reading the journals for the fourteen years preceding that time, — for the boy faithfully kept them from the age of seventeen onwards, — it seemed well to the editors to introduce large extracts from these. Before deciding to do so, however, they showed specimens of the boyish entries to several persons in whose taste and literary judgment they confided, and were confirmed in the plan by their less partial opinions. For we believe that those who care about Emerson, his thought and ideals, may wish to look beyond the matured and sifted work that he left in his books, and see the youth in his apprenticeship, the priest in his noviciate and in his full office caring for his people; his studies, questionings and hopes; his final sacrifice; meantime, the warmth and tenderness that came into this monastic life with his love for Ellen Tucker and his marriage, soon followed by her death and the sad wreck of the new home; then, after the parting with his church, the pilgrimage over-sea to restore his health and see certain men whose written words had helped him.

The extracts from the early journals are not chosen for their merit alone: they show the soil out of which Emerson grew, the atmosphere around, his habits and mental food, his doubts, his steady, earnest purpose, and the things he outgrew. His frankness with himself is seen, and how he granted the floor to the adversary for a fair hearing. Also the ups and downs of the boy’s health appear in the school-keeping days, and why, beyond all reasonable hope, considering the neglect of the body, he lived to a healthy middle life and old age by his rambling tendencies, by quietness, and bending to the blast which shattered the health of his more unyielding brothers.

In these years the young Emerson was reading eagerly and widely, and learned to find what the author or the college text-book had for him, and leave the rest. The growth of his literary taste, his style, independence of thought, and originality in writing verse can be traced.

But from first to last appears the value to him of his strange aunt, Miss Mary Moody Emerson, in her constant interest and stimulating influence: poor, remote, only self-educated, hungry for knowledge, extraordinarily well-read, exalted in her religious thought, critical but proud of her nephews, especially Ralph, and a tireless correspondent. The boy prized her letters, and they put him on his mettle. His most careful youthful writing is in his answers; he holds his own in them. Large extracts from her letters and his answers occur, especially in the earlier journals. He admired her rhetoric, now poetical, now fiery, now sarcastic, — always her own.

It was Mr. Emerson’s habit often in later years to copy into his journal passages from his letters to others in which he had conveyed his thought with care.

It was as natural to this boy to write as to another to play ball, or go fishing, or experiment with the tools of a neighbour carpenter, or feel out tunes on a musical instrument. When recitations were over, and study did not press, or he was not walking in Mount Auburn woods or the wild country around Fresh Pond, he betook himself to his journal. It was his confidential friend: his ambitions, his disappointments, his religious meditations, his mortifications, his romantic imaginings, his sillinesses, his trial-flights in verse, his joy in Byron and Scott, or Everett’s orations, the ideas gathered from serious books, — all went in, everything but what might be expected in a boy’s diary; for of incidents, of classmates, of students’ doings, there is hardly an entry.

Throughout, and increasingly in later years, these are journals, not of incidents and persons, but of thoughts.

With the biography of Mr. Emerson in mind or in hand, the outward conditions, or relations with people or public events which suggested a train of thought, may perhaps be found. A talk, or ramble with a friend, or the reading of a book, may be mentioned, but soon the thought takes its own direction. More often the thoughts were on the great, the abiding questions.

The journals of exile in Florida and of the visit to Europe in 1833 are exceptional, as being real records of daily life, of voyages in a packet ship, of sight-seeing, of travel in Malta, Sicily, the Italian cities, through the Brenner Pass, to Paris, the sights as well as thoughts there; then of the visits in England, and the voyage home. Much of the account of the visits to Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle is omitted in these volumes, as it is printed in English Traits. The notes of the second trip abroad are less full. Mr. Emerson printed many of them in that book, and others have been given in the notes to that volume in the Centenary Edition. During his third journeying abroad, in 1871-72, when, sent by his friends, Mr. Emerson visited England, France, Italy and Egypt, he took no notes, as his health and spirits were far below their usual standard.

After 1833, the journals are of greater interest, for Mr. Emerson was entering on a new life and founding his new home, whither he brought his wife, Lidian Jackson, and where their children were born. One finds the mention of the planting of trees, the gradually added fields, orchard, and — best for him — woodland by Walden. Turning his back on tradition, he sought the living God in Nature and the soul. The book Nature sped well and was soon published. Day by day, the journal was the storehouse of the thoughts given him in the wood.

Wandering voices in the air

And murmurs in the wold

Speak what I cannot declare,

Yet cannot all withhold.

These journals are reflections, sometimes dim, sometimes clear, of the inner life as stirred by the outer. The study of Nature led to increasing interest in Natural History, but always as a key to unlock chambers of thought. The first lectures after his European trip were on this subject.

Mr. Emerson often preached by invitation in various towns for several years, with good acceptance. But when, in 1837 and 1838, he spoke for free thought in letters and religion before chosen audiences gathered at the University, reaction followed and he stood condemned by many of the elder professors, clergy, and leading citizens, as visionary, dangerous, or insane. The journals show that, however bravely Mr. Emerson stood against the tide which then looked so strong, it seemed at the time as if he might be outlawed as speaker and writer, and have to turn to the soil for a living. The event quickly did away with such a fear. Societies at country colleges, apparently unaware of his heresies, asked him, year by year, to speak to them; his Boston lectures won him increasing audiences, and new friends, and the spread of the Lyceums from East to West gave him a hearing wide as could be desired. The bases of these lectures, which, thus tested and sifted, became the essays, came from these day-book entries of thoughts, sights, experiences, and the fine passages of his reading.

Now new friends appear one by one: the young Thoreau, loyal and skilful helper in all practical matters, yet keeping his fine independence, the Platonic Alcott, Jones Very the mystic, Father Taylor, Dr. Hedge, and always the beautiful and sisterly presence of Miss Elizabeth Hoar, who should have been the wife of Charles Emerson. The new home had been saddened by the death of the two brilliant younger brothers, Edward fading away in Porto Rico, and Charles, not two years later, in Concord. A few years later Samuel Gray Ward is often alluded to, to whom the “Letters to a Friend” were written; then Margaret Fuller came, and Charles Newcomb from Providence, a youth for whom Emerson cared much, and later, Ellery Channing and Hawthorne became his neighbours.

The earlier friends, of course, appear: the venerable Doctor Ripley and his beneficent son Rev. Samuel, of Waltham, his gifted wife, Sarah Bradford, and her brother George, whom Mr. Cabot speaks of as the only “crony” that Mr. Emerson ever had. At this period Waldo, the little son so soon to be taken away, comes into the Journal, a delight to his father.

The Transcendental Epoch meantime comes on, with its star-led souls, but also many reformers of small and strange pattern, uncomfortable creatures who had hitched their wagons to the smallest asteroids. These were hospitably heard and fed, — Mr. Emerson’s humanity, as appears in the journals, helped out by his sense of humour. Always the friend across the sea, Carlyle, remains a planet in his heaven, though sometimes with smoky and lurid light.

Goethe’s wide range of thought was stimulating, especially in the domain of Art, but the New England conscience could not accept the man.

A little earlier than the days of the Dial, the Neo-platonists stirred Mr. Emerson by their mysticism and strange imagery, and from them he followed upward the stream of thought that had influenced these to their remote sources in the scriptures of the ancient East. He found delight by the way in the gardens of Persia, with Saadi and Hafiz. In the verse-books many trial-renderings of their poems (from the German) are found. Traces of all these influences appear in his notes.

In 1848, Mr. Emerson, setting his face towards home after his stay in England, wrote “Boundless freedom in America,” but was forced to add “in the North,” for from that time on for thirteen years the cloud of Slavery grew darker, and the attitude of Northern politicians and merchants was sadly subservient, while the “comfortable classes” seemed indifferent, even the clergy and the scholars. Certain of the journals show how heavily the load of the Country’s shame lay on Emerson, and in them are found his notes of opinions given by great men of law, which he had sought out, on the basal rights of man and the supremacy of the moral law. In these days, although he well knew that the law of Compensation was sleeplessly working, out of sight — already the rifts made by Conscience were running through the parties, — its slow action tried even his brave philosophy. He saw too far to devote his life to abate this special evil, but his aid was never wanting at a time of danger, as a strong ally to those brave men who did. Loyal to the ideal Republic, disregarding coldness or hostility, there was no tremor in his voice as it rang out clearly for the eternal rights. In those years he had the relief each winter, given by his lecturing journeys afar, of seeing the new country of youth and courage, and speaking a word for Freedom as he passed.

The war came, and he rejoiced in the clearing of the heavens once more, though grieving at the wreck left by the cruel storm. In the journal of January, 1862, when Mr. Emerson gave before the Smithsonian Institute in Washington his lecture “Civilization at a Pinch,” in which he earnestly urged Emancipation, he wrote out, in detail unusual for him, the story of his meeting President Lincoln, Seward, Chase, Sumner, and others of the leading actors in the great drama.

Peace returned, and the Country seemed one to be proud of as never before. Mr. Emerson’s relief and his high hopes appear in the journals, and reappear in the poems and later essays. Then began a calmer, pleasanter chapter in his life. Years ago he had “planted himself on his thought,” and now “the world had come round to him.” He was now widely known on both sides of the ocean through his words and work, and welcomed as a helper. But the increasing call for lectures from a newer West beyond the Mississippi allowed no abatement of work, and the journeying, though less exposing, was greater. His material was still accumulating, but the arrangement of the choice pieces into a harmonious mosaic was growing more difficult than ever for him. One day he met the God of Bounds, who said, —

No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad, ambitious branches and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And — fault of novel germs —

Mature the unfallen fruit.

“Timely wise,” he accepted the terms; but, until he told of this meeting, no one had found out that he was growing old. His powers failed so gradually that not until the shock and exposure, culminating in serious illness, at the time of the burning of his house, did anyone realize that his strength was failing. But the journals show it, for although in the middle period of his life the entries in these were not so many as when his time was freer, after the war they are much fewer. The fact that Society and Solitude, and May Day, the second book of poems, were in preparation partly accounts for this.

Mr. Emerson had great happiness in that period in giving rein to his poetic instinct, now refined, and in “crooning rhymes” as he walked in the woods, — lines for “May Day,” “Waldeinsamkeit,” “My Garden,” and other fragments. The verse-book filled as the journal shrank.

With the illness of 1872 the journals practically came to an end, nor after that time did Mr. Emerson do any original work except endeavouring to mend or arrange passages in unpublished lectures for the promised volume Letters and Social Aims; but he felt his inability for this task, and consented to the calling in by his family of Mr. Cabot’s willing and admirable aid.

A few things remain to be said: —

1. — In these volumes are selections; not the whole, but the greater part of the contents of the journals.

2. — During his most productive years Mr. Emerson used in his books a great part of the thoughts set down in the journals, often with little or no change in form. Such paragraphs are for the most part left out, but sometimes, if important, are referred to. In some instances it seems well to give the original form, which may show the conditions.

3. — Most of the personal references, unless too private, are given. Mr. Emerson’s notes are free from offence in this particular.

4. — The passages in which “Osman” appears are not to be taken as exact autobiography, though they come near being so. “Osman” represents, not Emerson himself, but an ideal man whose problems and experiences are like his own.

5. — In some cases where Mr. Emerson quotes passages from memory erroneously, the true version has been given.

6. — The reading of the youth, as shown by the quotations, seems to have been so wide, and his love of certain authors so great and constant, that it seemed well to give lists of the books referred to or authors mentioned in each year up to 1833. Of course many of these quotations were at second hand, yet led the eager scholar to seek out the original work. Plutarch, Shakspeare, Milton, Montaigne, Jonson, Newton, Burke, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, are quoted so often that we have in the lists, year by year, set down their recurring names to show his love for them. After 1833 only the notable books of the newer reading will be mentioned.

It is interesting to see on the pages of the early journals how the boy’s hand instinctively strayed from writing to drawing heads. A few of these are given in the illustrations which seem to show that Emerson had some gift in that direction, had he chosen to follow it.

The cordial thanks of the editors are due to those friends who have helped them in their task by their valuable counsel.

EDWARD W. EMERSON.

September, 1909.

Selection of Early Journals: 1820-1823

JOURNAL

COLLEGE

“‘In the morning, solitude,’ said Pythagoras. By all means give the youth solitude, that Nature may speak to his imagination, as it does never in company; and for the like reason give him a chamber alone; — and that was the best thing I found in college.”

Emerson’s Journal, 1859.

“I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays; not because of any physical inability, but simply because, from his earliest years, he dwelt in a higher sphere. My one deep impression is, that, from his earliest childhood, our friend lived and moved and had his being in an atmosphere of letters, quite apart by himself. I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.”

From a letter about Emerson by his earliest friend, Dr, William H. Furness

JOURNAL I

“NO. XVII”

1820

[This “Blotting-Book” rather than Journal, simply marked “No. XVII,” showing that it had predecessors, though these are gone, was begun almost with the year 1820. Emerson was then a Junior, living in Hollis Hall, No. 15. A rude but faithful little picture in water-colours of that room, apparently done by him, is found in “The Wide World,” No. 1. Its bare floor, uncurtained window, cheap paper, and Spartan furniture, fairly represent the brave simplicity of those days. The pictures are probably such engravings of eminent divines as could be spared from home, — George Whitefield, Dr. Samuel Cooper, Rev. Charles Chauncy, or other lights of that ministry for which the boy was already destined. His chum was John Gaillard Keith Gourdin (pronounced Godyne): yet strangely no mention of him occurs in the jottings of that year. Dr. Holmes, in his memoir of Emerson, says: “The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard Keith, were dashing young fellows, as I recollect them, belonging to Charleston, South Carolina. The ‘Southerners’ were the reigning college elegans of that time, the merveilleux, the mirliflores, of their day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calf-skin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin together as room-mates.” Emerson was writing a dissertation on the Character of Socrates, for which he received a Bowdoin Prize. This, with a later prize-dissertation, “On the Present State of Ethical Culture,” were recently printed, with a sketch of Emerson’s life, by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in a small volume published in Boston by the Unitarian Association. F or the latter essay Emerson only received the second prize; his classmate, Josiah Quincy, won the first. The book is full of miscellaneous scraps of prose and verse written by the boy, and also quoted from a variety of sources, given below. Many lines from Shakspeare, Byron, Scott, Dryden, and Moore, classified by the initial letter, are stored away there for use in a game, now becoming obsolete, called “Capping verses.” The following passages from a study for the paper on Socrates, together with some “Phrases Poetical” which the young author stored to adorn his sentences or enlarge his vocabulary, and a song for a Club festival, are all that seem worth while to print.]

January, 1820. (Age, 16.)

The ostentatious ritual of India which worshipped God by outraging nature, though softened as it proceeded West, was still too harsh a discipline for Athenian manners to undergo. — Socrates had little to do with these and perhaps his information on the subject was very limited. He was not distinguished for knowledge or general information, but for acquaintance with the mind and its false and fond propensities, its springs of action, its assailable parts; in short, his art laid open its deepest recesses, and he handled it and moulded it at will. Indeed we do not have reason to suppose that he was intimately versed in his own national literature, Herodotus, Homer, Thucydides, Pindar, etc. — His profession in early life had perhaps imparted a little of poetic inspiration, but his leading feature seems to have been sagacity — little refinement, little erudition. His genius resembled Æsop.

The greatness of the philosopher shines forth in its fullest lustre when we examine the originality, the bold and unequalled sublimity of his conceptions. His powerful mind had surmounted the errours of education and had retained useful acquisitions, whilst it discarded what was absurd or unprofitable. He studied Nature with a chastised enthusiasm, and the constant activity of his mind endowed him with an energy of thought little short of inspiration. When he speaks of the immortality of the soul, or when he enters on considerations of the attributes or nature of the deity, he leaves the little quibblings of the sophists, and his own inferiour strains of irony, and his soul warms and expands with his subject; we forget that he is man — he seems seated like Jupiter Creator moulding magnificent forms and clothing them with beauty and grandeur....

What is God? said the disciples, and Plato replied, It is hard to learn and impossible to divulge....

In Athens, learning was not loved for its own sake, but for sinister ends. It was prized as a saleable commodity. The Sophists bargained their literature, such as it was, for a prize which, always exorbitant, was regulated by the ability of the disciple. And this must always happen more or less in the infancy of letters. In a moneymaking community literature will soon thrive. It must always follow, not precede, successful trade. The first wants to be supplied are the native ones of animal subsistence and comfort, and when these are more than provided for, and luxury and ease begin to look about them for new gratification, the mind then urges its claim to cultivation....

For use — PHRASES POETICAL rescuing and crowning virtue. “coldest complexion of age.” ill-conditioned, cameleon, zeal, booked in alphabet, cushioned, compunction, beleaguered, halidom galloping, whortleberry, spikenard, staunch, council-chamber, star-crossed, till its dye was doubled on the crimson cross, countless multitudes, abutments panoply, sycophant smile, kidnapping, beheaded demigods, signal (adjective). Cleopatra, ambidexter register (verb), defalcation.

SONG

You may say what you please of the current rebellion,

Tonight the Conventicle drink to a real one;

The annals of ages have blazoned its fame

And paeans are chanted to hallow its name.

             Derry down, etc.

Alas for the windows the Sophs have demolished!

Alas for the Laws that they are not abolished!

And that Dawes could abide the warm battle’s brunt, And the Government vote it was Gay, Lee and Blunt.

             Derry down.

But this shock of the Universe who could control?

Aghast in despair was each Sophomore’s soul,

Save one, who alone in his might could stand forth

To grapple with elements — Mr. Danforth.

             Derry down.

 could be looked down on smilingly by Juniors who had, the year before, been more or less involved in a “real one” celebrated in that epic, The Re be Iliad, which has been from time to time reprinted; also described in Josiah Quincy’s Figures of the Past.

Let the Earth and the Nations to havoc go soon,

And the world tumble upward to mix with the moon

Old Harvard shall smile at the rare conflagration,

The Coventicle standing her pledge of salvation.

             Derry down.

JOURNAL II

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. I 1820

[The journals from February, 1820, to July, 1824, bear the name “The Wide World,” and extracts from all of these are given here, excepting No. 6, which is missing.]

February, 1820.

Mixing with the thousand pursuits and passions and objects of the world as personified by Imagination, is profitable and entertaining. These pages are intended at their commencement to contain a record of new thoughts (when they occur); for a receptacle of all the old ideas that partial but peculiar peepings at antiquity can furnish or furbish; for tablet to save the wear and tear of weak Memory, and, in short, for all the various purposes and utility, real or imaginary, which are usually comprehended under that comprehensive title Common Place book. O ye witches, assist me! enliven or horrify some midnight lucubration or dream (whichever may be found most convenient) to supply this reservoir when other resources fail. Pardon me, Fairy Land! rich region of fancy and gnomery, elvery, sylphery, and Queen Mab! pardon me for presenting my first petition to your enemies, but there is probably one in the chamber who maliciously influenced me to what is irrevocable; pardon and favour me! — And finally, Spirits of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, wherever ye glow, whatsoever you patronize, whoever you inspire, hallow, hallow this devoted paper — Dedicated and Signed January 25, 1820,

JUNIO.

After such a dedication, what so proper to begin with as reflections on or from Edward Search? It is a fine idea which he either intends to convey, or else the form of expression unintentionally did (pray let us believe the latter for the credit of originality) that those parts of the world which man cannot or does not inhabit are the abodes of other orders of sentient being, invisible or unperceived by him. To amplify: Perhaps the inferiour centre of the earth, the bottomless depths and the upper paths of Ocean, the lands circumjacent to the poles, the high rock and clefts of the rock, are peopled by higher beings than ourselves; — animals cast in more refined mould; not subject to the inconveniences, woes, etc., of our species — to whom, as to us, this world appears made only for them, and among whom our very honest and honourable species are classed only as the highest order of brutes — perhaps called of the bee kind. When Imagination has formed this class of beings and given them the name of Supromines, it will be perfectly convenient to rise again to an order higher than these last, holding our self-complacent friends, the Supromines, in as utter contempt as they us, or as we the beasts, and then she may rise to another and another, till, for aught I know, she may make this world one of the Mansions of heaven, and in parts of it, though in and around, yet thoroughly unknown to us, the seraphim and cherubim may live and enjoy. I have now already fallen into an errour, which may be a very common one, to hunt an idea down, when obtained, in such a remorseless manner as to render dull and flat an idea originally plump, round and shining.

Perhaps our system and all the planets, stars, we can discover, nay, the whole interminable Universe, is moving on, as has been supposed, in one grand circle round the centre of light, and since the world began it has never completed a single revolution. It is an improvement on the grandeur of this supposition to suppose there is a source of light before us and the whole vast machinery has been forever and is now sweeping forward in a direct line through the interminable fields — extensions of space. It is a singular fact that we cannot present to the imagination a longer space than just so much of the world as is bounded by the visible horizon; so that, even in this stretching of thought to comprehend the broad path lengthening itself and widening to receive the rolling Universe, stern necessity bounds us to a little extent of a few miles only. But what matters it? we can talk and write and think it out.... Chateaubriand’s “the universe is the imagination of the deity made manifest” is worthy him.

“Mount on thy own path to Fame, nor swerve for man or more than man” says Caswallon (in “Samor”), and it will be a fine motto by striking out the last four words.

INDEPENDENCE; PULPIT ELOQUENCE

Let us suppose a pulpit Orator to whom the path of his profession is yet untried, but whose talents are good and feelings strong, and his independence, as a man, in opinion and action is established; let him ascend the pulpit for the first time, not to please or displease the multitude, but to expound to them the words of the book and to waft their minds and devotions to heaven. Let him come to them in solemnity and strength, and when he speaks he will claim attention with an interesting figure and an interested face. To expand their views of the sublime doctrines of the religion, he may embrace the universe and bring down the stars from their courses to do homage to their Creator.

Here is a fountain which cannot fail them. Wise Christian orators have often and profitably magnified the inconceivable power of the Creator as manifested in his works, and thus elevated and sobered the mind of the people and gradually drawn them off from the world they have left by the animating ideas of Majesty, Beauty, Wonder, which these considerations bestow. Then when life and its frivolities is fastly flowing away from before them, and the spirit is absorbed in the play of its mightiest energies, and their eyes are on him and their hearts are in heaven, then let him discharge his fearful duty, then let him unfold the stupendous designs of celestial wisdom, and whilst admiration is speechless, let him minister to their unearthly wants, and let the ambassador of the Most High prove himself worthy of his tremendous vocation. Let him gain the tremendous eloquence which stirs men’s souls, which turns the world upside down, but which loses all its filth and retains all its grandeur when consecrated to God. When a congregation are assembled together to hear such an apostle, you may look round and you will see the faces of men bent forward in the earnestness of expectation, and in this desirable frame of mind the preacher may lead them whithersoever he will; they have yielded up their prejudices to the eloquence of the lips which the archangel hath purified and hallowed with fire, and this first sacrifice is the sin-offering which cleanseth them.

WEBSTER

February 7th.

Mr. K., a lawyer of Boston, gave a fine character of a distinguished individual in private conversation, which in part I shall set down. “Webster is a rather large man, about five feet, seven, or nine, in height, and thirty-nine or forty years old — he has a long head, very large black eyes, bushy eyebrows, a commanding expression, — and his hair is coal-black, and coarse as a crow’s nest. His voice is sepulchral — there is not the least variety or the least harmony of tone — it commands, it fills, it echoes, but is harsh and discordant. — He possesses an admirable readiness, a fine memory and a faculty of perfect abstraction, an unparallelled impudence and a tremendous power of concentration — he brings all that he has ever heard, read or seen to bear on the case in question. He growls along the bar to see who will run, and if nobody runs he WILL fight. He knows his strength, has a perfect confidence in his own powers, and is distinguished by a spirit of fixed determination; he marks his path out, and will cut off fifty heads rather than turn out of it; but is generous and free from malice, and will never move a step to make a severe remark. His genius is such that, if he descends to be pathetic, he becomes ridiculous. He has no wit and never laughs, though he is very shrewd and sarcastic, and sometimes sets the whole court in a roar by the singularity or pointedness of a remark. His imagination is what the light of a furnace is to its heat, a necessary attendant — nothing sparkling or agreeable, but dreadful and gloomy.” — This is the finest character I have ever heard pourtrayed, and very truly drawn, with little or no exaggeration. With respect to the cause of a town’s condition of bad society he said well, “There is stuff to make good society, but they are discordant atoms,” and regarding the contrasting and comparing the worthy and great dead,— “you may not tell a man ‘your neighbor’s house is higher than yours,’ but you may measure gravestones and see which is the tallest.”

Cambridge, March nth, 1820.

Thus long I have been in Cambridge this term (three or four weeks) and have not before this moment paid my devoirs to the Gnomes to whom I dedicated this quaint and heterogeneous manuscript. Is it because matter has been wanting? — no — I have written much elsewhere in prose, poetry, and miscellany — let me put the most favourable construction on the case and say that I have been better employed. Beside considerable attention, however unsuccessful, to college studies, I have finished Bisset’s life of Burke, as well as Burke’s “Regicide Peace,” together with considerable variety of desultory reading, generally speaking, highly entertaining and instructive. The Pythologian poem does not proceed very rapidly, though I have experienced some poetic moments. Could I seat myself in the alcove of one of those public libraries which human pride and literary rivalship have made costly, splendid and magnificent, it would indeed be an enviable situation. I would plunge into the classic lore of chivalrous story and of the fairy-land bards, and unclosing the ponderous volumes of the firmest believers in magic and in the potency of consecrated crosier or elfin ring, I would let my soul sail away delighted into their wildest phantasies. Pendragon is rising before my fancy, and has given me permission to wander in his walks of Fairy-land and to present myself at the bower of Gloriana. I stand in the fair assembly of the chosen, the brave and the beautiful; honour and virtue, courage and delicacy are mingling in magnificent joy. Unstained knighthood is sheathing the successful blade in the presence of unstained chastity. And the festal jubilee of Fairy-land is announced by the tinkling of its silver bells. The halls are full of gorgeous splendour and the groves are joyous with light and beauty. The birds partake and magnify the happiness of the green-wood shades and the music of the harp comes swelling on the gay breezes. Or other views more real, scarcely less beautiful, should attract, enchain me. All the stores of Grecian and Roman literature may be unlocked and fully displayed — or, with the Indian enchanters, send my soul up to wander among the stars till “the twilight of the gods.”

April 2d.

Spring has returned and has begun to unfold her beautiful array, to throw herself on wild-flower couches, to walk abroad on the hills and summon her songsters to do her sweet homage. The Muses have issued from the library and costly winter dwelling of their votaries, and are gone up to build their bowers on Parnassus, and to melt their ice-bound fountains. Castalia is flowing rapturously and lifting her foam on high. The hunter and the shepherd are abroad on the rock and the vallies echo to the merry, merry horn. The Poet, of course, is wandering, while Nature’s thousand melodies are warbling to him. This soft bewitching luxury of vernal gales and accompanying beauty overwhelms. It produces a lassitude which is full of mental enjoyment and which we would not exchange for more vigorous pleasure. Although so long as the spell endures, little or nothing is accomplished, nevertheless, I believe it operates to divest the mind of old and worn-out contemplations and bestows new freshness upon life, and leaves behind it imaginations of enchantment for the mind to mould into splendid forms and gorgeous fancies which shall long continue to fascinate, after the physical phenomena which woke them have ceased to create delight.

April 4th.

Judging from opportunity enjoyed, I ought to have this evening a flow of thought, rich, abundant and deep; after having heard Mr.

Everett deliver his Introductory Lecture, in length one and one half hour, having read much and profitably in the Quarterly Review, and lastly having heard Dr. Warren’s introductory lecture to anatomy, — all in the compass of a day — and the mind possessing a temperament well adapted to receive with calm attention what was offered. Shall endeavor to record promiscuously received ideas: — Though the literature of Greece gives us sufficient information with regard to later periods of their commonwealth, as we go back, before the light of tradition comes in, the veil drops. “All tends to the mysterious East.”... From the time of the first dispersion of the human family to the time of Grecian rise, everything in the history of man is obscure, and we think ourselves sufficiently fortunate “if we can write in broad lines the fate of a dynasty,” though we know nothing of the individuals who composed it. The cause is the inefficiency and uncertainty of tradition in those early and ignorant times when the whole history of a tribe was lodged in the head of its patriarch, and in his death their history was lost. But even after the invention of letters, much, very much, has never reached us. This we need not regret. What was worth knowing was transmitted to posterity, the rest buried in deserved forgetfulness. Everything was handed down which ought to be handed down. The Phenicians gave the Greeks their Alphabet, yet not a line of all which they wrote has come down, while their pupils have built themselves an imperishable monument of fame. I here make a resolution to make myself acquainted with the Greek language and antiquities and history with long and serious attention and study; (always with the assistance of circumstances.) To which end I hereby dedicate and devote to the down-putting of sentences quoted or original, which regard Greece, historical, poetical and critical, page 47 of this time-honored register. By the way, I devote page 45 to the notation of Inquirenda and of books to be sought.

Signed, JUNIO.

April 30th,... Ethereal beings to whom I dedicated the pages of my “Wide World,” do not, I entreat you, neglect it; when I sleep waken me; when I weary animate! Wander after moonbeams, fairies! but bring them home here. Indeed, you cannot imagine how it would gratify me to wake up from an accursed Enfield lesson and find a page written in characters of light by a moonbeam of Queen Mab! I will give you a subject — a thousand if you wish; — for instance “Pendragon,” your own Pendragon; record his life and his glories. “Prince Arthur” if it is not too trite; or “the Universe,” or a broom-stick; either or all of these, or fifty thousand more.

June 7th.

A very singular chance led me to derive very sensible answers to the two questions I proposed to Virgil. For the first I opened to the line —

O crudelis Alexi, nihil mea carmina curas.

For the other I opened to a line, Dryden’s translation of which is ——

“Go, let the gods and temples claim thy care.”

Have been of late reading patches of Barrow and Ben Jonson; and what the object — not curiosity? no — nor expectation of edification intellectual or moral — but merely because they are authors where vigorous phrases and quaint, peculiar words and expressions may be sought and found, the better “to rattle out the battle of my thoughts.” I shall now set myself to give a good sentence of Barrow’s (the whole beauty of which he has impaired by a blundering collocation) in purer and more fashionable English; — Obvious manifestations may be sometimes seen of the ruling government of God. Sometimes in the career of triumphant guilt when things have come to such a pass that iniquity and outrage do exceedingly prevail, so that the life of the offender becomes intolerably grievous, a change comes upon the state of things, however stable and enduring in appearance, a revolution in a manner sudden and strange, and flowing from causes mean and unworthy, which overturneth the towering fabric of fortune and reduces its gigantic dimensions; and no strugglings of might, no fetches of policy, no circumspection or industry of man availing to uphold it: there is outstretched an invisible hand checking all such force and crossing all such devices — a stone cut out of the mountain without hands and breaking to pieces the iron and the brass and the clay and [the] silver and the gold. — In looking over the sentence however, though the grand outline of the whole was originally the Rev. Isaac Barrow’s, yet we very self-complacently confess that great alterations have rendered it editorially Mr. Ralph Emerson’s, and I intend to make use of it hereafter, after another new modelling, for it is still very susceptible of improvement.

June 19th.

When those magnificent masses of vapour which load our horizon are breaking away, disclosing fields of blue atmosphere, there is an exhilaration awakened in the system of a susceptible man which so invigorates the energies of mind, and displays to himself such manifold power and joy superiour to other existences, that he will triumph and exult that he is a man.... We feel at these times that eternal analogy which subsists between the external changes of nature, and scenes of good and ill that chequer human life. Joy cometh, but is speedily supplanted by grief, and we look at the approach of transient verities like the mists of the morning, fearful and many, but the fairies are in them and White Ladies beckoning.

August 8th.

I have been reading the Novum Organum. Lord Bacon is indeed a wonderful writer; he condenses an unrivaled degree of matter in one paragraph. He never suffers himself “to swerve from the direct forthright,” or to babble or speak unguardedly on his proper topic, and withal writes with more melody and rich cadence than any writer (I had almost said, of England) on a similar subject. Although I have quoted in my “Universe” of composition (by which presumptuous term I beg leave to remind myself that nothing was meant but to express wideness and variety of range), yet I will add here a fine little sentence from the thirtieth section of the second volume of the Novum Organum. Speaking of bodies composed of two different species of things, he says: “but these instances may be reckoned of the singular or heteroclite kind, as being rare and extraordinary in the universe; yet for their dignity they ought to be separately placed and treated. For they excellently indicate the composition and structure of things; and suggest the cause of the number of the ordinary species of the universe; and lead the understanding from that which is, to that which may be.” There is nothing in this sentence which should cause it to be quoted more than another. It does not stand out from the rest; but it struck me accidentally as a very different sentence from those similarly constructed in ordinary writers. For instance, in the last three clauses (beginning “For they excellently”) it is common to see an author construct a fine sentence in this way, with idle repetitions of the same idea, embellished a little for the sake of shrouding the deception. In this, they all convey ideas determinate, but widely different and all beautiful and intelligent. — But, says Sterne, “the cant of criticism is the most provoking.”

There is a strange face in the Freshman class whom I should like to know very much. He has a great deal of character in his features and should be a fast friend or bitter enemy. His name is — I shall endeavour to become acquainted with him and wish, if possible, that I might be able to recall at a future period the singular sensations which his presence produced at this.

When we see an exquisite specimen of painting — whence does the pleasure we experience arise? From the resemblance, it is immediately answered, to the works of nature. It is granted that this is in part the cause, but it can’t explain the whole pleasure we enjoy; for we see more perfect resemblances (as a stone apple or fruit) without this pleasure. No, it arises from the power which we immediately recollect to be necessary to the creation of the painting.

August 21st.

In the H [arvard] C[ollege] Athenæum I enjoyed a very pleasant hour reading the life of Marlborough in the “Quarterly Review.” I was a little troubled there by vexatious trains of thought; but once found myself stopping entirely from my reading and occupied in throwing guesses into futurity while I was asking myself if, when, ten or a dozen years hence, I am gone far on the bitter, perplexing roads of life, when I shall then recollect these moments, now thought so miserable, shall I not fervently wish the possibility of their return, and to find myself again thrown awkwardly on the tilted chair in the Athenæum study with my book in my hand; the snuffers and lamps and shelves around; and Motte coughing over his newspaper near me, and ready myself to saunter out into gaiety and Commons when that variously-meaning bell shall lift up his tongue.

“Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.”

August 23, 1820.

To-morrow finishes the Junior year. As it is time to close our accounts, we will conclude likewise this book which has been formed from the meditations and fancies which have sprinkled the miscellany-corner of my mind for two terms past. It was begun in the winter vacation. I think it has been an improving employment decidedly. It has not encroached upon other occupations and has afforded seasonable aid at various times to enlarge or enliven scanty themes, etc. Nor has it monopolized the energies of composition for literary exercises. Whilst I have written in it, I have begun and completed my Pythologian Poem of 260 lines, — and my Dissertation on the Character of Socrates. It has prevented the ennui of many an idle moment and has perhaps enriched my stock of language for future exertions. Much of it has been written with a view to their preservation, as hints for a peculiar pursuit at the distance of years. Little or none of it was elaborate — its office was to be a hasty, sketchy composition, containing at times elements of graver order.

So fare ye well, gay Powers and Princedoms! To you the sheets were inscribed. Light thanks for your tutelary smiles. Grim witches from Valhalla, and courteous dames from Faery-land, whose protection was implored and whose dreams were invoked to furnish forth the scroll, adieu to you all; — you have the laughing poet’s benison and malison, his wish and his forgetfulness. Abandoning your allegiance, he throws you to the winds, recklessly defying your malice and fun. Pinch the red nose; lead him astray after Will-o’-the-wisp over wilderness and fen; fright him with ghastly hobgoblins — wreak your vengeance as you will — He gives you free leave on this sole condition, — if you can.

JUNTO.

August 24, 1820.

Books to be Sought Wordsworth’s Recluse; Quarterly Review, September, 1819; Liber VIII, of Buchanan’s Scotland — Wallace; Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland; Camden’s Annals of Queen Elizabeth; Kennet’s Life and Characters of Greek Poets; Hody, De Illustribus Graecis; Middleton’s Cicero; Burton’s Melancholy; Barrow’s Sermons; Hobbes’ Leviathan; Joinville’s Life of St. Louis; Froissart’s History of England; Chaucer’s Works; Bayle’s Dictionaire; Corinne; Massinger’s Plays; Fletcher’s do; Bentley’s Phalaris; Peter’s Letters; Letters from Eastern States; Waverley; Cogan On the Passions; Sir Charles Grandison.

Inquirenda

Extent, history of the Troubadours. — Pendragon. — Sir Walter Raleigh’s conceipt of the “Faery Queen.” — Valhalla. — Archipelago. — Paestum. — Taillefer at the battle of Hastings.

 — Illumination (graphic). — Griselda of Boccace. — Walter Raleigh’s account of Theories of Paradise. — Water-spouts.

Extracts from the Record of the (PYTHOLOGIAN?) SOCIETY, of which Emerson was for a time Secretary. 1819-1821

[Although in the Secretary’s book no name is given to the Society, and in the record of the meeting of June 13, 1819, the committee appointed to consider the subject reported that “it is best that the society should have no name,” and that report was accepted, it there appears that Emerson was appointed to prepare a poem for the celebration of the first anniversary of the Society, and read one, as the accompanying extracts show. In the journal covering this period, however, he twice mentions the writing of his “Pythologian Poem.”]

Several members of the Sophomore class met at Gourdin’s room, April 24th, 1819, for the purpose of forming a society, for exercise in composition and discussion: Present, Blood, Emerson, Frye, Gourdin 2d, Hill 2d, James, Reed, and Wood. The question, whether it be expedient to form a society for this purpose, was proposed and debated. Voted unanimously, to form a society, for these purposes; Hill 2d, Wood and Emerson, were chosen to prepare regulations and laws, to be presented at the next meeting. They adjourned to meet at Frye’s room on the second of May, at half-past 7, p. M.

LAWS AND REGULATIONS OF THE —

The great design of public education is to qualify men for usefulness in active life, and the principal arts by which we can be useful are those of writing and speaking.

We are told by those from whose decision there is no appeal that by constant, unwearied practice only can facility and excellence in these arts be attained. We believe that societies, when well regulated, and supported with spirit, are of great use towards acquiring these important qualifications. We therefore agree to form ourselves into a society for writing and extemporaneous speaking, to be called

We engage to endeavour to promote the interests of the society and the mutual improvement of each other by freely receiving and imparting instructions, and we pledge our honour to be governed by the following laws and regulations: —

Article 1. The society shall consist of no more than twelve members, and no person shall be admitted without the consent of every member.

Article 4. Six members shall read compositions at every regular meeting, upon subjects given out by the society, as they are called upon by the Moderator, and six shall discuss subjects proposed at the preceding meeting, each upon the subject assigned him by the society.

Article 5. Two members shall be chosen from those who read compositions to decide the question, and, in case of disagreement, the Moderator shall decide it.

Article 6. Four members shall be chosen by the society to read essays before the society upon subjects of their own choice, two at the meeting nearest the middle of each term to perform at the meeting nearest the middle of the next term, and two at the end of each term to perform at the last meeting of the succeeding term. Any member neglecting or refusing to read a composition or discuss, shall be fined twelve and one-half cents; for neglecting to read an essay, fifty cents. Disorderly or disrespectful conduct shall subject the offender to a fine of six and one-quarter cents; non-attendance shall be fined twelve and one-half cents. Any member coming after the meeting shall be fined six and one-quarter cents.

JOHN ANGIER — GEO. B. JAMES

OLIVER BLOOD — BENJ. T. REED

WARREN BURTON — CHARLES W. UPHAM

RALPH W. EMERSON — NATHL. WOOD

Enoch Frye — Edward Kent John G. K. Gourdin Saml. H. Lyon JOSEPH B. HILL — JOHN M. CHENEY JN. B. HILL

October 25th, 1819.

The next meeting being that of the essays, a committee of three were chosen to provide for the evening: Blood, Gourdin and Lyon. It was found necessary by the society to have a particular sum of money agreed on to be expended essay evenings.

Accordingly, it was voted that two dollars should be the sum; that what the fines did latter also studied law, but was successively a printer, teacher and Presbyterian preaching elder, mainly in Tennessee. During the Civil War he was afield agent of the U. S. Christian Commission and died in that service at Chattanooga.

Charles W. Upham studied divinity and was a minister in Salem. Later, he was mayor of that city and was sent to Congress. His book on the Salem witchcraft is well known.

Edward Kent, a handsome, forcible, and dignified man, was born in Concord, N. H. He studied law and moved to Bangor, Maine, of which city he was mayor. He was twice Governor of Maine, later, Consul at Rio Janeiro, and finally a justice of the Supreme Court of Maine.

John M. Cheney lived in Concord, like Emerson, and was for most of his life cashier of the bank there. not cancel should be paid by an assessment upon the members. Voted to adjourn till Monday evening, 6 o’clock, to Br. Gourdin’s room, November 7th.

Nathaniel Wood, Sec’y.

Monday Ev’g., March 6th, [1820]. Met at Br. Wood’s room according to adjournment. Proceeded to confer on the admission of a new member, vice Upham. Cheney was nominated and elected, and Br. Wood appointed to inform him and invite him to join. Proceeded to the reading of themes. Brs. Lyon and Gourdin being absent, chose by lot as voluntary discussers Blood, vice Gourdin, and Wood, vice Lyon. The first discussion between Kent and Frye was decided in favour of Kent by Blood and Reed judges. After discussion, chose Brs. Kent and Hill 1st to appoint subjects for discussion; Brs. Wood and Burton for themes. The committee for discussions report: —

1st: Which is most conducive to individual happiness, a state of celibacy or matrimony? — Burton and Reed.

2d: Whether Daddy Tracy can be justified in spending his days in Cambridge? — Wood and Blood.

3d: Which is the strongest passion, Love or Ambition? — Emerson.

Committee for themes report, “Envy wishes, and then believes.” Both reports accepted.

Br. Reed requested that the fine which he had paid for non-performance of Essay might be refunded, as he had been sick for three weeks previous to the evening on which it was due, and was then sick and out of town. Much warm debate ensuing, he withdrew the request and it was Voted, That the members of the society as individuals in the situation of Br. Reed would consider an essay as due from them.

Adjourned till Monday evening, a fortnight hence, to meet at 7 o’clock at Br. Emerson’s room.

Attest, R. W. Emerson.

Monday Evg., March noth [1820].

Met according to adjournment, Br. Kent in the chair. Proceeded to reading themes, then to discussion. On account of the absence of Brs. Hill 1st, Gourdin and Lyon, it was Voted that Brs. Frye and Hill 2d be judges of all the discussions. Question arising with regard to the expediency of choosing by lot one who should voluntarily discuss with Br. Emerson, it was Voted, That in the present or a similar instance the single discussor should speak alone. The judges decided the first discussion in favour of Br. Reed (for celibacy!). On examination of the second, the judges reported indecision, and the Moderator decided for Br. Wood. After discussion, proceeded to hear Br. Wood’s report as committee, who reported that Mr. Cheney will join the society with pleasure, but cannot appear till the next meeting. Proceeded to committees. Brs. Blood and Burton, committee for discussions, report: —

1st: Whether the accession of the Canadas to the territory of the U. S. A. would be for the best interest of this country. — Frye and Hill 1st.

2d: Whether Commons be honourable to the progress of College literature. — Kent and Hill 2d.

3d: Whether Cicero or Demosthenes be the greatest orator. — Gourdin and Lyon.

Committee of themes report “Futurity.”

Voted, That the anniversary of this society, the 24th of April next, be celebrated by Oration and Poem. Chose Br. Kent Orator, and Br. Emerson Poet. As the next meeting is Essay night, chose Br. Burton and Emerson committee of arrangements.

Adjourned to Monday Evg., 7 o’clock, to meet at Br. Burton’s room.

Attest, R. W. Emerson, Sec’y.

Monday Evg., April 3d [1820].

Met according to adjournment. Br. Lyon in the chair. Proceeded to hear Br. Hill 1st’s Essay Voted, that the thanks of the society be presented to Br. Hill for his elegant and ingenious performance. Br. Gourdin not being present, proceeded to the convivial business of the evening. Afterwards Br. Gourdin appearing, on account of the lateness of the time, and other considerations, it was Voted, That Br. G.’s Essay should be read at the next ordinary meeting of the society.

Appointed Brs. Hill 2d and Wood to be the Essayists at the meeting in the middle of next term.

Adjourned till April 24th, the anniversary of the Society, to meet at Br. Emerson’s Room, to hear the Oration and Poem.

Attest, R. W. Emerson, Sec’y.

April 26th, 1820.

Met by mistake two days later than the anniversary. Voted, that Br. Gourdin be requested to read his Essay this evening to the society. Proceeded to initiate Br. Cheney, then to hear the Essay. Voted, that the thanks of the society be presented to Br. Gourdin, for his correct and elegant essay. Br. Blood presented Br. Kent’s excuse for non-attendance, and it was Voted, that Br. Emerson be a committee to request Br. Kent to deliver his oration to the society at the earliest convenient opportunity. Proceeded to hear the poem. A treat was then given to the society by the liberality of Brs. Reed and Lyon.

Voted that the thanks of the society be given to Brs. Reed and Lyon for their unexampled munificence. Adjourned to a fortnight from next Monday evening.

Sec. R. W. Emerson.

November 18, 1820.

After several unsuccessful efforts, on the part of the Secretary, to call the society together, a few of the members (affording an instance of disinterestedness and self denial, which reflects the highest honour on themselves) met this evening at Br. Hill’s room. After spending some time in lively conversation, a sufficient number were found present to form a quorum; and, accordingly, the meeting was opened, when, agreeably to the object of the meeting, the Essays were called for.

But Br. Gourdin, from whom one has been some time due, not appearing, his of course was omitted; as was Br. Blood’s for the same reason. The Essayists, whose performances became due this evening, were Brs. Cheney and Emerson. Br. Cheney was, therefore, called upon, and delivered a very elegant and patriotic Essay; for which the sincere thanks of the society were bestowed upon him; a mark of honour incomparably more valuable than medals, which time will tarnish and destroy, or statues, which violence will deface, and barbarism overthrow. —

Here the Secretary would gladly close the record of this evening, and let the critics of Posterity suppose that what he has written above is merely a fragment of what he recorded; and exercise their learning and ingenuity in supplying the deficiency, but truth and fidelity forbid. For (O tempora! O mores!) no sooner had Br. Cheney delivered his Essay, and received the thanks of the Society, as above recorded, than some of the members present began to express uneasiness at being any longer detained; and that, although Br. Emerson was prepared to read the Essay due from him. Strange infatuation! But such was their desire to depart that it was found impossible to keep them together any longer. The meeting was therefore adjourned. —

Attest, — E. FRYE, Secretary.

February 26th, 1821.

Wonderful to relate! within an hour of the time appointed, a larger number of the members than have attended any meeting since I have had the honour to be Sec’y, met at No. 4 Holworthy Hall to hear the Essays due last time, and the anniversary oration due from time not quite immemorial, but so long that it should have been delivered almost a year ago. — The meeting was then opened (with Br. Kent in the chair) and the oration called for. But Br. Kent, not having had sufficient time, we may suppose, to prepare himself since he was chosen Orator, desired that it might be postponed till the next anniversary (April 24th); which was agreed to by the society. We shall then verify the old proverb, by killing two birds with one stone. Having settled this business, Br. Burton was called on for his Essay, which has been due almost as long as the Oration. But not being prepared, it was Voted, after hearing his excuse, “that it be delivered on the evening of the Monday nearest the fifteenth of April.” — Br. Gourdin being absent, his Essay of course was not read. Br. Blood, whose Essay was due at the same time with Br. Gourdin’s, was next called on. — But it appearing that, by some fatal mistake, he had left it in Sterling, or elsewhere, a vote was passed to hear it with Br. Burton’s. Thus we despatch business. No Essay now remained to be heard except Br. Emerson’s; which was not read last term on account of circumstances mentioned page 46 of this volume. He was, therefore, called on to read now. And, oh! how the Secretary’s heart beat with joy, when he actually saw him arise from his seat, and, taking a roll of paper from his pocket, seat himself by the table! Rejoice with me, my Brethren, for we shall yet hear an Essay this evening. — He accordingly read a very “Elegant and appropriate Essay” for which he received the unanimous and (let me add) the most sincere thanks of the society.

All business relative to performances being thus finished, Br. Hill 2d was chosen committee of one to wait on Br. Gourdin, and inform him that, unless he, in future, attend the meetings of the society more regularly than in times past, he shall be expelled. Br. Blood was likewise chosen committee of one to wait on Br. Lyon for the same purpose....

And now, as my term of service has expired, I must leave it with him [Hill, the new Secretary] to transmit to posterity the very interesting proceedings of this society, while I with true firmness of mind (Oh! the sweets of power!), will descend to a private station. So farewell to all my greatness; Frye’s occupation’s gone!

Attest, Enoch Frye, Sec’y.

Wednesday, March 21, 1821.

Met at Br. Blood’s, and let us look up, for the day of restoration draweth nigh. With rapture do I record the proceedings of this joyful evening.

Imprimis: Br. Wood filled the chair with superior dignity, in which gravity and imposing majesty were predominant. The house was then called to order, and we were favoured with a most ingenious, amusing, and humorous performance by Br. Blood, entitled, “journal travels, etc” in the country. The effect which this produced upon us was — I can not tell how powerful — and therefore shall not attempt to describe it, — it baffled description. Therefore we will drop that subject and turn to a milder atmosphere, and calmer sky. — Br. Emerson next advanced, with a neat, concise and pithy comparison of country and city life, much to the edification of the Brotherhood. Br. Wood then obliged us with an original and, no doubt, very accurate description of “country life,” in which he drew aside the curtain, that is, opened the door and introduced us, at once, into the interior of a Yeoman’s dwelling. We were very much pleased with the mistake which the master of the house, “good easy soul” made, by taking his guest at first for an Ass, or some other outlandish beast. But on awaking from his nap, he saw his error, and gave him such a cordial reception, that we were charmed with “country life.” Themes being despatched, proceeded to discussion. The first, Hill 2d solus, Gourdin absent, decided in his favour of course. Then the important Dowling question was discussed by Kent and Frye. In the progress of which the former displayed an interest, an eloquence, warmth of feeling, and sensibility in defence of Patrick Dowling, a Catholic Irishman, which did equal honour to his head and his heart. He even rose to the Sublime in defence of this great and much injured man, interlarded with specimens of the most beautiful Pathos. His feelings indeed were so much affected, that they choked his utterance, but his expressive countenance did more for his cause than all the letters in the alphabet. Brother Frye on the contrary produced many “knockdown” arguments, which had a manifest tendency to disprove all his opponent had advanced. He assailed him with invectives and contradictions in abundance. Displayed much sophistry, satire, humour, in his attack upon the maculate Dowling. He would even gladly have buried him in a hole of his own digging, into which a fit of intoxication had plunged him. This being a case of peculiar importance, instead of committing the decision, as usual, to two members only, the secretary formally took the opinion of all present; and notwithstanding the obstinate virulence, and the position of Mr. Attorney Frye, the Patrick was cleared by a majority of one. So may intemperance triumph!

Committees: Kent and Hill 2d, For Discussions, reported the following which were accepted.

1: Whether it be beneficial to the students to spend much time in the acquisition of the polite accomplishment. — Burton and Emerson.

2: A Conference. On the comparative interest excited by the lectures of Ware, Willard and Everett. — Blood, Cheney and Wood.

Blood and Cheney, for themes, reported: “The miseries of human life.” Accepted.

Voted to adjourn to the 5 April next, to meet at Burton’s, at 7 o’clock p. M.

April 5, 1821.

Met at Burton’s....

Kent and Hill 2d, judges of the discussion by Burton and Emerson, decided in the negative, in favour of Burton.

       Attest,    Jos. B. HILL, Sec.

May 1st, 1821.

Met at Brother Blood’s to hear Br. Kent’s anniversary oration. Liberal provision had been made for social conviviality, to which two bottles of wine, handed over by brother Emerson, not a little contributed, and for which by a public vote the society bestowed their warmest thanks to brother Emerson. Br. Cheney filled the chair, and after a cheerful glass the orator held forth on —

[H ere the records of the society come to an abrupt end, excepting certain accounts in the end of the books, and the following official declaration: — ]

I, R.W. Emerson, committee of arrangements, have received of R. W. Emerson, Secretary, the sum of two dollars for each essay-meeting in the past term collected from fine and assessment, and likewise the donations made to the society on the anniversary meeting, &c., and have faithfully expended the same for the best interests of the society, as far as my limited apprehension would assist me. There remains in the Treasury the sum of one cent, being the donation of Br. Oliver Blood to the Society — which I shall pay on the demand of the new Secretary.

Signed, R. W. Emerson.

JOURNAL III

“NO. XVIII”

1820

[Between, or contemporary with “Wide Worlds,” Nos. 1 and 2, is a manuscript book, marked as above, a few specimens from which are here given. Besides these, it contains notes on College lectures, and extracts copied from the books he was reading; also some very juvenile criticism of Wordsworth, especially the “Excursion,” and notes for his prize dissertation “On the Present State of Ethical Philosophy,” which, as has been said, Rev. Dr. Edward Everett Hale printed, with that on Socrates, accompanying his sketch of Emerson.

The note-book also has fragments on the Religion of the Middle Ages, Religious Tendencies of Different States of Society, on Poetry, et cætera. Of romance also there are a few pages, “The Magician,” and an unnamed one about a witch-wife; also various scraps of verse, including part of a ballad on King Richard.

But much space is given in this and some of the following “Wide Worlds” to a discussion of the Drama, especially in America. He attacks it in a daring and violent manner, praising the Greek tragedies, but his youthful sense of morality is outraged by the grossness of passages in the Elizabethan dramatists, and his taste disgusted by the degeneracy of the later drama. It must be borne in mind, however, first, that it is doubtful whether the youth had ever been inside of a play-house; second, that the writings in question were probably prepared for a debate in the Pythologian Society, in which he had his part assigned; hence, do not exactly represent Emerson’s views at the time, especially as, somewhat later, he adopts a much less stringent tone, and believes that the Theatre in America might be reformed, and become an elevating influence, from which, however, Shakespeare with all his charms, must be excluded, unless severely expurgated.]

“NO. XVIII”

Boston, September 22d, 1820.

Where dost thou careless lie

Buried in ease and sloth?

Knowledge that sleeps doth die;

And this security,

It is the common moth Which eats on wits and arts, and quite destroys them both.

Are all the Aonian springs

Dryed up? Lies Thespia waste?

Does Clarius’ harp want strings?

That not a nymph now sings,

Or droop they as disgraced

To see their seats and bowers by chattering pies defaced?

          BEN JONSON TO HIMSELF.

DRAMA Campbell, the poet, said to Professor Everett that the only chance which America has for a truly national literature is to be found in the Drama; we are bound to reverence such high authority, and at least to examine the correctness of the position.

Few speculations have such a charm in their nature as this, whose object is, how to conduct a dialogue between a man and his fellow just far enough removed from common life to avoid disgust while it must claim the attention and elevate the tone of feeling.

In the nation which has always been regarded as the model in all the arts, the fountain of all polished letters, and the pattern of all time, the Drama was invented, and there alone succeeded perfectly. All inquiries therefore upon this subject begin from Greece. The history and influence of tragedy, its modes and machines of operation, must be explained from these sources.

Tragedy, by exciting the emotions of fear and of pity, tends to correct the same affections in the soul. This has been all along esteemed the philosophy of tragedy, with what correctness we shall not pretend to determine; but these ends were answered in Greece, and more than this, a respect for the gods was effectually inculcated. The thraldom of superstition was made useful to shackle those whom the light and law of natural religion could not guide, and he whom the beauty of moral rectitude could not win, was afraid to face the temple of the Furies, and averted his head as he passed by it. But by whom was this powerful influence created over a people whose refined taste kept a watchful eye on the artist, so that it should not be seduced unawares, and never yielded save to the irresistible might of genius? In what schools did they purchase the subtle art which became in their hands an instrument of such power? This question is the most important which can be asked, for it developes the causes of their preeminence. It was not the robed disciple at ease in the Academy who gained the prize of tragedy, but Æschylus was a son of the republic who had fought valiantly at Marathon and Plataea, and came bleeding from the battle, to assemble in a simple natural plot the personages of old traditions, and attribute to them the feelings he had just felt, and place them in circumstances in which himself had been placed. Miraculous effects have been recorded of their representation; but by whom and how were they performed? In answer to this we all know how the primitive stage differed from the modern; that all was on a magnificent scale, that the actors were transformed to giants, and the strength of their voices increased by a metallic mouthpiece. But that which formed their chief distinction were their independent habits of feeling, of sentiment, of invention. This is illustrated by an anecdote of their theatre. Polus, the first actor on the stage, was preparing to perform the part of Electra. In this piece Electra embraces the urn supposed to hold the remains of Orestes. The Greek actor ordered that the urn containing the ashes of his own son should be brought from the tomb and conveyed to the theatre; and when, on the stage, this urn was offered to him and the father bent over it, he rent the air with no mimic grief or insincere howlings, but the whole audience was melted with the moving picture of his grief and lamentation.

When the light had failed from the Greek theatre which those masters had poured upon it, it would have violated the common order of events had an equal illumination been rekindled. The frivolous Comic Muse, hitherto of slight esteem, grew into favour and trode fast on the steps of sceptred Tragedy. The witty and offensive Aristophanes parodied the eloquent declamation of Euripides, mimicked the awful port of princes and gods, and converted the general satire of the old comedians into a vicious personal ribaldry. Finally the civil authority interfered to stop its flagrant abuses.

The tragedy was not inherited by Rome, which scrupulously incorporated all the arts of Athens. It was too delicate a treasure to be lightly transmitted by instruction or won with the spoils.

In France, during the dark ages, the castle of feudal chieftains witnessed a second rude drama, the name and character of which is all that remains. The “Mysteries” served to shew that it was a natural expression of the human feelings.

In England, the progress was somewhat similar, but the first productions which were marked for fame are works of prodigious power and their origin is sudden and unaccountable. From an obscurity which none had illuminated since Chaucer’s era, there suddenly issued a series of elegant and original performances equal in power to the masterpieces of Greece, and adorned by a strain of such delicate feeling, and the wisdom of solid and rare philosophy, in verse wherein was breathed the very melody of nature to arrest the soul withal.

Over all this fair miracle a hideous corruption was spread which made every page offensive. It is wonderful how intimately health and poison, beauty and destruction, can combine, and nowhere shall we find such a fatal illustration. The inhabitants of England have sat down rejoicing in the light which Shakspeare’s genius hath shed around them, unconscious or careless of the defilement which attends us....

Shall we be told that Shakspeare painted nature as he found it, that we only see here what we see elsewhere in the scenes of life daily? No, he paints nature, not in innocence and its primitive condition, but not until it has become depraved itself, and its exhibition will deprave others. Nor is the general moral which is to be deduced from the whole pure....

Shakspeare assumed the commanding attitude of bold unrivalled genius; men saw that the inspiration was genuine, and few were so scrupulous as to ask if all were here....

The statue is colossal but its diabolical features poison our admiration for the genius which conceived and the skilful hand which carved it.

[THE EXACT SCIENCES]

Of all the sciences the science of the Mind is necessarily the most worthy and elevating. But it cannot precede the others. Natural Philosophy and Mathematics must be sought in order to gain first, the comforts of civilized life, and then the data whence our moral reasonings proceed. It is an old saying that all are a circle, and necessarily depend on one another; that great improvements in Astronomy involve a knowledge of Mathematics, and so of the others. We exist to moral purposes and are proud to call ourselves intellectual beings! Hence, one would say, Leave matter to the beasts that are only matter, and indulge your peculiar and distinguishing faculties. But then our reason and all our mental powers are called into as active exercise in demonstrating the properties of matter as the properties of mind, and the beasts are alike incapable of both. So your plea confutes itself.

With regard then to the study of Natural Philosophy, I do not think any one study so contributes to expand the mind as our first correct notions of this science; — when we first know that the sky is not a shell, but a vacant space, that the world is not still and a plain, but a little globe, performing, as one of a system, immense revolutions....

DEDICATION

Quem fugia? aut quis tc nostris complexibus arcet?

Hacc memorans, cinerem et sopitos suscitât ignes.

Virgilian lot.

(This song to one whose unimproved talents and unattained friendship have interested the writer in his character and fate.)

By the unacknowledged tie

Which binds us to each other,

By the pride of feeling high

Which friendship’s name can smother;

By the cold encountering eyes

Whose language deeply thrilling

Rebelled against the prompt surmise

Which told the heart was willing;

By all which you have felt and feel,

My eager glance returning,

I offer to this silent zeal

On youthful altars burning.

All the classic hours which fill

The little urn of honour; Minerva guide and pay the pen

Your hand conferred upon her.

TRANSLATION OF MONTAIGNE TO MONSIEUR CHARRON

May fortune bless thee

And friends caress thee

Remote from care, but loved by me;

The gifts of Pleasure

In boundless treasure

Not withheld, but poured on thee.

Garlanded with roses

At eve thy friend reposes,

Yet looks for joys that boundless be.

R. W. E.

When Jove’s grey daughter, beldame Care,

On crimson couches first was laid,

Her thousand wrinkled children there

Scowled on poor Man — to all betrayed.

There was a little Fairy then

Of crooked form, whose name was S,

Who bade the miscreants join to form

A smiling cherub, hight Caress.

“Doth not the Queen of the woods gather the secrets of futurity when she reads the decaying oak leaves, and can she not tell the young man how to guide his steps in life?”

JOURNAL IV

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 2

[Emerson was now a Senior, seventeen years old, and with his loved brother, Edward Bliss Emerson, who had just entered the Freshman class, occupied room No. 9 Hollis.]

October, 1820.

I have determined to grant a new charter to my pen, having finished my commonplace book, which I commenced in January, and with as much success as I was ambitious of — whose whole aim was the small utility of being the exchequer to the accumulating store of organized verbs, nouns and substantives, to wit, sentences. It has been a source of entertainment, and accomplished its end, and on this account has induced me to repeat or rather continue the experiment. Wherefore, On!

To forget for a season the world and its concerns, and to separate the soul for sublime contemplation till it has lost the sense of circumstances, and is decking itself in plumage drawn out from the gay wardrobe of Fancy, is a recreation and a rapture of which few men can avail themselves. But this privilege, in common with other great gifts of Nature, is attainable if not inborn. It is denied altogether to three classes at least of mankind, viz.: the queer, the downright, and the ungainly. This is by no means a careless or fanciful classification, although rather a restricted sense belongs to these epithets. By “the queer” I understand those animals of oddity whose disgusting eccentricity flows from a conceited character and the lack of common sense. I characterize “the downright” only as people who do jobs. And “the ungainly” points exclusively at some quaint lantern countenances who have at one time and another shocked my nerves and nauseated my taste by their hideous aspects. With cautious explanation we advance from these degraded stages of intellect, this doleful frontispiece of creation, to prouder orders of mind. Ordinary men claim the intermittent exercise of this power of beautiful abstraction; but to the souls only of the mightiest is it given to command the disappearance of land and sea, and mankind and things, and they vanish. Then comes the Enchanter illuminating the glorious vision with hues from heaven, granting thoughts of other worlds gilded with lustre of ravishment and delight, till the Hours, teeming with loveliness and Joy, roll by uncounted. Exulting in the exercise of this prerogative, the poet, truly called so, has entreated the reluctant permission.

“And forever shalt thou dwell

In the spirit of this spell.”

October 6th, 1820

I have listened this evening to an eloquent lecture of the elegant Professor of French and Spanish Literature on the subject of the extent of the language, a subject which bears on the face of it dullness and dread — every soul present warmly acknowledged the force of delineation when the great deluge of the French language, sweeping down all the feeble barriers of ephemeral dialects, carried captive the languages and literature of all Europe, while in the commotions of politics the German thrones were dashed to pieces against each other on this great and wide sea.

When bounding Fancy leaves the clods of earth

To riot in the regions of her birth,

Where, robed in light, the Genii of the Stars

Launch in refulgent space their diamond cars,

Or in pavilions of celestial pride,

Serene above all influente beside,

Vent the bold joy which swells the glorious soul

Rich with the rapture of secure controul,

Onward, around, their golden visions stray

Till only Glory can their range delay.

Well, I began with prose and have mustered up ten lines of poetry, which will answer rarely to lighten the labour of the next theme. It is half past 10, and time to put away The Wide World and its concerns, and consign my indolent limbs to comfortable repose. Ergo cease, my pen, “To witch the world with noble penmanship!”

October 12th.

I should write a theme this morning, but cruel Destiny forbids the thought of rainbow colours to rise. I want to write poetry to add to “When bounding,” etc.

October 15th. Different mortals improve resources of happiness which are entirely different. This I find more apparent in the familiar instances obvious at college recitations. My more fortunate neighbours exult in the display of mathematical study, while I, after feeling the humiliating sense of dependence and inferiority, which, like the goading, soul-sickening sense of extreme poverty, palsies effort, esteem myself abundantly compensated, if with my pen, I can marshal whole catalogues of nouns and verbs, to express to the life the imbecility I felt....

Mr. Everett says:— “the shout of admiration is lost ere it reaches the arches of heaven, but there is an all-seeing eye which looks deep down into the recesses of the obscurest heart. It is a small matter to abstain from vice to which there is no temptation, or to perform a virtue which is standing by you with crowns for your head; but it is the obscure, struggling and unsuccessful virtue which meets with reward.” Exhibition night. This tumultuous day is done. The character of its thought-weather is always extremely singular. Fuller than any other day of great thoughts and poets’ dreams, of hope and joy and pride, and then closed with merriment and wine, evincing or eliciting gay, fraternal feeling enough; but brutalized and defiled with excess of physical enjoyment; leaving the mind distracted and unfit for pursuits of soberness. Barnwell’s Oration contained sublime images. — One was of great power — a terrible description of the fire-tempest which overshadowed Sodom and Gomorrha — another description of the waterspout of the Pacific was noble. A great struggle of ambition is going on between Barnwell and Upham. Thundering and lightning are faint and tame descriptions of the course of astonishing eloquence. You double the force of painting if you describe it as it is.

The flashing eye, that fills up the chasms of language, the living brow, throwing meaning and intellect into every furrow and every frown; the stamping foot, the labouring limbs, the desperate gesture, these must all be seen in their strong exercise, before the vivid conception of their effect can be adequately felt. And then a man must separate and discipline and intoxicate his mind before he can enjoy the glory of the orator, when mighty thoughts come crowding on the soul; he must learn to harrow up unwelcome recollections and concentrate woe and horror and disgust till his own heart sickens; he must stretch forth his arm and array the bright ideas which have settled around him till they gather to forceful and appalling sublimity.

October 24th.

I begin to believe in the Indian doctrine of eye-fascination. The cold blue eye of — has so intimately connected him with my thoughts and visions that a dozen times a day, and as often by night, I find myself wholly wrapt up in conjectures of his character and inclinations. We have had already two or three long profound stares at each other. Be it wise or weak or superstitious, I must know him.

Perhaps thy lot in life is higher

Than the Fates assign to me,

While they fulfil thy large desire,

And bid my hopes as visions flee.

But grant me still in joy or sorrow,

In grief or hope, to claim thy heart,

And I will then defy the morrow

Whilst I fulfil a loyal part.

October 25.

I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid and hollow. This is somewhat appalling and, if I do not discipline myself with diligent care, I shall suffer severely from remorse and the sense of inferiority hereafter. All around me are industrious and will be great, I am indolent and shall be insignificant. Avert it, heaven! avert it, virtue! I need excitement.

November 1.

My opinion of — was strangely lowered by hearing that he was “proverbially idle.” This was redeemed by learning that he was a “superior man.” This week, a little eventful in college, has brought a share of its accidents to him.

November 2.

What a grand man was Milton! so marked by nature for the great Epic Poet that was to bear up the name of these latter times. In “Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty,” written while young, his spirit is already communing with itself and stretching out in its colossal proportions and yearning for the destiny he was appointed to fulfil.

November 10.

“The Abbot” must be to its author “a source of unmixed delight and unchastened pride.”

November 10.

A RECIPE!!!

Young Waldo, when in your thick-coming whims, you feel an itching to engrave, take a piece of glass and cover it with a thin film of wax or isinglass and trace the proposed figure with a steel point. Place this over a vessel containing a mixture of powdered fluor-spar, and sulphuric acid gently heated. The acid gas coming into contact with the uncovered parts of the glass combines with and removes the silex, as well probably as the alkali with which it is united, and lines more or less deep are thus formed — according to Gorham’s Chemistry (Article, Silicon), page 265, volume one.

Observe this. Mr. Everett notices that a temperate climate has always been found necessary to a high national character.

Also, Mr. Waldo, if you would like to find the sublimest attainable sayings on the destruction of nations, Vide 4th book of the Sybilline Collections.

November 18th.

I shall subjoin some recipes for the terrible void which ruins ever and anon the mind’s peace, and is otherwise called

Unhappiness.

1. — Take Scott’s Novels and read carefully the mottoes of the chapters; or, if you prefer reading a novel itself, take the “Bride of Lammermoor.” 1

2. — Sometimes (seldom) the finest parts of Cowper’s “Task” will answer the purpose. I refer to the home-scenes.

3. — For the same reason that I would take Scott’s mottoes, I would also take an old tragedy such as Ben Jonson’s, Otway’s, Congreve’s; in short, any thing of that kind which leads as far as possible from the usual trains of thought.

4. — Make recipes to add to this list.

December 4th, 1820.

Here at Cambridge in my cheerless schoolroom. Sunday Evening I heard Mr. Everett preach at the Old South a charity sermon — one of his most (perhaps the most) eloquent efforts.

December 5th.

It appears to me that it is a secret of the art of eloquence to know that a powerful aid would be derived from the use of forms of language which were generally known to men in their infancy, and which now, under another and unknown garb, but forcibly reminding them of early impressions, are likely to be mistaken for opinions whose beginning they cannot recollect, and therefore suppose them innate. At least, if by such operation they cannot convince the mind, they may serve to win attention by this awakening but ambiguous charm. By these forms of language I mean a paraphrase of some sentence in a Primer or other child’s book common to the country. The spell would be more perfect, perhaps, if, instead of such a paraphrase, the words of a sentence should be modulated to the cadence of the aforesaid infant literature. I dare not subjoin an example.

The human soul, the world, the universe are labouring on to their magnificent consummation. We are not fashioned thus marvellously for naught. The straining conceptions of man, the monuments of his reason and the whole furniture of his faculties is [sic] adapted to mightier views of things than the mightiest he has yet beheld. Roll on, then, thou stupendous Universe, in sublime, incomprehensible solitude, in an unbeheld but sure path. The finger of God is pointing out your way. And when ages shall have elapsed and time is no more, while the stars shall fall from heaven and the Sun become darkness and the moon blood, human intellect, purified and sublimed, shall mount to perfection of unmeasured and ineffable enjoyment of knowledge and glory. Man shall come to the presence of Jehovah. (In the manner of Chateaubriand.)

December 15th.

I claim and clasp a moment’s respite from this irksome school to saunter in the fields of my own wayward thought. The afternoon was gloomy and preparing to snow, — dull, ugly weather. But when I came out from the hot, steaming, stoved, stinking, dirty, A-B spellingschool-room, I almost soared and mounted the atmosphere at breathing the free magnificent air, the noble breath of life. It was a delightful exhilaration; but it soon passed off.

It is impossible that the distribution of rewards hereafter should not be in gradation. How inconsistent with justice would it be that all the boundless varieties of desert and condition should be levelled to a single lot — all, from the agonized martyr, who was sawn asunder for the faith, to the deathbed of a modern Christian, where a soul which was never tempted, and a sinless innocence which was never tried, has sighed out a harmless life on beds of down and accompanied and piloted to heaven by the prayerful sympathy of the saints on earth. (In the manner of Everett.)

The other day read Edinburgh Review of Drummond’s “Academic Questions.” The review and the reviewed are both beautiful specimens of an elegant metaphysical style.

Attended Mr. Ticknor’s Lecture on Voltaire.

1821

January 9th, 1821. Have heard to-day another consecrated display of genius — of the insinuating and overwhelming effect of eloquent manners and style, when made sacred and impregnable by the subject which they are to enforce — Mr. Everett’s sermon before the Howard Benevolent Society. He told a very affecting anecdote. “I have known a woman in this town go out to work with her own hands to pay for the wooden coffin which was to enclose the dust of her only child. I prayed with her when there was none to stand by her but he who was to bear that dust to the tomb.”

There was a vast congregation, but while he spoke as silent as death. Unluckily, in the pauses, however, they shook the house with their hideous convulsions; for when he raised his handkerchief to his face after a pause in the sermon, it seemed almost a concerted signal for the Old South to cough.

Let those now cough who never coughed before, And those who always cough, cough now the more.

February 7th.

The religion of my Aunt is the purest and most sublime of any I can conceive. It appears to be based on broad and deep and remote principles of expediency and adequateness to an end —— principles which few can comprehend and fewer feel. It labours to reconcile the apparent insignificancy of the field to the surpassing grandeur of the Operator, and founds the benignity and Mercy of the Scheme on adventurous but probable comparisons of the condition of other orders of being. Although it is an intellectual offspring of beauty and splendour, if that were all, it breathes a practical spirit of rigid and austere devotion. It is independent of forms and ceremonies, and its ethereal nature gives a glow of soul to her whole life. She is the Weird-woman of her religion, and conceives herself always bound to walk in narrow but exalted paths, which lead onward to interminable regions of rapturous and sublime glory.

March 14th.

I am reading Price, on Morals, and intend to read it with care and commentary. I shall set down here what remarks occur to me upon the matter or manner of his argument. On the 56th page, Dr. Price says that right and wrong are not determined by any reasoning or deduction, but by the ultimate perception of the human mind. It is to be desired that this were capable of satisfactory proof, but, as it is in direct opposition to the sceptical philosophy, it cannot stand unsupported by strong and sufficient evidence. I will however read more and see if it is proved or no. — He saith that the Understanding is this ultimate determiner.

CAMBRIDGE, March 25.

Sabbath.

I am sick — if I should die what would become of me? We forget ourselves and our destinies in health, and the chief use of temporary sickness is to remind us of these concerns. I must improve my time better. I must prepare myself for the great profession I have purposed to undertake. I am to give my soul to God and withdraw from sin and the world the idle or vicious time and thoughts I have sacrificed to them; and let me consider this as a resolution by which I pledge myself to act in all variety of circumstances, and to which I must recur often in times of carelessness and temptation, to measure my conduct by the rule of conscience.

CAMBRIDGE, April 1.

It is Sabbath again, and I am for the most part recovered. Is it a wise dispensation that we can never know what influence our own prayers have in restoring the health we have prayed God to restore? It has been thought by some that in these immediate effects they have no influence; in general, that their good is prospective and that the world is governed by Providence through the instrumentality of general laws, which are only broken on the great occasions of the world or other portions of the Creator’s works. But what have I wandered from? I think that it infinitely removes heavenly dispensations from earthly ones. This manner of giving gifts without expressing the reason for which they are bestowed, and leaving it to the heart to make the application, and to discover the giver, is worthy of a supreme, ineffable intelligence.

Well, I am sorry.... The anecdote which I accidentally heard of — shews him more like his neighbours than I should wish him to be. I shall have to throw him up after all, as a cheat of fancy. Before I ever saw him, I wished my friend to be different from any individual I had seen. I invested him with a solemn cast of mind, full of poetic feeling, and an idolater of friendship, and possessing a vein of rich sober thought.

For a year I have entertained towards him the same feelings and should be sorry to lose him altogether before we have ever exchanged above a dozen words.

May 2.

I am more puzzled than ever with— ‘s conduct. He came out to meet me yesterday, and I, observing him, just before we met, turned another corner and most strangely avoided him. This morning I went out to meet him in a different direction, and stopped to speak with a lounger, in order to be directly in— ‘sway; but — turned into the first gate and went towards Stoughton. All this [took place (?)] without any apparent design and as [soberly (?)] as if both were intent on some tremendous affair.

May 10th.

Huzza for my Magician! he engages me finely. I am as interested in the tale and as anxious to know the end as any other reader could be. By the by, this tale of mine might be told with powerful effect by a man of good voice and natural eloquence.

June 10.

Mr. Everett in his Artillery Election sermon, to preface his own prophecy that the century now begun (i e. third century since the Plymouth landing) will be the most important in determining the future fates of America, told this story: — In 1417, when Huss was bound to the stake at Prague, he declared amid his tortures that after a hundred years a retribution should be made on papacy. The inhabitants of Prague wrote his words “Post centum annos” upon their standard and in their records, and in 1517 the Reformation by Luther began.

Books Lent

Kett’s Elements, both vols., to Angier. Telemaque, to Stackpole I.

Lacroix, to Gutterson.

Locke, 2. Vol., to Hill.

III and IV Cantoes of Childe Harold, — both lost.

Guy Mannering, to Lane.

Rhyming Dictionary, to Williams, A. B. Blair’s Rhetoric (abridgement), to Hooper.

Lay of the Last Minstrel, Lothrop.

Lady of the Lake, to Idem.

Adams’s Antiquities.

Books Inquirenda Mather’s Magnalia.

Dunlop’s History of Fiction.

Mattaire.

Swift. Froissart.

Davy’s Chemistry.

Teignmouth’s life of Jones.

Simmon’s life of Milton. 3 Vol of Brit. Plutarch.

Chaucer.

Montaigne’s Essays.

Germany (Stael).

Drummond’s Academical Questions.

Price, on Morals.

Humboldt’s Work on America.

Smith’s Virginia.

Robertson’s S. America.

History of Philip II.

Life of Shakspeare.

Subjects for Themes

Destruction of a city; poetry.

(Forensic) Whether Civil Government be founded on a compact expressed or implied.

The domestic relations as restraints on an adventurous spirit.

Influence of weather on intellectual temperament.

Character of any fancy portrait, as for instance.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNALS OF 1820 AND 1821

Bible, Apocrypha.

Pythagoras; Anaxagoras; Aristotle; Xenophon’s and Plato’s accounts of Socrates; Homer; Æschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; Aristophanes; Archelaus; Theocritus (apud Kennet’s Greek Poets).

Cicero; Lucretius; Virgil; Horace; Epictetus; Arrian; Marcus Antoninus; Epicurus; Zendavesta, (apud Gibbon); Arthurian Romances; De Joinville, Chronicle of St. Louis; Plays and Masques of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson (The Alchymist), Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Otway; Bacon, Novum Organum; Milton, Paradise Lost, Comus, Samson Agonis tes; Rev. Isaac Barrow; Montaigne, Essays; Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes; Chateaubriand; Cowper, Task; Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel; Corneille; Racine; Hobbes; Swift; Sterne; Addison; Pope; Descartes; Cudworth; Locke; Woolaston; Shaftsbury; Mosheim; Hume, Essays; Priestly; Paley; Dugald Stewart; Dr. Reid; Dr. Price, On Morals; Mellen, On Divine Vengeance; Forsyth, Principles of Moral Science; Bishop Hall.

Johnson, Lives of the Poets; Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Burke, Regicide Peace; Bissel, Life of Burke; Edward Search’s [Abraham Tucker] Writings.

Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics; Scott, Guy Mannering, Old Mortality, Monastery, and Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; Lockhart, Spanish Ballads; Moore, Lalla Rookh; Campbell, Poems; Wordsworth, Excursion; Southey, Curse of Kehama; Byron, Manfred, Corsair, and Childe Harold; Charles Lamb, Essays; Maclaurin, Life of Sir Isaac Newton; Dean Milman, Samor, the Lord of the Bright City, and Fall of Jerusalem; Hillhouse, Percy1 s Masque; Bryant, Waterfowl, and Murdered Traveller; Edward Everett’s Lectures; Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews.

THE UNIVERSE

[During the years 1820 and 1821 Emerson kept a Quotation Book, named as above, made up of passages from his miscellaneous reading in the College Library or whatever other treasure-houses of letters were open to him. These passages are neatly copied in a small hand on folio sheets, numbered, which were afterwards folded once and placed in a cover. The range is somewhat remarkable and a list is given below.]

Spenser’s View of the State of Ireland, apud Warton.

Diversions of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honor; Harrison, apud Hollinshed’s Chronicle.

Verses of Homer, sung by him and a chorus of boys before the houses of the rich men in Samos; original Greek and a metrical rendering, apud Basil Kennet’s Lives and Characters of the Greek Poets, 1697.

Pope Gregory VII’s Excommunication of the Emperor Henry IV, apud Berington’s Abelard and Heloisa.

Queen Elizabeth’s infatuation for the Earl of Leicester, apud Camden’s Annales Elizabethae.

Extract from a scene in Byron’s Manfred.

Chaucer’s account of his sufferings in prison.

Extract from letter of Cicero to Plancus, Middleton’s Cicero.

Extract from poem by Cornwall, describing a pauper’s burial.

Close of the conference between the Jewess Rebecca and Brian de Bois Gilbert, in Scott’s Ivanhoe.

Death and funeral of Spenser, Camden.

Erasmus’s (Latin) epigram to Sir T. More, when he did not return the borrowed horse of the latter.

Alleged epitaph written by Virgil for himself.

The pedantry of the times of Queen Elizabeth, Warton.

On the Art of Rhetorick, Richard Wilson, apud Burnett.

On Bessarion, by Marcus Ficinus, apud Hody, De Graecis Illustribus.

Suppressed passage from Soliloquy of Bertram in play by Maturin, apud Edinburgh Review.

Passage from Shipwreck in Byron’s Don Juan.

Extract from Sermon of Rev. Isaac Barrow, on comparative ineffectiveness of Human Laws.

Concerning Shakespeare. Ben Jonson’s Discoveries.

Concerning Bacon.

Collins’s Ode, “How sleep the brave.”

Extract from Hebrew Melodies, Byron.

Meg Merrilies’ denunciation of the Laird of Ellangowan. Her prophecy of good to his son. Guy Mannering.

On shaking off Cupid’s yoke, and on Emulation; Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

Song of Runic Bard [quoted later in “Poetry and Imagination” in Letters and Social Aims, p. 59], Godwin.

Sforza’s speech on his misfortunes. Duke of Milan; Massinger.

Meditation on Conscience; Bishop Hall.

Concluding passage of C. W. Upham’s Oration, Exhibition, Aug. 1820.

The shadowing out of Paradise Lost; a long extract from Milton’s Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, beginning “Although a poet, soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him” etc.

Speech of Sir Bohort over the dead body of Lancelot. Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Romances.

The Mourning Bride; Congreve.

The power of Chance in human inventions; Bacon’s Novum Organum (Part 2 Section II).

Epitaph on Pizarro; Southey.

Long Extract from Idealist; Drummond’s Academical Questions.

Reasonings a priori; Moral Outline, Dugald Stewart.

The angels the guides of the heavenly bodies; sermon of Jeremy Taylor.

Dialogue between a tyrant and a Stoic; Arrian, Priestley’s translation.

Favourite passage, beginning “The unearthly voices ceased” in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto I.

Dreams, from The Castle of Indolence, Thomson.

Extracts from Scenes between Viola and the Duke, in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare.

Spenser’s lamentation; Mother Hubberd’s Tale.

The Nightingale; Thomson’s Seasons.

Extract from the Magnalia Christi of Cotton Mather, as to the number of settlers in Massachusetts Bay.

Lord Bacon’s expostulation with Queen Elizabeth, in a letter to the Earl of Devonshire.

Song from Gipsies Metamorphosed, Ben Jonson.

“Ode to Melancholy”; The Passionate Madman, Beaumont and Fletcher.

Extract from Lord Her ries* Complaint, C. K. Sharpe, apud Drake’s Essays.

The Origin of Fable; Éloge de Fontaine.

The Mariner’s Dream.

Song of the Clown, Twelfth Night.

The Lombards’ loss of opportunity to establish federated republics; Hallam’s Middle Ages.

Decline of Ecclesiastical Power of Rome; Hallam’s Middle Ages.

The defensive power and successes of federated republics. Sismondi, Histoire des Républiques Italiens du Moyen Age.

The bad omens attending the commencement of hostilities when Charles I set up his standard at Nottingham; Clarendon s History.

The character of Cromwell; Clarendon s History.

To the herb Rosemary; H. Kirke White.

Preface to one of Elizabeth’s costly masques; Ben Jonson.

To a Waterfowl, William Cullen Bryant.

Close of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; from Gibbon’s Memoirs of his own Life and Writings.

A student’s thought compared to a river which one undertakes to dam; Tucker’s (“Edward Search”) Light of Nature.

Deliberation and investigation compared to the hunting of a hound; Tucker.

JOURNAL

TEACHER

JOURNAL V

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 3

[EMERSON seems to have kept no journal for the last half of 1821.

He had graduated in the summer of 1821, number thirty in a class of fifty-nine. His actual scholarship in the required branches must have been much lower, for it must be remembered that any misconduct might remove a greater or less number of marks for recitations. Hence a boy of quiet disposition might stand in the end much higher than a brilliant but disorderly one. But Emerson, none the less, had, night and day, been educating himself in his own way. He came just within the number of those to whom “parts” at Commencement were assigned, and in those days they were always delivered. His was the Character of John Knox, in a Colloquy on Knox, Penn, and Wesley, in which function he is said to have been rather negligent. He was Class Poet, a doubtful honour, as at least six had been asked before him, and refused.

His brother William, who graduated in 1818, was doing his best to maintain the family, and it became Waldo’s duty to help, for the case was urgent. William, aged twenty-two, had recently opened a finishing school for young ladies, in Boston, at his mother’s house, and now offered his brother, aged eighteen, the place of assistant. It was a trying place for a bashful boy, unused to girls, but he accepted. (See Cabot’s Memoirs, pages 69-72 and 86.)]

BOSTON, January 12, 1822.

After a considerable interval I am still willing to think that these commonplace books are very useful and harmless things, — at least sufficiently so, to warrant another trial.

CONTRAST

The principle of Contrast which we find engraven within — ... how came it there, whence did we derive it? Either the Deity has written it as one of his laws upon the human mind, or we have derived it from an observation of the invariable course of human affairs....

In this principle is lodged the safety of human institutions and human life. For suppose ambition excite against the peace of the world one of those incarnate fiends which have, at different periods, arisen to destroy the peace and good order of one community after another, and of nation after nation. Gradually the lust of excess engendered by sudden prosperity debauches every virtue and steals away the Moral sense. The insolence of power tramples upon the laws of God and the rights of man.... Here, when the day of triumph burns with consuming splendour —— here, the mind itself pauses to anticipate change near at hand. The victor must cease. Else would the very stones cry out. Day and Night contend against him; the Elements which he wielded rebel and crush him; the clouds nurse their thunders to blast him; he is lifted up on rebellious spears between heaven and earth unworthy and abhorred of both, to perish.

TNAMURYA (anagram of Aunt Mary)

“When that spell which can only be felt is thrown over the soul by the magic of genius, ‘Now lettest thou thy servant depart where all is boundless genius — or let us tarry forever in this grave, if thus illuminated,’ is the adoring language of the heart. Is it not a well known principle of human nature that moments of enthusiasm can produce sacrifices which demand no proportionate virtue to those which never pretend to fame?”...

RELIGION

The invisible connection between heaven and earth, the solitary principle which unites intellectual beings to an account and makes of men moral beings — religion — is distinct and peculiar, alike in its origin and in its end, from all other relations. It is essential to the Universe. You seek in vain to contemplate the order of things apart from its existence. You can no more banish this than you can separate from yourself the notions of Space and Duration. Through all the perverse mazes and shadows of infidelity the from remote New England towns where she boarded, were one of the strongest influences of the earlier part of his life, quickening and enlarging his thoughts and also provoking him to defend its independence. His deep debt to her he always acknowledged. See “Mary Moody Emerson,” in his Lectures and Biographical Sketches.

Light still makes itself visible, until the reluctant mind shudders to acknowledge the eternal encompassing presence of Deity. If you can abstract it from the Universe, the Soul is bewildered by a system of things of which no account can be given; instances of tremendous power — and no hand found to form them; a thousand creations in a thousand spheres all pointing upward to a single point — and no object there to see and receive — it is all a vast anomaly. Restore Religion and you give to those energies a sublime object....

The History of Religion involves circumstances of remarkable interest, and it is almost all that we are able to trace in the passage of the remote ages of the world. It is a beautiful picture, and just as it should be, that in the character of Noah, of Abraham, and the early denizens of the world, we trace no feature which does not belong peculiarly to their religion; — it was their life. It was natural that when the mountains were just swelling upward under the hand of the Creator, when his bow was just built and painted in the sky, when the stone-tables were yet unbroken by Moses which now lie mouldering in fragments upon Sinai — that Men should walk with God. As we come downward and leave the immediate precincts of the tabernacle, although we become sensible of the progressive departure from the truth, yet each superstition retains the inherent beauty of the first form, disguised and defaced, in some degree, by ill-adjusted and needless apparel. Indeed, the only records by which the early ages of any nation are remembered is their religion. We know nothing of the first empires which grasped the sceptre of the earth in Egypt, Assyria, or Persia, but their modes of worship. And this fact forcibly suggests the idea that the only true and legitimate vehicle of immortality, the only bond of connection which can traverse the long duration which separates the ends of the world and unites the first people to the knowledge and sympathy of the last people, is religion.

We have said that the first nations were remembered by their religion; and in tracing down their history a little farther until the time of written languages, we find that the first efforts which the human genius made to commit its ideas to permanent signs were exercised upon the great topic which stood uppermost in an unperverted mind. Poetry attempted to fashion a probable picture of the Creation, to explore the character of Providence, to impress upon mankind the enlightened views of a moral government in the world which had been disclosed to her own eye.

But the date of writing marks the second age in the history of Religion, and we have parted from the more attractive memory of the first. The naked savage who ascends the mountain, — because the dusky summit inclines him to believe that the Great Spirit inhabits there, — and erects a stone as his simple and sincere tribute to the Majesty of that being, is an object infinitely more agreeable to our imagination and feelings than the loftier and more excellent offering of lettered Science. And although reason teaches us that the deliberate devotion of a philosophic mind is more worth than the vague fears of a superstitious one, yet we are apt to inquire if the pride of learning has not been known to harden the mind even to the plain proofs of Divine Providence.

The difference between the primitive forms of religion and the second dispensation (and likewise the first) consisted in this, that the first were the voluntary offerings of the imagination and the understanding to a sublime but unseen Spirit, and the last were the implicit submissions of duty, of custom, of fear. F or this reason we sympathize more with the savage.

It is somewhat remarkable that, in the simple institutions of the barbarous nations, God was worshipped through sublime and awful images, and nothing mean and disgusting was attributed to his character. It were needless to repeat that Caesar found the German nations without idols, deeming it unworthy to build a house for him that made the Universe; — or to transcribe the Indian creed of the Great Spirit, so scrupulously pure that it rejected what it could not reconcile of an evil world to a Benevolent Cause, and created an opposite active evil Principle on which to pile the sin and the storm, pain and death which beset human life. Such also was the Persian faith, which thought the Fire no unfit emblem of Divinity; and if the Druid sacrificed men on the altar, an oak forest was the temple, and it was not offered to an ox or an ass, but to an adequate notion of the Supreme Being. In all these the ways of Providence were traced in the hurricane, the sea, the cloud, or the earthquake, and therefore the mind must needs be elevated that would converse with them. But as civilized life advanced, and civil and social institutions were erected, and life became more intellectual, devotion was degraded by a profane and vulgar idolatry;... The gods and demigods went fast below the standard of human respectability, until the worship of superior beings, the holiest feeling of which the human soul is capable, and that perhaps for which it was made, seems to have almost passed out of repute and name among honest patriots, and Olympus needed to be cleaned of its impurities, and the thrones of heaven to be subverted for the peace of society. This fact, that the seeds of corruption are buried in the causes of improvement strikes us everywhere in the political, moral, and national history of the world. It seems to indicate the intentions of Providence to limit human perfectibility and to bind together good and evil, like life and death, by indissoluble connection.... The idea of power seems to have been everywhere at the bottom of the Theology; the human mind has a propensity to refer all its higher feelings, all its veneration for virtue and greatness, to something wherein this attribute is supposed to reside. Cause and Effect is another name for the direction of this sentiment.... What are Honour, Mercy, Pride, Humility, Revenge — but sensations which have reference to in-dwelling power? Honour is the worthiness which it gives; Mercy, the temperate forbearance of its exercise; Pride, the self-respect which attends its possession; Humility, the acknowledgement of its existence; Revenge, a barbarous use to which it is put. It is shared among all beings, but in all has a limit and a beginning, on which the mind’s eye eagerly fastens, with an immediate attempt to trace the sources whence the subtle principle was derived. It is a great flood which encircles the universe and is poured out in unnumbered channels to feed the fountains of life and the wants of Creation, but everywhere runs back again and is swallowed up in its eternal source. That source is God.

Will the disputes upon the Nature of God, upon Trinitarianism and Unitarianism, never yield to a purer pursuit and to practical inquiry? It is possible, for all we know to the contrary, that God may exist in a threefold Unity; but if it were so, since it is inconceivable to us, he would never have revealed to us such an existence which we cannot describe or comprehend. Infinite Wisdom established the foundations of knowledge in the mind, so that twice two could never make anything else than four. As soon as this can be otherwise, our faith is loosened and science abolished. Three may be one, and one three.

OF POETRY

It is the language of the passions which do not ordinarily find their full expression in the sober strains of prose. We should rest our argument on this: that there seems to be a tendency in the passions to clothe fanciful views of objects in beautiful language. It seems to consist in the pleasure of finding out a connection between a material image and a moral sentiment. Few men are safe when they begin to describe poetry; they talk at random, or hardly prevent the ends of the lines from rhyming, and are like the mimic of a madman who went mad himself. Poetry never offers a distinct set of sensations. Science penetrates the sky, Philosophy explains its adaptation to our wants, and Poetry grasps at its striking phenomena and combines them with the moral sentiment which they naturally suggest. Its images are nothing but the striking occurrences selected from Nature and Art and clothed in an artful combination of sounds.... But poetical expression constitutes to half the world the beauty of poetry and in this it seems to resemble Algebra, for both make language an instrument and depend solely upon it without having any abstracted use.

There are few things which the well-wishers of American literature have more at heart than our national poetry. For every thing else, for science, and morals and art they are willing to wait the gradual development, but they are in haste to pluck the bright blossoms from the fair tree which grows fast by the hill of Parnassus. For when a nation has found time for the luxury and refinement of poetry it takes off the reproach of a sluggish genius and of ignorant indifference.

Poetical expression serves to embellish dull thoughts, but we love better to follow the poet, when the muse is so ethereal and the thought so sublime that language sinks beneath it.

DRAMA

Saturday Evening, January 19th.

When a species of composition has been written with success in a brilliant period, and in another and remote land has been likewise known, and after having been discontinued and forgotten is revived in another age and another country — we have every right to say that such an art is agreeable to the dictates of nature. This is the history of the Drama, and it has every reasonable indication that it will every where flourish under favourable circumstances. It is easy also to distinguish between those parts of it which are unnatural and the forced production of a state of society, and those which are the genuine offspring of the human spirit. In the Mysteries, — the French Drama of the Middle Ages, — such personages were introduced upon the stage as “Such/* “Each One,” and “Both,” and performed their parts as gravely and as much to the satisfaction of a perverted public taste as did ever the most accomplished Iphigenia, Electra, Caesar. Such a folly as this is evidently the appropriate spawn of the age of the Schools and the pleasantry of confirmed pedantry. It does not follow that, if anything be out of the common course of human experience, it is not natural to the drama and may not talk with ordinary agents. The representation of the dead consorts perfectly with the feelings of the most refined taste, and in every age has formed a part of dramatic entertainment. For the belief in unseen agents is so universal, and indeed is a consequence of a belief in God, that no mind ever revolts at the idea.

A constituent part of the Drama from its very invention was the ornament of scenery.

This suggests itself unavoidably as an important element of the plan which acts altogether by deceiving the audience into the conviction that the actors really are the persons whom they represent. The illusion could be best promoted by removing all extraneous circumstances and affording the imagination the help of all the senses. Independently of this, it is a high gratification to be suddenly removed from all the common objects of daily occurrence, and admitted to a spectacle of shining cities, of imposing mountain scenery, of thrones, and of magnificent apparel.

May.

I rejoice in Shakspeare’s empire as far as it is reckless of that learning which some dotards make a merit of; but, as sustained on the sensual, regret and abhor his dominion. It is for a still brighter era to erase his deformities, and possibly set a mightier magician over the witcheries of fancy. But to me — to his old admirers, nothing could supply his place....

[A VENTURE IN ROMANCE]

I was the pampered child of the East. I was born where the soft western gale breathed upon me the fragrance of cinnamon groves, and through the seventy windows of my hall the eye fell on the Arabian harvest. An hundred elephants, apparelled in cloth of gold, carried my train to war, and the smile of the Great King beamed upon Omar. But now — the broad Indian moon looks through the broken arches of my tower, and the wing of Desolation fans me with poisonous airs; the spider’s threads are the tapestry which adorns my walls, and the rain of the night is heard in my halls for the music of the daughters of Cashmere. Wail, wail for me, ye who put on honour as gay drapery!

IDEALISM

Deep in the soul a strong delusion dwells, A curious round of fairly fashioned dreams; Yet, quietly the pleasant vision swells Its gay proportions far around, the streams Of the wide universe their wealth supply, Their everlasting sources furnish forth The fabled splendours, whose immortal dye Colours the scene with hues which mock the summer sky.

And oh how sweetly in youth’s seraph soul, That vision, like the light of heaven, doth rest.

Its name is Life; its Hours their circle roll Like angels in the robes of morning drest; And every phantom of the train is blest Who shakes his plumes upon the odorous air, Or lights a star upon his azure crest; And while the lovely beam reposes there, Joy in the guileless heart his welcome will prepare.

The circle of the sciences is no more firmly bound together than the circle of the virtues; but, in the first, a man cannot hope to be thoroughly acquainted with all, for they are in some degree incompatible; whereas, in the last, his character will be defective if it do not combine the whole, and form that harmony which results from all.

JOURNAL VI

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 4

DEDICATION

BOSTON, February 22, 1822.

I have invoked successively the Muse, the fairies, the witches, and Wisdom to preside over my creations; I have summoned Imagination from within, and Nature from without; I have called on Time, and assembled about the slight work the Hours of his train — But the Powers were unpropitious; fate was averse. Some other spell must be chaunted, some other melody sung. I will devote it to the dead. The mind shall anticipate a few fleeting hours, and borrow its tone from what all that have been are, and all that are will shortly be. All that adorns this world are the gifts which they left in their passage through it. To these monuments which they bequeathed, and to their shades which watch in the universe, I apply for excitement, and I dedicate my shortlived flowers.

CONTINUATION OF SOME REMARKS UPON PROVIDENCE

Saturday Eve., February 23.

No elaborate argument can remove the fact which strikes the senses, and which is the first and chief difficulty in the way of the belief of an omnipotent good Principle, namely, the existence of evil in the world, and next, the great share it has in the texture of human life, and its successful opposition to virtue and happiness. If we suppose the character of the Author to be unmixed Goodness, the work must be likewise pure, and an ultimate failure of success subtracts Wisdom and Omnipotence (if indeed the one be not involved in the other) from the qualities of the forming Being, that is, — demonstrates him not to be God. Human wisdom sees the imperfection of the part, and labours to make out the perfection of the whole from the analogies of the universe which fall under its eye, from its judgments upon the language which testimony attributes to this Creator, and from the intuitive and acquired conclusions which it forms upon Nature.

But another great testimony to which the mind will naturally turn to confirm or efface its convictions of a superintending hand, is History; to see if Time will fulfil any larger part of that Justice which should take place than falls under the life of one man. And this is an evidence which grows with every year of time, which could not be open to the primitive races of mankind, and which, if its weight be found favourable, will develope to the last ages the connecting bonds which unite the fate of many generations, — the plan, of ample outline and intricate parts, on Emerson, that he would not look on the dark side of the world, on evil, on sin. His attempts to deal with such problems he later considered as among the diseases of childhood.

In “Spiritual Laws” (Essays, 1st Series) he said: “The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if a man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in his speculations. Let him do and say what strictly belongs to him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man, — never darkened across any man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul’s mumps and measles and whooping-cough, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.” which will reveal the obscure relations between one and another remote scene, whereby a succession of misfortune and suffering is counterbalanced by an equal sum of happiness, and the unnatural success of vice and its undue preponderance over ages and nations of the world, is set right again by the triumphs of virtue over other ages and nations. Moralists have regarded the adjustment of this great and perplexing variety in human condition as the exhibition to the Universe of a great picture, in which, for the harmony of the whole, much is encompassed with deep shade; and the painted figures may not complain to the Artist because they have been arranged and coloured in such or such a manner. But is this a fair view? are free agents nothing more than painted emblems? are — (but I have left my proper course of thought and must return to it again) — I was about to say that it is history alone which can determine whether the means answer the end, and whether the design be fully accomplished in those schemes whose fulfilments involves many ages; e g. to discover the typical and direct relations between the Jewish and Christian dispensations; and to watch the fulfilment of prophecy. But whether these schemes be answered or not, the question still recurs — why did a good Providence permit at all the existence of evil, or why does any one individual suffer from the vice of others, or the sickness and unhappiness which he did not bring on himself, but which is incident to his nature? The reply which each individual finds himself able to make to this question will go far to doubt or to justify his idea of Providence.

It may be well by way of solving this question to propose and answer two more — What is evil? and, What is its origin?

What is evil? There is an answer from every corner of this globe — from every mountain and valley and sea. The enslaved, the sick, the disappointed, the poor, the unfortunate, the dying, the surviving, cry out, It is here. Every man points to his dwelling or strikes his breast to say, It is here. An enumeration of some of the most prominent evils in society will illustrate the variety and malignity of this disease.

What is its origin? The sin which Adam brought into the world and entailed upon his children.

One of the finest chapters in the Old Testament is the song of Deborah and Barak, Judges V. q v.!!

[NOVELS]

The novelist must fasten the skirts of his tale to scenes or traditions so well known as to make it impossible to disbelieve, and so obscure as not to obtrude repugnant facts upon the finished deception he weaves.

[COLLEGE REVISITED]

I have not much cause, I sometimes think, to wish my Alma Mater well, personally; I was not often highly flattered by success, and was every day mortified by my own ill fate or ill conduct. Still, when I went today to the ground where I had had the brightest thoughts of my little life and filled up the little measure of my knowledge, and had felt sentimental for a time, and poetical for a time, and had seen many fine faces, and traversed many fine walks, and enjoyed much pleasant, learned, or friendly society, — I felt a crowd of pleasant thoughts, as I went posting about from place to place, and room to chapel.

February 28, 1822.

Few of my pages have been filled so little to my own satisfaction as these — and why? — because the air has been so fine, and my visits so pleasant, and myself so full of pleasant social feelings, for a day or two past, that the mind has not possessed sufficiently the cold, frigid tone which is indispensable to become so oracular as it hath been of late. Etsi mearum cogitationum laus(et honor?) non tam magna quam ante a fuit, tamen gaudium voluptatemque majorem accipit, quoniam sentire principia amoris me credebam. Vidi amicum etsi veterem, ignotum; alteram vidi not am et noscendam; ambo, forsitan, si placet Deo, partem vitae, partem mei facient. Pcenitet mei res magnas narrare cum verbis qualibus tyro uti so let.

At mid day in the crowd of care,

The unbidden thought will come,

And force the obedient blush prepare

Reluctant welcome home;

And in the corners of the heart,

And in the Passions’ cell,

It bids my thoughts to battle start,

Which fain would peaceful dwell.

Peace, Pleasure, Pride, and Joy, and Grief,

Awake the chaos wild, —

But worse and cursed the relief

Which sense and strife beguiled. (To-wit, Indifference.)

So much poetry for peculiar sources of pride, old and inveterate, and perhaps hereafter unintelligible. Still one’s feelings are well worth speculation and I am desirous of remembering a date, (as that of the last page)...

A beautiful thought struck me suddenly, without any connection which I could trace with my previous trains of thought and feeling. It had no analogy to any notion I ever remembered to have formed; it surpassed all others in the energy and purity in which it clothed itself; it put by all others by the novelty it bore, and the grasp it laid upon every fibre; for the time, it absorbed all other thoughts; — all the faculties — each in his cell, bowed down and worshipped before this new Star. — Ye who roam among the living and the dead, over flowers or among the cherubims, in real or ideal universes, do not whisper my thought!

SOCIAL FEELINGS

... Solitude has but few sacrifices to make, and may be innocent, but can hardly be greatly virtuous like Abraham, like Job, like the Roman Regulus or the apostle Paul. Great actions, from their nature, are not done in the closet; they are performed in the face of the sun, and in behalf of the world....

Sabbath, March 3.

Animi ardor, de quo supra dixi, non extinctus est, sed mihi videtur non esse tam potens, tam clarus, tam magnus quam antea. Timeo ne caderet. Spero ut viveret.

March 4.

VISION

A breathless solitude in a cottage in the woods beneath the magnificent splendour of this moonlight and with this autumnal coolness might drive one mad with excitement. Precipitous and shadowy mountains, thick forests and far winding rivers should sleep under the light, and add their charm to the fascination. The silence broken only by the far cry of the night bird; or disturbed by the distant shout of the peasant, or, at intervals, by those melancholy moanings of the wind which speak so expressively to the ear, — who would not admire? Let the Hours roll by uncounted, let the universe sleep on in this grand repose, but be the spell unbroken by aught of this world, by vulgar and disquieting cares; by a regret or a thought which might remind us of aught but Nature. Here is her Paradise, here is her throne. The stars in their courses roll silently; the oaks rock in their forests to the voice of the sighing breeze; the wall flowers on the top of the cliff nod over its giddy edge, and the worshipping enthusiast stands at the door of his tent mute and happy, while the leaves rustle down from the topmost boughs and cover his feet A cry in the wilderness! the shriek and sudden sound of desolation! howl for him that comes riding on darkness through the midnight; that puts his hand forth to darken the moon, and quenches all the stars. Lo! where the awful pageantry rolleth now to the corners of the heaven; the fiery form shrouds his terrible brow behind the fragment of a stormy cloud, and the eyes of Creation gaze after the rushing chariot. Lo! he stands up in the Universe and with his hands he parts the firmament asunder from side to side. And as he trode upon the dragons, I saw the name which burned underneath. Wake, oh wake, ye who keep watch in the Universe! Time, Space, Eternity, ye Energies that live, — for his name is DESTRUCTION! — who keep the Sceptre of its eternal order, for He hath reached unto your treasuries, and he feeleth after your sceptre to break it in pieces. Another cry went up, like the crash of broken spheres, the voice of dying worlds. It is night. — An exceeding noisy vision!

GREATNESS

Never mistake yourself to be great, or designed for greatness, because you have been visited by an indistinct and shadowy hope that something is reserved for you beyond the common lot. It is easier to aspire than to do the deeds. The very idleness which leaves you leisure to dream of honour is the insurmountable obstacle between you and it. Those who are fitly furnished for the weary passage from mediocrity to greatness seldom find time or appetite to indulge that hungry and boisterous importunity for excitement which weaker intellects are prone to display. That which helps them on to eminence is in itself sufficient to engross the attention of all their powers, and to occupy the aching void. Greatness never comes upon a man by surprise, and without his exertions or consent; No, it is another sort of Genii who traverse your path suddenly; it is Poverty which travels like an armed man; it is Contempt which meets you in the corners and for the New England boy. In later years Mr. Emerson used to recite to his children, imitating the manner, some fragments of their college oratory which still remained in his memory. highways with a hiss, and Anger which treads you down as with the lightning. Greatness is a property for which no man gets credit too soon; it must be possessed long before it is acknowledged. Nor do I think this to be so absolutely rare and unattainable as it is commonly esteemed. This very hope, and panting after it, which was alluded to, is, in some sort, an earnest of the possibility of success. God doubtless designed to form minds of different mould, and to create distinctions in intellect; still the extraordinary effects of education attest a capacity of improvement to an indefinite degree....

Newton was often at a loss when the conversation turned upon his own discoveries; Shakspeare was indifferent or opposed to the publication of his works, and idly left his books, careless himself, for others, for Britain, or the world to boast of. It is impossible to make arithmetical computation of mind. Still this indifference to trifles, and the sensibility to them, trace a very broad line of distinction between the first and second orders....

I am not sure but that the highest order of greatness, that which abandons earthly consanguinity, and allies itself to immortal minds, is that which exists in obscurity and is least known among mankind. For superiour intellects are only drawn out into society by the action of those inducements which society holds up to them. If, therefore, there are any who are above the solicitation of wealth, honour, and influence, and who can laugh even at the love of Fame, that last infirmity of noble minds, there will be nothing left worth offering them, to attract them from their solitudes; they must pass on through their discipline and education of life, unsympathized with, unknown, or perhaps, ignorantly despised. Thus the archangels pass among us unseen, for, if known, they could not be appreciated, and having faculties and energies which our organs can never measure, it is better that we never meet.

March 7.

BALLAD

The Knight rode up to the castle-gate,

But a grisly hag was there,

She chattered in spite, with muttered threat,

And twisted her thin gray hair.

Her half-bald pate was a sorry sight,

But her eyes went wide askew;

Two long dog-teeth, like dim twilight,

Shone over her lips so blue.

“Fair ladye of love!” the Knight exclaimed, And bent his body low,

“Thou flower of beauty, widely famed,

Roses feed thee, I trow.

“The boy Cupide attendeth thee,

The Graces thy sisters be;

Oh give me a lock of thy golden hair

And make a faithful knight of me.”

The maiden clenched her shrivelled fist,

And her eyes grew red with rage: —

“You may mock, Sir Simple, as loud as you list,

But you shall be my (chosen) page.

“I’ll give you a lock of the hair that’s left,

Three hairs I’ll give to thee;

Beëlzebub knows, when I ‘m bereft,

I will the stronger be.”

She plucked three hairs from her pye-bald head,

And shrieked like a fishhorn loud, —

Straight of those hairs three snakes were made,

That leaped on the champion good;

And one twined round his armed neck,

And one twined round each hand,

And the tails of the three in a black braid met

In the grisly haggis hand.

And the hag she turned to a dragon green,

With these she flew away, —

And never again those two were seen,

Until the Judgement Day.

This book, in ordinary, is peculiarly devoted to original ideas, but I cannot resist the pleasure of setting down, in black and white, verses which I have repeated so often. It is a charm in one of Ben Jonson’s Masques.

“The faery beam upon you,

The stars to glister on you,

A moon of light,

In the noon of night,

Till the fire-drake hath oer-gone you.

The wheel of Fortune guide you,

The Boy with the bow beside you

Run aye in the way,

Till the bird of day,

And the luckier lot betide you.”

SOCIAL FEELINGS

... It is in itself a most noble and magnificent subject, and one to which all others seem tributary,... how the combined energies of many millions of co-existent agents may be brought to act, with their proper infinite influence, continually in the direction of their sure interests, for time and eternity; and how the improvement which is gained may be kept, and the separate and conflicting energies may be reconciled, and, that Mind shall reap all the fruits of the toiling of the body....

[DEATH]

March 8.

... Life is the spark which kindles up a soul and opens its capacities to receive the great lessons which it is appointed to learn of the Universe — of Good — of Evil — of accountability — of Eternity; of Beauty, of Happiness. The inestimable moment in which the history of past ages is opened, its own relations to the Universe explained, its dependence and independence shewn; the time to reach itself the affections, and to gratify them, to ally itself in kindly bonds with other beings of like destiny; the time to educate a citizen of unknown spheres; the time to serve the Lord.

And is it good to die? to exchange this precious consciousness capable of such sublime purposes for an unknown state (of which all that is seen is appalling); perhaps for a gloomy sleep? Is it good to be forced away against our will and through extreme suffering, from the vital body, and give up that organ of our enjoyment and sufferings to the worms, while what shall befall the soul we cannot tell? We shudder when the question is made, and terror, terror breaks down the vain refinements of philosophy, and the fences of affectation.

Reason bids us ask, who is the being that forces away the mind into this unknown state? Nature and Revelation have taught us something of this being. We are reduced to put our views of death entirely upon His character and will, and Death will become more or less terrible according to our notions of the Lord of Death.

Thus have I fulfilled enough of my design in this book to authorize my dedication on the first page. This shall not prevent me from resuming the topics upon the slightest indications of my Noometer.

DRAMA March 9.

In connexion with the remarks on the Drama [Wide World, No. 3] it should be further said, that this art is the most attractive, naturally, of all. The others speak to man from a distance, through cold and remote associations. The literature of a generation generally addresses but a scanty portion of society; of their contemporaries, history and poetry are confined to a few readers; philosophy and science to still fewer; but the buskined muse comes out impatient from these abstractions, to repeat in a popular and intelligible form the productions of the closet, to copy the manners of high and low life, to act upon the heart; and succeeds, by thus avoiding the haughty port of the Parnassian queens, to draw the multitude by the cords of love. Folly wins where wisdom fails; and the policy of adding to our attractions even at the cost of some wit, is seldom repented. This is the excellence of the drama which pretends to nothing more than to be a true picture of life.

FICTION

The origin of Fiction is buried in the darkness of the remotest ages. If it were a question of any importance, perhaps its secret springs are not yet beyond the reach of the inquirer. To paint what is not should naturally seem less agreeable to the mind than to describe what is. “Nothing” (said the author of the Essay on the Human Understanding) “is so beautiful to the eye, as truth to the mind.” But if we look again, I apprehend we shall find that the source of fable, is human misery; that to relieve one hour of life, by exciting the sympathies to a tale even of imaginary joy, was accounted a praiseworthy accomplishment; and honour and gold were due to him, whose rare talent took away, for the moment, the memory of care and grief. Fancy, which is ever a kind of contradiction to life and truth, set off in a path remote as possible from all human scenes and circumstances; and hence the first legends dealt altogether in monstrous scenes, and peopled the old mythology, and the nursery lore, with magicians, griffins, and metamorphoses which offend the ear of taste, and could only win away the credulity of a savage race, and the simplicity of a child. Reason, however, soon taught the bard that the deception was infinitely improved by being reduced within the compass of probability; and the second fictions introduced imaginary persons into the manners and dwellings of real life.

PROPHECY

March 10.

No talent is more prized, in society, than that sagacity which, from passing events draws just and profound conclusions regarding their future termination. The names of Burke, Fox and Pitt deservedly rank high in the world’s esteem from the success of their political predictions. For it argues a singular elevation of mind to generalize so calmly in the conflicting interests and partialities of fortune, to see something inevitable in the almost fortuitous concurrence of affairs, to cast a die into the whirl of events, and rest in confidence of its return. This, however, is but a faint approach to the majesty of that remarkable foresight which was exhibited in the early ages of the world, and termed Prophecy. For the one is of inferior origin, and depends altogether upon a shrewd comparison of present with past events, and a critical attention to the bias and results of a form of government, of a national character, of a popular excitement. The other grasps at indications which are invisible to other eyes, and possesses a new faculty of communication with the universe. It does not follow the general progress of things to a general result, but singles out, with admirable distinctness, the one man or event, for which its lips were opened; and, entirely destitute of any manifest clue to its knowledge, describes, with a precision not to be mistaken, the character, circumstances and use of things which are buried in a futurity of many ages. It sensibly elevates our notions of the human mind, to discover in it this latent capacity of reaching through the accidents of time, to ascertain a destiny beyond the possibility of cross accidents to change. It is a capacity which every soul looks to enjoy hereafter, and its development here is a signal distinction from the hand of Providence, and an earnest to the soul of an unclouded vision to come....

[Wide World, No. 5, is missing from the Journals.]

JOURNAL VII

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 6

“Maximus partus temporis,” quoth giggling Vanity. “Burn the trash,” saith Fear.

There the Northern light reposes

With ruddy flames in circles bright

Like a wreath of ruby roses

On the dusky brow of night.

DEDICATION

BOSTON, April 14, 1822.

In aforetime, while to the inhabitants of Europe the existence of America was yet a secret in the heart of time, there dwelled a giant upon the South Mountain Chimborazo, who extended a beneficent dominion over hills and clouds and continents, and sustained a communication with his mother Nature. He lived two hundred years in that rich land, causing peace and justice, and he battled with the Mammoths and slew them. Upon the summit of the mountain, amid the snows of all the winters, was the mouth of a cave which was lined with golden ore. This cavity, termed “The Golden Lips,” admitted downwards into the centre of the mountain, which was a vast and spacious temple, and all its walls and ceilings glowing with pure gold. Man had never polluted it with his tools of art. Nature fashioned the mighty tenement for the bower of her son. At midday, the vertical sun was perpendicular to the cavity, and poured its full effulgence upon the mirror floor; its reflected beams blazed on all sides, from the fretted roof, with a lustre which eclipsed the elder glory of the temple of Solomon. In the centre of this gorgeous palace, bareheaded and alone, the Giant Califo performed the incommunicable rite, and studied the lines of destiny. When the sun arrived at the meridian, a line of light traced this inscription upon the wall:— “A thousand years, a thousand years, and the Hand shall come, and shall tear the Veil for all.” Two thousand years have passed, and the mighty progress of improvement and civilization have been forming the force which shall reveal Nature to Man. To roll about the outskirts of this Mystery and ascertain and describe its pleasing wonders —— be this the journey of my Wideworld. The Hand shall come; — I traced its outline in the mists of the morning.

VAIN WORLD

Tuesday Evening, April i6.

It is strange that a world should be so dear which speculatively and seriously we acknowledge to be so unsatisfying and so dark. Not all its most glorious array when Nature is apparelled in her best, and when Art toils to gratify, —— not the bright sun itself, and the blazing firmament wherein he stands as chief — can prevent a man, at certain moments, from saying to his soul— “It is vanity.” No wild guesses, no elaborate reasoning can surmount this testimony to the familiar truth, that the human spirit hath a higher origin than matter, a higher home than the earth; that it is too capacious to be always cheated with trifles, and too long-lived to amalgamate with mortality....

It was found by philosophy that luminous matter wastes itself ever; it is true without a metaphor of this shining world which goes on decaying, and still attracting by its false lustre.

[POPULACE]

It is a matter of great doubt to me whether or not the populace of all ages is essentially the same in character. I am not a competent judge to decide if inconsistent institutions will affect and alter the prominent features of the moral character. There can be no question that from both the poles to the Equator, under every sun, man will be found selfish and comparatively indifferent to the general welfare, whenever it is put in competition with private interest. But in China, as in Venice, will faction and cabal always watch to check the continuance of every administration, good or bad? Will vulgar blood always rebel and rail, and against honourable, virtuous and opulent members of the same society? Will the good always be in peril from the misdeeds and menaces of the bad? In the answer to these interrogations, truth leads reluctantly towards the affirmative. This is certain — that war is waged in the Universe, without truce or end, between Virtue and Vice; they are Light and Darkness, they cannot harmonize. Upon Earth they are forcibly consorted, and the perpetual struggle which they make, separates by a distinct line man from man throughout the world.

MARTYRDOM

Saturday Evening. April.

I rejoice in the full and unquestionable testimony which certifies the sufferings of Martyrs, as the most undeniable merit of the human race; it proves the existence of a consistency and force of character which might else to common minds appear chimerical.... In those moments when a desperate view of the wrong side of society will sometimes totally unsettle our convictions, and reason almost leans to doubt and Atheism, because the world is frail or mad, this saving recollection comes up like an angel of light to assure us that men have suffered the fierceness of the torture, have endured, and died for the faith.... To keep inviolate the divine law, they have broken over the law of nature and the native fears of man and have dared to immolate this mysterious existence and to try the gulfs of futurity....

HABIT

Habit is a thing of compound character which forges chains for human nature at the same time that it announces its consistency and independence. It is a thorough and perfect servitude, but man voluntarily imposed it upon himself. It is a noble foresight which at once determines upon actions that will be perpetually proper, and makes one resolution answer for a thousand, and once made, binds with divine force. When we consider it as an instrument — put into the hands of Vice and Virtue, which both may wield to certain, to vast advantage, we shall have an adequate idea of its importance in the constitution of human life. In childhood it is given into the power of all to make choice between Virtue and Vice, to whom he will commit the service of this Magic Wand.

Each movement of the Archangel is perhaps free and independent of every former one.

Tuesday Evening. May 7.

Amid my diseases and aches and qualms I will write to see if my brains are gone. For a day or two past we have had a wind precisely annual; which I discovered by this, that I have a return of the identical thoughts and temperament which I had a year ago. But this sun shines upon, and these ill winds blow over a changed person in condition, in hope. I was then delighted with my recent honours, traversing my chamber (Hollis 9) flushed and proud of a poet’s fancies, and the day when they were to be exhibited; pleased with ambitious prospects, and careless because ignorant of the future. But now I am a hopeless Schoolmaster, just entering upon years of trade to which no distinct limit is placed; toiling through this miserable employment even without the poor satisfaction of discharging it well, for the good suspect me, and the geese dislike me. Then again look at this: there was pride in being a collegian, and a poet, and somewhat romantic in my queer acquaintance with — , and poverty presented nothing mortifying in the meeting of two young men whom their common relation and character as scholars equalized; But when one becomes a droning schoolmaster, and the other is advancing his footing in good company and fashionable friends, the cast of countenance on meeting is somewhat altered. Hope, it is true, still hangs out, though at further distance, her gay banners; but I have found her a cheat once, twice, many times, and shall I trust the deceiver again? And what am I the better for two, four, six years delay? Nine months are gone, and except some rags of Wideworlds, half a dozen general notions, etc., I am precisely the same World’s humble servant that left the University in August. Good people will tell me that it is a Judgment and lesson for my character, to make me fitter for the office whereto I aspire; but if I come out a dispirited, mature, broken-hearted miscreant, — how will man or myself be bettered? Now I have not thought, all this time, that I was complaining at Fate although I suppose it amounts to the same; these are the suggestions only of a disappointed spirit brooding over the fall of castles in the air. My fate is enviable contrasted with that of others; I have only to blame myself who had no right to build them. — WALDO E.

“And there is a great difference whether the tortoise gathers herself within her shell hurt or unhurt.”

I shall bless Cadmus, or Chad, or Hermes, for inventing letters and written language — you, my dear little Wideworld, deducing your pedigree from that pretty event.

May 13.

In twelve days I shall be nineteen years old; which I count a miserable thing. Has any other educated person lived so many years and lost so many days? I do not say acquired so little, for by an ease of thought and certain looseness of mind I have perhaps been the subject of as many ideas as many of mine age. But mine approaching maturity is attended with a goading sense of emptiness and wasted capacity; with the conviction that vanity has been content to admire the little circle of natural accomplishments, and has travelled again and again the narrow round, instead of adding sedulously the gems of knowledge to their number. Too tired and too indolent to travel up the mountain path which leads to good learning, to wisdom and to fame, I must be satisfied with beholding with an envious eye the labourious journey and final success of my fellows, remaining stationary myself, until my inferiors and juniors have reached and outgone me. And how long is this to last? How long shall I hold the little acclivity which four or six years ago I flattered myself was enviable, but which has become contemptible now? It is a child’s place, and if I hold it longer, I may quite as well resume the bauble and rattle, grow old with a baby’s red jockey on my grey head and a picture-book in my hand, instead of Plato and Newton. Well, and I am he who nourished brilliant visions of future grandeur which may well appear presumptuous and foolish now. My infant imagination was idolatrous of glory, and thought itself no mean pretender to the honours of those who stood highest in the community, and dared even to contend for fame with those who are hallowed by time and the approbation of ages. It was a little merit to conceive such animating hopes, and afforded some poor prospect of the possibility of their fulfilment. This hope was fed and fanned by the occasional lofty communications which were vouchsafed to me with the Muses’ Heaven, and which have at intervals made me the organ of remarkable sentiments and feelings which were far above my ordinary train. And with this lingering earnest of better hope (I refer to this fine exhilaration which now and then quickens my clay) shall I resign every aspiration to belong to that family of giant minds which live on earth many ages and rule the world when their bones are slumbering, no matter whether under a pyramid or a primrose? No, I will yet a little while entertain the angel.

Look next from the history of my intellect to the history of my heart. A blank, my lord. I have not the kind affections of a pigeon. Ungenerous and selfish, cautious and cold, I yet wish to be romantic; have not sufficient feeling to speak a natural, hearty welcome to a friend or stranger, and yet send abroad wishes and fancies of a friendship with a man I never knew. There is not in the whole wide Universe of God (my relations to Himself I do not understand) one being to whom I am attached with warm and entire devotion, — not a being to whom I have joined fate for weal or wo, not one whose interests I have nearly and dearly at heart; — and this I say at the most susceptible age of man. Perhaps at the distance of a score of years, if I then inhabit this world, or still more, if I do not, these will appear frightful confessions; they may or may not, — it is a true picture of a barren and desolate soul.

(Be it remembered that it was last evening that I heard that prodigious display of eloquence in Faneuil Hall, by Mr Otis, which astonished and delighted me above any thing of the kind I ever witnessed.)

I love my Wide Worlds.

My body weighs 144 pounds. — In a fortnight I intend, Deo volente, to make a journey on foot.

A month hence I will answer the question whether the pleasure was only in the hope.

MARATHON

Go hide the shields of war,

The clarion and the spear,

The plume of pride and scimetar,

Vain trophies of a bier.

They have digged a thousand graves

In Marathon today;

Their dirge is sounded by the waves

Which wash the slain away.

The hearth is forsaken, the Furies are fed, —

Wake, Maidens of Athens! your wail for the dead.

The Persian’s golden car,

And image of the Sun

In flashing light rolled fast and far

O’er echoing Marathon.

He mourns his quenchèd beam,

His slain and broken host,

He curses glory’s dream Which lured him to be lost.

His rose-wreath is dyed with a bloody stain

And the Genius of Asia shrieks Shame! to the slain.

Io! Minerva! Hail!

What Argive Harp is dumb?

The triumph loads the gale,

The laurelled victors come!

There’s a light in Victory’s eye

Which none but God can give;

And a name can never die —

Apollo bids it live.

The daughters of Music have learned your name,

And Athens, and Earth, shall reecho your fame.

May 24, 1822.

And now it is Friday at even, and I am come to take leave of my pleasant Wideworld, for a little time, and commence my journey tomorrow. I look to many pleasures in my fortnight’s absence, but neither is my temperament so volatile and gay, nor my zeal so strong as to make my expectations set aside the possibility of disappointment. I am so young an adventurer, that I am alive to regret and sentiment upon so little an occasion as this parting; though one would judge from my late whispered execrations of the school that a short suspension of its mortifications would be exceedingly delightful. I may also observe here that I had never suspected myself of so much feeling as rose within me at taking leave of Mrs. E. at the water side and seeing so delicate a lady getting into a boat from those steep wharf-stairs among sailors and labourers; and leaving her native shore for Louisiana without a single friend or relation attending her to the shore, and seeing her depart. — For myself I was introduced to her upon the wharf. Her husband behaved very well. God speed them!

Mem. Certain lines in Anthony and Cleopatra about a “hoop of affection so staunch,” etc.; find it. How noble a masterpiece is the tragedy of Hamlet: it can only be spoken of and described by superlatives. There is a deep and subtle wit, with an infinite variety, and every line is golden.

Sunday Evening, June 9.

If a man could go into the country but once, as to some raree-shew, or if it were indulged by God but to a single individual to behold the majesty of nature, I think the credit and magnificence of Art would fall suddenly to the ground. For take away the cheapness and ease of acquisition which lessen our estimation of its value, and who could suddenly find himself alone in the green fields where the whole firmament meets the eye at once, and the pomp of woods and clouds and hills is poured upon the mind — without an unearthly animation? Upon a mountain solitude a man instantly feels a sensible exaltation and a better claim to his rights in the universe. He who wanders in the woods perceives how natural it was to pagan imagination to find gods in every deep grove and by each fountain head. Nature seems to him not to be silent but to be eager and striving to break out into music. Each tree, flower and stone, he invests with life and character; and it is impossible that the wind which breathes so expressive a sound amid the leaves — should mean nothing.... The embowered cottage and solitary farmhouse display to you the same mingled picture of frankness and meanness, pride and poverty of feeling, fraud and charity, which are encompassed with brick walls in the city. Every pleasant feature is balanced by somewhat painful. To the stranger, the simplicity of manners is delightful and carries the memory back to the Arcadian reign of Saturn; and the primitive custom of saluting every passenger is an agreeable acknowledgement of common sympathies, and a common nature. But from the want of an upper class in society, from the admirable republican equality which levels one with all, results a rudeness and sometimes a savageness of manners which is apt to disgust a polished and courtly man.

DRAMA

June 10.

There are two natures in man, — flesh and spirit, — whose tendencies are wide as the universe asunder, and from whose miraculous combination it arises that he is urged alway by the visible eloquent image of Truth, toward immortal perfection, and allured aside from the painful pursuit by gross but fascinating pleasure. The worst form under which temptation entices our weakness, is when it plots to make the soul a pander to the sense, by winning the mind to the pleasures of lofty sentiment and sublime fiction, and insinuating amid this parade of moral beauty its pernicious incentives to crime, and invitations to folly. It is a fatal twilight, in which darkness is sown with light, until the perverted judgment learns to think that the whole spectacle is more harmonious, and better accommodated to his feeble human sense. But be assured, the light shall grow less and less, and shade shall be added to shade....

The Platonist... did not widely err who proclaimed the existence of two warring principles, the incorruptible mind, and the mass of malignant matter. This was a creed which was often damned as heresy by the infallible church; happy if they had never devised a worse. In their attempts to escape from this inherent corruption, and correct the imperfection of nature, they went wrong with delirious zeal; but eternal truth founded the basis of their belief....

The theory of the drama is, in itself, so beautiful, and so well designed to work good, that we feel forcibly what a pity it is, that its concentrating interest, its unequalled power of conveying instruction and the delight inspired by its ordinary decorations should be so miserably perverted to the service of sin. It might aid Virtue, and lend its skilful powers to the adornment of truth; its first form was a hymn to the gods, and a monitory voice to human frailty, and human passion. Now, it seduces to Pleasure and leads on to Death, and the shadows of Eternity settle over its termination.

I think it is pretty well known that more is gained to a man’s business by one half hour’s conversation with his friend, than by very many letters; for, face to face, each can distinctly state his own views; and each chief objection is started and answered; and, moreover, a more definite notion of one’s sentiments and intentions, with regard to the matter, are gathered from his look and tones, than it is possible to gain from paper. It is therefore a hint borrowed from Nature, when a lesson of morals is conveyed to an audience in the engaging form of a dialogue, instead of the silence of a book, or the cold soliloquy of an orator. When this didactic dialogue is improved by the addition of pathetic or romantic circumstances, and, in the place of indifferent speakers, we are presented with the characters of great and good men, of heroes and demigods, thus adding to the sentiments expressed the vast weight of virtuous life and character — the wit of the invention is doubled. Lastly, a general moral is drawn from an event where all the parts of the piece are made to tend and terminate; this is what is called the distribution of poetical justice, and is nothing but an inevitable inference of some great moral truth, which the mind readily makes, upon the turn of affairs. For greater delight, we add music, painting and poetry, well aware that the splendour of embellishment will fix the eye, after the mind grows weary. These are the advantages comprehended in the dramatic art. Truths otherwise impertinent, are told with admirable effect in this little epitome of life; and every philosophic Christian must be loth to lose to religion, an instrument of such tried powers.

GOD

... Simonides said well, “Give me twice the time, for the more I think, the more it enlarges”; and it is only mathematical truth; for when the subject is infinite, it must be, that, in proportion as discipline enlarges the capacity of the powers to comprehend a portion of the line, so much the more of the line will be continually discerned, extending above and beyond the straining orbs of imagination. It is, nevertheless, apparent in the munificent endowment of the human intellect, that provision has been made to enable it to proceed to some distinct knowledge of this Being whom in darkness we adore. Witness some of those admirable demonstrations of the existence and attributes which various minds in various ages have fallen upon, and which we record as the best monuments of human wit. And I regard this rather as a glimpse and earnest of the light which shall break upon the soul when its cumbering flesh bond is broken, — of the glory that shall be revealed — than as any solitary or fortuitous discovery which may stand unconnected with the past or the future. For is it not natural to believe that — out of earth, and men of clay — the Deity is the great engrossing theme which absorbs the wonder as well as the devotion of the disembodied spirits that people his creation? And is it not to be presumed that the soul will be furnished with some understanding of his strength when she enters on the scene where his divinity is displayed? The lisping infant, on earth, stammers the name of God; and shall the Archangel, whose gigantic intelligence displays the education of heaven, stand silent beneath the very Cloud? Mankind have naturally conceived the joy of that spiritual estate to consist in the satisfaction and delight of certain high intellectual exercises, of which our best and loftiest contemplations afford some faint symbol. And this notion is natural and consistent with their condition; for they have left the obstruction of a material universe, and dwell now in the majesty of thought, in a grand inconceivable dependence of mind upon the great Source of intelligence, and are therefore in a situation to pursue those inquiries which mocked the researches of finite beings, but which invite the study of those to whom the sources of wisdom, and the riches of the unseen state are laid open. In this state and with these opportunities, a little meditation will make it plain, that there can be, in heaven or earth, no thought which can so concentrate and absorb the living spirit as the idea of God.

What will divert our attention, and attach our affections in the long, long Day wherein the faculties shall enjoy an eternal exercise? Perhaps in the communion of departed wisdom and virtue; in the society of Socrates, Plato, and St. Paul. Be it so; it is a rational and authorized hope. We respect and admire the life and character of these eminent individuals; they appeared to possess an intimate familiarity with the profoundest principles of philosophy, and at the same time a power to express them with the most perfect simplicity in their conversation and in their books. It is natural to look to these great masters of mankind as qualified in another state to give us our introduction to its mysteries and joys.

But consider a moment, if a celestial spirit could be so besotted as to prefer the little flights of a spirit which is its peer, to the inconceivable intellect which kindles all and overwhelms all. Let it compare for a moment the history of the two Beings. One lived upon earth its span, and was then swallowed into the multitude of men, leaving no trace of its existence, except, perhaps, a little book, or its name, or its monument. But if your mind be strung to an elevated tone, try to comprehend the history of the Other; — A stream without a source, an age without an infancy, — the mind resorts in vain to its highest antiquity to seek the commencement of the Ancient of Days. It can only pursue a few days of his history in the immensity of his works. In a few days he built the world and the firmament, and in the darkness of the Universe he lit the sun; he created man and beast; he arranged the seasons and provided for the preservation of the Order established; he arched the rainbow and gathered the clouds, the granaries of his hail, of the lightning and thunder. That immeasurable existence upon such an insignificant portion of which the eye of all mankind rests with wonder — we conceive to have been spent in similar employment throughout his infinite kingdom; and that Being is well worthy of prostrate adoration to whom we ascribe an eternity, every moment of which hath been signalized by a scheme of preserving providence, by a plan of redemption, by the informing of angelic intellect, or by the creation of a world. One chief reason why the human soul is so prone to neglect or avoid this idea, is because it is so unsatisfactory, being almost entirely above the attainment of our weak powers; but, in the upper state, when this weakness is removed, and our faculties are taught to soar up to the very Throne — I need not ask if the mind could be so blind as to admire the spark, in the presence of that fire whence it came.

Sunday Morn.

On such employments we anticipate the happiness of heaven to depend. That any approximation to such spiritual elevation can be made on earth, will be believed by some and denied by others. The reasons why we are no more strongly attracted, are plainly seen, and are lodged within ourselves. [For] the mind does not yet exist but in an infant state, and waits for a development in another world. But there have been men at various intervals, in the world, who by some remarkable fortune, or remarkable effort, have rendered themselves less liable to the suggestions of sense, and have, in a manner, departed from the pursuits and habits of men to hold strict conversation with the attributes of Deity, and, in the emphatic language of the Hebrew historian, to walk with God. And there are certain facilities for this enlarged communion which sometimes occur, to give direction and aid to the feebleness of nature. The astronomer who, by reason of the littleness of the earth, would be able to learn next to nothing of the distance and magnitudes of the heavenly bodies, can yet take advantage of its revolutions around the Sun, and thus move his instruments about in the universe, across the vast orbit of his planet; so the lapse of ages may sometimes enable the devout philosopher to trace the design of Providence, otherwise above his comprehension, by reducing to a miniature view, a magnificent course of events.

The Being which we adore must of necessity be adorable. Where gat we the idea — so different from our other ideas — of somewhat so transcendant and sublime?... The only answer which we are compelled to receive is that the Intelligence who formed our minds adjusted them in such manner as to admit suitable notions of himself from the exhibition of his works, or from the consciousness of our own existence. What must be that existence to which every star, every leaf, every drop in the creation testifies, by their strange and unaccountable formation! Towards that object the eyes of all generations have successively turned, by an universal instinctive impulse; and we are actuated by a portion of the same inspiration when we pronounce the great name of God. And when the mute creation with irresistible force points our inquiries to Him, it becomes a truly admirable spectacle to behold this wise sympathy throughout nature, of imperfect beings consenting to adore perfection.

Si ulla fuit genitalis origo

Terrarumet coeli, semperque aeterna fuere,

Cur supra bellum Thebanum, et funera Trojae,

Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?

LUCRETIUS.

I know nothing more fit to conclude the remarks which have been made in the last pages than certain fine pagan strains.

... “Of dew-bespangled leaves and blossoms bright

Hence! vanish from my sight,

Delusive pictures! unsubstantial shews!

My soul absorbed, one only Being knows,

Of all perceptions, one abundant source,

Hence every object, every moment flows,

Suns hence derive their force,

Hence planets learn their course;

But suns and fading worlds I view no more,

God only I perceive, God only I adore!”

[Narayena; Sir William Jones’s translation.]

DIFFERING RANK OF NATIONS

July 6.

What imparted that impulse to Greece which may be said to have created literature, which has been communicated through Rome to the world?

It is a curious spectacle to a contemplative man to observe a little population of twelve or twenty thousand men for a couple of generations setting their minds at work more diligently than men were accustomed, and effecting something altogether new and strange; to see them lie quietly down again in darkness, while all the nations of the world rise up to do them a vain reverence; and all the wisest among them exhausting their powers to make a faint imitation of some one excellence of Greece in her age of glory; to see this admiration continued and augmented as the world grows older, and with all the advantages of an experience of 6000 years to find those departed artists never paralleled. It certainly is the most manly literature in the world, being composed of histories, orations, poems, and dramatic pieces, in which no sign of accommodation is discovered to the whims of fashion or patronage. Simplicity is a remarkable characteristic of the productions of all the ancient masters. Upon their most admirable statue they were content to engrave, “Apollodorus the Ephesian made it”; and we respect the republican brevity which, in the place of a studied eulogium upon a drama which had been represented with unbounded applause, simply wrote, “Placuit” (it pleased).

LICOÖ

“Let us plait the garland and weave the chi,

While the wild waves dash on our iron strand;

Tomorrow, these waves may wash our graves,

And the moon look down on a ruined land.”

The islanders who sung this melancholy song, presaging the evil fates which waited for them —— have passed away. No girdled chieftain sits upon their grim rocks to watch the dance of his tribe beneath the yellow lustre of the Moon; the moan of the waves is the only voice in their silent-land; the moan of the waves is the only requiem of the brave who are buried on the seashore or in the main. But their memory has not failed from among men; the mournful notes which foreboded their fall have given it immortality. For there is a charm in poetry, which binds the world, and finds its effect in the East and in the West.

“Let me not, like a worm, go by the way.”

CHAUCER.

JOURNAL VIII

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 7

DEDICATION

BOSTON, July 11, 1822.

I dedicate my book to the Spirit of America. I dedicate it to that living soul, which doth exist somewhere beyond the Fancy, to whom the Divinity hath assigned the care of this bright corner of the Universe. I bring my little offering, in this month, which covers the continent with matchless beauty, to the shrine, which distant generations shall load with sacrifice, and distant ages shall admire afar off. With a spark of prophetic devotion, I hasten to hail the Genius, who yet counts the tardy years of childhood, but who is increasing unawares in the twilight, and swelling into strength, until the hour when he shall break the cloud, to shew his colossal youth, and cover the firmament with the shadow of his wings.

Evening.

It is a slow patriotism which forgets to love till all the world have set the example. If the nations of Europe can find anything to idolize in their ruinous and enslaved institutions, we are content, though we are astonished at their satisfaction. But let them not ignorantly mock at the pride of an American, as if it were misplaced or unfounded, when that freeman is giving an imperfect expression to his sense of his condition. He rejoices in the birthright of a country where the freedom of opinion and action is so perfect that every man enjoys exactly that consideration to which he is entitled, and each mind, as in the bosom of a family, institutes and settles a comparison of its powers with those of its fellow, and quietly takes that stand which nature intended for it. He points to his native land as the only one where freedom has not degenerated to licentiousness; in whose well-ordered districts education and intelligence dwell with good morals; whose rich estates peacefully descend from sire to son, without the shadow of an interference from private violence, or public tyranny; whose offices of trust and seats of science are filled by minds of republican strength and elegant accomplishments. Xenophon and Thucydides would have thought it a theme better worthy of their powers, than Persia or Greece; and her Revolution would furnish Plutarch with a list of heroes. If the Constitution of the United States outlives a century, it will be matter of deep congratulation to the human race; for the Utopian dreams which visionaries have pursued and sages exploded, will find their beautiful theories rivalled and outdone by the reality, which it has pleased God to bestow upon United America.

Saturday Evening, July 13.

(Continued from Wide World, No. 6)

I have proposed to attempt the consideration of those different aspects, under which we are accustomed to view the Divinity. I shall endeavour first to give some account of his relation to us as the founder of the Moral law.

It is not necessary to describe that law, otherwise than by saying that it is the sovereign necessity which commands every mind to abide by one mode of conduct and to reject another, by joining to the one a perfect satisfaction, while it pursues the other with indefinite apprehensions.

Its divine origin is fully shown by its superiority to all the other principles of our nature. It seems to be more essential to our constitution than any other feeling whatever. It dwells so deeply in the human nature that we feel it to be implied in consciousness. Other faculties fail, —— Memory sleeps; Judgment is impaired or ruined; Imagination droops, — but the moral sense abides there still. In our very dreams, it wakes and judges amid the Chaos of the rest. The depths of its foundations in the heart, and the subtilty of its nature in eluding investigations into its causes and character, distinguish it eminently above other principles. If you compare it, for example, with the phenomena of taste, which also appear to be universal, we shall readily discern a considerable distinction withdrawing from the one its transient resemblance. The judgment which determines a circle to be more beautiful than a square, or a rose to be fairer than a clod, is not founded upon aught existing in the mind independent of the senses, but is manifestly derived from the humble sources of the material world. It is nothing but a power to decide upon the pleasures of sense. If this be not the limit of the province of taste, if it ever rise to the judgment of questions which seem to involve moral beauty, it is only where it begins to blend with the moral sense and becomes ennobled by its connection. But that sovereign sense whereof we speak leaves the material world and its subordinate knowledge to subordinate faculties, and marshals before its divine tribunal the motives of action, the secrets of character and the interests of the universe. It has no taint of mortality in the purity and unity of its intelligence; it is perfectly spiritual. It sometimes seems to sanction that Platonic dream, that the soul of the individual was but an emanation from the Abyss of Deity, and about to return whence it flowed. So it seems to predict, on SUPREME AUTHORITY, that fate which is to be declared, when Time shall cease. It seems to be the only human thought which is admitted to partake of the counsels of the eternal world, and to give note already to man, of the event and the sentence to which he is doomed....

GOD

We have one remarkable evidence to the character, from eternity, of that Being, in the divine determination to make man in the image of God. In all the insignificance and imperfection of our nature, in the guilt to which we are liable, and the calamity which guilt has accumulated, — man triumphs to remember that he bears about him a spark which all beings venerate [and] acknowledge to be the emblem of God, — which may be violated, but which cannot be extinguished. And we remark with delight the confirmations of this belief in the opening features of human character. And the little joy of the child who plants a seed and sees himself instrumental in the creation of a flower, forcibly reminds us of that beneficence which built the heavens and the earth, and saw that it was good.

THE RIVER

Among the bulrushes I lay

Which deck the river’s murmuring tide;

Upon those banks no men abide,

But swans come sailing in their pride

And graceful float into the quiet bay.

Fast sailed the golden fishes by,

And some leaped out to see the sky,

Nor saw the bird that stooped from high

Until he broke the wave’s white crest

And bore the flapping fish aloft unto his nest.

An April cloud blew o’er the stream

And cast its big drops down,

They oped the lily’s covering brown

And shed its steaming perfume round,

And golden insects flew unto that flower supreme.

DRAMA

July.

... The grand object of the Drama is to claim the affections by awakening... sympathy. It represents an accumulation of human we with gorgeous pomp to move the pity and indignation of a susceptible audience. Its triumph is complete, when the passions of the multitude, which naturally move in unison, at last aid each other to some general utterance, and consent to the weakness of feelings, which in an individual would be ridiculous. From the Theatre, then, drive out the buyers and sellers of corruption who have made it a den of vice, and make it an Oracle of those opinions and sentiments which multiply and strengthen the bonds of society.

The more we reflect upon the subject, the more thoroughly we shall be convinced how practicable it is to produce a Theatre of an actively useful character. It is a mistake to suppose that only vicious gratification can raise sufficient excitement to draw men together around a stage. On the contrary, what an inextinguishable thirst for eloquence, however rude, exists in every breast!...

It is natural that we pant to feel those thrilling sensations of a most agreeable character which passionate and powerful declamation never fails to move. They are akin to the emotions produced by the sublime, in sense or thought. And for these, the fictitious distresses of exalted personages, amid the passage of wonderful events, such as a pure play will freely admit, seem to afford every desirable facility.... Besides we have direct testimony of the certainty of success, in the instance of the Greek Tragedy, which, without impurity, was universally popular at Athens...

REASON

Sunday, September 7.

[As for] that hoary-headed error which considers Reason as opposed to Scripture, and which frequently and loudly condemns Reason as an adversary and a seducer, as unbelieving and profane.... Instead of placing idiots in his universe, capable only of sensual gratification, able only to obey instincts, and requiring every moment a new direction from heaven to prevent them from grovelling in the dirt, or being destroyed by the beasts, God has peopled it with images of himself, and kindled within them the light of his own understanding — a portion of that ray which illuminates, as it formed, the Creation. He has communicated to them an intelligence by which they are enabled to see their way in a universe where other beings are blind; to behold him, and their relation to him; to read and understand all those communications which in past or future time he is pleased to make; it is an intelligence by which they find themselves distinguished from his other creations. There are about and amidst them a thousand different properties; there are hills and waters, trees and flowers, the living forms of nature and the stars of the firmament; — but they are still and brutish — there is no eye and voice within them to detect and declare the stupendous glory which surrounds them; they lack that living spirit which opens the eyes of man, and without which the Universe is as if it were not, and the glory of Deity is darkness. It is an intelligence which soars above these charms of the material world, and can contemn them in the comparison with the objects which it is capable of enjoying. In fine, it is an intelligence which reveals to man another condition of existence, and a nearer approach to the Supreme Being. This intelligence is Reason.

Yet some there are who tell you, as if it involved no inconsistency, and certainly no sin, to avoid profaning the revelations of God by submitting them to the tribunal of man’s reason, — who seek to walk implicitly by a law which they do not and will not understand, because they refuse to apply to its explanation that light with which their maker has furnished them. It is not only a wilful perversion and abuse of a priceless gift, but it is a most ungrateful neglect of divine mercy, and a neglect which incurs a tremendous responsibility....

DRAMA (continued)

October.

In proposing schemes of reformation in so important a matter as the Drama, one should be cautious to avoid running into systems too visionary for popular understanding. The scholar in his closet must beware lest his poetical imaginations of the beauty of Tragedy lead him into fields beyond the track of common opinion, and to render his speculations of no use. Nevertheless, it appears to me that the bold and beautiful personification in Milton’s Penseroso is not an unapt description of the true drama: —

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy

With sceptred pall come sweeping by,

Presenting Thebes and Pelops’ line

And the tale of Troy divine.

For we wish that Tragedy should take advantage of that weakness, or perhaps virtue, in our nature which bears such an idolatrous love for the emblems of royalty, and that its moral lessons should be couched in the grand and pathetic fables which antiquity affords. Owing to the identity of human character in all ages, there is as much instruction in the tale of Troy as in the Annals of the French Revolution....

There is an embellishment which I would recommend, though out of place here. I mean the introduction of prophecies. The author of Guy Mannering and the Bride of Lammermoor knew the value of the charm and has made fine use of the fascination. It is the most beautiful use of supernatural machinery in fiction.

ORGAN

October, Thursday Evening.

When I was a lad, said the bearded islander, we had commonly a kind of vast musical apparatus in the Pacific islands which must appear as fabulous to you as it proved fatal to us. On the banks of the rivers there were abundance of siphar trees, which consist of vast trunks perforated by a multitude of natural tubes without having any external verdure. When the roots of these were connected with the waters of the river, the water was instantly sucked up by some of the tubes and discharged again by others, and, when properly echoed, the operation [was] attended by the most beautiful musical sounds in the world. My countrymen built their churches to the Great Zoa upon the margin of the water and enclosed a suitable number of these trees, hoping to entertain the ears of the god with this sweet harmony. Finding however by experience that the more water the pipes drew the more rich and various were the sounds of the Organ, they constructed a very large temple with high walls of clay and stone to make the echoes very complete, and enclosed a hundred siphars. When the edifice was complete, six thousand people assembled to hear the long expected song. After they had waited a long time and the waters of the river were beginning to rise, the Instrument suddenly began to emit the finest notes imaginable. Through some of the broader pipes the water rushed with the voice of thunder, and through others with the sweetness of one of your lutes. In a short time the effect of the music was such that it seemed to have made all the hearers mad. They laughed and wept alternately, and began to dance, and such was their delight, that they did not perceive the disaster which had befallen their Organ. Owing to the unusual swell of the River and to some unaccountable irregularity in the ducts, the pipes began to discharge their contents within the chapel. In a short time the evil became but too apparent, for the water rose in spouts from the top of the larger ducts and fell upon the multitude within. Meantime the music swelled louder and louder, and every note was more ravishing than the last. The inconvenience of the falling water which drenched them, was entirely forgotten, until finally the whole host of pipes discharged, every one, a volume of water upon the charmed congregation. The faster poured the water, the sweeter grew the music, and the floor being covered with the torrent, the people began to float upon it with intolerable extacies. Finally the whole multitude swam about in this deluge, holding up their heads with open months and ears as if to swallow the melody, whereby they swallowed much water. Many hundreds were immediately drowned and the enormous pipes, as they emptied the river, swelled their harmony to such perfection that the ear could no longer bear it, and they who escaped the drowning died of the exquisite music. Thenceforward there was no more use of the Siphar trees in the Pacific islands.

THE LAND OF NOT

... It is now nineteen years since I left the Land of Not, and I may safely say that, in the countries in which I have passed my time since that period, it has been invariably true that there is more crime, misery and vexation in every one of them, in the course of a single year, than transpires in the peaceful Land of Not in the lapse of many centuries. Except for the existence of one single institution which has been established from time immemorial, there is no question that a vast tide of emigration would rapidly flow into that country. This institution is a rigorous Alien Act which ordains that no man who leaves the limits of the country shall ever be permitted to set foot within it again. But, to my knowledge, many who have left it have often afterwards looked back to its pleasant abodes, and desired in vain to return....

Saturday Evening, November.

My adventurous and superficial pen has not hesitated to advance thus far upon these old but sublime foundations of our faith; and thus, without adding a straw to the weight of evidence or making the smallest discovery, it has still served to elevate somewhat my own notions by bringing me within prospect of the labours of the sages. After the primitive apostles, I apprehend that Christianity is indebted to those who have established the grounds upon which it rests; to Clarke, Butler, and Paley; to Sherlock, and to the incomparable Newton. And when it shall please my wayward Imagination to suffer me to go drink of these chrystal fountains; or when my better judgment shall have at last triumphed over the daemon Imagination, and shall itself conduct me thither, — I shall be proud and glad of the privilege. For the present, I must be content to make myself wiser as I may, by the same loose speculations upon divine themes...

CONCLUSION

I have come to the close of the sheets which I dedicated to the Genius of America, and notice that I have devoted nothing in my book to any peculiar topics which concern my country.

But is not every effort that her sons make to advance the intellectual interests of the world, and every new thought which is struck out from the mines of religion and morality, a forward step in the path of her greatness? Peace be with her progressive greatness, — and prosperity crown her giant minds. A victory is achieved today for one, whose name perchance is written highest in the volume of futurity.

JOURNAL IX

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 8

DEDICATION

BOSTON, November 6, 1822.

To glory which is departed, to majesty which hath ceased, to intellect which is quenched — I bring no homage, — no, not a grain of gold. For why seek to contradict the voice of Nature and of God, which saith over them, “It is finished,” by wasting our imaginations upon the deaf ear of the dead? Turn rather to the mighty multitude, the thunder of whose footsteps shakes now the earth; whose faces are flushed by the blood of life; whose eye is enlightened by a living soul. Is there none in this countless assembly who hath a claim on the reverence of the sons of Minerva?

I have chosen one from the throng. Upon his brow have the Muses hung no garland. His name hath never been named in the halls of fashion, or the palaces of state; but I saw Prophecy drop the knee before him, and I hastened to pay the tribute of a page.

VISION OF SLAVERY

In my dreams I departed to distant climes and to different periods, and my fancy presented before me many extraordinary societies, and many old and curious institutions. I sat on the margin of the River of Golden Sands when the thirsty leopard came thither to drink. It was just dawn and the shades were chased rapidly from the Eastern firmament by the golden magnificence of day. As I contemplated the brilliant spectacle of an African morning I thought on those sages of this storied land who instructed the infancy of the world. Meanwhile the sun arose and cast a full light over a vast and remarkable landscape. About the river, the country was green and its bed reflected the sunbeams from pebbles and gold. Far around was an ample plain with a soil of yellow sand, glittering everywhere with dew and interspersed with portions of forest, which extended into the plain from the mountains which surrounded this wide Amphitheatre. The distant roar of lions ceased to be heard, and I saw the leopard bathing his spotted limbs and swimming towards the woods which skirted the water. But his course was stopped; an arrow from the wood pierced his head, and he floated lifeless ashore. I looked then to see whence the slayer should have come, and beheld not far off a little village of huts built of canes. Presently I saw a band of families come out from their habitations; and these naked men, women and children sung a hymn to the sun, and came merrily down to the river with nets in their hands to fish. And a crimson bird with a yellow crest flew over their heads as they went, and lighted on a rock in the midst of the river and sung pleasantly to the savages while he brushed his feathers in the stream. The boys plunged into the river and swam towards the rock. But upon a sudden I saw many men dressed in foreign garb run out from the wood where the leopard had been killed; and these surrounded the fishers, and bound them with cords, and hastily carried them to their boats, which lay concealed behind the trees. So they sailed down the stream, talking aloud and laughing as they went; but they that were bound gnashed their teeth and uttered so piteous a howl that I thought it were a mercy if the river had swallowed them.

In my dream, I launched my skiff to follow the boats and redeem the captives. They went in ships to other lands and I could never reach them, albeit I came near enough to hear the piercing cry of the chained victims, which was louder than the noise of the Ocean. In the nations to which they were brought they were sold for a price, and compelled to labour all the day long, and scourged with whips until they fell dead in the fields, and found rest in the grave.

Canst thou ponder the vision, and shew why Providence suffers the land of its richest productions to be thus defiled? Do human bodies lodge immortal souls, — and is this tortured life of bondage and tears a fit education for the bright ages of heaven and the commerce of angels? Is man the Image of his Maker, — and shall this fettered and broken frame, this marred and brutalized soul become perfect as He is perfect? This slave hath eat the bread of captivity and drank the waters of bitterness, and cursed the light of the sun as it dawned on his bed of straw, and worked hard and suffered long, while never an idea of God hath kindled in his mind from the hour of his birth to the hour of his death; and yet thou sayest that a merciful Lord made man in his benevolence to live and enjoy, to take pleasure in his works and worship him forever. Confess that there are secrets in that Providence which no human eye can penetrate, which darken the prospect of Faith, and teach us the weakness of our Philosophy.

November 8.

At least we may look farther than to the simple fact and perhaps aid our faith by freer speculation. I believe that nobody now regards the maxim “that all men are born equal,” as any thing more than a convenient hypothesis or an extravagant declamation. For the reverse is true, — that all men are born unequal in personal powers, and in those essential circumstances, of time, parentage, country, fortune. The least knowledge of the natural history of man adds another important particular to these; namely, what class of men he belongs to — European, Moor, Tartar, African? Because Nature has plainly assigned different degrees of intellect to these different races, and the barriers between are insurmountable.

This inequality is an indication of the design of Providence that some should lead, and some should serve. For when an effect invariably takes place from causes which Heaven established, we surely say with safety, that Providence designed that result.

Throughout society there is therefore not only the direct and acknowledged relation of king and subject, master and servant, but a secret dependence quite as universal, of one man upon another, which sways habits, opinions, conduct. This prevails to an infinite extent and, however humbling the analogy, it is nevertheless true, that the same pleasure and confidence which the dog and horse feel when they rely upon the superior intelligence of man, is felt by the lower parts of our own species with reference to the higher.

Now, with these concessions, the question comes to this: whether this known and admitted assumption of power by one part of mankind over the other, can ever be pushed to the extent of total possession, and that without the will of the slave?

It can hardly be said that the whole difference of the will divides the natural servitude of which we have spoken from the forced servitude of “slavery.” For it is not voluntary, on my part, that I am born a subject; contrariwise, if my opinion had been consulted, it is ten to one I should have been the Great Mogul. The circumstances in which every man finds himself he owes to fortune and not to himself. And those men who happen to be born in the lowest caste in India, suffer much more perhaps than the kidnapped African, with no other difference in their lot than this, that God made the one wretched, and man, the other. Except that there is a dignity in suffering from the ordinances of Supreme Power — which is not at all common to the other class — one lot is as little enviable as the other.

When all this is admitted, the question may still remain entirely independent and untouched — apart from the consideration of slavery as agreeable or contradictory to the analogies of nature — whether any individual has a right to deprive any other individual of freedom without his consent; or whether he may continue to withhold the freedom which another hath taken away?

Upon the first question, — whether one man may forcibly take away the freedom of another, — the weakness and incapacity of Africans would seem to have no bearing; though it may affect the second. Still it may be advanced that the beasts of the field are all evidently subjected to the dominion of man, and, with the single restriction of the laws of humanity, are left entirely at his will. And why are they, and how do we acquire this declaration of heaven? Manifestly from a view of the perfect adaptation of these animals to the necessities of man, and of the advantage which in any of them find in leaving the forest for the barnyard. If they had reason, their strength would be so far superior to ours, that, besides our inability to use them, it would be inconsistent with nature. So that these three circumstances are the foundation of our dominion; viz their want of reason; their adaptation to our wants; and their own advantage (when domesticated). But these three circumstances may very well apply to the condition of the Blacks, and it may be hard to tell exactly where the difference lies. Is it in Reason? If we speak in general of the two classes, Man and Beast, we say that they are separated by the distinction of Reason, and the want of it; and the line of this distinction is very broad. But if we abandon this generalization, and compare the classes of one with the classes of the other, we shall find our boundary line growing narrower and narrower, and individuals of one species approaching individuals of the other, until the limits become finally lost in the mingling of the classes....

November 14.

If we pursue a revolting subject to its greatest lengths, we should find that in all those three circumstances which are the foundations of our dominion over the beasts, very much may be said to apply them to the African species; even in the last, viz., the advantage which they derive from our care; for the slaveholders violently assert that their slaves are happier than the freedmen of their class; and the slaves refuse oftentimes the offer of their freedom. Nor is this owing merely to the barbarity which has placed them out of the power of attaining a competence by themselves. For it is true that many a slave under the warm roof of a humane master, with easy labours and regular subsistence, enjoys more happiness than his naked brethren, parched with thirst on a burning sand, or endangered in the crying wilderness of their native land.

This is all that is offered in behalf of slavery; we shall next attempt to knock down the hydra.

To establish, by whatever specious argumentation, the perfect expediency of the worst institution on earth is prima facie an assault upon Reason and Common Sense. No ingenious sophistry can ever reconcile the unperverted mind to the pardon of slavery; nothing but tremendous familiarity, and the bias of private interest. Under the influence of better arguments than can be offered in support of slavery we should sustain our tranquillity by the confidence that no surrender of our opinion is ever demanded, and that we are only required to discover the lurking fallacy which the disputant acknowledges to exist. It is an old dispute, which is not now and never will be totally at rest, whether the human mind be or be not a free agent. And the asserter of either side must be scandalized by the bare naming of the theory that man may impose servitude on his brother. For if he is himself free, and it offends the attributes of God to have him otherwise, it is manifestly a bold stroke of impiety to wrest the same liberty from his fellow. And if he is not free, then this inhuman barbarity ascends to derive its origin from the author of all necessity.

A creature who is bound by his hopes of salvation to imitate the benevolence of better beings, and to do all the kindness in his power, fastens manacles on his fellow with an ill grace. A creature who holds a little lease of life upon the arbitrary tenure of God’s good pleasure improves his moment strangely by abusing God’s best works, his own peers.

MORAL LAW

Saturday Evening, November 16.

The child who refuses to pollute its little lips with a lie, and the archangel who refuses with indignation to rebel in the armies of heaven against the Most High, act alike in obedience to a law which pervades all intelligent beings. This law is the Moral Sense; a rule coëxtensive and coëval with Mind. It derives its existence from the eternal character of the Deity, of which we spoke above; and seems of itself to imply, and therefore to prove his Existence.... Whence comes this strong universal feeling that approves or abhors actions? Manifestly not from matter, which is altogether unmoved by it, and the connection of which with it is a thing absurd — but from a Mindy of which it is the essence. That Mind is God.

This Sentiment which we bear within us, is so subtle and unearthly in its nature, so entirely distinct from all sense and matter, and hence so difficult to be examined, and withal so decisive and invariable in its dictates — that it clearly partakes of another world than this, and looks forward to it in the end. It is further to be observed of it, that its dictates are never blind, are never capricious, but, however they may seem to differ, are always discovered on a close and profound examination to point to a faultless and unattainable perfection. They seem to refer to a sublime course of life and action which nowhere exists, or to which we are not privy; and to be an index of the Creator’s character lent to mankind in vindication or illustration of the command, “Be ye perfect as He is perfect.”

This Sentiment differs from the affections of the heart and from the faculties of the mind. The affections are undiscriminating and capricious. The Moral Sense is not. The powers of the intellect are sometimes wakeful and sometimes dull, alive with interest to one subject and dead to the charm of another. There are no ebbs and flows, no change, no contradiction in this. Its lively approbation never loses its pleasure; its aversion never loses its sting. Its oracular answers might be sounded through the world, for they are always the same. Motives and characters are amenable to it; and the golden rules which are the foundation of its judgments we feel and acknowledge, but do not understand....

JUSTICE

“Even handed Justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice To our own lips.”

The bold misdoer who transgresses the law of Justice grapples with he knows not what. He has offended against an essential attribute of the Divinity, which will plead against him inexorably until it be avenged. His rash hand has disordered a part of the moral machinery of the Universe and he is in peril of being crushed by the mischief he has caused.

... How shall man reconcile his freedom with that eternal necessary chain of cause and consequence which binds him and Nature down to an irreversible decree? How shall he reconcile his freedom with that prophetic omniscience which beheld his end long before the infant entered on the world? Perhaps he is a slave — and men have worn his limbs with irons, and his soul with suffering; the name of virtue and the smile of kindness never have stooped to alleviate his hard and bitter bondage; but ere his little day of apathy and distress was done, he cursed God and died; — hath he descended into hell? Or how dost thou reconcile the creation and destiny of this being with that Infinite and benevolent Justice that would not abuse its Omnipotence, and would not create a mind to be miserable?

Tell not that man of those feelings and thoughts which give a joy to your existence and warm your heart to the world; for it will be but to mock his wretchedness. Tell him not of the dignity of human nature, of its benevolence and philanthropy, — he will clank his chains at the word. He scoffs bitterly at your pictures of the golden gates of Heaven, for they are closed on him.

The man is bold who undertakes to answer beyond a doubt these perplexing questions. But theology would be a vain science, unworthy of our attention, if it left them all in their full force, without notice or solution.

If an ignorant man were carried from his closet to the prisons and penitentiaries of a vast kingdom and shewn a multitude of men confined and scourged and forced to labour, and informed that this was the act of the government, if he knew nothing more of that state and perhaps foolishly conceived that its limits extended no further than the walls wherein he stood, it would be a very plain conclusion that this government was a savage and outrageous tyranny; while perhaps at that very moment the government was the most perfect and beneficent in the world. Our rash conclusions from the dark side of human affairs are analogous to these, and like these are to be corrected by broader views of the system which we misunderstand.

The questions we have named, are incidental to the subject, but of such importance, that we shall digress from the main topic to attempt to answer them. The endeavour is always laudable to clear up the darkness which settles around portions of the system. God in heaven is answerable for his works, to those principles which he hath set within us to judge of them. To the discussion of some of them, our nature is incompetent.

One of the best satires upon women is the popular opinion of the third century, that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of evil demons.... Men’s minds visit heaven as they visit earth, and hence the Turkish heaven is a Harem; the Scandinavian, a hunting field; the Arabian, a place of wheaten cakes and murmuring fountains. We’ve supple understandings and so it comes that a new religion ever suits itself to the state in which ’tis born, whether despotism or democracy, as Montesquieu has remarked.

Four daughters make the family of Time,

But rosy Summer is the darling child.

BENEVOLENCE

Saturday Evening, November 23.

The hours of social intercourse, of gratified hope, of the festive board, have just now yielded to quieter pleasures of the closet and the pen. This tender flesh is warmly clad, the blood leaps in the vessels of life, Health and Hope write their results on the passing moment, — and these cussions of Benevolence a few pages farther on. In the latter of these his favourite doctrine of Compensation appears. things make the pleasure of a mortal, bodily, mental being. There are in the world at this moment one hundred million men whose history today may match with mine, not counting the numberless ones whose day was happier. There are also in existence here a countless crowd of inferior animals who have had their lesser cup filled full with pleasure. The sunny lakes reflect the noonday beams from the glittering tribes which cover its bottom, rapid as thought in their buoyant motions, leaping with the elasticity and gladness of life. The boundless Ocean supports in its noisy waves its own great population, — the beautiful dolphin, the enormous whale, and huge sea-monsters of a thousand families and a thousand uncouth gambols dash through its mighty domain in the fulness of sensual enjoyment. The air is fanned by innumerable wings, the green woods are vocal with the song of the insect and the bird; the beasts of the field fill all the lands untenanted by man, and beneath the sod the mole and the worm take their pleasure. All this vast mass of animated matter is moving and basking under the broad orb of the sun, — is drinking in the sweetness of the air, is feeding on the fruits of nature, — is pleased with life, and loth to lose it. All this pleasure flows from a source. That source is the Benevolence of God.

This is the first superficial glance at the economy of the world and necessarily leaves out a thousand circumstances. Let us take a closer view, and begin with the human mind. I find within me a motley array of feelings that have no connection with my clayey frame, and I call them my mind. Every day of my life, this mind draws a thousand curious conclusions from the different things which it beholds. With a wanton variety which tires of sameness, it throws all its thoughts into innumerable lights, and changes the fantastic scene by varying its own operations upon it; by combining and separating, by comparing and judging, by remembering and inventing all things. Every one of these little changes within, produces a pleasure, the pleasure of power or of sight. But besides the mere fact that the mind acts, there is a most rich variety in thought, and I grossly undervalue the gift I possess, if I limit its capacity to the puny round of every day’s sensations. It is a ticket of admission to another world of ineffable grandeur — to unknown orders of things which are as real as they are stupendous. As soon as it has advanced a little in life it opens its eye to thoughts which tax its whole power, and delight it by their greatness and novelty. These suggest kindred conceptions, which give birth to others, and thus draw the mind on in a path which it perceives is interminable, and is of interminable joy. To this high favoured intellect is added an intuition that it can never end, and that with its choice it can go forward to take the boon of immortal Happiness. These are causes and states of pleasure which no reason can deny. But this is the true history of all the individuals of the mighty nations that breathe today. These point also to a source — which is the Benevolence of God.

But a groan of the dying, a cry of torture from the diseased, the sob of the mourner, answer to this thanksgiving of human nature and produce a discord in our anthem of praise. If God is good, why are any of his creatures unhappy?...

Those who consider the foundations of human happiness find that it is a contrasted and comparative thing.... High and multiplied sources of pleasure are often in our possession, without being enjoyed, for they never were lacking; God disturbs or removes them for a time; and he is dull, who sees no wisdom in this mode of giving them value and sharpening the blunted edge of appetite. Thus Health and Peace are insipid goods, until you have been able to compare them with the torments of Pain and the visitation of War. And after this comparison has once been made, man runs riot in holding them.

Next, it should be remembered that we wisely assume the righteousness of the Creator in placing man in a probationary state. We do not seek with vain ambition to question the abstruse and unsearchable ground of this ordination, because it is plain matter of fact that we are incompetent to the discussion. This being assumed, there is no longer any doubt of the Divine Benevolence arising from the existence of evil. Evil is the rough and stony foundation of human Virtue; weaning man away from the seductive dangers of vicious, transient, destructive pleasures to a hold and security of Paradise where they are perpetual and perfect.

Of Professor N., Shakespeare long ago wrote the good and bad character:

Oh it is excellent To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant.

[SOLITARY FANCIES]

Rich in the playful joys of solitude

The peaceful Muse begins her jubilee

When Night’s black car, sprinkled with golden stars,

Has chased the Sun’s magnificence away.

Pleased with the closet’s motley furniture,

And broken shadows, where the elves and gnomes

Fight with the rats for noise or victory,

The Muse roves boldly on her vagrant wing,

Disdains the recent times and days of dwarfs,

And this cold land Apollo never knew;

Abandons with proud plumes the passing hour,

And follows Fancy through a thousand worlds.

It is a curious spectacle, to see

‘The panorama of unnumbered hues

That her wild journey marshals round her eye.

But icy Reason scowls upon the shew, —

And its gay battlements and beaming towers

And shining forms all vanish at his frown.

Yet I, who never bowed obedient neck

To Reason’s iron yoke, will still rebel

And vex the tyrant in his ancient halls.

I’ll ponder pleasantly the changing scenes And tell their wonders loudly on the lyre. of him as “a man of acute intellect and commanding personality and, I suppose, the foremost theologian of the liberal Christians.” Sixteen years later, Emerson, after the delivery of his Divinity School Address, felt the weight of this giant’s attack.

November 29, 1822.

The ardour of my college friendship for — is nearly extinct, and it is with difficulty that I can now recall those sensations of vivid pleasure which his presence was wont to waken spontaneously for a period of more than two years. To be so agreeably excited by the features of an individual personally unknown to me, and for so long a time, was surely a curious incident in the history of so cold a being, and well worth a second thought. At the very beginning of our singular acquaintance, I noticed the circumstance in my Wide World, with an expression of curiosity with regard to the effect which time would have upon those feelings. To this day, our glance at meeting is not that of indifferent persons, and were he not so thoroughly buried in his martial cares, I might still entertain the hope of departed hours. Probably the abatement of my solitary enthusiasm is owing to the discouraging reports which I have gathered of his pursuits and character, so entirely inconsistent with the indications of his face. But it were much better that our connexion should stop, and pass off, as it now will, than to have had it formed, and then broken by the late discovery of insurmountable barriers to friendship. From the first, I preferred to preserve the terms which kept alive so much sentiment rather than a more familiar intercourse which I feared would end in indifference.

 benevolence (continued)

Saturday Evening, November 30.

Heraclitus was a fool, who wept always for the miseries of human life. Or was he blind and deaf to beauty and melody? In his day, was the sky black, and were snakes instead of flowers coiled in his path? Was his mind reversed in its organization; — had he Despair for Hope, and Remorse for Memory? Could his disordered eye discern a savage Power sitting in this Splendid Universe, thwarting the good chances of Fortune and promoting the bad, sowing seeds of sorrow for glory> turning grace and tranquillity to desolation, and heaven to hell? Then let him weep on. True philosophy hath a clearer sight, and remarks amid the vast disproportions of human condition a great equalization of happiness; an intimate intermingling of pleasure with every gradation, down to the very lowest of all. Pleasant and joyous are the connexions of our sympathy and affection— ’tis proved by the very tear which marks their dissolution; and even that pang of separation and loss is relieved by its own indulgence....

Happiness lies at our own door. Misery is further away. Until I know by bitter personal experience that the world is the accursed seat of all misfortunes, and as long as I find it a garden of delights — I am bound to adore the Beneficent Author of my life.... No representations of foreign misery can liquidate your debt to Heaven. You must join the choral hymn to which the Universe resounds in the ear of Faith, and I think, of Philosophy....

The mind can perceive a harmonious whole, combined and overruled by a sublime Necessity, which embraces in its mighty circle the freedom of the individuals, and without subtracting from any, directs all to their appropriate ends. It perceives a purpose to pain, and sees how the instruction and perfection of myriads is brought about by the spectacle of guilt and its punishment. That great and primeval Necessity may make impossible an Universe without evil, and perhaps founds happiness everywhere, as here, upon the contrast of suffering. This question lies at the sources of things, and we are only indulged with an intimation that may make out the just goodness of the Deity.

(This connection may be deeper and more intimate than we are apt to imagine, and the circumstances observed just now, seem to indicate that it is. That connection, which subsists here in character, will subsist in condition hereafter. And some plan will be developed, in which the good of Evil will be made plain on the general scale, that cannot be explained upon the particular.)...

GREATNESS

Every man who enumerates the catalogue of his acquaintance is privately conscious, however reluctant to confess the inferiority, of a certain number of minds which do outrun and command his own, in whose company, despite the laws of good breeding and the fences of affectation, his own spirit bows like the brothers’ sheaves to Joseph’s sheaf. He remembers the soothsayer’s faithful account of Antony’s guardian genius which among other men was high and unmatchable, but quailed before Caesar’s. He remembers also other some of his companions, over whom his own spirit exercises the same mastery. And let no man complain of the inequality of such an ordination, or call Fortune partial in the distribution of her blessings.

AMERICA December 21.

There is everything in America’s favour, to one who puts faith in those proverbial prophecies of the Westward progress of the Car of Empire. Though there may be no more barbarians left to overrun Europe and extinguish forever the memory of its greatness, yet its rotten states, like Spain, may come to their decline by the festering and inveteracy of the faults of government. Aloof from the contagion during the long progress of their decline, America hath ample interval to lay deep and solid foundations for the greatness of the New World. And along the shores of the South Continent, to which the dregs of corruption of European society had been unfortunately transplanted, the fierceness of the present conflict for independence will, no doubt, act as a powerful remedy to the disease, by stirring up the slumbering spirits of those indolent zones to a consciousness of their “power and destiny. Here, then, new Romes are growing, and the Genius of man is brooding over the wide boundaries of infant empires, where yet are to be drunk the intoxicating draughts of honour and renown; here are to be played over again the bloody games of human ambition, bigotry and revenge, and the stupendous Drama of the passions to be repeated. Other Cleopatras shall seduce, Alexanders fight, and Cæsars die. The pillars of social strength, which we occupy ourselves in founding thus firmly to endure to future ages as the monuments of the wisdom of this, are to be shaken on their foundations with convulsions proportioned to their adamantine strength. The time is come, the hour is struck; already the actors in this immense and tremendous scene have begun to assemble. The doors of life in our mountain-land are opened, and the vast swarm of population is crowding in, bearing in their hands the burden of Sorrow and Sin, of glory, and science, which are to be mingled in their future fates. In the events and interests of these empires, the old tales of history and the fortunes of departed nations shall be thoroughly forgotten and the name of Rome or Britain fall seldom on the ear.

In that event, when the glory of Plato of Greece, of Cicero of Rome, and of Shakspeare of England shall have died, who are they that are to write their names where all time shall read them, and their words be the oracle of millions? Let those who would pluck the lot of Immortality from Fate’s Urn, look well to the future prospects of America.

Friday Evg. Bee. 21, 1822. Authors or Books quoted or referred to in Journals of 1822 Homer; Simonides; Heraclitus; Sophocles, Electra; Thucydides; Demosthenes; Bible; Zoroaster; Cicero; Lucretius; Horace; Plutarch; Tacitus, Germania; Seneca; Marcus Aurelius; Mediæval Mystery Plays; Chaucer; Shakspeare; Ben Jonson; Bacon; Milton, Paradise Lost; Boileau; Locke, On the Human Understanding; William Sherlock, Sermon on Faith; Newton; Burnet, Memorial; Fontenelle; Pope; Richardson, Novels; Montesquieu; Butler, Analogy; Voltaire; David Hartley, Observations on Man; Dr. Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes; Samuel Clarke; Priestly; Gibbon, Beeline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Paley; Logan, Tarrow; Speeches of Pitt, Burke, Fox; Dugald Stewart, Philosophy of the Mind; Claudius Buchanan, Christian Researches in India; Abernethy; Buckminster, Sermons; Arabian Nights; Scott, The Pirate, Minstrelsy; Byron, Corsair, Childe Harold; Fearing, Travels in the United States; Sismondi, Italian Republics; Leigh Hunt, Song.

JOURNAL X

THE WIDE WORLD, NO. 9

“Pass not unblest the Genius of the place.”

Saturday Evening, December 21, 1822.

To the Genius of the Future, I dedicate my page.

“Incipe. Vivendi qui recte prorogat horam,

Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.”

[GOOD HOPE]

... If the misanthrope take refuge in analogy —— it will fail him. For though we bewail the imperfection of sublunary things, yet all things in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom have a perfection, which, though not attained in the hundred instances, — is attained in the thousand; is attained much oftener than not. Man in many trials has failed;... But now a preparation is made for another experiment which begins with infinite advantages. I need not name the daily blessings which are diffused over the present generation and distinguish them above antiquity. I notice only that they possess Christianity and a civilization more deeply ingrafted in the mind (by reason of the extraordinary aids it derives from inventions and discoveries) than ever it has before been. It is the nature of these advantages to multiply themselves. Providence ordains that every improvement extend an influence of infinite extent over the face of society. For centuries back, the progress of human affairs has appeared to indicate some better era; and finally when all events were prepared, God has opened a new theatre for this ultimate trial. This country is daily rising to a higher comparative importance and attracting the eyes of all the rest of the world to the development of its embryo greatness.

ALFRED THE GREAT

Christmas, December 25.

If (as saith Voltaire) all that is related of Alfred the Great be true, I know not the man that ever lived, more worthy of the gratitude of posterity. I hope the reservation means nothing. There is not one incredible assertion made either of his abilities, his character, or his actions. Besides it was not an age, nor were Saxon monks the men, to invent and adorn another Cyropaedia. Sharon Turner, an ambitious flashing writer, and elsewhere a loon, hath done well by Alfred. His praise rests not upon monkish eulogy or vague tradition, but upon facts....

December 26, 1822.

I have heard this evening and shall elsewhere record Prof. Everett’s lecture upon Eleusinian mysteries, Dodona, and St. Sophia’s temple....

Though the lecture contained nothing original, and no very remarkable views, yet it was an account of antiquities bearing everywhere that “fine Roman hand,” and presented in the inimitable style of our Cicero. “Bigotry and Philosophy are the opposite poles of the judgment, and the scepticism of Hume and Gibbon is as different as the superstition of the Catholics from the freedom of the Protestant.” (Professor E.)

Saturday Evening, January 11.

“My bosom’s lord sits lightly on his throne”; I cannot distinctly discern the cause; tomorrow he will sit heavily there; and after a few days more, he shall cease to be. The connexions which he nursed with earthly society shall be broken off, and the memory of his individual influence shall be obliterated from human hearts. It may chance that he will resume his thought elsewhere; that while the place from whence he passed forgets him, he shall nourish the fires of a pure ambition in some freer sanctuary than this world holds. It is possible that the infinity of another world may so crowd his conception, as to divest him of that cumbrous sense of self that weighs him down, — until he lose his individual existence in his efforts for the Universe.

TIME

... The years of infancy fled, and those toys dwindled away to make room for the splendid hopes and enthusiastic resolutions of youth. The sky was not so bright, and alas! not so changeable as its promises. It revelled in the sight of beauty, and the sound of music, in the motion of the limbs, in the intercourse of friends, and in all the joys of a pleasant and gorgeous world. But the crimson flush went from its cheek and the joyous light from its eye; its bones hardened into manhood, and its years departed beyond the flood. Reason watched them as they departed, and was bitterly mortified to find how insignificant they became in the view. Those changes and events which had engaged the mind by their gigantic greatness sunk now to pigmy dimensions, and so dim were their images upon the memory that it was hard to believe they were not altogether a dream.

After a few more turnings of the globe in its orbit, manhood, age and life itself will have passed, and as I advance, that which I have left behind will continually grow less and less. As I reach and pass successively the several epochs of existence, the things of former pursuit will degenerate in my esteem. All, all, will be unremembered as if they had never been. The mind writes daily, in its recollections of the past, but one epitaph upon Time— “Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity!” God forbid that this be the faithful history of the Universe....

MORAL SENSE

... There is one distinction amid these fading phenomena — one decided distinction which is real and eternal and which will survive nature —— I mean the distinction of Right and Wrong. Your opinions upon all other topics, and your feelings with regard to this world, in childhood, youth, and age, perpetually change. Your perceptions of right and wrong never change. You can dismiss the world from your mind, and almost abolish in your imagination the dominion of sense; but you can never bury in your breast the sense of offended Justice....

The mind may lose its acquaintance with other minds, and may abandon, without a sigh, this glorious universe, as a tent of the night to dwell in; but it cannot part with its moral principle, by which it becomes akin to the extraordinary intelligences that are to accompany its everlasting journey to the throne of God. If there be anything real under heaven, or in heaven, the perception of right and wrong relates to that reality. Dogmatists and philosophers may easily convince me that my mind is but the abode of many passing shadows by the belief of whose existence about me I am mocked. I shall not very sturdily combat this ancient scepticism because, to my mind and to every mind, it has often seemed problematical whether or not it was cheated by an unsubstantial edifice of thought. But it is in the constitution of the mind to rely with firmer confidence upon the moral principle, and I reject at once the idea of a delusion in this. This is woven vitally into the thinking substance itself, so that it cannot be diminished or destroyed without dissipating forever that spirit which it inhabited. Upon the foundation of my moral sense I ground my faith in the immortality of the soul, in the existence and activity of good beings, and in the promise of rewards accommodated hereafter to the vicious or virtuous dispositions which were cultivated here. The great citizenship of the universe, which all souls partake, has this for its common bond and charter, which none may violate, without taking upon themselves the peril of losing its infinite privileges. Upon the bounded field of this earth, nations upon nations of men have expired in succession, and borne to other and unseen countries the minds that dwelled here for a space; and all the individuals of this host have consented together in one respect alone, namely, the acknowledgement of this inward tribunal of thought and action. They obeyed or disobeyed its law, they suffered or rejoiced, as they might; but not one ever escaped from this high, unyielding, universal thraldom which the Author of Mind has created upon the mind.

ENTHUSIASM

January 19, 1823.

The ideas of Deity and religious worship readily find admission to the mind, and are readily abused. The clown on a dunghill can exalt his capacity to these truths and is delighted and flattered by this consciousness of a new and transcendent power. God is infinitely above the whole creation, and he that aspires to worship Him, feels that his mounting spirit leaves the rest of the Universe beneath his feet. Enthusiasm is therefore apt to generate in uncultivated minds a rash and ignorant contempt for the slow modes of education and the cautious arts of reasoning by which enlightened men arrive at wisdom — because they have themselves acquired this surpassing conception without the irksome toil of the intermediate steps. The boor becomes philosopher at once, and boldly issues the dogmas of a religious creed from the exuberance of a coarse imagination. The tumults of a troubled mind are mistaken for the inspiration of an apostle, and the strength of excited feelings is substituted for the dispassionate and tardy induction, the comparison of scripture and reason, which sanctions the devotions of moderate and liberal men.

This has been everywhere found to be the history of religious error; not merely in the fanaticism of sects, but in the mistakes and superstitions of individuals. Every man’s heaven is different; and is coloured by the character and tone of feeling most natural to his mind. And, in like manner, his conceptions of the Divine Being will vary with the narrowness or justness of his modes of thinking. A mind which is remarkable for the truth and grandeur of its views in physical or metaphysical science will seldom be found the dupe of an unrelenting bigotry in its religious faith.... Intellectual habits are not the sudden productions of an accident, but are formed slowly, and confirmed from day to day by the influence of events, until they acquire an immutable strength that may outlast the period of this life. We think of God, therefore, as we think of man. Our views of human nature are liable to mistake; so are our views of the divine.

 prayer

... The origin of prayer is no doubt to be traced in our comparison of finite beings with the infinite Being. To obtain bread, we prayed our neighbour to impart from his store. But to obtain more than bread, — to obtain our health or the life of a friend, to change the course of events, is beyond our neighbour’s power. Man remembered in his hour of need that there was a Power above him, and uttered an ejaculation of his distress and his hopes, dictated by precisely the same emotions which moved him to address his earthly friend. Thus far the analogy is unexceptionable, but if pursued farther it fails. A judge has decreed the death of a criminal; the father and friends of the unfortunate man come before the tribunal to pray for his life, and plead with such importunity and eloquence that the judge consents to set aside the sentence. The character of the culprit is not amended, but the free course of justice is stopped, and society wronged, by the earnestness of the supplication. (In the ancient Persian religion, it is forbidden to petition for blessings to themselves individually; the prayer must extend to the whole Persian nation.) In like manner, men came to their Maker to ask the favour of a partial event, a particular blessing that will prove prejudicial to the whole; and reasoning erroneously from human experience, they concluded that there was a certain force in prayer that would extend some controul even over the Mind of Deity. Pity and irresolution in the human judge triumphed over his knowledge and his virtue, and the worshipper flattered himself with the hope that even God might be induced to hesitate by the offering of hecatombs and clamorous petition. The idolatry of every nation has had a tendency towards this belief, that the arm of omnipotence could be chained down by sacrifice and entreaty, which the Hindoo mythology has pursued to extravagant lengths. Prayer and penance by their intrinsic virtue will raise the worshipper above the power of gods and men, until it hurls the Highest from his throne to make room for the devout usurper. Such a creed shocks the mind; but a secret bias to this belief is by no means uncommon in Christian countries. We are prone to think that the prayers of righteous men avail with God to check or change the course of events, which implies either that those events were ill-ordered before, or that they will take a wrong direction now; but both these hypotheses are inconsistent with our trust in the superintendence of Providence over human affairs....

The opposition of a General to a Particular Providence is often implied in prayer. Antiquity viewed the gods as the Particular, Fate as the General Providence, and reconciles them by making Fate absolute in the administration of the Universe. Our perplexity springs from the union of both in the hands of One God.

... When God has ordained a change of events and the aspect of the world, suggesting the benefits of such a change to the mind, induces man to pray for it, in this case, the event coincides with the prayer, and is interpreted as an especial interposition. With this solitary exception, men’s prayers and the succession of events have no direct connexion at all with each other....

Human curiosity is forever engaged in seeking out ways and means of making a connection between the mind and the world of matter without, or the world of mind that has subsisted here, or an uniting bridge which shall join to future ages our own memory and deeds. This laudable curiosity should not neglect the formation of a bond which proposes to unite it, not to men, to matter, or to beasts, but to the Unseen Spirit of the Universe. Our native delight in the intercourse of other beings urges us to cultivate with assiduity the friendship of great minds. But there is a Mind to whom all their greatness is vanity and nothing; who did himself create and communicate all the intellect that exists; and there is a mode of intercourse provided by which we can approach this excellent majesty. That Mind is God; and that Mode is Prayer.

“And if by prayer

Incessant I could hope to change the will

Of Him who all things can, I would not cease

To weary Him with my assiduous cries.

But prayer against his absolute decree

No more avails than breath against the wind

Blown stifling back on him that breathes it forth.”

Paradise Lost, Book XI.

HISTORY

In reading History it is hard to keep the eye steadily fixed upon any distinct moral view of the species, to which we may readily refer all the facts recorded of individuals. When we lay aside the book, and think of man, our habitual theories regard him as a being in a state of probation, and we elevate the whole human race to an exalted equality of condition and destiny. Resume the page, and you are convinced at once, that whatever opinions you are yourself pleased to entertain concerning them, — it never entered the minds of the majority of mankind in past ages that any such equality prevailed, or that they sustained any very sublime rank in the scale of creation. They have themselves shewn a melancholy apathy (that is madness in the eye of a philanthropist) to every supposed nobleness of moral or intellectual design; they — that is the majority — have uniformly preferred the body to the mind, have permitted the free and excessive enjoyment of their sensual appetites, and chained down in torpid dreams the noble appetites of the soul. Instead of eating to live, men have lived to eat, to drink, and to be merry; and when ordinary means failed to bring about these grand purposes, then the extraordinary means of lies; murder and robbery have been resorted to. No doubt good men are also found in the dramatic variety of the tale, to recall the mind to the theory from which it has wandered; but a good man in the world is aptly represented by a stag in the chase, as the one mark and victim at whose cost the enjoyment of all the rest is procured.... It seems to be a mockery to send us to this howling wilderness to pluck roses and fruits. The rose is blooming there and the wild flowers hanging luxuriantly, but they cast their perfume in the tiger’s den. Fanciful men, heated by the new wine of their imaginations, have attempted to woo the indignant Reason into a better love of this darkened world; Epicurean pencils have painted it as perfectly accommodated to our powers of enjoyment, as fraught with every luxury, grace and good which we desire to gain, as the palace of beauty and love, the vast mart of thought, friendship, society and distinction, the home of Virtue and the End of Hope. So it is pictured, and so we believe in childhood; but our first mature glance at the actual state of society falls upon so much real deformity and such low moral and intellectual turpitude that the fair fabric of the imagination is speedily undermined. We find it difficult or impossible to reconcile the phenomena which we observe with any plausible hypotheses that heaven or earth have told us of their design; but humanity always resembles itself, and we readily recognize the imposture that attempts to describe better beings than men. For this more brilliant and seductive faith concerning man and the earth is deduced from false and partial representations of human nature, and makes only momentary converts when it is aided by the gay exhilaration which nature within and without awakens in youth, or by the few hours or moments that happen in a man’s life, when the heart is swelled and imagination is feasted at seasons of revel, magnificence and public joy. Whereas the times when the contrary conviction is forced upon the soul, outnumber these moments a thousand fold....

 history (continued)

The history of America since the Revolution is meagre because it has been all that time under better government, better circumstances of religious, moral, political, commercial prosperity than any nation ever was before. History will continually grow less interesting as the world grows better. Professor Playfair of Edinburgh, the greatest, or one of the greatest men of his time, died without a biography, for there was no incident in the life of a great and good man worth recording. Nelson and Bonaparte, men of abilities without principles, found four or five biographies apiece.

The true epochs of history should be those successive triumphs which, age after age, the communities of men have achieved, such as the Reformation, the Revival of letters, the progressive Abolition of the slave-trade.

Whoever considers what kind of a spirit it is which prompts men to write, will remark the improbability that a knowledge of the domestic manners of an ancient people should be transmitted to a remote age, by any but the most fortuitous event. Literature grew out of the necessity of written monuments, and in its first expansion into an elegant art, while yet its mechanical advantages were rude and poor, it was devoted only to those great features on the face of the world which first forced themselves on the mind of the writer, — to the history of laws, of colonies, of wars, and of religion. For his illustrations, the writer appealed to nature, and upon the early discovery of the delight given by these appeals, was formed a new department of the Art which was called poetry.

DOMESTIC MANNERS

... If we had a series of faithful portraits of private life in Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome, we might relinquish without a sigh their national annals. The great passions which move a whole nation, and the common sense of mankind, are alike everywhere, and these determine the foreign relations and the political counsels of men. But private life hath more delicate varieties, which differ in unlike circumstances;...

... Our vague and pompous outlines of history serve but to define in geographical and chronological limits, the faint vestiges we possess of former nations. But of what mighty moment is it that we know the precise scene of a Virtue or a Vice? Give us the bare narrative of the moral beings engaged, the moral feelings concerned, and the result — and you have answered all our purpose, all the ultimate design which leads the mind to explore the past. (That is of a speculative mind — apart from all purposes of government and policy — for the purposes of another world, rather than for this.) For the history of nations is but the history of private Virtues and Vices collected in a more splendid field, a wider sky. To little purpose you would shew the curious philosopher a mighty forest, extending at a distance its thousand majestic trees; a single branch, a stem, a leaf, in his hand is of more value to him for all the purposes of science. Even the Eternal Geometer, in the fancy of Leibnitz, deduces the past and present condition of the Universe from the examination of the single atom.

SOLITUDE

The gods and wild beasts are both, to a proverb, fond of solitude; thought makes the difference between the solitude of the god and that of the lion.

[imagination versus thought]

In the entry of the saloon there has been considerable bustle; but an individual now stood there to throw off his blue cloak, whose figure arrested at once the whole attention of two or three guests who chanced to be looking towards the door. A whisper instantly circulated to inform the party of the presence of a most distinguished and welcome guest. Every one rose at his entrance, and the stranger advanced with an air of dignified majesty towards the centre of the hall. Franklin saluted him with evident respect and introduced him to the company as the first American President. There was no brilliant sparkle in his eye which attracted notice, nor rapid change of expression in his countenance; his countenance was composed and a graceful dignity marked every motion, so that he was rather the Jupiter than the Apollo of the group. This however was manifest, that from the time of his entrance, during all that long conference, the first place in that society was invariably, and of right, as it seemed, conceded to him. A most melodious voice which rolled richly on the ear and was that of Cicero, addressed the last mentioned person. “I esteem myself happy to stand in the company of one to whom Heaven seems to have united me by a certain similarity of fortune and the common glory of saving a state. But the fates have given you an advantage, O most illustrious man, above my lot, in granting you an honourable decline and death amid the regrets of your country, while I fell by the vengeance of the flagitious Antony.” Gibbon put up his lip at this speech; and Franklin, who sat with his hands upon his knees between Washington and Gibbon, &c. &c.

“Tush!” he said, “thoughts and imaginations! I tell thee, man, that I, who have got my bread and fame by informing the world, can write, in twenty lines, all the thoughts that ever I had, while the imaginations would fill a thousand fair pages.”

[ANIMALS]

March 6, 1823.

My brother Edward asks me, Whether I have a right to make use of animals? I answer “Yes,” and shall attempt to give my reasons. A poor native of Lapland found himself in midwinter destitute of food, of clothing and light, and without even a bow to defend himself from the beasts. In this perplexity he met with a reindeer, which he killed and conveyed to his hut. He now found himself supplied with oil to light his lamp, with a warm covering for his body and with wholesome and strengthening food, and with bowstrings withal, whereby he could again procure a similar supply. Does any mind question the innocence of this starving wretch in thus giving life and comfort to a desolate family in that polar corner of the world?...Now there is a whole nation of men precisely in this condition, all reduced to the alternative of killing the beasts, or perishing themselves. Let the tender-hearted advocate of the brute creation go there, and choose whether he would make the beasts his food, or be himself theirs....

[BODY AND SOUL]

March 10.

The mixture of the body and soul is the great wonder in the world, and our familiarity with this puts us at ease with all that is unaccountable in our condition. Providence, no doubt, scrupulously observes the proportions of this mixture, and requires for the soundness of both, a fixed equilibrium. The gross appetites of the body are sometimes indulged until the mind by long disuse loses the command of her noble faculties, and one after another, star after star, they are gradually extinguished. Those passages and conduits of thought, of divine construction, through which God intended that the streams of intellect should flow in various directions, — because they have never been used, have fallen to ruin, and are choked up; Mind, from being the free born citizen of the Universe and the inheritor of glory, has become the caterer and the pander of sense. Even the body, from being the upright lord of the lower creation and the temperate owner of a thousand pleasures, has abused his liberties, until he is the slave of those pleasures, and the imitator and peer of the beasts. This is one mode of destroying the balance that Nature fixed in our compound frame....

Ascetic mortification and an unintermitting, livelong martyrdom of all the sensual appetites, although far more innocent than the contrary extreme, is nevertheless unwise, because it fails of its intended effect. Hermits, who believed that by this merciless crucifixion of the lusts of the body they should succeed in giving to the winds the rags and tatters of a corrupt nature, and elevate and purge the soul in exact proportion to the sufferings of the flesh, have been disappointed in their hopes; at least, if they have succeeded in deceiving themselves, they have grievously disappointed the world....

But these golden dreams of a rapid amelioration of the world to issue from the prayers and penances that stormed heaven from these solitudes, vanished away. The solitary man was as other men are. His sufferings had soured his temper, or inflamed his pride; the current of thought had been checked and frozen. His powers and dispositions were diverted from useful ends and were barren and selfish. Instead of the blessed plant which they thought had sprung for the healing of the nations, was a dry and withered branch; it was sundered from its root; producing neither blossoms, nor leaves, nor fruits, ‘t was fit only for the fire.

March 12.

... But there was an elder scripture, a prior command; Love thy neighbor; amid your righteous war against your passions, forget not that you are a man; that you are one individual of a great and immortal company, who, with you, are labouring on to attainment of objects which demand all and more than all their faculties to appreciate and reach; that thousands of these are fainting or falling by the way, and will task your utmost benevolence to lend them needful aid. And when a man has duly considered,... I think he will be led to undervalue the precious qualities of that man’s virtue who, like the priest and the Levite of the parable, goes on the other side and extricates himself as he can from the importunity of want or the cries of the dying.... The earth which supports him upon her bosom, the common mother of us all, has a right to ask at his hands some return for her bounties, and what immunity it is entitles him to nurse his own unprofitable existence, without putting his shoulder to the wheel or bearing his part of the burden of life; without giving help to the weary or pouring one drop of balm into the wounded heart. I am persuaded that God enforces the law... to make the perfection of man’s nature consist in a fixed equilibrium of the body and the mind. Those masters of the moral world, who have preserved an undisputed lordship over good minds for ages after they themselves have died, have not gained that rare fortune by any extraordinary manners of life, or any unseemly defiance of the elements, or of death. Temperate, unassuming men, they have conformed to the fashions of the times in which they fell, without effort or contempt. God, in their minds, removed the ancient landmarks of thought, or else gave them strength to overleap the boundary, so that they took in a mightier vision of the state of man than their fellows had done. In all this they did not see differently from them, but saw beyond the common limit. Accordingly it was no part of their pride to be at discord with men upon common matters of every day’s observation. Upon trifles of time and sense they all thought alike. Deeper thoughts and remote consequences, far beyond the ken of vulgar judgments, and yet intimately connected with the progress and destinies of society, were the points they fixed their eyes upon; and upon the distinctness with which they were able to detect these, they chiefly valued themselves. It is a delightful relief in the afflicting history of the world, it is a crystal fountain gushing in the wilderness — to remember the men who exercised this peaceful and sublime dominion over human hearts not cemented by the blood nor shaken by the curses of enemies. Bound like other men to the complicated machine of society, and their fortunes perhaps inseparably linked to the greatness of another house — these minds quietly founded a kingdom of their own, which should long outlast the ruins of that transient dynasty in which it grew.... Men of God they were, — children of a clearer day, walking upon earth, keeping in their hands the urns of immortality out of which there streamed a light which reached to far distant generations that they might follow in their track. The Pagan also blest them,

“Pauci quos aequus amavit

Juppiter, aut ardens virtus ad sidera tollit.”

March 13.

And what a motley patchwork of feelings may be found in the crew of their admirers behind them. How many brows are knit, how many hearts yearn, of those who resolve to follow, or are content to worship them! Upon what meat did these Caesars feed, that they have grown so great? Did God or Man, time, or place, or chance, sow the immortal seed? And how many seats at the Table of the Gods are yet vacant? And the storehouses of genius and goodness from which each child of the Universe may pluck out his share — are they yet exhausted or locked up? And shall those hearts which have throbbed to the secret urgency of the spirit, (perchance it was the same spirit that urges all existence) shall they faint in the outset? Onward, onward, the Sun is already high over your head! Or fearest thou because the day is waxed late that time shall lack? I tell thee, the race is for Eternity. The windows of heaven are opened, and they whose faces are as the day, Seraphim and Cherubim, beckon to the children of Man and bid him “Be bold!”

“Incipe. Vivendi qui recte prorogat horam,

Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.”

Selection of Middle Journals: 1841-1843

JOURNAL

FIRST ESSAYS

PRINTED REFORMS

JOURNAL XXXII

1841

(From Journals E, F, G, H, and J)

[IN January, Mr. Emerson — his book of Essays sent to the printer — had to prepare the lecture “Man the Reformer,” which he delivered before the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association in Boston on the 25th of the month. His sedentary work and the severe winter seem to have left him in bad condition in the spring, and in April a pleasant and successful alliance was made with Henry Thoreau, then twenty-four years old, which lasted for two years. Thoreau became, as it were, an elder son in the family, attended to the gardening, established a poultry-yard, grafted the trees, and skilfully did odd jobs and repairs in the house. He was man of the house during Mr. Emerson’s absences, and was most respectfully attentive to Mrs. Emerson, to whom he always looked up as a sort of lady-abbess. He was a delightful friend to the children, and had great gifts of amusing and helping them. He reserved what time he wished for studies, afield and at home. Sometimes he walked with Mr. Emerson and showed him Nature’s secrets in the woods or swamps or on the river. Mr. Emerson’s lack of skill in gardening or household emergencies was admirably supplemented by his young friend.]

(From E)

January 1, 1841.

I begin the year by sending my little book of Essays to the press. What remains to be done to its imperfect chapters I will seek to do justly. I see no reason why we may not write with as much grandeur of spirit as we can serve or suffer. Let the page be filled with the character, not with the skill of the writer.

Goethe is right in his mode of treating colors, i.e., poetically, humanly. Beethoven is too proud, yet is grand.

(From F)

I wondered at the continence of Nature under the glittering night sky, and truly Pan ought to be represented in the Mythology as the most continent of Gods. But not less admirable is the phlegm of the good ghost that inhabits it. For can I, can any, spare the next day, the next year of our lives? Can any consent to die now? Are we not always expecting that this marvellous moderation which refuses to blab the secret, and yields us no rapturous intelligence such as all feel must lie behind there, will give way at last to the necessity of imparting the Divine Miracle?

This reserve and taciturnity of time.

January 11.

The Confessional. — Does Nature, my friend, never show you the wrong side of the tapestry? Never come to look dingy and shabby? Do you never say, “Old stones! old rain! old landscape! you have done your best; there is no more to be said; praise wearies; you have pushed your joke a little too far”? — Or, on the other hand, do you find Nature always transcending and as good as new every day? I know, I know, how nimble it is, — the good monster. You have quite exhausted its power to please, and to-day you come into a new thought, and lo! in an instant there stands the entire world converted suddenly into the cipher or exponent of that very thought, and chanting it in full chorus from every leaf and drop of water. It has been singing that song every day since the Creation in your deaf ears.

Away with your prismatics, I want a spermatic book. Plato, Plotinus, and Plutarch are such..

It is necessary in considering the nature of everything to direct our attention to the purity of it. (Plotinus.)

Every soul pays a guardian attention to that which is inanimate. (Plato in Phœdrus.)

Necessity indeed is in intellect, but persuasion in soul. (Plotinus.)

(From E)

January 17.

It appears sometimes what Prudence stands for. The true prudence is no derogation from the lofty character. The man who moved by interrupted impulses of virtue would lead a violent and unfortunate life. These continent, persisting, immoveable persons who are scattered up and down for the blessing of the world, howsoever named, Osiris or Washington or Samuel Hoar, have in this phlegm or gravity of their nature a quality which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill which distributes the motion equably over all the wheels and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly in destructive shocks....

He did not get it from the books, but where the bookmaker got it.

Books lead us from ecstasy.

We look at the mercury to know the heat, but Nature is the mercury of our progress. Do we dissolve the sun or the sun us? do we freeze the January, or January us?

We have exhausted Nature, but we read one of the masters and instantly are made aware of new classes of laws, and the world casts itself into types so smiling grand and so equal to the sense that we get a new idea of wealth, and grow impatient of our words and think we will never use them again; like boys who have had a rocking-horse or boat and then are mounted on a live horse or a sailboat — they despise their toys.

Powerful influence should never let us go; never be out of the mind, sleeping or waking: his name is on our lips, though we do not frequent his society.

Thou, O Truth, never lettest us go.

The love of Nature, — what is that but the presentiment of intelligence of it? Nature preparing to become a language to us.

Mechanics easily change their trades, for that which they learn in their apprenticeship is the use of tools, and, having learned that, they can readily turn themselves to any new work. All knowledge is thus eccentric, and of course the progress of knowledge geometric. Are there three rates of increase, arithmetical, geometrical, and circumferential, or from the centre on all sides out?

January 20.

Of these unquiet daemons that fly or gleam across the brain what trait can I hope to draw in my sketch-book? Wonderful seemed to me as I read in Plotinus the calm and grand air of these few cherubim — great spiritual lords who have walked in the world — they of the old religion — dwelling in a worship that makes the sanctities of Christianity parvenues and merely popular...

“Blessed,” said the Review which pleased me so well, “is the man who has no powers, and, as I had written long ago, Happy is the man who hears: unhappy the man who speaks. The reason is obvious: it is better to be poor and helpless in doing, because our heart is preoccupied and astonished with the immensities of God, than to be at leisure to adorn and finish our trivial works because communication with the Deity is no longer open to us. Therefore very wisely did the ancients represent the Muses as daughters of Memory. But when vision and union come, there is no leisure for memory or muses.

The ploughman and the ox, or a rider and his horse, indicate the natural society of wisdom and strength: each is necessary to the other.

January 21.

A man should think much of himself because he is a necessary being: a link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature and he was hurled into being as the bridge, over that yawning need...

When I look at the sweeping sleet amid the pine woods, my sentences look very contemptible, and I think I will never write more: but the words prompted by an irresistible charity, the words whose path from the heart to the lips I cannot follow, — are fairer than the snow. It is pitiful to be an artist...

We are to come into Nature from a higher law, and classify it anew. There is no mire, no dirt to chemistry: the ignorant, the foul, know of dirt: the chemist sees all dissolved into a chain of immaterial, immortal, irresistible laws. Even so must we come into Nature, that is, so walk and work and build and associate. We must not scold, we must not lay hands on men, but, being inspired, must awe their violence and lead them by our eye into harmonic choirs.

A man is a poor, limitary benefactor...

January 31.

God gives us facts and does not tell us why; but the reason lives in the fact; we are sure their order is right: there is no interpolation: and they only await our riper insight to become harmonious in their order and proportion. God knows all the while their divine reason. Swedenborg writes history after ideas. If he names Jew or Persian, Moravian or Lutheran, Papist or African, he gives us the reason in their character for the fact he names. I hope that day will come when no man will pretend to write history but he who does so by divine right. A man being born to see the order of certain facts, is born to write that history. Every other person, not so qualified, who affects to do this work is a pretender, and the work is not done....

All my thoughts are foresters. I have scarce a day-dream on which the breath of the pines has not blown, and their shadows waved. Shall I not then call my little book Forest Essays?

Ecstasy, religion, are essentially self-relying, the entranced instantly speak down as from an immeasureable height to him who but yesterday was walking at their side. They ask no sympathy. But the soul which enters its noviciate in the temple, when it has prayed or chaunted inquires of its old friends, whether this was verily prayer and music?

The Present. — Cannot all literature, and all our own remote experience avail to teach us that the To-day which seems so trivial, the task which seems so unheroic, the inexpressive blank look of the Present moment,... cannot all avail to teach us that these are wholly deceptive appearances, and that as soon as the irrecoverable Years have placed their Blue between these and us, these things shall glitter and attract us, seeming to be the wildest romance, and — as far as we allowed them in passing to take their own way and natural shape — the homes of beauty and poetry?

Novels. — To find a story which I thought I remembered in Quentin Durward, I turned over the volume until I was fairly caught in the old foolish trap and read and read to the end of the novel. Then, as often before, I feel indignant to have been duped and dragged after a foolish boy and girl, to see them at last married and portioned, and I instantly turned out of doors like a beggar that has followed a gay procession into the castle. Had one noble thought opening the abysses of the intellect, one sentiment from the heart of God been spoken by them, I had been made a participator of their triumph, I had been an invited and an eternal guest, but this reward granted them is property, all-excluding property, a little cake baked for them to eat and for none other, nay, which is rude and insulting to all but the owner. In Wilhelm Meister, I am a partaker of the prosperity.

Yet a novel may teach one thing as well as my choosings at the corner of the street which way to go, — whether to my errand or whether to the woods, — this, namely, that action inspires respect; action makes character, power, man, God.

These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies; — captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly!

February 4.

I am dispirited by the lameness of an organ: if I have a cold, and the thought I would utter to my friend comes forth in stony, sepulchral tones, I am disgusted, and I will not speak more. But, as the drunkard who cannot walk can run, so I can speak my oration to an assembly, when I cannot without pain answer a question in the parlor. But lately it is a sort of general winter with me. I am not sick that I know, yet the names and projects of my friends sound far off and faint and unaffecting to my ear, as do, when I am sick, the voices of persons and the sounds of labor which I overhear in my solitary bed. A puny, limitary creature am I, with only a small annuity of vital force to expend, which if I squander in a few feast-days, I must feed on water and moss the rest of the time. I went to the Rainers’ concert last night in our Court-House. When I heard them in Boston, I had some dreams about music: last night, nothing. Last night I enjoyed the audience. I looked with a great degree of pride and affection at the company of my townsmen and townswomen, and dreamed of that kingdom and society of Love which we preach.

His virtues were virtues of the senses. You can’t tell how much good nature and generosity is to be ascribed to a good dinner, and how much to the character. There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea....

If I judge from my own experience I should unsay all my fine things, I fear, concerning the manual labor of literary men. They ought to be released from every species of public or private responsibility. To them the grasshopper is a burden. I guard my moods as anxiously as a miser his money; for company, business, my own household chares, untune and disqualify me for writing. I think then the writer ought not to be married; ought not to have a family. I think the Roman Church with its celibate clergy and its monastic cells was right. If he must marry, perhaps he should be regarded happiest who has a shrew for a wife, a sharp-tongued notable dame who can and will assume the total economy of the house, and, having some sense that her philosopher is best in his study, suffers him not to intermeddle with her thrift. He shall be master but not mistress, as Elizabeth Hoar said.

February 10.

Prudence. — What right have I to write on Prudence whereof I have but little and that of the negative sort?...

February 12.

There is no Time. — If the world would only wait one moment, if a day could now and then be intercalated, which should be no time, but pause and landing-place, a vacation during which sun and star, old age and decay, debts and interest of money, claims and duties, should all intermit and be suspended for the halcyon trance, so that poor man and woman could throw off the harness and take a long breath and consider what was to be done, without being fretted by the knowledge that new duties are gathering for them in the moment when they are considering the too much accumulated old duties! But this on, on, forever onward, wears out adamant. All families live in a perpetual hurry. Every rational thing gets still postponed and is at last slurred and ill-done or huddled out of sight and memory.

March 1.

In March many weathers. March always comes if it do not come till May. May generally does not come at all.

The poorness or recentness of my experience must not deter me from affirming the law of the soul: nay, although there was never any life which in any just manner represented the facts. We are bound to say what already is, and is explained and demonstrated by every right and every wrong of ours, though we are far enough from that inward health which would make this true order appear to be the order of our lives.

What a coxcomb is our experience which decides that such a fact or character cannot be because it has never been, as if that was not the reason why it should now be.

March 19.

Sent copies of my essays to Nathaniel L. Frothingham, Sam G. Ward, J. G. Palfrey, N. I. Bowditch, Margaret Fuller, Caroline Sturgis, W. H.

Furness, [Rev.] Dr. Francis, Samuel Ripley, F. H. Hedge, George Ripley, Abel Adams, J. R. Lowell, Dr. James Jackson, Dr. Charles T. Jackson, [Aunt] Mary Moody Emerson, William Emerson, Henry Ware, Jr., George P. Bradford, D[avid] H[enry] Thoreau, A. B. Alcott, W. Ware, Mrs. Lucy C. Brown, F. A. Farley, Elizabeth Hoar, William Henry Channing, W. E. Channing, Jr., [Rev.] Barzillai Frost, J. M. Cheney, Rockwood Hoar, Mother, Lidian, H. Colman, Thomas W. Haskins, Sarah Searle, Edward Palmer, William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, John Sterling, Harriet Martineau, J. W. Marston, Sophia Peabody [Mrs. Hawthorne], Wm. M. Jackson, H. Bulfinch, Mary Russell, M. W. Willis, N. T. Review, Knickerbocker.

April 10.

Do not judge the poet’s life to be sad because of his plaintive verses and confessions of despair. Because he was able to cast off his sorrows into these writings, therefore went he onward free and serene to new experiences. You must be a poet also to draw any just inference as to what he was from all the records, be they never so rich, which he has left. Did you hear him speak? His speech did great injustice to his thought. It was either better or worse. He gave you the treasures of his memory, or he availed himself of a topic rich in allusions to express hopes gayer than his life entertains, or sorrows poured out with an energy and religion which was an intellectual play and not the habit of his character. You shall not know his love or his hatred from his speech and behaviour. Cold and silent he shall be in the circle of those friends who, when absent, his heart walks with and talks with evermore. Face to face with that friend who for the time is unto him the essence of night and morning, of the sea and the land, the only equal and worthy incarnation of Thought and Faith, — silence and gloom shall overtake him; his talk shall be arid and trivial. There is no deeper dissembler than the sincerest man. Do not trust his blushes, for he blushes not at his affection, but at your suspicion. Do not trust his actions, for they are expiations and fines often, with which he has amerced himself, and not the indications of his desire. Do not conclude his ignorance or his indifference from, his silence. Do not think you have his thought, when you have heard his speech to the end. Do not judge him worldly and vulgar, because he respects the rich and the well-bred, for to him the glittering symbol has a surpassing beauty which it has not to other eyes, and fills his eye, and his heart dances with delight in which no envy and no meanness are mixed. Him the circumstance of life dazzles and overpowers whilst it passes because he is so delicate a meter of every influence. You shall find him noble at last, noble in his chamber.

France.— “But Gymnast said, ‘My sovereign lord, such is the nature and complexion of the French that they are worth nothing but at the first push.’” — (Rabelais.)

I read with joy the life of Pythagoras by Iamblichus; and the use of certain melodies to awaken in the disciple now purity, now valor, now gentleness. That Life is itself such a melody, and proper to these holy offices. Especially I admire the patience and longanimity of the probation of the novice. His countenance, his gait, his manners, diet, conversation, associates, employments, were all explored and watched; then the long discipline, the long silence was imposed, the new and vast doctrines taught, and then his vivacity and capability of virtue explored again. — If all failed, then his property (otherwise made common) was restored to him, a tomb built to his memory, and he was thenceforward spoken of and regarded by the School as dead. The long patience in this fugitive world is itself an affecting argument of the eternity of soul, affirms the faith of those who thus greatly slight our swift almanacs. He who treats human beings as centennial, millennial natures, convinces me of his faith.... Yet how much I admire their use of music as a medicine. But for me, with deaf ears, Order and Self-control are the “melodies” which I should use to mitigate and tranquillize the ferocity of my animal and foreign elements.

I saw with great pleasure the plates of the French artist of the ruins of Palenqua in Mexico: Cyclopean remains of a simple and original architecture that compares at once with what is best of Egyptian, Doric, or Gothic. Its great value to the eye is the emancipation of the spirit which it works. Everything is again possible. We are no longer forced to reproduce buildings in one of five or six foolish styles, but are as free as dreams, free as wishes, free as new necessities can make us.

Seest thou not how social and intrusive is the nature of all things? Ever they seek to penetrate and overpower each the nature of every other creature, and itself alone in all modes and throughout space and spirit to prevail and possess....

Man is the tender, irritable, susceptible matrix or receiver. The pollen of all these grand flowers, these savage forests, blows up and down and is lodged in him, and he bears a universal variegated blossom, rich with the qualities of every nature.

There is nothing man meditates but he tends presently to re - create, — whether a gallery of sculpture, or economical machines, or a government, or a bank, or the starry heaven, or a field of flowers, — a ship or a picture, music or a farm, a whaling voyage, or a war. Soft and facile all images float freely over his retina: the poet is he who can fix the grandest image and keep the vividness of a brisk conversation to a millennium. What are all these artists and masters of commerce, war, science, art, who go up and down so energetically, but the celebrators and worshippers and minions, one may say, each of some substance or relation in Nature? That shining, alluring property did first sing in his ear a syren song, was his seducer and sycophant, that it might in the end utterly possess and infuriate him in its service.

April 13.

In the unwelcome great snowstorm of this day I must blot a line to acknowledge the value of those social tests to which we all are brought in turn to be approved or damned. Precisely as the chemist submits the new substance to the action of oxygen, hydrogen, electricity, vegetable blue, etc., each soul in our little Massachusetts coterie is passed through the ordinary series of social re-agents, the market, the church, the parlour, the literary circle, writing, speaking, the ball, the reforms, etc., to ascertain his distinctive powers. Those tests which call out our latent powers and give us leave to shine, we love and applaud; those which detect our deficiencies we hate and malign. The poet who is paralysed in the company of the young and beautiful, where he would so gladly shine, revenges himself by satire and taxing that with emptiness and display. It is but fair that they for whose friendship we are candidates, and they who are candidates for ours, — and such are all men and all women, — should have the opportunity of putting and of being put into all the crucibles.

But when we have been tried and found wanting in any one, the wise heart will cherish that mortification until the flower grows out of the noisome pit. It will learn that not by seeking to do, as others do, that thing for which it was shown that we had no faculty, but by pious waiting from month to month, from year to year, and ever new effort after greater self-truth, will the new way at last appear by which we are to do the correspondent act in our circle.

I read alternately in Doctor Nichol and in Saint-Simon, that is, in the Heavens and in the Earth, and the effect is grotesque enough....

I am of the Maker and of the Made. The vastness of the Universe, the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor are no vastness, no longevity to me. In the eternity of truth, in the almightiness of love, I slight these monsters. Through all the running sea of forms, I am truth, I am love, and immutable I transcend form as I do time and space.

Is a service of plate a fit reward of a virtuous action? or, is the friend whom it has won, and the insight it has given, and the reaction it has caused, the fit reward? And is Science to be learned always in laboratories, or will it one day be eaten and drunken, be smelled and tested, be digged and swum and walked and dreamed?

Every man tries his hand at poetry somewhere, but most men do not know which their poems are.

April 19.

Saint-Simon paints Fénelon as he sees him from the army and the saloons of Versailles, so that his Fénelon is a Saint-Simon in surplice, and no Fénelon at all.

I am tempted lately to wish, for the benefit of our literary society, that we had the friendly institution of the Cafe. How much better than Munroe’s bookshop would be a coffee-room wherein one was sure at one o’clock to find what scholars were abroad taking their walk after the morning studies were ended.

Education. — We assume a certain air of holiness when we go to deal with our children, and appeal at that moment to a principle to which we do ‘not appeal at other times. Of course, we do not succeed: the child feels the fraud. Simply the Holy Spirit is not there, and the effects cannot appear.

April 20.

Would it not be well to write for the young men at Waterville a history of our present literary and philosophical crisis, a portrait of the parties, and read the augury of the coming hours? In England, ethics and philosophy have died out. How solitary is Coleridge and how conspicuous, not so much from his force as from his solitude. In this country, a throng of eager persons read and hear every divine word. Yet for the most part there is great monotony in the history of our young men of the liberal or reforming class. They have only got as far as rejection, not as far as affirmation. They seem therefore angry and railers: they have nothing new or memorable to offer; and that is the vice of their writings, — profuse declamation, but no new matter: after a very short time, this becomes to the reader insufferably wearisome, and the fine young men and women who looked but the other day in that direction, with eyes of hope like the first rays of morning, are turning away with a kind of bitterness from the saturation of talk, of promise, and of preaching. Silence, personal prowess, cheerfulness, solid doing, seem to be the natural cures.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Hesitation and following are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest, the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the whole generation is discontented with the tardy rate of growth which contents every European community. America is... the country of small adventures, of short plans, of daring risks, not of patience, not of great combinations, not of long, persistent, close-woven schemes, demanding the utmost fortitude, temper, faith, and poverty. Our books are tents, not pyramids: our reformers are slight and wearisome talkers, not man-subduing, immutable, all-attracting; discharging their own task and so “charming the eye with dread,” and persuading without knowing that they do so. There are no Duke Wellingtons, no George Washingtons, no Miltons, Bentleys, or Hearns among our rapid and dashing race; but abundance of Murats, of Rienzis, of Wallers, and that slight race who put their whole stake on the first die they cast.

The great men bequeath never their projects to their sons to finish: these eat too much pound cake.

The most interesting class of people are those who have genius by accident and are powerful obliquely....

Beautiful to me, among so many ordinary and mediocre youths as I see, was Sam Ward when I first fairly encountered him, and in this way just named.

There are two theories of life, — one, for the demonstration of our talent, and the other for the education of the man. The life of politics, of the college, of the city, is very seductive, as it invites to the former, but sincerity counts all the time spent in the former lost, or all but a little. But obey the Genius when he seems to lead to uninhabitable deserts, penetrate to the bottom of the fact which draws you, although no newspaper, no poet, no man, has ever yet found life and beauty in that region, and presently when men are whispered by the gods to go and hunt in that direction, they shall find that they cannot get to the point which they would reach without passing over that highway which you have built. Your hermit’s lodge shall [be] the Holy City and the Fair of the whole world.

War was courteously carried on, as a tournament of the aristocracy, in Louis Quatorze’s time. Duc de Saint-Simon relates that when the Maréchal de Lorges, general of the army on the Rhine, fell sick, Louis of Baden, the general of the enemy, sent by trumpet offers of his physicians, of supplies, and every courtesy and attention in his power.

April 21.

America, and not Europe, is the rich man. According to De Tocqueville, the column of our population on the western frontier from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico (twelve hundred miles as the bird flies) advances every year a mean distance of seventeen miles. He adds, “This gradual and continuous progress of the European race towards the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event; it is like a deluge of men rising unabatedly, and daily driven onward by the hand of God.”

Animals. — Pirates do not live on nuts and herbs. The use of animal food marks the extremely narrow limits of our ideas of justice. We confine our justice to men alone, according to Porphyry’s remark. Certainly our whole life ought to be a benefit, and the heliotrope and sweetbriar and thyme should not smell sweeter.

April 22.

Whenever the Church is restored, the culture of the Intellect will be enjoined in it, not, as now, with an apology and reservations, but conscientiously and to the shame and repentance of our fat, sluggish, and trivial modes of living. And I think that the labor in a college should be as strenuous and rugged, I may say as audacious as any labor that is undertaken in agriculture or in war. And the student ought to feel a poignant shame if when he reads the marches of Hannibal or Napoleon across the Alps, or the hardships of Hudson and Parry in their polar voyages, or the patience of Columbus, these eminent pieces of endurance appear to him to indicate a greater manhood and resolution, a more incessant industry, or a ruder courage than that which he exercises in his silent library. Does he wish to be a placid smiler, a demure, inoffensive reader of such books as the newspapers applaud, to be helped over a fence when he walks with a man, as if he were a girl (like my dear Rev. Mr. A.), — I see not how he is better than a lacquey hired to read, instead of one hired to wait on table or to polish boots. His courage is not that of a soldier or a sailor, but that of a scholar, and as worthy of their admiration as theirs is worthy of his.

Should not man be sacred to man? What are these thoughts we utter but the reason of our incarnation? To utter these thoughts we took flesh, missionaries of the everlasting Word which will be spoken.

April 23.

Do not cast about for reasons among their shop of reasons, but adduce yourself as the only reason. We forget daily our high call to be discoverers — we forget that we are embarked on a holy, unknown sea in whose blue recesses we have a secret warrant that we shall yet arrive at the Fortunate Isles hid from men; and at each saucy wood-craft or revenue cutter or rum-boat that hails us, we are astonished, and put off from our purpose, and ready to return to the rotten towns we have left, and quit our seeking of the Virgin Shore.

No great man ever complains of want of opportunity, — no, nor of any want except of being wanting to himself. All that he lays to the charge of his fortune accuses himself only. Want of opportunity! Why, did not divine necessity create him? Did he not come into being because something must there be, and be done, which thing he and none other is and does? If I see, the world is visible enough, clothed in brightness and prismatic hues. If again I see from a deeper energy, — I pierce the gay surface on all sides, and every mountain and rock and man and operation grows transparent before me...

When I wish, it is permitted me to say, These hands, this body, this history of Waldo Emerson are profane and wearisome, but I, I descend not to mix myself with that, or with any man. Above his life, above all creatures, I flow down forever, a sea of benefit into races of individuals. Nor can the stream ever roll backward, or the sin or death of a man taint the immutable energy which distributes itself into men, as the sun into rays, or the sea into drops.

When Coleridge converses, or Scott romances, or Wordsworth writes poems, there is an admirable fact; and now the activity of the engineer, of the railroad builder, and the manufacturer is real and inventive, and deserves regard. Commerce, speculation overflow their old boundaries and run into new paths. Reform is to-day creative and not slavish. But the only rule and condition of merit and noteworthiness is not renown, nor number, nor property, nor geography, but only vitality. Its title to be studied is not to be measured by anything but persons.... If you would know what was done long ago, examine the institutions, the millions, the wealth, the laws. If you would know what God now hath at heart, behold the bright eye, hear the melodious speech, mark the irresistible hand which that energy now flows into. It matters not what topic men prefer, but what subject or instance they select to study the same upon. Not divination or ethics or astronomy is better than farriery or the rules of chess, but the one object of study is a great man. A great personal ascendancy is an inundation of reason, and therein they shall read the laws of gods and men and atoms. But scholars who should be diviners, Ephori, Judges, Eyes and Souls, bow to badges and officers, and do not require of every man whom they meet, that he should be the Founder of a Family, or a Profession, the Inventor of a way of life. Geology, Chemistry, Animal Dynamics, Electricity, the law of day and night, and of all material relation is being read aloud.

We must distinguish between the hero’s greatness and his foible, and not consecrate so much nonsense as we do because it was allowed by great men. There is none without his foible...

April 24.

I beheld him and he turned his eyes on me, his great serious eyes Then a current of spiritual power ran through me, and I looked farther and wider than I was wont, and the visages of all men were altered and the semblances of things. The men seemed to me as mountains, and their faces seamed with thought, and great gulfs between them, and their tops reached high into the air. And when I came out of his sight, it seemed to me as if his eyes were a great river, like the Ohio or the Danube, which was always pouring a torrent of strong, sad light on some men, wherever he went, and tingeing them with the quality of his soul.

The balance must be kept, — the power to generalize and the power to individualize must coexist to make a poet; Will and Abandonment, the social and the solitary humour, man and opportunity.

Beauty is the only sure sign, so that if your word threatens me, I know it is a bully, I know it is weak, I know there is a better word discoverable and returnable. That word only which is fair and fragrant, which blooms and rejoices, which runs before me like verdure and a flowering vine, sowing an Eden in the path, is truth. I hate, therefore, to hear that a cloud always hangs on an American’s brow.

I frequently find the best part of my ride in the Concord Coach from my house to Winthrop Place to be in Prince Street, Charter Street, Ann Street, and the like places at the North End of Boston. The dishabille of both men and women, their unrestrained attitudes and manners, make pictures greatly more interesting than the clean-shaved and silk-robed procession in Washington and Tremont streets. I often see that the attitudes of both men and women engaged in hard work are more picturesque than any which art and study could contrive, for the Heart is in these first. I say picturesque; because when I pass these groups, I instantly know whence all the fine pictures I have seen had their origin: I feel the painter in me: these are the traits which make us feel the force and eloquence of form and the sting of color. But the painter is only in me; it does not come to the fingers’ ends. But whilst I see a true painting, I feel how it was made; I feel that genius organizes, or it is lost. It is the gift of God; as Fanny Elssler can dance and Braham can sing, when many a worthy citizen and his wife, however disposed, can by no culture either paint, dance, or sing. Do not let them be so ridiculous as to try, but know thou, know all, that no citizen, or citizen’s wife, no soul, is without organ. Each soul is a soul or an individual in virtue of its having, or I may say being, a power to translate the universe into some particular language of its own:... into something great, human, and adequate which, if it do not contain in itself all the dancing, painting, and poetry that ever was, it is because the man is faint-hearted and untrue.

Wouldest thou see the wonders of art and the graces of society without a sense of inferiority, make thy life secretly beautiful.

[Here follow passages on genius and on talent, which are printed in “The Method of Nature” (pp. 204 and 218). The following reference to Miss Mary Moody Emerson occurs, in the Journal, in the middle of the latter passage.]

May 4.

Aunt Mary, whose letters I read all yesterday afternoon, is Genius always new, subtle, frolicsome, musical, unpredictable. All your learning of all literatures and states of society, Platonistic, Calvinistic, English or Chinese, would never enable you to anticipate one thought or expression. She is embarrassed by no Moses or Paul, no Angelo or Shakspeare, after whose type she is to fashion her speech: her wit is the wild horse of the desart, who snuffs the sirocco and scours the palm-grove without having learned his paces in the Stadium or at Tattersall’s. What liberal, joyful architecture, liberal and manifold as the vegetation from the earth’s bosom, or the creations of frostwork on the window! Nothing can excel the freedom and felicity of her letters, — such nobility is in this self-rule, this absence of all reference to style or standard: it is the march of the mountain winds, the waving of flowers, or the flight of birds. But a man can hardly be a reader of books without acquiring their average tone, as one who walks with a military procession involuntarily falls into step.

In every family is its own little body of literature, divinity, and personal biography, — a common stock which their education and circumstance have furnished, and from which they all draw allusion and illustration to their conversation whilst it would be unintelligible (at least in the emphasis given to it) to a stranger. Thus, in my youth, after we had brought home Don Juan and learned to pester Aunt Mary with grave repetition of the lines from the shipwreck: “They grieved for those who perished in the cutter, And likewise for the biscuit-casks and butter,”

 —— these became the byword for the mean spirit of derision that characterised the present age, in contrast with the alleged earnest and religious spirit of the Puritans, and especially the austere saints of Concord and Malden, she was so swift to remember.

I find a letter of hers to Charles, dated Waterford, October, 1831:— “could you be here this afternoon — not a creature but the dog and me — we don’t go to four-days-meeting There’s been one at the Methodists’, closing to-day, and such a rush from the other society. But such a day! Here’s one balm-of-gilead tree — but a few leaves left, as though on purpose to catch the eye to see them play in the wind day after day, — and the deserted nest. Ah! where are its anxious parents and their loved brood? Dead? Where the mysterious principle of life?... Past nine o’clock. The vision of beauty has changed — a white mist has risen which hides the venerable mount, but shows the trees in fine picturesque, and the deserted nest is sheltered with a soft pall, like the oblivion which rests on the miseries of the wretched. Just after the house was left for the evening vigils at the chapel, a man came for me to write a note he was going to carry. The peculiarity of notes here, is, a friend asks for another’s conversion — thus the best of human feelings are brought into action. But note the Cracker’s; I brought down by mistake the only pen which is good of the four (one which I don’t use to you or Brother S.) and I persuaded him to shorten his petitions; and, as he was satisfied, surely there was no harm. And here comes a living voice — the charm too is gone from the moon — she rides full brightly — the tarn has gathered her misty wanderers in her bosom, and the trees stretch their naked arms to the skies like the scathed martyrs of Persecution.”

New England Theology. — The new relations we form we are apt to prefer, as our own ties, to those natural ones which they have supplanted. Yet how strict these are, we must learn later, when we recall our childhood and youth with vivid affection, and feel a poignant solitude, even in the multitude of modern friends. In reading these letters of M. M. E. I acknowledge (with surprise that I could ever forget it) the debt of myself and my brothers to that old religion which, in those years, still dwelt like a Sabbath peace in the country population of New England, which taught privation, self-denial, and sorrow A man was born, not for prosperity, but to suffer for the benefit of others, like the noble rock-maple tree which all around the villages bleeds for the service of man. Not praise, not men’s acceptance of our doing, but the Spirit’s holy errand through us, absorbed the thought.

How dignified is this! how all that is called talents and worth in Paris and in Washington dwindles before it! How our friendships and the complaisances we use, shame us now, — they withdraw, they disappear, and the gay and accomplished associates, — and our elder company, the dear children and grave relatives with whom we played and studied and repented, they return and join hands again. I feel suddenly that my life is frivolous and public; I am as one turned out of doors, I live in a balcony, or on the street; I would fain quit my present companions as if they were thieves or pot-companions, and betake myself to some Thebais, some Mount Athos, in the depths of New Hampshire or Maine, to bewail my innocency and to recover it, and with it the power to commune again with these sharers of a more sacred idea. I value Andover, Yale, and Princeton as altars of this same old fire, though I fear they have done burning cedar and sandalwood there also, and have learned to use chips and pine.

But I meant to say above, that we are surprised to find that we are solitary, that what is holiest in our character and faculty is unappreciated by those who stand around us, and so lies uncalled for and dormant, and that it needs that our dear ghosts should return, or such as they, to challenge us to right combats.

Charles and Edward. — I ought to record the pleasure I found, amid all this letter-reading, in some letters to C. C. E. from his college mates, in the uniform tone of affection and respect with which these boys — for such they still were — accost him. Edward also was respected, admired by his mates, but, I suspect, never loved, — not comprehended, not felt, — he puzzled them. Yet I still remember with joy Charles’s remark when he returned from visiting Edward at Porto Rico, that the tone of conversation there was the most frivolous and low that could be, yet that Edward never suffered anything unworthy to be said in his presence, without speaking for the right, and so good-humoredly and so well, as invariably to command respect, and be a check on the company But Charles always, from his school days, had this following, and that of the best who were about him; it was true, leal service, homage to something noble and superior, which the giver felt it was a compliment to himself to pay. Thus he brought boarders to the houses where he went, to Danforth’s in Cambridge, and Pelletier’s in Boston.

May 6.

These letters revive my faded purpose of writing the oft-requested memoir of Charles. That certainly would have been unfit: it was right for the young and the dear friend to ask: it had been wrong in me to undertake; the very nobleness of the promise should make us more reluctant to recite the disappointment of the promise. Let us not stoop to write the annals of sickness and disproportion. Charles delighted in strength, in grace, in poetry, in success; — shall we wrong promise, only one evidence of which was his standing at the head of his college class at graduation. I recall a tender and most impressive tribute of Mr. Everett’s to his memory at one of our annual B K meetings. He spoke of the blow which had jarred the strings of his fine intellect and made them return a sound, him so far as to make him the unwilling object of pity, the centre of a group of pain, a caryatid statue in our temple of Destiny? Yet now, as I read these yellowing letters of Aunt Mary, I begin to entertain the project in a new form. I doubt if the interior and spiritual history of New England could be trulier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of Aunt Mary and the boys, mainly Charles. The genius of that woman, the key to her life is in the conflict of the new and the old ideas in New England. The heir of whatever was rich and profound and efficient in thought and emotion in the old religion which planted and peopled this land. She strangely united to this passionate piety the fatal gifts of penetration, a love of philosophy, an impatience of words, and was thus a religious skeptic. She held on with both hands to the faith of the past generation as to the Palladium of all that was good and hopeful in the physical and metaphysical worlds; and in all companies, and on all occasions, and especially with these darling nephews of her hope and pride, extolled and poetised this beloved Calvinism. Yet all the time she doubted and denied it, and could not tell whether to be more glad or sorry to find that these boys were irremediably born to the adoption and furtherance of the new ideas. She reminds me of Margaret Graeme, the enthusiast in Scott’s Abbott who lives to infuse into the young Roland her enthusiasm for the Roman Church; only that our Margaret doubted whilst she loved. Milton and Young were the poets endeared to the generation she represented. Of Milton they were proud, but I fancy their religion has never found so faithful a picture as in the Night Thoughts. These combined traits in Aunt Mary’s character gave the new direction to her hope, that these boys should be richly and holily qualified and bred to purify the old faith of what narrowness and error adhered to it, and import all its fire into the new age, — such a gift should her Prometheus bring to men. She hated the poor, low, thin, unprofitable, unpoetical Humanitarians as the devastators of the Church and robbers of the soul, and never wearies with piling on them new terms of slight and weariness. “Ah!” she said, “what a poet would Byron have been, if he had been born and bred a Calvinist.”

Sunday.

Beautiful, eloquent day, rich with more than I have skill to tell, though I have attempted it in verses. We rightly call the woods enchanting, they so confound all our measures, and upset our whole system of tradition... Here reigns eternal Sabbath, and the hours so ample and profound, they seem to stretch to centuries.... How far off is man and his works; Babylon and Britain draw very near together, and are not to be discriminated. The Circumstance is here emphatically felt to be nothing.

The Present Age will perhaps be characterised long hence by the importance now for several centuries attached to two words, namely, Gentleman and Christian. Yet see how this is the prevalence or inundation of an idea, and not of any person or purpose. Who did this? Who elevated these two words to their dignity in the metaphysical and practical world? Was any man a party to this exaggeration? Plainly no man, but all men. Well, there is no fact and no thought which shall not equally come in turn to the top and be celebrated.

General Harrison was neither Whig nor Tory, but the Indignation President; and, what was   not at all surprising in this puny generation, he could not stand the excitement of seventeen millions of people, but died of the Presidency in one month. A man should have a heart and a trunk vascular and on the scale of the Aqueducts or the Cloaca Maxima of Rome to bear the friction of such a Mississippi stream.

The dew-drops which are only superficial, what a depth do they give to the aspect of the morning meadows as you walk! So do manners, so do social talents to frivolous society.

We know as little of men as we do of plants. We doubt not that every weed in our soil hath its uses, and each no doubt excellent and admirable uses; yet now how poorly they figure in our Materia Medica! And is not a man better than a mullein or a buckthorn? I walked in my dream with a pundit who said,... he could not speak with me many words, for the life of incarnate natures was short, but that the vice of men was old age, which they ought never to know; for, though they should see ten centuries, yet would they be younger than the waters, which — hearken unto their sound! how young is it, and yet how old! Neither, said he, ought men ever to accept grief from any external event; for, poverty, death, deluges, fires, are flaws of cold wind or a passing vapor which do not affect a constant soul. He added, that, as the river flows, and the plant flows (or emits odours), and the sun flows (or radiates), and the mind is a stream of thoughts, so was the universe the emanation of God... Therefore, he added, they mistake who seek to find only one meaning in sacred words and images, in the name of gods, as Jove, Apollo, Osiris, Vishnu, Odin: or in the sacred names of Western Europe and its colonies, as Jesus and the Holy Ghost: for these symbols are like coins of different countries, adopted from local proximity or convenience, and getting their cipher from some forgotten accident, the name of a consul, or the whim of a goldsmith; but they all represent the value of corn, wool, and labor, and are readily convertible into each other, or into the coin of any new country. That sense which is conveyed to one man by the name and rites of Pan or Jehovah, is found by another in the study of earthquakes and floods, by another in the forms and habits of animals; by a third in trade, or in politics; by a fourth in electromagnetism. Let a man not resist the law of his mind and he will be filled with the divinity which flows through all things. He must emanate; he must give all he takes, nor desire to appropriate and to stand still.

He also said, that the doctrine of Pantheism or the Omnipresence of God would avail to abolish the respect of circumstance, or the treating all things after the laws of time and place, and would accustom men to a profounder insight. Thus Hospitality, he said, was an external fact. The troops of guests who succeed each other as inmates of our houses and messmates at our tables, week after week, are recording angels who inspect and report our domestic behaviour, our temperance, our conversation, and manners. Therefore, the pure in heart, having nothing to hide, are the most hospitable, or keep always open house. But to those who have somewhat to conceal, every guest is unwelcome.

A man is a gate betwixt Hell and Heaven. Through his heart streams a procession, when he wills good, of all angels and mights; when he wills evil, of all cattle and devils. Thou saidst of thy heart just now that it was cold, that it was broken, and thou wonderest why God should create it to be pained; and other the like things. What is the Heart, but the power to give and receive which varies every moment with the action? Whoso blesseth all beings or any being, —— to him, to her, bend all the world of Spirits, as the brothers’ sheaves to Joseph’s sheaf. Whoso curseth any, by word or deed, from him, from her, all spirits in all worlds turn their backs. You cannot will without turning the key of Nature and opening or shutting the door of Light and of Darkness. There where you are, create value, and you publish yourself on the wings of every wind, every ray of light becomes your advertisement, and all souls shall bid on you until your just wages are paid.

I owe to genius always the same debt of lifting the curtain from the common, and showing me that gods are sitting disguised in this seeming gang of gypsies and pedlars And why should I owe it to a book or a friend, and not myself pierce the thin incognito? A question I may well ask, but I must ask it of my hands and of my will. Holiness is the only stair to the mount of God. Yet am I continually tempted to sacrifice genius to talent, the hope and promise of insight (through the sole door of better being) to the lust of a freer play and demonstration of those gifts I have. We seek that pleasurable excitement which unbinds our faculties and gives us every advantage for the display of that skill we possess, and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of general health. Humility, patience, abstinence, mortification, nakedness (stripping off these clothes of law, custom, fortune, and friends), they can teach a philosophy, a rhetoric, and a poetry which the world has not heard these thousand years. Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer. — Dost thou not fear that this perception, so keen, of right and wrong thou hast, of the true and the ridiculous in reform, will some time vanish and not be, and dost thou not wish to hold it to thee? I know thou dost. Do then what thou knowest...

What is strong but goodness, and what is energetic but the presence of a good man? It is time that this doctrine of the Presence...

The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological globe we inhabit...

The various matters which men magnify, as trade, law, creeds, sciences, paintings, coins, manuscripts, histories, poems, are all pieces of virtu which serve well enough to unfold the talents of the man, but are all diversions from the insight of the soul. Saints’ worship is one of these, — the worship of Mahomet or Jesus, — like all the rest, a fine field of ingenuity wherein to construct theories: a fine, capacious platform whereon to build institutions and societies, poetry, eloquence, and reputation — nay, a drug, a specific for the present distress, a crutch for fainting virtue, a lozenge for the sick; — but, seriously and sadly considered, a remedy more dangerous than the disease. The soul will none of this roving. Why goest thou boswellizing this saint or that? It is lèse-majesté it is the razor to the throat: here art thou, with whom so long the universe travailed in labor. Darest thou to think meanly of thyself — thee whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides; to shoot the gulf; to reconcile the erst irreconcileable? As long as thou magnifiest anything, thou accusest thyself of trifling, of dallying and postponing thy own deed, for, when once thou graspest the handles of thy plough, thou wilt put all names behind thee as living nature forces us to put all dead bodies under ground. In the infinite disparity between the soul and any one incarnation of it, though holiest and grandest, all differences between one and another disappear, — they have no parallax at a distance so vast.

In every pulse of virtue, in every revelation, tho’ slightest, of the soul, the soul affirmeth the kingdom of the universe, the descent of itself into man.

May 28.

Can I not learn that there is nothing settled in manners?...

Good sense is the leader of fashion as of everything else. A man has strong sense to write or to command armies, but he makes no figure in society, simply because there his sense does not work, — is dismounted by his self-consciousness, or excessive desire to please, or some other superstition; but the reason why he yields so readily to the victors of the carpet is, that he feels and sees that they carry the matter more sensibly than he.

[In his letter to Carlyle, May 30, Mr. Emerson said: —

“One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come, — Henry Thoreau, — a poet whom you may one day be proud of; — a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong.” — (Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, vol i, Letter LX.)]

June 6.

I am sometimes discontented with my house because it lies on a dusty road, and with its sills and cellar almost in the water of the meadow. But when I creep out of it into the Night or the Morning and see what majestic and what tender beauties daily wrap me in their bosom, how near to me is every transcendent secret of Nature’s love and religion, I see how indifferent it is where I eat and sleep. This very street of hucksters and taverns the moon will transform to a Palmyra, for she is the apologist of all apologists, and will kiss the elm trees alone and hides every meanness in a silver-edged darkness. Then the good river-god has taken the form of my valiant Henry Thoreau here and introduced me to the riches of his shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream, a lovely new world lying as close and yet as unknown to this vulgar trite one of streets and shops as death to life, or poetry to prose. Through one field only we went to the boat and then left all time, all science, all history, behind us, and entered into Nature with one stroke of a paddle. Take care, good friend! I said, as I looked west into the sunset overhead and underneath, and he with his face toward me rowed towards it, — take care; you know not what you do, dipping your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted with all reds and purples and yellows, which glows under and behind you. Presently this glory faded, and the stars came and said, “Here we are”; began to cast such private and ineffable beams as to stop all conversation. A holiday villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most magnificent, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and poetry ever decked and enjoyed — it is here, it is this. These stars signify it and proffer it: they gave the idea and the invitation,... these beguiling stars, soothsaying, flattering, persuading, who, though their promise was never yet made good in human experience, are not to be contradicted, not to be insulted, nay, not even to be disbelieved by us. All experience is against them, yet their word is Hope and shall still forever leave experience a liar....

Yes, bright Inviters! I accept your eternal courtesy...

But on us, sitting darkling or sparkling there in the boat, presently rose the moon, she cleared the clouds and sat in her triumph so maidenly and yet so queenly, so modest yet so strong, that I wonder not that she ever represents the Feminine to men. There is no envy, no interference in Nature. The beauty and sovereignty of the moon, the stars, or the trees, do not envy; they know how to make it all their own. As we sail swiftly along, and so cause the moon to go, now pure through her amber vault, and now through masses of shade, and now half-hid through the plumes of an oak or a pine, each moment, each aspect is sufficient and perfect; there is no better or worse, no interference, no preference; but every virtuous act of man or woman accuses other men and women; shames me; and the person of every man or woman as in my varying love slighted or preferred. Blessed is Law. This moon, the hill, the plant, the air, obey a law, they are but animated geometry and numbers; to them is no intemperance; these are through law born and ripened and ended in beauty: but we through the transgression of Law sicken and inveterate.

June 7.

[Here follow several sentences from the “Chaldæan Oracles” attributed to Zoroaster.]

Things divine are not attainable by mortals who understand body; But only as many as are lightly armed arrive at the summit.

It is not proper to understand the Intelligible with vehemence But with the extended flame of an extended mind measuring all things Except that Intelligible. But it profits to understand this For if you incline your mind you will understand it Not earnestly, but it becomes you to bring with you a pure and inquiring eye; To extend the void mind of your soul to the Intelligible Because it subsists beyond mind.

You will not understand it as when understanding some particular thing.

There is a certain Intelligible which it becomes you to understand with the flower of the mind.

Let the immortal depth of your soul lead you.

Enlarge not thy destiny.

To every tree its own leaf and fruit, and every man; are you a juniper or are you an orange: but if the tree is pruned and exposed to the South wind and manured, then it will bear a cartload of oranges; if neglected, few and bad. So it seems more the pity if you are a man of genius, the sweetest of all poets, that you should pine in bad condition and yield one song in a year.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages. Even the great books,— “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world.” — Each poet, each philosopher says this, and we expect to go like a thunder-bolt to the centre... Ever and forever Heraclitus is justified, who called the world an eternal inchoation.

Critics. — The borer on our peach trees bores that she may deposit an egg: but the borer into theories and institutions and books bores that he may bore.

The man of practical or worldly force requires of the preacher a talent, a force like his own...

You defy anybody to have things as good as yours. Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inopportune and ignoble. Take all you will, and leave him but a corner of Nature, a lane, a den, a cowshed, out of cities, far from letters and taste and culture; he promises to win to that scorned spot, the light of moon and stars, the love of men, the smile of beauty, the homage of art. It shall be painted, and carved, and sung and celebrated and visited by pilgrimage in all time to come.

(From G)

July.

The Actual. — O Protean Nature, whose energy is change evermore, thou hurlest thyself into a berry or a drop, thou lodgest all thought in a word, all moral quality in the glance of an eye, but tell me, art thou only such a creator as bards and orators? Is thy power only for display? Or canst thou change the form of this waste and unnecessary day into an hour of love and fitness? When I see what waste strength is in friendship and in the writing and reading of modern society, the world seems to exist to dilettantism.

OSMAN AND SCHILL

Schill, No tea! no wine! How are you the better or how am I the worse?

Osman. You are wise for me now. I am dull and you are inspired. But I know what you say, and shall remember it when you cannot.

Schill, How mean you that?

Osman. Time is my friend and not yours. The vital force is more ductile than gold, and the coin which you throw into a gambler’s hand may be beaten into a leaf which shall gild the globe.

Schill, Whilst I confess I come eating and drinking, I praise your self-denial which I also think is ton and tournure which makes kings vulgar.

Osman. It is no virtue in me, Sir. My father gave me a good constitution, which makes the taste of berries as grateful to me as pears or pineapples to you; and my temperance is no more to be imputed to me for righteousness than is the fact that a straw hat protects my head for all these years as well as an iron helmet. I think myself master of Assyrian luxury when I walk in the woods through sweet-fern and sassafras, or pass to the leeward of an elder bush in flower, or blacken my teeth with the betel nuts we have now plucked. One thing fell from you just now concerning fashion, which, though I did not quite understand it, may be the same thing which I have often thought, — that the best teachers of elegance are the stars which shine so delicately in yonder amber sky; and in the presence of the woodland flowers and the birds, I am ashamed to be coarse in my costume or behavior.

Character. — A word warm from the heart written or spoken, that enriches me. I surrender at discretion;...

I value my welfare too much to pay you any longer the compliment of attentions. I shall not draw the thinnest veil over my defects, but if you are here, you shall see me as I am. You will then see that, though I am full of tenderness, and born with as large hunger to love and to be loved as any man can be, yet its demonstrations are not active and bold, but are passive and tenacious. My love has no flood and no ebb, but is always there under my silence, under displeasure, under cold, arid, and even weak behavior.

I think not of mean ages, but of Chaldæan, Egyptian, or Teutonic ages, when man was not featherbrained, or French, or servile, but, if he stooped, he stooped under Ideas: times when the earth spoke and the heavens glowed, when the actions of men indicated vast conceptions, and men wrote histories of the world in prison, and builded like Himmaleh and the Alleghany chains. I think that only is real which men love and rejoice in...

Men do not to-day believe in one who ascribes to man the attributes of the soul: even they who speak that speech will scarcely stick to it, and if a man assert that great mystery, every little scribbler in the newspaper shall make great eyes, and point at his own little brain, and say, He is mad; and it may and does happen that the man who spoke it shall flee before the word of this newspaper written by some shallow boy in the dark, who wrote he knew not what, dipping his pen in mire and darkness. And yet night and morning, earth and heaven, and the soul of man are not to be so easily disposed of. It is true that there is another side to man. The other side, of fugitiveness, of frailty, that man is moth, or bubble, or gossamer, they readily hear and say: but that man is necessary and eternal they unwillingly hear. A man must reach the whole extent from Heaven to Earth. But it is possible that a man may come to subsist in some other way than that which the prudent think of. Hateful it is that transcendent men should only come to us in obscure and lurid forms, and not like sunshine and blue sky. Yet when they come, they will not be reported: they will affect men in a rapturous and extraordinary way, and the last thing they will think of will be to take notes.

The Age once more should appear capacious, undefinable, far retreating, still renewing, as the depths of the horizon do when seen from the hills.

You have many coats in your wardrobe, for you are rich. You need many for your conversation; and your action I am heartily tired of, — old, musty, and stale. But Godfrey, who has but one coat to his back, has as many to his thought as Nature has days or plants or transformations.

July 6.

Ah, ye old ghosts! Ye builders of dungeons in the air! Why do I ever allow you to encroach on me a moment; a moment, to win me to your hapless company? In every week there is some hour when I read my commission in every cipher of Nature, and know that I was made for another office, a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector and delineator of occult harmonies and unpublished beauties, a herald of civility, nobility, learning, and wisdom; an affirmer of the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music or dancing. A priest of the Soul, yet one who would better love to celebrate it through the beauty of health and harmonious power.

My trees teach me the value of our circumstance or limitation. I have a load of manure, and it is mine to say whether I shall turn it into strawberries, or peaches, or carrots. I have a tree which produces these golden delicious cones called Bartlett pears, and I have a plant of strong common-sense called a Potato. The pear tree is certainly a fine genius, but with all that wonderful constructive power it has, of turning air and dust, yea, the very dung to Hesperian fruit, it will very easily languish and bear nothing, if I starve it, give it no southern exposure, and no protecting neighborhood of other trees. How differs it with the tree-planter? He too may have a rare constructive power to make poems, or characters, or nations, perchance, but though his power be new and unique, if he be starved of his needful influences, if he have no love, no book, no critic, no external call, no need or market for that faculty of his, then he may sleep through dwarfish years and die at last without fruit.

Colombe prefers to take work of Edmund Hosmer by the job, “for the days are damn long.”

Sunday.

If I were a preacher, I should carry straight to church the remark Lidian made to-day, that “she had been more troubled by piety in her help than with any other fault. The girls that are not pious, she finds kind and sensible, but the church members are scorpions, too religious to do their duties, and full of wrath and horror at her if she does them.”

Every man has had one or two moments of extraordinary experience, has met his soul, has thought of something which he never afterwards forgot, and which revised all his speech, and moulded all his forms of thought.

I resent this intrusion of alterity. That which is done, and that which does, is somehow, I know, part of me. The Unconscious works with the Conscious, — tells somewhat which I consciously learn to have been told. What I am has been conveyed secretly from me to another whilst I was vainly endeavoring to tell him it. He has heard from me what I never spoke.

If I should or could record the true experience of my late years, I should have to say that I skulk and play a mean, shiftless, subaltern part much the largest part of the time. Things are to be done which I have no skill to do, or are to be said which others can say better, and I lie by, or occupy my hands with something which is only an apology for idleness, until my hour comes again.

But woe to him who is always successful, who still speaks the best word, and does the handiest thing, for that man has no heavenly moment.

I find an analogy also in the Asiatic sentences to this fact of life. The Oriental genius has no dramatic or epic turn, but ethical, contemplative, delights in Zoroastrian oracles, in Vedas, and Menu and Confucius. These all embracing apophthegms are like these profound moments of the heavenly life.

Lidian says that the only sin which people never forgive in each other is a difference of opinion.

Carlyle with his inimitable ways of saying the thing is next best to the inventor of the thing. “I King Saib built this pyramid. I, when I had built it, covered it with satin. Let him that cometh after me and says he is equal to me cover it with mats.”

[DURING this year it is evident that Mr. Emerson’s forces had ebbed, in spite of the gardening hours with his friend Henry Thoreau, and the change to the lonely hostelry on Nantasket Beach, whither he went to write his “Waterville Address,” was important. In Mr. Cabot’s Memoir of Emerson he gives several letters written from Nantasket to Mr. Emerson’s wife and friends with pleasant mention of that fortnight’s sojourn]

NANTASKET BEACH, July 10.

You shall not love beautiful objects ardently: you will not, if you are beautiful. He who is enamoured of a statue, a picture, a tune, or even of the stars and the ocean, finds in them some contrast to his own life. His own life is ugly, and he sickly prefers some marble Antinous or Cupid to the living images of his father and mother, and whole towns of his countrymen dwelling around him. But when a man’s life is concordant with Nature, he will behold all that is most beautiful in the universe with a fraternal regard unsurprised.

(From loose sheet)

[The following, though undated, was evidently written in July at Nantasket.]

We have two needs, Being and Organization. See how much pains we take here in Plato’s dialogues to set in order the One Fact in two or three or four steps, and renew as oft as we can the pleasure, the eternal surprise of coming at the last fact, as children run up steps to jump down, or up a hill to coast down on sleds, or run far for one slide, or as we get fishing-tackle and go many miles to a watering-place to catch fish, and having caught one and learned the whole mystery, we still repeat the process for the same result, though perhaps the fish are thrown overboard at the last. The merchant plays the same game on ’Change, the card-lover at whist, — and what else does the scholar? He knows how the poetry, he knows how the novel or the demonstration will affect him, — no new result but the oldest of all, yet he still craves a new book and bathes himself anew with the plunge at the last. The young men here, this morning, who have tried all the six or seven things to be done, namely, the sail, the bowling-alley, the ride to Hull and to Cohasset, the bath, and the spyglass, they are in a rage just now to do something: these itching fingers, this short activity, these nerves, this plasticity or creativeness accompanies forever and ever the Profound Being.

And yet the secret is kept.

It is only known to Plato that we can do without Plato. Being costs me nothing. I need not be rich, nor pay taxes, nor leave home, nor buy books for that. It is the organizing that costs. And the moment I am, I despise city and the seashore, yes, earth and the galaxy also.

“When Nature is forsaken by her lord, be she ever so great, she doth not survive.” — VEESHNOO SARMA.

Too feeble fall the impressions of our sense upon us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill: now ‘t is good for life, not for poetry. It seems as if every man ought to be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what has befallen him.

Aristotle defined Space as a certain immoveable vessel in which things were contained.

Every sensual pleasure is private and mortal: every spiritual action is public and generative.

The Church aërates my good neighbors and serves them as a somewhat stricter and finer ablution than a clean shirt or a bath or a shampooing. The minister is a functionary and the meeting-house a functionary: they are one and, when they have spent all their week in private and selfish action, the Sunday reminds them of a need they have to stand again in social and public and ideal relations beyond neighborhood, — higher than the town-meeting — to their fellow men. They marry, and the minister who represents this high public, celebrates the fact; their child is baptized, and again they are published by his intervention. One of their family dies, he comes again, and the family go up publicly to the church to be publicised or churched in this official sympathy of mankind. It is all good as far as it goes. It is homage to the Ideal Church, which they have not: which the actual Church so foully misrepresents. But it is better so than nohow. These people have no fine arts, no literature, no great men to boswellize, no fine speculation to entertain their family board or their solitary toil with. Their talk is of oxen and pigs and hay and corn and apples. Whatsoever liberal aspirations they at any time have, whatsoever spiritual experiences, have looked this way, and the Church is their fact for such things. It has not been discredited in their eyes as books, lectures, or living men of genius have been. It is still to them the accredited symbol of the religious Idea. The Church is not to be defended against any spiritualist clamoring for its reform, but against such as say it is expedient to shut it up and have none, this much may be said. It stands in the history of the present time as a high school for the civility and mansuetude of the people (I might prefer the Church of England or of Rome as the medium of those superior ablutions described above, only that I think the Unitarian Church, like the Lyceum, as yet an open and uncommitted organ, free to admit the ministrations of any inspired man that shall pass by: whilst the other churches are committed and will exclude him.)

I should add that, although this is the real account to be given of the church-going of the farmers and villagers, yet it is not known to them, only felt. Do you not suppose that it is some benefit to a young villager who comes out of the woods of New Hampshire to Boston and serves his apprenticeship in a shop, and now opens his own store, to hang up his name in bright gold letters afoot long? His father could not write his name: it is only lately that he could: the name is mean and unknown: now the sun shines on it: all men, all women, fairest eyes read it. It is a fact in the great city. Perhaps he shall be successful and make it wider known: shall leave it greatly brightened to his son. His son may be head of a party: governor of the state: a poet: a powerful thinker: and send the knowledge of this name over the habitable earth. By all these suggestions, he is at least made responsible and thoughtful by this public relation of a seen and aërated name.

Let him modestly accept those hints of a more beautiful life which he meets with; how to do with few and easily gotten things: but let him seize with enthusiasm the opportunity of doing what he can, for the virtues are natural to each man and the talents are little perfections.

Let him hope infinitely with a patience as large as the sky.

Nothing is so young and untaught as time.

Cities of men are like the perpetual succession of shells on the beach.

This world is a palace whose walls are lined with mirrors.

[Of a] Preacher. “There he has been at it, as tight as he could spring for an hour and a half.”

A vulgar man in leaving the eaves of his house has left the moral law and the gods. At Paris, at New Orleans he gives himself up to his appetite.

The theory of the Whig, carried out, requires that government should be paternal, and teach Paddy where is land, and how he should till it, that he may get bread. But the governments that now are, are improvident. The Spiritualist who goes for principles, and for the high and pure self, has none of this tenderness for individuals.

Do not waste yourself in rejection; do not bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good. I take pleasure only in coming near to people. What avails any conversation but the sincere? Uncover thy face, uncover thy heart to me, be thou who thou may, and the purpose of purposes is answered to us both. We may well play together, or eat or swim or travel or labor together, if this is the result: if this is not, all that we have accomplished together is naught. Is plain dealing the summit of human well-being? What serenity and independence proceed out of it! Then I have not lost the day: then I have not lived in vain. To be a lover with a lover, to be a god with a god, seems to be only this happiness, no more, namely, the being truer: with a broader and deeper Yes and No. Is this also a fortune, a felicity, coming by the grace of God, and not to be compassed by any effort or genius, when it does not descend on us like beauty or light? I cannot establish it with all, or with most, or with many; then I could be happy with all: no, but only with a few.

Travel, I think, consists really and spiritually in sounding all the stops of our instrument. If I have had a good indignation and a good complacency with my brother, if I have had reverence and compassion, had fine weather and good luck in my fishing excursion, and profound thought in my studies at home, seen a disaster well through, and wrought well in my garden, nor failed in my part at a banquet, then I have travelled, though all was within the limits of a mile from my house. Domestication consists in the unique art of living in the fact, and not in the appearance. Who has learned to root himself in being, and wholly to cease from seeming, he is domestic, he is at the heart of Nature. He must be sustained by the sense of having labored, or nothing can yield him cheerfulness.

Facts. All is for thee; but thence results the inconvenience that all is against thee which thou dost not make thine own. Victory over things is the destiny of man; of course, until it be accomplished, it is the war and insult of things over him. He may have as much time as he pleases, as long as he likes to be a coward, and a disgraced person, so long as he may delay to fight, but there is no escape from the alternative. I may not read Schleiermacher or Plato, I may even rejoice that Germany and Greece are too far off in time and space than that they can insult over my ignorance of their works, I may even have a secret joy that the heroes and giants of intellectual labor, say, for instance, these very Platos and Schleiermachers are dead, and cannot taunt me with a look: my soul knows better: they are not dead, for the nature of things is alive, and that passes its fatal word to me that these men shall yet meet me and shall yet tax me line for line, fact for fact, with all my pusillanimity.

All that we care for in a man is the tidings he gives us of our own faculty through the new conditions under which he exhibits the common soul. I would know how calm, how grand, how playful, how helpful, I can be.

Yet we care for individuals, not for the waste universality. It is the same ocean everywhere... So can Dante or Plato call the nations about them to hear what the Mind would say of those particulars which it happened to meet in their personality.

Lobster-car, boat, or fish-basket,

Peeps, noddies, old-squaws, or quail, —

To Musketaquid what from Nantasket,

What token of greeting and hail?

We cannot send you our thunder,

Pulse-beat of the sea on the shore,

Nor our rainbow, the daughter of Wonder,

Nor our rock, New England’s front door.

White pebbles from Nantasket beach

Whereon to write the maiden’s name,

Shells, sea-eggs, sea-flowers, — could they teach

Thee the fair haunts from whence they came!

Shall I write a sincerity or two? — I, who never write anything else, except dullness? And yet all truth is ever the new morn risen on noon. But I shall say that I think no persons whom I know could afford to live together on their merits. Some of us, or of them, could much better than others live together, but not by their power to command respect, but because of their easy, genial ways: that is, could live together by aid of their weakness and inferiority.

Understand that the history of modern improvements is good as matter of boast only for the twelve or twenty or two hundred who made them, not for those who adopted them and said We. The smallest sign of moral force in any person countervails all the models in Quincy Hall. The inventor may indeed show his model as sign of a moral force of some sort, but not the user.

I only need to meet one agreeable person, boy or man or woman, to make my journey a happy one. But lately it has been my misfortune to meet young men with a certain impudence on their brow, and who speak and answer with that offensive assumption, that what I say I say to fill up the time, and not that I mean anything. Not so with that fair and noble boy, whom I saw at Nantasket, and whom all good auguries attend!

Ascending souls sing a pæan. We will not exhort, but study the natural history of souls, and congratulate one another on the admirable harmonies.

Rich, say you? Are you rich? how rich? rich enough to help anybody? rich enough to succor the friendless, the unfashionable, the eccentric, rich enough to make the Canadian in his wagon, the travelling beggar with his written paper which recommends him to the charitable, the Italian foreigner with his few broken words of English, the ugly, lame pauper hunted by overseers from town to town, even the poor insane or half-insane wreck of man or woman, feel the noble exception of your presence and your house, from the general bleakness and stoniness; to make such feel that they were greeted with a voice that made them both remember and hope? What is vulgar but to refuse the claim? What is gentle but to allow it?

He is very young in his education who needs distinguished men in order to see grand traits. If there is grandeur in you, you will detect grandeur in laborers and washerwomen. And very fine relations are always established between a clear spirit and all the bystanders. Do you think there is no tie but your dollar between you and your landlord or your merchant? Have these made no distinction between their customers or guests?

Be calm, sit still in your chair, though the company be dull and unworthy. Are you not there? There then is the choir of your friends; for subtle influences are always arriving at you from them, and you represent them, do you not? to all who stand here.

It is not a word, that “I am a gentleman and the king is no more,” but is a fact expressed in every passage between the king and a gentleman.

With our faith that every man is a possessed person having that admirable Prompter at his ear, is it not a little superfluous to go about to reason with a person so advised?

We treat him as a detachment.

Do people expect the world to drop into their mouths like a peach.

I wish I could see a child go to school or a boy carrying a basket without a feeling of envy, but now I am so idle that everybody shames me.

Tropes. The metamorphosis of Nature shows itself in nothing more than this, that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of Nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a Dancer; it is a Rosary; it is a Torrent; it is a Boat; a Mist; a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold, and it will give the imagination keen pleasure. Swifter than light the world converts itself into that thing you name, and all things find their right place under this new and capricious classification. There is nothing small or mean to the soul. It derives as grand a joy from symbolizing the Godhead or his universe under the form of a moth or a gnat as of a Lord of Hosts. Must I call the heaven and the earth a maypole and country fair with booths, or an anthill, or an old coat, in order to give you the shock of pleasure which the imagination loves and the sense of spiritual greatness? Call it a blossom, a rod, a wreath of parsley, a tamarisk-crown, a cock, a sparrow, the ear instantly hears and the spirit leaps to the trope.

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration, but every moment, whilst we think of this offending person that he is ridden by a devil and go to pity him, comes in our sensibility to persuade us that the person is the devil, then the poison works, the devil jumps on our neck, and back again wilder on the other: jumps from neck to neck, and the kingdom of hell comes in.

The Age. What is the reason to be given for this extreme attraction which persons have for us but that they are the Age? Well, now we have some fine figures in the great group and many who promise to be fine. I think the nobility of the company or period is always to be estimated from the depth of the ideas. Here is great variety and great richness of mysticism.... Buthow many mysticisms of alchemy, magic, second sight and the like, can a grand genius like Leibnitz, Newton, or Milton dispose of amongst his shining parts, and be never the worse?

Motley assemblage on the planet; no conspiring as in an anthill. Every one his own huckster to the ruin of the rest, for aught he cares. In perspective one may find symmetry, and unconscious furtherance....

As soon as a man gets his suction-hose down into the great deep he belongs to no age, but is eternal man. And as soon as there is elevation of thought we leave the Times.

I will add to the portrait of Osman that he was never interrupted by success: he had never to look after his fame and his compliments, his claps and editions. In very sooth shall I not say that one of the wisest men I have known was one who began life as fool, at least, with a settled reputation of being underwitted?

“To me men are for what they are,

They wear no masks for me.”

When I was praised I lost my time, for instantly I turned round to look at the work I had thought slightly of, and that day I made nothing new.

The dissipation of praise, the dissipation of newspapers, and of evening parties.

It is the blue sky for background that makes the fine building.

Ideal. I think there are better things to be said for the conservative side than have yet been said. Certainly the onus of proving somewhat striking and grand should be with the Idealist. His defects are the strength of the man of the world.

Nothing but God can root out God. The whole contest between the Present and the Past is one between the Divinity entering and the Divinity departing. Napoleon said that he had always noticed that Providence favored the heaviest battalion.

Optimates. Elizabeth Hoar says that the fine young people break off all their flowers and leave none to ripen to fruit. So we have fine letters and a too imaginative and intellectual period, but no deep and well adapted character.

Scholar. We all know enough to be endless writers. Those who have written best are not those who have known most, but those to whom writing was natural and necessary.

Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

Character. I do not wish to appear at one time great, at another small, but to be of a stellar and undiminishable light.

Superlative. The greatest wit, the most space. It is the little wit that is always in extremes and sees no alternative but revelry or daggers.

Scale. We are to each other results. As your perception or sensibility is exalted, you see the genesis of my action and of my thought, you see me in my debt and fountains, and to your eye instead of a little pond of the water of life I am a rivulet fed by rills from every plain and height in nature and antiquity and deriving a remote origin from the foundation of all things.

August 22.

Measure is a virtue which society always appreciates, and it is hard to excuse the want of it...

Society may well value measure, for all its law and order is nothing else. There is a combat of opposite instincts and a golden mean, that is Right. What is the argument for marriage but this? What for a church, a state, or any existing institution, but just this — We must have a mean?

Genius unsettles everything. It is fixed (is it?) that after the reflective age arrives there can be no quite rustic and united man born. Yes, quite fixed. Ah, this unlucky Shakspeare! and ah, this hybrid Goethe! Make a new rule, my dear, can you not? and to-morrow Genius shall stamp on it with his starry sandal.

“Then it is very easy to write as Mr. Pericles writes. Why, I have been reading the books he read before he wrote his Dialogue, and I have traced him in them all and know where he got the things you most admire.” Yes, and the turnip grows in the same soil with the strawberry; knows all the nourishment that it gets, and feeds on the very same itself; yet is a turnip still.

All histories, all times, equally furnish examples of the spiritual economy; so does every kitchen and hen-coop. But I may choose then to use those which have got themselves well written. The annals of Poland would be as good to a philosopher as those of Greece, but these last are well composed.

Portableness. The meaner the type by which a spiritual law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men, just as we value most the smallest box or case in which any needful utensil can be carried.

The telescope is a screen: that is all. “And when Adam heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden he hid himself.”

“Remember to be sober and to be disposed to believe; for these are the nerves of wisdom.” The reformer affirms the tendency, the law. Vulgar people show much acuteness in stating exceptions. He is not careful to answer them or to show that they are only exceptions. Enough for him that he has an advocate in their consciences also declaring the law. They ought, instead of cavilling, to arm his hands, to thank him in the name of mankind, to see that he is the friend of humanity against their foolish brawling.

Humoring. I weary of dealing with people, each cased in his several insanity. Here is a fine person with wonderful gifts, but mad as the rest, and madder, and, by reason of his great genius, which he can use as weapon too, harder to deal with. I would gladly stand to him in relation of a benefactor as screen and defence to me, thereby having him at some advantage and on my own terms — that so his frenzy may not annoy me. I know well that this wish is not great but small, is mere apology for not treating him frankly and manlike: but I am not large man enough to treat him firmly and unsympathetically as a patient, and, if treated equally and sympathetically as sane, his disease makes him the worst of bores.

Quarrels are not composed on their own grounds, but only by the growth of the character which subverts their place and memory. We form in the life of a new idea new relations to all persons; we have become new persons and do not inherit the wars or the friendships of that person we were.

“If the misunderstanding could be healed, it would not have existed,” added L.

Unity. Nature is too thin a screen: the glory of the One breaks through everywhere.

I remember, when a child, in the pew on Sundays amusing myself with saying over common words as “black,”

“white,”

“board,” etc., twenty or thirty times, until the word lost all meaning and fixedness, and I began to doubt which was the right name for the thing, when I saw that neither had any natural relation, but all were arbitrary. It was a child’s first lesson in Idealism.

August 27.

How noble in secret are the men who have never stooped nor betrayed their faith! The two or three rusty, perchance wearisome, souls, who could never bring themselves to the smallest composition with society, rise with grandeur in the background like statues of the gods, whilst we listen in the dusty crowd to the adroit flattery and literary politics of those who stoop a little. If these also had stooped a little, then had we no examples, our ideas had been all unexecuted: we had been alone with the mind. The solitary hours — who are their favorites? Who cares for the summer fruit, the “sopsavines” that are early ripe by help of the worm at the core? Give me the winter apple, the russettin and pippin, cured and sweetened by all the heat and all the frost of the year.

In regard to H — I suppose we all feel alike that we care very little what he says, provided only that he says it well. What he establishes with so much ingenuity to-day, we know he will demolish with equal ingenuity to-morrow, not valuing any position or any principle, but only the tactics or method of the fight. Intellectual play is his delight,’ the question is indifferent. He is a warrior, and so only there be war, he is not scrupulous on which side his aid is wanted. In his oration there was universal attack, chivalry all round the field, but he cut up all so fast and with right good will that he left himself no ground to stand on; universal offence, but no power of retreat or resistance in him, so that we agreed it was a triumphant success for his troop, but no sincerity, a devastation and no home. It was the profoundness of superficiality, the most universal and triumphant seeming. The sentence which began with an attack on the conservatives ended with a blow at the reformers: the first clause was applauded by one party, and the other party had their revenge and gave their applause before the period was closed.

It is not to be denied that the pious youth who in his closet espouses some rude and harsh reform, such as Anti-slavery or the abstinence from animal food, lays himself open to the witty attacks of the intellectual man; is partial; and apt to magnify his own: yes, and the prostrate penitent also, he is not comprehensive, he is not philosophical in those tears and groans. Yet I feel that under him and his partiality and exclusiveness is the earth and sea and all that in them is, and the axis around which the eternal universe revolves passes through his body there where he stands, while the outcast that affects to pity his narrowness and chains is a wanderer, free as the unloved and the unloving are free and independent of the state, just as bachelors and beggars are homeless, companionless, useless. The heart detects immediately, whether the head find it out or not, whether you exist for purposes of exhibition or are holden by all the force of God to the place you occupy and the thing you do. This abuse of the conservative to win the reformer, and abuse of the reformer to win the conserver, may deceive the head, but not the heart. The heart knows that it is the fear and love of Beacon Street which got this bottle-green flesh-fly, and that only the love and the terror of the Eternal God begets the Angel which it waiteth for.

There is no depth to the intellectual pleasure which this speculation gives. But let in one of those men of love in the shade there, whom you affect to compassionate, and you shall feel instantly how shallow all this entertainment was, for he shall exercise your affection as well as your thought, and confront you with the realities that analyze Heaven and Hell.

Long ago I said, I have every inch of my merits allowed me, and was sad because my success was more than I deserved, — sad for others who had less. Now the beam trembles, and I see with some bitterness the slender claims I can make on fortune and the inevitable parsimony with which they will be answered.

Robin went to the house of his uncle, who was a clergyman, to assist him in the care of his private scholars. The boys were nearly or quite as old as he and they played together on the ice and in the field. One day the uncle was gone all day and the lady with whom they boarded called on Robin to say grace at dinner. Robin was at his wits’ end; he laughed, he looked grave, he said something, nobody knew what, and then laughed again, as if to indemnify himself with the boys for assuming one moment the cant of a man. And yet at home perhaps Robin had often said grace at dinner.

The woman spoken of to-day who finds beauty in every household work is right. And why not beauty in the Sunday church? I never wonder that the people like to go thither. I am interested in every shoe that goes into the meeting-house.

Yes, love relieves us of all timidities and superstitious fears by the most confident, mutual prophecy of each other: so that it is suicidal to this extent, that it can do without interviews, which once it existed for.

[Here follows much that is printed in “Manners” [Essays, Second Series).]

Character is the one counterpoise to all artificial, or say rather surface distinctions. Let a man be self-reposed and he shames a whole court, a whole city, who are not so. Do not care for society, and you put it away into your pocket.

I saw a young man who had a rare gift for pulpit eloquence: his whole constitution seemed to qualify him for that office, and to see and hear him produced an effect like a strain of music: not what he said, but the pleasing efflux of the spirit of the man through his sentences and gesture, suggested a thousand things, and I enjoyed it as I do a painting or poetry, and said to myself, “Here is creation again.” I was touched and taken out of my numbness and unbelief, and wished to go out and speak and write all things. After months I heard the favored youth speak again. Perhaps I was critical, perhaps he was cold. But too much praise I fancied had hurt him, had given to his flowing gesture the slightest possible fixedness; to his glowing rhetoric an artful return. It was later in the season, yet the plant was all in flower still, and no signs of fruit. Could the flowers be barren, or was an artificial stimulus kept upon the plant to convert all the leaves and fruit-buds to flowers? We love young bachelors and maidens, but not old bachelors and old maids. It seemed to me that I had seen before an example of the finest graces of youthful eloquence, hardened by the habit of haranguing, into grimace. It seemed that if, instead of the certainty of a throng of admirers, the youth had felt assured every Sunday that he spoke to hunger and debt, to lone women and poor boys, to grief, and to the friends of some sick or insane or felonious person, he would have lopped some of these redundant flowers, and given us with all the rest one or two plain and portable propositions. Praise is not so safe as austere exactors, and of all teachers of eloquence the best is a man’s own penitence and shame.

There are some public persons born not for privacy, but for publicity, who are dull and even silly in a tete-a-tete, but the moment they are called to preside, the form dilates, the senatorial teeth appear, the eye brightens, a certain majesty sits on the shoulders, and they have a wit and happy deliverance you should never have found in them in the closet.

August 31.

I know not why Landor should have so few readers. His book seems to me as original in its form as in its substance. He has no dramatic, no epic power, but he makes sentences, which, though not gravitation and electricity, is still vegetation. After twenty years I still read his strange dialogues with pleasure, not only sentences, but, page after page, the whole discourse...

I value a book which like this or Montaigne proves the existence of a literary world. What boundless leisure, what original jurisdiction, what new heavens and new earth! The old constellations have set, new and brighter have arisen: we have eaten lotus, we have tasted nectar. O that the dream might last! There is no man in this age who so truly belongs to this dispensation as Landor. To the performer this appears luxury; well, when he has quite got his new views through, when he sees how he can mend the old house, we will quit this entertainment. Until then, leave us the land where Horace and Ovid, Erasmus and Scaliger, Izaak Walton and Ben Jonson, Dryden and Pope had their whole existence.

“In the afternoon we came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon.”

But consider, O Reformers, ere you denounce the House of Fame and the land whose intoxications Homer and Milton, Plato and Shakspeare have partaken, that a shade of uncertainty still hangs over all that is actual. Alas, that I must hint to you that poverty is not an unmixed good; that labor may easily exceed. The sons of the rich have finer forms and in some respects a better organization than the sons of the laborer. The Irish population in our towns is the most laborious, but neither the most moral nor the most intelligent: the experience of the colleagues of Brook Farm was unanimous, “We have no thoughts.”

He who serves some, shall be served by some: he who serves all, shall be served by all.

When we quarrel, O then we wish we had always kept our appetites in rein, that we might speak so coolly and majestically from unquestionable heights of character.

Black and White Art. The sibyl treats every person with some art, flatters them, respects popular prejudices, accuses rum and slavery, and so appears cunning. The little boy who walks with me to the woods, has no design in his questions, the question which is asked in his mind he articulates to me, — over him, over me, — we exist in an element of awe and singleness. Not all children do so. Some have a fraud under their tongue before they can speak plain. But the art of the artist, how differs that from the art of sin? He too has a design on us, but it is not for his benefit, but for ours. That which first charms him and still charms him, he endeavors to convey, so that it shall work on us its legitimate effect. That is worship still.

Well for us that we cannot make good apologies. If I had skill that way, I should spend much of my time at that. Not being able, I leave it with Nature, who makes the best; meantime I am doing something new, which crowns the apology.

Whitewashing. We embellish involuntarily all stories, facts, and persons. In Nature there is no emphasis. By detaching and reciting a fact, we already have added emphasis to it and begun to give a wrong impression, which is inflamed by the new point given every time it is told. All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature we see, and finish the portrait symmetrically, which is false; for the rest of his body is small or deformed.

Concord Fight. I had occasion, in 1835, to inquire for the facts that befel on the Nineteenth April, 1775. Doctor Ripley carried me to Abel Davis and Jonas Buttrick and Master Blood. The Doctor carried in his mind what he wished them to testify, and extorted, where he could, their assent to his forewritten History. I, who had no theory, was anxious to get at their recollections, but could learn little. Blood’s impression plainly was that there was no great courage exhibited, except by a few. I suppose we know how brave they were by considering how the present inhabitants would behave in the like emergency. No history is true but that which is always true. It is plain that there is little of “the two o’clock in the morning courage” which, Napoleon said, he had known few to possess.

These thoughts of which the Universe is the celebration are, no doubt, as readily and thoroughly denoted in the nature and habits of animals and in those of plants as in men. The words dog and snake and crocodile are very significant to us.

At Cambridge, the last Wednesday, I met twenty members of my college class and spent the day with them. Governor Kent of Maine presided, Upham, Quincy, Lowell, Gardner, Loring, Gorham, Motte, Wood, Blood, Cheney, Withington, Bulfinch, Reed, Burton, Stetson, Lane, Angier, Hilliard, Farnsworth, Dexter, Emerson. It was strange how fast the company returned to their old relation, and the whole mass of college nonsense came back in a flood. They all associated perfectly, were an unit for the day — men who now never meet. Each resumed his old place. The change in them was really very little in twenty years, although every man present was married, and all but one fathers. I too resumed my old place and found myself as of old a spectator rather than a fellow. I drank a great deal of wine (for me) with the wish to raise my spirits to the pitch of good fellowship, but wine produced on me its old effect, and I grew graver with every glass. Indignation and eloquence will excite me, but wine does not.

One poor man came whom fortune had not favored, and we carried round a hat, and collected one hundred and fifteen dollars for him in two minutes.

Almost all these were prosperous men, but there was something sad and affecting in their prosperity. Very easy it was to see that each owed his success to some one trait or talent not supported by his other properties. There is no symmetry in great men of the first or of the tenth class. Often the division of talents is very minute. One man can pronounce well; another has a voice like a bell and the “orotund tone.” Edward Everett’s beautiful elocution and rhetoric had charms for the dull. I remember Charles Jarvis in my class, who said “he did not care what the subject was; he would hear him lecture on Hebrew or Persian.”

There is this pleasure in a class meeting. Each has been thoroughly measured and known to the other as a boy, and they are not to be imposed upon by later circumstances and acquisitions. One is a governor of a state, one is a president of a college, one is president of a senate, two or three are bank presidents. They have removed from New Hampshire or from Massachusetts or from Vermont into the State where they live. Well, all these are imposing facts in the new neighborhood, in the imaginations of the young men among whom they come; but not for us. When they come into the presence of either of their old mates, off goes every disguise, and the boy meets the boy as of old. This was ludicrously illustrated in the good story Wood told us of his visit to Moody in his office among his clients at Bangor. “How are you, Moody?” with a slap on the back.— “How do you do, sir?” with a stare and a civil but formal bow. “Sir, you have the advantage of me.”— “Yes, and I mean to keep it. But I am in no hurry. Go on with your business. I will sit here and look at this newspaper until your client is gone.” M. looked up every now and then from his bond and his bondsman, but could not recollect the stranger. By and by they were left alone. “Well,” said Wood, “and you have not found me out?”— “Hell!” cried Moody, with the utmost prolongation of accent, “it’s Wood!”

What you owe to me — you will vary the phrase — but I shall still recognize my thought. But what you say from the same idea, will have to me also the expected unexpectedness which belongs to every new work of Nature.

Amongst us only the face is well alive: the trunk and limbs have an inferior and subsidiary life, seeming to be only supporters to the head. The head is finished, the body only blocked. Now and then in a Southerner we see a body which is also alive, as in young Eustis. So is it with our manners and letters.

A beautiful woman varies her dress with her mood, as our lovely Walden Pond wears a new weather each time I see it, and all are so comely that I can prefer none. But there must be agreement between the mood and the dress. Vain and forgotten are the fine things if there is no holiday in the eye.

Tropes. Every gardener can change his flowers and leaves into fruit and so is the genius that today can upheave and balance and toss every object in Nature for his metaphor, capable in his next manifestation of playing such a game with his hands instead of his brain. An instinctive suspicion that this may befal, seems to have crept into the mind of men. What would happen to us who live on the surface, if this fellow in some new transmigration should have acquired power to do what he now delights to say? He must be watched.

For me, what I may call the autumnal style of Montaigne keeps all its old attraction.

Your reading you may use in conversation, but your writing should stop with your own thought.

The whole history of Sparta seems to be a picture or text of self-reliance.

Waldo’s diplomacy in giving account of Ellen’s loud cries declares that she put her foot into his sandhouse, and got pushed.

Democracy. Caius Gracchus, Plutarch says, first among the Romans turned himself in addressing the people from facing the senate-house, as was usual, and faced the Forum.

The trumpet-like lowing of a cow — what does that speak to in me? Not to my understanding. No. Yet somewhat in me hears and loves it well. I am glad to have guests who can entertain each other, and if I cannot find a second guest in our narrow village to keep the first in play, then I would have pictures, statues, an observatory and telescope, a garden, — somewhat that can bear the brunt of the stranger’s arrival and allow me to play a second part and be a guest in my own house. But when the friend shall come, then the smallest closet in my house is wide enough for our entertainment.

Has not Pedantry been defined, a transference of the language of one district of thought or action to another district, not in the way of rhetoric, but from a bigoted belief that it is intrinsically preferable? I remember some remark of Coleridge that is tantamount to this. I easily see that the spirit of life finds equal exercise in war, in chemistry, or in poetry. I see the law of Nature equally exemplified in bar-room and in a saloon of philosophers. I get instruction and the opportunities of my genius indifferently in all places, companies and pursuits, so only that there be antagonism. Yet there would be the greatest practical inconvenience, if, because the same law appears indifferently in all, we should bring the philosophers of the bar-room and of the saloon together. Like to like.

[Here follows most of the matter printed in the first two pages of “Character” (Essays, Second Series).]

Character is that reserved force which acts only by Presence, and not by visible or analysable methods. Samuel Hoar accomplishes everything by the aid of this weapon, not by talent, not by eloquence, not by magnetism. We feel that the largest part of the man has never yet been brought into action. As modern warfare is war of posts and not of battles, so these victories are by demonstration of superiority and not by conflict.

If one should go into State Street or much lower places, he would find that the battle there also is fought and won by the same grand agents...

Lord Bacon’s method in his books is of the Understanding, but his sentences are lighted by Ideas.

The fame of Burns also is too great for the facts.

Lotus-eaters. I suppose there is no more abandoned epicure or opium-eater than I. I taste every hour of these autumn days. Every light from the sky, every shadow on the earth, ministers to my pleasure. I love this gas. I grudge to move or to labor or to change my book or to will, lest I should disturb the sweet dream.

Our people are easily pleased: but I wonder to see how rare is any deviation from the routine.... If Mr and Mrs. Wigglesworth go to walk with their family in the mornings they are the speculation of Boston.

The moment is all. The boys like to have their swing of peaches once in the season, and it suffices them; or of plums, or cherries. We like to be rested; we like to be thoroughly tired by labor; I sit on a stone and look at the pond and feel that having basked in a nature so vast and splendid I can afford to decease, and yet the antecedent generations have not quite lost their labor. “In the heat of the battle Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to another detachment.”

I find a few passages in my biography noticeable. But it is the present state of mind which selects those anecdotes, and the selection characterizes the state of mind. All the passages will in turn be brought out.

Dr. Osgood said of P’s sermon that it was patty cake.

In history the soul spreads itself, enormous, eccentric and allows no rash inductions. The men who evince the force of the moral sentiment and of genius are not normal, canonical people, but wild and Ishmaelitish — Cromwells, Napoleons, Shakspeares, and the like.

The fine doctrine of availableness which gave the Whig party John Tyler for their President reaches into the politics of every parish and school district.

In Plutarch’s Life of Demosthenes it is quoted from the philosopher that through all his orations runs one idea, that Virtue secures its own success.

Dandies of Moral Sentiment. I, credulous, listened to his fine sentiment and wondered what must be the life of which the ornaments were so costly: and coming again, he lived there no longer: he was now such a tradesman as other tradesmen are, and he recognized my face with patronage and pity.

The fancies of the boy exceed a hundredfold the fruitions of the man.

(From E)

September.

A poet is very rare. I spoke the other day to Ellery’s ambition and said, Think that in so many millions, perhaps there is not another one whose thought can flow into music. Will you not do what you are created to do?... But Ellery, though he has fine glances and a poetry that is like an exquisite nerve communicating by thrills, yet is a very imperfect artist, and, as it now seems, will never finish anything. He does not even like to distinguish between what is good and what is not, in his verses, would fain have it all pass for good, — for the best, — and claim inspiration for the worst lines. But he is very good company, with his taste, and his cool, hard, sensible behaviour, yet with the capacity of melting to emotion, or of wakening to the most genial mirth. It is no affectation in him to talk of politics, of knives and forks, or of sanded floors, if you will; indeed, the conversation always begins low down, and, at the least faltering or excess on the high keys, instantly returns to the weather, the Concord Reading Room, and Mr. Rice’s shop. Now and then something appears that gives you to pause and think. First, I ask myself if it is real, or only a flitting shade of thought, spoken before it was half realized; then, if it sometimes appears, as it does, that there is in him a wonderful respect for mere humours of the mind, for very gentle and delicate courses of behaviour, then I am tempted to ask if the poet will not be too expensive to the man; whether the man can afford such costly self-denials and finenesses to the poet. But his feeling, as his poetry, only runs in veins, and he is, much of the time, a very common and unedifying sort of person.

(From G)

September 4.

Rightly says Elizabeth, that we do not like to hear our authors censured, for we love them by sympathy as well as for cause, and do not wish to have a reason put in the mouth of their enemies. It is excellent criticism and I will write it into my piece.

September 11.

The Poet, The Maker. It is much to write sentences: it is more to add method, and write out the spirit of your life symmetrically. Of all the persons who read good books and converse about them, the greater part are content to say, I was pleased; or I was displeased; it made me active or inactive; and rarely does one eliminate and express the peculiar quality of that life which the book awoke in him. So rare is a general reflection. But to arrange many general reflections in their natural order so that I shall have one homogeneous piece, a Lycidas, an Allegro, a Penseroso, a Hamlet, a Macbeth, a Midsummer - Night’s Dream, — this continuity is for the great. The wonderful men are wonderful hereby. The observations that Pythagoras made respecting sound and music are not in themselves unusually acute; but he goes on: adds fact to fact, makes two steps, three, or even four, and every additional step counts a thousand years to his fame.

September 12.

Osman said that when he went a-berrying the devil got into the blueberries and tempted him to eat a bellyful, but if he came to a spring of water he would wash his hands and mouth and promise himself that he would eat no more. Instantly the devil would come to him again in the shape of larger and fairer berriers than any he had yet found, and if he still passed them by, he would bring him blackberries, and if that would not serve, then grapes. He said, of one thing he was persuaded, that wisdom and berries grew on the same bushes, but that only one could ever be plucked at one time.

Optimates. Sir, said Heavenborn, the amount of labor you have spent on that piece is disgraceful. For me, not even my industry shall violate my sentiment. I will sit down in that corner and perish, unless I am commanded by the universe to rise and work.

And what became of Heavenborn? What a pragmatical question! Nothing to tell of: yet I suppose the new spirit that animates this crop of young philosophers, and perhaps the fine weather at this very hour, this thoughtful autumnal air, may be some of his work, since he is now, as we say, dead.

Osman. Our low and flat experiences have no right to speak of what is sacred. Out of a true reverence, which is all the good we have left us, we do not recognize the existence of God and Nature, but do what we can to exterminate them from the category of being. If I should ever be better, I will grant you their existence.

But I sympathize with all the sad angels who on this planet of ours are striking work and crying, O for something worthy to do!...

Life. Osman. We are all of us very near to sublimity. As one step freed Wordsworth’s Recluse on the mountains from the blinding mist and brought him to the view of “Glory beyond all glory ever seen,” so near are all to a vision of which Homer and Shakspeare are only hints and types, and yet cannot we take that one step. It does not seem worth our while to toil for anything so pitiful as skill to do one of the little feats we magnify so much, when presently the dream will scatter and we shall burst into universal power. The reason of all idleness and of all crime is the same. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time, one with jokes, one with sleep, one with eating, one with crimes.

It is pedantry to give such importance to property. Whoso does shows how much he desires it. Can I not play the game with these counters as well as with those? with land and money as well as with brown bread and serge? A good wrestler does not need the costume of the ring, and it is only indifferent writers who are so hard to be suited with a pen.

“I will not sign any petition that Mr. D. may hold his office: he and his party have been doing all they could to destroy my business, and drive me to saw wood for a living, and now he may saw wood himself,” said my neighbor the manufacturer. And that is the repute in which “the solid part of the community” hold labor. To such men no wonder that the fact of George Ripley’s association should appear wonderful, men of the highest cultivation leaving their libraries and going out in blue frocks and cowhide boots into the barnyard and peat-bog. They think it a freak, but when they find it lasting, and that the plans of years are based on it, they revise their own positions. Antony and Cleopatra, and old King George III drest themselves in kersey and went out incogniti.

Jones Very told George Bradford that “he valued his poems, not because they were his, but because they were not.”

“The Transcendentalists do not err in excess, but in defect, if I understand the case. They do not hold wild dreams for realities: the vision is deeper, broader, more spiritual than they have seen. They do not believe with too strong faith: their faith is too dim of sight, too feeble of grasp, too wanting in certainty.” (Rev.) Thomas T. Stone’s letter to M. M. E., June, 1841.

September 21.

Dr. Ripley died this morning The fall of this oak of ninety years makes some sensation in the forest, old and doomed as it was. He has identified himself with the forms at least of the old church of the New England Puritans, his nature was eminently loyal, not in the least adventurous or democratical; and his whole being leaned backward on the departed, so that he seemed one of the rear-guard of this great camp and army which have filled the world with fame, and with him passes out of sight almost the last banner and guidon flag of a mighty epoch. For these Puritans, however in our last days they have declined into ritualists, solemnized the heyday of their strength by the planting and the liberating of America.

Great, grim, earnest men, I belong by natural affinity to other thoughts and schools than yours, but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring footprints, your unpainted churches, strict platforms, and sad offices; the iron-gray deacon and the wearisome prayer rich with the diction of ages.

Well, the new is only the seed of the old. What is this abolition and non-resistance and temperance but the continuation of Puritanism, though it operate inevitably the destruction of the church in which it grew, as the new is always making the old superfluous?... He was a punctual fulfiller of all duties. What order, what prudence! No waste, and no stint, always open-handed; just and generous. My little boy, a week ago, carried him a peach in a calabash, but the calabash brought home two pears. I carried him melons in a basket, but the basket came home with apples. He subscribed to all charities; he was the most public-spirited citizen in this town. He gave the land for the monument. He knew the value of a dollar as well as another man. Yet he always sold cheaper than any other man....

“Woe that the linden and the vine should bloom

And a just man be gathered to the tomb.”

But out of his own ground he was not good for aught. To talk with the insane he was as mad as they; to speculate with the thoughtful and the haters of forms he was lost and foolish.... Credulous and opinionative, a great browbeater of the poor old fathers who still survived from the Nineteenth of April in order to make them testify to his history as he had written it. A man of no enthusiasm, no sentiment. His horror at the doctrine of non-resistance was amusing —

He was a man very easy to read, for his whole life and conversation was consistent and transparent.... In college, F. King told me from Governor Gore, who was the Doctor’s classmate, he was called “Holy Ripley,” perhaps in derision, perhaps in sadness, and now in his old age when all the antique Hebraism and customs are going to pieces, it is fit he too should depart, most fit that in the fall of laws a loyal man should die.

Shall I not say in general of him, that, given his constitution, his life was harmonious and perfect?

His body is a handsome and noble spectacle. My mother was moved just now to call it “the beauty of the dead.” He looks like a sachem fallen in the forest, or rather like “a warrior taking his rest with his martial cloak around him.” I carried Waldo to see him, and he testified neither repulsion nor surprise, but only the quietest curiosity. He was ninety years old the last May, yet this face has the tension and resolution of vigorous manhood. He has been a very temperate man. A man is but a little thing in the midst of these great objects of Nature, the mountains, the clouds, and the cope of the horizon, and the globes of heaven, yet a man by moral quality may abolish all thoughts of magnitude and in his manners equal the majesty of the world.

September 28.

Temperament. Every man, no doubt, is eloquent once in his life. The only difference betwixt us is that we boil at different degrees of the thermometer. This man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor; that man requires the additional caloric of a large meeting, a public debate; and a third needs an antagonist, or a great indignation; a fourth must have a revolution; and a fifth nothing less than the grandeur of absolute Ideas, the splendors of Heaven and Hell, the vastness of truth and love.

The whole state of society of course depends on that law of the soul which all must read sooner or later, — as I am, so I see; my state for the time must always get represented in my companion’s nuptial, mercantile, or municipal, as well as in my face and my fortunes.

“A new friend is like new wine; when it is old thou shalt drink it with pleasure.” (Ecclesiasticus ix, 10.)

(From H)

“One avenue was shaded from thine eyes

Through which I wandered to eternal truth.”

Acquiescence, patience, have a large part to play. The plenty of the poorest place is too great, — the harvest cannot be gathered. The thought that I think excludes me from all other thoughts. Culture is to cherish a great susceptibility, to turn the man into eyes, but as the eye can see only that which is eye-form, or of its own state, we tumble on our walls in every part of the universe, and must take such luck as we find, and be thankful. Let us deserve to see. Too feeble and faint fall the impressions of Nature on the sense. Let us not dull them by intemperance and sleep. Too partially we utter them again: the symbols in which I had hoped to convey a universal sense are rejected as partial. What remains but to acquiesce in the faith that by not lying, nor being angry, we shall at last acquire the voice and language of a man.

Sun and moon are the tablets on which the name and fame of the good are inscribed.

Nature is a silent man.

It would be well if at our schools some course of lessons in Idealism were given by way of showing each good Whig the gunpowder train which lies under the ground on which he stands so firmly. Let him know that he speaks to ghosts and phantasms, let him distinguish between a true man and a ghost.

“We do not wake up every morning at four to write what all the world thinks,” said the good German.

The Inevitableness of the new Spirit is the grand fact, and that no man lays to heart, or sees how the hope and palladium of mankind is there; but one blushes and timidly insinuates palliating circumstances, and one jeers at the foible or absurdity of some of its advocates, — but on comes the God to confirm and to destroy, to work through us if we be willing, to crush us if we resist. No great cause is ever defended on its merits.

If I should take the sum of the Annual Registers, of the Red Books, of the Scientific Associations, of the Lloyds’ Lists, and Bicknell’s Reporters, I should not get the Age which this pine wood speaks of.

Boston. Natural History Society; Athenæum and Galleries; Lowell Institute; Lyceum; Mechanics’ Fair; Cambridge College; Father Taylor; Statehouse; Faneuil Hall; Bookshops; Tremont Theatre.

Men. Taylor, Webster, Bancroft, Frothingham, Reed, Ward.

There is a great destiny which comes in with this as with every age, which is colossal in its traits, terrible in its strength, which cannot be tamed, or criticised, or subdued. It is shared by every man and woman of the time, for it is by it they live. As a vast, solid phalanx the generation comes on, they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is that which they do not detect in each other. It is this one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the laborers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. Fear not but this is full of romance, the wildest sea, or mountain, or desert — life is not more instinct with aboriginal force. This is that which inspires every new exertion that is made. It is this which makes life sweet to them; this which the ambitious seek power that they may control; this they wish to be rich that they may buy; when they marry, it is out of love of this; when they study, it is this which they pore after, and would read, or would write. It is new in the universe, it is the attraction of time: it is the wonder of the Infinite: this is the last painting of the Creator: calm and perfect it lies on the brow of the enormous Eternity, and if, in the superior recesses of Nature there be any abode for permanent spectators, what is there they would study but this, — the cumulative result, the new morning with all its dews, rich with the spoils of all foregoing time? Is there not something droll to see the first-born of this age ignorant of the deep, prophetic charm that makes the individual nothing; interrupting the awe and gladness of the time with their officious lamentations that they are critical, and know too much? Are they not torn up in a whirlwind, — borne by its force, they know not whence, they know not whither, yet settling their robes and faces in the moment they fly by me with this self-crimination of ennui? If ever anybody had found out how so much as a rye-straw is made! Feeble persons are occupied with themselves, — with what they have knowingly done, and what they propose to do, and they talk much hereof with modesty and fear. The strong persons look at themselves as facts, in which the involuntary part is so much as to fill all their wonder, and leave them no countenance to say anything of what is so trivial as their private thinking and doing. I can well speak of myself as a figure in a panorama so absorbing.

The whole game at which the philosopher busies himself every day, year in, year out, is to find the upper and the under side of every block in his way. Nothing so large and nothing so thin but it has two sides, and when he has seen the outside, he turns it over to see the other face. We never tire of this game, because ever a slight shudder of astonishment pervades us at the exhibition of the other side of the button, — at the contrast of the two sides. The head and the tail are called in the language of philosophy Finite and Infinite. Visible and Spiritual, Relative and Absolute, Apparent and Eternal, and many more fine names.

The Poet. I was astonished one morning by tidings that Genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table...

It is strange how fast Experience and Idea, the wonderful twins, the Castor and Pollux of our firmament, change places; one rises and the other instantaneously sets. To-day and for a hundred days Experience has been in the ascendant, and Idea has lurked about the life merely to enhance sensation, the firework-maker, master of the revels, and hired poet of the powers that be: but in a moment a revolution! the dream displaces the working day and working world, and they are now the dream and this the reality. All the old landmarks are swept away in a flood, and geography and history, the laws and manners, aim and method of society are as fugitive as the colors which chase each other when we close our eyes. All experience has become mere language now. Idea drags it now, a chained poet, to adorn and sing his triumph.

Chilmark. Sir, I have your note for a small debt, can you pay it to-day?

Hyannis. Far otherwise: perhaps you have brought me money.

Chil. No.

Hy. I contracted that debt when I bought and sold; now I protest against the market. The word pay is immoral.

Chil. “It is best to be off wi’ the old love, Before ye be on wi’ the new.”

In Berlin it was publicly reported at the tea-tables that Fichte had declared his disbelief in the existence of Heinrich Schlossen, who was worth two hundred thousand thalers. Nay, it was currently whispered that he did not credit the existence of Madame Fichte.

I stood one day in the Court House talking with Luther Lawrence when the sheriff introduced through the crowd a number of women who were witnesses in the trial that was pending. As they filed rapidly through the crowd, Mr. Lawrence said, “There go the light troops!” Neither Plato, Mahomet, nor Goethe have said a severer thing on our fair Eve. Yet the old lawyer did not mean to be satanic. The ridicule lies in the misplacement of our good Angel, in the violence of direction with which this string of maids and matrons are coming with hot heads to testify what gossip they know about Mr. Gulliver or Mrs. Veal, — being quite dislodged from that shrine of sanctity, sentiment, and solitude in which they make courts and forums appear absurd...I remember Edward Taylor’s indignation at the kind admonitions of Dr. P. The right answer is, ‘My friend, a man can neither be praised nor insulted.’

On rolls the old world, and these fugitive colors of political opinion, like doves’ neck lustres, chase each other over the wide encampments of mankind, Whig, Tory; Pro-and Antislavery; Catholic, Protestant; the clamor lasts for some time, but the persons who make it change; the mob remains, the persons who compose it change every moment. The world hears what both parties say and swear, accepts both statements, and takes the line of conduct recommended by neither, but a diagonal line of advance which partakes of both courses.

Aster solidagineus or solidago bicolor.

The Poet. The Idealist at least should be free of envy; for every poet is only a ray of his wit, and every beauty is his own beauty reflected. He is ever a guest in his own house and his house is the biggest possible.

Exaggeration is a law of Nature. As we have not given a peck of apples or potatoes, until we have heaped the measure, so Nature sends no creature, no man into the world without adding a small excess of his proper quality... Every sentence hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it. For the infinite diffuseness refuses to be epigrammatized, the world to be shut in a word. The thought being spoken in a sentence becomes by mere detachment falsely emphatic.

G.W. Tyler patronizes Providence.... The Whig party in the Universe concedes that the Radical enunciates the primal law, but makes no allowance for friction, and this omission makes their whole doctrine impertinent. The Whig assumes sickness, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, —— a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and pap-spoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea. Whig preaching, Whig poetry, Whig philosophy, Whig marriages. No rough, truth-telling Miltons, Rousseaus.

Blue Heron, loon, and sheldrake come to Fairhaven Pond; raccoon and otter to Walden.

The merchant will not allow a book in the counting-house, suspects every taste and tendency but that for goods, has no conversation, no thought but cotton, qualities of cotton, and its advance or fall a penny or a farthing. What a cramping of the form in wooden cap, wooden belt, and wooden shoes, is this, and how should not the negro be more a man than one of these victims? — the negro, who, if low and imperfect in organization, is yet no wooden sink, but a wild cedar swamp, rich with all vegetation of grass and moss and confervæ and ferns and flags, with rains and sunshine; mists and moonlight, birds and insects filling its wilderness with life and promise.

It is plain that none should be rich but those who understand it. Cushings and Perkinses ought to be rich, who incline to subscribe to college and railroad, to endow Athenaeums, and open public gardens, and buy and exhibit pictures, liberalities which very good and industrious men, who have earned their money a penny or a shilling at a time, would never think of. Yet what are rich men for? It is a most unnecessarily large and cumbrous apparatus for anybody who has not a genius for it to produce no other result than the most simple contrivance of an acre and a cabin.

Every nation, to emerge from barbarism, must have a foreign impulse, a graft on the wild stock, and every man must. He may go to college for it, or to conversation, or to affairs, or to the successes and mortifications of his private biography, war, politics, fishing, or love, — some antagonism he must have as projectile force to balance his centripetence.

Master Cheney says there is the eight-rowed corn, and the twelve-rowed, and the brindled, and the Badger corn, and the Canada corn, and the sweet, and the white, and the Missouri.

Fifty pounds to the bushel makes corn merchantable, and he weighed a bushel of the Bigelow (?) corn and there were seventy pounds.

O Master Cheney! I catch the tune in your talk, and see well that you have no need of poetry. I see its silver thread gleaming in your homespun. You do not break off your flowers. You plough your crops in.

G. W. Tyler came here with all his rattle. The attributes of God, he said, were two, power and risibility. It was the duty of every pious man, he said, to keep up the hoax the best he could, and so to patronize Whiggism, Piety, and Providence, and wherever he saw anything that would help keep the people in order, schools or churches, or poetry, or what-not, he must cry Hist-a-boy! and urge the game on. It was like Eli Robbins’s theory of amusements. He sleeps four hours, from three to seven. He outwitted Mr. Greenleaf in the courts. He practised medicine somewhere in the barracks, and, at St. Johns, having in a freak called himself a Free-will Baptist, he was immediately carried off to preach at a meeting, which he did for fifty-five minutes, and left the audience in tears, and got up a revival. A pound and a half of coffee to a pint of water, he drinks every night, of the thickness of molasses, and when he had headache, he piled a peck of ice on his head, by means of an iron hoop.

“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

To scorn delights and live laborious days.”

The philosopher sat with his face to the East until cobwebs were spun over the brim of his pot of porridge. Intemperance is the only vulgarity.

Inaptitude. I will never wonder at Mr. Pickens, who said “he would not go to Mr. R— ‘s church until the interesting times were quite over’* (i e., until the ordination and personal topics were exhausted). People’s personality, their biography, their brother and sister, uncle and aunt, are sadly in the way.

The novel of De Clifford gave me to think of aristocracy. I should like to have this and Pericles and Aspasia circulate freely in this country as lessons in the beauty of behavior which we greatly need, — lessons on personal merit and manners; but this book is superstitious and has no conception of the despotic power of character... But, in Miss Edgeworth, and in this story of De Clifford, the hero in the crisis speaks with the utmost spirit and nature, and so the scene is blood-warm, and does your heart good.

This hold we have on the selfish man, that he always values consequences, reputation, or after-clap of some sort; but the benevolent man never looks so far. Let the self-seeker be never so sharp, this unlucky trick of Nature is sharper than he, and has him on the hip. False connections have some good in them. All our solitudes yield a precious fruit, and this is the most remarkable of all our solitudes. I value the tenderness of a stern nature more than all the tenderness of the susceptible. When such a one is moved, the tears are precious. The only bribe the “community” has for us, is that it permits the association of friends without any compromise on any part, as our other hospitalities do not. We see now sundry persons whose slowness of friendship makes it plain that life is not long enough, with its rare opportunities, that we and they should ever be anything valuable to each other. They are constitutionally good and great, yet only by living in the house with them for years, could we realize the promise we read in their eye. They now are only the Lord’s pledge to us that worth exists, and will somewhere be available to us. What has life more to offer me than assurance?

I can forgive anything to a deep nature, for they outlive all their foibles and pedantries, and are just as good ten years hence and much better. Strange it is so hard to find good ones: the profound nature will have a savage rudeness, the delicate one will be shallow or have a great crack running through it, and so every piece has a flaw. I suppose that, if I should see all the gentry of England pass in review, I should find no gentleman and no lady... It must be genius which takes that direction [i e., friendship]: it must be not courteous, but courtesy; not tasteful, but taste; not gilt, but gold. O men of buckram and women of blonde, is civilization buckram and is gentleness blonde?

Sarah Alden Ripley is a bright foreigner: she signalizes herself among the figures of this masquerade. I do not hope when I see her to gain anything, any thought: she is choked, too, by the multitude of all her riches, Greek and German, Biot and Bichat, chemistry and philosophy. All this is bright obstruction. But capable she is of high and calm intelligence, and of putting all the facts, all life aloof, as we sometimes have done. But when she does not, and only has a tumultuous time, it is time well wasted. I think her worth throwing time away upon.

Eupatorium, white and red.

I see only two or three persons and allow them all their room: they spread themselves at large to the horizon. If I looked at many, as you do, or compared these habitually with others, these would look less. Yet are they not entitled to this magnificence? Is it not their own? And is not munificence the only insight?

We cannot rectify marriage, because it would introduce such carnage into our social relations, and it seems the most rabid Radical is a good Whig in relation to the theory of marriage.

Yet perhaps we can see how the facts stand in Heaven. Woman hides her form from the eyes of men in our world: they cannot, she rightly thinks, be trusted. In a right state the love of one, which each man carried in his heart, should protect all women from his eyes as by an impenetrable veil of indifference. The love of one should make him indifferent to all others, or rather their protector and saintly friend, as if for her sake. But now there is in the eyes of all men a certain evil light, a vague desire which attaches them to the forms of many women, whilst their affections fasten on some one. Their natural eye is not fixed into coincidence with their spiritual eye.

Spiræa tomentosa.

Why do I write another line, since my best friends assure me that in every line I repeat myself? Yet the God must be obeyed even to ridicule. The criticism of the public is, as I have often noted, much in advance of its invention. The ear is not to be cheated. A continuous effect cannot be produced by discontinuous thought, and when the eye cannot detect the juncture of the skilful mosaic, the spirit is apprised of disunion simply by the failure to affect the spirit. This other thing I will also concede, — that the man Fingal is rather too swiftly plastic, or, shall I say, works more in the spirit of a cabinetmaker, than of an architect. The thought which strikes him as great and Dantesque, and opens an abyss, he instantly presents to another transformed into a chamber or a neat parlor, and degrades ideas.

I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all his thoughts, — they are my own quite originally drest. But if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know three persons who seem to me fully to see this law of reciprocity or compensation, — himself, Alcott, and myself: and ‘t is odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the wide land or the wide earth I do not know another who seems to have it as deeply and originally as these three Gothamites.

Poetry. But now of poetry I would say, that when I go out into the fields in a still sultry day, in a still sultry humor, I do perceive that the finest rhythms and cadences of poetry are yet unfound, and that in that purer state which glimmers before us, rhythms of a faery and dreamlike music shall enchant us, compared with which the finest measures of English poetry are psalm-tunes. I think now that the very finest and sweetest closes and falls are not in our metres, but in the measures of eloquence, which have greater variety and richness than verse.... Now, alas, we know something too much about our poetry, — we are not part and parcel of it: it does not descend like a foreign conqueror from an unexpected quarter of the horizon upon us, carry us away with our flocks and herds into a strange and appalling captivity, to make us, at a later period, adopted children of the Great King, and, in the end, to disclose to us that he was our real parent, and this realm and palace is really our native country. Yet I please myself with thinking that there may yet be somewhere such elation of heart, such continuity of thought, that a man shall see the little sun and moon whisk about, making day and night, making month and month, without heed, in the grandeur of his absorption. Now we know not only when it is day, and when night, but we hear the dinner-bell ring with the most laudable punctuality. I am not such a fool but that I taste the joy which comes from a new and prodigious person, from Dante, from Rabelais, from Piranesi, flinging wide to me the doors of new modes of existence, and even if I should intimate by a premature nod my too economical perception of the old thrum, that the basis of this joy is at last the instinct, that I am only let into my own estate, that the poet and his book and his story are only fictions and semblances in which my thought is pleased to dress itself, I do not the less yield myself to the keen delight of difference and newness.

I think that the importance of fine scenery is usually greatly exaggerated, for the astonishing part of every landscape is the meeting of the sky and the earth...

A man in black came in while I spoke and my countenance fell. Then I said, Surely I see that the Swedenborgian finds a sweetness in his church and is enveloped by it in a love and society that haunts him by night and by day, but if the Unitarian is invited to go out and preach to Unitarians at Peoria, Illinois, I see no question so fit or inevitable as that he should ask whether they will pay the expense of his journey and maintain him well...

In good society, — say among the angels in Heaven, — is not everything spoken by indirection and nothing quite straight as it befel?

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which I have seen with interest a natural object.... At least these things are not drenched in our personalities and village ambition, pay no tax, own no City Bank stock, and need not engage their wood to be sawed. And yet whilst they rescue me from my village, I know that they attract me for somewhat which they symbolize:

 that they are not foreign as they seem, but related. Wait a little, and I shall see the return even of this remote and hyperbolic curve.

Margaret Fuller talked of ballads, and our love for them: strange that we should so value the wild man, the Ishmaelite, and his slogan, claymore, and tomahawk rhymes, and yet every step we take, everything we do, is to tame him. It is like Farley’s pioneer hatred of civilization, and absconding from it to cut down trees all winter and comfort himself that he was preparing for civilization! Margaret does not think, she says, in the woods, only “finds herself expressed.”

One of my stories promised above to embody the history of the times— ‘A Life and Times’

 —— should be that of little Edward Webster, who asked his father one day, after grace had been said at dinner, “Who would say wis-wis at dinner when he should be gone to Washington?”

Another of like import in the Chapter of Religion would be Lieutenant Bliss’s reply to me when I asked him if they had morning prayers at West Point as at a college? He said, “We have reveille beat, which is the same thing.”

Of the best jokes of these days is that told of poor Bokum, that when he went to hire a horse and chaise at a stable in Cambridge, and the man inquired whether he should put in a buffalo? “My God! no,” cried the astonished German, “put in a horse!”

I value Shakspeare, yes, as a Metaphysician, and admire the unspoken logic which upholds the structure of Iago, Macbeth, Antony, and the rest. Is it the real poverty at the bottom of all this seeming affluence, the headlong speed with which in London, Paris, and Cochin China, each seeing soul comes straight through all the thin masquerade on the old fact, is it the disgust at this indigence of Nature which makes these raging livers like Napoleon, Timour, Byron, Trelawney, and John Quincy Adams drive their steed so hard, in the fury of living to forget the soupe maigre of life?...

It is a bad fact that our editors fancy they have a right to call on Daniel Webster to resign his office, or, much more, resign his opinion and accept theirs. That is the madness of party. I account it a good sign, indicative of public virtue in the Whigs, that there are so many opinions among them, and that they are not organized and drilled.

There are two directions in which souls move: one is trust, religion, consent to be nothing for eternity, entranced waiting, the worship of Ideas: the other is activity, the busybody, the following of that practical talent which we have, in the belief that what is so natural, easy, and pleasant to us and desirable to others will surely lead us out safely: in this direction lies usefulness, comfort, society, low power of all sorts. The other is solitary, grand, secular. I see not but these diverge from every moment, and that either may be chosen. When I was in college John L. Gardiner said one day that “he had serious thoughts of becoming religious next week, but perhaps he should join the Porcellians.’, It is no joke: I have often thought the same thing. Whether does Love reconcile these two divergencies? for it is certain that every impulse of that sentiment exalts, and yet it brings all practical power into play. Here I am in a dark corner again. We have no one example of the poetic life realized, therefore all we say seems bloated. If life is sad and do not content us, if the heavens are brass, and rain no sweet thoughts on us, and especially we have nothing to say to shipwrecked and self-tormenting and young-old people, let us hold our tongues.... And if to my soul the day does not seem dark, nor the cause lost, why should I use such ruinous courtesy as to concede that God has failed, because the plain colors or the storm-suit of grey clouds in which the day is drest, do not please the rash fancy of my companions? Patience and truth, patience with our own frosts and negations, and few words must serve.... If our sleeps are long, if our flights are short, if we are not plumed and painted like orioles and Birds of Paradise, but like sparrows and plebeian birds, if our taste and training are earthen, let that fact be humbly and happily borne with. The wise God beholds that also with complacency. Wine and honey are good, but so are rice and meal. Perhaps all that is not performance is preparation, or performance that shall be.

October 8.

Exclusives. The close communion Baptists have a crowded communion: the open communion Unitarians have an empty table. If you wish to fill your house, make the door so narrow that a fat man cannot get in, and you shall be sure to be crammed with company.

The “Champion of England” is never called on until what new boxer has appeared has beaten all others who have met him in the ring. Then the existing “Champion” must appear, or forfeit his dignity and his pension. So the wise man need never trouble himself about the writings of the philosophers of the day until they have hit the white, and come within his bolt.

“O golden lads and lasses must,

Like chimney sweepers come to dust.”

Riches. Few may be trusted to speak of wealth. Quicksilver is our gauge of temperature of air and water, clay is our pyrometer, silver our photometer, feathers our electrometer, catgut our hygrometer, — but what is our meter of man, our anthropometer? Poverty is the mercury. Wealth seems the state of man.

The view taken of Transcendentalism in State Street is that it threatens to invalidate contracts.

Plutarch’s heroes are my friends and relatives.

As we drive it, the artist is in some degree sacrificed. Michel Angelo, to paint Sistine frescoes, must lose for a time the power to read without holding the book over his head, and Doctor Herschel, to keep his eyes for nocturnal observation, must shield them from daylight.

Thomas H. Benton’s speeches, and the Protocols of Vienna and St. Petersburg are as much in the circuit of to-day’s Universe — have got to be accounted for as are the most vital and beautiful appearance; and the theory of Heaven and Earth can be equally established on the lowest and the highest fact. The permissive as much characterises God as the beloved.

As I looked at the Madonnas and Magdalens in the Athenæum, I saw that for the most part the painter seemed to draw from models, and from such beauties, therefore, as models are likely to be, flesh and color and emotion; but from lordly, intellectual, spiritual beauties, “the great seraphic lords and cherubim” of the sex, no sign but in Raphaels. Yet two or three Greek women, clear, serene, and organically noble as any forms which remain to us on vase or temple, adorn my group and picture of life. And we demand that character shall have nothing muddy or turbid, but shall be transparent, — sublime as God pleases, but not eccentric.

Saturday, October 9.

Hippomachus knew a good wrestler by his gait in the street, and an old stager like myself will recognize the subtle Harlequin in his most uncouth frocks, in an Olmsted stove, in a horned ox, in a parliamentary speech, or a bushel of cranberries.

Hurrah for the camera obscura! the less we are, the better we look.

Books, — yes, if worst comes to worst: but not yet. A cup of tea, or a cup of wrath, or a good book will kindle the tinderbox. The poultry must have gravel or egg shells, the swallow and bluebird must have a thread or a wisp of straw for his nest. Have you got the whole beaver, before you have seen his amphibious house? The man is only half himself. Let me see the other half, namely, his expression. Strange, strange, we value this half the most. We worship expressors; we forgive every crime to them. Full expression is very rare. Music, sculpture, painting, poetry, speech, action, war, trade, manufacture is expression. A portrait is this translation of the thing into a new language. What passion all men have to see it done for themselves or others. Now see how small is the list of memorable expressions by book, picture, house, or institution, after so many millions have panted under the Idea!

Elizabeth Hoar consecrates. I have no friend whom I more wish to be immortal than she, an influence I cannot spare, but must always have at hand for recourse. When Margaret mentioned “an expression of unbroken purity,” I said, “That is hers.” M. replied, “Yes, but she knows.” I answer, — Know or know not, the impression she makes is that her part is taken, she has joined herself irrevocably to the sanctities, — to the Muses, and the Gods. Others suggest often that they still balance; their genius draws them to happiness; they contemplate experiment; they have not abdicated the power of election. Opium and honey, the dagger and madness, they like should still lie there in the background, as shadows and possibilities. But Elizabeth’s mind is made up, and she has soared into another firmament, and these exist not for her. Bonaparte did not like ideologists: Elizabeth is no poet, but her holiness is substantive and must be felt, like the heat of a stove, or the gravity of a stone: and Bonaparte would respect her.

Life. Is identity tedious? Not if we can see to the life. That always stupefies us with sweet astonishment. A million times since the sun rose have the words “I thank you” been spoken. Yet are they just as graceful and musical in my ear when spoken with living emotion as if now first coined.

Riches. People say law, but they mean wealth.

Genius. The observations of talent are punctures; but, of genius, shafts which unite at the bottom of the mine. But ah! this scud of opinions.

Hope. We sit chatting here in the dark, but do we not all know that the sun will yet again shine, and we shall depart each to our work? God will resolve all doubts, fill all measures. I would have my book read as I have read my favorite books, not with explosion and astonishment, a marvel and a rocket, but a friendly and agreeable influence stealing like the scent of a flower, or the sight of a new landscape on a traveller. I neither wish to be hated and defied by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose thoughts I stimulate.

Partridge berry, white alder or Prinos.

The sum of life ought to be valuable when the fractions and particles are so sweet.

The Daguerreotype is good for its authenticity. No man quarrels with his shadow, nor will he with his miniature when the sun was the painter. Here is no interference, and the distortions are not the blunders of an artist, but only those of motion, imperfect light, and the like.

October 12.

I would that I could, I know afar off that I cannot, give the lights and shades, the hopes and outlooks that come to me in these strange, cold-warm, attractive - repelling conversations with Margaret, whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love, — yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to promise to come nearest

October 14.

(From a loose sheet in G)

It is not the proposition, but -the tone that signifies. Is it a man that speaks, or the mimic of a man? Universal Whiggery is tame and weak. Every proclamation, dinner-speech, report of victory, or protest against the government it publishes betrays its thin and watery blood. It is never serene nor angry nor formidable, neither cool nor red hot. Instead of having its own aims passionately in view, it cants about the policy of a Washington and a Jefferson. It speaks to expectation, and not the torrent of its wishes and needs, waits for its antagonist to speak that it may have something to oppose, and, failing that, having nothing to say, is happy to hurrah. What business have Washington or Jefferson in this age?... They lived in the greenness and timidity of the political experiment. The kitten’s eyes were not yet opened. They shocked their contemporaries with their daring wisdom: have you not something which would have shocked them? If not, be silent, for others have.

Passion, appetite, seem to have self-reliance and reality; but Whiggery is a great fear.

(From H)

I saw in Boston Fanny Elssler in the ballet of Nathalie. She must show, I suppose, the whole compass of her instrument, and add to her softest graces of motion or “the wisdom of her feet,” the feats of the rope-dancer and tumbler: and perhaps on the whole the beauty of the exhibition is enhanced by this that is strong and strange, as when she stands erect on the extremities of her toes or on one toe, or “performs the impossible” in attitude. But the chief beauty is in the extreme grace of her movement, the variety and nature of her attitude, the winning fun and spirit of all her little coquetries, the beautiful erectness of her body, and the freedom and determination which she can so easily assume, and, what struck me much, the air of perfect sympathy with the house, and that mixture of deference and conscious superiority which puts her in perfect spirits and equality to her part. When she courtesies, her sweet and slow and prolonged salaam which descends and still descends whilst the curtain falls, until she seems to have invented new depths of grace and condescension, — she earns well the profusion of bouquets of flowers which are hurled on to the stage.

As to the morals, as it is called, of this exhibition, that lies wholly with the spectator. The basis of this exhibition, like that of every human talent, is moral, is the sport and triumph of health or the virtue of organization. Her charm for the house is that she dances for them or they dance in her, not being (fault of some defect in their forms and educations) able to dance themselves. We must be expressed. Hence all the cheer and exhilaration which the spectacle imparts and the intimate property which each beholder feels in the dancer, and the joy with which he hears good anecdotes of her spirit and her benevolence. They know that such surpassing grace must rest on some occult foundations of inward harmony.

But over and above her genius for dancing are the incidental vices of this individual, her own false taste or her meretricious arts to please the groundlings and which must displease the judicious. The immorality the immoral will see; the very immoral will see that only; the pure will not heed it, — for it is not obtrusive, — perhaps will not see it at all. I should not think of danger to young women stepping with their father or brother out of happy and guarded parlors into this theatre to return in a few hours to the same; but I can easily suppose that it is not the safest resort for college boys who have left metaphysics, conic sections, or Tacitus to see these tripping satin slippers, and they may not forget this graceful, silvery swimmer when they have retreated again to their baccalaureate cells.

It is a great satisfaction to see the best in each kind, and as a good student of the world, I desire to let pass nothing that is excellent in its own kind unseen, unheard.

In town I also heard some admirable music. It seemed, as I groped for the meaning, as if I were hearing a history of the adventures of fairy knights, — some Wace, or Monstrelet, or Froissart, was telling, in a language which I very imperfectly understood, the most minute and laughable particulars of the tournaments and loves and quarrels and religion and tears and fate of airy adventurers, small as moths, fine as light, swifter than shadows, — and these anecdotes were illustrated with all sorts of mimicry and scene-painting, all fun and humor and grief, and, now and then, the very persons described broke in and answered and danced and fought and sung for themselves. I saw Webster on the street, — but he was changed since I saw him last, — black as a thunder-cloud, and careworn; the anxiety that withers this generation among the young and thinking class had crept up also into the great lawyer’s chair, and too plainly, too plainly he was one of us. I did not wonder that he depressed his eyes when he saw me, and would not meet my face. The cankerworms have crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm and swing down from that. No wonder the elm is a little uneasy.

WATER

The water understands Civilization well —

It wets my foot, but prettily;

It chills my life, but wittily;

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted.

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy.

Ill used, it will destroy;

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

On the great Rarity of good Expressions. Fanny Elssler is a good expression. She can say in her language what her neighbors cannot say in theirs. Part of the reason why Elssler is so bewitching to the gay people is, that they are pinched and restrained by the decorums of city life, and she shows them freedom. They walk through their cotillions in Papanti’s assemblies, but Fanny’s arms, head and body dance as well as her feet, and they are greatly refreshed to see.

I rode to town with some insane people: the worst of such company is that they always bite you, and then you run mad also.

The aim of aristocracy is to secure the ends of good sense and beauty without vulgarity, or deformity of any kind, but they use a very operose method. What an apparatus of means to secure a little conversation...

It would give me no pleasure to sit in your house, it would give me none to be caressed by you, so long as this infernal infantry [fine clothes, dinners, and servants] hinder me from that dear and spiritual conversation that I desire. There will come a time when these obstructions, arising from I know not what cause, will pass away; if it is a poorness of spirit in me, I shall be warmed with the wine of God, and shall walk with a firmer step; if it is some unreasonable demand in you, experience will have reduced your terms to the level of practicability. The tone, the tone is all....

In writing, the casting moment is of greatest importance, just as it avails not in Daguerre portraits that you have the very man before you, if his expression has escaped.

October 21.

Yet is it not ridiculous, this that we do in this languid idle trick that we have gradually fallen into of writing and writing without end? After a day of humiliation and stripes, if I can write it down, I am straightway relieved and can sleep well. After a day of joy, the beating heart is calmed again by the diary. If grace is given me by all angels and I pray, if then I can catch one ejaculation of humility or hope and set it down in syllables, devotion is at an end.

When the great man comes, he will have that social strength which Doctor Kirkland or Doctor Franklin or Robert Burns had, and will so engage us to the moment that we shall not suspect his greatness until late afterward in some dull hour we shall say, I am enlarged: how dull was I! Is not of late my horizon wider and new? This man! this man! whence came he!

One thing more. As the solar system moves forward in the heavens, certain stars open before us, and certain stars close up behind us. So is man’s life...

October 22.

Would Jesus be received at Almacks? Would the manners of Adam and Eve be admired at the Thuilleries? In the lonely woods I remember London, and think I should like to be initiated in the exclusive circles. There are two ways: one, to conquer them and go as Attila to Rome, or as Napoleon married into the House of Austria: it has this condition that it be of the greatest kind, such conquest as grand genius makes, and so the individual demonstrates his natural aristocracy, best of the best.... It must hold its place subject to this condition of refreshing instantly old merits with new ones or making its first stroke one of those strokes for empire which perpetuates position....

Fashion is a large region and reaches from the precincts of Heaven to the purlieus of Hell. Mr. Philip Sidney is the presiding deity.

Inhumanity. You come into this company meanly. How so? We have come for the love of seeing each other and of conversing together. You have come to give us things which are written already in your note-books (and when you have told them, you are spent). The best of our talk is invented here, and we go hence greater than we came by so much life as we have awakened in each other; but you, when your quiver is emptied, must sit dumb and careful the rest of the evening. Everything you say makes you poorer, and everything we say makes us richer: you go home, when the company breaks up, forlorn: we go home (without a thought on ourselves) full of happiness to pleasant dreams.

To be sure there is a class of discreet citizens like secret-keeping men, good providers for their households, whom you know where to find: but do not measure by their law this wild influence which I found, to be sure, in space and time, but knew at once it could not be there imprisoned; a nature that lay enormous, indefinite, hastening every moment out of all limitation and to be treated like oxygen and hydrogen, of a diffusive, universal, irrevocable elasticity. He could keep no secret, he could keep no property, he could keep no law but his own.

Margaret is “a being of unsettled rank in the universe.” So proud and presumptuous, yet so meek; so worldly and artificial and with keenest sense and taste for all pleasures of luxurious society, yet living more than any other for long periods in a trance of religious sentiment; a person who, according to her own account of herself, expects everything for herself from the Universe.

October 23.

Milton describes religion in his time as leaving the tradesman when he goes into his shop to meet him again when he comes out.... In so pure a church as the Swedenborgian I cannot help feeling the neglect which leaves holiness out of trade. These omissions damn the church.

We forget in taking up a contemporary book that we see the house that is building and not the house that is built. A glance at my own manuscripts might teach me that all my poems are unfinished, heaps of sketches but no masterpiece, yet when I open a printed volume of poems I look imperatively for art.

I think Society has the highest interest in seeing that this movement called the Transcendental is no boys’ play or girls’ play, but has an interest very near and dear to him; that it has a necessary place in history, is a Fact not to be overlooked, not possibly to be prevented, and, however discredited to the heedless and to the moderate and conservative persons by the foibles or inadequacy of those who partake the movement, yet is it the pledge and the herald of all that is dear to the human heart, grand and inspiring to human faith.

I think the genius of this age more philosophical than any other has been, righter in its aims, truer, with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.

October 24.

Permanence is the nobility of human beings. We love that lover whose gayest love-song, whose fieriest engagement of romantic devotion is made good by all the days of all the years of strenuous long-suffering, ever-renewing benefit. The old Count said to the old Countess of Ilchester, “I know that wherever thou goest, thou wilt both trust and honor me, and thou knowest that wherever I am, I shall honor thee.”

We read either for antagonism or for confirmation. It matters not which way the book works on us, whether to contradict and enrage, or to edify and inspire. “Bubb Dodington” is of the first class, which I read to-day. A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.

Everybody, old men, young women, boys, play the doctor with me and prescribe for me. They always did so.

Life in Boston; A play in two acts. Youth and Age. Toys, dancing school, sets, parties, picture-galleries, sleigh-rides, Nahant, Saratoga Springs, lectures, concerts, — sets through them all; solitude and poetry, friendship, ennui, desolation, decline, meanness; plausibility, old age, death.

In the republic must always happen what happened here, that the steamboats and stages and hotels vote one way and the nation votes the other: and it seems to every meeting of readers and writers as if it were intolerable that Broad Street Paddies and bar-room politicians, the sots and loafers and all manner of ragged and unclean and foulmouthed persons without a dollar in their pocket should control the property of the country and make the lawgiver and the law. But is that any more than their share whilst you hold property selfishly? They are opposed to you: yes, but first you are opposed to them: they, to be sure, malevolently, menacingly, with songs and rowdies and mobs; you cunningly, plausibly, and well-bred; you cheat and they strike; you sleep and eat at their expense; they vote and threaten and sometimes throw stones, at yours.

Were you ever daguerrotyped, O immortal man? And did you look with all vigor at the lens of the camera, or rather, by the direction of the operator, at the brass peg a little below it, to give the picture the full benefit of your expanded and flashing eye? and in your zeal not to blur the image, did you keep every finger in its place with such energy that your hands became clenched as for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid; the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed as they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death? And when, at last you are relieved of your dismal duties, did you find the curtain drawn perfectly, and the coat perfectly, and the hands true, clenched for combat, and the shape of the face and head? — but, unhappily, the total expression escaped from the face and the portrait of a mask instead of a man? Could you not by grasping it very tight hold the stream of a river, or of a small brook, and prevent it from flowing? I told Garrison that I thought he must be a very young man, or his time hang very heavy on his hands, who can afford to think much and talk much about the foibles of his neighbors, or ‘denounce,’ and play ‘the son of thunder’ as he called it. I am one who believe all times to be pretty much alike, and yet I sympathize so keenly with this. We want to be expressed, yet you take from us war, that great opportunity which allowed the accumulations of electricity to stream off from both poles, the positive and the negative, — well, now you take from us our cup of alcohol, as before you took our cup of wrath. We had become canting moths of peace, our helm was a skillet, and now we must become temperance water-sops. You take away, but what do you give? Mr. Jefts has been preached into tipping up his barrel of rum into the brook, but day after to-morrow when he wakes up cold and poor, will he feel that he has somewhat for somewhat! No, this is mere thieving.... If I could lift him by happy violence into a religious beatitude, or into a Socratic trance and imparadise him in ideas, or into the pursuit of human beauty, a divine lover, then should I have greatly more than indemnified him for what I have taken. I should not take; he would put away, or rather ascend out of this litter and sty, in which he had rolled, to go up clothed and in his right mind into the assembly and conversation of men. I fight in my fashion, but you, O Paddies and roarers, must not fight in yours. I drink my tea and coffee, but as for you and your cups, here is the pledge and the Temperance Society. I walk on Sundays, and read Aristophanes and Rabelais in church hours: but for you, Go to church. Good vent or bad we must have for our nature.... Make love a crime, and we shall have lust. If you cannot contrive to raise us up to the love of science and make brute matter our antagonist which we shall have joy in handling, mastering, penetrating, condensing to adamant, dissolving to light, then we must brawl, carouse, gamble, or go to bull-fights. If we can get no full demonstration of our heart and mind, we feel wronged and incarcerated: the philosophers and divines we shall hate most, as the upper turnkeys. We wish to take the gas which allows us to break through your wearisome proprieties, to plant the foot, to set the teeth, to fling abroad the arms, and dance and sing.

[Here follow many passages printed in “The Transcendentalism” and the “Lecture on the Times.”]

Society ought to be forgiven if it do not love its rude unmaskers. The Council of Trent did not love Father Paul Sarpi. “But I show you,” says the philosopher, “the leprosy which is covered by these gay coats.”

“Well, I had rather see the handsome mask than the unhandsome skin,” replies Beacon Street. Do you not know that this is a masquerade? Did you suppose I took these harlequins for the kings and queens, the gods and goddesses they represent? I am not such a child. There is a terrific skepticism at the bottom of the determined conservers.

The Rhine of our Divinity School has strangely lost itself in the sands. A man enters the Divinity School, but knows not what shall befall him there, or where he shall come out of its tortuous track. Some reappear in trade, some in the navy, some in Swedenborg chapels, some in landscape painting.

Confide to the end in spiritual, and not in carnal weapons. It needs not to fight the battle of anti-slavery on the question of the seat in the cars: the doctrine advances every day among all people that a high chair, a platform, a strip of gold lace, a sword, a title, is not to protect an individual; but himself alone, his ability, his knowledge, his character. A clown, an idiot, may sit next him: he is begirt with an army of guards in the faculties and influences of his spirit: how can they contaminate him? Presently a man will commonly put his pride in sitting in low seats, in mean dress, in mean company, with mulattoes and blacks; and the legislature or the anti-slavery society will not need to interfere.

“What are you doing, Zeke?” said Judge Webster to his eldest boy.

“Nothing.”

“What are you doing, Daniel?”

“Helping Zeke.”

A tolerably correct account of most of our activity to-day.

It seems to me sometimes that we get our education ended a little too quick in this country. As soon as we have learned to read and write and cipher, we are dismissed from school and we set up for ourselves. We are writers and leaders of opinion and we write away without check of any kind, play whatsoever mad prank, indulge whatever spleen, or oddity, or obstinacy, comes into our dear head, and even feed our complacency thereon, and thus fine wits come to nothing, as good horses spoil themselves by running away and straining themselves. I cannot help seeing that Doctor Channing would have been a much greater writer had he found a strict tribunal of writers, a graduated intellectual empire established in the land, and knew that bad logic would not pass, and that the most severe exaction was to be made on all who enter these lists. Now, if a man can write a paragraph for a newspaper, next year he writes what he calls a history, and reckons himself a classic incontinently, nor will his contemporaries in critical Journal or Review question his claims. It is very easy to reach the degree of culture that prevails around us; very hard to pass it, and Doctor Channing, had he found Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb around him, would as easily have been severe with himself and risen a degree higher as he has stood where he is. I mean, of course, a genuine intellectual tribunal, not a literary junto of Edinburgh wits, or dull conventions of Quarterly or Gentleman’s Reviews. Somebody offers to teach me mathematics. I would fain learn. The man is right. I wish that the writers of this country would begin where they now end their culture.

Are the writers, then, to be reproached with writing to the English public? No, but to be congratulated. It shows they oversee their own, and propose to themselves the best existing standard.

Our Contemporaries. As Charles said, we have one set. It takes time to learn their names and allow for their humors so as to draw the most advantage from them. We all know the same stories, have read the same books, know the same politics, churches, geniuses, felons, bores, hoaxes, gossip, so that there is nothing to explain, but we can fall into conversation very quickly and get and give such information by the road as we want without needing to collect lexicons and dragomans when we wish to ask the way to the next village.

October 28.

Good not to let the Conscience sleep, but to keep it irritated by the presence and reiterated action of reforms and ideas.

Ellen H. asks “whether Reform is not always in bad taste?” Oh no, the poet, the saint are not only elegant, but elegance. It is only the half poet, the half saint, who disgust. Thus now, the saint in us proposes, but the sinner in us executes so lamely. But who can be misled who trusts to a thought? That profound deep whereunto it leads is the Heaven of Heavens. On that pillow, softer than darkness, he that falls can never be bruised.

I told C. and M. that Aunt Mary was no easy flute, but a quite national and clanlike instrument; a bagpipe, for instance, from which none but a native Highlandman could draw music. I sometimes fancy that the bitterness and prosaic side of our condition only obtrude in our conversation, or attempt to paint our portrait to another. Silent and alone, I have no such sad, unredeemed side.

Remove two miles, if you suffer from the influences of Fashion...

Why should I still postpone my existence and not take the ground to which I already feel that I am at last entitled? Why do I suffer a reference to others, and to such others, to keep me out of that which is most mine? Because, dear friend, it is as yet a thought, and not yet a spirit. You have not quite served up to it.

A foundation and cellar are good when one is going to build a house, but what is a foundation without a house but an offence to the eye and a stumbling-block to the feet? Sensation is good as the organ, the servant, the body of the Soul, but a world of sensations is a world of men without heads. Once they dined, that they might pray and praise, and so dining the function itself was prayer and praise: now they dine that they may dine again, and pray and praise (as they call it) in order that they may dine. Hence the appearance — which everywhere strikes the eye of an aimless society, an aimless nation, an aimless world. The earth is sick with that sickness. The man was made for activity, and action to any end has some health and pleasure for him.

Calculation, if that would only go far enough, would go for enthusiasm too. We only ask arithmetic to go on, not to stop and bolt, and the conclusions of the broker and of the poet shall be one. We are not Manichæans, not believers in two hostile principles, but we think evil arises from disproportion, interruption, mistake of means for end. Is Transcendentalism so bad? And is there a Christian, or a civilian, a lawyer, a naturalist, or a physician so bold as not to rely at last on Transcendental truths? He dares not say it, the blind man.

We can well enough discuss this topic with any one because we believe we are all too deeply implicated for any man to give himself airs and talk down to the rest...

“Donde hai tupigliato tante coglionerie?” And where did you pick up all this heap of fripperies, Messer Lodovico Ariosto? said the duke to the poet. “Here in your court, your Highness,” he replied. I own that all my universal pictures are nothing but very private sketches; that I live in a small village, and am obliged to guess at the composition of society from very few and very obscure specimens, and to tell Revolutions of France by anecdotes, etc., etc. Yet I supposed myself borne out in my confidence that each individual stands for a class by my own experience. Few as I have seen, I could do with fewer, and I shrink from seeing thousands when in fifteen or twenty I have already many duplicates.

We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe: can we not take the leap?

Daguerre. The strangeness of the discovery is that Daguerre should have known that a picture was there when he could not see any. When the plate is taken from the camera, it appears just as when it was put there spotless silver: it is then laid over steaming mercury and the picture comes out.

‘T is certain that the Daguerreotype is the true Republican style of painting. The artist stands aside and lets you paint yourself. If you make an ill head, not he but yourself are responsible, and so people who go Daguerreotyping have a pretty solemn time. They come home confessing and lamenting their sins. A Daguerreotype Institute is as good as a national Fast.

False valuations are not in Nature; a pound of water in the ocean tempest or in the landflood has no more momentum than in a midsummer pond....

We are equal to something, if it is only silence, waiting, and dying. Let us do that. The piece must have shades too. When the musicians are learning their first scores, every one wishes to scream, and country orchestras usually have a reasonable volume of voice. Afterwards, they learn to be still and to sing underparts. Perhaps we may trust the Composer of our great music to give us voice when our aid is needed, and to apply the bellows to other stops when we should mar the harmony....

Do what you can, and the world will feel you: speak what you must, and only that, and the echoes will ring with music.

There is so much ennui that I am persuaded if any sign could appear in Nature of decay, imperfect chemistry, or the like, men are very ready to believe that the best age is gone. But the youth of Nature which astounds the imagination repudiates the thought.

There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the traveller, who says, “Anywhere but here”; that of the rich who wants something more; and that of the sick who wants something different.

The willing or acquiescent are certainly better candidates for that idea which is creating the new world than the recalcitrating.

Steam should be solid.

Every man somewhere solid.

Poor men at six hours, six weeks, six months, six years.

Scholars should not carry their memories to balls.

Do you not believe that advertisements are given you continually of that which most imports you to know; but you, in the din and buzz of the senses, do not regard the vision? Miracles are continually occurring in the privatest spiritual experience which the man heeds not in his headlong partisan fury to celebrate and assert the miracles of the Church. By attention and obedience to the heavenly vision he would bring his perception to a finer delicacy.

Why Cupid did not assault the Muses may be found in Rabelais, 3d vol., p. 25.

October 30.

On this wonderful day when Heaven and Earth seem to glow with magnificence, and all the wealth of all the elements is put under contribution to make the world fine, as if Nature would indulge her offspring, it seemed ungrateful to hide in the house. Are there not dull days enough in the year for you to write and read in, that you should waste this glittering season when Florida and Cuba seem to have left their seats and come to visit us, with all their shining Hours, and almost we expect to see the jasmine and the cactus burst from the ground instead of these last gentians and asters which have loitered to attend this latter glory of the year? All insects are out, all birds come forth, — the very cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great thoughts, and Egypt and India look from their eyes.

“How dare I go to a person who will look at me only as a psychological fact?” said the thread-woman of G. R., and said well. But alas, that this awe which the writers inspire should prove at last to be so ill-founded! They ought to inspire most reverence when seen, and when they can thunder so loud at a distance not cheep so small in the chamber. “Ah! if they knew John as well as I!” said Mrs. M — Good Paul whose letter was so mighty, and whose bodily presence mean and contemptible, has too many imitators.

The Age. Shelley is wholly unaffecting to me. I was born a little too soon: but his power is so manifest over a large class of the best persons, that he is not to be overlooked.

There are tests enough of character if we really dare to apply them. Are you setting your expectation of happiness on any circumstance or event not within your control?

Vagueness of Character. I overheard Jove one day talking of destroying the Earth...

Soldier. Can one nowadays see a soldier without a slight feeling — the slightest possible — of the ridiculous?

The spiritual measure of inspiration is the depth of the thought: How deep? — how great its power to agitate and lift me? and never, Who said it? But the world answers, “Paul was inspired,” and would crave a space and indulgence for him in my consciousness. I reply, I do not know the man. It makes then a claim for Jesus. But the great soul says, He shall not come in, no man shall come in, how amiable, how holy soever.

Skepticism esteems ignorance organic and irremovable, believes in the existence of pure malignity, believes in a poor decayed God who does what he can to keep down the nuisances, and to keep the world going for our day. It believes the actual to be necessary; it argues habitually from the exception instead of the rule; and, if it went to the legitimate extreme, the earth would smell with suicide.

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.

Sickness also has its hero and brilliant vindication. Fontenelle, born feeble, a puny delicate creature, by care and nursing was preserved for a hundred years to be the delight of France and of Europe — laid up, they said, like a vase of porcelain in a cabinet and railed up and guarded to hold the softest and most volatile of perfumes. Mr. Pope also was born sick and a cripple, yet by care and study of these facts, and engaging, wherever he went, nursing and rubbing from the domestics, he lived long and enjoyed much and gave others much to enjoy.

Dandies of Moral Sentiment. Our contemporaries do not always contemporize us, but now one is continually surprised to find some stranger, who has been educated in the most different manner, dreaming the same dream.

We like all the better to see some graceful youth, free and beautiful as a palm or a pine tree, who hears with curiosity and intelligence our theory of the world and has his own, and does not hiss with our hiss, but only has the same mother-tongue.

Yet do not mistake a fine tulip for good timber. Do not fancy when you have vivacity and innocence and the charm of youthful manners, and have got for the time the ear of such an one to the gravest themes, do not rely on this polite and facile stripling as on a native and hereditary scholar. The newcomer for the moment casts all merits into eclipse, and the heart gives itself so gladly to the hope of indefinite and paradisaical times at hand. But none can adhere but the men that are born of that idea which they express.

But there are ways of anticipating time. Always this cry of “Time, Time; give us time: men are not ready for it,” means deficiency of spiritual force. Time is an inverse measure of the amount of spirit. If you are sure of your truth, if you are sure of yourself, you ascend now into eternity; you have already arrived at that, and that takes place with you which other men promise themselves.

In poetry we say we require the miracle. The bee flies among the flowers and gets mint and marjoram, and generates a new product which is not mint or marjoram but honey: and the chemist mixes hydrogen and oxygen to yield a new product which is not hydrogen or oxygen but water: and the poet listens to all conversations and receives all objects of Nature to give back, not them, but a new and perfect and radiant whole.

We concede, O Miss P., there is a difference between the spirit in which these poor men struggling to emancipate themselves from the yoke of a traditional worship, and crying out in their sorrow and hope, speak at the Chardon Street Convention, and the spirit in which he who is long already free from these fears turns back and knowingly shoots sarcasms at the old and venerated names.

“That Influence which every Strong Mind has over a Weak One.” You believe in magnetism, in new and preternatural powers, powers contrary to all experience, and do you not think then that Cæsar in irons can shuffle off the irons?...

The new vegetable is always made out of the materials of the decomposed vegetable, and the triumph of thought to-day is over the ruin of some old triumph of thought. I saw a man who religiously burned his Bible and other books: and yet the publication of the Bible and Milton and the rest was the same act, namely, the burning of the then books of the world which had also once been a cremation of more.

Our American geography is so large that the noisy make no noise. Whoever hears of the American army? or of the formidable Sophomores who are said to rebel in our colleges? or of the Law Students, or the Medical Students, or of any other local village incendiaries who, when we were young, filled whole neighborhoods with alarm? The American Government is fast becoming quite as innocent.

What can be affirmed of magnetisable subjects? To-day, seen unaffected, they are larvae; they are so low and earthy and bestial, they bark and neigh, a good man or a poet is repelled who goes near them, as if they would one day be his executioners. But to-morrow, a great spirit chances to approach them in a happy and unsuspected way, and they receive ‘his light and influence into all the channels of their being and are filled with him, enriched and ennobled by this virtue, they are godlike, and he too is twice himself. Straightway the earth seems to have emerged from the primal curse and a new day has dawned.

Great causes are never tried, assaulted, or defended on their merits: they need so long perspective, and the habits of the race are marked with so strong a tendency to particulars. The stake is Europe or Asia, and the battle is for some contemptible village or dog-hutch. A man shares the new light that irradiates the world and promises the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven, — and ends with champing unleavened bread or devoting himself to the nourishment of a beard, or making a fool of himself about his hat or his shoes. A man is furnished with this superb case of instruments, the senses, and perceptive and executive faculties, and they betray him every day. He transfers his allegiance from Instinct and God to this adroit little committee. A man is an exaggerator. In every conversation see how the main end is still lost sight of by all but the best, and with slight apology or none, a digression made to a creaking door or a buzzing fly. What heavenly eloquence could hold the ear of an audience if a child cried! A man with a truth to express is caught by the beauty of his own words and ends with being a rhymester or critic. And Genius is sacrificed to talent every day.

[Here follows the passage about Osman, the ideal man, and the broad hospitality to persons half-crazed with poor reforms which is printed in the last pages of “Manners.”]

November 10.

Genius is very well, but it is enveloped and undermined by Wonder. The last fact is still Astonishment, — mute, bottomless, boundless, endless wonder. When we meet an intelligent soul, all that we wish to ask him — phrase it how we will — is, ‘Brother have you wondered? Have you seen the Fact?’ To come out from a forest in which we have always lived, unexpectedly on the ocean, startles us, for it is a symbol of this....

Originality. All originality is relative.

The young people complain that everything around them must be denied, and therefore, if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life. Aunt Betsey and Uncle Gulliver insist on their respect to this Sabbath and that Rollin’s History or Fragment Society or some other school, or charity, or morning call, which, to preserve their integrity, they resist.

Nature never troubles herself with the difficulty which Language finds in expressing her.

Man begets man who begets man, heedless of the world of contradictions which the metaphysician finds in this cotemporaneous procession of body, soul, and mind.

Is Character an educated will? “But bad thoughts,” said M., “Who could dare to uncover all the thoughts of a single hour?” Indeed! is it so bad? I own that to a witness worse than myself and less intelligent, I should not willingly put a window into my breast, but to a witness more intelligent and virtuous than I, or to one precisely as intelligent and well intentioned, I have no objection to uncover my heart.

Certainly the progress of character is in that direction, namely, to introduce Beauty, the order of Beauty, into that invisible and private world of my thoughts, and make them public and heavenly in their discipline. It is a part of friendship with me to carry its courtesies and sacred boundaries into my silent solitude, and not confound distinctions in my fancy which I respect in my reason.

November 13.

Originality. The great majority of men are not original, for they are not primary, have not assumed their own vows, but are secondaries, — grow up and grow old in seeming and following; and when they die they occupy themselves to the last with what others will think, and whether Mr. A and Mr. B will go to their funeral. The poet has pierced the shows and come out on the wonder which envelopes all: more, he has conspired with the high cause and felt the holy glee with which man detects the ultimate oneness of the Seer and the spectacle....

As to the Miracle, too, of Poetry. There is truly but one miracle, the perpetual fact of Being and Becoming, the ceaseless saliency, the transit from the Vast to the particular, which miracle, one and the same, has for its most universal name the word God. Take one or two or three steps where you will, from any fact in Nature or Art, and you come out full on this fact; as you may penetrate the forest in any direction and go straight on, you will come to the sea. But all the particulars of the poet’s merit, his sweetest rhythms, the subtlest thoughts, the richest images, if you could pass into his consciousness, or rather if you could exalt his consciousness, would class themselves in the common chemistry of thought, and obey the laws of the cheapest mental combinations.

In every moment and action and passion, you must be a man, must be a whole Olympus of gods. I surprised you, O Waldo Emerson, yesterday eve hurrying up one page and down another of a little book of some Menzel, panting and straining after the sense of some mob, better or worse, of German authors. I thought you had known better. Adhere, sit fast, lie low.

Anti-Transcendentalists. Yet we must not blame those who make the outcry against these refiners. It comes from one of two causes: either an instinctive fear that this philosophy threatens property and sensual comfort; or a distrust of the sincerity and virtue of persons who preach an impracticable elevation of life.

If from the first, it is a good sign, an eulogy of the innovators which should encourage them. And let them not be too anxious to show how their new world is to realize itself to men, but know that, as the Lord liveth, it shall be well with them who obey a spiritual law.

If from the second, — why, perhaps the world is in the right, and the reformer is not sound. There is an instinct about this too. It is in vain that you gild gold and whiten snow in your preaching, if, when I see you, I do not look through your pure eye into a society of angels and angelic thoughts within.

No man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world,... or do anything well who does not suppose his work to be of greatest importance. My work may be of none, but I must not think it of none, or I shall not do it with impunity.

Whoso does what he thinks mean, is mean.

How finely we are told in the Hebrew story that the anger of the Lord was kindled against David because he had made a census of the people. Philosophy also takes an inventory of her possessions: and an inventory is of pride: it is the negative state. But Poetry is always affirmative, and Prayer is affirmative.

How much of life is affirmative? How many dare show their whole hand? For the most part we hide, and parry as we can the inquisition of each other. I am for preserving all those religious writings which were in their origin poetic, ecstatic expressions which the first user of did not know what he said, but they were spoken through him and from above, not from his level; things which seemed a happy casualty, but which were no more random than the human race are a random formation. “It is necessary,” says Iamblichus, “that ancient prayers, like sacred asyla, should be preserved invariably the same, neither taking anything from them nor adding anything to them which is elsewhere derived.” This is the reason, doubtless, why Homer declares that Jove loved the Ethiopians. And Iamblichus in answer to the query, “Why of significant names we prefer such as are barbaric to our own?” says, among other reasons: “Barbarous names have much emphasis, great conciseness, and less ambiguity, variety, and multitude and then afterwards: “But the Barbarians are stable in their manners, and firmly continue to employ the same words. Hence they are dear to the gods, and proffer words which are grateful to them.” And the ancients spoke of the Egyptians and Chaldæans as “sacred nations.”

Now the words “God,” “Grace,” “Prayer,” “Heaven,” “Hell,” are these barbarous and sacred words, to which we must still return, whenever we would speak an ecstatic and universal sense? There are objections to them, no doubt, for academical use, but when the professor’s gown is taken off, Man will come back to them.

The granite comes to the surface and towers into the highest mountains, and if we could dig down we should find it below all the superficial strata...

The question of Property wants seers.... The staunchest Whig and the poorest philosopher are all on the Property side, all abettors of the present abuse, all either owners or enviers: no man is on the other side, no man can give us any insight into the remedy, no man deserves to be heard against Property; only Love, only an Idea, is on the right side against Property as we hold it.

Good scholar, what are you for but for hospitality to every new thought of your time? Have you property, have you leisure, have you accomplishments and the eye of command, you shall be the Maecenas of every new thought, every untried project that proceeds from good will and honest seeking. The newspapers, of course, will defame what is noble, and what are you for but to withstand the newspapers and all the other tongues of to-day? You do not hold of to-day, but of an age, as the rapt and truly great man holds of all ages or of Eternity. If you defer to the newspaper, where is the scholar?

Hints, fragments, scintillations of men enough and more than enough, but men valiant and who can execute the project they learned of no man, but which was born with them, there are none. Perfect and execute yourself an Orson, if Orson; a Valentine, if Valentine. Let us see at least a good Orson, and know the best and worst of that.

(From H)

November 18.

Queenie’s dream of the statue so beautiful that the blooming child who was in the room looked pale and sallow beside it, and of the speech of the statue, which was not quite speech either, but something better, which seemed at last identical with the thing itself spoken of. It described to the fair girl who sat by, and whose face became flushed with her earnest attention, —— life and being; — and then, by a few slight movements of the head and body, it gave the most forcible picture of decay and death and corruption, and then became all radiant again with the signs of resurrection. I thought it a just description of that Eloquence to which we are all entitled — are we not? — which shall be no idle tale, but the suffering of the action, and the action it describes. That shall make intent and privileged hearers.

The blue vault silver-lined with hills of snow.

(From G)

November 22.

Ediths There came into the house a young maiden, but she seemed to be more than a thousand years old. She came into the house naked and helpless, but she had for her defence more than the strength of millions. She brought into the day the manners of the Night.

[On the second day of December, Mr. Emerson began his course of lectures on “The Times,” in the Masonic Temple in Boston:

I, — The “Introductory,” is printed in the first volume of the Works as “Lecture on the Times”; II, — , “The Conservative”; III, “The Poet” (much of the matter is in “Poetry and Imagination,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches); IV, “The Transcendentalist”; V, “Manners”; VI, “Character”; VII, “Relation to Nature”; VIII, “Prospects.”]

(From J)

Robin Hood. Little John asks Robin “Where shall we take? Where shall we leave? Where shall we rob and beat and bind?” Robin says: —

“Look ye do no husband harm

That tilleth with his plough.

“These bishops and these archbishops

Ye shall them beat and bind;

The high sheriff of Nottingham,

Him holde in your mind.”

When Jones Very was in Concord, he said to me, “I always felt when I heard you speak or read your writings that you saw the truth better than others, yet I felt that your spirit was not quite right. It was as if a vein of colder air blew across me.” He seemed to expect from me a full acknowledgment of his mission and a participation of the same. Seeing this, I asked him if he did not see that my thoughts and my position were constitutional, that it would be false and impossible for me to say his things or try to occupy his ground as for him to usurp mine? After some frank and full explanation, he conceded this. When I met him afterwards one evening at my lecture in Boston, I invited him to go home to Mr. Adams’s with me and sleep, which he did. He slept in the chamber adjoining mine. Early the next day, in the grey dawn, he came into my room and talked whilst I dressed. He said, “When I was at Concord I tried to say you were also right; but the spirit said, you were not right. It is just as if I should say, It is not morning; but the morning says, It is the morning.”

“Use what language you will,” he said, “you can never say anything but what you are.”

All writing is by the grace of God. People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad. In these sentences that you show me, I can find no beauty, for I see death in every clause and every word. There is a fossil or a mummy character which pervades this book. The best sepulchres, the vastest catacombs, Thebes and Cairo, Pyramids, are sepulchres to me. I like gardens and nurseries. Give me initiative, spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.

I am probably all the better spectator that I am so indifferent an actor. Some who hear or read my reports misjudged me as being a good actor in the scene which I could so well describe; but, when they came to talk with me, even those who fancied they strictly sympathized with me found I was dumb for them as well as for others. In this, both I and they must be passive and acquiescent, and take our fortune. And now that I have said it, I shall not suffer again from this misadventure.

It is never worth while to worry people with your contritions We shed our follies and absurdities as fast as the rosebugs drop off in July and leave the apple tree which they so threatened. Nothing dies so fast as a fault and the memory of a fault. I am awkward, sour, saturnine, lumpish, pedantic, and thoroughly disagreeable and oppressive to the people around me. Yet if I am born to write a few good sentences or verses, these shall endure, and my disgraces utterly perish out of memory.

Woman should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores; she does all by inspiring man to do all. The poet finds her eyes anticipating all his ode, the sculptor his god, the architect his house. She looks at it. She is the requiring genius.

We ask to be self-sustained, nothing less.

The rude reformer rose from his bed of moss and dry leaves, gnawed his roots and drank water, and went to Boston. There he met fair maidens who smiled kindly on him, then gentle mothers with their babes at their breasts who told them how much love they bore them and how they were perplexed in their daily walk. What! he said, and this on rich, embroidered carpets, with fine marbles and costly woods!

Who is up so high as to receive a gift well? We are either glad or sorry at a gift...

(From J)

December 12.

We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves. Yet that is not all my dream just now; but this also, that only the affirmative is good, and methinks that is as much in what is called Whiggery as in Protestantism, for the latter falls into cold recusances, and love is the affirmative. Whigs love; Protestants have a good deal of hating to do. Loyalty is affirming; Idleness is denying. But out on your exhibitions! There is somewhat a little scenic and showy in your lecturing. Those who take up thus much thought into action, have nothing to say, no rhetoric to please with, but it is elemental, strong. It is like that great quantity of heat which ice absorbs in becoming water without any indication on the thermometer....

And yet Raphael’s picture is bold and beautiful, affirming, and the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and every thought of mine which I naturally and happily speak. Let me not be witty, but only faithful and bold and happy, and I put all Nature in the wrong.

We lose time in trying to be like others, accusing ourselves because we are not like others. If something surprises us from our propriety, we act well and strong, because we lose in our fright the recollection of others.

Those who defend the establishment are less than it. Those who speak from a thought must always be greater than any actual fact. I see behind the Whig no mighty matter, nothing but a very trite fact of his land titles and certificates of stock. But through the eyes of the theorist stares at me a formidable, gigantic spirit who will not undo if I bid him, who has much more to say and do than he has yet told, and who can do great things with the same facility as little.

In the feudal table the humblest retainer sat in the company of his lord, and so had some indemnity for his thraldom in the education he derived from the spectacle of the wit, the grace, and the valor of his superiors.

Mr. Frost thought that there would not be many of these recusants who declared against the state, etc. I told him he was like the good man of Noah’s neighbors who said, “Go to thunder with your old ark! I don’t think there’ll be much of a shower.”

Osman. Seemed to me that I had the keeping of a secret too great to be confided to one man; that a divine man dwelt near me in a hollow tree.

A Dandy, Godelureau in French, a favorite word with Napoleon. Napoleon was calm, serious, and well calculated to stand the gaze of millions: and d’Abrantès describes the splendor of his smile.

And cakes by female hands wrought artfully,

Well steep’d in the liquid of the gold-wing’d bee.

PLUTARCH.

Atque ego peccati vellem modo conscius essem;

Aequo animo poenam qui meruere ferunt.

Ovid, Amor 2, VII, 11.

Historians of reform are not necessarily lovers of reform among their contemporaries.

Among the powers of circumstance none so striking as the provocation of thought in particular companies. Every art may be learned for itself, as, e g., that of composure and good behavior in all companies; but a better way is to be inspired by a sentiment which shall ennoble the behaviour without intention.

The man is yet to arise who eats angels’ food; who, working for universal aims, finds himself fed, he knows not how, and clothed he knows not how, and yet it is done by his own hands. The squirrel hoards nuts, and the bee gathers honey, each without knowing what he does, and thus they are provided, without any degradation or selfishness. In the man, I should look to see it adorned, beyond this innocency, with conscious efforts for the general good.

Trees draw nineteen twentieths of their nourishment from their aërial roots, the leaves.

The pis aller of Romanism for Tieck, Winckelmann, Schlegel, Schelling, Montaigne, Dana, Coleridge-men.

Midsummer Night entertainment can easily seem to me profane and I shall do penance for having delighted in such toys: and Dante must shrink before a great life, and appear a permitted greatness.

To those who have been accustomed to lead, it is not quite indifferent to find their word or deed for the first time unimportant to society. Yet a human being always has the indemnity of acting religiously, and then he exchanges an eclat with the society of his town, for a reputation and weight with the society of the Universe.

Every word we speak is million-faced, or convertible to an indefinite number of applications. If it were not so, we could read no book. Your remark would only fit your case, not mine. And Dante, who described his circumstance, would be unintelligible now. But a thousand readers in a thousand different years shall read his story and find it a picture of their story by making, of course, a new application of every word.

All Bernardo’s wit and study did not enable him to answer M. de Gullivere’s question. As it happened once, so it happened twenty times. M. de Gullivere asked pointedly of the scholar for information which he should certainly have supplied; but poor Bernardo always wondered that he should have failed to inform himself of just that particular fact. Afterwards he found that it was just the same with his actions: he was very able and very willing to do a thousand things: but the particular action which must now be done, he was not ready for: and so he played at crosspurposes with all men in this world. One thing more Bernardo remarked, and said as much to Xavier, — that he was convinced it was a chance and not a right that he had received the laurel of the Sorbonne: “For I,” said he, “was not made by Nature for an original genius, but to take delight in the genius of others. I was made to read Virgil, and not to write Bucolics of my own; for always if I have anything to say, it clothes itself in the language of some poet or author I have been reading, or perhaps of one of my friends with whom I daily converse. The thought is not born sufficiently vigorous to clothe itself.”

Credit, it seems, is to be abolished...

December 18.

We believe in the existence of matter, not because we can touch it or conceive of it, but because it agrees with ourselves, and the Universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

A man founding a reputation for benevolence on his expenditure! a great blunder...

How much one person sways us, we have so few. The presence or absence of Milton will very sensibly affect the result of human history: the presence or absence of Jesus, how greatly! Well, to-morrow a new man may be born, not indebted like Milton to the Old, and more entirely dedicated than he to the New, yet clothed like him with beauty.

As we take our stand on Necessity or on Ethics, shall we go for the Conservative or the Reformer?... The view of Necessity is always good-tempered, permits wit and pleasantry. The view of Liberty is sour and dogmatical. Both may be equally free of personal consideration. we unto me if I preach not the gospel.

I like the spontaneous persons of both classes: and those in the Conservative side have as much truth and progressive force as those on the Liberal.

Do not be so grand with your one objection. Do you think there is only one? If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes...

According to Boehmen, the world was nothing else than the relievo, the print of a seal of an invisible world concealed in his own bosom. (See Penhoen, vol i, p. 123.)

When, in our discontent with the pedantry of scholars, we prefer farmers, and when, suspecting their conservatism, we hearken after the hard words of drovers and Irishmen, this is only subjective or relative criticism, this is alkali to our acid, or shade to our too much sunshine; but abide with these and you will presently find they are the same men you left. A coat has cheated you.

What a plague is this perplexity. We are so sharpsighted — that we are miserable and, as E. H. says, can neither read Homer, nor not read him.

“Kepler’s science was a strange alliance of that sublime science of antiquity which proceeded by inspiration with that modern science which measures, compares, analyses.” (Penhoen.)

Leibnitz predicted the Zoophytes; Kant predicted the asteroids; Newton the decomposition of the diamond; Swedenborg, Uranus. (Penhoen, vol i, p. 159.)

They say that the mathematics leave the mind where they found it. What if life or experience should do the same?

Writing, also, is a knack and leaves the man where it found him. And Literature and Nature and Life.

All that a man hath will he give for his erect demeanor, that he may never more be ashamed, —— society the measure. I go to you and I expand, and I go to another and I contract.

Look out of the window and it is Eternal Now. Look in faces of men and it varies every minute.

Reading Herrick, I feel how rich is Nature. This art of poetry, — I see that here is work and beauty enough to justify a man for quitting all else and sitting down with the Muses. Did not Cæsar say to the Egyptian priest, Come, I will quit army, Empire, and all if you will show me the fountains of the Nile? Well, all topics are indifferent: you may reach the centre by boring a shaft from any point on the surface, with equal ease. And yet in this instance of poetry the provocation is not that the Law is there, but the means are alluring.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN THE JOURNAL FOR 1841

(including also books mentioned in letters)

Vishnu Sarna; Zoroaster; Confucius; Hesiod; Heraclitus; Empedocles; Æschylus; Plato, Banquet and Phœdrus; Aristophanes; Aristotle; Ovid, Ars Amatoria; Lucan, Pharsalia; Hermes Trismegistus; Plotinus; Porphyry (Taylor’s), On Abstinence from Animal Food; Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras; Synesius; Proclus; Olympiadorus; RobertWace; T)ante,Paradiso; Saadi; Hafiz; Monstrelet; Froissart, Chronicles; Ariosto; Rabelais; Fra Paolo Sarpi; Kepler; Burton; Boehme (Behmen), the Aurora; Herrick; Izaak Walton; Waller; Dryden; Locke; Leibnitz, apud Penhoen; Fontenelle; Rollin, History; Bentley; Thomas Hearne; Pitt (Lord Chatham); Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art; Merck, Correspondence with Goethe; Laplace; Fox; William Pitt; Goethe; Burns; Saint-Simon; Dodington; Duchesse d’Abrantès, Mémoires, ou Souvenirs sur Napoleon, la Revolution, etc.; Canning; Shelley; Southey; Schleiermacher; Schlegel; Tieck; Schelling; Menzel, apud George Ripley’s Specimens of Foreign Literature; Ritter; Sir William Edward Parry, Arctic Voyages; Charles Lamb, Essays; Manzoni,! Promessi Sposi; Dr. Channing, Milton and Napoleon; Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, French Revolution; Nichol, Architecture of the Heavens; Miss Edgeworth, Novels; Béranger, Chansons; George Sand, Letters; De Tocqueville; Barchon de Penhoen, History of German Philosophy from Leibnitz to Hegel; Westland Martin, The Patrician s Daughter; Robert P. Ward, De Clifford; Tennyson, The Lotus-Eaters, Locksley Hall; Hawthorne; Frederic Henry Hedge; William Lloyd Garrison.

JOURNAL

WALDO’S DEATH

COURSES IN PROVIDENCE AND NEW YORK

ALCOTT VISITS ENGLAND

HAWTHORNE COMES TO CONCORD

ALCOTT’S RETURN

JOURNAL XXXIII

1842

(From Journals E, J, K, and N)

Betrayed me to a book and wrapped me in a gown.

HERBERT.

[THE year opened happily. A daughter (Edith) had come safely into the family. Little Ellen, the eldest, was thriving. Waldo, now five years old, gave to his father and mother every promise for the future, while

“Gentlest guardians marked serene

His early hope, his liberal mien,”

 for every friend that came to the house, and Henry Thoreau, who then formed one of the family, delighted in the child. Mr. Emerson was going once a week to Boston, by the stage which passed his door, giving the last lectures of the course on “The Times.” Suddenly malignant scarlet fever struck the little boy and he lived but a few days. Bowed down by the blow, Mr. Emerson yet had to fulfil his engagements for lectures in Providence and also for a short course in New York. These were a fortunate distraction for him, away from associations that met him at home at every turn, and he met at his lectures new and earnest young friends. His brother William, with his good and refined wife (Susan Haven of Portsmouth), received him into their home at Staten Island. Of him Mr. Emerson wrote to his wife, “William is not the isolated man I used to find or fancy him, but, under the name of ‘the judge,’ seems to be an important part of the web of life here at the island.”]

(From J)

January 28, 1842.

Yesterday night, at fifteen minutes after eight, my little Waldo ended his life.

January 30.

What he looked upon is better; what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday, I woke at three o’clock, and every cock in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonored by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the hen-house, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn. — For everything he had his own name and way of thinking, his own pronunciation and manner. And every word came mended from that tongue. A boy of early wisdom, of a grave and even majestic deportment, of a perfect gentleness.

Every tramper that ever tramped is abroad, but the little feet are still.

He gave up his little innocent breath like a bird.

He dictated a letter to his Cousin Willie on Monday night, to thank him for the magic lantern which he had sent him, and said, “I wish you would tell Cousin Willie that I have so many presents that I do not need that he should send me any more unless he wishes to very much.”

The boy had his full swing in this world; never, I think, did a child enjoy more; he had been thoroughly respected by his parents and those around him, and not interfered with; and he had been the most fortunate in respect to the influences near him, for his Aunt Elizabeth had adopted him from his infancy and treated him ever with that plain and wise love which belongs to her and, as she boasted, had never given him sugarplums. So he was won to her, and always signalized her arrival as a visit to him, and left playmates, playthings, and all to go to her. Then Mary Russell had been his friend and teacher for two summers, with true love and wisdom. Then Henry Thoreau had been one of the family for the last year, and charmed Waldo by the variety of toys, — whistles, boats, popguns, — and all kinds of instruments which he could make and mend; and possessed his love and respect by the gentle firmness with which he always treated him. Margaret Fuller and Caroline Sturgis had also marked the boy and caressed and conversed with him whenever they were here.

Meantime every day his grandmother gave him his reading-lesson and had by patience taught him to read and spell; by patience and by love, for she loved him dearly.

Sorrow makes us all children again, — destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another.

“Are there any other countries?”

“Yes. I wish you to name the other countries”; so I went on to name London, Paris, Amsterdam, Cairo, etc. But Henry Thoreau well said, in allusion to his large way of speech, that “his questions did not admit of an answer; they were the same which you would ask yourself.”

He named the parts of the toy house he was always building by fancy names which had a good sound, as “the interspeglium” and “the coridaga,” which names, he told Margaret,” the children could not understand.”

If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook. Every place is handsome or tolerable where he has been. Once he sat in the pew.

His house he proposed to build in summer of burrs and in winter of snow.

“My music,” he said, “makes the thunder dance,” for it thundered when he was blowing his willow whistle.

“Mamma, may I have this bell which I have been making, to stand by the side of my bed?”

“Yes, it may stand there.”

“But, Mamma, I am afraid it will alarm you. It may sound in the middle of the night, and it will be heard over the whole town; it will be louder than ten thousand hawks; it will be heard across the water, and in all the countries. It will be heard all over the world. It will sound like some great glass thing which falls down and breaks all to pieces.”

Masses; is the attraction of cohesion the same as the attraction of gravity? Is the law of masses one with the law of particles. And there is a certain momentum of mass which I recognize readily enough in literature. Chaucer affects me when I read many pages of Romaunt of Love or the Canterbury Tales by his mass, as much as by the merit of single passages. So does Shakspeare eminently: he adds architecture to costliness of material, and beauty of single chambers and chapels. So does Milton. Then, as I have remarked of Pythagoras, so I feel in reference to all great masters, that they are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken their first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first. It is like the price which is sometimes set on a horse by jockeys; a price is agreed upon in the stall, and then he is turned into a pasture and allowed to roll, and for every time he shall roll himself over, ten dollars are added to the price.

Masses again. If you go near to the White Mountains, you cannot see them; you must go off thirty or forty miles to get a good view. Well, so is it with men, and with all that is high in our life, it is a total and distant effect, a mass effect, that instructs us, and not the first apprehension of them.

Then our relation to our friends is not only one of particular good offices, but one of the purest pleasures of life is the mutual consciousness of a long and uniform exchange of good offices between two persons; so that a good man seems to draw both simple and compound interest from his capital of love, both a particular and a mass benefit from his good deeds.

Will is a particular, Habit a massive force; Speech a particular, Manners a mass.

Take thy body away that I may see thee. Thou showest me this mask all the time.

I have seen the poor boy, when he came to a tuft of violets in the wood, kneel down on the ground, smell of them, kiss them, and depart without plucking them.

As if one needed eyes in order to see. Look at yonder tree which the sun has drawn out of the ground by its continual love and striving towards him, and which now spreads a hundred arms, a thousand boughs, in gratitude, basking in his presence. Does that not see? It sees all over, with every leaf and every blossom.

I am not a man to read books, but one receiving that which books are written to report, said the poet.

My thoughts run about vainly seeking to arrive at those distant persons. Then I see Facts or objects which serve me as horses. Each of my thoughts seizes one of these, and, being mounted, rides directly to men.

When Osman came to read a page of Proclus, he was impatient of reading, and wished to hear the horn sound from the farmhouse that he might put in practice what he had learned of the elegance of dancing in a temperate life, but the horn delaying to sound, he bethought himself that his temperance should begin now and he would establish tranquillity and order in his thoughts.

Bores are good, too. They may help you to a good indignation, if not to a sympathy; to a “mania better than temperance,” as. Proclus would say. Long Beard and Short Beard, who came hither the other day with intent as it seemed to make Artesian Wells of us, taught me something.

Ben Jonson is rude and Tennyson is fine, but Ben’s beauty is worth more than Tennyson’s....

My life is optical, not practical. I go out to walk for exercise and not to answer a necessity. I speculate on virtue, not burn with love. Is not this as if one should quiz Michael and Gabriel through an opera-glass?

It would be easy, would it not, to give your own color and character to any meeting, if your spirit and insight was better than that of the speakers. Wait till the noisy man has done, and then speak and leave him out: he will feel that he is left out. What takes place in every parlor will take place there, that the less will yield to the greater and feel that his contribution is unnecessary.

Such a sense as dwells in these purple deeps of Proclus transforms every page into a slab of marble, and the book seems monumental. They suggest what magnificent dreams and projects. They show what literature should be. Rarely, rarely, does the Imagination awake; he alone knows Astronomy and Geology, the laws of Chemistry and Animation. He, the Imagination, knows why the plain or meadow of Space is strown with these flowers we call suns, moons, and stars: why the great Deep is adorned with animals, with men and Gods; for in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

I see, in reading this, that a man ought to renounce writing for his townsmen or his countrymen and express his spiritual history and motions in such images as have a private significance to him.

Hither came a lady with as much remoteness, fromness, or aversation expressed in her countenance as it could carry. All her speech was in the dialect of her church, and as unintelligible to others as a flash conversation. Such a person ceases to be a woman that she may be a church-member, and is necessarily treated like the insane in all companies. Yet every one must respect her eminent truth.

Nature is very clear in her teachings on one point, that you shall not accept any man’s person; for just as much as she distinguishes any man for wit or character, to the same extent she deforms him in some particular to the eye.

And see the mountainous greatness of Shakspeare is given to a man of a common life, and not himself, it would seem, aware of his possession.

(From K)

Friday evening, February 4.

I have heard that Sheridan made a good deal of experimental writing with a view to take what might fall, if any wit should transpire in all the waste pages. I, in my dark hours, may scratch the page, if perchance any hour of recent life may project a hand from the darkness and inscribe a record. Twice to-day it has seemed to me that truth is our only armor in all passages of life and death.... I will speak the truth also in my secret heart, or, think the truth against what is called God. Born and bred as we are in traditions, we easily find ourselves denying what seems to us sacred. I must resist the tradition, however subtile and encroaching, and say, Truth against the universe. Truth has its holidays which seem to come but once in a century, when she absolves her children with triumph to all souls.

Saturday morn, February 5.

Character. There are many gross and obscure natures whose bodies seem impure as shambles or grocers’ shops, but character makes flesh and blood comely and alive. A meek allegiance to the Supreme Law consecrates youth and age alike, refines the whole body, gives a charm to wrinkles and silver hairs.... Character, in short, is conquest, and if there is not that, there is not character.

February 21.

Home again from Providence to the deserted house. Dear friends find I, but the wonderful Boy is gone. What a looking for miracles have I! As his walking into the room where we are would not surprise Ellen, so it would seem to me the most natural of all things.

In Providence I found Charles Newcomb, who made me happy by his conversation and his reading of his tales.

March 18.

Home from New York, where I read six lectures on the Times, viz., Introductory; The Poet; The Conservative; The Transcendentalist; Manners; Prospects. They were read in the “ Society Library,” were attended by three or four hundred persons, and after all expenses were paid yielded me about two hundred dollars.

In New York I became acquainted with Henry James, John James, William Greene, Mrs. Rebecca Black, Thomas Truesdale, Horace Greeley, Albert Brisbane, J. L. H. McCracken, Mr. Field, Maxwell, Mason, Nathan, Delf, Eames, besides Bryant and Miss Sedgwick, whom I knew before.

Letters from beloved persons found me there. My lectures had about the same reception there as elsewhere: very fine and poetical, but a little puzzling. One thought it “as good as a kaleidoscope.” Another, a good Staten Islander, would go hear, “for he had heard I was a rattler.”

March 20.

The Dial is to be sustained or ended, and I must settle the question, it seems, of its life or death. I wish it to live, but do not wish to be its life. Neither do I like to put it in the hands of the Humanity and Reform Men, because they trample on letters and poetry; nor in the hands of the Scholars, for they are dead and dry. I do not like the Plain Speaker so well as the Edinburgh Review. The spirit of the last may be conventional and artificial, but that of the first is coarse, sour, indigent, dwells in a cellar kitchen, and goes to make suicides.

In New York, Thomas Delf modestly inquired, as if the question lay hard on his conscience, whether there could not be in every number of the Dial at least one article which should be a statement of principles, good for doctrine, good for edification, so that there should be somewhat solid and distinct for the eye of the constant reader to rest upon, and an advancing evolution of truth. A very reasonable question.

Life goes headlong....

When I read the “Lord of the Isles” last week at Staten Island, and when I meet my friend, I have the same feeling of shame at having allowed myself to be a mere huntsman and follower. Why art thou disquieted, O Soul?

In New York lately, as in cities generally, one seems to lose all substance, and become surface in a world of surfaces. Everything is external, and I remember my hat and coat, and all my other surfaces, and nothing else. If suddenly a reasonable question is addressed to me, what refreshment and relief! I visited twice and parted with a most polite lady without giving her reason to believe that she had met any other in me than a worshipper of surfaces, like all Broadway. It stings me yet.

“What are brothers for?” said Charles G. Loring, when somebody praised a man who helped his brother. William Emerson is a faithful brother.

The least differences in intellect are immeasurable. This beloved and now departed Boy, this Image in every part beautiful, how he expands in his dimensions in this fond memory to the dimensions of Nature!

Ellen asks her grandmother “ whether God can’t stay alone with the angels a little while and let Waldo come down?”

The chrysalis which he brought in with care and tenderness and gave to his mother to keep is still alive, and he, most beautiful of the children of men, is not here.

I comprehend nothing of this fact but its bitterness. Explanation I have none, consolation none that rises out of the fact itself; only diversion; only oblivion of this, and pursuit of new objects.

March 23.

To-day Nelly thinks “the snow is on the ground and the trees so white as a tablecloth and so white as parched corn.”

The scholar is a man of no more account in the street than another man; as the sound of a flute is not louder than the noise of a saw. But as the tone of the flute is heard at a greater distance than any noise, so the fame of the scholar reaches farther than the credit of the banker.

Osric was always great in the Present time....

Tecumseh: A Poem. A well-read, clerical person, with a skilful ear and with Scott and Campbell in full possession of his memory, has written this poem in the feeling that the delight he has experienced from Scott’s effective list of names might be reproduced in America from the enumeration of sweet or sonorous Indian names. The costume, as is usual in all such essays, crowds the man out of nature. The most Indian thing about the Indian is surely not his moccasins or his calumet, his wampum or his stone hatchet, but traits of character and sagacity, skill or passion which would be intelligible to all men and which Scipio or Sidney or Colonel Worth or Lord Clive would be as likely to exhibit as Osceola and Black Hawk. As Johnson remarked that there was a middle style in English above vulgarity and below pedantry, which never became obsolete and in which the plays of Shakspeare were written, so is there in human language a middle style, proper to all nations and spoken by Indians and by Frenchmen, so they be men of personal force.

Colonel Worth has lately declared Halleck Tastenugge one of the best infantry officers, and William Greene  said he found the spirit among the Indians.

Hell is better than Heaven, if the man in Hell knows his place, and the man in Heaven does not. It is in vain you pretend that you are not responsible for the evil law because you are not a magistrate, or a party to a civil process, or do not vote. You eat the law in a crust of bread, you wear it in your hat and shoes. The Man — it is his attitude: the attitude makes the man.

Instead of wondering that there is a Bible, I wonder that there are not a thousand.

Toiling in the naked fields

Where no bush a shelter yields,

Needy Labor dithering stands,

Beats and blows his numbing hands,

And upon the crumping snows

Stamps in vain to warm his toes.

Though all’s in vain to keep him warm,

Poverty must brave the storm;

Friendship none its aid to lend —

Constant health his only friend;

Granting leave to live in pain,

Giving strength to toil in vain.

CLARE.

 for a time a preacher. In the Civil War, Colonel Greene commanded the 14th Infantry, M. V.

Brisbane in New York pushed his Fourierism with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and impudence. It was the sublime of mechanics....

Here prepares now the good Alcott to go to England, after so long and strict acquaintance as I have had with him for seven years. I saw him for the first time in Boston in 1835.

What shall we say of him to the wise Englishman?

He is a man of ideas, a man of faith. Expect contempt for all usages which are simply such. His social nature and his taste for beauty and magnificence will betray him into tolerance and indulgence, even, to men and to magnificence, but a statute or a practice he is condemned to measure by its essential wisdom or folly.

He delights in speculation, in nothing so much, and is very well endowed and weaponed for that work with a copious, accurate and elegant vocabulary; I may say poetic; so that I know no man who speaks such good English as he, and is so inventive withal. He speaks truth truly; or the expression is adequate. Yet he knows only this one language. He hardly needs an antagonist, — he needs only an intelligent ear. Where he is greeted by loving and intelligent persons, his discourse soars to a wonderful height, so regular, so lucid, so playful, so new and disdainful of all boundaries of tradition and experience, that the hearers seem no longer to have bodies or material gravity, but almost they can mount into the air at pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar system. I say this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he loses, in my judgment, all his power, and I derive more pain than pleasure from the perusal. The Post expresses the feeling of most readers in its rude joke, when it said of his Orphic Sayings that they “resembled a train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger.” He has moreover the greatest possession both of mind and of temper in his discourse, so that the mastery and moderation and foresight, and yet felicity, with which he unfolds his thought, are not to be surpassed. This is of importance to such a broacher of novelties as he is, and to one baited, as he is very apt to be, by the sticklers for old books or old institutions. He takes such delight in the exercise of this faculty that he will willingly talk the whole of a day, and most part of the night, and then again tomorrow, for days successively, and if I, who am impatient of much speaking, draw him out to walk in the woods or fields, he will stop at the first fence and very soon propose either to sit down or to return. He seems to think society exists for this function, and that all literature is good or bad as it approaches colloquy, which is its perfection. Poems and histories may be good, but only as adumbrations of this; and the only true manner of writing the literature of a nation would be to convene the best heads in the community, set them talking, and then introduce stenographers to record what they say. He so swiftly and naturally plants himself on the moral sentiment in any conversation that no man will ever get any advantage of him, unless he be a saint, as Jones Very was. Every one else Alcott will put in the wrong.

It must be conceded that it is speculation which he loves, and not action. Therefore he dissatisfies everybody and disgusts many. When the conversation is ended, all is over. He lives to-morrow, as he lived to-day, for further discourse, not to begin, as he seemed pledged to do, a new celestial life. The ladies fancied that he loved cake; very likely; most people do. Yet in the last two years he has changed his way of living, which was perhaps a little easy and self-indulgent for such a Zeno, so far as to become ascetically temperate. He has no vocation to labor, and, although he strenuously preached it for a time, and made some efforts to practise it, he soon found he had no genius for it, and that it was a cruel waste of his time. It depressed his spirits even to tears.

He is very noble in his carriage to all men, of a serene and lofty aspect and deportment in the street and in the house. Of simple but graceful and majestic manners, having a great sense of his own worth, so that not willingly will he give his hand to a merchant, though he be never so rich, — yet with a strong love of men, and an insatiable curiosity concerning all who were distinguished either by their intellect or by their character. He is the most generous and hospitable of men, so that he has been as munificent in his long poverty as Mr. Perkins in his wealth, or I should say much more munificent. And for his hospitality, every thing in the form of man that entered his door as a suppliant would be made master of all the house contained. Moreover, every man who converses with him is presently made sensible that, although this person has no faculty or patience for our trivial hodiernal labors, yet if there were a great courage, a great sacrifice, a self-immolation to be made, this and no other is the man for a crisis, — and with such grandeur, yet with such temperance in his mien.

Such a man, with no talent for household uses, none for action, and whose taste is for precisely that which is most rare and unattainable, could not be popular, — he could never be a doll, nor a beau, nor a bestower of money or presents, nor even a model of good daily life to propose to virtuous young persons. His greatness consists in his attitude merely; of course he found very few to relish or appreciate him; and very many to dispraise him. Somebody called him a “moral Sam Patch.”

Another circumstance marks this extreme love of speculation. He carries all his opinions and all his condition and manner of life in his hand, and, whilst you talk with him, it is plain he has put out no roots, but is an air-plant, which can readily and without any ill consequence be transported to any place. He is quite ready at any moment to abandon his present residence and employment, his country, nay, his wife and children, on very short notice, to put any new dream into practice which has bubbled up in the effervescence of discourse. If it is so with his way of living, much more so is it with his opinions. He never remembers. He never affirms anything to-day because he has affirmed it before. You are rather astonished, having left him in the morning with one set of opinions, to find him in the evening totally escaped from all recollection of them, as confident of a new line of conduct and heedless of his old advocacy. Sauve qui peut.

Another effect of this speculation is that he is preternaturally acute and ingenious to the extent sometimes of a little jesuitry in his action. He contemns the facts so far that his poetic representations have the effect of a falsehood, and those who are deceived by them ascribe the falsehood to him: and sometimes he plays with actions unimportant to him in a manner not justifiable to any observers but those who are competent to do justice to his real magnanimity and conscience.

Like all virtuous persons he is destitute of the appearance of virtue, and so shocks all persons of decorum by the imprudence of his behavior and the enormity of his expressions....

This man entertained in his spirit all vast and magnificent problems. None came to him so much recommended as the most universal. He delighted in the fable of Prometheus; in all the dim, gigantic pictures of the most ancient mythology; in the Indian and Egyptian traditions; in the history of magic, of palmistry, of temperaments, of astrology, of whatever showed any impatience of custom and limits, any impulse to dare the solution of the total problem of man’s nature, finding in every such experiment an implied pledge and prophecy of worlds of science and power yet unknown to us. He seems often to realize the pictures of the old alchemists: for he stood brooding on the edge of discovery of the Absolute from month to month, ever and anon affirming that it was within his reach, and nowise discomfited by uniform shortcomings.

The other tendency of his mind was to realize a reform in the Life of Man. This was the steadily returning, the monotonous topic of years of conversation. This drew him to a constant intercourse with the projectors and saints of all shades, who preached or practised any part or particle of reform, and to a continual coldness, quarrel, and non-intercourse with the scholars and men of refinement who are usually found in the ranks of conservatism. Very soon the Reformers whom he had joined would disappoint him; they were pitiful persons, and, in their coarseness and ignorance, he began to pine again for literary society. In these oscillations from the Scholars to the Reformers, and back again, he spent his days.

His vice, an intellectual vice, grew out of this constitution, and was that to which almost all spiritualists have been liable, — a certain brooding on the private thought which produces monotony in the conversation, and egotism in the character. Steadily subjective himself, the variety of facts which seem necessary to the health of most minds, yielded him no variety of meaning, and he quickly quitted the play on objects, to come to the Subject, which was always the same, viz., Alcott in reference to the World of To-day.

From a stray leaf I copy this: —

Alcott sees the law of man truer and farther than any one ever did. Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17th October; to-day, Alcott on the 18th October; to-morrow, on the 19th. So will it be always. The poet, rapt into future times or into deeps of nature admired for themselves, lost in their law, cheers us with a lively charm; but this noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more such persons to exist.

What for the visions of the night? Our life is so safe and regular that we hardly know the emotion of terror. Neither public nor private violence, neither natural catastrophes, as earthquake, volcano, or deluge; nor the expectation of supernatural agents in the form of ghosts, or of purgatory and devils and hell fire, disturb the sleepy circulations of our blood in these calm, well-spoken days. And yet dreams acquaint us with what the day omits. Eat a hearty supper, tuck up your bed tightly, put an additional bedspread over your three blankets, and lie on your back, and you may, in the course of an hour or two, have this neglected part of your education in some measure supplied. Let me consider: I found myself in a garret disturbed by the noise of some one sawing wood. On walking towards the sound, I saw lying in a crib an insane person whom I very well knew, and the noise instantly stopped: there was no saw, a mere stirring among several trumpery matters, fur muffs and empty baskets that lay on the floor. As I tried to approach, the muffs swelled themselves a little, as with wind, and whirled off into a corner of the garret, as if alive, and a kind of animation appeared in all the objects in that corner. Seeing this, and instantly aware that here was Witchcraft, that here was a devilish Will which signified itself plainly enough in the stir and the sound of the wind, I was unable to move; my limbs were frozen with fear; I was bold and would go forward, but my limbs I could not move; I mowed the defiance I could not articulate, and woke with the ugly sound I made. After I woke and recalled the impressions, my brain tingled with repeated vibrations of terror; and yet was the sensation pleasing, as it was a sort of rehearsal of a Tragedy.

What room for Fourier phalanxes, for large and remote schemes of happiness, when I may be in any moment surprised by contentment?

Here was Edward Palmer, with somewhat ridiculous, yet much nobility, always combined in his person and conversation, truth, honesty, love, independence, yet this listening to men, and this credulity in days and conventions and Brisbane projects. His look has somewhat too priestly and ecclesiastic in its cut. He looks like an Universalist minister. But though his intellect is something low and limitary, prosaic, and a good roadster, yet he has great depth of character, and grows on your eye. Pathetic it was to hear of his little circle of six young men who met one evening long ago in a little chamber in Boston, and talked over his project of No-Money until all saw that it was true, and had new faith in the Omnipotence of love. In Alabama and Georgia, he seems to have stopped in every printing-house, and the only signs of hope and comfort he found were Newspapers, like Brisbane’s “Future,” which he found in these dusky universities. When shall we see a man whose image blends with nature? so that when he is gone, he shall not seem a little ridiculous, that same small man!

Edmund Hosmer is a noble creature, so manly, so sweet-tempered, so faithful, so disdainful of all appearances, who always looks respectable and excellent to you in his old shabby cap and blue frock bedaubed with the slime of the marsh, and makes you respect and honor him through all. A man to deal with who always needs to be watched lest he should cheat himself; with his admiration of his wife, harried by the care of her poor household and ten children. Edmund says, the first time he saw her, he did not observe that she was much different from other women, but now he thinks her the handsomest woman he ever saw! And so you come to think also when you see [her]... in her house at her work, or hear her artless stories of her sufferings and her works and opinions and tastes.

Friendship, five people; yes; Association and grand phalanx of the best of the human race....

Opus super abat materiem, said the Transcendentalist to the man who gave him money: or, All my concern is with the expenditure.

“The Devil is the Lord’s bulldog,” said the good Dow.

April 3.

“The peculiarity of divine souls is shown by Parmenides to consist in their being younger and at the same time older both than themselves and other things.” — PROCLUS.

The population of the world is a conditional population. These are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals.

Shall the new thought make the magnificence of England rags?

An immense deduction is to be made from the doctrine of the wisest man to arrive at his truth. All his dogmatick is mere flourish and grammar. What a mass of nonsense in St. Paul, and again in Swedenborg, that has no relation to rain and sun and bird. Yet truth will resolve a magpie as well as a creed when once you get it pure.

He should not see poorest culinary stove but he saw its relation to the charity which is the fountain of nature.

Swedenborg a right poet. Everything protean to his eye.... In his eye the eternal flux of things goes always on, there is no material kernel, only a spiritual centre.

April 5.

Alcott brought here this day a manuscript paper written by his brother Junius, which had three good things in it, — first, that it was a Prayer, written in this prayerless age; second, that he thanks God for the continuance of their love, the one for the other; and third, he thanks him for the knowledge he has attained of him by his Sons.

‘Truth; Realism. Are you not scared by seeing that the Gypsies are more attractive to us than the Apostles? For though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

The feeblest babe is a channel through which the tremendous energies stream which we call Life, Fate, Love, Conscience, Thought, Hope, Sensibility.

I began to write of Poetry and was driven at once to think of Swedenborg as the person who, of all the men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the translator of Nature into thought. I do not know a man in history to whom things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the Metamorphosis continually plays. And if there be in Heaven Museums of Psychology, the most scientific angel could scarcely find a better example than the brain of Swedenborg, of the tendency to interpret the moral by the material. „..

Swedenborg never indicates any emotion, — a cold, passionless man.

What we admire is the majestic and beautiful Necessity which necessitated him to see these Heavens and Hells of his. The Heaven, which overpowered his and every human mind in proportion to the apprehensiveness of each, is more excellent than his picture; the Hell, which is its negation, is more formidable than he had skill to draw.

Very dangerous study will Swedenborg be to any but a mind of great elasticity. Like Napoleon as a military leader, a master of such extraordinary extent of nature, and not to be acted on by any other, that he must needs be a god to the young and enthusiastic.

April 6.

Having once learned that in some one thing, although externally small, greatness might be contained, so that in doing that, it was all one as if I had builded a world; I was thereby taught, that every thing in nature should represent total nature; and that whatsoever thing did not represent to me the sea and sky, day and night, was something forbidden or wrong.

Heroes.

Heaven’s exiles straying from the orb of light.

EMPEDOCLES.

Pericles, the father of these youths, has beautifully and well instructed them in those things which are taught by masters; but in those things in which he is wise he has neither instructed them himself, nor has he sent them to another to be instructed; but they, feeding, as it were, without restraint, wander about, to see if they can casually meet with virtue. — PLATO, in Protagoras.

You should never ask me what I can do. If you do not find my gift without asking, I have none for you. Would you ask a woman wherein her loveliness consists? Those to whom she is lovely will not discover it so. Such questions are but curiosity and gossip. Besides, I cannot tell you what my gift is unless you can find it without my description.

THE POET

On that night the poet went

From the lighted halls

Beneath the darkling firmament

To the seashore, to the old sea walls.

Dark was night upon the seas,

Darker was the poet’s mind;

For his shallow suppleness

Black abyss of penitence.

The wind blew keen, the poet threw

His cloak apart, to feel the cold;

The wind, he said, is free and true,

But I am mean and sold.

Out shone a star between the clouds,

The constellation glittered soon, —

You have no lapse: so have ye glowed

But once in your dominion.

And I to whom your light has spoken,

I pining to be one of you,

I fall, my faith is broken;

Ye scorn me from your deeps of Blue —

And yet, dear stars, I know ye shine

Only by needs and loves of mine;

Light-loving, light-asking life in me

Feeds those eternal lamps I see.

The history of Christ is the best document of the power of Character which we have. A youth who owed nothing to fortune and who was “hanged at Tyburn,” — by the pure quality of his nature has shed this epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into a grand universal symbol for the eyes of all mankind ever since.

He did well. This great Defeat is hitherto the highest fact we have. But he that shall come shall do better. The mind requires a far higher exhibition of character, one which shall make itself good to the senses as well as to the soul; a success to the senses as well as to the soul. This was a great Defeat; we demand Victory. More character will convert judge and jury, soldier and king; will rule human and animal and mineral nature; will command irresistibly and blend with the course of Universal Nature.

In short, there ought to be no such thing as Fate. As long as we use this word, it is a sign of our impotence and that we are not yet ourselves.... Whilst I adore this ineffable life which is at my heart, it will not condescend to gossip with me, it will not announce to me any particulars of science, it will not enter into the details of my biography, and say to me why I have a son and daughters born to me, or why my son dies in his sixth year of joy. Herein, then, I have this latent omniscience coexistent with omnignorance. Moreover, whilst this Deity glows at the heart, and by his unlimited presentiments gives me all Power, I know that to-morrow will be as this day, I am a dwarf, and I remain a dwarf. That is to say, I believe in Fate. As long as I am weak, I shall talk of Fate; whenever the God fills me with his fulness, I shall see the disappearance of Fate.

I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.

But the objection to idolatry of which all Christendom is guilty, why do you not feel? viz., that it is retrospective, whilst all the health and power of man consists in the prospective eye. A saint, an angel, a chorus of saints, a myriad of Christs, are alike worthless and forgotten by the soul, as the leaves that fall, or the fruit that was gathered in the garden of Eden in the golden age. A new day, a new harvest, new duties, new men, new fields of thought, new powers call you, and an eye fastened on the past unsuns nature, bereaves me of hope, and ruins me with a squalid indigence which nothing but death can adequately symbolize.

The Poet should not only be able to use nature as his hieroglyphic, but he should have a still higher power, namely, an adequate message to communicate; a vision fit for such a faculty. Therefore, when we speak of Poet in the great sense, we seem to be driven to such examples as Ezekiel and Saint John and Menu with their moral burdens; and all those we commonly call Poets become rhymesters and poetasters by their side.

All our works which we do not understand are symbolical. If I appear to myself to carry rails into the shed under my barn, if I appear to myself to dig parsnips with a dung-fork, there is reason, no doubt, in these special appearances as much as in the study of metaphysics or mythology, in which I do not see meaning.

We are greatly more poetic than we know; poets in our drudgery, poets in our eyes, and ears, and skin.

The schoolboys went on with their game of baseball without regard to the passenger, and the ball struck him smartly in the back. He was angry. Little cared the boys. If you had learned how to play when you was at school, they said, you would have known better than to be hit. If you did not learn then, you had better stop short where you are, and learn now. Hit him again, Dick!

Sunday eve.

I say that he will render the greatest service to criticism which has been known for ages who shall draw the line of relation that subsists between Shakspeare and Swedenborg....

Always there is this Woman as well as this Man in the mind; Affection as well as Intellect.

You might know beforehand that your friends will not succeed, since you have never been able to find the Institution in the Institutor.

“If he who brings corn to sale be entitled to a remunerating price for it by law, by what just law is he disentitled to a remunerating price who likewise brings his property to sale — his labour?” — LORD NUGENT.

If I go into the churches in these days, I usually find the preacher in proportion to his intelligence to be cunning, so that the whole institution sounds hollow. X, the ablest of all the Unitarian clergy, spread popular traps all over the lecture which I heard in the Odeon. But in the days of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the preachers were the victims of the same faith with which they whipped and persecuted other men, and their sermons are strong, imaginative, fervid, and every word a cube of stone.

As soon as my guests are gone, they show like dreams.

Mr. Clapp, of Dorchester, to whom I described the Fourier project, thought it must not only succeed, but that agricultural association must presently fix the price of bread, and drive single farmers into association in self-defence, as the great commercial and manufacturing companies had done.

Last night I read many pages in Chester Dewey’s Report of Herbaceous Plants in Massachusetts. With what delight we always come to these images! The mere names of reeds and grasses, of the milkweeds, of the mint tribe and the gentians, of mallows and trefoils, are a lively pleasure. The odorous waving of these children of beauty soothes and heals us. The names are poems often. Erigeron, because it grows old early, is thus named the Old Man of the Spring. The Pyrola umbellata is called Chimaphila, Lover of Winter, because of its bright green leaves in the snow; called also Prince’s Pine. The Plantain (Plantago major), which follows man wherever he builds a hut, is called by the Indians “White Man’s Foot.” And it is always affecting to see Lidian or one of her girls stepping outside the door with a lamp at night to gather a few plantain leaves to dress some slight wound or inflamed hand or foot. What acres of Houstonia whiten and ripple before the eye with innumerable pretty florets at the mention of May. My beloved Liatris in the end of August and September acquires some added interest from being an approved remedy for the bite of serpents, and so called “ Rattlesnake’s Master.” The naming of the localities comforts us— “ponds,” “shady roads,” “sandy woods,” “wet pastures,” etc. I begin to see the sun and moon, and to share the life of Nature, as under the spell of the sweetest pastoral Poet.

Fireweed, a Hieracium which springs up abundantly on newly cleared land. The aromatic fields of dry Gnaphalium; the sweet flags live in my memory this April day. But this dull country professor insults some of my favorites, as the well beloved Lespedeza, for instance. The beautiful Epigæa, pride of Plymouth woods, he utterly omits. He who loves a flower, though he knows nothing of its botany or medicine, is nearer to it than one of these catalogue-makers....

These are our Poetry. What, I pray thee, O Emanuel Swedenborg, have I to do with jasper, sardonyx, beryl, and chalcedony?...

One would think that God made fig trees and dates, grapes and olives, but the Devil made Baldwin apples and pound-pears, cherries and whortleberries, Indian corn and Irish potatoes.

I tell you, I love the peeping of a Hyla in a pond in April, or the evening cry of a whip-poor-will, better than all the bellowing of all the Bulls of Bashan or all the turtles of whole Palestina. The

County of Berkshire is worth all Moab, Gog, and Kadesh, put together.

When Swedenborg described the roads leading up from the “world of spirit” into Heaven as not visible at first to any Spirit, but after some time visible to such as are pure, he figuratively reports a familiar truth in relation to the history of thought. The gates of thought, — how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.

April 13.

Read last night Mr. Colman’s Fourth Report of the Agriculture of Massachusetts. The account he gives of the fat cattle raised on Connecticut River and sold at Brighton is pathetic almost. The sale sometimes will not pay the note the farmer gave for the money with which he bought his stock in the fall. The miseries of Brighton would make a new chapter in Porphyry on “Abstinence from Animal Food.” The Maple Sugar business is far more agreeable to read of. One tree may be tapped for eighty or ninety years and not injured. One man can tap three hundred in a day. I read with less pleasure that a principal crop of Franklin County is broomcorn.

The babe is not disconcerted. I delight in her eyes? they receive good-humoredly everything that appears before them, but give way to nothing. Scrap as she is, she is never displaced, as older children are.

I like a meeting of gentlemen; for they also bring each one a certain cumulative result. From every company they have visited, from every business they have transacted, they have brought away something which they wear as a certain complexion or permanent coat, and their manners are a certificate, a trophy of their culture. What we want when you come to see us is country culture. We have town culture enough and to spare. Show us your own, inimitable and charming to us, O Countryman!

At New York I saw Mrs. Black, a devout woman bred in the Presbyterian Church, but who had left it and come out into the light, as she said, “in a moment of time.” She was spiritual and serene. The contemplation of the presence and perfection of the Moral Law contented her. She had read Madame Guion and Jacob Behmen, and now, lately, the Book of Esdras, the author of which she said was an impatient spirit, but yet wise. She quoted Scripture a good deal, but in the poetic and original way of Jones Very. I was greatly contented with her, at my first interview; but at the second I asked her, “ Had she no temptations?” No. “ Had she no wish to serve some creature who could only be served by her involving herself in affairs?” No. For herself she satisfied me pretty well, but I soon felt that she had no answers to give the Inquirers whom I usually meet. She only said, they must be willing to be fools. “Yes,” I said, “but they already are fools and have been so a long time, and now they begin to whimper, How long, O Lord!”

Goodness is not good enough, unless it has insight, universal insights, results that are of universal application.

Men whom we see are whipped through the world;... The most private is the most public energy. We shall see that quality atones for quantity; that creative action in one outvalues feeble exhibition and philanthropic declamation to crowds; and that grandeur of character acts in the dark, and succors them who never saw it.

I ought to be obeyed. The reason I am not is because I am not real. Let me be a lover, and no man can resist me. I am not united, I am not friendly to myself, I bite and tear myself. I am ashamed of myself. When will the day dawn, of peace and reconcilement, when, self-united and friendly, I shall display one heart and energy to the world?

“Every intellect,” says Proclus, “is an impartible essence.” Very likely and very unimportant; but that every intellect is an impartible essence, or is communicable in the same proportion with its amount or depth, — is a theme for the song of angels.

Quotation. It is a great advantage to come first in time. He that comes second must needs quote him that came first. You say that Square never quotes: you say something absurd. Let him speak a word, only to say “chair,”

“table,”

“fire,”

“bread,” — what are these but quotations from some ancient savage?

I have sometimes fancied my friend’s wisdom rather corrective than initiative, an excellent element in conversation to counteract the common exaggerations and preserve the sanity, but chiefly valuable so, and not for its adventure and exploration or for its satisfying peace.

(From E)

April 14.

If I should write an honest diary, what should I say? Alas, that life has halfness, shallowness.

I have almost completed thirty-nine years, and I have not yet adjusted my relation to my fellows on the planet, or to my own work. Always too young or too old, I do not justify myself; how can I satisfy others?

Christianity. I do not wonder that there was a Christ; I wonder that there were not a thousand.

Dull, cheerless business this of playing lion and talking down to people. Rather let me be scourged and humiliated; then the exaltation is sure and speedy.

(From K)

 — April 19.

My daily life is miscellaneous enough, but when I read Plato or Proclus, or, without Plato, when I ascend to thought, I do not at once arrive at satisfactions, as when I drink being thirsty, or go to the fire being cold; no; I am only apprized at first of my vicinity to a new and most bright region of life....

Life. Where do we find ourselves?...

April 12.

This afternoon I found Edmund Hosmer in his field, after traversing his orchard where two of his boys were grafting trees; Mr. Hosmer was ploughing and Andrew driving the oxen. I could not help feeling the highest respect as I approached this brave laborer. Here is the Napoleon, the Alexander of the soil, conquering and to conquer, after how many and many a hard-fought summer’s day and winter’s day, not like Napoleon of sixty battles only, but of six thousand, and out of every one he has come victor.... I am ashamed of these slight and useless limbs of mine before this strong soldier....

True it is, I thought, as he talked, that Necessity farms it, that Necessity finds out when to go to Brighton, and when to feed in stall, better than Mr. Colman.

Elizabeth gives me two Proverbs to-day, which are both bucolic poetry: —

“When the oaks are in the grey,

Then, Farmers, plant away.”

And the other: —

“The Mistress makes the morning,

But the Lord makes the afternoon.”

Strange that what I have not is always more excellent than what I have, and that Beauty, no, not Beauty, but a beauty instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon.

If I could put my hand on the Evening Star, would it be as beautiful?

In the fields, this lovely day, I was ashamed of the inhospitality of disputing. Very hoarsely sounds the parlor debate on theology from the lonely, sunny hill, or the meadow where the children play.

As sings the pine tree in the wind,

So sings in the wind a sprig of the pine.

As Proclus ascribes to the Deity the property of being in contact, and of not being in contact at the same moment of time, so we demand of men that they should exhibit a conduct which is at once continence and abandonment; “a wanton heed, and giddy cunning.”

We look wishfully to emergencies, to eventful revolutionary times from the desart of our ennui, and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads. But is not Peace greater than War, and has it not greater wars and victories? Is there no progress? To wish for war is atheism.

When I saw the sylvan youth, I said, “ Very good promise, but I cannot now watch any more buds: like the good Grandfather when they brought him the twentieth babe, he declined the dandling, he had said ‘Kitty, Kitty’ long enough.”

Queenie says, “Save me from magnificent souls. I like a small common-sized one.”

As they say that when your razor is dull, lay it away in your drawer and use another until that becomes dull, then take the old one and you shall find it sharp again, so I have heard scholars remark of their skill in languages, that by putting away the Greek or German book for a time, when they resumed it afterwards, they were surprised at their own facility.

(From J)

April 28.

Q. Why not great and good?

Ans. Because I am not what I ought to be.

Q. But why not what you ought?

Ans. The Deity still solicits me, but this self, this individuality, this will resists.

Q. Well for you that it does: if it did yield, you would die, as it is called. But why does it resist?

Ans. I can only reply, God is great: it is the will of God. When he wills, he enters: when he does not will, he enters not.

(From K)

May 1.

“And the most difficult of tasks to keep Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”

These lines of Wordsworth are a sort of elegy on these times. When I read Proclus, I am astonished with the vigor and breadth of his performance. Here is no epileptic modern muse, with short breath and short flight, but an Atlantic strength which is everywhere equal to itself and dares great attempts, because of the life with which it feels itself filled. —

There will come a day when a man shall appear who will so draw men to him as a mistress or a friend draws a lover or a friend, making it the happiness and honor of the other party to serve him. In that way character will inspire the kindness it requires, and will not need to provide in the direct way for its bodily wants. Then every man will “live by his strength and not by his weakness,” as A said. God hates inquisitiveness, said Euclides.

Boldness we wish to see, — boldness in any kind, whether in behavior and action, or in thought or poetry or music or building. But whence is boldness? What is it but the badge and sign of Life, of Spirit? And sometimes that wind bloweth here, and sometimes there, none can tell why, or how, or when, it listeth. Am I master of any of the conditions of its presence, or must I fold my hands and wait until I be bold?

Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

Doctor James Jackson said it always took some time to learn the scale of patients and nurses; what they meant by “violent pain.”

“feeling that they should die,” etc., etc. Almost all persons delight in the superlative, and for this reason seize upon an exaggeration, as on sugar, in all their actual observations of each character. ‘It proceeds from the want of skill to detect quality that they hope to move your admiration by quantity: for they feel that here in this or that person is somewhat remarkable.

A reading man, or a child self-entertained, is the serpent with its tail in the mouth. Let Saadi sit alone.

The Surfaces threaten to carry it in Nature. The fox and musquash, the hawk and snipe and bittern, when near by seen, are found to have no more root than man, to be just such superficial tenants in the globe. Then this new molecular philosophy goes to show that there are astronomical interspaces betwixt atom and atom; the world is all outside; it has no inside.

Atom from atom yawns as far

As moon from earth, as star from star.

Elizabeth Hoar says, when we spoke of the beauty of morning and the beauty of evening, — — “I go a beggar to the sunset, but in the morning I am equal to Nature.”

(From J)

May 6.

Here is a proposition for the formation of a good neighborhood: Hedge shall live at Concord, and Mr. Hawthorne; George Bradford shall come then; and Mrs. Ripley afterward. Who knows but Margaret Fuller and Charles Newcomb would presently be added? These, if added to our present kings and queens, would make a rare, an unrivalled company. If these all had their hearth and home here, we might have a solid social satisfaction, instead of the disgust and depression of visitation. We might find that each of us was more completely isolated and sacred than before. You may come — no matter how near in place, so that you have metes and bounds, instead of the confounding and chaos of visiting.

May 15.

The instruction at church seemed very infantile. Calvinism seems complexional merely;...

In general, I recognize, in stagecoach and elsewhere, the constitutional Calvinist, the inconvertible. And in all companies we find those who are self-accused, who live in their memories and charge themselves with the seven deadly sins daily, like my Queen without guile; and the other class, who cumber themselves never with contrition, but appeal from their experience always hopefully to their faith.

Our poetry reminds me of the catbird, who sings so affectedly and vaingloriously to me near Walden. Very sweet and musical! very various! fine execution! but so conscious, such a performer! not a note is his own, except at last, Miou, miou.

Of recent men, one may say that Milton’s opinion might be adduced on Marriage, and Swedenborg’s and even Shelley’s. Goethe gave none that I remember, and no others occur to me.

“Abou ben Adhem” seems to promise its own immortality beyond all the contemporary poems. And how long will one search books to find as good a story as that of the woman of Alexandria with her torch and bucket of water to burn Heaven and extinguish Hell?

Stick to thy affirming, how faint and feeble soever. A poet is an affirmer. Such loud and manifold denial as certain chemists, astronomers, and geologists make, imposing on me and all, and we think they will do wonders. Years pass and they are still exposing errors, and some quiet body has done in a corner the deed which they must worship.

It seems a mark of rarest genius to be able to distinguish the affirmative talent. Such geniuses as we know are deceived every day, as grossly almost as common society.

June 14.

Talent makes comfort. I propose to set an Athenæum on foot in this village; but to what end? We know very well what is its utmost, to make, namely, such agreeable and adorned men as we ourselves, but not to open doors into Heaven, as genius does in every deed of genius. This goes rather to fix and to content with fixedness; the comfort of talent. London is the kingdom of Talent. Every paper and book and journal comes from that tree. Civilization is Talent’s version of human life.

A highly endowed man with good intellect and good conscience is a Man-woman and does not so much need the complement of woman to his being as another. Hence his relations to the sex are somewhat dislocated and unsatisfactory. He asks in woman sometimes the woman, sometimes the man.

As when I have walked long in one direction, and then, if I turn around, discover that a large fair star has long risen and shined on me, I feel a kind of wonder that I should be so long in such a presence without knowing it, so feel I when a fine genius, which has been born and growing to full age in my neighborhood, now first turns its full deep light on my eyes.

June 15.

To-day. The ascetic of every day is how to keep me at the top of my condition; because a good day of work is too important a possession to be risked for any chance of good days to come.

Shut your eyes and hear a military band play on the field at night and you shall have kings and queens and all regal behavior and beautiful society, all chivalry walking visibly before you....

Doctor Bradford said it was a misfortune to be born when children were nothing and live until men were nothing.

June 16.

Literary criticism, how beautiful to me, and I am shocked lately to detect such omnipresent egotism in my things. My prayer is that I may be never deprived of a fact, but be always so rich in objects of study as never to feel this impoverishment of remembering myself.

That the Intellect grows by moral obedience seems to me the Judgment Day. Let that fact once obtain credence and all wrongs are righted; sorrow and pity are no more, nor fear nor hatred; but a justice as shining and palpable as the best we know of kings and caliphs and ordeals, and what we call “poetical justice,” — that is, thorough justice, justice to the eye and justice to the mind — takes place.

Friendship.

For Gods are to each other not unknown.

Odyssey, v, 79.

The same depth which dew gives to the morning meadow, the fireflies give to the evening meadow. Fire, though a spark on the chimney-back, is always a deep.

I read the Timæus in these days, but am never sufficiently in a sacred and holiday health for the task. The man must be equal to the book. A man does not know how fine a morning he wants until he goes to read Plato and Proclus.

Elizabeth Hoar says that Shelley is like shining sand; it always looks attractive and valuable, but, try never so many times, you cannot get anything good. And yet the mica-glitter will still remain after all.

I admire the unerring instinct with which, like an arrow to its mark, the newborn fine genius always flies to the geniuses. Here is this young stripling darting upon Shakspeare, Dante, Spenser, Coleridge, and can see nothing intervening.

Charles King Newcomb took us all captive. He had grown so fast that I told him I should not show him the many things I had bribed him with. Why teaze him with multitude? Multitude is for children. I should let him alone. His criticism in his “ Book-Journal” was captivating and in its devotion to the author, whether Æschylus, Dante, Shakspeare, Austin, or Scott, as feeling that he had a stake in that book,— “who touches that, touches me”; — and in the total solitude of the critic, the Patmos of thought from which he writes, in total unconsciousness of any eyes that shall ever read this writing, he reminds me of Aunt Mary. Charles is a Religious Intellect. Let it be his praise that when I carried his manuscript story to the woods, and read it in the armchair of the upturned root of a pine tree, I felt for the first time since Waldo’s death some efficient faith again in the repairs of the Universe, some independency of natural relations whilst spiritual affinities can be so perfect and compensating.

Robert Bartlett defined the church as “the organic medium of life from the Lord to the Divine Humanity.” He and Weiss gave an amusing account of the truckman who came with the square-cap mob to the college yard and bullied for an hour. It was the richest swearing, the most aesthetic, fertilizing, — and they took notes.

Nelly waked and fretted at night and put all sleep of her seniors to rout. Seniors grew very cross, but Nell conquered soon by the pathos and eloquence of childhood and its words of fate. Thus, after wishing it would be morning, she broke out into sublimity: “Mother, it must be morning.” Presently after, in her sleep, she rolled out of bed; I heard the little feet running round on the floor, and then, “O dear! Where ‘s my bed?”

She slept again, and then woke: “Mother, I am afraid; I wish I could sleep in the bed beside of you. I am afraid I shall tumble into the waters — it is all water!” What else could papa do? He jumped out of bed and laid himself down by the little mischief, and soothed her the best he might.

I think that language should aim to describe the fact, and not merely suggest it. If you, with these sketchers and dilettanti, give me some conscious, indeterminate compound word, it is like a daub of color to hide the defects of your drawing. Sharper sight would see and indicate the true line. The poet both draws well, and colors at the same time.

When C. says, “If I were a Transcendentalist I should not seal my letters,” what does he truly say but that he sees he ought not to seal his letters?

“When I shall be deserted,” said the scholar. And he told his thoughts and read his favorite pieces to many visitors, and when he saw the club-moss, or when he saw the night heaven, and when he saw his dead mistress, he knew that this, though fair and sorrowful, was good for his song; and it seemed then as if what had been a sphere of polished steel became a surface, or a convex mirror. Then he defended copyright until the Muse left him, and Apollo said, He may die. Yet before this befel, he had been a lover of things which he did not know how to praise, nor suspected they were loved by others. Again the scholar will come to scorn this putting his gods at vendue. The loosestrife waved over him its pagoda of yellow bells.

None longs for a church so much as he who stays at home.

But my increasing value of the present moment, to which I gladly abandon myself when I can, is destroying my Sunday respects, which always, no doubt, have some regard to the state and conservatism. But when to-day is great I fling all the world’s future into the sea.

In June, about the time when Alcott sailed for England, Manlius C. Clarke, a lawyer, came to Elizabeth Peabody and told her that he was going to sell seven hundred and fifty copies of Alcott’s Conversations on the Gospels in sheets, for the sum of fifty dollars to trunkmakers for waste paper. There are nine hundred pounds and they are sold at five cents a pound.

I hear with pleasure that a young girl in the midst of rich, decorous Unitarian friends in Boston is well-nigh persuaded to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her friends, who are also my friends, lamented to me the growth of this inclination. But I told them that I think she is to be greatly congratulated on the event. She has lived in great poverty of events. In form and years a woman, she is still a child, having had no experiences, and although of a fine, liberal, susceptible, expanding nature, has never yet found any worthy object of attention; has not been in love, nor been called out by any taste, except lately by music, and sadly wants adequate objects. In this church, perhaps, she shall find what she needs, in a power to call out the slumbering religious sentiment. It is unfortunate that the guide who has led her into this path is a young girl of a lively, forcible, but quite external character, who teaches her the historical argument for the Catholic faith. I told A. that I hoped she would not be misled by attaching any importance to that. If the offices of the church attracted her, if its beautiful forms and humane spirit draw her, if St. Augustine and St. Bernard, Jesus and Madonna cathedral musicand masses, then go, for thy dear heart’s sake, but do not go out of this icehouse of Unitarianism, all external, into an icehouse again of external. At all events, I charged her to pay no regard to dissenters, but to suck that orange thoroughly.

In Boston I saw the new second volume of Tennyson’s Poems. It had many merits, but the question might remain whether it has the merit. One would say it was the poetry of an exquisite; that it was prettiness carried out to the infinite, but with no one great heroic stroke; a too vigorous exclusion of all mere natural influences.

In reading aloud, you soon become sensible of a monotony of elegance. It wants a little northwest wind, or a northeast storm; it is a lady’s bower — garden-spot; or a lord’s conservatory, aviary, apiary, and musky greenhouse. And yet, tried by one of my tests, it was not found wholly wanting — I mean that it was liberating; it slipped or caused to slide a little “this mortal coil.” The poem of “ Locksley,” and “The Talking Oak,” — I bear cheerful witness both gave me to feel a momentary sense of freedom and power.

In town I also talked with Sampson Reed, of Swedenborg, and the rest. “It is not so in your experience, but is so in the other world.” — Other world? I reply, there is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact, all the universe over, there is but one thing, — this old double, Creator-creature, mind-matter, right-wrong. He would have devils, objective devils. I replied, That pure malignity exists, is an absurd proposition.... In regard to Swedenborg, I commended him as a grand poet. Reed wished that if I admired the poetry, I should feel it as a fact. I told him, All my concern is with the subjective truth of Jesus’s or Swedenborg’s or Homer’s remark, not at all with the object. To care too much for the object were low and gossiping. He may and must speak to his circumstance and the way of events and of belief around him; he may speak of angels, or Jews, or gods, or Lutherans, or gypsies, or whatsoever figures come next to his hand; I can readily enough translate his rhetoric into mine.

Every consciousness repeats mine and is a sliding scale from Deity to Dust. Sometimes the man conspires with the Universe, and sometimes he is at the other extreme and abides there, a criminal confessing sin. The moment he begins to speak I apprehend his whole relations and fix him at his point in the scale.

One seems in debate to play a foolish game for mastery, so inconvertible men are....

There is a formula well known to children, “Did,” “Didn’t,” “Did,” “Didn’t,” etc.

Three Classes. I had occasion to say the other day to Elizabeth Hoar that I like best the strong and worthy persons like her father, who support the social order without hesitation or misgiving. I like these: they never incommode us by exciting grief, pity, or perturbation of any sort.

But my conscience, my unhappy conscience, respects that hapless class who see the faults and stains of our social order and who pray and strive incessantly to right the wrong. This annoying class of men and women commonly find the work altogether beyond their faculty, and though their honesty is commendable, their results are for this present distressing. But there is a third class who are born into a new heaven and earth with organs for the new element, and who from that Better behold this bad world in which the million gropes and suffers. By their life and happiness in the new, I am assured of the doom of the old, and these, therefore, I love and worship.

July 12.

Looking in the wrong directions for light.

Obedience is the only ladder to the throne.

It is sad to outgrow our preachers, our friends, and our books, and find them no longer potent. Proclus and Plato last me still, yet I do not read them in a manner to honor the writer....

I read these English tracts with interest. Goodwyn Barmby is another Ebenezer Elliot, but more practical. Revolution is no longer formidable when the Radicals are amiable. If Jack Cade loves poetry, and goes for “Love Marriage” with Milton and Shelley, for community, phalanxes, dietetics, and so forth, I no longer smell fagots. Strange it is that Carlyle should skip this remarkable class of Dissenters and Radicals so near him, Lane, Owen, Wright, Fry, etc., etc.

It probably arises from that necessity of isolation which genius so often feels. He must stand on his glass tripod if he would keep his electricity. Keep them off, then, my brave Carlyle, thou worshipper of Beauty, and publisher of beauty to the world. Every sentence of thine is joyful proclamation that Beauty the Creator, Venus Creatrix, yet exists; the sentences are written for no utility, to no moral, but for the joy of writing.

Yes, Carlyle represents very well the literary man, makes good the place of and function of Erasmus and Johnson, of Dryden and Swift, to our generation. He is thoroughly a gentleman and deserves well of the whole fraternity of scholars, for sustaining the dignity of his profession of Author in England. Yet I always feel his limitation, and praise him as one who plays his part well according to his light, as I praise the Clays and Websters. For Carlyle is worldly, and speaks not out of the celestial region of Milton and Angels.

July 16.

Chaucer is such a poet as I have described Saadi, possessing that advantage of being the most cultivated man of the times. So he speaks always sovereignly and cheerfully. For the most part, the poet nature, being very susceptible, is overacted on by others. The most affecting experience, that of the religious sentiment, goes to teach the immensity of every moment, the indifferency of magnitudes. The present moment is all that the soul is God; — a great, ineffable lesson whose particulars are innumerable.

Yet experience shows that, great as is this lesson, great and greatest, yet this discipline also has its limits. One must not seek to dwell always in contemplation of the Spirit. So should the man decline into an indolent and unskilful person and stop short of his possible enlargement into a gloomy person; under churches are tombs, but Intellect is cheerful.

As bookbinders separate each sheet or each set of sheets in a large pile, by interposing a small block of pasteboard, so it seemed as if some genius had laid a ray of light underneath every thought and fact in nature to this man’s eye, so that all things separated themselves according to their laws before him and he never confounded the similar with the same.

July 21.

Profound meaning of “ Good will makes insight.” It is as when one finds his way to the sea by embarking on a river; or finds a passage for the mind through a lump of matter by following the path of electricity, or magnetism, or heat, or light, through it; anyhow, knows the nature by sharing the nature; is at once victim and victor.

All our days are so unprofitable whilst they pass.

Yery often there seems so little affinity between the man and his works that it seems as if the wind wrote the book and not he.

Put dittany in your greenhouse, asphodel, nepenthe, moly, poppy, rue, self-heal.

Rosebugs of splendid fate living on apple trees and roses and dying by an apoplexy of sweet sensations in the golden days, middle days of July.

He hoed the desart, his potatoes were poled, his asparagus grew to trees, his melons and gourds ran for miles, and had roots like oak trees.

The Telescope. The greatest genius adds nothing; he only detaches from the mass of life a particle not before detached, so that I see it separated.

Fate takes in the holidays and the work-minutes; it was writ on your brow before you were born; the watch was wound up to go seventy years, and here to stop, and there to hasten. Just this neuralgia and that typhus fever, this good October and that most auspicious friendship were all rolled in. The little barrel of the music-box revolves until all its ditties are played.

Wright, Lane, Barmby, Harwood, Heraud, Doherty, Barham, Greaves, Marston, Owen.

August 2.

Zanoni. We must not rail if we read the book. Of all the ministers to luxury these novelwrights are the best. It is a trick, a juggle. We are cheated into laughter or wonder by feats which only oddly combine acts that we do every day.

England. Many of them gave hospitable reception to Mr. Alcott and his ideas. H. G. Wright was the head of the Alcott House School in Surrey; he, with Charles Lane and his son, came to America with Mr. Alcott on his return; Goodwyn Barmby was editor of the Promethean, or Communitarian Apostle; Harwood wrote for some of the reform journals; John A. Heraud was the editor of the London Monthly Magazine, to which journal Mr. Emerson gave some praise in vol iii of the Dial. In the editorial Record of the Months of this magazine of January, 1843, a Life of Charles Fourier, by Hugh Doherty, is mentioned; also the London Phalanx as from him. Francis Barham wrote dramatic poetry, The Death of Socrates, etc. He was editor of The Alist, a monthly magazine of Divinity and Universal Literature. John Pierrepont Greaves has been already mentioned in these notes as a retired merchant who became the friend of Pestalozzi and of Strauss and devoted himself, on returning to England, to improvement of English schools, especially the establishment of Infant Schools: he died in 1842. J. Westland Marston has been praised in this Journal for his dramatic poem The Patrician’s Daughter. Robert Owen, brother of the great anatomist, was the promoter of community life in England and America.

In the Dial of October, 1842, in a paper called “ English Reformers” Mr. Emerson tells of most of these men.

There is no new element, no power, no furtherance. It is only confectionery, not the raising of new corn; and being such, there is no limit to its extension and multiplication. Mr. Babbage will presently invent a Novel-writing machine. The old machinery cannot be disguised, however gaily vamped. Money and killing and the Wandering Jew, these are the mainsprings still; new names, but no new qualities in the dramatis personæ. Italics and capitals are the stale substitutes for natural epigram and the revelations of loving speech. Therefore the vain endeavor to keep any bit of this fairy gold which has rolled like a brook through our hands. A thousand thoughts awoke, great rainbows seemed to span the sky. A morning among the mountains; but as we close the book, we end the remembrance, nothing survives, not a ray.

The power to excite which the page for moments possessed is derived from you. You read it as you read words in a dictionary, or hear a sonorous name of some foreigner and invest the stranger with some eminent gifts. But because there was not wisdom in the book, nothing fixes itself; all floats, hovers, and is dissipated forever.

The young men are the readers and victims of Vivian Grey.... One would say of Vivian Grey that it was written by a person of lively talent who had rare opportunities of society and access to the best anecdotes of Europe. Beckendorf is a sketch after nature, and whoever was the model was a strong head, a strong humorist, who deserved his empire for a day over these college boys.

Bulwer evidently is the dissolute Alcibiades, who has been the pupil once of Socrates, and now and then recites a lesson which his master taught him. But the worst of Bulwer is that he has no style of his own; he is always a collector, and neither contributes flash, nor low life, nor learning, nor poetry, nor religion, nor description, from his own stores.

August 3.

Our eagerness for anecdotes of the face, form, manners, dress, dwelling, etc., of any remarkable mind should teach us that the man should make all these anew, and not borrow them from Custom.

A noble brain, a searching eye, but alas! he hath no hands.

Work in every hour; paid or unpaid, see only that thou work;...

Some play at chess, some at cards, some at the Stock Exchange. I prefer to play at Cause and Effect.

Bettine is more real, more witty than George Sand or Mme de Staël; as profound and greatly more readable.

Gold represents labor and rightly opens all doors, but labor is higher and opens secreter doors, opens man, and finds new place in the kingdom of intelligence.

We read Zanoni with pleasure because magic is natural; ...

A mean, obscure weed by the doorstep, trodden by every foot that entered the house, was the plantain, yet, when the master’s foot was wounded and lame, they went out at night with a lamp to seek its leaves, and it brought refreshment and healing. Temperance is the poor plantain, a mean virtue in its daily details, but what an interest — compound on compound interest — it yields at last.

Our Concord Athenæum ought to be celebrated in the town’s newspaper. What shall we say but that it is good for us to club our newspapers and journals, that it will liberalize the village to make readers here, that it will give a new and handsome hospitality to our guests: and that we shall value small subscriptions more than large ones, for they always look sincere and affectionate.

(From E)

August.

The only poetic fact in the life of thousands and thousands is their death. No wonder they specify all the circumstances of the death of another person.

To give eminency to facts: to select facts, requires genius. Indigence of egotists.

Phi Beta Kappa. Nine cold hurrahs at Cambridge to Lord Ashburton. Pity they should lie so about their keen sensibility to cold hurrahs. Men of the world value truth in proportion to their ability. Of such, and especially of diplomatists, one has a right to [expect] wit and ingenuity to avoid the lie, if they must comply with the form. Elizabeth Hoar repeats Colonel Shattuck’s toast to poor K — : “The orator of the day. His subject deserves the attention of every agriculturist.” It does honor to Colonel Shattuck. I wish the great lords and diplomatists at Cambridge had only as much ingenuity and respect for truth. The speeches froze me to my place. At last Bancroft thawed the ice, and released us, and I inwardly thanked him.

Balzac has two merits, talent and Paris. The doctrine in which the world has acquiesced (has it not?) on this much agitated question of the Classic and Romantic is, that it is not a question of times, nor of forms, but of methods; that the Classic is creative and the Romantic is aggregative; that the Greek in the Christian

Germany would have built a Cathedral; and that the Romantic in our time builds a Parthenon Custom House.

We stopped at a farmhouse at Lincoln, and asked for milk, and when we came away I offered money, but this was wrong. We injure everybody with this money, both ourselves and the receivers. We owe men a great behavior, and knowing that we have half a dollar in our pocket, we skulk and idle and misbehave, and do not put ourselves on our courtesy and sentiment.

Never look at my book and perhaps it will be better worth looking at. My thought to-day was how rightly Swedenborg pictured each man with a sphere, for we use for moral qualities the word great, and really conceive of Socrates, Milton, or Goethe, as a large personality.

But this also occurred as the security of the institution of marriage against the Shelleys of the time, that we need in these twilights of the gods all the conventions of the most regulated life to crutch our lame and indigent loves. The least departure from the usage of marriage would bring too strong a tide against us for so weak a reed as modern love to withstand. Its frigidities, its ebbs already need all the protection and humoring they can get from the forms and manners.

(From J)

August 11.

Yes, they are all children, and when we speak of actual parties, that must be borne in mind.

Queenie says that, according to Edmund Hosmer, it was a piece of weak indulgence in the good God to make plums and peaches.

August 20.

Last night a walk to the river with Margaret, and saw the moon broken in the water, interrogating, interrogating. Thence followed the history of the surrounding minds. Margaret said she felt herself amidst Tendencies: did not regret life, nor accuse the imperfections of her own or their performance whilst these strong native Tendencies so appeared, and in the children of all of us will be ripened. I told her that I could not discern the least difference between the first experience and the latest in my own case. I had never been otherwise than indolent, never strained a muscle, and only saw a difference in the circumstance, not in the man; at first a circle of boys — my brothers at home, with aunt and cousins, or the schoolroom; all agreed that my verses were obscure nonsense; and now a larger public say the same thing, “obscure nonsense,” and yet both conceded that the boy had wit. A little more excitement now, but the fact identical, both in my consciousness and in my relations.

Margaret would beat with the beating heart of Nature; I feel that underneath the greatest life, though it were Jove’s or Jehovah’s, must lie an astonishment that embosoms both action and thought.

In talking with W. Ellery Channing on Greek mythology as it was believed at Athens, I could not help feeling how fast the key to such possibilities is lost, the key to the faith of men perishes with the faith. A thousand years hence it will seem less monstrous that those acute Greeks believed in the fables of Mercury and Pan, than that these learned and practical nations of modern Europe and America, these physicians, metaphysicians, mathematicians, critics, and merchants, believed this Jewish apologue of the poor Jewish boy, and how they contrived to attach that accidental history to the religious idea, and this famous dogma of the Triune God, etc., etc.

Nothing more facile, so long as the detachment is not made; nothing so wild and incredible the moment after that shall happen.

Lecturers. Bancroft, Giles, Mann, Rantoul, Longfellow, Theodore Parker, Doctor [S. G.] Howe, Doctor [Charles T.] Jackson, George B. Emerson.

(From E)

September 1.

A walk in the most wonderful sunset this afternoon with W. E. Channing. The sunset is very unlike anything that is underneath it. But it must always seem unreal, until it has figures that are equal to it. The sunset wanted men. But unutterable is all we know of Nature. How well we know certain winds, certain lights, certain aspects of the soil and the grove. Yet no words can begin to convey that which they express to us monthly and daily.

The reason why lunatics swear is because their exaggerated sensation requires an exaggerated speech. But Nature never swears, loves temperate expressions and sober colors, green grass, fawns and drabs, greys and blues and dark mixed; now and then a grim Acherontian fungus. Yet the sunset was vows of love of the angels. Swearing has gone out of vogue on the earth, because society, which means discriminating persons, rejects unmeasured speech. Oaths never go out of fashion, but are always beautiful and thrilling; but the sham of them, which is called profane swearing, is rightly voted a bore. Sham damns we do not like.

Results. Report of a Committee of One on the Subject of Nature. If this is the age of Criticism, let it be written greatly from a point of view that is at least Olympian or super-Olympian, and treats gods and men alike.... It must be roundly told the upper power that, though there is a landscape, it is not yet peopled; that Nature is not enjoyed or enjoyable until man finds his completion; that we have examined very carefully both sides of the Thing, and have ascertained and do here declare that there is no Reconcilement; Want is always larger than Have, Idea than Fact. Consider also that our practical Pyrrhonism is increased by our observation that the most lamented circumstance is the source of new power, and that we owe our wisdom to our folly.

It is much to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by your side....

We may well be slow of belief concerning Genius, since we give up all to it as soon as we know it. I pardon everything to it: everything is trifling before it; I will wait for it for years, and sit in contempt before the doors of that inexhaustible blessing.

You say, perhaps Nature will yet give me the joy of friendship. But our pleasures are in some proportion to our forces. I have so little vital force that I could not stand the dissipation of a flowing and friendly life; I should die of consumption in three months. But now I husband all my strength in this bachelor life I lead; no doubt shall be a well-preserved old gentleman.

September 4.

A few noble victims life shows us who do and suffer with temper and proportion; the rest are slight people, and shirk work, to use the common phrase. But every deed deepens the literature and exalts the art of the doer, and the soul doubles, trebles, quadruples, and infinitely multiplies itself.

Marston’s Tragedy, The Patrician’s Daughter. When we have such a gift, let us read it and thank God. Undoubtedly it may have faults, but what a benefit to speak to my imagination and paint with electric pencil a new form, new forms on my vacant sky. This is refreshing to read, — written with so ‘much simplicity and spirit; the character of Mordaunt very natural and familiar to English experience in the Cannings, Pulteneys, Burkes, Foxes: the Lady Mabel also well and easily conceived. Pity that the catastrophe should be wrought by a wholesale lie on the part of the Lady Lydia, which lovers can so easily pierce. It is a weak way of making a play whose crises ought, as in life, to grow out of the faults and the conditions of the parties, as in Goethe’s Tasso. The play seems on all accounts but one, namely, the lapse of five years between two acts, to be eminently fit for representation. The “No” of Mordaunt is wonderful for the stage.

[Passages from “Experience,” on Nature and Books, and on optical illusion about persons, followed (Essays, Second Series, pp. 50 and 52).]

I remember that Mr. [Samuel] Ripley said to the young coxcomb from the South,” Fiddle, faddle,” in reply to all his brag. Pity that we do not know how to say Fiddle faddle to people who take our time and do not exercise our wit. Most men are dupes of the hour, dupes of the nearest object: they cannot put things in perspective; but the nearest is still the largest. They talk with inferiors and do not know it, do not know that they are talking down. As on a mountain, you must level your gun at another mountain and see if the shot run out of the barrel, to know that the summit is lower than yours. The eye cannot measure it.

The poor Irish Mary Corbet, whose five weeks’ infant died here three months ago, sends word to Lidian that “she cannot send back her bandbox (in which the child’s body was carried to Boston): she must please give it to her; and she cannot send back the little handkerchief (with which its head was bound up): she must please give it to her.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

Sam Ward says, “I like women, they are so finished.”

Edmund Hosmer’s suffrage on Sunday evening to Alcott was good, so qualified and so strong. I said to him, what is really Alcott’s distinction, that, rejoicing or desponding, this man always trusts his principle, never deserts it, never mistakes the convenient, customary way of doing the thing for the right and might, whilst all vulgar reformers, like these Community people, after sounding their sentimental trumpet, rely on the arm of money and the law. It is the effect of his nature, of his natural clearness of spiritual sight, which makes this confusion of thought impossible to him. I have a company who travel with me in the world, and one or other of whom I must still meet, whose office none can supply to me: Edward Stubler; my Methodist Tarbox; Wordsworth’s Pedlar; Mary Rotch; Alcott; Manzoni’s Fra Cristoforo; Swedenborg; Mrs. Black; and now Greaves, and his disciple Lane; supreme people who represent, with whatever defects, the Ethical Idea. Elizabeth Hoar, the true Elizabeth Hoar, that is, felt the element of self in her intellectual and in her devout friends; the former loved truth, but loved self in the truth; the latter would make sacrifices, but never forgot their claims. Strange, all is strange. O Edith small, thyself strange, life is strange, and God the greatest strange and stranger in his universe.

The lady said that S — never forgot himself, he was affected, but his affectation was natural to him; also that the only thing she was afraid of was of being frightened. Mr. C — sold his Boston house, and went to live in the country, because he found he could not make a bow. It was a very sensible reason, and yet Charles’s criticism on it was, that he should have raised his ceiling and made his rooms larger; because an awkward man in the area of the State House, or on the Common, is no longer awkward. Large space, high rooms, have the same exhilarating and liberating quality as great light. A dance in a half-lighted ballroom would be a sad affair, but make the light intense, and the spirits of the party all rise instantly. There are two choices for one who is unhappy in an evening party: one, to go no more into such companies, which is flight; the other, to frequent them until their law is wholly learned and they become indifferent, which is conquest. O fine victim, martyrchild! clowns and scullions are content with themselves, and thou art not.

Intellect always puts an interval between the subject and the object. Affection would blend the two. For weal or for woe, I clear myself from the thing I contemplate: I grieve, but am not a grief. I love, but am not a love.

Marriage in what is called the spiritual world is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object....

Young S — went out tutor in the family travelling through Italy. It would have been so easy to have made his life joyful, — one human creature made happy; yet they contrived to make him feel that he was a servant, and poisoned every day, and he has come back with a fixed disgust at aristocracy. Too happy if he has. Too cheap the price he paid, if he has really attained to despise or to pity their joyless joys. But I doubt, I doubt.

I hate this sudden crystallization in my poets. A pleasing poem, but here is a rude expression, a feeble line, a wrong word. “I am sorry,” returns the poet, “but it stands so written.”

“But you can alter it,” I say. “Not one letter,”replies the hardened bard.

I question when I read Tennyson’s Ulysses, whether there is taste in England to do justice to the poet; whether the riches of Dante’s greatness would find an equal apprehension. Yet it seems feeble to deny it. The poet and the lover of poetry are born at one instant twins; and when Wordsworth wrote Laodamia, Landor found it out and celebrated it, and so did an Edinboro’ critic....

We are dissipated with our fine reading, we have too many fine books, and as those who have had too much cake and candy long for a brown crust, so we like the Albany Cultivator,

(From N)

September.

There is reality, however, in our relations to our friend, is there not?

Yes, and I hail the grander lights and hints that proceed from these, as the worthiest fruits of our being, thus far.

But do not these show that the existence you so loved is not closed?

I have no presentiment of that.

Alas, my friend, you have no generosity; you cannot give yourself away. I see the law of all your friendships. It is a bargain. You tell your things, your friend tells his things, and as soon as the inventory is complete, you take your hats.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could see with her eyes, you would see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas....

How slowly, how slowly we learn that witchcraft and ghostcraft, palmistry and magic, and all the other so-called superstitions, which, with so much police, boastful skepticism, and scientific committees, we had finally dismissed to the moon as nonsense, are really no nonsense at all, but subtle and valid influences, always starting up, mowing, muttering in our path, and shading our day. The things are real, only they have shed their skin which with much insult we have gibbeted and buried. One person fastens an eye on us, and the very graves of the memory render up their dead....

It is with Literature as it is with the Faculty of Medicine. The poor man catches the disease and dies, nobody knows how; the rich man takes the same disease and dies also, but has the honor and the satisfaction of having the disease named by his physician and a council of physidans. It is a great matter to have the thing named.

Chemistry, Entomology, Conic Sections, Medicine, each science, each province of science, will come to satisfy all demands: the whole of poetry, of mythology, of ethics, of demonology, will be expressed by it: a new rhetoric, new methods of philosophy, perhaps new political parties, will celebrate the culmination of each one.

Just to fill the hour, that is happiness....

It pains me never that I cannot give you an accurate answer to the question, What is God? What is the operation we call Providence? and the like. There lies the answer: there it exists, present, omnipresent to you, to me....

I woke up and found the dear old world, wife, babe and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old Devil not far off.

“Blind Love,” yes, Love lives in the stratum of the Relative and is blind to the Absolute. But Self is blind too, and not lovelily but odiously. As far as that element comes in, we run on about ourselves and never perceive that we have long lost the ear of our companion.

Transcendental Criticism. With this eternal demand for more which belongs to our modest constitutions, how can we be helped? The gods themselves could not help us, they are just as badly off themselves.

T. P. has beautiful fangs, and the whole amphitheatre delights to see him worry and tear his victim.

Ringsand jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself....

That were a right problem for a dramatist to solve; given a bandit, the strongest temptation and opportunity for violence or plunder, — how to bring off the man of wit by his wit only, exercised not immediately, but directly through speech. It is a problem perfectly easy to solve in action whenever the right Cæsar comes. He does not exert courage but wit. The Corsair has caught a Captain.

Sterling writes well of sculpture, and if I were rich, I would have my reception-room for my friends filled with statues or casts of all the gods, to preach serenity to me, and my friends. But it is vain to make a matter of conscience of calmness; a man will not become grand by accusing himself, but grandeur will come in where God wills, like a fine day.

T. sells me peat or wood or apples for more money than he sells the same to Hosmer, who can use certain test questions or examinations which I cannot apply. Well, do I not exclude T. also from the use of certain test questions and examinations in reference to other matters more important to his honor and standing as a man than are his peat and apples to me?

The highest criticism should be written in poetry.

Goethe received four, Fichte five, and Richter seven louis d’ors a sheet for their best works. A louis = $4.00.

I have a kind of promise to write, one of these days, a verse or two to the praise of my native city, which in common days we often rail at, yet which has great merits to usward. That, too, like every city, has certain virtues, as a museum of the arts. The parlors of private collectors; the Athenaeum Gallery; and the College; become the city of the City. Then a city has this praise, that, as the bell or band of music is heard outside, beyond the din of carts, so the beautiful in architecture, or in political and social institutions, endures: all else comes to nought. So that the antiquities and permanent things in each city are good and fine.

In London, Alcott saw Carlyle, Lane, O’Connell; Robert Owen, Heraud, Marston, Wright, Barham, Browning, Milnes, W. J. Fox, Harwood, Doctor Bowring, Doctor Elliotson, Morgan, Doherty, Barmby, George Thompson.

All persons are puzzles until at last we find in some word or act the key to the man, to the woman; straightway all their past words and actions lie in light before us.

Men are so gregarious that they have no solitary merits. They all — the reputed leaders and all — lean on some other, — and this superstitiously, and not from insight of his merit. They follow a fact, they follow success, and not skill. Therefore, as soon as the success stops, fails, and Mr. Jackson blunders in building Pemberton Square, they quit him; already they remember that long ago they suspected Mr. Jackson’s judgment, and they transfer the repute of judgment to the next succeeder who has not yet blundered.

Vegetables, Plants, are the young of the Universe, the future men, but not yet ripe for that rank in Nature. Yet they are all handsome, and men, let them once be fifteen years old, are for the most part unsightly. The reason is that the men, though young, are already dissipated, but the maples and ferns are not. Yet, no doubt, when they come to it, they, too, will curse and swear. In the wood I heard the laughter of the crows.

Milnes brought Carlyle to the railway, and showed him the departing train. Carlyle looked at it and then said, “These are our poems, Milnes.” Milnes ought to have answered, “Aye, and our histories, Carlyle.”

But it is worth noticing how fast the poet can dispose of these formidable facts. One sees the Factory village and the Railway, and thinks of Wordsworth and what will be his dismay. Wordsworth has the sense to see that this also falls in, un bete de plus, with the known multitude of mechanical facts and that all Mechanics have not gained a grain’s weight from the addition. The spiritual Fact alike remains Unalterable by many or by few particulars, as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.

Men are great in their own despite. They achieve a certain greatness, but it was while they were toiling to achieve another conventional one. The boy at college apologizes for not learning the tutor’s task, and tries to learn it, but stronger Nature gives him Otway and Massinger to read, or betrays him into a stroll to Mount Auburn in study hours. The poor boy, instead of thanking the gods and slighting the mathematical tutor, ducks before the functionary, and poisons his own fine pleasures by a perpetual penitence. Well, at least let that one never brag of the choice he made; as he might have well done, if he had known what he did when he was doing it.

Alcott, when he went to England, wished to carry with him miniatures of Elizabeth Peabody, of Margaret Fuller, and of me. — I remember once that A. thought that the head would soon put off from it the trunk, which would perish, whilst the brain would unfold a new and higher organization.

(From a loose sheet)

I am most of the time a very young child who does not pretend to oversee Nature and dictate its law. I play with it, like other infants, as my toy. I see sun and moon and river without asking their causes. I am pleased by the mysterious music of falling water or the rippling and washing against the shores, without knowing why. Yet, child as I am, I know that I may in any moment wake up to the sense of authority and deity herein. A seer, a prophet, passing by, will bring me to it; poetry will; nay, I shall think it in the austere woods and they will tremble and turn to dreams.

(From N)

Richter said, “ In the great world I despise the men and their joyless joys, but I esteem the women; in them alone can one investigate the spirit of the times.”

I think that in my house where there are no ears, no fine person should be so much wronged as to be asked to sing.

White Lies. It shall be the law of this Society that no member shall be reckoned a liar who is a sportsman, and indicates the wrong place when asked where he shot his partridge; or who is an angler, and misremembers where he took his trout; or who is an engineer, and misdirects his inquiring friends as to the best mill privilege; or who is a merchant, and forgets in what stock he proposes to invest; or who is an author, and being asked if he wrote an anonymous book, replies in the negative.

Ghost (under the floor). It shall not be the law.

[The account of Edward Everett, which occupies the following nine pages of the Journal, seems to have been written at this time. Mr. Emerson introduced almost all of it into a lecture delivered in the later years of his active life (perhaps 1867 and later) after Everett’s death. This, called “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Mr. Cabot first published in the Riverside Edition of the Works, in the vol ume Lectures and Biographical Sketches, a year or two after Mr. Emerson died.

The opening passage of the journal entry, and one or two others that showed his young enthusiasm for Everett, also one or two not printed in the posthumous volume, are here given.]

Edward Everett. There was an influence on the young people from Everett’s genius which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens. That man had an inspiration that did not go beyond his head, but which made him the genius of elegance. He had a radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, a heavy, large eye, marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form needed, sculptured lips, a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England.

Especially beautiful were his poetic quotations. He quoted Milton; more rarely Byron; and sometimes a verse from Watts, and with such sweet and perfect modulation that he seemed to give as much beauty as he borrowed, and what ever he had quoted will seldom be remembered by any who heard him without inseparable association with his voice and genius. This eminently beautiful person was followed like an Apollo from church to church, wherever the fame that he would preach led, by all the most cultivated and intelligent youths with grateful admiration. His appearance in any pulpit lighted up all countenances with delight. The smallest anecdote of his behavior or conversation was eagerly caught and repeated, and every young scholar could repeat brilliant sentences from his sermons with mimicry; good or bad, of his voice.... The church was dismissed, but the bright image of that eloquent form followed the boy home to his bedchamber, and not a sentence was written in a theme, not a declamation attempted in the College Chapel, but showed the omnipresence of his genius to youthful heads. He thus raised the standard of taste in writing and speaking in New England.

Meantime all this was a pure triumph of Rhetoric. This man had neither intellectual nor moral principles to teach. He had no thoughts. It was early asked, when Massachusetts was full of his fame, what truths he had thrown into circulation, and how he had enriched the general mind, and agreed that only in graces of manner, only in a new perception of Grecian beauty, had he opened our eyes. It was early observed that he had no warm personal friends. Yet his genius made every youth his defender and boys filled their mouths with arguments to prove that the orator had a heart....

Everett’s fame had the effect of giving a new lustre to the University — which it greatly needed. Students flocked thither from the South and the West, from the remote points of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana.

Well, this bright morning had a short continuance. Mr. Everett was soon attracted by the vulgar prizes of politics, and quit coldly the splendid career which opened before him (and which, not circumstances, but his own genius had made) for the road to Washington, where it is said he has had the usual fortune of flattery and mortification, but is wholly lost to any real and manly usefulness.

Everett had as lief his manuscript was in your pocket, he read so well.

In every conversation, even the highest, there is a certain trick, one may say, which may be soon learned by an acute person, and then that particular style be continued indefinitely. This is true of Very’s, Alcott’s, Lane’s, and all such specialists or mystics; more true of these than of other classes.

Sam Ward said that men died to break up their styles; but Nature had no objection to Goethe’s living, for he did not form one.

September 27 was a fine day, and Hawthorne and I set forth on a walk. We went first to the Factory where Mr. Damon makes Domett cloths, but his mills were standing still, his houses empty. Nothing so small but comes to honor and has its shining moment somewhere; and so was it here with our little Assabet or North Branch; it was falling over the rocks into silver, and above was expanded into this tranquil lake. After looking about us a few moments, we took the road to Stow. The day was full of sunshine, and it was a luxury to walk in the midst of all this warm and colored light. The days of September are so rich that it seems natural to walk to the end of one’s strength, and then fall prostrate, saturated with the fine floods, and cry, Nunc dimittis me. Fringed gentians, a thornbush with red fruit, wild apple trees whose fruit hung like berries, and grapevines were the decorations of the path. We scarcely encountered man or ; boy in our road nor saw any in the fields. This depopulation lasted all day. But the outlines of the landscape were so gentle that it seemed as if we were in a very cultivated country, and elegant persons must be living just over yonder hills. Three or four times, or oftener, we saw the entrance to their lordly park. But nothing in the farms or in the houses made this good. And it is to be considered that when any large brain is born in these towns, it is sent, at sixteen or twenty years, to Boston or New York, and the country is tilled only by the inferior class of the people, by the second crop or rowan of the Men. Hence all these shiftless poverty-struck pig-farms. In Europe, where society has an aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the best stock, and the best culture, whose interest and pride it is to remain half of the year at least on their estates and to fill these with every convenience and ornament. Of course these make model-farms and model-architecture, and are a constant education to the eye and hand of the surrounding population.

Our walk had no incidents. It needed none, for we were in excellent spirits, had much conversation, for we were both old collectors who had never had opportunity before to show each other our cabinets, so that we could have filled with matter much longer days. We agreed that it needed a little dash of humor or extravagance in the traveller to give occasion to incident in his journey. Here we sober men, easily pleased, kept on the outside of the land and did not by so much as a request for a cup of milk creep into any farmhouse. If want of pence in our pocket or some vagary in our brain drove us into these “huts where poor men lie,” to crave dinner or night’s lodging, it would be so easy to break into some mesh of domestic romance, learn so much pathetic private history, perchance see the first blush mantle on the cheeks of the young girl when the mail stage came or did not come, or even get entangled ourselves in some thread of gold or grey. Then again the opportunities which the taverns once offered the traveller, of witnessing and even sharing in the joke and the politics of the teamster and farmers on the road, are now no more. The Temperance Society emptied the bar-room. It is a cold place. Hawthorne tried to smoke a cigar, but I observed he was soon out on the piazza. After noon we reached Stow, and dined, and then continued pur journey towards Harvard, making our day’s walk, according to our best computation, about twenty miles. The last miles, however, we rode in a wagon, having been challenged by a friendly, fatherly gentleman, who knew my name, and my father’s name and history, and who insisted on doing the honors of his town to us, and of us to his townsmen; for he fairly installed us at the tavern, introduced us to the Doctor, and to General — , and bespoke the landlord’s best attention to our wants. We get the view of the Nashua River Valley from the top of Oak Hill, as we enter Harvard village. Next morning we began our walk at 6.30 o’clock for the Shaker Village, distant three and a half miles. Whilst the good Sisters were getting ready our breakfast, we had a conversation with Seth Blanchard and Cloutman of the Brethren, who gave an honest account, by yea and by nay, of their faith and practice. They were not stupid, like some whom I have seen of their Society, and not worldly like others. The conversation on both parts was frank enough; with the downright I will be downright, thought I, and Seth showed some humor. I doubt not we should have had our own way with them to a good extent (not quite after the manner of Hayraddin Maugrabin with the Monks of Liège) if we could have stayed twenty-four hours; although my powers of persuasion were crippled by a disgraceful barking cold, and Hawthorne inclined to play Jove more than Mercurius. After breakfast Cloutman showed us the farm, vineyard, orchard, barn, pressing-room, etc. The vineyard contained two noble arcades of grapes, both white and Isabella, full of fruit; the orchard, fine varieties of pears and peaches and apples.

They have fifteen hundred acres here, a tract of woodland in Ashburnham, and a sheep pasture somewhere else, enough to supply the wants of the two hundred souls in this family. They are in many ways an interesting Society, but at present have an additional importance as an experiment of Socialism which so falls in with the temper of the times. What improvement is made is made forever; this Capitalist is old and never dies, his subsistence was long ago secured, and he has gone on now for long scores of years in adding easily compound interests to his stock. Moreover, this settlement is of great value in the heart of the country as a model-farm, in the absence of that rural nobility we talked of yesterday. Here are improvements invented, or adopted from the other Shaker communities, which the neighboring farmers see and copy. From the Shaker Village we came to Littleton and thence to Acton, still in the same redundance of splendor. It was like a day of July, and from Acton we sauntered leisurely homeward, to finish the nineteen miles of our second day before four in the afternoon.

In a town which you enter for the first time at late sunset, the trees and houses look pictorial in the twilight, but you can never play tricks with old acquaintances.

There is something very agreeable in fatigue. I am willinger to die, having had my swing of the fair day; and seven times in his life, I suppose, every man sings, Now, Lord, let thy servant depart.

Landor, though like other poets he has not been happy in love, has written admirable sentences on the passion. Perhaps, said Hawthorne, their disappointment taught them to write these things. Well, it is probable. One of Landor’s sentences was worth a divorce; “ Those to whom love is a secondary thing love more than those to whom it is a primary.”

This thought appeared in all the Shakers said about admission of members to their Society, that people came and proved themselves; they soon showed what they were, and remained or departed, as the Spirit made manifest, alike to themselves and to the Society. No man should join them for a living: and no man should be turned off because he was poor or bedridden, but only for not being of them.

Cloutman told us their hospitality was costly, for they entertain without price all the friends of any member who visit them.

We talked of Scott. There is some greatness in defying posterity and writing for the hour, and so being a harper.

Piety, like chivalry, has no stationary exemplar, but is evanescent and receding like rainbows. You cannot find any specimen of a religious man now in your society; you hear the fame of one; you go far and find him; and he begins, “I had a friend in my youth,” etc. Yet it seems as if nothing would make such good picture in national sketches as genuine Connecticut, if you could lay your hand on it.

At night the frogs were loud, but the eagle was silent in his cliff.

If in this last book of Wordsworth there be dulness, it is yet the dulness of a great and cultivated mind.

We have our culture, like Allston, from Europe, and are Europeans. Perhaps we must be content with this and thank God for Europe for a while yet, and there shall be no great Yankee, until, in the unfolding of our population and power, England kicks the beam, and English authors write to America; which must happen ere long.

I have not yet begun to regret much the omission to see any particular part of nature or art, but perhaps, as we live longer, we begin to compare more narrowly the chances of life with the things to be seen in it, and count the Niagaras we have not visited. For me, not only Niagara, but the Prairie, and the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers are still only names. And yet, better see nothing beyond your village than to go coldly and hardly to work to see the Meccas of the mind. It were indeed an enlargement, a duplication of life, if, in fit company and with good reason, I can go to Italy; but Florence is not Florence if the visit is forced.

Avarice, ambition, almost all talents, are restless and vagrant; they go up to the cities; but Religion is a good rooter.

October 8.

The commercial relations of the world are so intimately drawn to London, that it seems as if every dollar in the world contributed to strengthen the English government.

It is ridiculous to quote solemnly what the young W. said in his sermon as decisive of his faith in this or that. These young preachers are but chipping birds, who chirp now on the bushes, now on the ground, but do not mean anything by their chirping. He must be very green who would go to infer anything in respect to their character from what they say.

What does the extraordinary taste for Indian names which now appear on every Hotel and every Omnibus, betoken?

Edward Washburn told me that at Andover they sell shelvesful of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in a year.

Queenie says that Edie spends half her time in looking innocent, and the other half in looking dignified. Nelly, asleep in her bed, had the air and attitude of one who rides a horse of Night.

Edmund Hosmer thinks there is a good deal of unnecessary labor spent to feed the animals, — especially the pig and horse. Many a farmer is but a horse’s horse or a pig’s pig.

At the Shakers’ house in Harvard I found a spirit-level on the window-seat, a very good emblem for the Society; but, unfortunately, neither the table nor the shelf nor the window-seat were plumb.

It appears that there are people, both men and women, who transgress every rule of prudence, and yet have unexceptional health and bring much to pass; and it seems just as well, if one can get on a good exception, to live off the road as to keep the highway.

The sons of great men should be great; if they are little, it is because they eat too much pound cake, which is an accident; or, because their fathers married dolls.

“The spring of her economy fed the fountain of her bounty.”

October 12.

The merit of a poem or tragedy is a matter of experience. An intelligent youth can find little wonderful in the Greeks or Romans. These tragedies, these poems, are cold and tame. Nature and all the events passing in the street are more to him, he says, than the stark, unchangeable crisis of the Iliad or the Antigone; and as for thoughts, his own thoughts are better and are more numerous. So says one, so say all. Presently, each of them tries his hand at expressing his thought; — but there is a certain stiffness, or a certain extravagance in it. All try, and all fail, each from some peculiar and different defect. The whole age of authors tries; many ages try; and in the millions and millions of experiments these confessedly tame and stark-poems of the Ancient are still the best. It seems to be certain that they will go on discontenting yet excelling the intelligent youths of the generations to come.

But always they will find their admirers, not in the creative and enthusiastic few, who will always feel their ideal inferiority, but in the elegant, cultivated and conservative class.

You praise Homer and disesteem the art that makes the tragedy. To me it seems higher — the unpopular and austere muse that casts human life into a high tragedy, Prometheusy Œdipus, Hamlet (midway between the Epic and the Ode) — than the art of the epic poet, which condescends more to common humanity, and approaches the ballad. Man is nine parts fool for one part wise, and therefore Homer and Chaucer more read than Antigone, Hamlet, or Comus.

Making Money. Men think there is some magic about this....

The worst times that ever fell were good times to somebody. There is always some one in the gap.

He is shallow who rails at men and their contrivances and does not see Divinity behind all their institutions and all their fetiches, even behind such as are odious and paltry; they are documents of beauty also. The practice of Prayer is not philosophical, — there is somewhat of absurd and ridiculous in it to the eye of science; it is juvenile, and, like plays of children, though nonsense, yet very useful and educative nonsense. Well, so with all our things....

The prosperity of Boston is an unexpected consequence of Steam - communication. The frightful expenses of steam make the greater neighborhood of Boston to Europe a circumstance of commanding importance, — and the ports of Havre and Liverpool are two days nearer to Boston than to New York. This superiority for the steam-post added to the contemporaneous opening of its great lines of railroad, like iron rivers, which already are making it the dépôt for flour from Western New York, Michigan, Illinois, promise a great prosperity to that city.

I woke with a regret that I had made a bargain at B. and had not rather thrown myself wholly on their sense of justice. The Olympian must be Olympian in carriage and deeds wherever he can be symmetrically, not rudely, — and he must dare a little, and try Olympian experiments. Well, courage, and do better again.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes nor by violent passivities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crop or squatting on his land, — by none of these ways can he free him self; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius; only by the freest activity in the way constitutional to him, does an angel seem to arise and lead him by the hand out of all wards of the prison.

Pecunia est alter Sanguis.

The seamstress’ wax,

The woodman’s axe, —

These pay the tax.

I think Doctor Channing was intellectual by dint of his fine moral sentiment, and not primarily.... His paper on Milton contained the true doctrine of Inspiration; “Milton observes higher laws than he transgresses.”

When the friend has newly died, the survivor has not yet grief, but the expectation of grief. He has not long enough been deprived of his society to feel yet the want of it. He is surprised, and is now under a certain intellectual excitement, being occupied and in a manner amused by the novelty of the event, and is exploring his changed condition. This defends him from sorrow. It is not until the funeral procession has departed from his doors, and the mourners have all returned to their ordinary pursuits, and forgotten the deceased, that the grief of the friend begins. In the midst of his work, in the midst of his leisure, in his thoughts which are now uncommunicated, in his successes which are now in vain, in his hopes which now are quickly checked and run low, he sees with bitterness how poor he is. As it is with the mourner, so it is with the man of Virtue in respect to the practice of virtue. The evil practice of the country and the time is exposed by some preacher of righteousness, and after some time the land is filled with the noise of the reform. Men congratulate themselves on the great evil they have escaped and on the signal progress of society. But it is not until after this tumult is over, and all have, one after another, come in to the new practice, and the reaction has occurred, and great numbers are disgusted and have gone back again, not until then does the true reformer, the noble man, begin to find his virtue and advantage. Through the clamor he has said nothing,

 —— he embraced the right which was shown, at once and forever. Now society is back again where it was before, but he has added this beauty to his life.

Le Peau d’Ane. You can do two things at a time; and when you have got your pockets full of chestnuts, and say I have lost my half-hour, behold you have got something besides, for the tops of the Silver Mountains of the White Island loomed up whilst you stood under the tree, and glittered for an instant; therefore there is no peau de chagrin.

Life. Everything good, we say, is on the highway. A virtuoso hunts up with great pains a landscape of Guercino, a crayon sketch of Salvator, but the Transfiguration, The Last Judgment, The Communion, are on the walls of the Vatican where every footman may see them without price. You have got for five hundredpounds an autograph receipt of Shakspeare; but for nothing a schoolboy can read Hamlet, and, if he has eyes, can detect secrets yet unpublished and of highest concernment therein. I think I will never read any but the commonest of all books: the Bible, Shakspeare, Milton, Dante, Homer,

Somebody cried to him out of the walnut woods, “Ho! Ho! Be sure not to get imposed upon. Ho! Ho!” And Arthur rubbed his eyes, looked round him, and bethought him that he would not again. But at night he found the whole journey was a blunder, and he was a dupe. The next morning when he woke, he heard his old neighbor calling to the cattle in the yard under his window, and when Arthur looked out, the man said, “Ho! Ho! Be sure you don’t get imposed upon. Ho! Ho!” Forewarned, thought Arthur once more.

The sannup and the squaw do not get drunk at the same time. They take turns in keeping sober, and husband and wife should never be low-spirited at the same time, but each should be able to cheer the other.

We learn with joy and wonder this new and flattering art of language, deceived by the exhilaration which accompanies the attainment of each new word. We fancy we gain somewhat. We gain nothing. It seemed to men that words come nearer to the thing; described the fact; were the fact. They learn later that they only suggest it. It is an operose, circuitous way of putting us in mind of the thing, — of flagellating our attention. But this was slowly discovered. With what good faith these old books of barbarous men record the genesis of the world. Their best attempts to narrate how it is that star and earth and man exist, run out into some gigantic mythology, which, when it is ended, leaves the beautiful principal facts where they were, and the stupid gazing fabulist just as far from them as at first. Garrulity is our religion and philosophy. They wonder and are angry that some persons slight their books and prefer the thing itself. But with all progress this happens, that speech becomes less, and finally ceases in a noble silence.

I, oh, I am only here to see. Droll privilege of Spectatorship that we all feel; I have an unquestioning presumption, on hearing that a good man is coming by, that this man is true, consistent, and his conscience greatly more faithful and effective than mine. And unluckily he has the same feeling respecting me and others, that not he, but I and they, are the responsible persons.

In our parties there is no great difference: the Democratic Party is not more human than the

Whig. I think the leaders, in my little experience, to be worse men than the Whig leaders. I think their democracy no more principled than the conservatism; that it is only a little worse Whiggism. They have no higher objects. To vote at all for either party is Whiggism, and it is only a little more to vote for those whose bias is conservatism. I have many points of sympathy with the Whigs in these “ dregs of Romulus,” and I cannot for a moment permit these profligate Tammany Hall and Morning Post adventurers to represent the cause of humanity and love.

It is odious that our fine geniuses should all have this imperfection, that they cannot do anything useful....

Cheerfulness is so much the order of nature that the superabundant glee of a child lying on its back and not yet strong enough to get up or to sit up, yet cooing, warbling, laughing, screaming with joy, is an image of independence which makes power no part of independence. Queenie looks at Edie kicking up both feet into the air, and thinks that Edie says “the world was made on purpose to carry round the little baby; and the world goes round the sun only to bring tittytime and creeping - on - the - floor - time to the Baby.”

Ogden respected nothing in — so much as this tenacious trick of asking at breakfast and on’Change, at work and at bedtime, between glasses of wine or drops taken for fever, questions touching God and duty, the salvation of the soul. The Devil take you and your soul! said Ogden; but on second thought nothing seemed to him that he had met within Marseilles more respectable than this determined curiosity and thoughtfulness in a being in so many ways inferior, in one so superior.

And really and truly, — so ought a person to end, — we cannot spare any the coarsest muniment of virtue, and the purest sense of justice that lives in any human breast needs a law founded on force as index and remembrancer.

Margaret [Fuller] described E. as hobgoblin nature and full of indirections. But he is a good vagabond and knows how to take a walk. The gipsy talent is inestimable in the country, and so rare. In a woman it would be bewitching. Margaret Fuller has not a particle, and only the possibility. And yet this is a relative talent, and to each there doubtless exists a gipsy-maker. I told Hawthorne yesterday that I think every young man at some time inclines to make the experiment of a dare-God and dare-devil originality like that of Rabelais. He would jump on the top of the nearest fence and crow. He makes the experiment, but it proves like the flight of pig-lead into the air, which cannot cope with the poorest hen. Irresistible custom brings him plump down, and he finds himself, instead of odes, writing gazettes and leases. Yet there is imitation and model, or suggestion, to the very archangels, if we knew their history, and if we knew Rabelais’s reading we should see the rill of the Rabelais river. Yet his hold of his place in Parnassus is as firm as Homer’s. A jester, but his is the jest of the world, and not of Touchstone or Clown or Harlequin. His wit is universal, not accidental, and the anecdotes of the time, which made the first butt of the satire and which are lost, are of no importance, as the wit transcends any particular mark, and pierces to permanent relations and interests. His joke will fit any town or community of men.

The style at once decides the high quality of the man. It flows like the river Amazon, so rich, so plentiful, so transparent, and with such long reaches, that longanimity or longsightedness which belongs to the Platos. No sand without lime, no short, chippy, indigent epigrammatist or proverbialist with docked sentences, but an exhaustless affluence.

It is only a young man who supposes there is anything new in Wall Street. The merchant who figures there, so much to his own satisfaction and to the admiration or fear or hatred of the younger or weaker competitors, is a very old business. You shall find him, his way, that is, of thinking concerning the world and men and property and eating and drinking and marriage and education and religion and government, — the whole concatenation of his opinions, the very shade of their color, the same laughter, the same knowingness, the same unbelief, and the same ability and taste, in Rabelais and Aristophanes. Panurge was good Wall Street. Pyrrhonism and Transcendentalism are just as old; and I am persuaded that by and by we shall find them in the chemical element, that excess of oxygen makes the sinner, and of hydrogen the saint.

“My evening visitors,” said that excellent Professor Fortinbras, “if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face. As soon as it is nine, I begin to curse them with internal execrations that are minute-guns.” And yet, he added, “The devil take half-hospitalities, this self-protecting civility whose invitations to dinner are determined exclusions from the heart of the inviter, as if he said, ‘ I invite you to eat, because I will not converse with you.’ If he dared only say it, that exception would be hospitality of angels, an admission to the thought of his heart.”

Mary Rotch inclined to speak of the spirit negatively and instead of calling it a light, “an oracle,” a “leading,” she said, “When she would do that she should not, she found an objection.”

Sad the swiftness with which life culminates and the humility of the expectations of the greatest part of men....

In the Indian summers, of which we have eight or ten every year, you can almost see the Indians under the trees in the wood. These are the reconciling days which come to graduate the autumn into winter, and to comfort us after the first attacks of the cold. Soothsayers, prediction as well as memory, they look over December and January into the crepuscular light of March and April.

This feeling I have respecting Homer and Greek, that in this great, empty continent of ours, stretching enormous almost from pole to pole, with thousands of long rivers and thousands of ranges of mountains, the rare scholar, who, under a farmhouse roof, reads Homer and the Tragedies, adorns the land. He begins to fill it with wit, to counterbalance the enormous disproportion of the unquickened earth. He who first reads Homer in America is its Cadmus and Numa, and a subtle but unlimited benefactor.

Rabelais is not to be skipped in literary history, as he is the source of so much proverb, story, and joke which are derived from him into all modern books in all languages. He is the Joe Miller of modern literature.

Thou shalt read Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Jamblichus, Porphyry, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch, Apuleius, Chaucer, Dante,Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakspeare, Jonson, Ford, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Marvell, More, Milton, Molière, Swedenborg, Goethe.

Every spinner is not a spider. Society — what a delicate result! No matter how good the associates, the society is sure to spoil, if the least overdone,... Do not let us meet to argue; let us meet to rest. Let us dispose quite unceremoniously of these obstreperous selves and of their vain talents, and dwell, for a little, in the great Peace. Self-respect and brotherly love seem equally to demand silence.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Books. Theophrastus said “that the most illiterate were able to speak in the presence of the most elegant persons, while they spake nothing but truth and reason.”

Every man writes after a trick, and you need not read many sentences to learn his whole trick. Richter is a perpetual exaggeration and I get nervous.

October is come, and the harvest home, and the need that the journalist should make his indexes for the winter’s preelections. Let us consider....

Our fine cousin reminded us of a fierce terrier who conceives it a duty for a dog of honor to bark at every passer-by, whether poet or reformer, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight.

Men are delicate ware to bring across the sea, more delicate than Sèvres porcelain and glass, or than tropical fruit, for the least non-reception of them in the thought and heart of those to whom they come makes cruelty, futility, and confusion. The thought that at once occurred when the strangers came was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither? Yea or nay? Or, prior to that, answer me this, Are you victimizable? Then, Will you waste my time? Or, Are you afraid I shall waste yours? If so, we shall agree like lovers.

(From E)

October 19.

To his Aunt Mary. Nothing has occurred to interest us so much as Doctor Channing’s departure, and perhaps it is saddest that this should interest us no more. Our broad country has few men; none that one would die for; worse, none that one could live for. If the great God shined so near in the breast that we could not look aside to other manifestations, such defamation of our Channings and Websters would be joy and praise; but if we are neither pious nor admirers of men — I wish you would write me what you think, after so long a perspective as his good days have afforded, of your old preacher. For a sick man, he has managed to shame many sound ones, and seems to have made the most of his time, and was bright to the last month and week. A most respectable life; and deserves the more praise that there is so much merely external, and a sort of creature of society, in it; — that sort of merit of which praise is the legitimate fee. He seems sometimes as the sublime of calculation, as the nearest that mechanism could get to the flowing of genius. His later years — perhaps his earlier — have been adorned by a series of sacrifices.... He has been, whilst he lived, the Star of the American Church, and has left no successor in the pulpit.... The sternest Judges of the Dead, who shall consider our wants and his austere self-application to them, and his fidelity to his lights, will absolve this Soul as it passes, and say, This man has done well. Perhaps I think much better things of him too. His Milton and Napoleon were excellent for the time (the want of drill and thorough breeding as a writer from which he suffered, being considered), and will be great ornaments of his biography.

We are very ungrateful, but we do not willingly give the name of poet to any the rarest talents, or industry and skill in metre. Here is Tennyson, a man of subtle and progressive mind, a perfect music-box for all manner of delicate tones and rhythms, to whom the language seems plastic, so superior and forceful in his thought. — But is he a poet? We read Burns and said, He is a poet. We read Tennyson and do him the indignity of asking the question, Is he poet? I feel in him the misfortune of the time. He is a strict contemporary, not Eternal Man. He does not stand out of our low limitations like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe on its high and mottled sides with rings of the herbage of every latitude, but in him as in the authors of Paracelsus, and Festus, I hear through all the varied music the native tones of an ordinary, to make my meaning plainer, say, of a vulgar man. They are men of talents who sing, but they are not the children of music. The particular which under this generality deserves most notice is this (and it is a black ingratitude to receive it so), that the argument of the poem is secondary, the finish of the verses primary. It is the splendor of the versification that draws me to the sense, and not the reverse. Who that has read the “Ode to Memory,” the “Poet,” the “Confessions of a Sensitive Mind,” the “Two Voices,” remembers the scope of the poem when it is named, and does not rather call to mind some beautiful lines; or, when reading it, does not need some effort of attention to find the thought of the writer, which is also rather poor and mean? Even in “Locksley Hall,” which is in a prouder tone, I have to keep a sharp lookout for the thought, or it will desert me. It is the merit of a poet to be unanalyzable. We cannot sever his word and thought. We listen because we must, and become aware of a crowd of particular merits, after we have been thoroughly commanded and elevated. I should not go to these books for a total diversion, and the stimulus of thought, as I should go to the Catskills or the Sea, or to Homer, Chaucer, or Shakspeare.

To the makers of artificial flowers, we say

“the better, the worse.” The best verse-maker, not inspired, is accountable for the sentiment and spirit of his piece; it never exceeds his own dimensions. But the inspired writer, let his verse be never so frivolous in its subject, or treatment, — a mere catch or street verse, — is yet not accountable for the piece, but it came as if out of a spiracle of the great animal world. Therefore, these little pieces about owls and autumn gardens and the sea are not tinged with London philosophy, which makes all the best pieces “disconsolate preachers,” but are quite independent of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, and are natural.

A poor man had an insufficient stove which it took him a great part of the winter to tend: he was up early to make the fire and very careful to keep it from going out. He interrupted his work at all hours of the day to feed it: he kept it late into the night, that the chamber walls need not get hopelessly cold. But it never warmed the room, he shivered over it, hoping it would be better, but he lost a great deal of time and comfort.

Once Latin and Greek had a strict relation to all the science and culture there was in Europe, and the mathematics had a momentary importance at some era of activity in physical science. These things became stereotyped as Education.

Life is so much greater than thought, that when we talk on an affair of grave personal interest with one with whom hitherto we have had only intellectual discourse, we use lower tones, much less oratory, but we come much nearer and are quickly acquainted.

(From N)

October 26.

Boston is not quite a mean place, since in walking yesterday in the street I met George Bancroft, Horatio Greenough, Sampson Reed, Sam Ward, Theodore Parker, George Bradford, and had a little talk with each of them.

I doubt if I recorded what pleased me so well, when Jones Very related it, years ago, that at the McLean Asylum the patients severally thanked him when he came away, and told him that he had been of great service to them.

The strangers have brought with them a complete library of the mystical writers, and the first feeling I have in looking at them is, I am too old for so many books. These are for younger men, and what fuel, what food for an open youth is here! Then comes the suggestion of our old plan of the University, but these men, though excellent, are none of them gifted for leaders. They are admirable instruments for a master’s hand, if some instituting Pythagoras, some marshalling Mirabeau, some royal Alfred were here; he could not have better professors than Alcott and Lane and Wright. But they are too desultory, ignorant, imperfect, and whimsical to be trusted for any progress, — excellent springs, worthless regulators. Alcott is a singular person, a natural Levite, a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, whom all good persons would readily combine, one would say, to maintain as a priest by voluntary contribution to live in his own cottage, literary, spiritual, and choosing his own methods of teaching and action. But for a founder of a family or institution, I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman.

Read Cornelius Agrippa this morning on the Vanity of Arts and Sciences; another specimen of that scribaciousness which distinguishes the immense readers of his time. Robert Burton is the head of the class.... One cannot afford to read fora few sentences. He will learn more by praying. They are good to read... for suggestion, I use them much for that. Plato or Shakspeare are not suggestive. Their method is so high and fine, that they take too much possession of us.

The communities will never have men in them, but only halves and quarters. They require a sacrifice of what cannot be sacrificed without detriment. The Community must always be ideal....

Men talk about ideas all the time, not persons; they name persons, but it is only illustratively, they are really pursuing thoughts — the men they speak of are like metaphors which will not bear to be too hard driven — will not go on all fours, as we say. Thus they praise the farmer’s life, but it is only to express their sense of some wrong in the merchants: praise the farmers a little more, you shall find they do not like it. A man is a partiality.

To-day I think the common people very right, and literary justice to be certain. These London Newspapers are sure to be just to each new book. Books full of matter they accept; for the matter is like the atmosphere or bread, and small thanks to the author of the book. But other books of thought, of poetry, of taste, in which the author mainly appears, they readily damn, if they are not admirable; and if they are not admirable, such books are damnable. But the people — no thanks to them — are always nearly right, have a low sort of right, that of common sense and instinct; and the man of talent and transcendent ingenuity is wrong.

“Waste not thy gifts

In profitless waiting for the gods’ descent.”

“Would God translate me to his throne, believe

That I should only listen to his words

To further my own aims.”

 —

Paracelsus is written for a natural history of a scholar, who, following his ambition through great successes, at last finds himself arrived at being a quack. He is too proud for this, very impatient of quackery, and tells his friend that he cannot afford to spare the luxury of being sincere to one friend, so unbosoms himself to him and in all scorn and bitterness depicts the quackery and the barrenness of his results and the despair into which he seems sinking. And here the Poet leaves him, a disease without a remedy. The laws of disease are as beautiful as the laws of health, say the physicians, and the poet is of that mind, and so contents himself with painting with great accuracy and eloquence the symptoms. But the poem is withering, the wolfish hunger for knowledge for its own sake.

Lane and Wright, our friends, have brought with them a thousand volumes, making, no doubt, one of the best mystical libraries in the world, and twelve manuscript volumes of J. P. Greaves, and his head in a plaster cast; and with these professions they think they have brought England with them; that the England they have left behind is a congregation of nothings, spiritless, and therefore not to be taxed or starved or whipped into revolution.

Could they not die? or succeed? or help themselves? or draw others? in any manner, I care not how, could they not be disposed of, and cease to hang there in the horizon an unsettled appearance, too great to be neglected, and not great enough to be of any aid or comfort to this great craving humanity?

Few strokes and much color: they draw a lion, and then a lion, and then a small red lion! there is a fact in the mind of the writer, but so near to the known facts in other minds that he does not venture to say it quite simply lest it should not prove worth saying, but partly conceals it in rich dress and figures.

Yet each near fact, like these which Paracelsus celebrates and which George Bradford bemoans, the wolfish hunger for knowledge which still leaves us hungry, and the defaced and degraded condition of the scholar, as if his heart and bowels had been drawn out, deserves nearest study, for this way of seeing it in men, in

Carlyle, or whatever dried and so-called dead scholar, is only the announcement of the shortcomings of the Universe. Nature itself has not been able, up to this moment, to drive her tendencies farther: and the Bulletin or Gazette in which always she announces her news is a man. So Carlyle, Browning, Bradford, must represent the Court of God up to the latest dates.

We do not care for the topic, but for the speaker. Mr. Webster, or Mr. Allston, may give me his opinions on what he will, I shall learn his philosophy; for really every point is equidistant from the centre, whether it be beets, rutabaga, or the Gnostic sect.

The material is nothing; proportion is all.

Fourier our Paracelsus.

Oh, if they could take a second step, and a third! The reformer is so confident, that all are erect whilst he puts the finger on your special abuse, and tells you your great want in America. I tell him, yea, but not in America only, but in the Universe ever since it was known, just this defect has appeared. But when he has anatomized the evil, he will be called out of the room, or have got something else in his head. Remedied it never will be. But Charles Lane gives a very good account of his conversation with Brownson, who would drive him to an argument. He took his paper and pencil out of his pocket, and asked Brownson to give him the names of the profoundest men in America. Brownson stopped, and gave him one, and then another, and then his own for a third. Brownson never will stop and listen, neither in conversation, but what is more, not in solitude.

Men of aim must always rule the aimless. And yet there will always be singing-birds.

Union. Many voices call for it, Fourier, Owen, Alcott, Channing. And its effect will be magical. That is it which shall renovate institutions and destroy drudgery. But not in the way these men think, in none of their ways. But only in a method that combines union with isolation: silent union, actual separateness; ideal union, actual independence.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Time respects only what he has himself made.

The Englishmen remarked that the greatest interior advantage which they observed in our Community over theirs was in the Women. In England the women were quite obtuse to any liberal thought; whilst here they are intelligent and ready.

Henry Thoreau made, last night, the fine remark that, as long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way, governments, society, and even the sun and moon and stars, as astrology may testify.

“T is a pity that we should fail in our ambition to live well, since, I suppose, all considerate persons must agree that, although there is selfishness and frivolity, yet the general purpose in the great number of people is fidelity... Each of us, too, has at home in the shape of woman (who is naturally good) a directing conscience to hold him in the right. And yet we do no better; yet we get on so little way; it seems as if there must be mountains of difficulty to lift.

November 11.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit....

To-day I have the feeling, to a degree not experienced by me before, that discussions, like that of yesterday and many the like in which I have participated, invade and injure me. I often have felt emptiness and restlessness to a sort of hatred of the human race after such prating by me and my fellows, but, never so seriously as now, that absence from them is better for me than the taking an active part in them.

You may associate on what grounds you like, for economy, or for good neighborhood, for a school, or for whatever reason, only do not say that the Divine Spirit enjoins it. The Spirit detaches you from all associations, and makes you, to your own astonishment, secretly a member of the Universal Association, but it descends to no specialties, draws up no Articles of a Society, but leaves you just as you were for that matter, to be guided by your particular convenience and circumstance whether to join with others, or whether to go alone.

It seems to be true that our New England population was settled by the most religious and ideal of the Puritans of England. It is natural enough that we should be more ideal than old England.

It is taking a great liberty with a man to offer to lend him a book, as if he also had not access to that truth to which the bookmaker had access. Each of the books, if I read, invades me, displaces me; the law of it is, that it should be first, that I should give way to it; I, who have no right to give way, and, if I would be tranquil and divine again, I must dismiss the book.

And yet I expect a great man to be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.

Every book serves us at last only by adding some one word to our vocabulary, or perhaps two or three. And perhaps that word shall not be in the volume, or shall only be the author’s name. And yet there are books of no vulgar origin, but the work and the proof of faculties so comprehensive, so nearly equal to the universe which they paint, that although one shuts them also with meaner ones, yet he says with a sigh the while, This were to be read in long thousands of years by some stream in Paradise.

Do not gloze and prate and mystify. Here is our dear, grand Alcott says, You shall dig in my field for a day and I will give you a dollar when it is done, and it shall not be a business transaction! It makes me sick. Whilst money is the measure really adopted by us all as the most convenient measure of all material values, let us not affectedly disuse the name, and mystify ourselves and others; let us not “say no, and take it.” We may very well and honestly have theoretical and practical objections to it; if they are fatal to the use of money and barter, let us disuse them; if they are less grave than the inconvenience of abolishing traffic, let us not pretend to have done with it, whilst we eat and drink and wear and breathe it.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble. This matter of the lectures, for instance. The engagement drives your thoughts and studies to a head, and enables you to do somewhat not otherwise practicable; that is the action. Then there is the reaction; for when you bring your discourse to your auditory, it shows differently. You have more power than you had thought of, or less. The thing fits, or does not fit; is good or detestable.

It is a peculiar feature of New England that young farmers and mechanics who work all summer on the soil, or in a shop, take a school in the winter months. Mr. Fay, the pump-maker in this town, goes to Marlborough this winter for that purpose; young Wheeler and Wood do the same thing.

Edmund Hosmer was willing to sell his farm five years ago for $3800 and go to the West. He found and still finds that the Irish, of which there are two hundred in this town, are underselling him in labor, and he does not see how he and his boys can do those things which only he is willing to do; for, go to market he will not, nor shall his boys with his consent do any of those things for which high wages are paid, as, for example, take any shop, or the office of foreman or agent in any corporation wherein there seems to be a premium paid for faculty, as if it were paid for the faculty of cheating. He does not see how he and his children are to prosper here, and the only way for them is to run, the Caucasian before the Irishman.

I call the terror of starving, Skepticism, and say that I do not believe that I can be put in any condition in which I cannot honestly maintain myself, and honestly be rich, that is, not be poor. It is in vain that you put to me any case of misfortune or calamity — the extremest, the Manchester weaver, the Carolina slave; I doubt not that in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be party to his present estate. Put me in his condition, and I should see its outlets and reliefs, though now I see them not. The main and capital remedy of the religious sentiment and all the abundance of its counsels for his special distresses, it were atheism to doubt. But do not require of me, sitting out here, to say what he, within there, ought to do. I can never meddle with other people’s facts, I have enough of my own. But this one thing I know, that, if I do not clear myself, I am in fault, and that my condition is matched, point for point, with every other man’s. I can only dispose of my own facts.

Last night Henry Thoreau read me verses which pleased, if not by beauty of particular lines, yet by the honest truth, and by the length of flight and strength of wing; for most of our poets are only writers of lines or of epigrams. These of Henry’s at least have rude strength, and we do not come to the bottom of the mine. Their fault is, that the gold does not yet flow pure, but is drossy and crude. The thyme and marjoram are not yet made into honey; the assimilation is imperfect. It seems as if the poetry was all written before time was.... But it is a great pleasure to have poetry of the second degree also, and mass here, as in other instances, is some compensation for superior quality, for I find myself stimulated and rejoiced like one who should see a cargo of sea-shells discharged on the wharf, whole boxes and crates of conchs, cypræas, cones, neritas, cardiums, murexes, though there should be no pearl-oyster nor one shell of great rarity and value among them.

Time is the little grey man who takes out of his breast-pocket first a pocketbook, then a Dollond telescope, then a Turkey carpet, then four saddled and bridled nags and a sumptuous canvas tent. We are accustomed to chemistry and it does not surprise us. But chemistry is but a name for changes and developments as wonderful as those of this Breast-Pocket.

I was a little chubby boy trundling a hoop in Chauncy Place, and spouting poetry from Scott and Campbell at the Latin School. But Time, the little grey man, has taken out of his vest-pocket a great, awkward house (in a corner of which I sit down and write of him), some acres of land, several full-grown and several very young persons, and seated them close beside me; then he has taken that chubbiness and that hoop quite away (to be sure he has left the declamation and the poetry), and here left a long, lean person threatening to be a little grey man, like himself.

Religion has failed! Yes, the religion of another man has failed to save me. But it has saved him. We speak of the Past with pity and reprobation, but through the enormities, evils, and temptations of the past, saints and heroes slipped into heaven. There is no spot in Europe but has been a battle-field; there is no religion, no church, no sect, no year of history, but has served men to rise by, to scale the walls of heaven, and enter into the banquets of angels. Our fathers are saved. The same, precisely the same conflicts have always stood as now, with slight shiftings of scene and costume.

(From Z)

November 19.

I should willingly give you an account of one of these conversations. For example, we had one yesterday afternoon. I begged Alcott to paint out his project, and he proceeded to say that there should be found a farm of a hundred acres in excellent condition, with good build ings, a good orchard, and grounds which admitted of being laid out with great beauty; and this should be purchased and given to them, in the first place. I replied, You ask too much. This is not solving the problem; there are hundreds of innocent young persons, whom, if you will thus stablish and endow and protect, will find it no hard matter to keep their innocency. And to see their tranquil household, after all this has been done for them, will in no wise instruct or strengthen me. But he will instruct and strengthen me, who, there where he is, unaided, in the midst of poverty, toil, and traffic, extricates himself from the corruptions of the same and builds on his land a house of peace and benefit, good customs, and free thoughts. But, replied Alcott, how is this to be done? How can I do it who have a wife and family to maintain? I answered that he was not the person to do it, or he would not ask the question. When he that shall come is born, he will not only see the thing to be done, but invent the life, invent the ways and means of doing it. The way you would show me does not commend itself to me as the way of greatness.

The Spirit does not stipulate for land and exemption from taxes, but, in great straits and want, or even on no land, nowhere to lay its head, it manages, without asking for land, to occupy and enjoy all land, for it is the law by which land exists; it classifies and distributes the whole creation anew. If you ask for application to particulars of this Way of the Spirit, I shall say that the cooperation you look for is such cooperation as colleges and all secular institutions look for, — money. True cooperation comes in another manner. A man quite unexpectedly shows me that which I and all souls looked for, and I cry, “That is it; Take me and mine; I count it my chief good, to do in my way that very thing.” — That is real cooperation, unlimited, uncalculating, infinite cooperation.

The Spirit is not half so slow or mediate, or needful of conditions or organs, as you suppose. A few persons in the course of my life have at certain moments appeared to me, not measured men of five feet, five or ten inches, but large, enormous, indefinite; but these were not great proprietors, nor heads of communities, nor men in office, or in any action which affected large numbers of men, but, on the contrary, nothing could be more private, they were in some want, or affliction, or other relation which called out the emanation of the Spirit, which dignified and transfigured them to my eye. And the good Spirit will burn and blaze in the cinders of your condition, in the drudgeries of your endeavor, — in the very process of extricating us from the evils of want and of a bad society.

This fatal fault in the logic of our friends still appears: Their whole doctrine is spiritual, but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money. If I should give them anything, it would be facility and not beneficence. Unless one should say after the maxims of the world, Let them drink their own error to saturation, and this will be the best hellebore. I know the Spirit by its victorious tone.

An immense force has that man whose part is taken, and who does not wait for society in any part of his conduct of life. Now it is plain, of our three adventurers, that this gives them the most of their importance with us, and the deductions to be made from each are the hesitations at the plunge, the reserves which they still make and the reliances and expectations they still cherish on the arm of flesh, the aid of others.

A reformer must be born; he can never be made such by reasons. All reform, like all form, is by the grace of God, and not otherwise.

You ask, O Theanor, said Amphitryon, that I should go forth from this palace with my wife and my children and that you and your family may enter and possess it. The same request in substance has been often made to me before by numbers of persons. Now I also think that I and my wife ought to go forth from this house, and work all day in the fields, and lie at night under some thicket, but I am waiting where I am, only until some god shall point out to me which among all these applicants, yourself or some other, is the rightful claimant.

Transcendentalism is the Saturnalia of faith. It is faith run mad. Nature is transcendental...

Lethe. It seemed strange to men that they should thus forget so fast, that they became suspicious, that there was some treachery, and began to suspect their food that perhaps the bread they eat, or’ the flesh, was narcotic. Hence rose Graham societies.

Government should find its perfectness in its obedience and good conduction of the elemental fluids. Because persons will have their effect, and things theirs — we are safe anyhow.

I think the power of things such that property’s will is done whether by law, or against law, openly or underhand. It was obviously the feeling and the right of a ruder age to say persons must make law for persons, property for property. But now we begin to feel that persons are the only interest, and that property will follow them; that a special care need not be given to the farm. Let us be wise, and the culture of men being the end of government, love will write the law, and the law which has been so given will be gentle.

Since I have been here in New York I have grown less diffident of my political opinions. I supposed once the Democracy must be right. I see that they are aimless. Whigs have the best men, Democrats the best cause. But the last are destructive, not constructive. What hope, what end have they?

(From K)

November 25.

Yesterday I read Dickens’s American Notes. It answers its end very well, which plainly was to make a readable book, nothing more. Truth is not his object for a single instant, but merely to make good points in a lively sequence, and he proceeds very well. As an account of America it is not to be considered for a moment: it is too short, and too narrow, too superficial, and too ignorant, too slight, and too fabulous, and the man totally unequal to the work. A very lively rattle on that nuisance, a sea voyage, is the first chapter; and a pretty fair example of the historical truth of the whole book. We can hear throughout every page the dialogue between the author and his publisher,— “Mr. Dickens, the book must be entertaining — that is the essential point. Truth? Damn truth! I tell you, it must be entertaining.” As a picture of American manners nothing can be falser. No such conversations ever occur in this country in real life, as he relates. He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and, when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature; and the scene might as truly have been laid in Wales or in England as in the States. Monstrous exaggeration is an easy secret of romance. But Americans who, like some of us Massachusetts people, are not fond of spitting, will go from Maine to New Orleans, and meet no more annoyance than we should in Britain or France. So with “yes,” so with “fixings,” so with soap and towels; and all the other trivialities which this trifler detected in travelling over half the world. The book makes but a poor apology for its author, who certainly appears in no dignified or enviable position....

(From N)

November 26.

The young people, like Brownson, Channing, Greene, Elizabeth P. Peabody, and possibly

Bancroft, think that the vice of the age is to exaggerate individualism, and they adopt the word l’humanité from Le Roux, and go for “the race.” Hence the Phalanx, Owenism, Simonism, the Communities. The same spirit in theology has produced the Puseyism, which endeavors to rear “the Church” as a balance and overpoise to the conscience.

London, New York, Boston, are phalanxes ready-made, where you shall find concerts, books, balls, medical lectures, prayers, or Punch and Judy, according to your fancy, on any night or day.

It is indifferent whether you show a new object to the child, or a new relation in an old object. You may give him another toy, or you may show him the iron block among his blocks is a magnet. The avaricious man seeks to add to the number of his toys, the scientific man to find new relations.

You never can hurt us by new ideas. God speed you, gentlemen reformers.

Bancroft and Bryant are historical democrats who are interested in dead or organized, but not in organizing, liberty. Bancroft would not know George Fox, whom he had so well eulogized, if he should meet him in the street. It is like Lyell’s science, who did not know by sight, when George B. Emerson showed him them, the shells he has described in his Geology.

I think four walls one of the best of our institutions. A man comes to me, and oppresses me by his presence; he looks very large and unanswerable. I cannot dispose of him whilst he stays; he quits the room, and passes, not only out of the house, but, as it were, out of the horizon; he is a mere phantom or ghost. I think of him no more. I recover my sanity, the universe dawns on me again.

W. H. Channing thinks that, not in solitude, but in love, in the actual society of beloved persons, have been his highest intuitions. To me it sounds like shallow verbs and nouns; for in closest society a man is by thought wrapt into remotest isolation.

No man can be criticised but by a greater than he. Do not, then, read the reviews.

Wordsworth dismisses a whole regiment of poets from their vocation.

The world is waking up to the idea of Union.... [But] the Union is only perfect when all the Unities are absolutely isolated. Each man being the Universe, if he attempt to join himself to others, he instantly is jostled, crowded, cramped, halved, quartered, or on all sides diminished of his proportion, and, the stricter the union, the less and more pitiful he is. But let him go alone, and recognizing the Perfect in every moment with entire obedience, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the whole work will be done with concert, though no man spoke; government will be adamantine without any governor.

Union ideal, — in actual individualism, actual union; then would be the culmination of science, useful art, fine art, and culmination on culmination.

The tongue of flame, the picture the newspapers give, at the late fire in Liverpool, of the mountains of burning cotton over which the flame arose to twice their height, the volcano also from which the conflagration rises toward the zenith an appreciable distance toward the stars, — these are the most affecting symbols of what man should be. A spark of fire is infinitely deep, but a mass of fire reaching from earth upward into the heaven, this is the fire of the robust, united, burning, radiant fuel.

Fate, yes, our music-box only plays certain tunes, and never a sweeter strain but we are assured that our barrel is not a dead, but a live barrel, — nay, is only a part of the tune, and changes like that.

Conservatism stands on this, that a man cannot jump out of his skin; and well for him that he cannot, for his skin is the world; and the stars of heaven do hold him there: in the folly of men glitters the wisdom of God.

This old Bible, if you pitch it out of the window with a fork, it comes bounce back again.

Several Steps. A man’s greatness is to advance on a line. Simple recipiency is the virtue of Space not of Man; to him belongs progress, he builds himself on himself. Angelo, Dante, Milton, Swedenborg, Pythagoras, Paracelsus were men of great robustness; they built, not only with energy but symmetry, and their work could be called architecture. Napoleon lately was an architect....

(From E)

December.

The trick of every man’s conversation we soon learn. In one, this remorseless Buddhism lies all around, threatening with death and night. We make a little fire in our cabin, but we dare not go abroad one furlong into the murderous cold. Every thought, every enterprise, every sentiment, has its ruin in this horrid Infinite which circles us and awaits our dropping into it. If killing all Buddhists would do the least good, we would have a slaughter of the Innocents directly.

In Orpheus, the Demiurgus interrogates Night, thus, —

“Tell me how all things will as one subsist,

Yet each its nature separate preserve.”

It is the problem proposed to the Fourierist.

The blue sky is a fit covering for a cottage or a market and for the meeting of supernatural forms and events of magic and of fairyland. Could my most poetic dream fall true and realize itself to my faith in some golden moment in the presence and by the concurrence of all gods, I should look upward into the identical web of blue depth which I see as I trudge along the road to the Post-Office. And yet no dream could have that sky. It is like the touch of God, it discerns between shadow and substance. The look of the zenith, — would not our friend Lane reckon that a “real experience”?

There was a conversation last evening at our good Mrs. B.’s on “the Family,” which was quite too narrowing and exclusive. There was a very unnecessary hostility in a great deal of the talk. A hostility in the hearers was presumed, and we were valiant men full of fight, ready and able to break a lance for our faith. Lane is so skilful, instant, and witty, there is no loitering or repetition in his speech, that I delight to hear him and forgive everything to so much ability: yet he is very provoking and warlike in his manner. He rails at trades and cities, and yet it is obvious in every word he says how much he is the debtor to both. There is a wisdom of life about them, a toughness and solidity of experience, that makes them always entertaining and makes Alcott’s words look pale and lifeless.

I came away from the company in better spirits than from any party this long time, for I did not speak one word. Perhaps the proper reply to the tone of dogmatism should have been, Shall there be no more cakes and ale? Why so much stress?

‘Two Meals a Day. A poet may eat bread for his breakfast, and bread and flesh for his dinner, but for his supper he must eat stars only.

Romeo was minister of Raymond Béranger, Count of Provence. He managed the affairs of his master so well that each one of his four daughters became a queen. Margaret, the eldest, was married to Louis IX of France; Eleanor, the next, to Henry III, of England; Sancha, the third, to Richard, Henry’s brother, and King of the Romans; and Beatrice, the youngest, to Charles I, King of Naples and Sicily, and brother to Louis. The Provençal Barons, enviers of Romeo, instigated the Count his master to demand of him an account of the revenues he had so carefully husbanded, and the Prince as lavishly disbursed. Then Romeo demanded the little mule, the staff, and the scrip, with which he had first entered into the Count’s service, a stranger pilgrim from the shrine of St. James in Galicia, and departed as he came, nor was it ever known whence he was, or whither he went. (See Dante, Paradiso, Canto VI.)

O what would Nature say?

She spared no speech to-day;

The fungus and the bulrush spoke,

Answered the pine-tree and the oak,

The wizard South blew down the glen,

Filled the straits and filled the wide;

Each maple leaf turned up its silver side.

The south wind blows; I leave my book.

I need not bide in nature long,

Could I transfer my life to song;

It needs the lapsing centuries

To tell you the wit of the passing breeze.

And yet the landscape taunts me,

Advancing, then receding....

“Full many a glorious morning have I seen.” That is a bold saying. Few men have seen many mornings. This day when I woke I felt the peace of the morning, and knew that I seldom behold it.

I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods. Wherever that music comes it has its sequel. It is the voice of the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying, “Here I am.” It is interrogative: it is prophetic: and this Cassandra is believed:” Whew! Whew! Whew! How is real estate here in the swamp and wilderness? Ho for Boston! Whew! Whew! Down with that forest on the side of the hill. I want ten thousand chestnut sleepers. I want cedar posts, and hundreds of thousands of feet of boards. Up! my masters of oak and pine! You have waited long enough — a good part of a century in the wind and stupid sky. Ho for axes and saws, and away with me to Boston! Whew! Whew! I will plant a dozen houses on this pasture next moon, and a village anon; and I will sprinkle yonder square mile with white houses like the broken snow-banks that strow it in March.”

History. Something gets possession and elbows all the rest aside. Yet there hang these clouds of dissenters and fanatics and prophets, like Arabs in the horizon or on the mountains waiting their turn and kingdom. Fixtures none. The world is the prey and dominion of thoughts. History is a foolish, pragmatic misstatement. As easily might you survey a cloud, which is now as big as your hat, and before you have measured its first angle, covers ten acres. Thoughts work and make what you call the world. Heroes are the lucky individuals who stand at the pole and are the largest and ripest. —

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.... These [idealists] have no memory, no retrospect, no baggage-waggon of a tradition at their back, but have their eye forward and their foot forward, for their whole attention is to the fact of creation, — of Creation now being and to be.

The world is too rich for us. We have hardly set our hearts on one toy, say a house and land, before a poetic reputation seems the high prize, then eloquence, then political power, then asceticism, and then art; and thus each of many things draws us aside from the other. If in choosing one, we could drink a cup of Lethe to the others, we should not be robbed of satisfaction.

(From Z)

December 10.

A good visit to Boston, and saw Sam Ward and Ellery to advantage, and my Parian sister. Ellery has such an affectionate speech, and a tone that is tremulous with emotion, that he is a flower in the wind. He says he has an immense dispersing power. Ward is wise and beautiful: and said and admitted the best things. He had found out, he said, why people die: it is to break up their style.

Life would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not full of surprises. I wake in the morning, and go to my window, and see the day break, and receive from the spectacle a new secret of Nature that goes to compromise all my past manner of living, and invite me to a new.

I am filled with a great tranquillity. I seek to express this somehow and find that I have cut out a Hesperus in marble. Wonderful is the Alembic of Nature through which the sentient mind of tranquillity becomes the figure of a youth; but the feeling manages somehow to shed itself over the stone, as if that were porous to love and truth.  Yet is not that figure final or adequate; it is a prison rather of the thought, of the emotion, if I am contented with it. The thought scorns it, mocks at it as some wretched caricature; the thought has already transcended it, is already something else, has taken twenty thousand shapes, whilst poor Hans was hammering at this one. The oak leaf is perfect, a kind of absolute realized, but every work of art is only relatively good; — the artist advances, and finds all his fine things naught.

Nature tends to a Fact. She will be expressed. Then scholars are her victims of expression.

You who see the artist, the orator, the poet too near, and find them victims of partiality,... pronounce them failures...

Very hard it is to keep the middle point. It is a very narrow line.

W. said, that there was a great deal of deferring and a great deal of wondering and quoting, but of calm affirming very little. Cannot a man only communicate that which he knows? But Nature hates calm system-makers, her methods are saltatory, impulsive. Man lives by pulses, all his organic movements are such, and all chemical, and ethereal; even seem to be undulatory or alternate. And so with the mind, it antagonizes ever, and gets on so.

The Yankee is one who if he once gets his teeth set on a thing, all creation can’t make him let go; who, if he can get hold anywhere of a rope’s end or a spar, will not let it go, but will make it carry him; if he can but find so much as a stump or a log, will hold on to it and whittle out of it a house and barn, a farm and stock, a mill-seat and a village, a railroad and a bank, and various other things equally useful and entertaining, — a seat in Congress or a foreign mission, for example. But these no doubt are inventions of the enemy.

C.’s eyes are a compliment to the human race; that steady look from year to year makes Phidian sculpture and Poussin landscape still real and contemporary.

The harvest will be better preserved and go farther, laid up in private bins, in each farmer’s corn-barn, and each woman’s basket, than if it were kept in national granaries. In like manner, an amount of money will go farther if expended by each man and woman for their own wants, and in the feeling that this is their all, than if expended by a great Steward, or National Commissioners of the Treasury. Take away from me the feeling that I must depend on myself, give me the least hint that I have good friends and backers there in reserve who will gladly help me, and instantly I relax my diligence. I obey the first impulse of generosity that is to cost me nothing, and a certain slackness will creep over my conduct of my affairs. Here is a bank-note found of one hundred dollars. Let it fall into the hands of an easy man who never earned the estate he spends, and see how little difference it will make in his affairs. At the end of the year he is just as much behindhand as ever, and could not have done at all without that hundred. Let it fall into the hands of a poor and prudent woman, and every shilling and every cent of it tells, goes to reduce debt, or to add to instant and constant comfort, mends a window, buys a blanket or a pelisse, gets a stove instead of the old cavernous fireplace, all chimney.

All the Channings are men of the world; have a little silex in their composition, which gives a good edge, and protects them like a coat of mail. Ellery has the manners and address of a merchant.

Elizabeth Hoar affirms that religion bestows a refinement which she misses in the best-bred people not religious, and she considers it essential therefore to the flower of gentleness.

Come dal fuoco il caldo, esser diviso

Non puô’I bel dall’ eterno.

MICHEL ANGELO.

I have no thoughts to-day; What then? What difference does it make? It is only that there does not chance to-day to be an antagonism to evolve them, the electricity is the more accumulated; a week hence you shall meet somebody or something that shall draw from you a shower of sparks.

Travelling is a very humiliating experience to me. I never go to any church like a railroad car for teaching me my deficiencies.

For any grandeur of circumstance length of time seems an indispensable element. Who can attach anything majestic to creatures so shortlived as we men? The time that is proper to spend in mere musing is too large a fraction of threescore years and ten to be indulged to that greatness of behavior. The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

There is a comparative innocence in this country and a corresponding health. We do not often see bald boys and gray-haired girls; children victims of gout and apoplexy; the street is not full of near-sighted and deaf people; nor do we see those horrid mutilations and disgusting forms of disease as leprosy and undescribed varieties of plague which European streets exhibit, stumps of men.

Charles Lane said that our people do not appear to him to have that steadfastness that can be calculated on. Thus, Green may be a trader, or a priest, or a soldier as probably as a progressive reformer. And so Davis and Robbins and the rest. This results from the greater freedom of circumstance. English and Europeans are guided as with iron belt of condition.

The fine and finest young people despise life;...

Naming, yes, that is the office of the newspapers of the world, these famous editors from Moses, Homer, Confucius, and so on, down to Goethe and Kant: they name what the people have already done, and the thankful people say, “ Doctor, ‘t is a great comfort to know the disease whereof I die.”

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1842

Vishnu Sarna; Pythagoras; Æschylus; Sophocles; Euripides; Aristophanes; Symposium of Plato, Xenophon, and Phocion; Theophrastus; Plotinus; Porphyry; Iamblichus; St. Augustine, Confessions; Synesius, On Providence; Proclus; Apuleius; Saadi; Dante, Paradiso; Chaucer; Erasmus; Michel Angelo, Sonnets; Sir Thomas More; Rabelais; Cornelius Agrippa, The Vanity of Arts and Sciences; Cervantes; Robert Burton; Chapman; Behmen; Massinger; Ford; George Fox; Marvell; Molière; Dryden; Otway; Swift; Pope; Doctor Johnson; Pestalozzi; Goethe; Sheridan; Talleyrand; Richter; Reimer; Robert Owen; Fourier; Manzoni,! Promessi Sposi; Daniel Webster; Doctor Channing; Edward Everett; Shelley; Bryant; Carlyle; James P. Greaves; Lyell; John Clare, Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery; Pusey; Bancroft; George B. Emerson; Hawthorne; John Sterling, Dœdalus; Disraeli, Vivian Grey; Bulwer, Zanoni; George Borrow, The Zincali; Tennyson, second volume of Poems; Browning, Paracelsus; Bailey, Festus; Westland Marston, The Patrician s Daughter; George H. Colton, Tecumseh;

William Henry Channing; William Ellery Channing, Poems; Thoreau, Poems; Alcott; Orestes A. Brownson; Albert Brisbane; Theodore Parker; Margaret Fuller; Charles K. Newcomb; Balzac, Peau de Chagrin; [English writers, friends of Mr. Alcott] Charles Lane; Henry G. Wright; John A. Heraud; Goodwyn Barmby; Frances Barham; “Corporal Spohn”; Ernest, a poem; “The Plain Speaker, edited by Christopher Greene and William M. Chace of Providence.

JOURNAL

LECTURES IN NEW YORK AND BALTIMORE

VISIT TO WASHINGTON

EDITING DIAL

WEBSTER IN CONCORD

BROOK FARM

JOURNAL XXXIV

1843

(From Journals Z, R, and U)

Secondo alia fede di ciascuno.

And whatsoever soul has perceived anything of truth shall be safe from harm until another period. — Plato, Phoedrus.

[IN January, Mr. Emerson set forth on a long lecturing trip. He went to Philadelphia, probably visiting there his friend and loving schoolmate, Rev. William H. Furness; thence by rail to Baltimore, where he gave two lectures, visiting Washington, between them, after an interval of sixteen years. He then gave his course on “New England” in New York, in February before the Berean Society: I, Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race; II, Trade; III, Manners and Customs of New England; IV, Recent Literature and Spiritual Influences; V, Results.

Meantime Henry Thoreau, chivalrous, universally helpful, witty, and kind, had manned the wall at home for his absent friend, and had also relieved him of much editorial work for the Dial. This will appear in the Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Mr. F. B. Sanborn, for that period.]

(From Z)

BALTIMORE, BARNUM’S HOTEL, January 7, 1843.

Here to-day from Philadelphia. The railroad, which was but a toy coach the other day, is now a dowdy, lumbering country wagon. Yet it is not prosaic, as people say, but highly poetic, this strong shuttle which shoots across the forest, swamp, river, and arms of the sea, binding city to city. The Americans take to the little contrivance as if it were the cradle in which they were born.

AT PHILADELPHIA.

Philosophy shakes hands at last with the simplest Methodist and teaches one fact with him, namely, that it is the grace of God, — all grace,

 — no inch of space left for the impertinence of human will. Everything is good which a man does naturally, and nothing else: and sitting in railroad cars, happy is he who is moved to talk, and knows nothing about it; and happy he who is moved to sit still, and knows not that he sits still; but I hate him with a perfect hatred who thinks of himself. Let a man hate eddies, hate the sides of the river, but keep the middle of the stream. The hero did nothing apart and odd, but travelled on the highway and went to the same tavern as the whole people, and was very heartily and naturally there, no dainty, protected person.

“Every bullet will hit its mark if it is first dipped in the marksman’s blood.”

It makes men very bad to talk good.

An American is served like a noble in these city hotels; and his individuality as much respected; and he may go imperially along all the highways of iron or of water. I like it very well that in the heart of democracy I find such practical illustration of high theories.

Mrs. Siddons said to her niece, Fanny Kemble, “You are an extraordinary girl, but you are not Mrs. Siddons yet, though many will tell you that you are.”

AT WASHINGTON, January 11, 12, 13, 14.

“The Winter Arrangement to the South” advertises “the great central mail route through from Baltimore to Charleston, with but three changes of Person and Baggage.”

January 16.

So much novel-reading ought not to leave the young men of the land quite unaffected, and doubtless does idealize them. They must study noble behavior, and this dignity of hotel armchairs is not quite unsupported by inward dignity.

I understand poverty much better than riches; and it is odd that one of my friends who is rich seems to me always accidentally so, and in character made to be poor.

I do not observe that many men can aid others in the direct way.

Commonly every man occupies every inch of his ground. The poor or the middle class can better help than the richer.

Giles Waldo told me of one of his friends who gambled, not for winnings, but for bread, and with the members of the Legislature of Indiana; and the men whose money he won liked him so well that they one day made him clerk of the House of Representatives, much to his surprise, and, if he had remained in that country, would have made him Secretary of State.

In Philadelphia, they play chess in all houses. At the Athenæum, a game goes on behind a screen at all hours, and whenever I was in the room I noticed several spectators watching the moves of the players.

NEW YORK, February 7.

I am greatly pleased with the merchants. In rail car and hotel it is common to meet only the successful class, and so we have favorable specimens: but these discover more manly power of all kinds than scholars; behave a great deal better, converse better, and have inexpensive and sufficient manners.

Dreamlike travelling on the railroad. The towns through which I pass between Philadelphia and New York make no distinct impression. They are like pictures on a wall. The more, that you can read all the way in a car a French novel.

February 7.

Nature. Nature asked, Whether troop and baggage be two things; whether the world is all troop or all baggage, or whether there be any troop that shall not one day be baggage? Easy, she thinks it, to show you the Universal Soul: we have all sucked that orange; but would you please to mention what is an Individual? She apologized for trifling with you in your nonage, and adding a little sugar to your milk that you might draw the teat, and a little glory afterward to important lessons, but declared she would never tell you another fib, if you had quite settled that Buddhism was better than hands and feet, and would keep that conviction in the presence of two persons. As for far and too far, she wondered what it meant. She admires people who read, and people who look at pictures, but if they read until they write, or look at pictures until they draw them, she curses them up and down. She has the oddest tastes and behavior. An onion, which is all coat, she dotes on; and among birds she admires the godwit; but when I hinted that a blue weed grew about my house called Self-heal, she said, — a coxcomb named it; but she teaches cobwebs to resist the tempest, and when a babe’s cries drove away a lion, she almost devoured the darling with kisses.. She says her office of Dragoman is vacant, though she has been much pestered with applications, and if you have a talent of asking questions, she will play with you all your life; but if you can answer questions, she will propose one, which, if you answer, she will die first. She hates authors, but likes Montaigne.

Webster. Webster is very dear to the Yankees because he is a person of very commanding understanding with every talent for its adequate expression. The American, foreigners say, always reasons, and he is the most American of the Americans. They have no abandonment, but dearly love logic, as all their churches have so long witnessed. His external advantages are very rare and admirable; his noble and majestic frame, his breadth and projection of brows, his coal-black hair, his great cinderous eyes, his perfect self-possession, and the rich and well-modulated thunder of his voice (to which I used to listen, sometimes, abstracting myself from his sense merely for the luxury of such noble explosions of sound) distinguish him above all other men. In a million you would single him out. In England, he made the same impression by his personal advantages as at home, and was called the Great Western. In speech he has a great good sense, — is always pertinent to time and place, and has an eye to the simple facts of nature, — to the place where he is, to the hour of the day, to the sun in heaven, to his neighborhood to the sea or to the mountains, — but very sparingly notices these things, and clings closely to the business part of his speech with great gravity and faithfulness. “I do not inflame,” he said on one occasion, “ I do not exaggerate; I avoid all incendiary allusion.” He trusts to his simple strength of statement — in which he excels all men — for the attention of his assembly. His statement is lucid throughout, and of equal strength. He has great fairness and deserves all his success in debate, for he always carries a point from his adversary by really taking superior ground, as in the Hayne debate. There are no puerilities, no tricks, no academical play in any of his speeches, — they are all majestic men of business. Every one is a first-rate Yankee.

He has had a faithful apprenticeship to his position, for he was born in New Hampshire, a farmer’s son, and his youth spent in those hardships and privations which add such edge to every simple pleasure and every liberalizing opportunity. The Almanac does not come unnoticed, but is read and committed to heart by the farmer’s boys. And when it was announced to him by his father that he would send him to college he could not speak. The struggles, — brothers and sisters in poor men’s houses in New England are dear to each other, and the bringing up of a family involves many sacrifices, each for the other.

The faults that shade his character are not such as to hurt his popularity. He is very expensive, and always in debt; but this rather commends him, as he is known to be generous, and his countrymen make for him the apology of Themistocles, that to keep treasure undiminished is the virtue of a chest and not of a man. Then there is in him a large share of good nature and a sort of bonhomie. It is sometimes complained of him that he is a man of pleasure, and all his chosen friends are easy epicures and debauchees. But this is after Talleyrand’s taste, who said of his foolish wife that he found nonsense very refreshing: so Webster, after he has been pumping his brains in the courts and the Senate, is, no doubt, heartily glad to get among cronies and gossips where he can stretch himself at his ease and drink his mulled wine. They also quote as his three rules of living: (1) Never to pay any debt that can by any possibility be avoided; (2) Never to do anything to-day that can be put off till to-morrow; (3) Never to do anything himself which he can get anybody else to do for him.

All is forgiven to a man of such surpassing intellect, and such prodigious powers of business which have so long been exerted. There is no malice in the man, but broad good humor and much enjoyment of the hour; so that Stetson said of him, “It is true that he sometimes commits crimes, but without any guilt.”

A great man is always entitled to the most liberal interpretation, and the few anecdotes by which his opponents have most deeply stabbed at his reputation admit of explanation. I cannot but think, however, that his speech at Richmond was made to bear a meaning by his Southern backers which he did not intend, and I have never forgiven him that he did not say, Not so fast, good friends, I did not mean what you say.

He has misused the opportunity of making himself the darling of the American world in all coming time by abstaining from putting himself at the head of the Anti-slavery interest, by standing for New England and for man against the bullying and barbarism of the South.

I should say of him that he was not at all majestic, but the purest intellect that was ever applied to business. He is Intellect applied to affairs. He is the greatest of lawyers; but a very indifferent statesman for carrying his points. He carries points with the bench, but not with the caucus. No following has he, no troop of friends, but those whose intellect he fires. No sweaty mob will carry him on their shoulders. And yet all New England to the remotest farmhouse, or lumberers’ camp in the woods of Maine, delights to tell and hear of anecdotes of his forensic eloquence. What he said at Salem, at the Knapp trial; and how in Boston he looked a witness out of court, — once, he set his great eyes on him, and searched him through and through; then as the cause went on, and this prisoner’s perjury was not yet called for, he looked round on him as if to see if he was safe and ready for the inquisition he was preparing to inflict on him. The witness felt for his hat, and edged towards the door; a third time he looked on him, and the witness could sit no longer, but seized his opportunity, fled out of court, and could nowhere be found, such was the terror of those eyes.

People think that in our license of construing the Constitution, and the despotism of Public Opinion, we have no anchor, and one Frenchman thinks he has found it in our Marriage, and one in our Calvinism. But the fact of two poles is universal; the fact of two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, is universal, and each develops the other, each by its own activity. Wild liberty develops iron conscience; want of liberty strengthens decorous and convenient law, which supersedes in a measure the native conscience.

Queenie makes herself merry with the Reformers who make unleavened bread, and are foes to the death to fermentation. Queenie says, God made yeast as well as wheat, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation; that the fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. But that they wish the “pure wheat” and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear Nature, these incessant advances; let me scotch these ever-rolling wheels.

Earth Spirit, living, a black river like that swarthy stream which rushes through the human body is thy nature, demoniacal, warm, fruitful, sad, nocturnal.

February 8.

As we go along the street, the eyes of all the passengers either ask, ask, continually of all they meet, or else assert, assert to all. Only rarely do we meet a face which has the balance of expression, neither asking leave to be, nor rudely egotistic, but equally receptive and affirmative. W. A. Tappan says, that when a man is looked at, he instantly assumes a new expression, and strangers whom he meets every day in the street grow angry at being regarded.

Strict conversation with a friend is the magazine out of which all good writing is drawn.

[Here follow the passages from “ Experience” on God’s delight in isolating us and hiding the past and future; on the eye making the horizon, and the mind’s eye deifying persons; and on Skepticisms as limitations of the affirmative. See Essays, Second Series, pp. 67, 68; 76, 77; 75]

Men may affect modesty as much as they will, every speaker wants the most intelligent audience, wants genius to hear him.

It is very funny to go in to a family where the father and mother are devoted to the children. You flatter yourself for an instant that you have secured your friend’s ear, for his countenance brightens; then you discover that he has just caught the eye of his babe over your shoulder, and is chirruping to him.

The moral must have its origin from inward fountains, but must have its objects in the variety of social life; how much we are domesticated by the moral. “I feel at home,” said Mrs. B., “more than among my relations, for you are honest people.” So in my experience with the praying traveller at the hotel. So when I go abroad, if I enter a church, the first godly sentiment makes me truly at home. The source must not be the expectations of others, but a delight in serving, an effusion of good will, a delight in serving and not in being seen to serve, not the feeling of duty, but the wish to make happy.

A man going out of Constantinople met the Plague coming in, who said he was sent thither for twenty thousand souls. Forty thousand persons were swept off, and when the traveller came back, he met the Plague coming out of the city. “Why did you kill forty thousand?” he asked. “ I only killed twenty,” replied the Pest; “Fear killed the rest.”

Mr. Adams chose wisely and according to his constitution, when, on leaving the Presidency, he went into Congress. He is no literary old gentleman, but a bruiser, and loves the melee. When they talk about his age and venerableness and nearness to the grave, he knows better, he is like one of those old cardinals, who, as quick as he is chosen Pope, throws away his crutches and his crookedness, and is as straight as a boy. He is an old roue who cannot live on slops, but must have sulphuric acid in his tea.

There is no line that does not return; I suppose the mathematicians will tell us that what are called straight lines are lines with long curves, but that there is no straight line in nature. If, as you say, we are destroying number by affirming the strict infinite, why then I concede that number also is swallowable, and that one of these days we shall eat it like custard.

National characteristics stand no chance beside intellectual. Physicians say every constitution makes a new case of fever. So it is with persons. Our national traits may appear so long as we are drowsy and have headache, but put me in good spirits, search me with thought, and all nations are men together. The first Englishman I met in travelling was a frank, affectionate fellow, and the first Frenchman was a mystic.

Major Davezac at the Carlton House, New

York, told me of Father Antoine at New Orleans, the only man left attached to the Spanish Government when the Americans took possession of the city. He never dined at home, but when the noon came, went into the nearest house wherever he walked, and said,” My child, I have come to dine with you.” Then they made festival. After dinner, he smoked a cigar, slept half an hour, blessed the house, and departed.

When he fell sick, hourly bulletins were issued of his health: when he died, all shops were shut, all courts and legislatures adjourned. Two shillings were found in his desk, and his testament begged all his children of all sects — for he would not separate in this instrument those whom in heart he had never separated — to kneel down for five minutes and pray that his term of purgatory might be shortened. And Protestant and Catholic knelt down and prayed. He preached a crusade against the English during the siege. And General Jackson came and thanked him, and told him that his prayers and urgent addresses were as good to him as a thousand men. He had Te Deum sung in the church.

Abbess of the Ursuline Convent and her bell of St. Victoire. A vow of a bell of one thousand pounds’ weight, not if the victory, but because the victory. The book opened of itself to the prayer of the day, it was the prayer to St. Victoire. General Jackson said,” This was very extraordinary, Major Davezac, and I tell you, sir, that something very remarkable has attended this campaign. Ever since the battle on the night of the 23 d, until the retreat of the British, I have had the sense that these things had occurred to me before, and been obliterated; and when I observed it, I was sure of success, for I knew that God would not give me previsions of disaster, but signs of victory. He said, This ditch can never be passed. It cannot be done.”

We are all chemists who only know our own gold. Men cast pearls about in large companies where I go, and none but I seems to know that they are pearls.

Society. I feel and own your power, but I lament that your power smothers mine. This I regret, not for my sake, for I am well content to lie hid a year, but for yours, that it prevents me making that just return which your merit demands; and I should like to justify to you your good deed and will towards me.

Democracy with us is charged with being malignant, and I think it seems aimless, selfish resistance, pulling down, and wild wish to have physical freedom, — but for what? Only for freedom; not to any noble end. Vethake thought that society was fast arriving at the excess of democracy, — universal abolition, I think, he called it, which he thought the absolute extinction of the feminine principle. Then woman will say, I cannot stand this death, and will rise in indignation and end that epoch. Mr. V’s opinion was that Mahomet had tried power, and Jesus, or, I think, John, persuasion; that Mahomet had felt that persuasion, this John-persuasion had miserably failed, was a pretty poor shift or system of shifts, this expediency or system of coaxing and example and so forth, precisely that against which nowadays we write essays and lectures; and he said, I will try this Oriental weapon, the sword, which never, never will go West; and he said to Ayesha, “I have found out how to work it. This Woman element will not bear the sword; well, I will dispose of woman: she may exist; but henceforward I will veil it:” so he veiled Woman. Then the sword could work and eat. A man and a woman he thought the true social unit, born of the community, and that the old and the young could only exist in a state of tutelage or protection; that the only holders of property were the married couple, who should not take either the name of husband or wife, but a new name common to both, and have but one vote. Three ways of killing there were. In the third, I smelt fagots: Society, he said, should not put to death, but should say, this cannot be, and it would cease. I remembered what I have heard or dreamed, that the most terrific of hierarchs would be a mystic. Beware of Swedenborg in power. Swedenborg in minority, Swedenborg contemplative, is excellent company; but Swedenborg executive would be the Devil in crown and sceptre. Fagots!

In the capacious leisures of the spirit I think we may beguile the time by the play of the understanding and the use of the hands, and yet be candidates for the divine succors and the use of divine methods as truly as if we should fold our hands and rely on transcendent methods only.

Cheap literature makes new markets. We have thought only of a box audience, or at most of box and pit; but now it appears there is also slip audience, and galleries one, two, three; and back stairs, and street listeners, besides. Greeley tells me that Graham’s Magazine has seventy thousand subscribers, and I may write a lecture, if I will, to seventy thousand readers.

Like Vethake, Brisbane thought the Democracy did not wish to build, but only to tear down; “to tear down,” as he said,” God and the Bank, and everything else they could see.”

CONCORD, March 12.

Home again from my long journey to count my treasures old and new, and, might it be, to impart them.

The world has since the beginning an incurable trick of taking care of itself, or every hilltop in America would have counsel to offer. We sit and think how richly ornamented the wide champaign and yonder woodlands to the foot of those blue mountains shall be, and meanwhile here are ready and willing thousands strong and teachable who have no land to till. If Government in our present clumsy fashion must go on, — could it not assume the charge of providing each citizen, on his coming of age, with a pair of acres, to enable him to get his bread honestly? Perhaps one day it will be done by the State’s assuming to distribute the estates of the dead. In the United States almost every State owns so much public land, that it would be practicable to give what they have, and devise a system by which the State should continue to possess a fund of this sort.

Gypsies and militia captains, Paddies and Chinese, all manner of cunning and pragmatical men and a few fine women, — a strange world made up of such oddities; the only beings that belong to the horizon being the fine women.

Cheap is the humiliation of to-day which gives wit, eloquence, poetry to-morrow.

All work for me. I and my day. Some persons use my language, but are foreign to me, and others who use a language foreign to me are very near me. Events are the clothes of the Spirit. Why should we try to steal and strip them. And we know God so, as we know each other by our garments. “You flee fast, but the pursuers flee after you as fast.” So said to me Mrs. Rebecca Black in New York.

At the Five Points I heard a woman swearing very liberally as she talked with her companions; but when I looked at her face, I saw that she was no worse than other women; that she used the dialect of her class, as all others do, and are neither better nor worse for it; but under this bad costume was the same repose, the same probity as in Broadway. Nor was she misinterpreted by her mates. There is a virtue of vice as well as of virtue.

And the Spirit drove him apart into a solitary place. This does the Spirit for every man.

(From R)

I find it easier to read Goethe than Mundt, and it must always be easier to understand a sensible than a weak man in a foreign tongue, because things themselves translate for the one, and not for the other. Yet very pleasant is the progress which we make in a new language, the medium through which we explore the thoughts ever growing rarer, until at last we become unconscious of its presence in its transparency.

Ellery’s verses should be called poetry for poets, they touch the fine pulses of thought and will be the cause of more poetry and of verses more finished and better turned than them selves; but I cannot blame the North Americans and Knickerbockers if they should not suspect his genius. When the rudder is invented for the balloon, railroads will be superseded. And when Ellery’s muse finds an aim, whether some passion or some fast faith, any kind of thing on which all these wild and sometimes brilliant beads can be strung, we shall have a poet. Now he fantasies merely, as dilettanti in music. He breaks faith continually with the intellect. The sonnet has merits, fine lines, gleams of deep thought; well worth sounding, worth studying, if only I could confide that he had any steady meaning before him, that he kept faith with himself; but I fear that he changed his purpose with every verse; was led up and down, to this or that, with the exigencies of the rhyme, and only wanted to write and rhyme somewhat, careless how or what, and stopped when he came to the end of the paper. He breaks faith with the reader; wants integrity. Yet for Poets it will be a better book than a whole volume of Bryant and Campbell. Miss Peabody has beautiful colors to sell, but her shop has no attraction for house-builders and merchants: Mr. Allston and Mr. Cheney will probably find the way to it.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is a genius. His dulness is as insupportable as any other dulness. Only success will justify a departure and a license. But Ellery has freaks which are entitled to no more charity than the dulness and madness of others, which he despises. He uses a license continually which would be just in oral improvisation, but is not pardonable in written verses. He fantasies on his piano.

E. H. said, that he was a wood-elf which one of the maids in a story fell in love with, and then grew uneasy, desiring that he might be baptized. Margaret said, he reminded one of a great Genius with a little wretched boy trotting beside him.

“For in thee hides a matchless light

That splendors all the dreaming night;

Thy bark shall be a precious stone

In whose red veins deep magic hides,

Thy ecstasies be known to none,

Except those vast ethereal tides

That circulate our being round

But whisper not the slightest sound.”

“Away, away, thou starlit breath!

On bended knees I pray thee go;

O bind thy temples not with death,

Nor let thy shadow fall on snow.”

Jock could not eat rice, because it came west, nor molasses because it came north, nor put on leathern shoes because of the methods by which leather was procured, nor indeed wear a woolen coat. But Dick gave him a gold eagle that he might buy wheat and rye, maple sugar and an oaken chest, and said, This gold-piece, unhappy Jock! is molasses, and rice, and horsehide and sheepskin.

[Here follow sentences from The Chinese Classical Work, commonly called The Four Books, translated by Rev. David Collier. These and other Oriental religious sayings were printed in the Dial, there called “Ethnical Scriptures.”]

Criticism. So the Gothic cathedral and the Shakspeare perfection is as wild and unaccountable as a geranium or a rabbit or an ornithorhynchus. It is done, and we must go to work and do something else, that undone something which is now hinting and working and impatient here in and around us.

Drawing, M. R. said from Mr. Cheney, was only a good eye for distances; and the descriptive talent in the poet seems to depend on a certain lakelike passiveness to receive the picture of the whole landscape in its native proportions, uninjured, and then with sweet heedfulness the caution of love, to transfer it to the tablet of language.

Health. Health is the most objective of subjects. The Vishnu Sarna said, “It is the same to him who wears a shoe as if the whole earth were covered with leather.” So I spread my health over the whole world and make it strong, happy, and serviceable. To the sick man, the world is a medicine chest.

Poet. It is true that when a man writes poetry, he appears to assume the high feminine part of his nature. We clothe the poet, therefore, in robes and garlands, which are proper to woman. The Muse is feminine. But action is male. And a king is draped almost in feminine attire.

The philosophers at Fruitlands have such an image of virtue before their eyes, that the poetry of man and nature they never see; the poetry that is in man’s life, the poorest pastoral clownish life; the light that shines on a man’s hat, in a child’s spoon, the sparkle on every wave and on every mote of dust, they see not.

Lectures. “Aristo said, that neither a bath nor a lecture did signify anything unless they scoured and made men clean.”

Pride is a great convenience,... so much handsomer and cheaper than vanity, but proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

Translations. I thank the translators....

March 23.

Two brave chanticleers go up and down stripping the plumes from all the fine birds, showing that all are not in the best health. It makes much unhappiness on all sides; much crowing it occasions on the part of the two cockerels who so shrewdly discover and dismantle all the young beaux of the aviary. But alas, the two valiant cocks who strip are no better than those who are stripped, only they have sharper beak and talons. In plain prose, I grieved so much to hear the most intellectual youth I have met, Charles Newcomb, so disparaged, and our good and most deserving scholar, Theodore Parker, threatened as a morsel to be swallowed when he shall come to-morrow, and all this by my brave friends, who are only brave, not helpful, not loving, not creative, — that I said, Cursed is preaching, — the better it is, the worse. A preacher is a bully: I who have preached so much, — by the help of God will never preach more.

We want the fortification of an acknowledgment of the good in us. “The girl is the least part of herself”; God is in the girl. That is the reason why fools can be so beloved by sages; that, under all the corsets and infirmities, is life, and the revelation of Reason and of Conscience.

Margaret. A pure and purifying mind, self-purifying also, full of faith in men, and inspiring it. Unable to find any companion great enough to receive the rich effusions of her thought, so that her riches are still unknown and seem unknowable. It is a great joy to find that we have underrated our friend, that he or she is far more excellent than we had thought. All natures seem poor beside one so rich, which pours a stream of amber over all objects, clean and unclean, that lie in its path, and makes that comely and presentable which was mean in itself. We are taught by her plenty how lifeless and outward we were, what poor Laplanders burrowing under the snows of prudence and pedantry. Beside her friendship, other friendships seem trade, and by the firmness with which she treads her upward path, all mortals are convinced that another road exists than that which their feet know. The wonderful generosity of her sentiments pours a contempt on books and writing at the very time when one asks how shall this fiery picture be kept in its glow and variety for other eyes. She excels other intellectual persons in this, that her sentiments are more blended with her life; so the expression of them has greater steadiness and greater clearness. I have never known any example of such steady progress from stage to stage of thought and of character. An inspirer of courage, the secret friend of all nobleness, the patient waiter for the realization of character, forgiver of injuries gracefully waving aside folly, and elevating lowness, — in her presence all were apprised of their fettered estate and longed for liberation, of ugliness and longed for their beauty; of meanness and panted for grandeur.

Her growth is visible. All the persons whom we know have reached their height, or else their growth is so nearly at the same rate with ours, that it is imperceptible, but this child inspires always more faith in her. She rose before me at times into heroical and godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women, but thought of Ceres, Minerva, Proserpine, and the august ideal forms of the foreworld. She said that no man gave such invitation to her mind as to tempt her to full expression; that she felt a power to enrich her thought with such wealth and variety of embellishment as would, no doubt, be tedious to such as she conversed with. And there is no form that does not seem to wait her beck, — dramatic, lyric, epic, passionate, pictorial, humorous.

She has great sincerity, force, and fluency as a writer, yet her powers of speech throw her writing into the shade. What method, what exquisite judgment, as well as energy, in the selection of her words; what character and wisdom they convey! You cannot predict her opinion. She sympathizes so fast with all forms of life, that she talks never narrowly or hostilely, nor betrays, like all the rest, under a thin garb of new words, the old droning cast-iron opinions or notions of many years’ standing. What richness of experience, what newness of dress, and fast as Olympus to her principle. And a silver eloquence, which inmost Polymnia taught. Meantime, all this pathos of sentiment and riches of literature, and of invention, and this march of character threatening to arrive presently at the shores and plunge into the sea of Buddhism and mystic trances, consists with a boundless fun and drollery, with light satire, and the most entertaining conversation in America.

Her experience contains, I know, golden moments, which, if they could be fitly narrated, would stand equally beside any histories of magnanimity which the world contains; and whilst Dante’s Nuova Vita is almost unique in the literature of Sentiment, I have called the imperfect record she gave me of two of her days, “Nuovissima Vita.”

A working King is one of the best symbols. Alfred and Ulysses are such. And we see them now and then in society; — oftener off the throne, of course, than on it. This is the right country for them.

A chamber of flame in which the martyr passes is more magnificent than any royal apartment; and this martyr palace may be built up on any waste place instantly.

Persons are fine things, but they cost so much! for thee I must pay me.

Fine constellation of people; rare force of character and wealth of truth; they ought to cluster and shine and illuminate the nation and the nations. Alcott said reasonable words about the Dial, that it ought to be waited for by all the newspapers and journals, the Abolitionists ought to get their leading from it, and not be able to spurn it as they do. It should lead. Here the sceptre is offered us, and we refuse it from poorness of spirit.

When I see what fine people we have, I think it a sort of King Rene period: there is no doing, but rare and shrilling prophecy from bands of competing minstrels and the age shall not sneak out, but affirm all the beauty and truth in its heart.

“Dial has not piety.”

The same persons should not constitute a Standing Committee on Reform. A man may say, I am the chief of sinners, but once. He is already damned, if having come once to the insight of that condition, he remains there to say it again. But the Committee on Reform should be made of new persons every day; of those just arrived at the power of comparing the state of society with their own daily expanding spirit. Fatal to discuss reform weekly! The poorest poet or young beginner in the fine arts hesitates to speak of the design he wishes to execute, lest it die in your cold fingers. And this art of life has the same pudency and will not be exposed.

It is a great joy to get away from persons, and live under the dominion of the Multiplication Table.

Milton is the most literary man in literature.

We are greatly vexed when poets, who are by excellence the thinking and feeling of the world, are deficient in truth of intellect and of affection. Then is Feeling unfeeling and Thought unwise.

The conversation turned upon the state and duties of Woman. As always, it was historically considered, and had a certain falseness so. For me, to-day, Woman is not a degraded person with duties forgotten, but a docile daughter of God with her face heavenward endeavoring to hear the divine word and to convey it to me.

I read again the verses of Margaret with the new commentary of beautiful anecdotes she had given, freshly in my mind. Of course the poems grew golden, the twig blossomed in my hands: but a poem should not need its relation to life to explain it; it should be a new life, not still half engaged in the soil, like the new created lions in Eden.

Do you know how diamonds and other gems were invented? Rim, wishing to go on the errands of Ormuzd through the Kingdoms of Ariman without discovery, received from Ormuzd in a pod of lupine seven days in the form of seven diamonds. He used each of them as a lamp, which, spent, gave him a sharp and wise light for his path for twenty-four degrees of the way. On other occasions, Ormuzd gave him spring days in the form of emeralds, midsummer days in the shape of rubies, and autumn in topazes. All these stones are Children of Day.

The world must be new as we know it, for see how lately it has bethought itself of so many articles of the simplest convenience; as, for example, wooden clothes-pins to pinch the clothes to the line, instead of metallic pins, were introduced since the Peace of 1783. My mother remembers when her sister, Mrs. Inman, returned from England at that time, and brought these articles with her furniture, then new in this country; then the india-rubber shoe; the railroad; the steamboat; and the air-tight stove; the friction match; and cut nails.

The difference between Talent and Genius is, that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.

Genius is power; Talent is applicability. A human body, an animal, is an applicability; the Life, the Soul is Genius.

“Mamma,” said the child,” they have begun again!”

Elizabeth Hoar says, “I love Henry, but do not like him.” Young men, like Henry Thoreau, owe us a new world, and they have not acquitted the debt. For the most part, such die young, and so dodge the fulfilment. One of our girls said, that Henry never went through the kitchen without coloring.

Do not mince your speech. Power fraternizes with power....

Montaigne. In Roxbury, in 1825, I read Cotton’s translation of Montaigne. It seemed to me as if I had written the book myself in some former life, so sincerely it spoke my thought and experience. No book before or since was ever so much to me as that. How I delighted afterward in reading Cotton’s dedication to Halifax, and the reply of Halifax, which seemed no words, of course, but genuine suffrages. Afterwards I went to Paris in 1833, and to the Pere le Chaise, and stumbled on the tomb of Auguste Collignon, who, said the stone, formed himself to virtue on the essays of Montaigne. Afterwards John Sterling wrote a loving criticism on Montaigne in the Westminster Review, with a journal of his own pilgrimage to Montaigne’s estate and chateau, — and, soon after, Carlyle writes me word that this same lover of Montaigne is a lover of me. Now, I have been introducing to his genius two of my friends, James and Tappan, who both warm to him as to their brother.

Reference. We praise the pine because it looks like a palm, the oriole because it looks like equatorial birds, and all our view of Nature is adjusted to a tropical standard. The man under the line delights as much in the Alpine and Arctic type and dreams of the cool water and the apple and pear and peach of the Temperate climates where Nature serves man. Endless weak reference. Grief and Joy, Charity and Faith get derivative and referring. Dire Necessity is good and strong; — I love him, I hate him; I like, I dislike. Once there was a race that subsisted, but these seeming, spectral fellows that ask even when they curse and swear — or but affect to curse and swear! I wish there was no more good nature left in the world; tomahawks are better. I think the reason why we value mystics so much is, as oaks indicate a strong soil, so a thick crop of mystics shows like redemption from our universal supplication of each other.

Of Books. He is a poor writer who does not teach courage of treatment.

The Brook Farm Community is an expression in plain prose and actuality of the theory of impulse. It contains several bold and consistent philosophers, both men and women, who carry out the theory, odiously enough, inasmuch as this centripetence of theirs is balanced by no centrifugence; this wish to obey impulse is guarded by no old, old Intellect — or that which knows metes and bounds. The young people who have been faithful to this, their testimony, have lived a great deal in a short time, but have come forth with shattered constitutions. It is an intellectual Sansculottism. Happily, Charles Newcomb and George Bradford have been there, and their presence could not but be felt as sanitary and retentive. Charles Newcomb, I hear, was greatly respected, and his conduct, even in trifles, observed and imitated, — the quiet, retreating, demoniacal youth. Nathaniel Hawthorne said that Burton felt the presence of Newcomb all the time.

I read in Ward’s Chinese book, the other day, of bards; many sentences purporting that bards love wine. Tea and coffee are my wine, and I have finer and lighter wines than these. But some nectar an intellectual man will naturally use. For he will soon learn the secret that beside the energy of his conscious intellect, his intellect is capable of new energy by abandonment to the nature of things.... All persons avail themselves of such means as they can to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers. One finds it in music, one in war, one in great pictures or sculpture; one in travelling; one in conversation; in politics, in mobs, in fires, in theatres, in love, in science; in animal intoxication. I take many stimulants and often make an art of my inebriation. I read Proclus for my opium; it excites my imagination to let sail before me the pleasing and grand figures of gods and daemons and demoniacal men. I hear of rumors rife among the most ancient gods, of azonic gods who are itinerants, of daemons with fulgid eyes, of the unenvying and exuberant will of the gods; the aquatic gods, the Plain of Truth, the meadow, the nutriment of the gods, the paternal port, and all the rest of the Platonic rhetoric quoted as household words. By all these and so many rare and brave words I am filled with hilarity and spring, my heart dances, my sight is quickened, I behold shining relations between all beings, and am impelled to write and almost to sing. I think one would grow handsome who read Proclus much and well.

But of this inebriation I spoke of, it is an old knowledge that Intellect by its relation to what is prior to Intellect is a god. This is inspiration.

They [the Neoplatonists] speak of the Gods with such pictorial distinctness often that one would think they had actually been present, Swedenborg-like, at the Olympic feasts; e g., “This is that which emits the intelligible light, that, when it appeared, astonished the intellectual gods and made them admire their father, as Orpheus says.”

How often I have said, what this morning I must say once more, that the conscience of the coming age will put its surveillance on the intellect. We accuse ourselves that we have been useless, but not that we have been thoughtless.

Thou oughtest to have listened, will it say, so shouldest thou have heard the oracles, which would elevate every day of life.

It is not in the power of God to make a communication of his will to a Calvinist. For to every inward revelation he holds up his silly book, and quotes chapter and verse against the BookMaker and Man-Maker, against that which quotes not, but is and cometh. There is a light older than intellect, by which the intellect lives and works, always new, and which degrades every past and particular shining of itself. This light, Calvinism denies, in its idolatry of a certain past shining.

Swedenborg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to uninstructed and thoughtless persons.... A thinker, or a man through whom shineth that light which is older than intellect and through which alone intellect is a god, will undervalue each reporter when he beholds the splendor of the truth itself. And though such a person will; do justice to the good intention of one of these men of God who strove to say truly what they had seen, yet he will see that to such as quote their words instead of listening to the truth itself, they falsify the truth: for his book is not truth, but truth Swedenborgized or Behmenized or Spinozised.

Much poor talk concerning woman, which at least had the effect of revealing the true sex of several of the party who usually go disguised in the form of the other sex. Thus Mrs. B. is a man. The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Hermaphrodite is then the symbol of the finished Soul. It was agreed that in every act should appear the married pair: the two elements should mix in every act.

To me it sounded hoarsely, the attempt to prescribe didactically to woman her duties. Man can never tell woman what her duties are: he will certainly end in describing a man in female attire, as Harriet Martineau, a masculine woman, solved her problem of Woman. No, Woman only can tell the heights of feminine nature, and the only way in which man can help her, is by observing woman reverently, and whenever she speaks from herself, and catches him in inspired moments up to a heaven of honor and religion, to hold her to that point by reverential recognition of the divinity that speaks through her.

I can never think of woman without gratitude for the bright revelations of her best nature which have been made to me, unworthy. The angel who walked with me in younger days shamed my ambition and prudence by her generous love in our first interview. I described my prospects. She said, I do not wish to hear of your prospects.

April 10.

The slowly retreating snow blocks the roads and wood paths and shuts me in the house. But yesterday the warm south wind drew me to the top of the hill, like the dove from the ark, to see if these white waters were abated, and there was place for the foot. The grass springs up already between the holes in the snow, and I walked along the knolls and edges of the hill wherever the winter bank was melted, but I thrust my cane into the bank two feet perpendicular. I greeted the well-known pine grove which I could not reach; the pine tops seemed to cast a friendly gold-green smile of acquaintance toward me, for it was in my heart that I had not yet quite got home from my late journey, until I had revisited and rejoined these vegetable daemons. The air was kind and clear, the sky southward was full of comets, so white and fan-shaped and ethereal lay the clouds, as if the late visit of this foreign wonder had set the fashion for the humbler meteors. And all around me the new-come sparrows, robins, bluebirds, and blackbirds were announcing their arrival with great spirit.

The Transcendentalist or Realist is distinguished from the Churchman herein, that he limits his affirmation to his perception, and never goes beyond the warrant of his experience (spiritual and sensuous) in his creed. Whilst the Churchman affirms many things received on testimony as of equal value with the moral intuitions.

I told Mr. Means that he need not consult the Germans, but, if he wished at any time to know what the Transcendentalists believed, he might simply omit what in his own mind he added from the tradition, and the rest would be Transcendentalism.

The Church affirms this and that fact of time and place; describes circumstances; a circumstantial heaven; a circumstantial hell. The way of the Spirit is different. It never antedates its revelations, it does not tell you when or how; but it says, Be thus and thus, and in our doing, it opens the path, shines in the way we are to go, and creates around us new unpredicted relations.

Daniel Webster is a great man with a small ambition. Nature has built him and holds him forth as a sample of the heroic mould to this puny generation. He was virtual President of the United States from the hour of the Speech on Foot’s Resolutions in the United States Senate in 1832, being regarded as the Expounder of the Constitution and the Defender of Law. But this did not suffice; he wished to be an officer, also; wished to add a title to his name, and be a President. That ruined him. He should have learned from the Chinese that “it has never been the case that, when a man in a place where no mulberry trees yet grew could cause the aged to wear silks, and where there were no breeders of fowls or hogs or sheep could cause the aged to eat flesh and the young did not suffer hunger or cold, — he did not become Emperor.”

The Drop of Nectar. In Nature the “woodness” or tendency to make an idle savage and idiot of a man, through the seduction of forests, mountains, and waters, is a conspicuous example of the bias or small excess of force which is always added in the vital directions.

Buddhism. Winter, Night, Sleep, are all the invasions of eternal Buddh, and it gains a point every day. Let be, laissez-faire, so popular now in philosophy and in politics, that is bald Buddhism; and then very fine names has it got to cover up its chaos withal, namely, trances, raptures, abandonment, ecstasy, — all Buddh, naked Buddh.

Travelling, forsooth! as if every traveller did not feel himself an impertinence when he came among the diligent in their places. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald the milkpans, and clout the infants, and burn the brushwood? And yet Humboldt may travel, or any other man, when the state seems to travel in his legs, as these railway levellers whom I met this afternoon.

Nature is the strictest economist,...

Ellen wishes to know if she may come and see when the railroad goes by?

“Father, what makes the railroad grow worse?”

I said she must come in, for it was damp, and she would get sick, and I could not spare my little daughter. She answered, “Could you not spare her to God?”

It is a compensation for the habitual moderation of Nature in these Concord fields and the want of picturesque outlines, the ease of getting about. I long sometimes to have mountains, ravines, and flumes like that in Lincoln, New Hampshire, within reach of my eyes and feet; but the thickets of the forest and the fatigue of mountains are spared me and I go through Concord as through a park.

Concord is a little town, and yet has its honors. We get our handful of every ton that comes to the city. We have had our share of Everett and Webster, who have both spoken here. So has Edward Taylor. So did George Bancroft, and Bronson Alcott, and Charles Lane, and Garrison and Phillips, the Abolition orators. We have had our shows and processions, conjurors, and beargardens, and here, too, came Herr Driesbach with his cats and snakes, lying down on a lioness, and kissing a tiger, and rolling himself up, not in leopard-skins, but in live leopards, and his companion with his tippet of anacondas.

Hither come in summer the Penobscot Indians, and make baskets for us on the river-bank.

Doctor Channing and Harriet Martineau were here and — what I think much more — here was Aunt Mary, Ellen, Edward, and Charles; here is Elizabeth Hoar; here have been, or are, Margaret Fuller, Sam and Anna Ward, Caroline Sturgis, Charles Newcomb George Bradford, Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sarah Alden Ripley; Henry Thoreau, James Elliot Cabot.

In the old time, John Winthrop, John Eliot, Peter Bulkeley; then Whitefield; then Hancock, Adams and the College were here in 1775.

[Mr. Emerson, years later, added the following: — ]

Kossuth spoke to us in the court-house in 1852. Agassiz, Greenough, Clough, Jeffries Wyman, Samuel Hoar, Lafayette.

April 17.

How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feel ing that we have spun a rope of sand, that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words.... Could they but once understand that I loved to know that they existed and heartily wished them Godspeed, yet out of my poverty of life and thought, had no word or welcome for them when they came to see me, and could well consent to their living in another town, from any claim that I felt on them, — it would be great satisfaction. Not this, but something like this, I said, and then, as the discourse, as so often, touched Character, I added, that they were both intellectual, they assumed to be substantial and centra], to be the thing they said, but were not; but only intellectual, or the scholars, the learned, of the Spirit or Central Life. If they were that, if the centres of their life were coincident with the Centre of Life, I should bow the knee, I should accept without gainsaying all that they said, as if I had said it: just as our saint (though morbid), Jones Very, had affected us with what was best in him, but I felt in them the slight dislocation of these Centres which allowed them to stand aside and speak of these facts knowingly. Therefore, I was at liberty to look at them, not as the commanding fact, but as one of the whole circle of facts. They did not like pictures, marbles, woodlands, and poetry; I liked all these, and Lane and Alcott too, as one figure more in the various landscape.

And now, I said, will you not please to pound me a little before I go, just by way of squaring the account, that I may not remember that I alone was saucy? Alcott contented himself with quarrelling with the injury done to greater qualities in my company, by the tyranny of my Taste; — which certainly was very soft pounding. And so I departed from the divine lotus-eaters.

Veracity. Almost every writing of a liberal kind when at last it is done assumes the air of an escapade, it is done to get rid of it, done for editors, booksellers, and all miscellaneous occasions, and not out of a dire or divine intrinsic necessity. So much deduction from veracity.

Intellectual race are the New Englanders. Mrs. Ripley at Brook Farm said that the young women who came thither from farms elsewhere would work faithfully and do whatever was given them without grumbling, but there was no heart in it, but their whole interest was in their intellectual culture.

“Open the mouth of the cave, and bring out those five kings unto me out of the cave” (Joshua x, 22), was Dr. Frothingham’s text on the five points of Calvinism.

Carlyle esteems all living men mice and rats, but that is one of the conditions of his genius. Take away that feeling, and you would possibly make him dumb.

Carlyle in his new book, as everywhere, is a continuer of the great line of scholars in the world, of Horace, Varro, Pliny, Erasmus, Scaliger, Milton, and well sustains their office in ample credit and honor. If the good Heaven have any truth to impart, there he is at his post, a fit organ to say it well. Not a prophet, not a poet, but a master of that cunning art which can clothe any fact with a fine robe of words. first in Waltham, and, in her later years, in Concord, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, wife of Rev. Samuel Ripley.

Nature gives me precious signs in such persons as William Tappan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and now eminently in L. M. W., that in democratic America, she will not be democratized. How cloistered and constitutionally sequestered from the market and gossips!

Second Advent. I read of an excellent Millerite who gives out that he expects the second advent of the Lord in 1843, but there is any error in his computation, — he shall look for him until he comes.

The hurts of the husbandmen are many. As soon as the heat bursts his vine-seed and the cotyledons open, the striped yellow bugs and the stupid squash-bug, smelling like a decomposing pear, sting the little plants to death and destroy the hope of melons. And as soon as the grass is well cut and spread on the ground, the thunderclouds, which are the bugs of the haymakers, come growling down the heaven and make tea of his hay.

We cannot forgive you that worst want of tact which incapacitates you from discriminating between what is to be disputed, and what is to be reverenced or cherished in your friend’s communications. The babe of a Choctaw, the cub of a lion, may be strangled by a boy: and the ablest genius, if he trust you with his yet unripe fancies, casts himself helpless on your compassion. Life and death are in your hands, let his power and renown be what they may. There is no part then to be taken but to throw yourself as much as possible into the neutral state of mind and entertain his thought as far as you can; and where you cannot, be satisfied that you cannot, without criticism. It is, though you can kill it, the babe of a Choctaw, the cub of a lion, and will yet approve its sinewy stock.

I wrote to Thomas Carlyle of his new book, Past and Present....

I went to Washington and spent four days. The two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to Canada and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here terminate and play and make the air electric and violent. Yet one feels how little, more than how much, Man is represented there. I think, in the higher societies of the universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating.

May 1.

Yesterday I read an old file of Aunt Mary’s letters, and felt how she still gains by all comparison with later friends. Never any gave higher counsels, as Elizabeth Hoar most truly said, nor played with all the household incidents with more wit and humor. My life and its early events never look trivial in her letters, but full of eyes, and acquire deepest expression.

In America, out-of-doors all seems a market, in-doors an air-tight stove of conventionalism. Everybody who comes into the house savors of these precious habits: the men, of the market; the women, of the custom. In every woman’s conversation and total influence, mild or acid, lurks the conventional devil. They look at your carpet, they look at your cap, at your salt-cel lar, at your cook and waiting-maid, conventionally, — to see how close they square with the customary cut in Boston and Salem and New Bedford. But Aunt Mary and Elizabeth do not bring into a house with them a platoon of conventional devils.

May 7.

Yesterday George Bradford walked and talked of the Community and cleared up some of the mists which gossip had made: and expressed the conviction, shared by himself and his friends there, that plain dealing was the best defence of manners and morals between the sexes. I suppose that the danger arises whenever bodily familiarity grows up without a spiritual intimacy. The reason why there is purity in marriage is, that the parties are universally near and helpful, and not only near bodily. If their wisdoms come near and meet, there is no danger of passion. Therefore, the remedy of impurity is to come nearer.

Many events on the light-winged hours. Alcott and Lane make ready to depart. Channing has brought his Lares to Concord, and Henry Thoreau is gone yesterday to New York — whence come the warm south winds.

At Brook Farm this peculiarity, that there is no head. In every family, a paterfamilias; in every factory, a foreman; in a shop, a master; in a boat, a boatswain; but in Brook Farm, no authority, but each master and mistress of their own actions, — happy, hapless, sansculottes.

Yesterday, English visitors, and I waited all day when they should go.

If we could establish the rule that each man was a guest in his own house, and when we had shown our visitors the passages of the house, the way to fire, to bread, and water, and thus made them as much at home as the inhabitant, did then leave them to the accidents of intercourse, and went about our ordinary business, a guest would no longer be formidable.

At Brook Farm again, I understand the authority of Mr and Mrs. Ripley is felt unconsciously by all; and this is ground of regret to individuals, who see that this particular power is thrown into the conservative scale. But Mr and Mrs. Ripley are the only ones who have identified themselves with the Community. They have married it, and they are it. The others are experimenters who will stay by this if it thrives, being always ready to retire, but these have burned their ships, and are entitled to the moral consideration which this position gives. The young people agree that they have had more rapid experiences than elsewhere befel them; have lived faster.

May 10.

This morning sent away L. M. W.’s manuscript with some regret that my wild flowers must ever go back. Their value is as a relief from literature, these unhackneyed fresh draughts from the sources of sentiment and thought, far, far from shop and market, or the aim at effect. It is read as we read in an age of polish and criticism the first lines of written prose and verse in a nation.

George Bradford yesterday dug with mein the swamp his young larches, and we sat with the sphagnum and the budding coptis and the blooming white violet, sweet-scented. He talks happily of his new friends. But it is not enough that people should be intelligent and interested in themselves. They must also make me feel that they have a controlling happy Future opening before them and inevitably bright, and brightening their present hour. Edward Lowell and Charles Emerson suggested their promise in their salutation, or in the least transaction. Freedom is frivolous beside the tyranny of our genius.

The blue sky in the zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. If we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, the blue sky would be all that would remain of our furniture. — I have written this or the like of this somewhere else, I know not where.

Ellery has reticency, Carlyle has not. How many things this book of Carlyle gives us to think. It is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but Literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists. The gods are come among us in the likeness of men. An honest Iliad of English woes. Who is he that can trust himself in the fray? Only such as cannot be familiarized, but, nearest seen and touched, is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere bring him here and environ him, as the ambassador carries his country with him. Love protects him from profanation. What a book this is in its relation to English privileged estates!...

Gulliver among the Lilliputians. This book comes so near to life and men, that one can hardly help looking ahead a little and inquiring whether this strong brain will always be shut up in a scholar’s library; whether the most intelligent Englishman will nourish no ambition to do that which he describes, and when the hour comes that these volleys of pungent counsels shall have got thoroughly sunk into the ear and heart of the population, and the population is Carlyle’s, whether our vigorous Samson will not have a ruler’s part to play. Yet nobody, neither law-sergeant nor newspaper, yet cries “Cromwell.”

A Londoner must exaggerate the social problem.

Brook Farm Again! The freaks of the young philosophers show how much life they have, as jockeys, when a horse rolls on the ground, add a gold eagle to his price for every turn he makes. But nothing will take the place of fidelity. The final result will be the same to Mrs. Ripley and the true workers. Yet one would fain say to the dear youths, that pride and bearing will serve for a year or two, but are serpents’ eggs, and will end in serpents, though they look now like alabaster and the egg of Jove’s eagle; that God has suffered us to be represented in Genius, but in Virtue we must appear in person.

Brook Farm will show a few noble victims, who act and suffer with temper and proportion, but the larger part will be slight adventurers and will shirk work.

May 18.

I set out yesterday, by the hands of Cyrus Warren, nineteen young pine trees west of my house and four in the triangle.

I never see a quite unmusical character. Beautiful results are everywhere lodged.

All intercourse is random and remote, yet what fiery and consoling friendships we have! The Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam. We never know while the days pass which day is valuable. The surface is vexation, but the serene lies underneath.

Nature lives by making fools of us all, adds a drop of nectar to every man’s cup.

Machinery and Transcendentalism agree well. Stage-Coach and Railroad are bursting the old legislation like green withes.

My garden is an honest place. Every tree and every vine are incapable of concealment, and tell after two or three months exactly what sort of treatment they have had. The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.

No matter how long you are silent. Silence is only postponement: the retained thought takes a softer form.... You must hear the birds sing without attempting to render it into verbs and nouns. Let it lie a while and at night you shall find you have transferred its expression into the history of the day. Our American lives are somewhat poor and pallid, Franklins and Washingtons, no fiery grain; staid men, like our pale and timid flora. We have too much freedom, need an austerity, need some iron girth.

The poets, the great, have been illustrious wretches who have beggared the world which has beggared them.

Work on; the bee works all day, all summer, not knowing whom he works for, until the hive is full. Then comes a higher being, Man, and takes the store. As long as you feel the voracity of reading, read in God’s name, asking no questions of why and whereto. By and by, some man or men, a continent, or perhaps a higher sphere of beings, will be served by you.

May 19.

A youth of the name of Ball, a native, as he told me, of Concord, came to me yesterday, who towered away in such declamatory talk that at first I thought it rhodomontade and we should soon have done with each other. But he turned out to be a prodigious reader, and writer, too (for he spoke of whole volumes of prose and poetry barrelled away), and discovered great sagacity and insight in his criticisms, — a great impatience of our strait New England ways, and a wish to go to the Ganges, or at the least to live in Greece and Italy. There was little precision in his thinking, great discontent with metaphysics, and he seemed of a musical rather than a mathematical structure. With a little more repose of thought, he would be a great companion. He thought very humbly of most of his contemporaries: and Napoleon he thought good to turn periods with, but that he could see through him; but Lord Bacon he could not pardon for not seeing Shakspeare, for, said he, “As many Lord Bacons as could stand in Concord could find ample room in Shakspeare’s brain”; and Pope’s mean thought and splendid rhetoric he thought “resembled rats’ nests in kings’ closets, made up in a crown and purple robe and regalia.” He knows Greek well, and reads Italian, German, and Spanish. He spent five hours with me and carried off a pile of books. He had never known but one person of extraordinary promise, a youth at Dartmouth of the name of Hobart.

Critical. Do not write modern antiques like Landor’s Pericles, or Goethe’s Iphigenia, or Wieland’s Abderites, or Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, or Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. They are paste jewels. You may well take an ancient subject where the form is incidental merely, like Shakspeare’s plays, and the treatment and dialogue is simple, and most modern. But do not make much of the costume. For such things have no verity; no man will live or die by them: The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent, like Cupid in Anacreon. Shakspeare’s speeches in Lear are in the very dialect of 1843.

High speech of Demiurgus to his gods in the Timaeus. Goethe’s World-Soul is a sequel of the same thought. And that does the Intellect; it goes ordering, distributing, and by order making beauty.

This creative vortex has not spun over London, over our modern Europe, until now in Carlyle. Humboldt is magnificent, too, as a distributing eye. His glance is stratification; geography of plants, etc.

May 20.

Walked with Ellery. In the landscape felt the magic of color; the world is all opal, and those ethereal tints the mountains wear have the finest effects of music on us. Mountains are great poets, and one glance at this fine cliff scene undoes a great deal of prose, and reinstates us wronged men in our rights. All life, all society begins to get illuminated and transparent, and we generalize boldly and well. Space is felt as a great thing. There is some pinch and narrowness to us, and we laugh and leap to see the world, and what amplitudes it has of meadow, stream, upland, forest, and sea, which yet are but lanes and crevices to the great Space in which the world swims like a cockboat in the sea. A little canoe with three figures put out from a creek into the river and sailed downstream to the Bridge, and we rejoiced in the Blessed Water inviolable, magical, whose nature is Beauty, which instantly began to play its sweet games, all circles and dimples and lovely gleaming motions, — always Ganges, the Sacred River, and which cannot be desecrated or made to forget itself. But there below are these farms, yet are the farmers unpoetic. The life of labor does not make men, but drudges. Pleasant it is, as the habits of all poets may testify, to think of great proprietors, to reckon this grove we walk in a park of the noble; but a continent cut up into ten-acre farms is not desirable to the imagination. The Farmer is an enchanted laborer, and after toiling his brains out, sacrificing thought, religion, taste, love, hope, courage at the shrine of toil, turns out a bankrupt as well as the merchant. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a transpiercing criticism settled whether life is worth having on such terms....

Ellery said, “ The village [of Concord] did not look so very bad from our point; — the three churches looked like geese swimming about in a pond.”

All the physicians I have ever seen call themselves believers, but are materialists; they believe only in the existence of matter, and not in matter as an appearance, but as substance, and do not contemplate a cause. Their idea of spirit is a chemical agent.

The stars I think the antidotes of pyrrhonism. In the fuss of the sunlight and the rapid succession of moods, one might doubt his identity; but these expressive points, always in their place so immutable, are the tranquillizers of men. No narcotic so sedative or sanative as this.

Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain. A preoccupied mind an immense protection. There is a great concession on all hands to the ideal decorum in grief, as well as joy, but few hearts are broken.

Edward Everett did long ago for Boston what Carlyle is doing now for England and Europe, in rhetoricizing the conspicuous objects.

Reform. Chang Tsoo and Kee Neih retired from the state to the fields on account of misrule, and showed their displeasure at Confucius who remained in the world. Confucius sighed and said, “I cannot associate with birds and beasts. If I follow not man, whom shall I follow? If the world were in possession of right principles, I should not seek to change it.” See The Four Books; translated from the Chinese by Rev. D. Collier, Malacca, 1828.

[H ere follow several extracts from the same work.]

I enjoy all the hours of life. Few persons have such susceptibility to pleasure; as a countryman will say, “ I was at sea a month and never missed a meal,” so I eat my dinner and sow my turnips, yet do I never, I think, fear death. It seems to me so often a relief, a rendering-up of responsibility, a quittance of so many vexatious trifles.

How poetic this wondrous web of property! J. P. sitting in his parlor talking of philanthropy has his pocket full of papers, representing dead labor done long ago, not by him, not by his ancestor, but by hands which his ancestor had skill to set at work and get the certificates of. And now these signs of the work of hands, long ago mouldered in the grave, are honored by all men, and for them J. P. can get what vast amounts of work done by new young hands, — canals, railways, houses, gardens, coaches, pastures, sheep, oxen, and corn.

One great wrong must soon disappear, — this right to burden the unborn with state loans.

It is folly to imagine that there can be anything very bad in the position of woman compared with that of man, at any time; for since every woman is a man’s daughter, and every man is a woman’s son, every woman is too near to man, was too recently a man, than that possibly any wide disparity can be. As is the man will be the woman; and as is the woman, the man.

It is greatest to believe and to hope well of the world, because he who does so, quits the world of experience, and makes the world he lives in.

It is very odd that Nature should be so unscrupulous. She is no saint;...

Luther said he “preached coarsely; that giveth content to all: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin I spare until we learned ones come together, and then we make it so curled and finical that God himself wondereth at us.”

Reform, people hate the sound of now that they have begun to think it is like reading novels, which, when they are done, leave them just where they were, carpenters, and merchants, and debtors, and poor ladies — only they disbelieved the novel, and believed at first the reformer. But with any faith that would give a new face to the world for poor old eyes, lank hair, and wrinkled brows — as Millerism and Fourierism and other of our superstitions attest.

The smallest piece of God in a man makes him as attractive as loadstone. A scholar shines and immediately draws many youth around him, and, if he have not God enough in him to know how to say No, he finds himself inconveniently attractive. The Man, the God, is awakening; the door bolt will be broken, the iron fence melted in the forge; a man will yet measure his acres by his need and ability. I can manage ten and do take ten; I forty, and take forty; I a hundred, and will farm a hundred. He will know how to stand in his garden and in his house as steward, and say, This is right that you should take; this is wrong; therefore, leave it, O guest! And by his just standing there, as a channel of law and not of Self, the human race will feel that they occupy it by his occupation, they are excluded in his departure.

In dreamy woods, what forms abound

That elsewhere never poet found!

Here voices ring, and pictures burn,

And grace on grace, where’er I turn.

In the dreaming woods, I find what is nowhere else, and pictures on pictures whithersoever I turn. Over our little “God’s Pond” the birds flitted spectrally; nothing could look more elysian and unreal. I think that at some Parliament of Beauty, Fire and Water will contend for the apple which mistaken Paris gave, and it will be adjudged to neither but to Animal, who is the child of both. For the red bird is fire and the running horse is water.

It is agreeable and picturesque to see a man drink water and eat bread; not so, coffee and cake.

It is not travelling, it is not residence, it is relations that make life much or little. A few grand persons coming to us and weaving duties and offices between us and them, shall make our bread ambrosial. — But now it seems to me that I know persons enough of the first class, if only they were necessarily related. Three, four, five, six, seven, or eight persons, who look at nature and existence with no unworthy eye, but they are players, and rather melancholy players in the world, for want of work. I have seen no one who wore on his face an expression of habitual energy, but rather of indolence, the great faculties lie idle, whilst the hands and feet bustle.

We do not live by times; we do not belong to this or that century; but we live by qualities. A new style of face, a new person, would be a new age and regeneration to us. Nature, a mountain walk, always gives us to suspect the poverty of life, and we believe that we have run along only one thread of experience out of millions of varied threads which we were competent to combine with that single-string of ours.

Life must look forlorn, if we have nothing above us. Paddy values life, and it looks solid to him, because he sees and feels so much and so many above him. It looks to us sad enough that not even a superstition should remain to us, no ghosts in the broad land and social system of millions, no play for the imagination of millions; and yet it has so appeared to all peoples, for no man knew his superstition as superstition. And we who lie under this enchantment of desiring money, may find ours there, when we consider that the net result of the life which is bestowed on drudging for an estate, and of that which is merrily trifled away, does not much vary. The farmer, as we passed, was leading a small company of men in their Eleusinian mysteries along the furrows of the field. One step each and then seeds were dropped and the soil smoothed and then another step and no man lifted his face from the ground.

This country must be filled with incident, and then how will the landscape look! Now our houses and towns are like mosses and lichens, so thin laid on the rock. One day they will get rooted like oaks and be a part of the globe.

I think we are not quite yet fit for Flying Machines, and therefore there will be none....

The mountains in the horizon acquaint us with more exalted relations to our friends than any we sustain.

Carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. What a man s book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. A masterly criticism on the times. Fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of to-day. The poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e g., dwarf British Debt and raise Nature and social life.

May 25.

Criticism. It is for the novelist to make no character act absurdly, but only absurdly as seen by the others....

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes. What sculpture in these hard clouds; what expression of immense amplitude in this dotted and rippled rack, here firm and continental, there vanishing into plumes and auroral gleams. No crowding; boundless, cheerful, and strong.

Men Representative. Nothing is dead. Men and things feign themselves dead....

The gods are jealous, and their finest gifts of men they deface with some shrewd fault, that we may hate the vessel which holds the nectar. And hence men have in all ages suffered the heralds of Heaven to starve and struggle with evils of all kinds; for the gods will not have their heralds amiable; lest men should love the cup and not the nectar.

My friends are leaving the town, and I am sad at heart that they cannot have that love and service from me to which they seem by their aims and the complexion of their minds, and by their unpopularity, to have rich claims. Especially Charles Lane I seem to myself to have treated with the worst inhospitality, inasmuch as I have never received that man to me — not for so much as one moment. A pure, superior, mystical, intellectual, and gentle soul, free and youthful, too, in character, and treating me ever with marked forbearance, he so formidable, — a fighter in the ring, — yet he has come, and has stayed so long in my neighborhood an alien: for his nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me. It sometimes seems to me strange that English and New Englanders should be so little capable of blending. Their methods and temperaments so differ from ours. They strike twelve the first time. Our people have more than meets the ear. This man seems to me born a warrior, the most expert swordsman we have ever seen; good when the trumpet sounds. Metallic in his nature, not vegetable enough. No eye for Nature, and his hands as far from his head as Alcott’s own. — We are not willing to trust the Universe to give the hospitality of the Omnipresent to the good, but we, too, must assume to do the honors with offices, money, and clatter of plates.

O Poet, by rock and bird is conferred a new nobility, and not in palaces any longer. Would you know the conditions, hard but equal? Thou shalt leave the world and know the Muse only....

[This, the concluding passage off “ The Poet” (Essays, Second Series) varies, it seems to the editors for the better, in the Journal, in the following passage: — ]

For the time of towns is measured by funeral chimes, and every hour is tolled away from the world, but in Nature the merry hours are dialled by flowers on the hillside and growth of joy on joy. Thou shalt have a new census and calendar; for a long September day between sun and sun shall hold centuries in its rosy and yellow deeps, and thy calendar shall be thoughts and thy action as thou ought. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life ... And a tomb is all that shall be denied thee. For the Universe is thy house to live in and thou shalt not die.

If thou keep these laws, thou shalt have a leader’s eye, or live always in the mountain, seeing all the details, but seeing them all in their place and tendency. And thou shalt be greeted by omens that are prosperity and fill thee with light.

And thou shalt serve the God Terminus, the bounding Intellect, and love Boundary or Form; believing that Form is an oracle which never lies.

And every man shall be to thee for all men, each man being alone in the vast Desart; and thou shalt worship him, for he is the Universe in a mask.

June 10.

Hawthorne and I talked of the number of superior young men we have seen. H. said, that he had seen several from whom he had expected much, but they had not distinguished themselves; and he had inferred that he must not expect a popular success from such; he had in nowise lost his confidence in their power.

I am often refreshed by seeing marks of excellence, and of excellence which makes no impression on people at large, who reckon it a bar-room wit, and swaggering intellect, not presentable, and of no great value. — Then I take comfort that these gifts are so cheap, and it would seem that all men are great, only some are adjusted to the delicate mean of this world and can swim in it wherever put.

June 11.

Pride. Pride is so handsome, pride is so economical, pride eradicates so many vices — ...

The men show the quality of the land.

My Chinese book does not forget to record of Confucius, that his night-gown was one length and a half of his body.

There are some persons from whom we always expect fairy gifts. Let us not cease to expect them.

June 18.

Yesterday at Bunker Hill, a prodigious concourse of people, but a village green could not be more peaceful, orderly, sober, and even affectionate. Webster gave us his plain statement like good bread, yet the oration was feeble compared with his other efforts, and even seemed poor and Polonius-like with its indigent conservations. When there is no antagonism, as in these holiday speeches, and no religion, things sound not heroically. It is a poor oration that finds Washington for its highest mark. The audience give one much to observe, they are so light-headed and light-timbered, every man thinking more of his inconveniences than of the objects of the occasion, and the hurrahs are so slight and easily procured. Webster is very good America himself.

Wonderful multitudes: on the top of a house I saw a company protecting themselves from the sun by an old large map of the United States. A charitable lumber merchant near the Bridge had chalked up over his counting-room door “500 seats for ladies, free”; and there the five hundred sat in white tiers. The ground within the square at the monument was arranged to hold 80,000 persons.

It was evident that there was the Monument and here was Webster, and he knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing:... He was there as the representative of the American continent, there in his Adamitic capacity, and that is the basis of the satisfaction the people have in hearing him, that he alone of all men does not disappoint the eye and ear, but is a fit figure in the landscape.

June 22.

I was at Brook Farm and had a cheerful time. Some confidences were granted me; and grief softened the somewhat hard nature of Mrs. George Ripley, so that I had never seen her to such advantage. Fine weather, cheerful uplands, and every person you meet is a character and in free costume. Charles Newcomb I saw, and was relieved to meet again on something of the old footing, after hearing of so much illness and sensitiveness. But Charles is not a person to be seen on a holiday or in holiday places, but one should live in solitude and obscurity, with him for the only person in the county to speak to. Also George Bradford let me a little into the spiritual history and relations that go forward, but one has this feeling in hearing of their spiritualism, — ah! had they never heard of it first! and did not know it was spiritualism.

The scholars are the true hierarchy, only that now they are displaced by hypocrites, that is, sciolists. For is not that the one want of the man, to meet a brother who, being fuller of God than he, can hold him steady to a truth until he has made it his own? O with what joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an inspiration....

[Under the ink writing of this page in the Journal can be traced the pencilled lines on “The Poet,” beginning —

But oh, to see his solar eyes

Like meteors which chose the way

And rived the dark like a new day, etc.

 which form the end of the first division of the verses with that title printed in the Appendix to the Poems.]

The Chinese are as wonderful for their etiquette as the Hebrews for their piety.

Those men who are noised all their lifetime as on the edge of some great discovery, never discover anything. But nobody ever heard of Monsieur Daguerre until the Daguerreotype appeared. And now I do not know who invented the railroad.

Dante’s Vita Nuova reads like the Book of Genesis, as if written before literature, whilst truth yet existed. A few incidents are sufficient, and are displayed with Oriental amplitude and leisure. It is the Bible of Love.

The Interim. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle — and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do....

Variety. [Here follows the passage on the successive delights that various authors have given, which is printed in “Experience.”] Pero si muove. And when at night I look at moon and stars, I seem stationary and they to hurry.

THE THREE DIMENSIONS

Room! cried the spheres when first they shined,

And dived into the ample sky:

Room! room! cried the new mankind,

And took the oath of Liberty:

Room! room! willed the opening mind,

And found it in Variety.

Life. Fools and clowns and sots make the fringes of every one’s tapestry of life, and give a certain reality to the picture. What could we do in Concord without Bigelow’s and Wesson’s bar-rooms and their dependencies? What without such fixtures as Uncle Sol, and old Moore who sleeps in Doctor Hurd’s barn, and the red charity-house over the brook? Tragedy and comedy always go hand in hand.

Life itself is an interim and a transition; this, O Indur, is my one and twenty thousandth form, and already I feel the old Life sprouting underneath in the twenty thousand and first, and I know well that he builds no new world but by tearing down the old for materials.

[In July, Mr. Emerson, by invitation, gave an address to the Temperance Society at Harvard, Massachusetts. The extract which Mr. Cabot gives in the Appendix to his Memoir shows that he treated his subject largely and by no means in the usual narrow and specific way.]

July 8.

The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at Fruit-lands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact, to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and in the field were those of superior men, of men at rest. What had they to conceal? What had they to exhibit? And it seemed so high an attainment that I thought, as often before, so now more, because they had a fit home or the picture was fitly framed, that these men ought to be maintained in their place by the Country for its culture. Young men and young maidens, old men and women, should visit them and be inspired. I think there is as much merit in beautiful manners as in hard work.

I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July. We will see them in December. I know they are better for themselves than as partners. One can easily see that they have yet to settle several things. Their saying that things are clear, and they sane, does not make them so. If they will in every deed be lovers and not selfish; if they will serve the town of Harvard, and make their neighbors feel them as benefactors wherever they touch them, they are as safe as the sun.

We spend our money for that which is not help and have the inconvenience of the reputation of money without its advantage. Those who have no appearance to keep up, the dowdy farmer’s wife who meets you at her door, broom in hand, or pauses at her washtub to answer your question, — their house is serene and majestic, if their natures are; but ours is not, let our ideas be what they may, whilst we may not appear except in costume, and our immunity at the same time is bought by money and not by love and nature.

And far away the purple morn

Concealed by intervening fruits and flowers

Lies buried in the abundance of the hours.

July 10.

Ellery Channing railed an hour in good set terms at the usurpation of the past, at the great hoaxes of the Homers and Shakspeares, hindering the books and the men of to-day of their just meed. Oh certainly; I assure him that oaks and horse-chestnuts are entirely obsolete, that the Horticultural Society are about to recommend the introduction of cabbages as a shade tree, so much more convenient and every way comprehensible; all grown from the seed upward to its most generous crumpled extremity within one’s own short memory; past contradiction the ornament of the world, and then so good to eat, as acorns and horse-chestnuts are not. Shade trees for breakfast! Then this whole business of one man taking the praise of all or more than his share of the praise. As all are alike in nature and possibility, it is absurd that any should pretend to exhibit more reason or virtue than I do. A man of genius, did you say? A man of virtue? I tell you both are malformations, painful inflammations of the brain and of the liver and such shall be punishable in the new Commonwealth. And if any such appear they shall be dealt with as all reasonable Spartans and Indians do with lame and deformed infants, toss them into the river and the average of the race improved. Nothing that is not ex tempore shall now be tolerated: pyramids and cities shall give place to tents. The man, the skeleton and body, which many years have built up, shall go for nothing: his dinner, the mutton and rice he ate two hours ago, now fast flowing into chyle, that is all we consider; and the problem how to detach new dinner from old man — what we respect from what we scorn — deserves the study of the scientific.

[The poem “Blight” follows.]

The clergy are the etiquette or Chinese Empire of our American Society. They are here that we may not be fed and bedded and die and be buried as dogs, but, in the want of dignity, we may be treated to a sufficiency of parade and gentle gradations of salutation at coming and parting. If anybody dies and grieves us to the heart, so that the people might be melted to tears by a hearty word, the minister shuts his lips and preaches on the miracles, or the parables, or Solomon’s Temple, because the family have not had up their note; if any new outrage on law or any pregnant event fills the mind of people with queries and omens, the pulpit is dumb.

Ellery, who hopes there will be no cows in Heaven, has discovered what cows are for, namely, to give the farmers something to do in summertime. All this haying comes at midsummer between planting and harvest, when all hands would be idle, but for this cow and ox, which must be fed and mowed for; and thus Intemperance and the progress of Crime is prevented!

July 16.

Montaigne has the de quoi which the French cherubs had not, when the courteous Archbishop implored them to sit down. His reading was Plutarch.

‘T is high time we had a Bible that should be no provincial record, but should open the history of the planet and bind all tendencies and dwarf all the Epics and Philosophies we have. It will have no Books of Ruth and Esther, no Song of Solomon, nor excellent, sophistical Pauls.

As if any taste or imagination could supply identity. The old duty is the old God.

Readiness is youthfulness; to hold the old world in our hand, awaiting our new errand, and to be rebuked by a child, by a sot, by a philistine, and thankfully take a new course. The Moral Sentiment is well called the Newness, for it is never other than a surprise, and the oldest angels are the boys whom it doth whip and scourge, though its scars give the gladness of the Martyr flame.

I have got in my barn a carpenter’s bench and two planes, a shave, a saw, a chisel, a vise, and a square. These planes seem to me great institutions, whose inventor no man knoweth, yet what a stroke of genius was each of these tools! When you have them, you must watch a workman for a month, or a year, or seven years, as our boys do, to know all his tricks with them. Great is Tubal Cain. A good pen is a finer, stronger instrument, and a language, an algebra, a calculus, music, or poetic metre, more wondrous tools yet, for this polygon or pentagon that is called Man. Thanks, too, to Pythagoras for the multiplication table.

To lay down the heavy burden

Of herself as woman would.

August 5.

Home from Plymouth, where I spent a fine day in an excursion to Half Way Pond, dining at the house of Mrs. R — . Mary and Lucia Russell made the party for us, and Abraham Jackson and Helen Russell accompanied us. Mrs. R. was a genuine Yankee, and so fluent in her provincial English that Walter Scott or Dickens could not desire a better sample of local life. Mr. Faunce, Mr. Swift, and Mr. Stetson, her ministers at “Ponds” (meaning Monument Ponds), baptism by immersion and by sprinkling, Mr. Whitefield’s “sarmons,” the “Univarsallers,” the Schools, and the Reformation of the Church at Ponds and elsewhere, and the drowning of her son Allen in a vessel loaded with paving-stones which sunk in a tempest near Boston Light, and the marriage of her son’s widow, were the principal events of her life, and the topics of her conversation. She lives alone in this pleasing, tranquil scene at the head of a pond, and never is uneasy except in a tempest in the night.

I cannot well say what I found at Plymouth, beyond the uneasiness of seeing people. Every person of worth, man or woman, whom I see, gives me a pain as if I injured them, because of my incapacity to do them justice in the intercourse that passes between us. Two or more persons together deoxygenate the air, apathize and paralyze me. I twist like the poor eel in the exhausted receiver, and my conviction of their sense and virtue only makes matters worse for me by accusing my injustice. I am made for chronic relations, not for moments, and am wretched with fine people who are only there for an hour.

It is a town of great local and social advantages, Plymouth; lying on the sea with this fine, broken, inland country, pine-covered and scooped into beds of two hundred lakes. Their proverb is that there is a pond in Plymouth for everyday of the year. Billington Sea is the best of all, and yet this superb chain of lakes which we pass in returning from Half Way Pond might content one a hundred years.

The botany of the region is rare. The Epigæa, named Mayflower at Plymouth, is now found elsewhere. The beautiful and fragrant Sabbatia, the Empetrum, the sun-dew, the Rhinanthus or Yellow-Rattle and other plants are almost peculiar to this spot. Great linden trees lift their green domes above the town, as seen from the sea, and the graveyard hill shows the monuments of the Pilgrims and their children as far out to sea as we could see anything of the town. The virtues of the Russells are as eminent and fragrant here, at this moment, as ever were the glories of that name in England: and L — is a flower of the sweetest and softest beauty which real life ever exhibited. These people know so well how to live, and have such perfect adjustment in their tastes and their power to gratify them, that the ideal life is necessarily thrown into the shade, and I have never seen a strong conservatism appear so amiable and wise. We saw their well-built houses which an equal and generous economy warmed and animated; and their good neighborhood was never surpassed: the use of the door-bell and knocker seems unknown. And the fine children who played in the yards and piazzas appeared to come of a more amiable and gentle stock.

[Concord was, until about 1852, a “ shire town” and the courts, later transferred to Lowell, were held there. In the summer of 1843 a somewhat notable case, Commonwealth vs. Wyman, from the eminence of the counsel employed, was tried there, an officer of a Charlestown bank having been charged with misappropriation of its funds. Several passages of this entry were used by Mr. Emerson in 1854 in his address in New York on “The Fugitive Slave Law”; but it seemed best to keep them here, not to interrupt the continuity of the text. (See Miscellanies, pp. 222, 223.)]

August 17.

Webster at Concord. Mr. Webster loses nothing by comparison with brilliant men in the legal profession: he is as much before them as before the ordinary lawyer. At least I thought he appeared among these best lawyers of the Suffolk Bar, like a schoolmaster among his boys.

His wonderful organization, the perfection of his elocution, and all that thereto belongs, — voice, accent, intonation, attitude, manner, — are such as one cannot hope to see again in a century; then he is so thoroughly simple and wise in his rhetoric. Understanding language and the use of the positive degree, all his words tell, and his rhetoric is perfect, so homely, so fit, so strong. Then he manages his matter so well, he hugs his fact so close, and will not let it go, and never indulges in a weak flourish, though he knows perfectly well how to make such exordiums and episodes and perorations as may give perspective to his harangue, without in the least embarrassing his plan or confounding his transitions. What is small, he shows as small, and makes the great, great. In speech he sometimes roars, and his words are like blows of an axe. His force of personal attack is terrible, he lays out his strength so directly in honest blows, and all his powers of voice, arm, eye, and whole man are so heartily united and bestowed on the adversary that he cannot fail to be felt.

His “Christian religion” is always weak, being merely popular, and so most of his religion. Thus, he spoke of the value of character; it was simply mercantile; it was to defend a man in criminal prosecutions, and the like; and bear him up against the inspection of all BUT the Almighty, etc. And in describing Wyman’s character, he said, he wanted that sternness of Christian principle which teaches to “avoid even the appearance of evil.” And one feels every moment that he goes for the actual world, and never one moment for the ideal. He is the triumph of the Understanding and is undermined and supplanted by the Reason for which yet he is so good a witness, being all the time fed therefrom, and his whole nature and faculty presupposing that, that I felt as if the children of Reason might gladly see his success as a homage to their law, and regard him as a poor, rude soldier hired for sixpence a day to fight their battles. I looked at him sometimes with the same feeling with which I see one of these strong Paddies on the railroad. Perhaps it was this, perhaps it was a mark of having outlived some of my once finest pleasures, that I found no appetite to return to the Court in the afternoon and hear the conclusion of his argument. The green fields on my way home were too fresh and fair, and forbade me to go again.

His splendid wrath, when his eyes became fires, is as good to see, so intellectual it is, and the wrath of the fact and cause he espouses, and not at all personal to himself.

Rockwood Hoar said, nothing amused him more than to see Mr. Webster adjourn the Court every day, which he did by rising, and taking his hat and looking the Judge coolly in the face; who then bade the Crier adjourn the Court.

Choate and Webster. Rufus Choate is a favorite with the bar, and a nervous, fluent speaker, with a little too much fire for the occasion, yet with a certain temperance in his fury and a perfect self-command; but he uses the superlative degree, and speaks of affairs altogether too rhetorically. This property of $300,000, the property of a bank, he speaks of as “vast,” and quite academically. And there was no perspective in his speech; the transitions were too slight and sudden. But the cast-iron tones of the man of men, the perfect machine that he is for arguing a case, dwarfed instantly Choate and all the rest of the learned counselors.

Webster behaves admirably well in society. These village parties must be dishwater to him, yet he shows himself just good-natured, just nonchalant enough, and has his own way without offending any one or losing any ground. He told us that he never read by candle-light.

Judge Allen told me last night that he had great and increasing confidence in juries, and thought that in nine cases out of ten they rendered a satisfactory and a right verdict. He appealed to Mr. Hoar, who thought this true in five cases out of six.

“Sir Walter Raleigh was such a person every way, that, as King Charles I says of the Lord Strafford, a prince would rather be afraid of than ashamed of. He had that awfulness and ascendancy in his aspect over other mortals, that the King— “and here Aubrey’s manuscript stops.

Webster quite fills our little town, and I doubt if I shall get settled down to writing until he is well gone from the county. He is a natural Emperor of men; they remark in him the kingly talent of remembering persons accurately, and knowing at once to whom he has been introduced, and to whom not.

He has lately bought his father’s farm in

Franklin (formerly Salisbury), New Hampshire, as Waller the poet wished to buy his birthplace, Winchmore Hill, saying to his Cousin Hampden, “A stag, when he is hunted and near spent, always returns home.”

Elizabeth Hoar says that she talked with him, as one likes to go behind the Niagara Falls, so she tried to look into those famed caverns of eyes, and see how deep they were, and the whole man was magnificent. Mr. Choate told her that he should not sleep for a week when a cause like this was pending, but that when they met in Boston on Saturday afternoon to talk over the matter, the rest of them were wide awake, but Mr. Webster went fast asleep amidst the consultation.

It seems to me the Quixotism of Criticism to quarrel with Webster because he has not this or that fine evangelical property. He is no saint, but the wild olive wood, ungrafted yet by grace, but according to his lights a very true and admirable man. His expensiveness seems to be necessary to him. Were he too prudent a Yankee it would be a sad deduction from his magnificence. I only wish he would never truckle; I do not care how much he spends.

 Webster’s force is part of nature and the world, like any given amount of azote or electricity.... After all his great talents have been told, there remains that perfect propriety, which belongs to every world-genius, which animates all the details of action and speech with the character of the whole so that his beauties of detail are endless. Great is life.

I cannot consent to compare him [Webster] with his competitors, but when the Clay men and Van Buren men and the Calhoun men have had all their way and all their political objections have been conceded, and they have settled their little man, whichever it be, on the top of the martin-box of state, then and not before will we begin to state the claims of this world’s man, this strong Paddy of the times and laws and state, to his place in history.

Nature. In Nature the doubt occurs whether the man is the cause or the effect. Are beasts and plants degradations of man? or are these the prophecies and preparations of Nature practising herself for her master-piece in Man? Culminate we do not; but that point of imperfection which we occupy — is it on the way up or down?

Again, is the world (according to the old doubt) to be criticized otherwise than as the best possible in the existing system: and the population of the world the best that soils, climates, and animals permit?

“Will is the measure of Power.” — PROCLUS on Timaeus.

“Prudence is a medium between intellect and opinion.” — Idem.

“Intellect is that by which we know terms or boundaries.” — ARISTOTLE.

“Beauty swims on the light of forms.” — PROCLUS.

“Intellect,” according to Amelius, “is threefold, that which is, that which has, and that which sees.” — PROCLUS.

“Law is the distribution of intellect.” — PROCLUS.

“Every soul pays a guardian attention to that which is inanimate.” — PLATO, in Phoedrus.

It is a pathetic thing to meet a friend prepared to love you, to whom yet, from some inaptitude, you cannot communicate yourself with that grace and power which only love will allow. You wish to repay his goodness by showing him the dear relations that subsist between you and your chosen friends, but you feel that he cannot conceive of you whom he knows so slow and cold, under these sweet and gentle aspects.

Confide in your power, whether it be to be a wet-nurse or a wood-sawyer, lion-taming Van Amburgh, or Stewart maker of steam candy, keep your shop, magnify your office. Fear smears our work, and ignorance gilds our neighbor’s, but the sure years punish our faint-heartedness.

[Here follow many extracts from the She-King, the third member of the pentateuch of most ancient Chinese Classics. A few are here given.]

“The way of Chow is even as a whetstone and as straight as an arrow. Superior men tread in it and inferior men view it as their pattern.”

“Sorry sorry is my heart; I am hated by the low herd.”

“He who neither errs nor forgets is the man who accords with the ancient canons.”

“Let the rain descend first on our public and then on our private fields.”

(From U)

Apparent imitations of unapparent natures.

Victurus Genium debet habere liber. — MARTIAL.

I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I find it needs much heedfulness to preserve the due decorum, they melt so fast into each other....

August 25.

The railroad whose building I inspected this afternoon brings a multitude of picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery.

There is nothing in history to parallel the influence of Jesus Christ. The Chinese books say of Wan Wang, one of their kings, “From the west, from the east, from the south, and from the north there was not one thought not brought in subjection to him.” This can be more truly said of Jesus than of any mortal.

Mencius says, “A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Pih E are heard of, the stupid become intelligent and the wavering determined.”

Fourier carries a whole French Revolution in his head, and much more. This is arithmetic with a vengeance.

In the points of good breeding, what I most require and insist upon is deference. I like that every chair should be a throne and hold a king. And what I most dislike is a low sympathy of each with his neighbor’s palate.... I respect cats, they seem to have so much else in their heads besides their mess.... I prefer a tendency to stateliness to an excess of fellowship.

In all things I would have the island of a man inviolate. No degree of affection is to invade this religion....

The charge which a lady in much trust made to me against her companions was that people on whom beforehand all persons would put the utmost reliance were not responsible. They saw the necessity that the work must be done, and did it not; and it of course fell to be done by herself and the few principals. I replied, that in my experience good people were as bad as rogues, that the conscience of the conscientious ran in veins, and the most punctilious in some particulars were latitudinarian in others.

Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen. Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.

The thinker looks for God in the direction of the consciousness, the churchman out of it. If you ask the former for his definition of God, he would answer, “My possibility”; for his definition of Man, “My actuality.”

“Stand up straight,” said the stage-coachman, “and the rain won’t wet you a mite.”

We like the strong objectiveness of Homer and of the primitive poems of each country, ballads and the Chinese and Indian sentences, but that cannot be preserved in a large and civilized population. The scholar will inevitably be detached from the mechanic, and will not dwell in the same house, nor see his handiworks so near by, and must adopt new classification and a more metaphysical vocabulary. Hawthorne boasts that he lived at Brook Farm during its heroic age: then all were intimate and each knew the other’s work: priest and cook conversed at night of the day’s work. Now they complain that they are separated and such intimacy cannot be; there are a hundred souls.

It seems as if we had abundance of insight and a great taste for writing in this country: only the describers wanted subjects. But that is deceptive. The great describer is known hereby, that he finds topics.

The farmer whom I visited this afternoon works very hard and very skillfully to get a good estate, and gets it. But by his skill and diligence and that of thousands more, his competitors, the wheat and milk by which I live are made so cheap that they are within reach of my scanty monies, and I am not y et forced to go to work and produce them for myself. Tuttle told me that he had once carried forty-one hundredweight of hay to Boston and received $61.50 for the load. But it is no part of T.’s design to keep down the price of hay or wheat or milk.

How long shalt thou stay,

Thou devastator of thy friend’s day?

Each substance and relation

In Nature’s operation

Hath its unit and metre;

And the new compounds are multiples of that.

But the unit of the visit,

Or the meeting of friends,

Is the meeting of their eyes.

The founders of Brook Farm ought to have this praise, that they have made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, and the most fastidious, find it the pleasantest of residences.

If you look at these railroad laborers and hear their stories, their fortunes appear as little controlled as those of the forest leaves. One is whirled off to Albany, one to Ohio, one digs on the levee at New Orleans and one at Walden Pond; others on the wharves in Boston or the woods in Maine, and they have too little foresight and too little money to leave them any more election of whither to go or what to do than the poor leaf which is blown into this dike or that brook to perish. “To work from dark to dark for fifty cents the day,” as the poor woman in the shanty told us, is but pitiful wages for a married man.

Few people know how to spend a large fortune. A beauty of wealth is power without pretension, a despotism under the quietest speech and under the plainest garb, neither rich nor poor.... The money-lord should have no fine furniture or fine equipage, but should open all doors, be warm, be cool, ride, fly, execute or suspend execution, at his will, and see what he willed come to pass.

Ellery’s poetry shows the Art, though the poems are imperfect, as the first Daguerres are grim things, yet show that a great engine has been invented.

Superiority of Vathek over Vivian Grey. Is life a thunderstorm that we can see now by a flash the whole horizon, and then cannot see our right hand?

Families should be formed on a higher method than by the Intelligence Office. A man will come to think it as absurd to send thither for his nurse or farmer, as for a wife. Domestics pass in silence through the social rooms and recover their tongues at the kitchen door — to bless you?

September 3.

Representative. We pursue ideas, not persons, the man momentarily stands for the thought....

My friend came hither and satisfied me in many ways, and, as usual, dissatisfied me with myself. She increased ‘my knowledge of life, and her sketches of manners and persons are always valuable, she sees so clearly and steadily through the veils. But best of all is the admonition that comes to me from a demand of beauty so naturally made wheresoever her eye rests, that our ways of life, our indolences, our indulgences, our want of heroic action are shamed. Yet I cordially greet the reproof. When that which is so fair and noble passes, I seem enlarged; all my thoughts are spacious; the chambers of the brain and the lobes of the heart are bigger. How am I cheered always by traits of that “vis superba formae” which inspires art and genius but not passion: there is that in beauty which cannot be caressed, but which demands the utmost wealth of nature in the beholder properly to meet it.

We cannot quite pull down and degrade our life and divest it of poetry. The day-laborer is popularly reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale: yet, talk with him, he is saturated with the beautiful laws of the world....

Any form of government would content me in which the rulers were gentlemen, but it is in vain that I have tried to persuade myself that Mr. Calhoun or Mr. Clay or Mr. Webster were such; they are underlings, and take the law from the dirtiest fellows. In England it usually appears as if the power were confided to persons of superior sentiment, but they have not treated Russia as they ought in the affair of Poland. It is true these fellows should hear the truth from other quarters than the Anti-slavery papers and Whig papers and Investigators and all other committed organs. We have allowed them to take a certain place in private society as if they were at the head of their countrymen. They must be told that they have dishonored themselves and it can be allowed no longer, they are not now to be admitted to the society of scholars.

The capital defect of my nature for society (as it is of so many others) is the want of animal spirits. They seem to me a thing incredible, as if God should raise the dead. I hear of what others perform by their aid, with fear. It is as much out of my hospitality as the prowess of Cœur de Lion, or an Irishman’s day’s work on the railroad. Animal spirits seem the power of the Present, and their feats equal to the Pyramids of Karnac. Before them what a base mendicant is Memory with his leathern badge. I cannot suddenly form my relation to my friend, or rather, can very slowly arrive at its satisfaction. I make new friendships on the old: we shall meet on higher and higher platforms until our first intercourse shall seem like an acquaintance of tops, marbles, and ball-time. I am an architect and ask a thousand years for my probation. Meantime I am very sensible to the deep flattery of Omens.

Has the South European more animal spirits than we, that he is so joyous a companion?

A visit to the railroad yesterday, in Lincoln, showed me the laborers — how grand they are; all their postures, their air, and their very dress. They are men, manlike employed, and the art of the sculptor is to take these forms and set on them a cultivated face and head. But cultivation never, except in war, makes such forms and carriage as these.

I think it will soon become the pride of the country to make gardens and adorn country-houses. That is the fine art which especially fits us. Sculpture, painting, music, architecture, do not thrive with us....

The other day came C. S., with eyes full of Naushon and Nahant and Niagara, dreaming by day and night of canoes, and lightning, and deer-parks, and silver waves, and could hardly disguise her disdain for our poor cold, low life in Concord, like rabbits in a warren. Yet the interiors of our woodland which recommend the place to us, she did not see.... The great sun equalizes all places, — the sun and the stars. The grand features of Nature are so identical that, whether in a mountain or a waterfall, or whether in a flat meadow, the presence of the great agents makes the presence or absence of the inferior features insignificant. With the sun, with morning and evening.

The difference between men, if one could accept exterior tests, is in power of face....

But it is easy to see that as soon as one acts for large masses, the moral element will and must be allowed for, will and must work. Daniel O’Connell is no saint, yet at this vast meeting on the hill of Tara, eighteen miles from Dublin, of five hundred thousand persons, he almost preaches; he goes for temperance, for law and order, and suggests every reconciling, gentilizing, humanizing consideration. There is little difference between him and Father Mathew, when the audience is thus enormously swelled.

Ellery says that at Brook Farm they keep Curtis and Charles Newcomb and a few others as decoy-ducks.

Life. A great lack of vital energy; excellent beginners, infirm executors. I should think there were factories above us which stop the water....

God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.

Fear haunts the building railroad, but it will be American power and beauty, when it is done. And these peaceful shovels are better, dull as they are, than pikes in the hands of these Kernes; and this stern day’s work of fifteen or sixteen hours, though deplored by all the humanity of the neighborhood, and, though all Concord cries Shame! on the contractors, is a better police than the sheriff and his deputies to let off the peccant humors.

The appeal to the public indicates infirm faith.... Yet this must be said in defense of Alcott and Lane, that their appeal to the public is a recognition of mankind as proof of abiding interest in other men, of whom they wish to be saviours.

It is in vain to tell me that you are sufficient to yourself, but have not anything to impart. I know and am assured that whoever is sufficient to himself will, if only by existing, suffice me also.

’Tis a great convenience to be educated for a time in a counting-room or attorney’s business; then you may safely be a scholar the rest of your life, and will find the use of that partial thickening of the skin every day as you will of your shoes or your hat. What mountains of nonsense will you have cleared your brain of forever!

We admire the tendency, but the men who exhibit it are grass and waves, until they are conscious of that which they share: then it is still admirable in them, as out of them; yea, how much more dear!

There is no chance for the aesthetic village....

September 26.

This morning Charles Lane left us after a two days’ visit. He was dressed in linen altogether, with the exception of his shoes, which were lined with linen, and he wore no stockings. He was full of methods of an improved life: valued himself chiefly just now on getting rid of the animals; thinks there is no economy in using them on a farm. He said that they could carry on their Family at Fruitlands in many respects better, no doubt, if they wished to play it well. He said that the clergy for the most part opposed the Temperance Reform, and conspicuously this simplicity in diet, because they were alarmed, as soon as such nonconformity appeared, by the conviction that the next question people would ask, would be, “Of what use are the clergy?” In the College he found an arithmetic class, Latin, German, Hebrew classes, but no Creative Class. He had this confidence, namely, that §hii facit per alium, facit per se: that it was of no use to put off upon a second or third person the act of serving or of killing cattle; as in cities, for example, it would be sure to come back on the offending party in some shape, as in the brutality of the person or persons you have brutalized.

[Here follow some trial lines for the “Ode to Beauty.”]

The poet should walk in the fields, drawn on by new scenes, supplied with vivid pictures and thoughts, until insensibly the recollection of his home was crowded out of his mind, and all memory obliterated, and he was led in triumph by Nature.

When he spoke of the stars he should be innocent of what he said; for it seemed that the stars, as they rolled over him, mirrored themselves in his mind as in a deep well, and it was their image and not his thought that you saw.

It is of no importance to real wisdom how many propositions you add on the same platform, but only what new forms. I knew somewhat concerning the American Revolution, the action at Bunker Hill, the battle of Monmouth, of Yorktown, etc. To-day I learn new particulars of General Greene, of Lee, of Rochambeau.

But now that I think of that event with a changed mind and see what a compliment to England is all this self-glorification, and betrays a servile mind in us who think it so overgreat an action; it makes the courage and the wit of the admirers suspected, who ought to look at such things as things of course.

Let us shame the fathers by the virtue of the sons, and not belittle us by brag.

We ought to thank the nonconformist for everything good he does. Who has a right to ask him why he compounds with this or that wrong?

Certainly the objection to Reform is the common sense of mankind, which seems to have settled several things; as traffic, and the use of the animals for labor and food. But it will not do to offer this by way of argument, as that is precisely the ground of dispute.

Read Montaigne’s journey into Italy, which is an important part of his biography. I like him so well that I value even his register of his disease. Is it that the valetudinarian gives the assurance that he is not ashamed of himself? Then what a treasure, to enlarge my knowledge of his friend by his narrative of the last days and the death of Etienne de la Boëtie. In Boston, when I heard lately Chandler Robbins preach so well the funeral sermon of Henry Ware, I thought of Montaigne, who would also have felt how much this surface called Unitarianism admits of being opened and deepened, and that this was as good and defensible a post of life to occupy as any other. It was a true cathedral music and brought chancels and choirs, surplices, ephods and arks and hierarchies into presence. Certainly Montaigne is the antagonist of the fanatic reformer. Under the oldest, mouldiest conventions he would prosper just as well as in the newest world. His is the common sense which, though no science, is fairly worth the Seven.

A newspaper lately called Daniel Webster “ a steam engine in breeches,” and the people are apt to speak of him as “Daniel,” and it is a sort of proverb in New England of a vast knowledge— “if I knew as much as Daniel Webster.” Os, oculosque Jovi par.

Henry Ware, with his benevolence and frigid manners, reminded men how often of a volcano covered with snow. But there was no deep enthusiasm.... All his talent was available, and he was a good example of the proverb, no doubt a hundred times applied to him, of “a free steed driven to death.” He ought to have been dead ten years ago, but hard work had kept him alive. A very slight and puny frame he had, and the impression of size was derived from his head. Then he was dressed with heroical plainness. I think him well entitled to the dangerous style of Professor of Pulpit eloquence, — none but Channing so well, and he had ten times the business valor of Channing. This was a soldier that flung himself into all risks at all hours, not a solemn martyr kept to be burned once and make the flames proud. In calm hours and friendly company, his face expanded into broad simple sunshine; and I thought le bon Henri a pumpkin-sweeting.

Plato paints and quibbles, and by and by a sentence that moves the sea and land.

George B. Emerson read me a criticism on Spenser, who makes twenty trees of different kinds grow in one grove, whereof the critic says it was an imaginary grove. George, however, doubts not it was after nature, for he knows a piece of natural woodland near Boston, wherein twenty-four different trees grow together in a small grove.

New England cannot be painted without a portrait of Millerism with the new advent of hymns.

“You will see the Lord a-coming

To the old churchyards,

With a band of music, etc.

“He’ll awake all the nations

In the old churchyards.

“We will march into the city

From the old churchyards.”

Hard clouds, and hard expressions, and hard manners, I love.

Aristocracy. In Salem, the aristocracy is often merchants; even the lawyers are a second class. In Boston, is aristocracy of families which have inherited their wealth and position, and of lawyers and of merchants. In Charleston, the merchants are an inferior class, the planters are the aristocracy. In England, the aristocracy, incorporated by law and education, degrades life for the unprivileged classes. Long ago they wrote on placards in the streets,” Of what use are the lords?” And now that the misery of Ireland and of English manufacturing counties famishes and growls around the park fences of Lord Shannon, Lord Cork, and Sir Robert Peel, a park and a castle will be a less pleasant abode.... I must nevertheless respect this Order as “a part of the order of Providence,” as my good Aunt used to say of the rich, when I see, as I do everywhere, a class born with these attributes of rule. The class of officers I recognize everywhere in town or country. These gallants come into the world to ruffle it, and by rough or smooth to find their way to the top. When I spoke to Nathaniel Hawthorne of the class who hold the keys of State Street and are yet excluded from the best Boston circles, he said, “Perhaps he has a heavy wife.”

The Reformer (after the Chinese). There is a class whom I call the thieves of virtue. They are those who mock the simple and sincere endeavorers after a better way of life, and say, These are pompous talkers; but when they come to act they are weak, nor do they regard what they have said. These mockers are continually appealing to the ancients, and they say, Why make ourselves singular? Let those who are born in this age, act as men of this age. Thus they secretly obtain the flattery of the age.... The multitude all delight in them and they confuse virtue.

Chin Seang praised Heu Tsze to Mencius as a prince who taught and exemplified a righteous life. A truly virtuous prince, he added, will plough along with his people, and while he rules will cook his own food.

Mencius. Does Heu Tsze sow the grain which he eats?

Seang. Yes.

M. Does Heu Tsze weave cloth and then wear it?

S. No: Heu Tsze wears coarse hair-cloth.

M. Does Heu Tsze wear a cap?

S. Yes.

M. What sort of a cap?

S. A coarse cap.

M. Does he make it himself?

S. No: he gives grain in exchange for it.

M. Why doesn’t he make it himself?

S. It would be injurious to his farming.

M. Does he use earthenware in cooking his victuals, or iron utensils in tilling his farm?

S. Yes.

M. Does he make them himself?

S. No, he gives grain in barter for them.

M. Why does not Heu Tsze act the potter, and take everything from his own shop he wants to use? Why should he be in the confused bustle exchanging articles with the mechanics? He is not afraid of labor, surely?

S. The work of the mechanic and that of the husbandman ought not to be united.

M. Oh, then the government of the Empire and the labor of the husbandman are the only employments that ought to be united. Were every man to do all kinds of work, it would be necessary that he should first make his implements, and then use them: thus all men would constantly crowd the roads. Some men labor with their minds, and some with bodily strength. Those who labor with their strength are ruled by men. Those who are governed by others, feed others. This is a general rule under the whole heavens.

Mencius proceeds to instance Yu, who, after the deluge, was eight years abroad directing the opening of channels to let off the inundation into the sea, and the burning of forests and marshes to clear the land of beasts of prey, so that he had no time to go home even, but passed his own door repeatedly without entering; and asks if he had leisure for husbandry, if he had been inclined? Yu and Shun employed their whole minds in governing the Empire, yet they did not plough the fields....

Gonzalo in the Tempest anticipates our Reformers.

Gonzalo, Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, And were the king of it, what would I do?

In the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:

No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too; but innocent and pure:

No sovereignty.

Sebastian. Yet he would be king on’t.

Gon. All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,

Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,

To feed my innocent people.

I would with such perfection govern, sir,

To excel the golden age.

Act II, Scene 1.

Queenie thinks the Fruitlands People far too gross in their way of living. She prefers to live on snow.

Aristocracy. In solitude, — in the woods, for example, — every man is a noble, and we cannot prize too highly the staid and erect and plain manners of our farmers.

Nature seems a little wicked and to delight in mystifying us. Everything changes in ourselves and our relations, and for twenty or thirty years I shall find some old cider barrel or well-known rusty nail or hook, or rag of dish clout unchanged.

The only straight line in Nature that I remember is the spider swinging down from a twig.

The rainbow and the horizon seen at sea are good curves.

For laughter never looked upon his brow.

GILES FLETCHER.

In Saadi’s Gulistan, I find many traits which comport with the portrait I drew. He replied to Nizan: “It was rumored abroad that I was penitent and had forsaken wine, but this was a gross calumny, for what have I to do with repentance?” Like Montaigne, he learns manners from the unmannerly, and he says “there is a tradition of the prophet that poverty has a gloomy aspect in this world and in the next!” There is a spice of Gibbon in him when he describes a schoolmaster so ugly and crabbed that the sight of him would damage the ecstasies of the orthodox.

Like Homer and Dante and Chaucer, Saadi possessed a great advantage over poets of cultivated times in being the representative of learning and thought to his countrymen. These old poets felt that all wit was their wit, they used their memory as readily as their invention, and were at once the librarian as well as the poet, historiographer as well as priest of the Muses.

“The blow of our beloved has the relish of raisins.”

“The dervish in his prayer is saying, O God! have compassion on the wicked; for thou hast given all things to the good in making them good.”

Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old Persian of an hundred and fifty years, who was dying, and was saying to himself, “I said, I will enjoy myself for a few moments; alas! that my soul took the path of departure. Alas! at the variegated table of life, I partook a few mouthfuls, and the fates said, Enough!”

“Take heed that the orphan weep not; for the throne of the Almighty is shaken to and fro when the orphan sets a-crying.”

[In 1865, at the request of the publishers, Mr. Emerson wrote the Introduction to the American edition of Gladwin’s translation of the Gulistan. This explains the omission of any account of Saadi in the essay on “Persian Poetry,” printed in Letters and Social Aims.]

Saadi was long a Sacayi or Water-drawer in the Holy Land, “till found worthy of an introduction to the prophet Khizr (Elias, or the Syrian and Greek Hermes) who moistened his mouth with the water of immortality.” Somebody doubted this and saw in a dream a host of angels descending with salvers of glory in their hands. On asking one of them for whom those were intended, he answered, “ For Shaikh Saadi of Shiraz, who has written a stanza of poetry that has met with the approbation of God Almighty.”

“Khosraw of Delhi asked Khzir for a mouthful of this inspiring beverage; but he told him, that Saadi had got the last of it.”

“It was on the evening of Friday in the Month Showal, of the Arabian year 690, that the eagle of the immaterial soul of Shaikh Saadi shook from his plumage the dust of his body.”

No wonder the farmer is so stingy of his dollar....

Ellery says, Wordsworth writes like a man who takes snuff.

Tennyson is a master of metre, but it is as an artist who has learned admirable mechanical secrets. He has no wood-notes. Great are the dangers of education.

I will say it again to-day, — I am very much struck in literature by the appearance that one person wrote all the books....

Immense benefit of party I feel to-day in seeing how it reveals faults of character in such an idol as Webster.... The great men dull their palm by entertainment of those they dare not refuse. And lose the tact of greeting the wits with sincerity, but give that odious brassiness to those who would forgive coldness, silence, dislike, — everything but simulation and duping.

In Goethe is that sincerity which makes the value of literature and is that one voice or one writer who wrote all the good books. In Helena, Faust is sincere and represents actual, cultivated, strong-natured Man; the book would be farrago without the sincerity of Faust. I think the second part of Faust the grandest enterprise of literature that has been attempted since the Paradise Lost. It is a philosophy of history set in Poetry....

FAME

Her house is all of echo made

Where never dies the sound,

And as her brows the clouds invade

Her feet do strike the ground.

BEN JONSON.

The skeptic says: how can any man love any woman, except by delusion, and ignorance? Brothers do not wish to marry sisters because they see them too nearly, and all attractiveness, like fame, requires some distance. But the lover of nature loves nature in his mistress or his friend; he sees the faults and absurdities of the individual as well as you. No familiarity can exhaust the chasm. It is not personalities but universalities that draw him. The like is true of life. It seems to me that he has learned its lesson who has come to feel so assured of his well-being as to hold lightly all particulars of to-day and to-morrow, and to count death amongst the particulars. He must have such a grasp of the whole as to be willing to be ridiculous and unfortunate.

Literature is the only art that is ashamed of itself. The poet should be delivered as much as may be from routine, to increase his chances. It is a game of luck that he plays, and he must be liberated and ready to use the opportunities. Every one of them has been a high gambler.

Ellery says, that writers never do anything: they are passive observers. Some of them seem to do, but they do not; H. will never be a writer; he is as active as a shoemaker.

It is vain to attempt to get rid of the children by not minding them, ye parents dear; for the children measure their own life by the reaction, and if purring and humming is not noticed, they begin to squeal; if that is neglected, to screech; then, if you chide and console them, they find the experiment succeeds, and they begin again. The child will sit in your arms if you do nothing, contented; but if you read, it misses the reaction, and commences hostile operations: “pourvu seulement qu’un s’ occupe d’eux” is the law.

I thought yesterday, as I read letters of Aunt Mary’s, that I would attempt the arrangement of them. With a little selection and compiling and a little narrative thinly veiled of the youth of Ellen and Charles, and, if brought far enough, with letters from Charles and later letters from my sweet saint, there should be a picture of a New England youth and education, so connected with the story of religious opinion in New England as to be a warm and bright life picture.

Autobiography. My great-grandfather was Rev. Joseph Emerson of Malden, son of Edward Emerson, Esq., of Newbury(port). I used often to hear that when William, son of Joseph, was yet a boy walking before his father to church, on a Sunday, his father checked him: “ William, you walk as if the earth was not good enough for you.”

“I did not know it, Sir,” he replied, with the utmost humility. This is one of the household anecdotes in which I have found a relationship. ‘T is curious, but the same remark was made to me, by Mrs. Lucy Brown, when I walked one day under her windows here in Concord.

What confidence can I have in a fine behavior and way of life that requires riches to bear it out? Shall I never see a greatness of carriage and thought combined with a power that actually earns its bread and teaches others to earn theirs?

We come down with free thinking into the dear institutions, and at once make carnage amongst them. We are innocent of any such fell purpose as the sequel seems to impute to us. We were only smoking a cigar, but it turns out to be a powder-mill that we are promenading.

If one could have any security against moods!...

The best yet, or T. T.’s last. My divine Thomas Taylor in his translation of Cratylus (p. 30, note) calls Christianity “a certain most irrational and gigantic impiety,”

People came, it seems, to my lectures with expectation that I was to realize the Republic I described, and ceased to come when they found this reality no nearer. They mistook me. I am and always was a painter. I paint still with might and main, and choose the best subjects I can. Many have I seen come and go with false hopes and fears, and dubiously affected by my pictures. But I paint on. I count this distinct vocation which never leaves me in doubt what to do, but in all times, places, and fortunes gives me an open future, to be the great felicity of my lot. Doctor C. T. J., too, was born to his chemistry and his minerals.

“Men who in the present life knew the particular deity from whom they descended, and gave themselves always to their proper employment, were called by the ancient, divine men.” See Taylor’s Cratylus, p. 32.

Yet what to say to the sighing realist as he passes and comes to the vivid painter with a profound assurance of sympathy, saying, “He surely must be charmed to scale with me the silver mountains whose dim enchantments he has so affectionately sketched.” The painter does not like the realist; sees his faults; doubts his means and methods; in what experiments they make, both are baffled; no joy. The painter is early warned that he is jeopardizing his genius in these premature actualizations.

Very painful is the discovery we are always making that we can only give to each other a rare and partial sympathy; for as much time as we have spent in looking over into our neighbor’s field and chatting with him is lost to our own, and must be made up by haste and renewed solitude.

“L’esprit est une sorte de luxe qui détruit le bon sens, comme le luxe détruit la fortune

Alcott came, the magnificent dreamer, brooding, as ever, on the renewal or reëdification of the social fabric after ideal law, heedless that he had been uniformly rejected by every class to whom he has addressed himself, and just as sanguine and vast as ever; — the most cogent example of the drop too much which Nature adds of each man’s peculiarity. To himself he seems the only realist, and whilst I and other men wish to deck the dullness of the months with here and there a fine action or hope, he would weave the whole, a new texture of truth and beauty.... Very pathetic it is to see this wandering Emperor from year to year making his round of visits from house to house of such as do not exclude him, seeking a companion, tired of pupils.

We early men at least have a vast advantage: we are up at four o’clock in the morning and have the whole market, — we Enniuses and Venerable Bedes of the empty American Parnassus.

Wish not a man from England.

Henry V.

It is hardly rhetoric to speak of the guardian angels of children. How beautiful they are, so protected from all infusions of evil persons, from vulgarity and second thought. Well-bred people ignore trifles and unsightly things; but heroes do not see them, through an attention preëngaged to beauty.

“That is musk, which discloses itself by its smell, and not what the perfumers impose upon us,” said Saadi.

I began to write Saadi’s sentence above as a text to some homily of my own which muttered aloud as I walked this morning, to the effect, that the force of character is quite too faint and insignificant. The good are the poor, but if the poor were but once rich, how many fine scruples would melt away; how many blossoming reforms would be nipped in the bud. I ought to see that you must do that you say, as tomato-vines bear tomatoes and meadows yield grass. But I find the seed comes in the manure, and it is your condition, not your genius, which yields all this democratical and tender-hearted harvest.

November 5.

To genius everything is permitted, and not only that, but it enters into all other men’s labors. A tyrannical privilege to convert every man’s wisdom or skill, as it would seem, to its own use, or to show for the first time what all these fine and complex preparations were for.

See how many libraries one master absorbs. Who hereafter will go gleaning in those contemporary and anterior books, from each of which he has taken the only grain of truth it had, and has given it tenfold value by placing it? The railroad was built for him; for him history laboriously registered; for him arms and arts and politics and commerce waited, like so many servants until the heir of the manor arrived, which he quite easily administers.

Genius is a poor man and has no house; but see this proud landlord, who has built the great house and furnished it delicately, opens it all to him and beseeches him respectfully to make it honorable by entering there and eating bread.

Some philosophers went out of town, founded a community in which they proposed to pay talent and labor at one rate, say, ten cents the hour!...

Punctuality. On the dinner bell was written, “I laughed at them and they believed me not.”

The sect is the stove, gets old, worn out, there are a hundred kinds, but the fire keeps its properties. Calvinism is a fine history to show you how peasants, Paddies, and old country crones may be liberalized and beatified.

The reformers wrote very ill. They made it a rule not to bolt their flour, and unfortunately neglected also to sift their thoughts. But Hesiod’s great discovery, πλέον ήμισν πάντος, is truest in writing, where half is a great deal more than the whole. Give us only the eminent experiences.

Alcott and Lane want feet: they are always feeling of their shoulders to find if their wings are sprouting; but next best to wings are cowhide boots, which society is always advising them to put on.

Married women uniformly decided against the communities.

November 12.

It is wiser to live in the country and have poverty instead of pauperism. Yet citizens or cockneys are a natural formation also, a secondary formation, and their relation to the town is organic, — but there are all shades of it, and we dwellers in the country are only half countrymen. As I run along the yard from my woodpile I chance to see the sun as he rises or as he hangs in beauty over a cloud, and am apprised how far off from that beauty I live, how careful and little I am. He calls me to solitude.

Where does the light come from that shines on things? From the soul of the sufferer, of the enjoyer. Minerva and Telemachus, PLOTINUS, 452.

I have known a person of extraordinary intellectual power, on some real or supposed imputation of weakness of her reasoning faculty from another party, enter with heat into a defence of the same by naming the eminent individuals who had trusted and respected her genius. The moment we quote a man to prove our sanity, we give up all. No authority can establish it, and if I have lost confidence in myself I have the Universe against me.

Five minutes of to-day, as I used to preach, are worth as much to me as five minutes a million years hence.

We fathers of American nations should not set the bad example of Repudiation to the centuries. The Years are the moments of the life of this nation.

Common sense knows its own, and so recognizes the fact at first sight in chemical experiment. The common sense of Dalton, Davy, Black, is that common sense which made these arrangements which now it discovers.

Eternity of the World. The different ages of man, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, signify the mutations of human lives from virtue to vice and from vice to virtue. There are periods of fertility and of sterility of souls; sometimes men descend for the benevolent purpose of leading back apostate souls to right principles. Hades signified the profound union of the soul with the present body. See Taylor’s Cratylus.

Euclid, Plato, and the multiplication table are spheres in your thought. Bail up with a spoon and you shall get Mrs. Glass or the newspaper: bail up with a bucket and you shall have purer water: dive yourself and you shall come to the immortal deeps.

Therefore, we feel that one man wrote all the books of literature. It will certainly so appear at a distance. Neither is any dead, neither Christ nor Plato.

Each man reserves to himself alone the right of being tedious.

There are many audiences in every public assembly....

[Early in December, Mr. Emerson wrote to his brother William that he had had, for the second time, an application from a bookseller to print a volume of poems. He had, at the request of Rev. James Freeman Clarke, allowed him to print several in the Western Messenger, at Louisville, Kentucky; and he had contributed several to the Dial, and many friends urged their publication.]

December 25.

At the performing of Handel’s Messiah I heard some delicious strains and understood a very little of all that was told me. My ear received but a little thereof.... The genius of Nature could well be discerned. By right and might we should become participant of her invention, and not wait for morning and evening to know their peace, but prepossess it.

I walked in the bright paths of sound, and liked it best when the long continuance of a chorus had made the ear insensible to the music, made it as if there was none; then I was quite solitary and at ease in the melodious uproar. Once or twice in the solos, when well sung, I could play tricks, as I like to do, with my eyes, — darken the whole house and brighten and transfigure the central singer, and enjoy the enchantment.

This wonderful piece of music carried us back into the rich, historical past. It is full of the Roman Church and its hierarchy and its architecture. Then, further, it rests on and requires so deep a faith in Christianity that it seems bereft of half and more than half its power when sung to-day in this unbelieving city.

We love morals until they come to us with mountainous melancholy and grim overcharged rebuke: then we so gladly prefer intellect, the light-maker. Dear sir, you treat these fantastical fellow men too seriously, you seem to believe that they exist.

The solid earth exhales a certain permanent average gas which we call the atmosphere; and the spiritual solid sphere of Mankind emits the volatile sphere of literature of which books are single and inferior effects.

December 31.

The year ends, and how much the years teach which the days never know!... but the individual is always mistaken.

At the Convention of Socialists in Boston last week Alcott was present, and was solicited to speak, but had no disposition, he said, to do so.

Although none of the representatives of the “Communities” present would probably admit it, yet in truth he is more the cause of their movements than any other man. He feels a certain parental relation to them without approving either of their establishments. His presence could not be indifferent to any speaker, and has not been nothing to any of them in the past years.

A true course of English literary history would contain what I may read the Wartons and not learn: e g., of Marlowe’s mighty line; of Crashaw’s Musician and Nightingale; of Ben Jonson’s visit to Drummond; of Wotton’s list of contemporaries; of the history of John Dennis; of the Rehearsal; of the Critic; a history of Bishop Berkeley; of the Scriblerus Club; of Wood, and Aubrey; of Shakspeare at the last dates; of Cotton’s Montaigne; of the translators of Plutarch; of the forgeries of Chatterton, Landor, and Ireland; of Robert of Gloucester; of the Roxburgh Club; of Thomas Taylor.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

Belief and Unbelief. Kant, it seems, searched the metaphysics of the Self-reverence which is the favorite position of modern ethics, and demonstrated to the Consciousness that itself alone exists.

The two parties in life are the believers and unbelievers, variously named. The believer is poet, saint, democrat, theocrat, free-trade, no church, no capital punishment, idealist.

The unbeliever supports the church, education, the fine arts, etc., as amusements.

But the unbelief is very profound: Who can escape it? I am nominally a believer: yet I hold on to property: I eat my bread with unbelief. I approve every wild action of the experimenters. I say what they say concerning celibacy, or money, or community of goods, and my only apology for not doing their work is preoccupation of mind. I have a work of my own which I know I can do with some success. It would leave that undone if I should undertake with them, and I do not see in myself any vigor equal to such an enterprise. My genius loudly calls me to stay where I am, even with the degradation of owning bank-stock and seeing poor men suffer, whilst the Universal Genius apprises me of this disgrace and beckons me to the martyrs and redeemer’s office.

This is belief, too, this debility of practice, this staying by our work. For the obedience to a man’s genius is the particular of Faith: by and by, shall I come to the universal of Faith.

I take the law on the subject of Education to read thus, The Intellect sees by moral obedience. (Thomas Taylor’s translations.)

Alypius in Iamblichus had the true doctrine of money.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1843

The She-King; The Four Books (Chinese Classics), translated by Rev. D. Collier, Malacca; Vishnu Sarna; The Desatir (Persian), translation of Mr. Duncan, Bombay; AEschylus, Prometheus Bound; Martial; Marcus Terentius Varro; Pliny the Elder; Plotinus, Iamblichus, Synesius, Proclus (Thomas Taylor’s translations);

William Lorris and Jean de Meung, Roman de la Rose; Dante; Saadi; Erasmus; Calvin; Scaliger; Raleigh; Marlowe; Behmen; Giles Fletcher, Christ’s Victory and Triumph; Crashaw, Musician and Nightingale; Anthony à Wood; Spinoza; Swift, Gulliver s Travels; Berkeley; Beckford, Vathek; Joseph and Thomas Warton; Beaumarchais; Wieland, The Abderites; Goethe, Iphigenia, Faust (second part), Wilhelm Meister; Chatterton; William H. Ireland; Thomas Taylor, translations of the Cratylus and the Neoplatonists; O’Connell; Campbell; Ludwig Borne; Bettina von Arnim; Webster; Carlyle, Past and Present; Rev. Henry Ware; Rev. Lyman Beecher; Rev. Nathaniel Frothingham; Eugene Bernouf; George Borrow, The Zincali; Disraeli, Vivian Grey; Theodore Mundt; John Sterling; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Rev. Chandler Robbins; Goodwyn Barmby; Margaret Fuller; Thoreau; William Ellery Channing.

Selection of Last Journals: 1869-1876

JOURNAL

CELTIC BARDS AND MORTE D’ARTHUR

TONE IN POETRY

FRIENDS

RICHARD HUNT

READINGS TO CLASS

COLLEGE MARKING

JUDGE HOAR

CHARLES SUMNER

HESIOD. HUMBOLDT. AGASSIZ

POETRY.

GOOD WRITING

JOURNAL LX

1869

(From Journals NY and ML)

[IN January, Mr. Emerson seems to have made a shorter lecturing trip than usual, going no farther West than Cleveland.]

(From NY)

In this proposition lately brought to me by a class, it occurs that I could by readings show the difference between good poetry and what passes for good; that I could show how much so-called poetry is only eloquence; that I could vindicate the genius of Wordsworth, and show his distinctive merits. I should like to call attention to the critical superiority of Arnold, his excellent ear for style, and the singular poverty of his poetry, that in fact he has written but one poem, “Thyrsis,” and that on an inspiration borrowed from Milton. A topic would be this Welsh genius (and Arnold, too, has been attracted to that) which I recognized to-day in reading this new translator, Skene, and which I find, as long ago, far more suggestive, contagious, or I will say, more inoculating the reader with poetic madness, than any poet I now think of, except Hafiz. I can easily believe this an idiosyncrasy of mine, and, to describe it more accurately, I will add that I place these as not equal, but of like kind in genius and influence with the Zoroastrian sentences, and those of the Bhagavat Geeta and the Vishnu Purana.

There is always a height of land which, in a walk for pleasure or business, the party seek as the natural centre, or point of view; and there is in every book, whether poem or history, or treatise of philosophy, a height which attracts more than other parts, and which is best remembered. Thus, in Morte d’Arthur, I remember nothing so well as Merlin’s cry from his invisible, inaccessible prison. To be sure, different readers select by natural affinity different points. In the proposed class, it would be my wish to indicate such points in literature, and thus be an “old guide,” like Stephen, who shows, after ten years’ daily trudging through the subterranean holes, the best wonders of the Mammoth Cave.

The gripe of Byron has not been repeated, and the delightful romance which came from Scott to young America has not. Tennyson has finer, more delicate beauty and variety, but does not possess men as the others did. Tennyson has a perfect English culture, and its petulance.

Homer has this prerogative, that he never discovers in the Iliad a preference to the Greeks over the Trojans.

It were good to contrast the hospitality of Abu Bekr in the Sahara with that of Admetus in Euripides’s Alcestis. That of the Arab is at once noble, yet human; that of the king in the play is overstrained to absurdity.

I have said above that tone, rather than lines, marks a genuine poem. Wolfe’s “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,” is an example, so is Sterling’s “Dædalus,” so “Dinas Emlinn” of Scott, and Scott always has that merit; and Byron’s Incantation in “Manfred,” and the whole of [the poem] charms, in spite of its shallowness, by that unity; and Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Melancholy.” I think the vice of the French, their notorious incapacity of poetic power, is the total want of this music, which all their brilliant talent cannot supply. Voltaire could see wholes as well as parts, and his testimony to French unpoeticalness is distinct. “Si le roi in avait donné,” etc., has right tone, and that little carol is still their best poem. Many poems owe their fame to tone, as others to their sense.

But Victor Hugo has genius in Le Semeur, and the star-piece, which I have saved. And, I must repeat, that one genial thought is the source of every true poem. I have heard that a unity of this kind pervades Beethoven’s great pieces in music. And why, but because tone gives unity?

In the matter of religion, men eagerly fasten their eyes on the differences between their own creed and yours; whilst the charm of the study is in finding the agreements and identities in all the religions of men.

The few stout and sincere persons, whom each one of us knows, recommend the country and the planet to us. ’Tis not a bad world this, as long as I know that John M. Forbes or William H. Forbes and Judge Hoar, and Agassiz, and my three children, and twenty other shining creatures whose faces I see looming through the mist, are walking in it. Is it the thirty millions of America, or is it your ten or twelve units that encourage your heart from day to day?

Of immortality, I should say that it is at least equally and perhaps better seen in little than in large angles. I mean, that in a calm and clear state of mind, we have no fears, no prayers, even; that we feel all is well. We have arrived at an enjoyment so pure, as to imply and affirm its perfect accord with the nature of things, so that it alone appears durable, and all mixed or inferior states accidental and temporary.

The managers of the public conventions, political and other, understand well that they must set the fire going by ready popular speakers, like Wilson, and Russell, and Swift, who will crackle and kindle, and afterwards they may venture to pile on the slow anthracite of argumentative judges and political economists; kindlings first, and then hard coal.

Shakspeare. I think, with all due respect to Aubrey, and Dyce, and Delia Bacon, and Judge Holmes, that it is not by discovery of contemporary documents, but by more cunning reading of the Book itself, that we shall at last eliminate the true biography of Shakspeare.

[On March 1, Mr. Emerson read before the Woman’s Club an account of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, with some extracts from her letters and journal. (See Lectures and Biographical Sketches.)”]

Montaigne says that “Socrates’s virtue does seem to have been ever on the rack to perform its actions, but to have done them naturally and gracefully. ‘T was a better born virtue than other men’s.”

In my visit to New York I saw one remarkable person new to me, Richard Hunt, the architect. His conversation was spirited beyond any that I could easily remember, loaded with matter, and expressed with the vigour and fury of a member of the Harvard boat or ball club relating the adventures of one of their matches; inspired, meantime, throughout, with fine theories of the possibilities of art. Yet the tone of his voice and the accent of his conversation so strongly reminded me of my rural neighbour Sam Staples as to be in ludicrous contrast with the Egyptian and Greek grandeurs he was hinting or portraying. I could only think of the immense advantage which a thinking soul possesses when horsed on a robust and vivacious temperament. The combination is so rare of an Irish labourer’s nerve and elasticity with Winckelmann’s experience and cultivation as to fill one with immense hope of great results when he meets it in the New York of to-day.

[Mr. Emerson’s friend, James T. Fields, the genial publisher and author, and his son-in-law, Colonel William H. Forbes, did him the friendly office of arranging for him a “Class,” to whom he read, in Chickering Hall, on ten Saturday afternoons in the spring, his favourite pieces of prose or verse, with some short introduction. Among the subjects were, Chivalry (extracts from Old Chronicles); Chaucer; Shakspeare; Ben Jonson and Lord Bacon; Herrick; Donne; Herbert; Vaughan; Marvell; Milton; Johnson; Gibbon; Burke; Cowper; Wordsworth.

These readings were much enjoyed by the Class, but, in this wealth of material and the limits of an hour, many things that Mr. Emerson wished to read were not included, as appears from the following entry, which yet tells of many that were.]

(From ML)

March 21, 1869.

Readings at Chickering Hall. Yesterday finished the Tenth Reading at Chickering Hall. Many good things were read in these ten Saturdays, and some important passages that had been selected were not read. Read nothing of Byron but the lines, “I twine my hopes of being remembered,” etc., from “Childe Harold”; nothing of Sterling but “Alfred the Harper”; nothing of Wordsworth but “Helvellyn,”

“Dion,” and verses from the “Ode”; nothing from Coleridge, prose or verse. From Scott, I read the Abbot and Bruce in Lord of the Isles; “Helvellyn”; “Look not thou when beauty’s charming.” Read nothing from Blake but “Persecution.” From Gray, nothing. From Campbell, nothing. From Clough, Thoreau, Channing, Brownell, Mellen, Longfellow, Arnold, Willis, Sprague, nothing. Of Moore, nothing.

I had designed to read some pages on the art of writing, on Language, Compression, etc.; but with the exception of a page or two on the dire, TO Seivov, omitted them. Little searching criticism was given. I meant to show some inspired prose from Charles K. Newcomb, Sampson Reed, Mary Moody Emerson, etc., but did not.

I meant to have one Ethical Reading, and one Oriental: but they came not. Nothing from Goethe except the “Song of the Parcae” in Iphigenia. Nothing from Horatio Greenough. Did not read the proposed hymns of Watts, and Barbauld, or Sir Thomas Browne. I designed to read from Montaigne, of “Friendship,” of “Socrates,” but did not. From Goethe, West -Ostlichen Divan. From Coleridge, Lay Sermons, Literary Biography, Friend. From Plutarch’s Morals; Synesius; Plotinus. From James Hogg, read only “Kilmeny”; had wished to read “The Witch of Fife.” Of Samuel Ferguson, should have read “Forging of the Anchor”; of Frederic H. Hedge, should have read Lines in the Dial; and from Brownell, “The Old Cove”; and from Ellen Hooper, “Sweep Ho!”

What selections from Plato I might read! e g., Theages, and the beginning and end of Phadon, and the naivetes of the Apology. Carlyle’s portrait of Webster in letter to me. Story of Berthollet, and examples of Courage; Fra Cristoforo, in! Promessi Sposi. And, in American Poets remember Sarah Palfrey’s “Sir Pavon,” and Helen Hunt’s “Thought.”  Eugène Fromentin on Arab Hospitality; Lord Carnarvon’s speech in the House of Lords on the impeachment of the Earl of Danby; Faryabi, in D’Herbelot; The Cid’s arraignment of his sons-in-law before the Cortes; Romeo, in Cary; Lord Bacon’s “Young Scholar,”

“Ships of Time,” Speech for Essex; Earl of Devonshire, from Coleridge’s “Puritan Soldier”; Lay Sermons; Story of Marvell’s refusal of royal bounty. Gibbon’s Conception and Conclusion of the History. Hobbes’s definition of Laughter (not read); Hobbes’s barbarous society (not read); John Quincy Adams’s Peroration; Behmen, Life of Christ. Milton, Prose and Poetry. Charles K. Newcomb, of Swedenborg and Brook Farm; Dr. Johnson, “Iona”; Hindoo Books; Chivalry, Lord Herbert; Chief Justice Crewe; Merlin in Morte d’Arthur; the lion story; “Celinda”; Cid; Horn of Roland in Chanson de Roland; Voltaire on French Poetry; Niebuhr’s View of Poetry; Creation of new characters; Pepys’s notices of Shakspeare and Clarendon.

Poetry. “Dædalus,” unread; Wordsworth, “The intellectual power from words to things Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way”; “Russian Snow,” not read; Beaumont and Fletcher, “Melancholy,”

“Lines on An Honest Man’s Fortune”; Speech of Caratach in Bonduca, Scene I; Gray and Collins — inimitable skill in perfectly modern verse; had digested their classics. Jones Very’s two poems, “The Strangers” and “Barberry Bush,” with notes of Jones Very. William Blake’s “Persecution,” and Allingham’s “Touchstone”; Clough; Henry Kirke White’s “Herb Rosemary”; Waller’s “Rose,” and Bayly’s “Round my own lovely Rose,” and Mrs. Hemans’s “Nightingale”; Hogg’s “Witch of Fife”; Tennyson’s “Memory”; Byron’s “Shipwreck,” and “Out upon Time”; Bryant’s “Waterfowl.”...

Coup-de-force poetry, Everett; Lapidary or gem-carving; Eloquent; Biblical; Sculpturesque, M. Angelo; Vers de Société, Daniel Webster. —

The Mountain

Seemed, though the soft sheen all enchants,

Cheers the rough crag and mournful dell,

As if on such stern forms and haunts

A wintry storm more fitly fell.

Et vocatus et non vocatus Deus aderit. Invoked or uninvoked, the God will be present.

Who was the king to whom the sophist wished to teach the art of memory, and who replied, that he would give him a greater reward if he could teach him to forget?

No more irreconcilable persons brought to annoy and confound each other in one room than are sometimes actually lodged by Nature in one man’s skin.

Memory. It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own, and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine. I ask myself, Is it not some old aunt who goes in and out of the house, and occasionally recites anecdotes of old times and persons, which I recognize as having heard before, — and she being gone again, I search in vain for any trace of the anecdotes?

March 29.

Alcott came, and talked Plato and Socrates, extolling them with gravity. I bore it long, and then said, that was a song for others, not for him. He should find what was the equivalent for these masters in our times; for surely the world was always equal to itself, and it was for him to detect what was the counter-weight and compensation to us. Was it natural science? Was it the immense dilution of the same amount of thought into nations? I told him to shut his eyes, and let his thoughts run into reverie or whithersoever, — and then take an observation. He would find that the current went outward from man, not to man. Consciousness was upstream.

Bunsen’s physiognomy, as I remember him in London, suggested not a noble, but the common German scholar, with marked sentimentalism, or, as we commonly say, gushing; and these prayers, and violent conventicle utterances to which he runs in his correspondence and diary, betray that temperament. Yet he had talent and generosity, and appears to have been highly useful.

May 5, died Philip Physick Randolph, son of the late Jacob Randolph, M. D.

[On May 17, Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion at the house of the Rev. J.T. Sargent; and on May 28, spoke at the second annual meeting of the Free Religious Association.]

God had infinite time to give us; but how did He give it? In one immense tract of a lazy millennium? No, but He cut it up into neat succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.

“The door of intercourse is closed between those confined and those unconfined by space,” say the Ali Ilahi An. — DABISTAN.

The religions are the amusements of the intellect.

June.

Yesterday, Saturday, June 12, the committee on scale of merit and discipline met at Dr. Walker’s in Cambridge. Present, Dr. Walker, Professor Runkle, Theodore Lyman, and I. Rev. Mr. Hale alone was absent. Dr. Walker gave some details of the manner in which the scale is made up, and stated that the Faculty were for the most part contented with it as it stands, and do not wish any alteration. He added that there is question and inconvenience in regard to elective studies. For the poor men, it is matter of grave importance that they shall have rank sufficient to obtain a scholarship, that is, an income; and when elective studies are proposed, they do not choose that which they wish to learn, but that which will give the most marks, that is, highest rank. It was stated that the idle boys would choose botany, or some other study which cost no thought and little attention, and it was not quite fair that for such idle reading they should receive equally high marks with those who elected severer studies as trigonometry, or metaphysics, or advanced studies in Greek. Mr. Lyman said the state of study was much superior at present to that which he remembered when in college, and alluded to the performance of young Hill at the examination.

Some of the professors, as Mr. Lowell and Mr. Peirce, Senior, do not keep a daily account of merits of the students, but make up a general average, each in a way of his own. It was suggested that whilst each teacher should keep a daily record of the quality of recitations, he should by no means present that in his final report, but should correct it by his growing knowledge of the depth of real merit of the student, as shown to him by his proficiency and power, or his want of success, as made known in decisive strokes from time to time.

It is the necessary result of the existing system the mixing of the record of deportment with that of scholarship, and thus degrading a good scholar, if by neglect of prayers or recitations he had incurred a “public admonition,” or raising the rank of a dull scholar if he was punctual and in deportment blameless.

President Hosmer, of Antioch College, tells me that there they do not mark for merit; and that, for discipline they organize the students in the Dormitory into a Society for noting and resisting all breaches of order. The students have a president and other officers, and when any disturbance occurs they examine, and vote perhaps to recommend the expulsion of the offenders, — which the College Government then considers and decides.

At present, the friends of Harvard are possessed in greater or less degree by the idea of making it a University for men, instead of a College for boys.

One would say that this better moral record should only serve to give the casting vote in favour of good behaviour, where the marks for scholarship were equal.

I think every one who has had any experience in marking a series of recitations has found how uncertainly his 6, and 7, and 8 are given. His first attempt will be worthless except in the extreme numbers, and can only be approximately trustworthy in a great number of days.

July 1.

Judge Hoar, in his speech at the Alumni dinner at Cambridge yesterday, was a perfect example of Coleridge’s definition of genius, “the carrying the feelings of youth into the powers of manhood”; and the audience were impressed and delighted with the rare combination of the innocence of a boy with the faculty of a hero.

(From loose sheets of uncertain date)

Charles Sumner. Clean, self-poised, great-hearted man, noble in person, incorruptible in life, the friend of the poor, the champion of the oppressed. Of course, Congress must draw from every part of the country swarms of individuals intent only on their private interests, eager only for private interests who could not love his stern justice. But if they gave him no high employment, he made low work high by the dignity of honesty and truth. But men cannot long do without faculty and perseverance, and he rose, step by step, to the mastery of all affairs entrusted to him, and by those lights and upliftings with which the Spirit that makes the Universe rewards labour and brave truth. He became learned and adequate to the highest questions, and the counsellor of every correction of old errors and of every noble reform. How nobly he bore himself in disastrous times! Every reform he led or assisted. In the shock of the war his patriotism never failed.

A man of varied learning and accomplishments. He held that every man is to be judged by the horizon of his mind, and Fame he defined as the shadow of excellence, but that which follows him, not which he follows after. A tragic character, like Algernon Sydney; a man of conscience and courage, but without humour. Fear did not exist for him.

Sumner has been collecting his works. They will be the history of the Republic for the last twenty-five years, as told by a brave, perfectly honest, and well-instructed man with social culture and relation to all eminent persons. Diligent and able workman, without humour, but with persevering study while reading, excellent memory, high sense of honour, disdaining any bribe, any compliances, and incapable of falsehood. His singular advantages of person, of manners, and a statesman’s conversation, impress every one favourably. He has the foible of most public men, the egotism which seems almost unavoidable at Washington. I sat in his room once at Washington whilst he wrote a weary succession of letters, — he writing without pause as fast as if he were copying. He outshines all his mates in historical conversation and is so public in his regards that he cannot be relied on to push an office-seeker, so that he is no favourite with politicians. But wherever I have met with a dear lover of the Country and its moral interests, he is sure to be a supporter of Sumner.

It characterizes a man for me that he hates Charles Sumner: for it shows that he cannot discriminate between a foible and a vice. Sumner’s moral instinct and character are so exceptionally pure that he must have perpetual magnetism for honest men; his ability and working energy such, that every good friend of the Republic must stand by him. Those who come near him and are offended by his egotism, or his foible (if you please) of using classic quotations, or other bad taste, easily forgive these whims, if themselves are good; or magnify them into disgust, if they themselves are incapable of his virtue. And when he read one night in Concord a lecture on Lafayette we felt that of all Americans he was best entitled by his own character and fortunes to read that eulogy.

Every Pericles must have his Creon; Sumner had his adversaries, his wasps and backbiters. We almost wished that he had not stooped to answer them. But he condescended to give them truth and patriotism, without asking whether they could appreciate the instruction or not.

A man of such truth that he can be truly described: he needs no exaggerated praise.

Not a man of extraordinary genius, but a man of great heart, of a perpetual youth, incapable of any fraud, little or large; loving his friend, and loving his Country, with perfect steadiness to his purpose, shunning no labour that his aim required; and his works justified him by their scope and thoroughness.

He had good masters, who quickly found that they had a good scholar. He read law with Judge Story, who was at the head of the Law School of Harvard University, and who speedily discovered the value of his pupil, and called him to his assistance in the Law School.

He had great talent for labour, and spared no time and no research to make himself master of his subject. His treatment of every question was faithful and exhaustive and marked always by the noble sentiment.

(From NY)

July 26.

This morning sent my six prose volumes, revised and corrected, to Fields and Company for their new edition in two volumes.

Landor says, “A single man of genius hath never appeared in the whole extent of Austria, an extent several thousand times greater than our city (Florence); and this very street has given birth to fifty.” — Works, vol i, p. 191.

“Annibal Caracci said to his scholar, What you do not understand, you must darken” — LANDOR.

At Walden, the other day, with George Bradford, I was struck, as often, with the expression of refinement which Nature wears often in such places; — the bright sunshine reflected by the agreeable forms of the water, the shore-line, and the forest, the soft lapping sound of the water.

At my Club, I suppose I behave very ill in securing always, if I can, a place by a valued friend, and, though I suppose (though I have never heard it) that I offend by this selection, sometimes too visible, my reason is that I, who rarely see, in ordinary, select society, must make the best use of this opportunity, having, at the same time, the feeling that

“I could be happy with either,

Were the other dear charmer away.”

I am interested not only in my advantages, but in my disadvantages, that is, in my fortunes proper; that is, in watching my fate, to notice, after each act of mine, what result. Is it prosperous? Is it adverse? And thus I find a pure entertainment of the intellect, alike in what is called good or bad.

In Xenophon’s Banquet, Critobulus says, “I swear by all the gods, I would not choose the power of the Persian King in preference to beauty.”

Washington City. I notice that they who drink for some time the Potomac water lose their relish for the water of the Charles River, the Merrimack, and the Connecticut. But I think the public health requires that the Potomac water should be corrected by copious infusions of these provincial streams. Rockwood Hoar retains his relish for the Musketaquid.

Sumner cites Cato as saying “that Kings were carnivorous animals.”

In looking into Hesiod’s Works and Days, I am reminded how much harm our clocks and almanacs do us by withdrawing our attention from the stars, the annual winds, and rains, habits of animals, and whatever primary observations of Nature the ancient nations relied on. Their year was throughout religious and imaginative.

“Sit in the shade, and drink moreover dark-hued wine — Pour in three cups of water first and add the fourth of wine.” — HESIOD.

“You, Perses, flattered much the bribe-swallowing judges. Fools, they know neither how much half exceeds the whole, nor how great advantage is in mallow and asphodel.” — Bohn’s HESIOD, p. 76.

“Sow stripped,. plough stripped, and reap stripped, if thou wouldst gather the works of Ceres.” — Idem, p. 95.

The same periodicity — shall I say — reigns in fable, and brings the wildest curve round to a true moral, as works in electricity, gravitation, and the crystal. And this is also expressed in tone and rhythm.

[The Boston Society of Natural History celebrated, on September 14, the Centennial Anniversary of the birth of Alexander von Humboldt. Mr. Emerson was invited to speak, and an abstract of his remarks is printed in the Miscellanies. Some additional sentences are given in what follows.]

September.

Humboldt one of those wonders of the world like Aristotle, like Crichton, like Newton, appearing now and then as if to show us the possibilities of the genus Homo the powers of the eye, the range of the faculties; whose eyes are natural teléscopes and microscopes and whose faculties are so symmetrically joined that they have perpetual presence of mind, and can read Nature by bringing instantly their insight and their momentary observation together; whilst men ordinarily are, as it were, astonished by the new object, and do not on the instant bring their knowledge to bear on it. Other men have memory which they can ransack, but Humboldt’s memory was wide awake to assist his observation. Our faculties are a committee that slowly, one at a time, give their attention and opinion, — but his, all united by electric chain,... You could not lose him. He was the man of the world, if ever there was one. You could not lose him; you could not detain him; you could not disappoint him. The tardy Spaniards were months in getting their expedition ready and it was a year that he waited; but Spain or Africa or Asia were all harvest-fields to this armed eye, to this Lyncaeus who could see through the earth, and through the ocean, who knew how mountains were built, and seas drained....

Agassiz never appeared to such advantage as in his Biographical Discourse on Humboldt, at the Music Hall in Boston, yesterday. What is unusual for him, he read a written discourse, about two hours long; yet all of it strong, nothing to spare, not a weak point, no rhetoric, no falsetto; — his personal recollections and anecdotes of their intercourse, simple, frank, and tender in the tone of voice, too, no error of egotism or of self-assertion, and far enough from French sentimentalism. He is quite as good a man as his hero, and not to be duplicated, I fear. I admire his manliness, his equality always to the occasion, to any and every company, — never a fop, never can his manners be separated from himself.

I never could get beyond five steps in my enumeration of intellectual powers; say, Instinct, Perception, Memory, Imagination (including Fancy as a subaltern), Reasoning or Understanding. Some of the lower divisions, as Genius, Talent, Logic, Wit, and Humour, Pathos, can be dealt with more easily.

The person who commands the servant successfully is the one who does not think of the manner, solely thinking that this thing must be done. Command is constitutional.

October 19.

Carried to Fields and Company to-day the copy of the four first chapters of my so-called new book, Society and Solitude.

I read a good deal of experimental poetry in the new books. The author has said to himself, “Who knows but this may please, and become famous? Did not Goethe experiment? Does not this read like the ancients?” But good poetry was not written thus, but it delighted the poet first; he said and wrote it for joy, and it pleases the reader for the same reason.

October 21,

I wish I could recall my singular dream of last night with its physics, metaphysics, and rapid transformations, — all impressive at the moment, that on waking at midnight I tried to rehearse them, that I might keep them till morn. I fear ’tis all vanished. I noted how we magnify the inward world, and emphasize it to hypocrisy by contempt of house and land and man’s condition, which we call shabby and beastly. But in a few minutes these have their revenge, for we look to their chemistry and perceive that they are miracles of combination of ethereal elements, and do point instantly to moral causes.

General Wayne was the commissioner of the Government who first saw the importance of the nook of land at the foot of Lake Michigan round which the road to the northwest must run, and managed to run the boundary line of Illinois in such manner as to include this swamp, called Chicago, within it.

Aunt Mary held a relation to good society not very uncommon. She was strongly drawn to it as to the reputed theatre for genius, but her eccentricity disgusted it, and she was quite too proud and impulsive to sit and conform. So she acquiesced, and made no attempt to keep place, and knew it only in the narratives of a few friends like Mrs. George Lee, Mrs. Mary Schalkwic, Miss Searle, etc., with whom she had been early intimate, and who for her genius tolerated or forgave her oddities. But her sympathy and delight in its existence daily appear through all her disclaimers and fine scorn.

Good writing. All writing should be selection in order to drop every dead word. Why do you not save out of your speech or thinking only the vital things, — the spirited mot which amused or warmed you when you spoke it, — because of its luck and newness? I have just been reading, in this careful book of a most intelligent and learned man, any number of flat conventional words and sentences. If a man would learn to read his own manuscript severely, — becoming really a third person, and search only for what interested him, he would blot to purpose, — and how every page would gain! Then all the words will be sprightly, and every sentence a surprise.

I will tell you what it is to be immortal, — this, namely, that I cannot read Plutarch without perpetual reminders of men and women whom I know.

Dr. Hedge tells us that the Indian asked John Eliot, “Why God did not kill the devil?” One would like to know what was Eliot’s answer.

December 8.

The scholar wants not only time but warm time, good anthracite or cannel coal to make every minute in the hour avail.

“Harmony latent is of greater value than that which is visible.” — HERACLITUS.

Calvinism. There is a certain weakness in solemnly threatening the human being with the revelations of the Judgment Day, as Mrs. Stowe winds up her appeal to the executors of Lady Byron. An honest man would say, Why refer it? All that is true and weighty with me has all its force now.

We meet people who seem to overlook and read us with a smile, but they do not tell us what they read. Now and then we say things to our mates, or hear things from them, which seem to put it out of the power of the parties to be strangers again. Especially if any one show me a stroke of courage, a piece of inventive wit, a trait of character, or a pure delight in character when shown by others, henceforward I must be that man’s or that woman’s debtor, as one who has discovered to me among perishing men somewhat more clean and incorruptible than the light of these midnight stars. Indeed, the only real benefit of which we are susceptible is (is it not?) to have man dignified for us.

“To declare war against length of time.” — SIMONIDES.

Compensation of failing memory in age by the increased power and means of generalization.

I asked Theodore Lyman on Saturday how it was exactly with Agassiz’s health. He said “that no further paralysis had appeared, and that he seemed not threatened. It was not apoplexy, but a peculiarity of his constitution, — these turns of insensibility which had occurred. It was hysteria.” I replied that I had often said that Agassiz appeared to have two or three men rolled up into his personality, but I had never suspected there was any woman also in his make. Lyman replied that he had himself seen hysteria oftener in men than in women.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1869

Zoroaster; Hesiod, Works and Days; Simonides; Heracleitus; Euripides, Alcestis; Xenophon, Banquet; Cato the Elder; Proclus; Arthurian Romances; Dabistan; James (“the Admirable”) Crichton; Sir Philip Sidney, Life of, by Lord Brooke; De Retz; Aubrey; Sprat, Death of Cromwell, apud Johnson; Addison, Cato; Voltaire; Winckelmann; Humboldt; Rev. W. E. Channing; Varnhagen von Ense; Haydon; Chevalier Bunsen; Alexander Dyce; Alcott; Victor Hugo, Le Semeur; Agassiz; Tennyson; Crabbe Robinson, Diary; La Cit’e Antique; Charles Sumner; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated; Fromentin, Un Été dans le Sahara; W. Ellery Channing, Poems; Matthew Arnold, Poems; M. H. Cobb, Outward Bound; O. W. Holmes, Jr.

See also the list of authors and poems and passages quoted in the readings on pages 282285.

JOURNAL:

MEMORY. DREAMS

THOREAU. ALVAH CROCKER

SAMPSON REED

METAPHYSICIANS

PLUTARCH. HIS MORALS

NANTASKET BEACH

MARY MOODY EMERSON

MOUNT WASHINGTON. THE NOTCH

IMAGINATION. CHIVALRY

HARVARD MEMORIAL HALL

FOREIGN CULTURE

THE PILGRIMS

JOURNAL LXI

1870

(From Journals NY and ST)

[DURING January, Mr. Emerson was preparing his preface to a new translation, by Professor William Watson Goodwin, of Plut arch’s Morals. This, by the kindness of Messrs. Little and Brown, the publishers, is included in the works (Lectures and Biographical Sketches).]

(From NY)

February 3, 1870.

The last proof-sheet of Society and Solitude comes back to me to-day for correction.

Mr. Charles P. Ware tells Edward that the night before the Cambridge Commemoration Day he spent at Mr. Hudson’s room, in Cambridge, and woke from a dream which he could not remember, repeating these words, —

And what they dare to dream of, dare to die for.

He went to the Pavilion Dinner, and there heard Mr. Lowell read his poem, and when he came to the lines: —

“Those love her best who to themselves are true And what” —

Ware said, “Now I know what’s coming, — but it won’t rhyme;” and Mr. Lowell proceeded, —

“they dare to dream of, dare to do.”

[No mention of lectures is found until the spring, except before Lyceums in neighboring towns, and one in Philadelphia, February 7, an excursion always pleasant, for there Mr. Emerson met his old schoolmates of his Boston boyhood, Rev. William H. Furness and Mr. Samuel Bradford.]

February 24.

Bettine, in Varnhagen’s Diary, reminds me continually of Aunt Mary, though the first is ever helping herself with a lie, which the other abhorred. But the dwelling long with grief and with genius on your wrongs and wrongdoers, exasperating the offender with habitual reproaches, puts the parties in the worst relation and at last incapacitates the complaining woman from seeing what degree of right or of necessity there is on the side of her offender, and what good reason he has to complain of her wrath and insults.

This ever-increasing bias of the injured party has all the mischief of lying.

February 27.

At Club yesterday, Lowell, Longfellow, Cabot, Brimmer, Appleton, Hunt, James, Forbes, Fields. Erastus Bigelow was a guest.

How dangerous is criticism. My brilliant friend cannot see any healthy power in Thoreau’s thoughts. At first I suspect, of course, that he oversees me, who admire Thoreau’s power. But when I meet again fine perceptions in Thoreau’s papers, I see that there is defect in his critic that he should undervalue them. Thoreau writes, in his Field Notes, “I look back for the era of this creation not into the night, but to a dawn for which no man ever rose early enough.” A fine example of his affirmative genius.

March 15.

My new book sells faster, it appears, than either of its foregoers. This is not for its merit, but only shows that old age is a good advertisement. Your name has been seen so often that your book must be worth buying.

I hate protection of trade in our politics, and now I recall in what Stillman said of the Greek war, — that the English opposition to the independence of Greece is merely out of fear of’ its depriving them of the Eastern trade.

A gentleman, English, French, or American, is rare; I think I remember every one I have ever seen.

March 16.

Musagetes. After the Social Circle had broken up, last night, and only two remained with me, one said that a cigar had uses. If you found yourself in a hotel with writing to do, — fire just kindled in a cold room, — it was hard to begin; but light a cigar, and you were presently comfortable, and in condition to work. Mr.

Simon Brown then said, that he had never smoked, but as an editor (of the New England Farmer) he had much writing, and he often found himself taking up a little stick and whittling away on it, and, in a short time, brought into tune and temper by that Yankee method.

Alvah Crocker gave me in the cars a history of his activity in the matter of the Fitchburg Railroad, beginning, I think, in 1837. He is the author of the road. He was a paper manufacturer, and could not get the material for making paper for less than eight cents a pound, — whilst in Boston and elsewhere it could be got for two, three, and four cents. He must find a way to bring Fitchburg nearer to Boston. He knew the country round him and studied the possibilities of each connection. He found he must study the nearest practicable paths to tidewater. No man but he had faith in the rivers; Nashua River.

After studying the Hoosac Mountains well, he decided that the mountain must be perforated. He must see Loammi Baldwin, who was the best engineer in the State. He could not get at that busy man. He knew that his own mother’s dearest friend had been the lady who was now Mr. Baldwin’s wife. To her he went, and told her who he was, and that he wished of all things to see Mr. Baldwin. The lady said, “I loved your mother dearly, but I know nothing of you; but for her sake, I will take care that you shall see him. Come here, say, next Sunday after dinner, about 3 o’clock, — that is the right time, and I will see that Mr. Baldwin shall answer all your questions.” He did so.

Dream. The waking from an impressive dream is a curious example of the jealousy of the gods. There is an air as if the sender of the illusion had been heedless for a moment that the Reason had returned to its seat, and was startled into attention. Instantly, there is a rush from some quarter to break up the drama into a chaos of parts, then of particles, then of ether, like smoke dissolving in a wind; it cannot be disintegrated fast enough or fine enough. If you could give the waked watchman the smallest fragment, he could reconstruct the whole; for the moment, he is sure he can and will; but his attention is so divided on the disappearing parts, that he cannot grasp the least atomy, and the last fragment or film disappears before he could say, “I have it.”

“Aimer a lire, c’est faire un échange des heures d’ennui que? on doit avoir en sa vie, contre des heures délicieuses.” — MONTESQUIEU, Pensées.

March.

In “Clubs” I ought to have said that men being each a treasure-house of valuable experiences, — and yet the man often shy and daunted by company into dumbness, — it needs to court him, to put him at his ease, to make him laugh or weep, and so at last to get his naturel confessions, and his best experience.

The blinded Arago’s “Ardent Age”— “Sa vieillesse est aussi remarquable que celle de M. de Humboldt, elle est même -plus ardente.” — VARN- HAGEN, vol x, p. 100.

I ought to have had Arago among my heroes in “Old Age,” and Humboldt, and Agesilaus.

March 23.

On the 31st, I received President Eliot’s letter signifying the acceptance of Carlyle’s bequest of the Cromwellian and Friedrich books by the Corporation of Harvard College, and enclosing the vote of the Corporation. I wrote to Carlyle the same day enclosing the President’s letter to me, and the record of their vote, and mailed it yesterday morning to him.

“Study for eternity smiled on me.”

Varnhagen says, “Goethe once said to me, ‘How can the narrative be always right? The things themselves are not always right’ and Varnhagen adds: “A microscopic history is not better than one seen with the natural, unarmed eye; — not the rightness of the now invisible littles, but the gross impression is the main thing.” — VARNHAGEN, vol x, p. 174.

At Wiesbaden, an Englishman being addressed by another guest at the table, called the waiter, and said to him aloud, “Waiter, say to that gentleman that I won’t speak with him.” This delighted Varnhagen, and he adds, “Worthy of imitation. Nothing more odious than table d’hôte conversation.”

1 For the account of the generous gift which Carlyle felt moved to make to the college, see the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence.

The widow of General Charles Russell Lowell (sister of Colonel Robert G. Shaw) had visited Carlyle with a letter of introduction from Mr. Emerson, had talked freely with him about our war and sent him the Harvard Memorial Biographies to enlighten him on the cause and its heroes.

Musagetes. Goethe’s fly. Read not in your official professional direction too steadily, — rather less and less, but, where you find excitement, awakening, for every surface is equally near to the centre. Every one has his own experience, — but I find the contrasts most suggestive.

[Under the new and more liberal dispensation of President Eliot’s administration, courses of “University Lectures” were established, and Mr. Emerson was invited to give a course of sixteen in the Philosophical Department in April and May. These were: — I, Introductory, The Praise of Knowledge; II, Transcendency of Physics; III and IV, Perception; V and VI, Memory; VII, Imagination; VIII, Inspiration; IX, Genius; X, Common Sense; XI, Identity; XII, XIII, Metres of Mind; XIV, The Platonists; XV, Conduct of Intellect; XVI, Relation of Intellect to Morals.]

Identity. Bias. The best identity is the practical one, as in the pure satisfaction felt in finding that we have long since said, written, or done somewhat quite true and fit for ourselves.

Steffens relates that he went into Schelling’s lecture-room at Jena (?). Schelling said, “Gentlemen, think of the wall.” All the class at once took attitudes of thought; some stiffened themselves up; some shut their eyes; all concentrated themselves. After a time, he said, “Gentlemen, think of that which thought the wall.” Then there was trouble in all the camp.

The scholar who abstracted himself with pain to make the analysis of Hegel is less enriched than when the beauty and depth of any thought by the wayside has commanded his mind and led to new thought and action; for this is healthy, and these thoughts light up the mind. He is made aware of the walls, and also of the open way leading outward and upward, whilst the other analytic process is cold and bereaving, and, — shall I say it? — somewhat mean, as spying.

The delicate lines of character in Aunt Mary, Rahel, Margaret Fuller, Sarah A. Ripley, need good metaphysic, better than Hegel’s, to read and delineate.

There is one other reason for dressing well than I have ever considered, namely, that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.

The strength of his moral convictions is the charm of the character of Fichte.

Autograph letters. Wise was the Turkish cadi who said, “O my friend, my liver, the questioner is one, and the answer is another.”

I find Plutarch a richer teacher of rhetoric than any modern.

Plutarch quotes, as a true judgment, this,— “That this courteous, gentle, and benign disposition and behaviour is not so acceptable, so obliging, and delightful to any of those with whom they converse, as it is to those who have it.” — PLUTARCH, Morals, vol i, p. 59.

Old age. Here is a good text from Montesquieu: “Les vieillards qui ont étudié dans leur jeunesse n’ont besoin que de se ressouvenir, et non d’apprendre. Cela est bien heureux.” — Pensées, p. 232.

June 9.

I find Philip Randolph almost if not quite on a level with my one or two Olympic friends in his insight, — as shown in his manuscript, which I have been reading. He made that impression on me once and again in our interviews whilst he lived, and in his paper which was promised to the North American Review. But in these papers on science, philosophy, poetry, painting, and music, the supremacy of his faith purely shines.

How much it ever pleases me that this pure spiritualist was the best chess-player in Philadelphia, and, according to Evan Randolph’s account to me, had beaten the best players in Paris!

Plutarch rightly tells the anecdote of Alexander (badly remembered and misrelated usually) that he wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking if any accident had befallen him, he replied, “Don’t you think it a matter for my lamentation, that, when there is such a vast multitude of them, I have not yet conquered one?” — Plutarch, Morals, vol i, P- 134-

Were I professor of rhetoric, I would urge my class to read Plutarch’s Morals in English, and Cotton’s Montaigne for their English style.

We think we do a great service to our country in publishing this book if we hereby force our public men to read the “Apophthegms of Great Commanders,” before they make their speeches to caucuses and conventions. If I could keep the secret, and communicate it only to one or two chosen youths, I should know that they would by this noble infiltration easily carry the victory over all competitors. But as it was the desire of these old patriots to fill Rome or Sparta with this majestic spirit, and not a few leaders only, we desire to offer them to the American people.

The reason of a new philosophy or philosopher is ever that a man of thought finds that he cannot read in the old books. I can’t read Hegel, or Schelling, or find interest in what is told me from them, so I persist in my own idle and easy way, and write down my thoughts, and find presently that there are congenial persons who like them, so I persist, until some sort of outline or system grows. ’Tis the common course: ever a new bias. It happened to each of these, Heraclitus, or Hegel, or whosoever.

June 30.

I cannot but please myself with the recoil when Plutarch tells me that “the Athenians had such an abhorrence of those who accused Socrates that they would neither lend them fire, nor answer them any question, nor wash with them in the same water, but commanded the servants to pour it out as polluted, till these sycophants, no longer able to bear up under the pressure of this hatred, put an end to their own lives.” — PLUTARCH, Morals, vol ii, p. 96.

I find Nouvelle Biographie Générale a perpetual benefactor, — almost sure on every consultation to answer promptly and well. Long live M. le Docteur Hoefer! Just now he has answered fully on Plutarch, Suetonius, Amyot, but I dared not believe he would know Dr. Philemon Holland, — yet he answered at once joyfully concerning him; and even cites the epigram upon him: —

“Philemon with translations will so fill us

He cannot let Suetonius be Tranquillus.”

July 14.

Here at Nantasket Beach, with Ellen, I wonder that so few men do penetrate what seems the secret of the innkeeper. He funs along the coast, and perceives that by buying a few acres, well chosen, of the seashore, which cost no more or not so much as good land elsewhere, and building a good house, he shifts upon Nature the whole duty of filling it with guests, the sun, the moon, the stars, the rainbow, the sea, the islands, the whole horizon, — not elsewhere seen, ships of all nations. All of these (and all unpaid) take on themselves the whole charge of entertaining his guests, and filling and delighting their senses with shows; and it were long to tell in detail the attractions which these furnish. Everything here is picturesque: the long beach is every day renewed with pleasing and magical shows, with variety of colour, with the varied music of the rising and falling water, with the multitudes of fishes, and the birds and men that prey on them; with the strange forms of the radiates sprawling on the beach; with shells; with the beautiful variety of sea-rolled pebbles, — of quartz, porphyry, sienite, mica, and limestone. The man buys a few acres, but he has all the good and all the glory of a hundred square miles, by the cunning choice of the place; for the storm is one of the grand entertainers of his company; so is the sun, and the moon, and all the stars of heaven, since they who see them here, in all their beauty, and in the grand area or amphitheatre which they need for their right exhibition, feel that they have never rightly seen them before.

The men and women who come to the house, and swarm or scatter in groups along the spacious beach, or in yachts, or boats, or in carriages, or as bathers, never appeared before so gracious and inoffensive. In these wide stretches, the largest company do not jostle one another. Then to help him, even the poor Indians from Maine and Canada creep on to the outskirts of the hotel to pitch their tents, and make baskets and bows and arrows to add a picturesque feature. Multitudes of children decorate the piazza, and the grounds in front, with their babble and games; and in this broad area every individual from least to largest is inoffensive and an entertaining variety. To make the day complete, I saw from the deck of our boat this morning, coming out of the bay, the English steamer which lately made the perilous jump on Minot’s Ledge, and this afternoon I saw the turret monitor, Miantonomoh, sailing into Boston.

The parlours, chambers, and the table of the Rockland House were all good, but the supreme relish of these conveniences was this superb panorama which the wise choice of the place on which the house was built afforded. This selection of the site gives this house the like advantage over other houses that an astronomical observatory has over other towers, — namely, that this particular tower leads you to the heavens, and searches depths of space before inconceivable.

July 21.

I am filling my house with books which I am bound to read, and wondering whether the new heavens which await the soul (after the fatal hour) will allow the consultation of these.

I honour the author of the “Battle Hymn,” and of “The Flag.” She was born in the city of New York. I could well wish she were a native of Massachusetts. We have had no such poetess in New England.

August 7.

This morning I think no subject so fit for poetry as Home, the Massachusetts or the American Home.

I find my readings of Aunt Mary ever monitory and healthful as of old, and for the reason that they are moral inspirations. All the men and women whose talents challenge my admiration from time to time lack this depth of source, and are therefore comparatively shallow. They amuse, they may be inimitable; I am proud of them as countrymen and contemporaries; but it is as music or pictures, — and other music and pictures would have served me as well; but they do not take rank hold of me as consolers, uplifters, and hinderers from sleep. But the moral muse is eternal, and wakes us to eternity, —— pervades the whole man. Socrates is not distant; Sparta is nearer than New York; Marcus Antoninus is of no age; Plotinus and Porphyry, Confucius and Menu had a deeper civilization than Paris or London; and the deeply religious men and women in or out of our churches are really the salt of our civilization, and constitute the nerve and tension of our politics in Germany, England, and America. The men of talent see the power of principle, and the necessity of respecting it, but they deal with its phenomena, and not with the source. It is learned and wielded as an accomplishment and a weapon.

As I have before written, that no number of Nays will help, — only one Tea, and this is moral. Strength enters according to the presence of the moral element. There are no bounds to this power. If it have limits, we have not found them. It domesticates. They are not our friends who are of our household, but they who think and see with us. But it is ever wonderful where the moral element comes from.

The Christian doctrine not only modifies the individual character, but the individual character modifies the Christian doctrine in Luther, in Augustine, in Fénelon, in Milton. — Something like this I read in Lévêque or Antoninus.

September 1.

With Edward took the 7.30 a m. train from Boston to Portland, thence to South Paris, where we took a carriage and reached Waterford, Mr. Houghton’s inn, at 5 p m. Thence, the next afternoon, to South Paris, carried by Mr. Wilkins, and took the train for Gorham, and thence immediately the stage to the Glen House, Mount Washington, where we arrived near 9 o’clock in the evening. Spent Sunday, September 4, and on Monday, September 5, at 8 o’clock, ascended the mountain in open carriage; descended in the railway [funicular] car, at 3, and reached the Crawford House. Next morning, September 6, took stage to Whitefield, arriving to dine, thence by railway to Plymouth, arriving at 9 p m. Next morning, at 5 o’clock, took railroad, and arrived in Boston at 11.30 and home in an hour.

[To fill out this rather bald itinerary, it may be said that Mr. Emerson’s family, seeing that the Philosophy course (sixteen lectures in a few weeks) had been a tax on his strength, betrayed him into a journey to Maine on the plea of showing to his son the village of Waterford, of which Mr. Emerson had a happy remembrance from the days long past when he went there to visit his Haskins relations, and his Aunt Mary. His consent was won, and reaching Waterford we climbed Bear Mountain and from its sheer cliff looked down into the blue lake below. Then he eagerly led the way to a broad brook whose clear waters, rushing over smooth ledges and boulders, had long delighted him in memory, and now gave like joy.

We were glad to find at Gorham, where we passed Sunday, Mr. James Bryce, now noted, who had lately brought his letter of introduction to Concord. Next morning he and young Emerson climbed the mountain, and Mr. Emerson followed in the stage from the great heat and moisture below into a fierce, cold snow-squall which blew almost dangerously on the top. We saw nothing but that, shivered through dinner, and gladly descended to Crawford’s Notch, where Mr. Emerson had stayed with Ellen Tucker and her family some forty years before.

 —— E. IV. Emerson.]

Very much afflicted in these days with stupor:

 —— acute attacks whenever a visit is proposed or made.

Montesquieu’s prediction is fulfilled, “La France se perdra par les gens de guerre.” — Pens’ees.

September 24.

On Saturday, at the Club; present, Sumner, Longfellow, Lowell, Hoar, James, Brimmer, Fields, Estes Howe, Holmes, R. W. E., and, as guests, Mr. Catacazy, the Russian Minister, Hon. Samuel Hooper, and Henry Lee, Esq.

September 26.

Chivalry, I fancied, this afternoon, would serve as a good title for many topics, and some good readings which I might offer to the Fraternity [Course of Lectures] on December 6. George Ticknor, Hallam, and Renan (in his paper on the Paris Exposition) have each given me good texts; Fauriel has others; and the wonderful mythology and poetry of Wales, of Brittany, of Germany (in the Nibelungenlied), and Scott and Joinville and Froissart can add their stores. It might be called “Imagination” as well, and what we call chivalry be only a rich illustration. Every reading boy has marched to school and on his errands, to fragments of this magic, and swinging a cut stick for his broadsword, brandishing it, and plunging it into the swarm of airy enemies whom his fancy arrayed on his right and left.

The life of the topic, of course, would be the impatience in every man of his limits; the inextinguishableness of the imagination. We cannot crouch in our hovels or our experience. We have an immense elasticity. Every reader takes part with the king, or the angel, or the god, in the novel or poem he reads, and not with dwarfs and cockneys. That healthy surprise which a sunset sky gives to a man coming out on it alone, and from his day’s work; or which the stars unexpectedly seen give.

(From ST)

October 2.

La portée, the range of a thought, of a fact observed, and thence of the word by which we denote it, makes its value. Only whilst it has new values does it warm and invite and enable to write. And this range or ulterior outlook appears to be rare in men; — a slight primitive difference, but essential to the work. For this possessor has the necessity to write,— ’Tis easy and delightful to him; the other, finding no continuity, — must begin again uphill at every step. Now Plutarch is not a deep man, and might well not be personally impressive to his contemporaries; but, having this facile association in his thought, — a wide horizon to every fact or maxim or character which engaged him, every new topic reanimated all his experience or memory, and he was impelled with joy to begin a new chapter. Then there is no such chord in Nature for fagoting thoughts as well as actions, as religion, which means fagoting. Plutarch had a commanding moral sentiment, which, indeed, is common to all men, but in very unlike degree, so that in multitudes it appears secondary, as if aped only from eminent characters, and not native. But in Plutarch was his genius. This clear morale is the foundation of genius in Milton, in Burke, in Herbert, in Socrates, in Wordsworth, Michael Angelo, and, I think, also in many men who like to mask or disguise it in the variety of their powers, —— as Shakespeare and Goethe. Indeed, we are sure to feel the discord and limitation in men of rare talent in whom this sentiment has not its healthy or normal superiority; as, Byron, Voltaire, Daniel Webster.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into new land.

Memory. The compensation of failing memory is, — the assistance of increased and increasing generalization.

“Old age stands not in years, but in directed activity.”

Among my mnemonics I recorded that I went into France just three hundred years after Montaigne did. He was born, 1533; I visited it in 1833.

[During this year the Government of Harvard University determined that it should no longer discredit itself by conferring the degree of Master of Arts on any graduate who should have survived five years and have five dollars to pay into the treasury for receiving it. Mr. Emerson was appointed one of a Committee of Harvard teachers to prepare a plan for conferring that degree. He was also made one of the Committee to visit the Academic Department of the University.]

October 6.

To-day at the laying of the corner-stone of the “Memorial Hall,” at Cambridge. All was well and wisely done. The storm ceased for us, the company was large, — the best men and the best women all there, — or all but a few; — the arrangements simple and excellent, and every speaker successful. Henry Lee, with his uniform sense and courage, the Manager; the Chaplain, Rev. Phillips Brooks, offered a prayer, in which not a word was superfluous, and every right thing was said. Henry Rogers, William Gray, Dr. Palfrey, made each his proper Report. Luther’s Hymn in Dr. Hedge’s translation was sung by a great choir, the corner-stone was laid, and then Rockwood Hoar read a discourse of perfect sense, taste, and feeling, — full of virtue and of tenderness. After this, an original song by Wendell Holmes was given by the Choir. Every part in all these performances was in such true feeling that people praised them with broken voices, and we all proudly wept. Our Harvard soldiers of the war were in their uniforms, and heard their own praises, and the tender allusions to their dead comrades. General Meade was present, and “adopted by the College,” as Judge Hoar said, and Governor Claflin sat by President Eliot. Our English guests, Hughes, Rawlins, Dicey, and Bryce, sat and listened. cc I bear no ill will to my contemporaries,” said Cumberland. “After you, ma’am, in manners,” said Swett. The only point in which I regret priority of departure is that I, as every one, keep many stories of which the etiquette of contemporariness forbids the airing, and which burn uncomfortably being untold. I positively resolve not to kill A. nor C. nor N.

 —— but I could a tale unfold, like Hamlet’s father.

Now a private class gives just this liberty which in book or public lecture were unparliamentary, and of course because here, at least, one is safe from the unamiable presence of reporters. Another point. I set great value in culture on foreign literature — the farther off the better —— much on French, on Italian, on German, or Welsh — more on Persian or Hindu, because if one read and write only English, he soon slides into narrow conventions, and believes there is no other way to write poetry than as Pope or Milton. But a quite foreign mind born and grown in different latitude and longitude, —— nearer to the pole or to the equator, — a child of Mount Hecla, like Sturluson, or of the Sahara, like Averroës, astonishes us with a new nature, gives a fillip to our indolence, and we promptly learn that we have faculties which we have never used.

How right is Couture’s rule ‘of looking three times at the object, for one at your drawing, — of looking at Nature, and not at your whim; and William Hunt’s emphasis, after him, on the mass, instead of the details! And how perfectly (as I wrote upon Couture long ago) the same rule applies in rhetoric or writing! Wendell Holmes hits right in every affectionate poem he scribbles, by his instinct at obeying a just perception of what is important, instead, of feeling about how he shall write some verses touching the subject: and eminently this is true in Rockwood Hoar’s mind, — his tendency to the integrity of the thing!

What a lesson on culture is drawn from every day’s intercourse with men and women. The rude youth or maid comes as a visitor to a house, and at the table cannot understand half the conversation that passes, — so many allusions to books, to anecdotes, to persons, — hints of a song, or a fashion of the War, or the College, or the boatmen, or a single French or 1 In his admirable Méthode et entretiens d’ atelier.

Latin word to suggest a line or sentence familiar to inmates, unknown to the stranger, — so that practically’t is as if the family spoke another language than the guest. Well, there is an equal difference if their culture is better, in all their ways, and the like abbreviation by better methods, and only long acquaintance, that is, slow education, step by step, in their arts and knowledge can breed a practical equality. The like difference, of course, must appear in the father, the son, the grandson, and the great-grandson, if better opportunities of education are provided to each successor than his parent enjoyed.

Greatness. “They deride thee, O Diogenes!” He replied, “But I am not derided.” — PLUTARCH, Morals.

But, memo. I must procure a Greek Grammar. O for my old Gloucester again!

A passage in the Convito of Dante testifies that he knew Greek too imperfectly to read Homer in the original. (See Biographie Générale.)

Objection to Metaphysics. The poet sees wholes, and avoids analysis. Ellery Channing said to me, he would not know the botanical name of the flower, for fear he should never see the flower again. The metaphysician, dealing, as it were, with the mathematics of the mind, puts himself out of the way of the Inspiration, loses that which is the miracle, and which creates the worship.

America. We get rid in this Republic of a great deal of nonsense which disgusts us in European biography. There a superior mind, a Hegel, sincerely and scientifically exploring the laws of thought, is suddenly called by a necessity of pleasing some king, or conciliating some Catholics, to give a twist to his universal propositions to fit these absurd people, and not satisfying them even by these sacrifices of truth and manhood; another great genius, Schelling, is called in, when Hegel dies, to come to Berlin, and bend truth to the crotchets of the king and rabble. Not so here. The paucity of population, the vast extent of territory, the solitude of each family and each man, allow some approximation to the result that every citizen has a religion of his own, — is a church by himself, —— and worships and speculates in a new, quite independent fashion.

Plutarch treats every subject except Art. He is ingenious to draw medical virtue from every poison, to detect the good that may be made of evil.

An admirable passage concerning Plato’s expression “that God geometrizes,” in Plutarch’s Symposiacs. (See especially in the Old Edition, vol iii, p. 434.)

In the History of opinion, the pinch of falsehood shows itself, not first in argument and formal protest, but in insincerity, indifference, and abandonment of the church, or the scientific or political or economic institution, for other better or worse forms. Then good heads, feeling or observing this loss, formulate the fact in protest and argument, and suggest the correction and superior form. Rabelais, Voltaire, Heine, are earlier reformers than Huss, and Luther, and Strauss, and Parker, though less solemn and to less solemn readers.

Voltaire’s Spinoza,— “Je soupçonne, entre nous, que vous n existez pas.” — Satires. Les Systèmes.

It really appears that the Latin and Greek continue to be forced in education, just as chignons must be worn, in spite of the disgust against both, for fashion. If a wise traveller should visit England to study the causes of her power, it is not the universities in which he would find them; but Mr. Owen, Mr. Armstrong, Mr. Airy, Mr. Stephenson, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Scott Russell, Boulton, Watt, Faraday, Tyndall, Darwin. If any of these were college men, ‘t is only the good luck of the universities, and not their normal fruit. What these men have done, they did not learn there.

“Plato says that Time had its original from an intelligence.” — PLUTARCH, Morals, vol iii, P- 158 —

Micrew (and I remember that Mr. Tom Lee complained of Margaret Fuller that she remembered things); “and the ancients used to consecrate Forgetfulness, with a ferula in hand, to Bacchus, thereby intimating that we should either not remember any irregularity committed in mirth and company, or should apply a gentle and childish correction to the faults.” — Idem.

Plutarch loves apples like our Thoreau, and well praises them. — See Morals, vol iii, p. 362.

Let a scholar begin to read something to a few strangers in a parlour, and he may find his voice disobedient, and he reads badly. Let him go to an assembly of intelligent people in a public hall, and his voice will behave beautifully, and he is another person, and contented.

A scholar forgives everything to him whose fault gives him a new insight, a new fact.

Peter Oliver, in the Puritan Commonwealth, insists like a lawyer on the duty the Pilgrims owed to their Charter, and the presumed spirit and intent in which it was given. He overlooks the irresistible instruction which the actual arrival in the new continent gave. That was a greater king than Charles, and insisted on making the law for those who live in it. They could not shut their eyes on the terms on which alone they could live in it. The savages, the sands,

 the snow, the mutineers, and the French were antagonists who must be dealt with on the instant, and there was no clause in the Charter that could deal with these. No lawyer could help them to read the pitiless alternative which Plymouth Rock offered them, — Self-help or Ruin: come up to the real conditions, or die.

November 30.

Judge W — of Rhode Island was not a great man, and resented some slight he received from Tristram Burgess at the Bar, by asking him if he knew before whom he was speaking. He replied, “Yes, your honour; before the inferior Court of the inferior Bench of the inferior State of Rhode Island.”

Mr. Weeden  told me, that his old aunt said of the people whom she knew in her youth that “they had to hold on hard to the huckleberry bushes to hinder themselves from being translated.”

I delight ever in having to do with the drastic class, the men who can do things, as Dr. Charles T. Jackson; and Jim Bartlett, and Boynton. Such was Thoreau. Once out of doors, the poets paled like ghosts before them. I met Boynton in Rochester, New York, and was cold enough to a popular and unscientific lecturer on Geology. But I talked to him of the notice I had read of repulsion of incandescent bodies, and new experiments. “O,” he said, “nothing is plainer: I have tried it”; and, on my way to Mr. Ward’s, he led me into a forge, where a stream of melted iron was running out of a furnace, and he passed his finger through the streamlet again and again, and invited me to do the same. I said, “Do you not wet your finger?”

“No,” he said, “the hand sweats a little and that suffices.”

Parnassus.

So words must sparks be of those fires they strike.

I saw that no pressman could lay his sheets so deftly but that under every one a second sheet was inadvertently laid; and no bookbinder could bind so carefully but that a second sheet was bound in the book: then I saw that if the writer was skilful, every word he wrote sank into the inner sheet, and there remained indelible; and if he was not skilful, it did not penetrate, and the ink faded, and the writing was effaced.

Quoique aderant vates rebar adesse Deos.1 — OVID.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1870

Menu; Confucius; Heracleitus; Ovid; Suetonius; Marcus Aurelius; Plotinus; Porphyry; St. Augustine; Averroës (Ibn Roshd); Snorre Sturluson; Nibelungenlied; De Joinville, Chronicle of Saint Louis; Froissart, Chronicles; Huss; Luther; Michel Angelo; Rabelais; Amyot, Philemon Holland (translators of Plutarch’s Morals into French and English respectively); Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy; Spinoza; Fénelon; Montesquieu,Pensées; Voltaire; Peter Oliver, The Puritan Commonwealth; Matthew Boulton; James Watt; Goethe; Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe; Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau; Fichte; Richter; Alexander von Humboldt; Hegel; Heinrich Steffens, Review of Schelling’s Philosophy; Fauriel; Schelling; Hallam; Varnhagen von Ense, ‘Tagebucher; Arago; George Ticknor; Faraday; John G. Palfrey, History of New England; Carlyle; Heine; George B. Airy; George Sand; Richard Owen; Strauss; John Scott Russell; O. W. Holmes; Charles Darwin; Margaret Fuller; Theodore Parker; Sir William Armstrong; J. W. Foster, Geology; Erastus B. Bigelow; Thomas Couture, Méthode et entretiens d’atelier; J. R. Lowell; Thoreau, Field Notes; Lévêque; Julia Ward Howe, Battle Hymn of the Republic; Tyndall; William J. Stillman; Ernest Renan; Huxley, Lay Sermons; Sir John Lubbuck; Phillips Brooks; Hoefer, Nouvelle Biographie Générale.

JOURNAL

UNIVERSITY LECTURES

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

MILL, PUSEY, FROUDE

JOHN MURRAY FORBES

THE CALIFORNIA EXCURSION

SPLENDORS OF THE AGE

CHANNING. BRET HARTE

POETRY IN SCIENCE

GEOFFROY SAINT-HILAIRE

SYMPATHY WITH BOYS

CULTURE IN ENGLAND AND HERE

BOYHOOD

JOURNAL LXII

1871

(From Journal ST)

[Mr. EMERSON seems to have lectured in some Massachusetts towns; also at Buffalo, Cleveland, and New Brunswick, New Jersey, during January.

On February 3, he spoke by request at a meeting held for the purpose of organizing the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In a letter of thanks, Mr. Martin Brimmer expressed his belief that the good effects of this speech in awakening substantial interest in the Museum soon appeared.

But through the winter Mr. Emerson had the serious task of preparing for a course of lectures on Philosophy for a new class at the University. According to Mr. Cabot, the lectures were mainly the same as those given in the previous Spring, except that “Identity” and “The Platonists” were omitted, but “Wit and Humour,”

“Demonology,” and another on “The Conduct of the Intellect” were added. A large part of the new matter in this course was later used in “Poetry and Imagination,” in Letters and Social Aims, the next published volume.]

January, 1871.

Old age. “Man is oldest when he is born, and is younger and younger continually.” — TALIESSIN, apud Skene.

February 10.

I do not know that I should feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before my eyes. I should only feel that it indicated that the day had arrived when the human race might be trusted with a new degree of power, and its immense responsibility; for these steps are not solitary or local, but only a hint of an advanced frontier supported by an advancing race behind it.

What at first scares the Spiritualist in the experiments of Natural Science — as if thought were only finer chyle, fine to aroma — now redounds to the credit of matter, which, it appears, is impregnated with thought and heaven, and is really of God, and not of the Devil, as he had too hastily believed. All is resolved into Unity again. My chemistry, he will say, was blind and barbarous, but my intuition is, was, and will be true.

I believe that every man belongs to his time, if our Newtons and philosophers belong also to the next age which they help to form.

“Our progress appears great, only because the future of Science is hidden from us.” — PHILIP RANDOLPH.

Of gravitation, John Mill said to Carlyle, “A force can act but where it is.”

“With all my heart,” replied Carlyle, “but where is it?”

March 5.

Dr. E. B. Pusey of Oxford surprised me two or three days ago with sending me, “with greetings,” a book, Lectures on Daniel and the Prophets, with the following inscription written on the blank leaf, —

To the unwise and wise A debtor I.

‘T is strange if true, And yet the old Is often new.

When in England, I did not meet him, but I remember that, in Oxford, Froude one day, walking with me, pointed to his window, and said, “There is where all our light came from.”

I ought also to have recorded that Max Müller, on last Christmas Day, surprised me with the gift of a book.

Coleridge says, “The Greeks, except perhaps in Homer, seem to have had no way of making their women interesting, but by unsexing them, as in the instances of the tragic Medea, Electra, etc. Contrast such characters with Spenser’s Una, who exhibits no prominent feature, has no particularization, but produces the same feeling that a statue does, when contemplated at a distance.

‘From her fair head her fillet she undight,

And laid her stole aside: her angel’s face

As the great eye of Heaven shined bright,

And made a sunshine in a shady place:

Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace?’”

Greatness. Chateaubriand says that President Washington granted him an audience in Philadelphia, and adds, “Happy am I that the looks of Washington fell on me. I felt myself warmed by them for the rest of my life.” Calvert gives the anecdote.

None is so great but finds one who apprehends him, and no historical person begins to content us; and this is our pledge of a higher height than he has reached. And when we have arrived at the question, the answer is already near.

April 7.

[Mr. Emerson’s good friend Mr. John M. Forbes, hearing that he seemed worn and jaded by the strain of his Philosophy lectures, — two or more a week, — invited him to be his guest on an excursion in a private car to California. In the party, besides Mr and Mrs. Forbes and their youngest daughter, were Colonel Forbes, with his wife (Mr. Emerson’s daughter Edith), Mrs. George Russell, James B. Thayer (late Royall Professor of Law at Cambridge), Garth Wilkinson James, late the adjutant of Colonel Robert Shaw, and wounded on the slopes of Fort Wagner. Mr. Emerson’s inborn reluctance to receive favours even from near friends, and his scruples about leaving his work, stood in the way, but at last he yielded to Mr. Forbes’s tactful ingenuity of plea, and to his daughter’s urgency, and went. The journey across the prairie, mountains, and desert (including a short stay at Salt Lake City and conversation with Brigham Young), the weeks in California in its spring freshness and sheets of flowers, were to Mr. Emerson an unforeseen delight and refreshment. The good friends in the party, with their tactful and affectionate care of him, each contributed to his pleasure, and his respect and admiration for the quality of his host grew with each day. Professor Thayer in a little volume gave a pleasant account of the journey.

Mr. Emerson was enjoying the rest, and did little writing. But few notes of the trip occur.]

California Notes. Irrigation. Tea, impossible culture where labor is dear as in America. Silk (?) Wine is not adulterated; because grapes at one cent a pound are cheaper than any substitute.

Cape Donner. Golden Gate, named of old from its flowers. Asia at your doors and South America. Inflamed Expectation haunting men. Henry Pierce’s opinion of the need of check, calamity, punishment, to teach economy. Nickels [for] cents.

Mission Dolores. Flora. The altered Year. (See Hittel on California.)

John Muir. General Sumner.

Antelopes, prairie-dogs, elk-horns, wolves, eagles, vultures, prairie-hen, owls.

Sequoias generally have marks of fire: having lived thirteen hundred years must have met that danger, and every other, in turn. Yet they possess great power of resistance to fire. (See Cronise, pp. 507-508.)

Sarcodes Sanguinea, snow plant growing in the snow, a parasite from decayed wood; monotropa. Cœanothus; Wild lilac; Madrona; — Arbutus Menziesii; Manzanita; Acrostaphylos glaucus.

Black sand at Lake Tahoe, and carnelians. Mono Lake. Glaciers; Clarence King. Volcanic mountains, cones, Enneo County.

The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days, and more of them, than any other country.

Mount Shasta, 14,440 feet high, in northeastern corner of the State. Mount Whitney, 15,000 feet, in Tulare County. In Yosemite, grandeur of these mountains perhaps unmatched in the globe; for here they strip themselves like athletes for exhibition, and stand perpendicular granite walls, showing their entire height, and wearing a liberty cap of snow on their head.

Sequoia Gigantea, Pinus Lambertiana, Sugar pine, 10 feet diameter; 300 feet height; cones 18 inches. Pinus Ponder osa, yellow pine. Pinus Albicaulis.

May 12.

At the request of Galen Clark, our host at Mariposa, and who is, by State appointment, the protector of the trees, and who went with us to the Mammoth Groves, I selected a Sequoia Gigantea, near Galen’s Hospice, in the presence of our party, and named it Samoset, in memory of the first Indian ally of the Plymouth Colony, and I gave Mr. Clark directions to procure a tin plate, and have the inscription painted thereon in the usual form of the named trees: and paid him its cost: —

Samoset. 12 May 1871.

The tree was a strong healthy one; girth, at 2 1/2 feet from the ground, 50 feet.

What they once told me at St. Louis is truer in California, that there is no difference between a boy and a man: as soon as a boy is “that high” [high as the table], he contradicts his father. When introduced to the stranger, he says, “I am happy to make your acquaintance,” and shakes hands like a senior.

California is teaching in its history and its poetry the good of evil, and confirming my thought, one day in Five Points in New York, twenty years ago, that the ruffians and Amazons in that district were only superficially such, but carried underneath this bronze about the same morals as their civil and well-dressed neighbours.

Gifts. The pleasing humiliation of gifts.

The saying is attributed to Sir Isaac Newton that “they who give nothing before their death never in fact give at all.”

We are sometimes startled by coincidences so friendly as to suggest a guardian angel: and sometimes, when they would be so fit, and every way desirable, nothing but disincidences occur. ‘T is perhaps thus; the coincidence is probably the rule, and if we could retain our early innocence, we might trust our feet uncommanded to take the right path to our friend in the woods....

[Mr. Emerson reached home in the last week in May, much refreshed, and having had pleasure in the company of his good friends.

Perhaps on the journey, he wrote, at her request, the following]

Inscription for Mrs. Sarah Swain Forbes’s Memorial Fountain: —

Fall, Stream! to bless. Return to Heaven as well: So, did our sons, Heaven met them as they fell.

What was the name of the nymph “Whom young Apollo courted for her hair”? That fable renews itself every day in the street and in the drawing-room. Nothing in nature is more ideal than the hair. Analyze it by taking a single hair, and it is characterless and worthless: but in the mass it is recipient of such variety of form, and momentary change from form to form, that it vies in expression with the eye and the countenance. The wind and the sun play with it and enhance it, and its coils and its mass are a perpetual mystery and attraction to the young poet. But the doleful imposture of buying it at the shops is suicidal, and disgusts.

Nature lays the ground-plan of each creature, —— accurately, sternly fit for all his functions, — then veils it.

(From NY)

My Men. Thomas Carlyle, Louis Agassiz, E. Rockwood Hoar, J. Elliot Cabot, John M. Forbes, Charles K. Newcomb, Philip P. Randolph, Richard Hunt, Alvah Crocker, William B. Ogden, Samuel G. Ward, J. R. Lowell, Sampson Reed, Henry D. Thoreau, A. B. Alcott, Horatio Greenough, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Muir.

[In June, Mr. Emerson had been chosen a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and on August 15, when the Society celebrated the Centennial Anniversary of Scott’s birth, Mr. Emerson spoke. What he said is printed in Miscellanies.]

(From ST)

Scott said to Mr. Cheney, “Superstition is very picturesque, and I make it at times stand me in great stead; but I never allow it to interfere with interest or conscience.” — LOCKHART, vol viii, p. 81.

I think he spoke honestly and well, but his superstition was dearer to him and more comprehensive than he well knew: I mean that it made him a sterner royalist, churchman, and conservative than his intellect should allow.

Correlation of forces is an irrepressible hint which must compel the widest application of it. It gives unforeseen force to the old word of Cicero’s aliquid commune vinculum, and we realize the correlation of sciences. But poetry correlates men, and genius, and every fine talent, and men the most diverse; and men that are enemies hug each other when they hear from that once hated neighbour the synonym of their own cherished belief.

The splendors of this age outshine all other recorded ages. In my lifetime have been wrought five miracles, — namely, I, the Steamboat; 1, the Railroad; 3, the Electric Telegraph; 4, the application of the Spectroscope to astronomy; 5, the Photograph; — five miracles which have altered the relations of nations to each other. Add cheap postage; and the mowing-machine and the horse-rake. A corresponding power has been given to manufactures by the machine for pegging shoes, and the power-loom, and the power-press of the printers. And in dentistry and in surgery, Dr. Jackson’s discovery of Anaesthesia. It only needs to add the power which, up to this hour, eludes all human ingenuity, namely, a rudder to the balloon, to give us the dominion of the air, as well as of the sea and the land. But the account is not complete until we add the discovery of Oersted, of the identity of Electricity and Magnetism, and the generalization of that conversion by its application to light, heat, and gravitation. The geologist has found the correspondence of the age of stratified remains to the ascending scale of structure in animal life. Add now, the daily predictions of the weather for the next twenty-four hours for North America, by the Observatory at Washington.

Poetry. “The newness.” Every day must be a new morn. Clothe the new object with a coat that fits it alone of all things in the world. I can see in many poems that the coat is second-hand. Emphasis betrays poverty of thought, as if the man did not know that all things are full of meaning, and not his trumpery thing only.

‘T is one of the mysteries of our condition that the poet seems sometimes to have a mere talent, — a chamber in his brain into which an angel flies with divine messages, but the man, apart from this privilege, commonplace. Wordsworth is an example (and Channing’s poetry is apart from the man). Those who know and meet him day by day cannot reconcile the verses with their man.

Ah, not to me these heights belong;

A better voice sings through my song.

[In July, at the Commencement Dinner at Harvard College, it being the fiftieth year since Mr. Emerson graduated, Mr. William Gray, who presided, called upon him to speak. He did so, but what he said is not preserved.]

Rhetoric. All conversation and writing is rhetoric, and the great secret is to know thoroughly, and not to be affected, and to have a steel spring.

The English write better than we, but I fancy we read more out of their books than they do.

For History of Liberty. There was a great deal of Whig poetry written in Charles and Cromwell’s time: not a line of it has survived.

In certain minds Thought expels Memory. I have this example, — that, eager as I am to fix and record each experience, the interest of a new thought is sometimes such that I do not think of pen and paper at all, and the next day I puzzle myself in a vain attempt to recall the new perception that had so captivated me.

Channing’s poetry does not regard the reader. It is written to himself; is his strict experience, the record of his moods, of his fancies, of his observations and studies, and will interest good readers as such. He does not flatter the reader by any attempt to meet his expectation, or to polish his record that he may gratify him, as readers expect to be gratified. He confides entirely in his own bent or bias for meditation and writing. He will write as he has ever written, whether he has readers or not. But his poems have to me and to others an exceptional value for this reason. We have not been considered in their composition, but either defied or forgotten, and therefore read them securely, as original pictures which add something to our knowledge, and with a fair chance to be surprised and refreshed by novel experience.

George Bradford said that Mr. Alcott once said to him, “that as the child loses, as he comes into the world, his angelic memory, so the man, as he grows old, loses his memory of this world.”

October 18.

Bret Harte’s visit. Bret Harte referred to my essay on Civilization, that the piano comes so quickly into the shanty, etc., and said, “Do you know that, on the contrary, it is vice that brings them in? It is the gamblers who bring in the music to California. It is the prostitute who brings in the New York fashions of dress there, and so throughout.” I told him that I spoke also from Pilgrim experience, and knew on good grounds the resistless culture that religion effects.

October 21.

Ruskin is a surprise to me. This old book, ‘Two Paths, is original, acute, thoroughly informed, and religious.

“Wie der Fischer aus dem Meer

Fische zieht die niemand sah.”

As the fisher from the sea

Pulls the fish that no man saw.

Names should be of good omen, of agreeable sound, commending the person in advance, and, if possible, keeping the old belief of the Greeks, “that the name borne by each man and woman has some connection with their part in the drama of life.” The name, then, should look before and after.

We have two or three facts of natural education: I. First, the common sense of merciless dealing of matter with us, punishing us instantly for any mistake about fire, water, iron, food, and poison. 2. And this world perfectly symmetrical, so that its laws can be reduced to one law. 3. Then we have the world of thought, and its laws, like Niagara currents. 4. Then the astonishing relation between these two.

The necessity of the mind is poetic.... It is plain that Kepler, Hunter, Bonnet, Buffon, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, Linnaeus, Hauy, Oken, Goethe, and Faraday were poets in science as compared with Cuvier.

The physicists in general repel me. I have no wish to read them, and thus do not know their names. But the anecdotes of these men of ideas wake curiosity and delight. Thus Goethe’s and Oken’s theory of the skull as a metamorphosed vertebra; and Hunter’s “arrested development”; and Oersted’s “correlation of forces”; and Hay’s theory of the form of vases; and Garbett’s and Ruskin’s architectural theories; and Vitruvius’s relation between the human form and the temple; and Peirce’s showing that the orbits of comets (parabolics) make the forms of flowers; and Kepler’s relation of planetary laws to music; and Franklin’s kite.

Reality, however, has a sliding floor.

Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your’trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say, — but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return!

In the novel, the hero meets with a person who astonishes him with a perfect knowledge of his history and character, and draws from him a promise that, whenever and wherever he shall next find him, the youth shall instantly follow and obey him. So is it with you, and the new thought.

“For deathless powers to verse belong,

And they like demigods are strong

On whom the Muses smile.”

In Twistleton’s Handwriting of Junius (p xiv) I find the quotation from Johnson, of Bacon’s remark, “Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow: the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force, though shot by a child.”

Tibullus (on Sulpicia) says of Venus: — lllam, quldquid a git, quoquo vestigia vertit, Componit furtim, subsequiturque decor.

Then Twistleton’s motto from Epicharmus is good —

NoOs opr) κάι νοΰ? ακούει, ταλλα κωφά και τυφλά.

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is a true hero. Read his behaviour, in August, 1792, when his masters Lhomonde and Haiiy, professors in his college of Cardinal-Lemoine, and all the rest of the professors were arrested and sent to the prison of Saint-Firmin....

[Here follows the account of his repeated attempts, at desperate risk to himself, and his final success in accomplishing the escape of twelve of his friends.]

Saint-Hilaire was very ill in consequence of these exertions. Haiiy wrote to him: “Leave your problems of crystals, rhomboids, and dodkaedres; stick to plants, which are full of beauty;

 a course of botany is pure hygiene.” He went with Bonaparte to Egypt, and saved the scientific results, by a brillant stroke of heroism. In the debate in the Académie des Sciences, in 1830 (?), July 19, the contest between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire broke out, and reminded of the old sects of philosophers who shook the world with their contests. The austere and regulated thinkers, men of severe science, took part with Cuvier; the bold minds ranged themselves with Geoffroy. What changes have come into the contests of Churches! The debates of the Ecumenical Council are only interesting to the Catholics and a few abnormal readers, interested as the billiard players in the contests of the billiard champions.

Culture. The wide diffusion of taste for poetry is a new fact. We receive twelve newspapers in this house every week, and eleven of them contain a new poem or poems, — all of these respectable, — perhaps one or two fit to clip from the paper, and put into your anthology. Many of these poems are quite as good as many of the pieces in Aikin’s or Anderson’s standard collections, and recall Walter Scott’s reply when Tom Moore said, “Now, Scott, it seems to me that these young fellows write better poetry than we did, and nobody reads it. See how good this poetry is of so many young writers, and the public takes no note of them.” Scott replied, “Egad, man, we were in the luck of time.” Verses of conversation are now written in a hundred houses, or [for] “picnics” or “private theatricals,” which would have made reputation a century ago, but are now unknown out of some family circle. Webster wrote excellent lines in an Album; Macaulay did the same, his “God”: then Byrch’s “Riddle on the Letter H.”

George Bartlett’s wit and luck in the privatest “Game parties” are charming. Yet the public never heard of his name. Arthur Gilman, too. In England, in France, appear the Frères, Tom Taylors, Luttrells, Hendersons (Newton’s Cotes, too, of whom but for Newton’s one remark we should have never heard).

Yet good poetry is as rare as ever.

What a benediction of Heaven is this cheerfulness which I observe with delight, — which no wrath and no fretting and no disaster can disturb, but keeps its perfect key and heals insanity in all companies and crises.

“Little boys should be seen, and not heard”: Very well, but Poets are not to be seen. Look at the foolish portraits of Herrick and Gray, one a butcher, and the other silly. The Greek form answered to the Greek character, but Poets are divided from their forms, — live an official life. Intellect is impersonal.

The father cannot control the child, from defect of sympathy. The man with a longer scale of sympathy, the man who feels the boy’s sense and piety and imagination, and also his rough play and impatience and revolt, — who knows the whole gamut in himself, — knows also a way out of the one into the other, and can play on the boy, as on a harp, and easily lead him up from the Scamp to the Angel.

America. Oxford, working steadily now for a thousand years, — or the Sorbonne in France, —— and a royal court steadily drawing for centuries men and women of talent and grace throughout the kingdom to the capital city, might give an impulse and sequence to learning and genius. And the history of this country has been far less friendly to a rich and polished literature than England and France. Count our literary men, and they are few, and their works not commanding. But if the question be not of books, but of men, — question of intellect, not of literature, — there would be no steep inferiority. For every one knows men of wit and special or general power, whom to compare with citizens of any nation. Edward Taylor lavished more wit and imagination on his motley congregation of sailors and caulkers than you might find in all France. The coarsest experiences he melted and purified, like Shakspeare, into eloquence. Wendell Phillips is a Pericles whilst you hear him speaking. Beecher, I am sure, is a master in addressing an assembly, though I have never heard such good speeches of his as I have read. Webster was majestic in his best days: and the better audience these men had, the higher would be the appreciation. Neither of them could write as well as he spoke. Appleton’s wit is quite as good as Frère’s or Selby’s or Luttrell’s, who shine in the biographies. And England has no Occasional Poet to surpass Holmes. Dr. Channing, I must believe, had no equal as a preacher in the world of his time. Then we have men of affairs, who would rule wherever there were men, — masters in commerce, in law, in politics, in society. Every civil country has such, but I doubt if any has more or better than we.

Add, that the Adamses have shown hereditary skill in public affairs, and Judge Hoar is as good a lawyer, a statesman, and an influence in public and in private, as any city could hope to find.

I pass over my own list of thinkers and friends [often referred to], and only add, that I believe our soil yields as good women, too, as England or France, though we have not a book from them to compare with Allemagne. Yet Aunt Mary’s journals shine with genius, and Margaret Fuller’s conversation did.

[The burning of Chicago occurred in early October. Mr. Emerson had not meant to go on a far journey to lecture again, but could not resist the appeal to go there and speak, which he did, and incidentally lectured in other cities.]

Home again from Chicago, Quincy, Springfield, and Diibuque, which I had not believed I should see again, yet found it easier to visit than before, and the kindest reception in each city.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1871

Epicharmus; Heracleitus; Vitruvius; Tibullus, Elegia; Iamblichus; Taliessin, apud Skene; Kepler; Robert Hooke; Newton; Roger Cotes; Buffon; Linnaeus; Gray; Bonnet; John Hunter; John Adams; Haüy; Henry McKenzie; Playfair; Goethe; Dugald Stewart; Mackintosh; John Quincy Adams; John Hookham Frère; Chateaubriand; Cuvier; Sir John Leslie; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; James Hogg; Jeffrey; Oersted; Oken; Lord Brougham; Lord Cockburn; Rev. W. E. Channing; Chalmers; General Gourgaud; Daniel Webster; “Father” Edward Taylor; Robert Knox; John Wilson (“Christopher North”); De Quincey; Allan Cunningham; Sir William Hamilton; Lockhart; Carlyle; Flourens, Debat entre Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; Rev. Edward B. Pusey, Lectures on Daniel and the Prophets; Macaulay; Cardinal Wiseman; Luttrell; Byrch, Riddle on the Letter H; J. S. Mill; Dr. Charles T. Jackson; Benjamin Peirce; Holmes; Wendell Phillips; Beecher; Dr. Jeffries Wyman, Symmetry and Homology in Human Limbs; Thomas G. Appleton; Tom Taylor; Froude; W. Ellery Channing, Poems; Ruskin, ‘The Two Paths; Hay, On Vases; Tyndall, On Sound; Max Müller; Lacy Garbett, Design in Architecture; Charles Francis Adams; Arthur Gilman; Twistleton, The Handwriting of Junius; Francis Bret Harte; John Muir; Cronise, On Trees (?)

JOUR

NAL

BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON

BOSTON READINGS

CHILDHOOD’S MEMORIES

PARALLEL IN LITERATURE

OLD SUMMER STREET

AMHERST

BURNING OF THE HOME

FRIENDS TO THE RESCUE

FAILING HEALTH

ENGLAND. FRANCE. ITALY

JOURNAL LXIII

1872

(From Journal ST)

[In January, Mr. Emerson gave a course of four lectures in Baltimore, and at Washington, where he was the guest of Senator Sumner, was asked to speak to the students (Freedmen) of Howard University. The address was partly extempore, but he probably, to help out the address, read them some sheets from his lecture on Books, to guide the reading of the more earnest, and intellectual among them. The occasion was reported in all the papers,1 and, after his return, Mr. Emerson was almost annoyed, but soon rather amused, by the many letters which he received. He told his family that the speech was “very poor; merely talking against time.” In the course of it he praised George Herbert’s Poems as “a Sunday book, and a Monday book, too,” asked if it were in their library, and said he should have the privilege of giving it to them.

When he went to the bookstore in Boston to buy it he was told, “There isn’t a Herbert to be had, Sir. Since your speech was published there has been such a demand for them that they are all sold out, and none left in Boston.” However, he found one, and came home better pleased with the result of his speech than he had ever thought to be. Then more letters came, one suggesting that he should write on the subject of Books. Comparatively few persons had probably then read Society and Solitude, the volume published nearly two years before.

Mr. James T. Fields, who, with Colonel Forbes, had arranged the Saturday afternoon readings of English Prose and Verse in 1869, again kindly bestirred himself (Colonel Forbes having gone to Europe with his family) to have such another course. This plan was most successful, and the tickets were in great demand for the six Readings, in Mechanics’ Hall, Boston, beginning in the middle of April. Mr. Emerson enjoyed sharing with an audience of friends, old and young, the pleasure that he had in these selections, made from his boyhood on. The poems and selections were of authors of various periods, and on widely differing themes. Mr. Emerson read his favorites, whether recent, or dear from the associations of his youth, not caring greatly whether all were illustrations of the short discourse at the beginning. As his memory was now imperfect, he, once at least, read a sheet which he had already read a few minutes before. His daughter Ellen, who had always accompanied him, was troubled at this and begged him always to read his lectures to her in advance. But he answered, “Things that go wrong-about these lectures don’t disturb me, because I know that everyone knows that I am worn out and passed by, and that it is only my old friends come for friendship’s sake to have one last season with me.”

The course, however, seems to have been very successful, and to have given great pleasure week by week to a large number of the best of Boston and the neighborhood.

What follows may have been some notes for the last of these readings, or possibly for some Sunday address to the Parker Society at the Music Hall.]

‘T is becoming in the Americans to dare in religion to be simple, as they have been in government, in trade, in social life.

Christianity is pure Deism.

“Hunger and thirst after righteousness.”

“The kingdom of God cometh not by observation”; is “received as a little child.”

“God considers integrity, not munificence.” — SOCRATES.

Power belongeth unto God, but his secret is with them that fear him.

Schleiermacher said, “The human soul is by nature a Christian.”

One thing is certain: the religions are obsolete when the reforms do not proceed from them.

You say, the Church is an institution of God. Yes, but are not wit, and wise men, and good judgment whether a thing be so or no, — also institutions of God, and older than the other?

Concord Lyceum. For that local lecture which I still propose to read at our Town Hall [remember to speak] concerning the hanging of private pictures, each for one month, in the Library, etc., etc.

Remember that a scholar wishes that every book, chart, and plate belonging to him should draw interest every moment by circulation: for

“No man is the lord of anything

Till he communicate his part to others;

Nor doth he of himself know them for aught

Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they ‘re extended; where, like an arch, reverberates The voice again, or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back The figure and its heat.”

( Troilus and Cressida.)

When a boy I used to go to the wharves, and pick up shells out of the sand which vessels had brought as ballast, and also plenty of stones, gypsum, which I discovered would be luminous when I rubbed two bits together in a dark closet, to my great wonder; — and I do not know why luminous to this day. That, and the magnetizing my penknife, till it would hold a needle; and the fact that blue and gamboge would make green in my pictures of mountains; and the charm of drawing vases by scrawling with ink heavy random lines, and then doubling the paper, so as to make another side symmetrical, — what was chaos, becoming symmetrical; then halloing to an echo at the pond, and getting wonderful replies.

Still earlier, what silent wonder is waked in the boy by blowing bubbles from soap and water with a pipe!

Old Age. We spend a great deal of time in waiting.

“No more I seek, the prize is found;

I furl my sail, the voyage is o’er.”

Whose lines? Mine, I believe, part of translation of some Latin lines for Mrs. Drury.

The good writer is sure of his influence, because, as he is always copying not from his fancy, but from real facts, — when his reader afterwards comes to like experiences of his own he is always reminded of the writer. Nor do I much care for the question whether the Zend-Avesta or the Desatir are genuine antiques, or modern counterfeits, as I am only concerned with the good sentences; and it is indifferent how old a truth is, whether an hour or five centuries, whether it first shot into the mind of Adam, or your own. If it be truth it is certainly much older than both of us.

Shakspeare. Parallax, as you know, is the apparent displacement of an object from two points of view; — less and less of the heavenly bodies, because of their remoteness, — and of the fixed stars, none at all. Well it is thus that we have found Shakspeare to be a fixed star.

Because all sorts of men have in three centuries found him still unapproachable. The merit of a poem is decided by long experience.

May 16, 1872.

Yesterday, my sixty-ninth birthday, I found myself on my round of errands in Summer Street, and, though close on the spot where I was born, was looking into a street with some bewilderment and read on the sign Kingston Street, with surprise, finding in the granite blocks no hint of Nathaniel Goddard’s pasture and long wooden fence, and so of my nearness to my native corner of Chauncy Place. It occurred to me that few living persons ought to know so much of the families of this fast-growing city, for the reason, that Aunt Mary — whose manuscripts I had been reading to Hedge and Bartol, on Friday evening — had such a keen perception of character, and taste for aristocracy, and I heard in my youth and manhood every name she knew. It is now nearly a hundred years since she was born, and the founders of the oldest families that are still notable were known to her as retail - merchants, milliners, tailors, distillers, as well as the ministers, lawyers, and doctors of the time. She was a realist, and knew a great man or “a whale - hearted woman” — as she called one of her pets — from a successful money-maker.

If I should live another year, I think I shall cite still the last stanza of my own poem, “The World-Soul.”

Walk in the city for an hour, and you shall see the whole history of female beauty. Here are the school-girls in the first profusion of their hair covering them to the waist, and now and then one maiden of eighteen or nineteen years, in the moment of her perfect beauty. Look quick and sharply, — this is her one meridian day. To find the like again, you must meet, on your next visit, one who is a month younger to-day. Then troops of pleasing, well-dressed ladies, sufficiently good-looking and graceful, but without claims to the prize of the goddess of Discord.

I Spring still makes spring in the mind

When sixty years are told;

Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,

And we are never old.

Over the winter glaciers

I see the summer glow,

And through the wild-piled snowdrift

The warm rosebuds below.

“No sign that our mighty rocks had ever tingled with earthquake,” said John Muir.

He said he slept in a wrinkle of the bark of a Sequoia on the night after we left him.

June 12.

Sarah Clarke gratified us with her visit of twenty-six hours, ever the same peaceful, wise, just, and benevolent spirit, open, gentle, skilful, without a word of self-assertion. I regret that I did not recall and testify to her my oft recollection of her noble and oft-needed and repeated sisterly aid to Margaret Fuller, in old times, in her cruel headaches. We talked of many friends of both of us, but of Charles Newcomb it seems she knew nothing. Of Greenough she did not know much. I was glad, in describing his last visit to me, to add that he was one who to his varied perception added the rare one of to Seivov (the dire).

What proof of Goethe’s wealth of mind like the Sprüche?...

July 11.

Yesterday read my paper on “Character” or “Greatness” to the “Social Union” comprising the four Classes at Amherst College. Stayed with Ellen at President Stearns’s house, there finding Henry Ward Beecher, Judge Lord, and other gentlemen, with Miss Gleason, Miss Goodman, of Lenox, Miss Annie Lee, of Charlestown, and the daughters of President Stearns.

Visited the Boltwoods, and with Professor Charles U. Shepard, went through his rich collection of minerals in the Walker Hall.

‘T is easy to write the technics of poetry, to discriminate Imagination and Fancy, etc.; but the office and power which that word poetry covers and suggests are not so easily reached and defined. What heaven and earth and sea and the forms of men and women are speaking or hinting to us in our healthiest and most impressionable hours, — what fresh perceptions a new day will give us of the old problems of our own being and its hidden source; what is this Sky of Law, and what the Future hides.

Wednesday, July 24.

House burned.

[The above is all the record that Mr. Emerson left of the temporary destruction of his home. By unhappy chance not one of their children was at hand to help their father and mother when, on a rainy morning, they were waked by the crackling of fire in the walls of their room. Their daughter Ellen was visiting friends at the seashore; Mrs. Forbes (Edith) was, with her husband and family, on the homeward voyage from England, and Edward, then convalescent from a surgical operation, had remained there, to pursue his medical studies. But the immediate neighbours, and soon a great number of the townspeople as well as the fire-company, were quickly on the spot, men and boys with great energy and courage saving property and fighting the fire, and women and girls sorting and gathering the household goods intelligently and quickly and saving them from the rain by carrying them to the houses near by. The occurrences at a fire in a village and the actions of kind-hearted but inexperienced neighbours have been a stock subject for ridicule in newspapers and stories, but here was an occasion when good sense and brave and affectionate neighbourly action reached a high water mark, and never did the town family, as it used to exist in simpler days, and still in a measure remains, show forth more finely. The fire originated in the attic, almost surely from a kerosene lamp charring the timbers hot and dry from the summer. A woman, engaged the day before for domestic service, had apparently spent a part of the night in prowling among the chests and trunks there. When help began to arrive the house was filling with choking black smoke, making it hard to save furniture and clothing upstairs. By the time this was done and the falling ceilings drove out the men, the lower storey was so filled with smoke that, when the books in Mr. Emerson’s study were remembered, they were felt there by brave boys, who rushed in, holding their breath, and pulled them out into baskets or blankets and all were saved; happily the manuscripts also.

Mr and Mrs. Emerson, imperfectly clothed, wet by the rain, fatigued and worn by excitement, were taken home and cared for by Judge Keyes and his family, and the next day were welcomed to the Manse, — the ancestral home, dear to Mr. Emerson from his boyhood, — by his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Ripley. All sorts of exciting and some dangerous incidents occurred during the fire. When a hole chopped in the roof let out the smoke and let in the water which put out the fire, the roof and the top of the walls of the main house were ruined and the interior greatly damaged by smoke and water.

Mr. Cabot, in the Memoir, gives some account of the fire and its effects on Mr. Emerson, and he also prints in Appendix E of the second volume Dr. Le Baron Russell’s moving story of the “friendly conspiracy,” the instant and unsolicited action of friends old and new, some of them hardly known to Mr. Emerson, in testimony of affection and gratitude, to rebuild his house and send him abroad for rest and recreation meanwhile. There also, in Judge Hoar’s letter to Dr. Russell, appears the Judge’s happy and affectionate wit in presenting the matter to Mr. Emerson, as ambassador of his friends, in such a way that the gift was impossible to refuse, though Mr. Emerson pleaded for time to consider it, saying that thus far in life he “had been allowed to stand on his own feet.”

Mr. Emerson seemed brave and cheerful during the fire, and for more than a week afterwards it looked as if he had suffered no harm. His daughter wrote that it did not seem as if that experience would seriously affect him. “There is no doubt,” she wrote, “that it was a tragedy to him at the time, and that he suffered very much. Nothing ever showed me so distinctly how faithful he is never to mention himself, as this week has.”

A room in the Court-House was secured for Mr. Emerson, to which his manuscripts and needed books were brought, and there he tried to work at the anxious and unwelcome task of preparing a new volume. This had been forced upon him by an English publishing-house who, otherwise, proposed to print earlier scattered works of his (from the Dial and elsewhere), but they consented to desist if in a very short time he would let them, in connection with his Boston publishers, bring out in England a new volume of his essays.

But, about a fortnight after the fire, Mr. Emerson began to be very unwell, and, though he kept about, a low feverish condition with cough and weakness came on. Growing no better, he went for a day or two to Rye Beach with his daughter and thence to Waterford, Maine. Improvement came slowly; he was distressed about the urgency of the publishers for the new volume on which he was quite unable to work. At Waterford he began to think that possibly the end of his life might be at hand, and to consider what would become of his manuscripts and journals, saying that, if his son were a scholar, they would be most valuable to him, “Otherwise they are worthless.” He dreaded their falling into the hands of the wrong persons. His friend Mr. J. Elliot Cabot and Dr. Frederiç H. Hedge were the only persons that he would consider, but he did not feel that he could ask either of them to leave their work for his, should his powers fail. It was explained to the publishers in London and here that it was absolutely out of the question for Mr. Emerson to do any work upon Letters and Social Aims until he had recovered his health by entire rest. Next year, Mr. Cabot most kindly arranged the material for it and prepared it for the press.

Not long after the fire, Miss Emerson wrote to Dr. Edward H. Clarke, whom her father was about to consult, a letter telling of the failure of his memory and working powers, which now the family began to realize had been imperceptibly coming on him for five or six years, — Mr. Emerson had calmly recognized this in 1866, when he wrote “Terminus.” The fire and subsequent illness had increased this trouble, and now aphasia, the difficulty of associating the fit word to the idea, appeared, though not at first seriously, and also being very variable according to the state of his health.]

NORWAY, MAINE, August 20.

Forgot, in leaving home, twenty necessities, —— forgot to put Horace, or Martial, or Cicero’s Letters, La Cité Antique, or Taine’s England, in my wallet: forgot even the sacred chocolate satchel itself, to hold them or their like. Well, at the dear Vale, eleven miles off yet, I may recall or invoke things as good. Yet I should there remember that letters are due... [to many dear friends who had joined in the generous provision for restoring the house and giving a restful vacation]. Perhaps I will venture on a letter of proposals of a voyage to Elliot Cabot, and a letter to the kindly Alexander Ireland is more than due.

[Colonel William Forbes and his wife and children had returned from abroad, and Mr. Emerson, now recovered from his acute attack, joyfully accepted his daughter’s invitation to spend a month with them on the Forbes’s beautiful island, Mrs. Emerson and their daughter Ellen going too.]

NAUSHON, August 31.

I thought to-day, in these rare seaside woods, that if absolute leisure were offered me, I should run to the college or the scientific school which offered best lectures on Geology, Chemistry, Minerals, Botany, and seek to make the alphabets of those sciences clear to me. How could leisure or labour be better employed. ’Tis never late to learn them, and every secret opened goes to authorize our æsthetics. Cato learned Greek at eighty years, but these are older bibles and oracles than Greek. Certainly this were a good pis aller if Elliot Cabot and Athens and Egypt should prove an abortive dream.

I think one must go to the tropics to find any match to this enchanting isle of Prospero. It needs and ought to find its Shakspeare. What dells! what lakelets! what groves! what clumps of historic trees of unknown age, hinting annals of white men and Indians, histories of fire and of storm and of peaceful ages of social growth! Nature shows her secret wonders, and seems to have impressed her fortunate landlords with instant and constant respect for her solitudes and centennial growths. Where else do such oaks and beeches and vines grow, which the winds and storms seem rather to adorn than spoil by their hurts and devastations, touching them as with Fate, and not wanton interference? And the sea binds the Paradise with its grand belt of blue, with its margin of beautiful pebbles, with its watching herons and hawks and eagles, and its endless fleet of barques, steamers, yachts, and fishers’ boats.

The island compels them — glad to be compelled — to be skilful sailors, yachtsmen, fishermen, and swimmers, thus adding all the charm of the sea to their abode, and adds the surprise and romance of hunting.

[It was not quite easy to persuade Mr. Emerson to go abroad for the winter and spring. The thought of seeing a few friends, old and new, in England, attracted him, but he always held himself as unfit for visiting and society, and now the limitations and growing infirmities of age were mortifying. Yet the thought of seeing the ancient Nile, and perhaps Greece, drew him, and at last he was persuaded to sail, in the last week in October, with his daughter Ellen, for Liverpool, leaving Mrs. Emerson with their daughter Mrs. Forbes. Mr and Miss Emerson were met on arriving in England by his son Edward, then a student at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, whither, after a short rest at Chester, they went early in November. Edward then had to sail for home.

Mr. Emerson and his daughter were most affectionately welcomed on their arrival in London, and every delicate aid and guidance was given them by American friends who should be here mentioned. Colonel Henry Lee, who had in the winter lost two of his daughters by diphtheria in Florence, whose wife was ill, and his oldest son then struggling between life and death with typhoid fever, yet came daily to see them, and, keeping back his own troubles, cheered them with his friendly and witty talk; Mr. Charles Eliot Norton who, within a year, had lost his beautiful wife, was then resident in London with his family, and gave help and wise counsel as to planning the trip to France and Italy on the way to Egypt. His sister, too, gave sisterly help to Miss Emerson, who was temporarily lame; Rev. William Henry Channing, then a Unitarian preacher in Kensington, with affectionate zeal did everything possible to make their stay in London in their invalid condition easy and pleasant, as did also Mr. Moncure D. Conway, then minister of the South Place Ethical Society. Mr. Emerson had also the unexpected pleasure of meeting Charles K. Newcomb, the valued friend of many years ago.

Of English friends, first came Mr. Thomas Hughes, then Dean Stanley and Lady Augusta his wife, the admirable surgeon (soon after knighted) William MacCormac, who had taken care of young Emerson, and, best valued, Carlyle, though old, broken, and sad. In Chester, and in London, as far as his friends would allow, Mr. Emerson took great comfort in absence of responsibility and quiet, declared that “idlesse is the business of age. I love above all things to do nothing”; he said he never before had discovered this privilege of seventy years: also that he finds “there is a convenience of having a name, — it serves one as well as having a good coat.” He began to eat better than he had for a long time, and made long nights, saying, “A warm bed is the best medicine, — and one gets such good sleep in this country, — good strong sleep.” At the table he said, “The land of England desires much food in its inhabitants.” When plans were made for him, he would smile and say, “Old age loves leisure.” Nevertheless, in this short stay, though he felt reluctant to go into company, he enjoyed in moderation seeing the sights of London.

Mr. Norton, during the last year, as far as possible had sunk his own sorrows in cheering Ruskin and Carlyle, both sick and utterly downhearted, and had made himself much beloved by them. Carlyle said to him, speaking of a letter from Emerson acknowledging the last volumes of the completed Frederick the Great, “I have a letter received from him, after a long silence, and though there were few words in it that did not give me pain, it says the only thing that has been said about my book that was worth saying; and therefore, when I had read it through, I wrapped it up in a piece of paper and put it inside the book, and there it will stay till I am dead and it will fall into other hands than mine.” This interesting sentence Miss Emerson, whose verbal memory was excellent, wrote in a letter to her sister soon after Mr. Norton’s visit. It probably refers to Letter CLV (January 7, 1866) of the Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, and yet what is said of the pain-giving words might well refer to the letter from Emerson preceding it (CLIII, September 26, 1864), referring to Carlyle’s perverse hostility to the North during the War. The last letters that passed between them were most friendly.

After staying but one week of chill and rainy November in London, Mr. Emerson and his daughter moved on to Canterbury — so attractive that he proposed they should send for Mrs. Emerson and settle there. However, after two days they went direct to Paris. There they had a happy week at the same hotel with Mr and Mrs. James Russell Lowell and the charming Mr. John Holmes (brother of the Doctor), whose acquaintance Mr. Emerson had made fourteen years before at their Adirondac Camp. In Paris they were joined by the admirable Swiss travelling servant recommended to them by Dean Stanley, without whose services their farther journeyings would have been spoiled by cares and difficulties, thus avoided. They went thence by rail to Marseilles and Nice and by boat to Genoa, and thence again by boat to Leghorn. Making but short stays at Pisa and Florence, they reached Rome on the last day of November.

The weather was fine, they met friends, and had especial good fortune in being the guests during their last week of Baron von Hoffman and his wife, who was the daughter of Samuel Gray Ward, of Boston, Mr. Emerson’s early and valued friend. Their villa and garden high on the Caelian Hill were most beautiful and commanded a wonderful view of the Campagna and distant mountains. Under the Baron’s admirable guidance they saw the ancient city to best advantage. Thence they went to Naples, and after four days sailed for Egypt. Christmas found them in Alexandria, and in the last days of the year they proceeded to Cairo.]

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1872

Zend-Avesta; Heracleitus; Socrates; Cicero; Martial; Taliessin; Saadi; Leonardo da Vinci; Vasari, Life of Raphael; Spenser, Muiopotmos; Ben Jonson, Ode to Himself; John Fletcher,’Epilogue to An Honest Man’s Fortune; Waller, Apology for having loved before; Montrose, Love Song; Richard Lovelace,’To Althea; Crashaw, Sospetto d’Herode; Bishop Berkeley; Pope; David Lewis, Lines to Pope; Thomson, Seasons; John Wesley, Hymn, O draw me, Father, after Thee; John Hunter; Sir William Jones, translation of Hindu poem, To Narayena; Goethe, Sprüchei West-Ostlichen Divan; Schleiermacher; Wordsworth, Sonnet to Schill, The Force of Prayer; Scott, Songs of the White Lady of Avenel; Ballad, Thomas the Rhymer; Byron, Murat in Ode to Napoleon, When coldness wraps this suffering clay; Varnhagen von Ense; Boucher de Perthes, De l’homme antédiluvien; Josiah Conder, The Modern Traveller; Translations of Klephtic Ballads (from the Dial), A Romaic Lochinvar, and Olympus and Kissarvos; Arab Ballad; Agassiz; Tennyson, Maud; Richard Monckton Milnes, The Lay of the Humble; Julia C. R. Dorr, Outgrown; Mrs. Caroline Tappan, Lines to the Poet; J. G. Saxe; Thoreau, Inspiration; Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies; J. R. Lowell; Coventry Patmore; Herman Grimm, Leben Raphaels; Henry Timrod, Ode to the Confederate Dead; Edmund C. Stedman, John Brown of Ossawatomie; Helen Hunt, ‘Thought.

JOURNAL

THE NILE ROME, FLORENCE, PARIS

THREE WEEKS OF LONDON

OXFORD

RETURN HOME

JOURNAL LXIV

1873

(From Journal ST)

[IN spite of rest, friendly faces, and interesting scenes, the old feeling of the unprofitableness of travel for travel’s sake, which has appeared so often in Mr. Emerson’s writings, would assert itself, especially in the early part of the journey. His daughter records some of the “dismally witty remarks” that he made on the Delta as they passed through it to Cairo: “Could anything argue wilder insanity than leaving a country like ours to see this bareness of mud? — Look! there is some water, and see! there is a crowd of people. They have collected with a purpose of drowning themselves.” Although he would have been quite willing to go home, he said that he would gladly spend a fortnight with Mr. Lowell in Paris, and desired to find in England Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning before his return. Also, before leaving home, when Egypt was suggested, he said, “Yes, I should like to see the tomb of ‘him who sleeps at Phylæ.’” At Cairo, he was pleased to find Mr. Bancroft, and went about the city with him. Mr. Charles G. Leland and Mr. Augustus Julius Hare were also agreeable. General Charles Stone (formerly of the United States Army, then Chief-of-Staff of the Turkish force in Egypt) and his family showed great courtesy to Mr. Emerson and his daughter.]

SHEPHEARD’S HOTEL, CAIRO,

January, 1873.

Nothing has struck me more in the streets here than the erect carriage and walking of the Copts (I suppose them); better and nobler in figure and movement than any passengers in our cities at home.

On Tuesday, January 7, we sailed from Cairo for Philæ, in the dahabeah Aurora, with Mahmoud Bedowa, dragoman; a rets or captain, and his mate; ten oarsmen, two cooks, a factotum boy, a head waiter named Marzook, and second waiter Hassan, — in all eighteen: The company in the cabin were Mr and Mrs. Whitwell, Miss May Whitwell, and Miss Bessie Whitwell, Miss Farquhar [a Scotch lady], Ellen, and I.

Egypt very poor in trees: we have seen hardly an orange tree. Palms are the chief tree along the banks of the river, from Cairo to Assuan; acacias, the fig. In Cairo, we had a banian with its boughs planting themselves around it under my window at Shepheard’s Hotel.

Egypt is the Nile and its shores. The cultivated land is a mere green ribbon on either shore of the river. You can see, as you sail, its quick boundary in rocky mountains or desart sands. Day after day and week after week of unbroken sunshine, and though you may see clouds in the sky, they are merely for ornament, and never rain.

The Prophet says of the Egyptians, “It is their strength to sit still.”

Papyrus is of more importance to history than cotton.

All this journey is a perpetual humiliation, satirizing and whipping our ignorance. The people despise us because we are helpless babies who cannot speak or understand a word they say; the sphinxes scorn dunces; the obelisks, the temple walls, defy us with their histories which we cannot spell. Every new object only makes new questions which each traveller asks of the other, and none of us can answer, and each sinks lower in the opinion of his companion. The people, whether in the boat, or out of it, are a perpetual study for the excellence and grace of their forms and motion. No people walk so well, so upright as they are, and strong, and flexible; and for studying the nude, our artists should come here and not to Paris. Every group of the country people on the shores, as seen from our dahabeah, look like the ancient philosophers going to the School of Athens.

In swimming, the Arabs show great strength and speed, all using what at Cambridge we used to call the “Southern stroke,” alternating the right arm and the left.

All the boys and all the babes have flies roosting about their eyes, which they do not disturb, nor seem to know their presence. It is rare to find sound eyes among them. Blind beggars appear at every landing led about by their children.

From the time of our arrival at Cairo to our return thither, six weeks, we have had no rain; — unclouded summer on the Nile to Assuan and back, and have required the awning to be spread over us on the deck from 10 A. M. till late in the afternoon.

In Egypt the sandstone or limestone instructs men how to build, — stands in square blocks, and they have only to make a square door for tombs, and the shore is a pair or a series of steps or stairs. The lateen sail is the shadow of a pyramid; and the pyramid is the simplest copy of a mountain, or of the form which a pile of sand or earth takes when dropped from a cart.

 —— I saw a crocodile in the Nile at a distance.

We arrived at Thebes 19th January; Esne (?), 24th; and at Assuan, 28th January; visited Philæ, on Wednesday, 29th January; arrived in Cairo Thursday, 13th February, making 38 days for our expedition and return.

The magnet is the mystery which I would fain have explained to me, though I doubt if there be any teachers. It is the wonder of the child and not less of the philosopher. Goethe says, “The magnet is a primary phenomenon, which we must only express in order to have it explained. Thereby is it then also a symbol for all besides for which we use to speak no word or name.”

See Plutarch, Morals, vol i, p. 156, old copy [edition].

Tuesday, January 28.

Met Mr. George L. Owen at Assuan, our party and his exchanging visits. I found him a very intelligent and agreeable companion. In the dahabeah in which we found him on the Nile, he shared the cabin with only one companion, Mr. Ralph Elliot.

[This meeting with Mr. Owen (also a second, soon after, in going down the Nile) was a very agreeable episode. Mr. Emerson’s health was steadily improving, and with it his enjoyment.

At Cairo, Mr. Emerson and his daughter parted from their friendly travelling companions, took ship for Italy — in passing he enjoyed the sight of Crete, and its mountains, birthplace of Zeus, and after landing hastened on to Rome. They had little time for sightseeing in eleven days, but received constant visits and kind attentions. Mr. Marsh, the American Minister, and his wife were very kind, and they saw their friends the Yon Hoffmans; also the Storys, the Howitts, Lady Ashburton, Mr. Tilton the artist, Miss Sarah Clarke, and Dr. Wister, of Philadelphia.]

In Florence, I hoped to find Herman Grimm, who, as I had heard, was residing there to complete his Life of Raffaelle. Immediately on my arrival, I sent Curnex [the travelling servant] to the German bookstores to inquire his address. Neither of these knew of his presence in the city. In the street, I met Mr. Bigelow, our American Minister at Paris, and asked him for news of Grimm. He did not know that he was here. On my return to the Hotel du Nord, I found Mr. Bigelow’s card saying that, immediately after leaving me, he had met Grimm in the street, and learned his address which he had written out for me on his card: and Grimm had also called and left his own. I went at once to Grimm, and was received and introduced to Gisela his wife, and invited them to dine with us that evening, which they did, to the great satisfaction of Ellen and me. He speaks English very well, and Gisela, who does not, talked with Ellen in German.

[Mr. Emerson had never met Grimm, although he and his wife (daughter of Bettine [Brentano] von Arnim) had corresponded with him occasionally for years. The meeting was very pleasant and fortunate, as Mr. Emerson and his daughter were to set out for Paris the next morning.

In Herman Grimm’s Essays is a very interesting account of how he first became acquainted with Emerson’s writings.

Grimm’s comments to Miss Emerson on her father’s appearance are interesting as showing not only the benefit of the Egyptian voyage, but what a wholesome looking man he was, even to the time of his last illness, and how much certain pictures belied him. His daughter, writing home from Florence, said, “Herman now began telling me of his pleasure in beholding Father, and said every photograph did him great injustice;— ‘they all represent a feeble old man of seventy; he looks a strong man of fifty. They look as if he were made of iron, of copper. He looks as if he were made of steel. He has a fine sharp, manly face; and such bright colouring, which is all lost, of course, in the photographs.’”]

[March 16 to April.]

In the Hotel de Lorraine, Rue de Beaune, Paris, where Ellen and I took rooms for some weeks during both our visits to Paris, we lived with James R. Lowell and his wife, and John Holmes, to our great satisfaction. There also I received, one evening, a long and happy visit from Mr. James Cotter Morison, who is writing the Life of Comte. At the house of Mr. Laugel, I was introduced to Ernest Renan; to Henri Taine; to Elie de Beaumont; and to some other noted gentlemen. M. Taine sent me, the next day, his Littérature anglaise, in five volumes.

The enjoyment of travel is in the arrival at a new city, as Paris, or Florence, or Rome, — the feeling of free adventure, you have no duties, — nobody knows you, nobody has claims, you are like a boy on his first visit to the Common on Election Day. Old Civilization offers to you alone this huge city, all its wonders, architecture, gardens, ornaments, galleries, which had never cost you so much as a thought. For the first time for many years you wake master of the bright day, in a bright world without a claim on you; — only leave to enjoy. This dropping, for the first time, the doleful bundle of Duty creates, day after day, a health as of new youth.

In Paris, your mere passport admits you to the vast and costly public galleries on days on which the natives of the city cannot pass the doors. Household cares you have none: you take your dinner, lunch, or supper where and when you will: cheap cabs wait for you at every corner, — guides at every door, magazines of sumptuous goods and attractive fairings, unknown hitherto, solicit your eyes. Your health mends every day. Every word spoken to you is a wonderful and agreeable riddle which it is a pleasure to solve, — a pleasure and a pride. Every experience of the day is important, and furnishes conversation to you who were so silent at home.

[Mr. Emerson now, as witnessed above, was greatly improved in health, and his memory and power of finding the right word in conversation had so far returned towards the normal that he no longer shrank from going into society.

He and his daughter arrived in London on Saturday, April 5, and went to comfortable lodgings. They remained in the city three weeks. On their previous stay, London had been comparatively empty of persons whom they would naturally have seen, but now friends and visitors were most attentive and they had little time for sight-seeing, as they had daily invitations to lunches and dinners. Of course the meeting with his oldest and best friend in England was what was foremost in Mr. Emerson’s mind. Of the call on Carlyle Miss Emerson wrote, “He was in more amiable and cheerful humour than he had been a few days before when Father walked with him, and Father has been very happy in the remembrance of this call.” Just before leaving London, she writes, “Father, after breakfast with Mr. Gladstone, spent the forenoon with Mr. Carlyle with real comfort, bade him good-bye, and then went to the Howards’ and lunched with Mrs. Lewes.”]

April.

In London, I saw Fergusson the architect; Browning the poet; John Stuart Mill; Sir Henry Holland; Huxley; Tyndall; Lord Houghton; Mr. Gladstone; Dean Stanley; Lecky; Froude; Thomas Hughes; Lyon Playfair; Sir Arthur Helps; the Duke of Argyle; the Duke of Cleveland; the Duke of Bedford; Sir Frederick Pollock; Charles Reade; Mr. Dasent; — with the Amberleys I paid a visit to Lord Russell at his house, and lunched there. I failed to see Garth Wilkinson, though I called on him twice, and he left his card twice at my door, in my absence. William H. Channing was, as always, the kindest of friends. Moncure Conway was incessant in his attentions, and William Allingham gave us excellent aid. George Howard, who will one day, I hope, be Earl of Carlisle, was the most attentive and generous of friends.

Mr. Thomas Hughes introduced me to the Cosmopolitan Club, which meets every Sunday and Wednesday night at 10 o’clock, and there I saw on two evenings very agreeable gentlemen, Sir Frederick Pollock, Fergusson, Lord Houghton, William Story, and others. Professor Tyndall procured me the privileges of the Athenæum, which is still the best of the great London Clubs; and also of the Royal Shelley, except in the case of “The Skylark” and perhaps one or two more.

Institution, in Albemarle Street, where he presides since the death of Faraday.

Visited John Forster at his own house, Palace Gate House, Kensington, West.

[From London Mr. Emerson and his daughter went to Chester for a day or two, the guests of Lord and Lady Amberley, who showed them Tintern Abbey, and thence they went to Cyfarthra Castle to visit Mr and Mrs. Crawshay.]

At Oxford [April 30 to May 3] I was the guest of Professor Max Müller, and was introduced to Jowett and to Ruskin and to Mr. Dodgson, author of Alice in Wonderland, and to many of the University dignitaries. Prince Leopold was a student, and came home from Max Müller’s lecture to lunch with us, and then invited Ellen and me to go to his house, and there showed us his pictures and his album, and there we drank tea. The next day I heard Ruskin’s lecture, and we then went home with Ruskin to his chambers, where he showed us his pictures, and told us his doleful opinions of modern society. In the evening we dined with Vice-Chancellor Liddell and a large company.

[On May 3, the Emersons left Oxford for Warwick, where, after seeing the castle, they were met by Mr. E. F. Flower, an old friend, who took them to his home at Stratford-upon-Avon, where they spent ten days.

On Sunday, at the door of the church, they were met by the Clerk, who led them to seats in the chancel near Shakspeare’s tomb.

Before sailing for home they made a short visit to Edinburgh, but no record appears in Journal or letters.

The presence of Mr. Norton and his family helped to make the homeward voyage pleasant. On the morning of Mr. Emerson’s seventieth birthday his friend met him on deck and put into his hands the following verses.]

To R. W. Emerson

Blest of the highest gods are they who die Ere youth is fled. For them their mother Fate, Clasping from happy earth to happier sky, Frees life, and joy, and love from dread of date. But thee, revered of men, the gods have blest With fruitful years. And yet for thee, in sooth, They have reserved of all their gifts the best; — And, thou, though full of days, shalt die in youth. May 25, 1873. — Charles E. Norton.

[Mr. Emerson landed in Boston, May 27. Before sailing, his home in Concord had been burned, and now from the steamer he looked on his native city, which since his departure had been devastated by fire even to his birthplace, which was where the great establishment of C. F. Hovey & Co now stands. That was in the autumn, and now the statelier building was rapidly advancing.

When he and his daughter got out of the cars at Concord, to their astonishment they found a large part of the population assembled there to greet them. They welcomed the two returned travellers with a cheer, echoed from the passengers in the train as it moved on. Then, as the reunited family entered the carriages, the local band played, and, escorted by the children of all the schools and many friends and neighbors, they drove home, passing under a welcoming triumphal arch. There stood the house among the trees, except for its freshness looking without and within as if nothing had ever happened. Mr. Emerson entered and saw; then turned, rapidly walked to the gate and said such words of joy and gratitude as his emotion would allow. The smiling crowd dispersed’ and he re-entered his home to realize its restoration and greet his nearer friends.]

Egypt. Mrs. Helen Bell, it seems, was asked, “What do you think the Sphinx said to Mr. Emerson?”

“Why,” replied Mrs. Bell, “the Sphinx probably said to him, ‘You’re another.’”

For the writers on Religion, — none should speak on this matter polemically: it is the Gai Science and only to be chanted by troubadours.

Professor Max Muller has dedicated his new book to me, and sent me a copy. I have read it, and though I am too dull a scholar to judge of the correctness of his courageous deductions from resembling names, or to relish this as I did his earlier books, I respect and thank his erudition and its results.

[Mr. Emerson was invited to make the Address at the opening of the Concord Free Public Library, in September, built and given to the town by one of its sons, William Munroe. The following paragraphs were written while he was preparing for this occasion. The Address is printed in Miscellanies.]

Be a little careful about your Library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little, to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in. You will find a book here that will tell you such news of what has been seen lately at the observatories in the sun and the other stars that you will not rest until you find a telescope to see the eclipse with your own eyes. ‘T is only the other day that they found out what the stars are made of: what chemical elements, identical with those that are in our planet, are found in Saturn; what in the sun; and that human life could not exist in the moon.

They have just learned that Italy had people before the Romans, before the Etruscans, who made just such arrow-heads as we find in Concord, and all their tools were stone: Mr. Marsh told me he picked them up in Africa as in Vermont; and they find these all over the world, — and the world, instead of being six thousand years old, has had men on it a hundred thousand years.

All the new facts of science are not only interesting for themselves, but their best value is the rare effect on the mind, the electric shock; each new law of Nature speaks to a related fact in our thought: for every law of Chemistry has some analogon in the soul, and however skilful the chemist may be, and how much soever he may push and multiply his researches, he is a superficial trifler in the presence of the student who sees the strict analogy of the experiment to the laws of thought and of morals.

We read a line, a word, that lifts us: we rise into a succession of thoughts that is better than the book. The old saying of Montluc, that “one man is worth a hundred, and a hundred are not worth one,” is quite as true of books.

Our reading sometimes seems guided. I open a book which happens to be near me, — a book I had not thought of before, — and, seeing the name of a known writer, I sit down to read the chapter, which presently fixes my attention as if it were an important message directly sent to me.

Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, but Stallo, in 1849, writes, “animals are but foetal forms of man.”

Stallo quotes Liebig as saying, “The secret of all those who make discoveries is that they regard nothing as impossible.”

“The lines of our ancestry run into all the phenomena of the material world.” — STALLO.

Théologic mysteries. Our theology ignores the identity of the worshipper; he has fallen in another, he rises in another. Can identity be claimed for a being whose life is so often vicarious, or belonging to an age or generation?

Harvard College. My new term as overseer begun at the close of Commencement Day, 1873, and ends at the close of Commencement Day, 1879.

Life. “We do not take into account what life is in the concrete, — the agreeable habit of working and doing, as Goethe names it, — the steadily engaging, incessant in-streaming of sensations into the bodily comfortableness.” — HEGEL, apud Varnhagen.

[The latter half of the year was quietly passed in Concord by Mr. Emerson, except for a visit to his daughter Mrs. Forbes and her husband at Naushon. As the English publisher with whom he had had dealings, and, as it were, an enforced arrangement about a new volume (only suspended by his illness), had died, that matter was not troubling him.

On December 16, the Centennial Anniversary of the “Boston Tea Party,” Mr. Emerson completed his poem “Boston,” so long meditated, and, by request, read it at the celebration in Faneuil Hall.]

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1873

[The greater part of the authors mentioned in this list are included because Mr. Emerson met them upon his recent journey, principally in England.]

Kalevala of the Finns; Edward, Lord Herbert, Autobiography; Heeren, Ancient World, Egypt; Hegel; Stendhal (M. H. Bayle); Sir Henry Holland; Elie de Beaumont; Thomas Carlyle; Earl Russell; George Bancroft; Richard Owen; Liebig; Francis W.

Newman; J. S. Mill; James Fergusson; R. M. Milnes; Gladstone; Charles Darwin; ViceChancellor Liddell; Dean Church; Robert Browning; J. J. Garth Wilkinson; Dr. W. B. Carpenter; Charles Reade; Daniel Kirkwood, Comets and Meteors; Dean Stanley; Henry Lewes and Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot); Sir Arthur Helps; Jowett; Dasent; Turgénieff; Froude; William W. Story; Lyon Playfair; Ruskin; J. R. Lowell; Alexander C. Fraser; Thomas Hughes; Max Müller; Stallo; Duke of Argyle; Sir Frederick Pollock; Dr. Hinton; Ernest Renan; Charles G. Leland; Huxley, Lay Sermons; Charles E. Norton; William Allinghani; Moncure D. Conway; Herman Grimm; Taine; Canon Liddon; Charles Flower; Professor Lecky; Smalley.

JOURNAL

DEATH OF SUMNER

ABEL ADAMS

FRANCIS C. LOWELL

CANDIDACY FOR LORD RECTORSHIP OF GLASGOW UNIVERSITY

PARNASSUS

JOURNAL LXV

1874

(From Journal ST)

[No longer pledged to far-away lecture engagements, but at home with his family, Mr. Emerson passed his days in his study looking over the sheets of manuscript still unprinted, which might or might not have done duty in lectures or occasional speeches, selecting and planning for their use, but making little progress, for arrangement of sibylline leaves, always difficult, was now almost impossible. He hardly realized this, but was under no pressure, and so undisturbed. He took pleasure in reading; he kept up his afternoon solitary walk, and enjoyed the monthly meeting with his friends at the dinner of the Saturday Club.

The Journal was almost entirely neglected. The following entry is the first, and must have been in latter March, after receiving the letter from Judge Hoar which follows it.] to the dark times of 1850 and see the position of Boston and its eminent men.

WASHINGTON, March 11, 1874. My DEAR Mr. EMERSON: —

Sumner is dead, as the telegraph will have told you before you receive this. He died at thirteen minutes before three this afternoon. I held his hand when he died; and, except his secretary and the attending physician, was the only one of his near friends who was in the room.

His last words (except to say “Sit down” to Mr. Hooper, who came to his bedside, but had gone out before his death) were these: “Judge, tell Emerson how much I love and revere him.” I replied, “He said of you once that he never knew so white a soul.”

During the morning, he had repeated to several persons, to me among the rest, “You must take care of The Civil Rights Bill.” That was his last public thought.

Very sorrowfully and affectionately yours,

 — E. R. HOAR.

[Mr. Emerson, being asked for some lines that would be appropriate to be read or printed with regard to Senator Sumner, took these from his poem in memory of his own brother Edward Bliss Emerson. (See “In Memoriam E. B. E.,” Poems.)]

All inborn power that could

Consist with homage to the good

Flamed from his martial eye;...

Fronting foes of God and man,

Frowning down the evil-doer,

Battling for the weak and poor.

His from youth the leader’s look

Gave the law which others took,

And never poor beseeching glance

Shamed that sculptured countenance.

[Two notices of valued and early friends who died about this time follow. Mr. Abel Adams, of the firm of Barnard and Adams, was Mr. Emerson’s parishioner, and neighbor in his Chardon Street housekeeping. He was also his business adviser, and was so troubled that the venture in Vermont and Canada Railroad stock turned out ill that he insisted on assuming the expenses of Edward Emerson in college, a great help to Mr. Emerson in the hard times of the war.]

I ought to have many notes of my pleasant memories of Abel Adams, one of the best of my friends, whose hospitable house was always open to me by day or by night for so many years in Boston, Lynn, or West Roxbury. His experiences as a merchant were always interesting to me. I think I must have somewhere recorded the fact, which I recall to-day, that he told me that he and two or three merchants had been counting up, in the Globe Bank, out of a hundred Boston merchants how many had not once failed, and they could only count three. Abel Adams was the benefactor of Edward W. E. in College, and of all of us in his last will.

September (?).

The death of Francis Cabot Lowell is a great loss to me. Now for fifty-seven years since we entered college together, we have been friends, meeting sometimes rarely, sometimes often; seldom living in the same town, we have always met gladly on the old simple terms. He was a conservative, I always of a speculative habit; and often in the wayward politics of former years, we had to compare our different opinions. He was a native gentleman, thoroughly true, and of decided opinions, always frank, considerate, and kind. On all questions his opinions were his own, and deliberately formed. One day he came to Concord to read to me some opinions he had written out in regard to the education now given at Cambridge. He did not leave the paper with me and I regret that I cannot recall its substance. However you might differ from him, he always inspired respect and love. I have never known a man of more simplicity and truth.

I heard gladly, long since, from Dr. Hobbs, of Waltham, what I had never heard from himself, — the story of Lowell’s relation to the Chemical Mills in Waltham. His father, Mr. Frank Lowell, Senior, had founded them, and his son inherited in them an important interest. From whatever causes, the property had sadly depreciated. But Mr. Lowell undertook the charge of them himself, studied chemistry with direct reference to the work done in this mill, made himself master of all the processes required; corrected the mistakes; and against all advice stayed therein until its depreciated shares came up to par; then he sold his shares in the property and retired. A man of a quiet inward life, silent and grave, but with opinions and purposes which he quietly held and frankly stated, when his opinion was asked; — gently, but with a strong will, and a perseverance which at last carried his point. Mr. Henry Lee Higginson told me how scrupulously honest he was, how slow to avail himself of the right to take up mortgages, the terms of which had not been kept. Mr. H. thought him romantically honest. And his truth was of the like strain. He said to me, at his house, that when his Club had lately met there, several gentlemen expressed to him their satisfaction at being his guests; and this led him to say that he did not believe he had ever expressed to any man more regard for the person than he really felt. Exact and literal in affairs and in intercourse, he was the most affectionate parent, and his children’s children filled the house with their joy.

His generosity was quiet, but sure and effective. Very strict in its direction, but ample in amount. He was the friend in need, silent but sure, and the character of the giver added rare value to the gift, as if an angel brought you gold. I may well say this, when I recall the fact that on the next day after my house was burned, he came to Concord to express his sympathy in my misfortune, and a few days afterward surprised me with a munificent donation from himself and his children which went far to rebuild it.

In college, I well remember the innocence of the youth when we first met; — and the perfect simplicity of his manners he never lost. Yet long years afterward I well remember that when we stood together to witness a marriage in the Stone Chapel, my wife inquired who was the gentleman who stood by me, and who looked so like a king; I was delighted by the perception.

I dearly prize the photograph taken from Rowse’s drawing of his head, which is an admirable likeness, my gift from his daughter, Georgina Lowell. His daughter tells me that he thought he did not interest his acquaintances. I believe he always had their entire respect, and a friendship akin to love.

Fortunate in his birth and education, accustomed always to a connection of excellent society, he was never confounded with others by the facility of interest and neighbourhood, but remained as independent in his thought as if he had lived alone.

PARKER HOUSE,

Monday night, November.

The secret of poetry is never explained, — is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. ‘T is as easy as breath. ‘T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.

“The arch is the parent of the vault, the vault is the parent of the cupola.” — EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

The boy grew to man and never asked a question, for every problem quickly developed its law.

[In the Spring, Mr. Emerson had been surprised by an invitation from the Independent Club of the University of Glasgow to accept their nomination as candidate for the office of Lord Rector for that year, the duty involved being the delivery of the annual address. Mr. Emerson was pleased with the compliment, and, after some consideration, and consultation with near friends, sent his acceptance, but with little expectation of election — especially as Disraeli was the candidate of the Conservative body of students. The campaign, as shown by manifestoes, songs, etc., constantly sent to Mr. Emerson through the mail by his enthusiastic adherents, was conducted with great spirit and excitement. In November he was notified of the result. He had received more than five hundred votes, and Disraeli was chosen Lord Rector by a majority of some two hundred.

In December, the collection of poems, Parnassus, was published, which owes its existence to the urgency and activity through several years of Mr. Emerson’s younger daughter. She loved to hear her father read poems and fragments collected through years in his “Black Anthology” (so called from its leather covers) and another. As his favourites were often hard to find, especially those from the older poets, and not in such collections as were at hand, the idea of publishing such a volume pleased him, when suggested, and he said, and, when urged again another year, repeated, “We must.” Then the zealous school - girl began herself to seize occasions to bring volumes of the poets to her father in his study and insist on his choosing, and began herself to copy the favourites. This went on through several years until she became Mrs. Forbes, and then, whenever she was with her father either in Milton or Concord, she succeeded in commanding attention to the work, and herself had the copying done. Thus, when the lecturing ceased, there was more time to attend to the selections. It should be said also that Mr. Emerson became less exacting in his criticisms of newer verses. In the preface to Parnassus he gives in the first paragraph an account of his selection of poems from his early youth, followed by a short essay on the poets.]

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1874

Alexis, Lines on Sleep; Plotinus; Dr. Charles R. Lowell; Charles Sumner; Edward A. Freeman, Cathedral Architecture; William Morris, Proem to the Earthly Paradise; Charles Warren Stoddard; Titus M. Coan,

The Tree of Life.

JOURNAL

CABOT THE HELPER

MEETING OF OLD SCHOOLMATES

THE MINUTE MAN

LIFE AND THE CHILD

CARLYLE’S BIRTHDAY

JOURNAL LXVI

1875

(From Journal ST)

[The flame of Mr. Emerson’s powers of writing, faint in the last three years, now flickered to extinction in the journals of this and the following year. Yet the instinct of work remained, and he passed most of each day in his study still working at arranging his manuscripts, and his daughter Ellen helped him as far as she could. In the year before, the question of who should deal with his manuscripts when he was gone had been in his thought, and Mr. Cabot’s name was the one which he wistfully mentioned, but felt that the favour was so great that he could not venture to ask it from his friend. But now the case became urgent, for the promised book was called for by the successors of the English publishers who had first wrung consent from Mr. Emerson by threatening to collect a book of old Dial papers, and other rejected material, out of copyright. So, with Mr. Emerson’s permission, the matter was presented for Mr. Cabot’s consideration. He consented with entire kindness to give what help he could, and thus lifted the last load from Mr. Emerson’s shoulders. The relief was complete and rendered his remaining years happy. At last he could see and come near to the friend whom he had valued at a distance for years. Mr. Cabot’s frequent visits, often for several days at a time, were a great pleasure. Just how large Mr. Cabot’s share in preparing for the press Letter’s and Social Aims was he tells with entire frankness in the preface to that volume. Mr. Emerson furnished the matter, — almost all written years before, — but Mr. Cabot the arrangement and much of the selection. All was submitted to Mr. Emerson’s approval, but he always spoke to his friend of the volume as “your book.” Early in the year his crony of the Boston school - boy days, Dr. William H. Furness, wrote to him begging him to accept an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia and to be his guest. In the affectionate letter in answer, given in full in Mr. Cabot’s Memoir, Mr. Emerson writes: “Well, what shall I say in defence of my stolid silence at which you hint? Why, only this:... that the gods have given you some draught of their perennial cup, and withheld the same from me. I have, for the last two years, written nothing in my once diurnal manuscripts; and never a letter that I could omit.... Now comes your new letter with all your affectionate memories and preference fresh as roses.... I must obey it. My daughter Ellen, who goes always with my antiquity, insists that we shall.... My love to Sam Bradford.” They went and the three playfellows had a happy reunion.

On March 18, Mr. Emerson read in Boston a lecture “True Oratory,” probably nearly the same as the chapter “Eloquence” in Letters and Social Aims.

On the Nineteenth of April, the town celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of Concord Fight. President Grant and members of his Cabinet were present, the Governors of all the New England States with their escorting regiments, the Massachusetts General Court, the eminent writers of New England, and an immense concourse of people. At the end of the North Bridge (built anew for the occasion), where stood the American force, the bronze Minute Man made by Daniel C. French had been placed, and, when the throng arrived, Mr. Emerson unveiled it and made a short speech, the last he ever composed. Then, in the tent beyond, Lowell and Curtis delivered respectively the admirable Ode and Address.

Mr. Emerson’s speech was not included in the Works. It is to be found in the Boston papers of the next day, the Commonwealth of April 27, and in the Concord pamphlet recording that celebration.]

In 1775, the patriotism in Massachusetts was so hot that it melted the snow, and the rye waved on the 19th April. Our farmers have never seen it so early. The very air and the soil felt the anger of the people.

It occurs that the short limit of human life is set in relation to the instruction man can draw of Nature. No one has lived long enough to exhaust its laws.

The delicacy of the touch and the eternity it inherits —

In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such: ‘t is as easy as breathing. ‘T is like gravity which holds the universe together, and none knows what it is.

[It should be mentioned that Mr. Emerson had been appointed a member of the sub-committee on Philosophy at Harvard University for the year.]

“Eichhorn would have the order of studies and the establishment of rigor therein in our universities increased. Others agreed. Then Schleiermacher quite simply said, he did not see how each must prescribe the way by which he came to his knowledge: the routine was in our ways of study so demolished, the rules of all kinds so heaped, that to him nothing seemed better to do than to pull down all the universities. ‘And what to put in their place?’ they asked: ‘That would it find of itself at once, and quite rightly,’ answered Schleiermacher.” — VARNHAGEN VON ENSE. Blatter aus der preussischen Geschichte, v, 44.

December 5, 1875.

Thomas Carlyle’s 80th birthday.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS QUOTED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNAL FOR 1875

Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Eichhorn and Schleiermacher apud Yon Ense; Charles Levigne, Un Médecin de L’Ame.

JOURNAL

CARLYLE

MEDAL

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

LATIN SCHOOL

CENTENARY

ALLINGHAM’S POEM

JOURNAL LXVII

1876

(From Journal ST )

ON Saturday, February 5, received through the post-office a pacquet containing a silver medal, on one face bearing the profile of Carlyle, with the name “Thomas Carlyle” inscribed; on the other face,

“In Commemoration

1875 December 4.”

A card enclosed reads, “To R. W. Emerson from Alexander Macmillan” [London]; for which welcome and precious gift I wish to write immediately my thanks to the kind sender.

[In March, Mr. Emerson read a lecture in Lexington. An invitation from the Washington and Jefferson literary societies of the University of Virginia to give an address at their Commencement pleased him as a token from the South and he accepted it, and went with his daughter to Charlottesville in June. He was hospitably received, and read there “The Scholar” (in Lectures and Biographical Sketches).

On November 8, at a meeting of the Latin School Association in Boston, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the reopening of the school after the evacuation of the city by the British, he gave his pleasant reminiscences of his school-days. His remarks were reported in the Boston papers of next day.

The year’s journal, hardly begun, — or rather the journal of more than half a century, — closes with a poem of William Allingham, sent and signed by the Author, whom Mr. Emerson valued, enclosed between the leaves. It might seem, perhaps, a grateful tribute of a disciple to a master.]

POESIS HUMANA

What is the Artist’s duty?

His work, however wrought,

Shape, color, word or tone

Is to make better known

(Himself divinely taught),

To praise and celebrate,

Because his love is great,

The lovely miracle

Of Universal Beauty.

This message would he tell.

This message is his trust,

Amidst the day’s crude strife,

With all his heart and soul,

With all his skill and strength

Seeking to add at length, —

(Because he may and must, — )

Some atom to the whole

Of man’s inheritance;

Some fineness to the glance,

Some richness to the life.

If he shall deal perforce

With evil and with pain,

With horror and affright,

He does it to our gain;

Makes felt the mighty course

Of law — whose atmosphere

Is beauty and delight;

Nay, these its very source.

His work, however small,

Itself hath rounded well, —

Even like Earth’s own ball

In softly tinted shell

Of air. His magic brings

The mystery of things;

It gives dead substance wings;

It shows in little, much;

And by an artful touch

Conveys the hint of all.

(From Ledgers of uncertain date)

[Mr. Emerson, with all the temperamental difficulty he found in arrangement of the abundant material received from Nature and man, had something of business method in his bookkeeping. Besides his Journals — day-books — he had also a few books which might be called ledgers, into which irregularly he copied, or wrote, good material according to subject. Such were IL (Intellect), PY (Poetry), PH (Philosophy), LI (Literature), TO (Tolerance?) and others less easily guessed.

The editors have ventured to give here a few concluding passages, of uncertain date, from some of these manuscripts, which they do not find among the journal selections, or in the Works.]

(From PH)

Idealism. Is it thought that to reduce the Divine mode of existence to a state of ideas is deducting with a high hand of idealism and unfastening the logic of the Universe? We are mammals of a higher element, and, as the whale must come to the top of the water for air, we must go to the top of the air, now and then, for thought.

The guiding star to the arrangement and use of facts is in your leading thought. The heaven of Intellect is profoundly solitary, it is unprofitable, it is to be despised and rejected of men. If I recall the happiest hours of existence, those which really make a man an inmate of a better world, it is a lonely and undescribed joy, but it is the door that leads to joys ear hath not heard nor eye seen.

Each power of the mind is well in itself; as, perception, or memory: but we are first sensible of the miracle when these powers combine or interact. Mathematic combinations are potent only in the first degree, until powerful memory is joined to them; then you have Archimedes and Laplace.

Sensibility. The poorest place has all the wealth of the richest, as soon as genius arrives.... Ah, could I quicken your attention to your society by whispering to you its immense wealth of nature, and genius’s possibility. There are persons who might take their seat on the throne of this globe without real or false shame.

The real estate of the Universe is Space and Matter; the proprietor is Intellect, and what belongs to Intellect, Will or Good Will.

Abnormal Minds. William Blake, Swedenborg, Behmen, and what other men of abnormal experience, — as, for example, some trustworthy second-sighted or forewarned seers or dreamers who are apprised in one country of the death or danger of their twin or brother in another country (if ever one could get a proven fact of this kind), — are important examples each to the metaphysician; Blake [also], who affirmed that he did not see the phenomenon, as the marble, the harp, or the cloud, but looked ever through it, and saw its meaning. The Zoroasters and Sibyls and oracular men to whom we owe some profoundest sentences are essential parts of our knowledge of the Human Mind, or the possible omnificence (latent but for these flashes) of the Intellect. The Hindu specimens have their value. Every such mind is a new key to the secret of Mind.

Wonder. The most advanced man in his most advanced moment — contemplating himself and Nature — sees how rude an idiot he is, how utterly unknown is the Cause and the Necessity, — its roots and its future all unknown, —— a gigantic dream.

Divination. I think that not by analytic inspection, but by sympathy and piety, we correct our metaphysics. Thus Hegel and Kant have become possible by the extraordinary wealth of all natural sciences, which waked and tested every faculty of thought, and thus finer distinctions could be felt and expressed.

The analysis of Intellect and Nature which the grand masters, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, have attempted are of primary value to Science, like the work of the great geometers and mathematicians, and cannot be spared or over praised: they are dear to us as vindications of the sufficiency of the intellect, and pledges of future advances. They seem to the scholar to degrade all inferior and less ambitious observation as needless and of no worth. They freeze his invention and hope. They write Ne plus ultra on the dizzy pinnacle to which in the thin air their almost winged footsteps have climbed.

They have marked, once for all, distinctions which are inherent in the sound mind, and which we must henceforth respect.

The instinct that led Heraclitus and Parmenides and Lucretius to write in verse was just, however imperfect their success. The world lies so in heaps that it is not strange that there should yet be no painters, no Homer of our thoughts, far higher than the Homer of Greek thoughts.

Intellect. There is no age to Intellect. Read Plato at twenty or at sixty years, the impression is about equal.

The joy of the thinker in detecting his errors:

 —— I have more enjoyed, in the last hours of finishing a chapter, the insight attained of how the truths really stand, than I suffer from seeing the confusion I had left in the statement.

Inspiration. Our music-box only plays certain tunes, and rarely a sweeter strain: but we are assured that our barrel is not a dead, but a live barrel, nay, is only a part of the tune, and changes like that. A larger dialectic conveys a sense of power and feeling of terror unknown; and Henry Thoreau said, “that a thought would destroy most persons,” and yet we apologize for the power, and bow to the persons.

I want an electrical machine. Slumbering power we have, but not excited, collected, and discharged. If I should be honest, I should say, my exploring of life presents little or nothing of respectable event or action, or, in myself, of a personality. Too composite to offer a positive unity: but it is a recipiency, a percipiency. And I, and far weaker persons (if it were possible) than I, who pass for nothing but imbeciles, do yet affirm by our own percipiency the presence and perfection of Law, as much as all the martyrs.

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices. Truth is shrill as a fife, various as a panharmonium.

Transition. Transition the organic destiny of the mind.

The value of a trope is that the hearer is one. ‘T is the great law of Nature, that the more transit, the more continuity; or, we are immortal by force of transits. We ask a selfish, selfsame immortality. Nature replies by steeping us in the sea which girds the seven worlds, and makes us free of them all. At any pitch, a higher pitch. What we call the Universe to-day is only a symptom or omen of that to which we are passing. Every atom is on its way onward. The universe circulates in thought. Every thought is fleeting. Our power lies in transition, there is said to be a certain infinite of power which is availed us in the power-press.

There’s not only your talent, but your spirit. Easy to give your colour or character to any assembly, if your spirit is better than the speaker’s. [My brother] Edward, with his wit, never failed to check any trifling with morals in his presence. ‘T is impossible that the Divine Order be broken without resistance, and the remorses, wraths, indecisions, violence, and runnings away into solitude of men are the checks and recoils.

The wonder of the world in good hours — I might say whenever we go home from the streets — is, that so many men of various talent, including men of eminent special ability, do not recognize the supreme value of character. In history we appreciate it fully. We all read Plutarch with one mind, and unanimously take sides with Agesilaus in Sparta, with Aristides, Phocion, Demosthenes, in Athens, with Epaminondas in Thebes, and wonder how the Athenians could be such fools as to take such bravos as the Créons against these grave, just, and noble heroes. In Rome, we give our suffrages again to Scipio, Regulus, Paulus Æmilius and Cato, and Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius against their profligate rivals. In England, we know the worth of Sidney, Alfred, of More, of Burke. In America, we see the purity and exceptional elevation of Washington. And, at this moment, we see in the English Minister at the head of the Government the immense comfort and trust reposed in a competent minister of a high and blameless character.

Nature. The secret of Nature glimmers to all eyes in these days, namely, that her ulterior meaning dwarfs all her wonders before the grandeur to which she leads us on. For she apprises man that he converses with reality, with the cause of causes, and her fairest pictures are only part of the immense procession of effects.

Mind and Nature. On this (unity) the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid. Nature is brute, but as this animates it, — only a language, a noun, for the poet. Nature always the effect; Mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, is as is our sensibility; hostile to ignorance, — plastic, transparent, delightful to knowledge. Mind contains the law; History is the slow and atomic unfolding: the Universe, at last, only prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic of vaster interpretation and result.

(From TO)

‘T is fine, that Hegel “dared not unfold or pursue the surprising revolutionary conclusions ‘ of his own method,” but not the less did the young Hegelians consummate the work, so that quickly, in all departments of life, in natural sciences, politics, ethics, laws, and in art, the rigorous Dogma of Immanent Necessity exterminated all the old tottering, shadowy forms. ’Tis like Goethe and Wordsworth disowning their poetry.

Room must be allowed for the skepticism. It was always in use that certain belligerent minds had a suicidal, a scorpion-sting-scorpion talent, as, it is said, the gastric juices sometimes eat up the stomach: so these have the whim to go behind the Institutions also, and ask the foundation of the foundation, “the guide of my guide,” as M. R. asked me. And there is, as my brother Edward said, in boyhood, always “the other way”; or, as Shakspeare says, “A plague of opinion! a man can wear on both sides, like a leather jerkin.”

They are all cracked; every one of them has his egotism, or mania, or gluttony, or vulgarity, or flattery of some kind, as he has his rheumatism, or scrofula, or sixth toe, or other flaw in his body. All I want is his sanity, his specialty of acuteness, his fluency, his knack; and I should as soon think of asking after the old shoes of an observer as after his gluttonies, or his debts, or his conceit, or whatever infirmities. “Did the troops carry the battery?”

“Sire, here is the list of the wounded.”

“Take that to the surgeon. Did they carry the battery? Vive la France!”

Allowance always for the exempts, who, by strong call of Nature, [haunt] the pond-sides, groping for plants (as Bishop Turpin for the talisman which Charlemagne threw into the pond): or, lost in the allurement of colour, mix pigments on a pallet; or study the surfaces and mantles and runes on seashells, heedless of France or England or Prussia, or what the Pope, the Emperor, the Congress, or the stock exchange, may do; or Carnot buried in his mathematics; or Kant in his climbing from round to round the steps of the mysterious ladder which is the scale of metaphysic powers. These are always justified sooner or later: point for point, the whole noisy fracas of politics or interest is truly and divinely recognized and counted for them, there in their spiritual coil or cælum. There is Sardinia, and London, Rome, and Vienna, and Washington, sternly abstracted into its salt and essence.

Transition. Ever the ascending effort. The Greeks and the Scandinavians hold that men had one name and the gods another for heaven, hell, water, cloud, and mountain. And the Edda, when it has named and dealt with the Asa and the Elfin, speaks of the “higher gods.” See the ascending scale of Plato and especially of Plotinus.

Natural Sciences have made great stride by means of Hegel’s dogma which put Nature, and thought, matter and spirit, in right relation, one the expression or externalization of the other. Observation was the right method, and metaphysics was Nature and subject to observation also. But (Hegel and all his followers) shunned to apply the new arm to what most of all belonged to it, to anthropology, morals, politics, etc. For this at once touched conservatism, church, jurisprudence, etc. Therefore the Natural Sciences made great progress and philosophy none. But Natural Science, without philosophy, without ethics, was unsouled. Presently Natural Science, which the governments have befriended, will disclose the liberalizing as well as the dynamic strength; then Natural Science will be presented as, e g., geology, astronomy, ethnology, as contradicting the Bible. Difference of the two is: Natural Sciences, a circle, Morals and Metaphysics a line of advance; one the basis, the other the completion.

Not only Transition but Melioration. The good soul took you up, and showed you for an instant of time something to the purpose. Well, in this way, it educates the youth of the Universe, — warms, suns, refines each particle; then drops the little channel, through which the life rolled beatific, to the ground, — touched and educated by a moment of sunshine, to be the fairer material for future channels, through which the old glory shall dart again in new directions, until the Universe shall have been shot through and through, tilled with light.

With this eternal demand for more which belongs to our modest constitutions, how can we be helped? The gods themselves cannot help us; they are just as badly off themselves.

Genius unsettles everything. It is fixed, is it? that after the reflective age arrives, there can be no quite rustic and united man born? Yes, quite fixed. Ah! this unlucky Shakspeare! and ah! this hybrid Goethe! make a new rule, my dear, can you not? and to-morrow Genius shall stamp on it with his starry sandals.

Genius consists neither in improvising, nor in remembering, but in both.

Writing should be like the settlement of dew on the leaf, of stalactites on the cavern wall, the deposit of flesh from the blood, of woody fibre from the sap. The poem is made up of lines each of which filled the sky of the poet in its turn; so that mere synthesis produces a work quite superhuman. For that reason, a true poem by no means yields all its virtue at the first reading, but is best when we have slowly and by repeated attention felt the truth of all the details.

Fame is a signal convenience. Do we read all the authors, to grope our way to the best? No, but the world selects for us the best, and we select from the best, our best.

Mankind have ever a deep common sense that guides their judgments, so that they are always right in their fames. How strange that Jesus should stand at the head of history, the first character of the world, without doubt, but the unlikeliest of all men, one would say, to take such a ground in such a world. Yet he dates our chronology. Well, as if to indemnify themselves for this vast concession to truth, they must put up the militia — Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, etc. — into the next place of proclamation. Yet ’tis a pit to Olympus, this fame to that; or were by the place of Plato, Homer, Pindar, etc.

Thoughts. Against Fate, Thought; for, though that force be infinitely small, infinitesimal against the bulky masses of Nature, and the universal chemistry, ‘t is of that subtlety that it homeopathically doses the system.

Thought is nothing but the circulations made harmonious. Every thought, like every man, wears, at its first emergence from the creative night, its rank stamped on it: — this is a witticism, and this is a power....

Thoughts come to those who have thoughts, as banks lend to capitalists and not to paupers. Every new thought which makes day in our souls has its long morning twilight to announce its coming. Add the aurora that precedes a beloved name.

The distinction of a man is that he thinks. Let that be so. For a man cannot otherwise compare with a steam-engine or the self-acting spinning-mule which is never tired, and makes no fault. But a man thinks and adapts. A man is not a man, then, until he have his own thoughts: that first; then, that he can detach them. But what thoughts of his own are in Abner or Guy? They are clean, well-built men enough to look at, have money, and houses and books, but they are not yet arrived at humanity, but remain idiots and minors.

[Language.] You can find an old philosopher who has anticipated most of your theses; but, if you cannot find the Antisthenes or the Proclus that did, you can find in language that some unknown man has done it, inasmuch as words exist which cover your thought.

Thus there is a day when the boy arrives at wanting a word to express his sense of relation between two things or two classes of things and finds the word analogy or identity of ratio. A day comes when men of all countries are compelled to use the French word solidarité to signify inseparable individualities.

(From IL)

Genius. Genius loves truth, and clings to it, so that what it says and does is not in a byroad visited only by curiosity, but on the great highways of the world, which were before the Appian Way, and will long outlast it, and which all souls must travel.

Genius delights in statements which are themselves true, which attack and wound any who opposes them.

They called Ideas Gods, and worshipped intellect. They dared not contravene with knacks and talents the divinity which they recognized in genius.

When the Greeks in the Iliad perceived that the gods mixed in the fray, they drew off.

Wonderful is the Alembic of Nature, through which the sentiment of tranquillity in the mind of the sculptor becomes, at the end of his fingers, a marble Hesperus: but the feeling manages somehow to shed itself over the stone, as if that were porous to love and truth.

Truth. Truth does not come with jangle and contradiction, but it is what all sects accept, what recommends their tenets to right-minded men. Truth is mine, though I never spoke it.

“Unquestionable truth is sweet, though it were the announcement of our dissolution.” — H. D. Thoreau.

People value thoughts, not truths; truth, not until it has passed through the mould of some man’s mind, and so is a curiosity, and an individualism. But ideas, as powers, they are not up to valuing. We say that the characteristic of the Teutonic race is, to prefer an idea to a phenomenon; and of the Celtic, to prefer the phenomenon to the idea. Higher is it to prize the power above the thought, i e., above the idea individualized or domesticated.

Subjectiveness. Dangerously great, immoral even in its violence of power. The man sees as he is. Add the least power of vision, and the tyranny of duties slackens. I am afraid to trust you with the statement. The genius of Bonaparte gilds his crimes to us; but that is only a hint of what it was to him. It converts every obstruction into facilities and fuel of force; dwarfs into giants. His aim, so dim before, beams like the morning star, and every cloud is touched by its rays....

Subjectiveness itself is the question, and Nature is the answer: the Universe is the blackboard on which we write. Philosophy is called the homesickness of the soul.

Automatic Action of Thought. There is a process in the mind analogous to crystallization in the mineral. I think of some fact. In thinking of it, I am led to more thoughts, which show themselves, first partially, and afterwards more fully. But in them I see no order. When I would present them to others, they have no beginning. Leave them now, and return later. Do not force them into arrangement, and by and bye you shall find they will take their own order, and the order they assume is divine.

Thought has its own foregoers and followers, that is, its own current. Thoughts have a life of their own. A thought takes its own true rank in the memory by surviving other thoughts that were preferred.

But also thought ranks itself at its first emergence.

Religion. Religion is the perception of that power which constructs the greatness of the centuries out of the paltriness of the hours.

Fancy and Imagination. Examples. Henry Thoreau writes, —

“The day has gone by with its wind, like the wind of a cannon ball, and now far in the west it blows; by that dim - colored sky you may track it.” (June 18, 1853.)

“The Solidago Nemoralis now yellows the dry fields with its recurved standard a little more than a foot high, marching to the holy land, a countless host of crusaders.” (August 23.)

Flight of eagle. “Circling, or rather looping along westward.”

“And where are gone the bluebirds, whose warble was wafted to me so lately like a blue wavelet through the air?”

“The air over these fields is a foundry full of moulds for casting the bluebird’s warbles.” (Feb. 18, 1857.)

“The bird withdrew by his aërial turnpikes.” (Oct. 5, 1857.)

Scholar s Creed. I believe that all men are born free and equal quoad the laws.

That all men have a right to their life, quoad the laws.

I believe in freedom of opinion religious and political.

I believe in universal suffrage, in public schools, in free trade.

I believe the soul makes the body.

I believe that casualty is perfect.

(From EO)

Fate. The opinions of men lose all worth to him who observes that they are accurately predictable from the ground of their sect.

Well, they are still valuable as representatives of that fagot of circumstances, if they are not themselves primary parties. But even the chickens running up and down, and pecking at each white spot and at each other as ridden by chicken nature, seem ever and anon to have a pause of consideration, then hurry on again to be chickens. Men have more pause.

We are to each other results. As my perception or sensibility is exalted, I see the genesis of your action, and of your thought. I see you in your debt, and fountains; and, to my eye, instead of a little pond of life, you are a rivulet fed by rills from every plain and height in Nature and antiquity; and reviving a remote origin from the source of things.

May and must. The musts are a safe company to follow, and even agreeable. If we are whigs, let us be whigs of Nature and Science, and go for the necessities. The must is as fixed in civil history and political economy as in chemistry. How much will has been expended to extinguish the Jews! Yet the tenacities of the race resist and prevail. So the Negro sees with glee, through all his miseries, his future possession of the West Indies (and of the Southern States of America) assured. For he accumulates and buys, whilst climate, etc., favour him, against the white.

Souls with a certain quantity of light are in excess, and, once for all, belong to the moral class, — what animal force they may retain, to the contrary, notwithstanding. Souls with less light, —— it is chemically impossible that they be moral, what talent or good they have, to the contrary notwithstanding; and these belong to the world of Fate, or animal good: the minors of the universe, not yet twenty-one, — not yet voters, —— not robed in the toga virilis.

Fate. We are talkative, but Heaven is silent. I have puzzled myself like a mob of writers before me in trying to state the doctrine of Fate for the printer. I wish to sum the conflicting impressions by saying that all point at last to an Unity which inspires all, but disdains words and passes understanding.... The First Cause; as soon as it is uttered, it is profaned. The thinker denies personality out of piety, not out of pride. It refuses a personality which is instantly imprisoned in human measures.

“It stands written on the Gate of Heaven Woe to him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate.”

HAFIZ.

I have heard that they seem fools who allow themselves to be engaged and compromised in undertakings, but that at last it appears quite otherwise, and to the gods otherwise from the first. I affix a like sense to this text of Hafiz: for he who loves is not betrayed, but makes an ass of Fate.

(From PY)

[Man’s Eastern Horizon.] The men in the street fail to interest us, because at first view they seem thoroughly known and exhausted. As if an inventory of all man’s parts and qualities had been taken.... But after the most exact count has been taken, there remains as much more, which no tongue can tell. This remainder is that which genius works upon. This is that which the preacher, the poet, the artist, and Love, and Nature, speak unto, the region of power and aspiration. These men have a secret persuasion, that, as little as they pass for in the world, they are immensely rich in expectancy and power. The best part of truth is certainly that which hovers in gleams and suggestions unpossessed before man. His recorded knowledge is dead and cold. But this chorus of thoughts and hopes, these dawning truths, like great stars just lifting themselves into his horizon, they are his future, and console him for the ridiculous brevity and meanness of his civic life.

Psychology is fragmentarily taught. One man sees a sparkle or shimmer of the truth, and reports it, and his saying becomes a legend or golden proverb for all ages. And other men see and try to say as much, but no man wholly and well.

We see what we make. We can see only what we make. All our perceptions, all our desires, are procréant. Perception has a destiny....

[In the last six years of his life, after the journals had no entries save for a few memoranda, Mr. Emerson, though he wrote nothing, — could hardly answer a letter, — still, occasionally, when urged, read a discourse near home, among old friends. On these occasions his daughter always sat near him to make sure that the sheets of his manuscript did not get out of order, or even to prompt him, in case he mistook a word.

In April, 1877, he read his affectionate paper on his native city “Boston” at the Old South Church, and, a year later, in the same place, “The Fortune of the Republic.”

In the Spring of 1879, he read “Eloquence” at Cambridge, and also “The Preacher” in The Divinity School Chapel, where, forty-one years before, he had startled his hearers with the Address which banished him from the University for so many years.

The School of Philosophy was established in Concord in that year by Mr. Alcott’s friends, and there Mr. Emerson read “Memory,” and in the following year, “Aristocracy,” to its assembled company.

In 1880, it has been said, Mr. Emerson read his hundredth lecture to his townsfolk in The Concord Lyceum.

His last public reading was probably his paper on Carlyle (See Lectures and Biographical Sketches) before the Massachusetts Historical Society.

It is a pleasant circumstance to remember that in his last years Mr. Emerson took from the study shelves the volumes of his own printed works. They seemed new to him, and when his daughter came in, he looked up, smiling, and said, “Why, these things are really very good.”

To readers of these journals — talks of a poet and scholar, who was also a good citizen of the Republic, with himself in varying moods — the words of the East Indian Mozoomdar may seem appropriate: —

“Yes, Emerson had all the wisdom and spirituality of the Brahmans. Brahmanism is an acquirement, a state of being rather than a creed.”]

THE END

The Biographies

Emerson, 1857

RALPH WALDO EMERSON by Oliver Wendell Holmes

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I. BIRTHPLACE. — BOYHOOD. — COLLEGE LIFE.

CHAPTER II. 1823-1828. AET. 20-25.

CHAPTER III. 1828-1833. AET. 25-30.

CHAPTER IV. 1833-1838. AET. 30-35.

CHAPTER V. 1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

CHAPTER VI. 1843-1848. AET. 40-45.

CHAPTER VII. 1848-1853. AET. 45-50.

CHAPTER VIII. 1858-1858. AET. 50-55.

CHAPTER IX. 1858-1863: AET. 55-60.

CHAPTER X. 1863-1868. AET. 60-65.

CHAPTER XI. 1868-1873. AET. 65-70.

CHAPTER XII. 1873-1878. AET. 70-75.

CHAPTER XIII. 1878-1882. AET. 75-79.

CHAPTER XIV. EMERSON’S POEMS.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI. EMERSON. — A RETROSPECT.

NOTE.

My thanks are due to the members of Mr. Emerson’s family, and the other friends who kindly assisted me by lending interesting letters and furnishing valuable information.

The Index, carefully made by Mr. J.H. Wiggin, was revised and somewhat abridged by myself.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

BOSTON, November 25, 1884.

  ”Thou wert the morning star among the living,
    Ere thy fair light had fled:
  Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus, giving
    New splendor to the dead.”

INTRODUCTION.

“I have the feeling that every man’s biography is at his own expense. He furnishes not only the facts, but the report. I mean that all biography is autobiography. It is only what he tells of himself that comes to be known and believed.”

So writes the man whose life we are to pass in review, and it is certainly as true of him as of any author we could name. He delineates himself so perfectly in his various writings that the careful reader sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature added to make him Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He himself believes in the hereditary transmission of certain characteristics. Though Nature appears capricious, he says, “Some qualities she carefully fixes and transmits, but some, and those the finer, she exhales with the breath of the individual, as too costly to perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fixed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last Nature adopts them and bakes them in her porcelain.”

* * * * *

We have in New England a certain number of families who constitute what may be called the Academic Races. Their names have been on college catalogues for generation after generation. They have filled the learned professions, more especially the ministry, from the old colonial days to our own time. If aptitudes for the acquisition of knowledge can be bred into a family as the qualities the sportsman wants in his dog are developed in pointers and setters, we know what we may expect of a descendant of one of the Academic Races. Other things being equal, he will take more naturally, more easily, to his books. His features will be more pliable, his voice will be more flexible, his whole nature more plastic than those of the youth with less favoring antecedents. The gift of genius is never to be reckoned upon beforehand, any more than a choice new variety of pear or peach in a seedling; it is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation.

These thoughts suggest themselves in looking back at the striking record of the family made historic by the birth of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was remarkable for the long succession of clergymen in its genealogy, and for the large number of college graduates it counted on its rolls.

A genealogical table is very apt to illustrate the “survival of the fittest,” — in the estimate of the descendants. It is inclined to remember and record those ancestors who do most honor to the living heirs of the family name and traditions. As every man may count two grandfathers, four great-grandfathers, eight great-great-grandfathers, and so on, a few generations give him a good chance for selection. If he adds his distinguished grandmothers, he may double the number of personages to choose from. The great-grandfathers of Mr. Emerson at the sixth remove were thirty-two in number, unless the list was shortened by intermarriage of relatives. One of these, from whom the name descended, was Thomas Emerson of Ipswich, who furnished the staff of life to the people of that wonderfully interesting old town and its neighborhood.

His son, the Reverend Joseph Emerson, minister of the town of Mendon,
Massachusetts, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Edward
Bulkeley, who succeeded his father, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley, as
Minister of Concord, Massachusetts.

Peter Bulkeley was therefore one of Emerson’s sixty-four grandfathers at the seventh remove. We know the tenacity of certain family characteristics through long lines of descent, and it is not impossible that any one of a hundred and twenty-eight grandparents, if indeed the full number existed in spite of family admixtures, may have transmitted his or her distinguishing traits through a series of lives that cover more than two centuries, to our own contemporary. Inherited qualities move along their several paths not unlike the pieces in the game of chess. Sometimes the character of the son can be traced directly to that of the father or of the mother, as the pawn’s move carries him from one square to the next. Sometimes a series of distinguished fathers follows in a line, or a succession of superior mothers, as the black or white bishop sweeps the board on his own color. Sometimes the distinguishing characters pass from one sex to the other indifferently, as the castle strides over the black and white squares. Sometimes an uncle or aunt lives over again in a nephew or niece, as if the knight’s move were repeated on the squares of human individuality. It is not impossible, then, that some of the qualities we mark in Emerson may have come from the remote ancestor whose name figures with distinction in the early history of New England.

The Reverend Peter Bulkeley is honorably commemorated among the worthies consigned to immortality in that precious and entertaining medley of fact and fancy, enlivened by a wilderness of quotations at first or second hand, the Magnolia Christi Americana, of the Reverend Cotton Mather. The old chronicler tells his story so much better than any one can tell it for him that he must be allowed to speak for himself in a few extracts, transferred with all their typographical idiosyncrasies from the London-printed, folio of 1702.

“He was descended of an Honourable Family in Bedfordshire. — He was born at Woodhil (or Odel) in Bedfordshire, January 31st, 1582.

“His Education was answerable unto his Original; it was Learned, it was Genteel, and, which was the top of all, it was very Pious: At length it made him a Batchellor of Divinity, and a Fellow of Saint John’s Colledge in Cambridge. —

“When he came abroad into the World, a good benefice befel him, added unto the estate of a Gentleman, left him by his Father; whom he succeeded in his Ministry, at the place of his Nativity: Which one would imagine Temptations enough to keep him out of a Wilderness.”

But he could not conscientiously conform to the ceremonies of the
English Church, and so, —

   ”When Sir Nathaniel Brent was Arch-Bishop Laud’s General, as
    Arch-Bishop Laud was another’s, Complaints were made against Mr.
    Bulkly, for his Non-Conformity, and he was therefore Silenced.

“To New-England he therefore came, in the Year 1635; and there having been for a while, at Cambridge, he carried a good Number of Planters with him, up further into the Woods, where they gathered the Twelfth Church, then formed in the Colony, and call’d the Town by the Name of Concord.

“Here he buried a great Estate, while he raised one still, for almost every Person whom he employed in the Affairs of his Husbandry. —

“He was a most excellent Scholar, a very-well read Person, and one, who in his advice to young Students, gave Demonstrations, that he knew what would go to make a Scholar. But it being essential unto a Scholar to love a Scholar, so did he; and in Token thereof, endowed the Library of Harvard-Colledge with no small part of his own.

“And he was therewithal a most exalted Christian — In his Ministry he was another Farel, Quo nemo tonuit fortius — And the observance which his own People had for him, was also paid him from all sorts of People throughout the Land; but especially from the Ministers of the Country, who would still address him as a Father, a Prophet, a Counsellor, on all occasions.”

These extracts may not quite satisfy the exacting reader, who must be referred to the old folio from which they were taken, where he will receive the following counsel: —

“If then any Person would know what Mr. Peter Bulkly was, let him read his Judicious and Savory Treatise of the Gospel Covenant, which has passed through several Editions, with much Acceptance among the People of God.” It must be added that “he had a competently good Stroke at Latin Poetry; and even in his Old Age, affected sometimes to improve it. Many of his Composure are yet in our Hands.”

It is pleasant to believe that some of the qualities of this distinguished scholar and Christian were reproduced in the descendant whose life we are studying. At his death in 1659 he was succeeded, as was mentioned, by his son Edward, whose daughter became the wife of the Reverend Joseph Emerson, the minister of Mendon who, when that village was destroyed by the Indians, removed to Concord, where he died in the year 1680. This is the first connection of the name of Emerson with Concord, with which it has since been so long associated.

Edward Emerson, son of the first and father of the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, though not a minister, was the next thing to being one, for on his gravestone he is thus recorded: “Mr. Edward Emerson, sometime Deacon of the first church in Newbury.” He was noted for the virtue of patience, and it is a family tradition that he never complained but once, when he said mildly to his daughter that her dumplings were somewhat harder than needful,— “but not often.” This same Edward was the only break in the line of ministers who descended from Thomas of Ipswich. He is remembered in the family as having been “a merchant in Charlestown.”

Their son, the second Reverend Joseph Emerson, Minister of Malden for nearly half a century, married Mary, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Moody, — Father Moody, — of York, Maine. Three of his sons were ministers, and one of these, William, was pastor of the church at Concord at the period of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

As the successive generations narrow down towards the individual whose life we are recalling, the character of his progenitors becomes more and more important and interesting to the biographer. The Reverend William Emerson, grandfather of Ralph Waldo, was an excellent and popular preacher and an ardent and devoted patriot. He preached resistance to tyrants from the pulpit, he encouraged his townsmen and their allies to make a stand against the soldiers who had marched upon their peaceful village, and would have taken a part in the Fight at the Bridge, which he saw from his own house, had not the friends around him prevented his quitting his doorstep. He left Concord in 1776 to join the army at Ticonderoga, was taken with fever, was advised to return to Concord and set out on the journey, but died on his way. His wife was the daughter of the Reverend Daniel Bliss, his predecessor in the pulpit at Concord. This was another very noticeable personage in the line of Emerson’s ancestors. His merits and abilities are described at great length on his tombstone in the Concord burial-ground. There is no reason to doubt that his epitaph was composed by one who knew him well. But the slabs which record the excellences of our New England clergymen of the past generations are so crowded with virtues that the reader can hardly help inquiring whether a sharp bargain was not driven with the stonecutter, like that which the good Vicar of Wakefield arranged with the portrait-painter. He was to represent Sophia as a shepherdess, it will be remembered, with as many sheep as he could afford to put in for nothing.

William Emerson left four children, a son bearing the same name, and three daughters, one of whom, Mary Moody Emerson, is well remembered as pictured for us by her nephew, Ralph Waldo. His widow became the wife of the Reverend Ezra Ripley, Doctor of Divinity, and his successor as Minister at Concord.

The Reverend William Emerson, the second of that name and profession, and the father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in the year 1769, and graduated at Harvard College in 1789. He was settled as Minister in the town of Harvard in the year 1792, and in 1799 became Minister of the First Church in Boston. In 1796 he married Ruth Haskins of Boston. He died in 1811, leaving five sons, of whom Ralph Waldo was the second.

The interest which attaches itself to the immediate parentage of a man like Emerson leads us to inquire particularly about the characteristics of the Reverend William Emerson so far as we can learn them from his own writings and from the record of his contemporaries.

The Reverend Dr. Sprague’s valuable and well-known work, “Annals of the American Pulpit,” contains three letters from which we learn some of his leading characteristics. Dr. Pierce of Brookline, the faithful chronicler of his time, speaks of his pulpit talents as extraordinary, but thinks there was not a perfect sympathy between him and the people of the quiet little town of Harvard, while he was highly acceptable in the pulpits of the metropolis. In personal appearance he was attractive; his voice was melodious, his utterance distinct, his manner agreeable. “He was a faithful and generous friend and knew how to forgive an enemy. — In his theological views perhaps he went farther on the liberal side than most of his brethren with whom he was associated. — He was, however, perfectly tolerant towards those who differed from him most widely.”

Dr. Charles Lowell, another brother minister, says of him, “Mr. Emerson was a handsome man, rather tall, with a fair complexion, his cheeks slightly tinted, his motions easy, graceful, and gentlemanlike, his manners bland and pleasant. He was an honest man, and expressed himself decidedly and emphatically, but never bluntly or vulgarly. — Mr. Emerson was a man of good sense. His conversation was edifying and useful; never foolish or undignified. — In his theological opinions he was, to say the least, far from having any sympathy with Calvinism. I have not supposed that he was, like Dr. Freeman, a Humanitarian, though he may have been so.”

There was no honester chronicler than our clerical Pepys, good, hearty, sweet-souled, fact-loving Dr. John Pierce of Brookline, who knew the dates of birth and death of the graduates of Harvard, starred and unstarred, better, one is tempted to say (Hibernice), than they did themselves. There was not a nobler gentleman in charge of any Boston parish than Dr. Charles Lowell. But after the pulpit has said what it thinks of the pulpit, it is well to listen to what the pews have to say about it.

This is what the late Mr. George Ticknor said in an article in the
“Christian Examiner” for September, 1849.

“Mr. Emerson, transplanted to the First Church in Boston six years before Mr. Buckminster’s settlement, possessed, on the contrary, a graceful and dignified style of speaking, which was by no means without its attraction, but he lacked the fervor that could rouse the masses, and the original resources that could command the few.”

As to his religious beliefs, Emerson writes to Dr. Sprague as follows: “I did not find in any manuscript or printed sermons that I looked at, any very explicit statement of opinion on the question between Calvinists and Socinians. He inclines obviously to what is ethical and universal in Christianity; very little to the personal and historical. — I think I observe in his writings, as in the writings of Unitarians down to a recent date, a studied reserve on the subject of the nature and offices of Jesus. They had not made up their own minds on it. It was a mystery to them, and they let it remain so.”

Mr. William Emerson left, published, fifteen Sermons and Discourses, an Oration pronounced at Boston on the Fourth of July, 1802, a Collection of Psalms and Hymns, an Historical Sketch of the First Church in Boston, besides his contributions to the “Monthly Anthology,” of which he was the Editor.

Ruth Haskins, the wife of William and the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, is spoken of by the late Dr. Frothingham, in an article in the “Christian Examiner,” as a woman “of great patience and fortitude, of the serenest trust in God, of a discerning spirit, and a most courteous bearing, one who knew how to guide the affairs of her own house, as long as she was responsible for that, with the sweetest authority, and knew how to give the least trouble and the greatest happiness after that authority was resigned. Both her mind and her character were of a superior order, and they set their stamp upon manners of peculiar softness and natural grace and quiet dignity. Her sensible and kindly speech was always as good as the best instruction; her smile, though it was ever ready, was a reward.”

The Reverend Dr. Furness of Philadelphia, who grew up with her son, says, “Waldo bore a strong resemblance to his father; the other children resembled their mother.”

Such was the descent of Ralph Waldo Emerson. If the ideas of parents survive as impressions or tendencies in their descendants, no man had a better right to an inheritance of theological instincts than this representative of a long line of ministers. The same trains of thought and feeling might naturally gain in force from another association of near family relationship, though not of blood. After the death of the first William Emerson, the Concord minister, his widow, Mr. Emerson’s grandmother, married, as has been mentioned, his successor, Dr. Ezra Ripley. The grandson spent much time in the family of Dr. Ripley, whose character he has drawn with exquisite felicity in a sketch read before The Social Circle of Concord, and published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for November, 1883. Mr. Emerson says of him: “He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America…. The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley.” It would be hard to find a more perfect sketch of character than Mr. Emerson’s living picture of Dr. Ripley. I myself remember him as a comely little old gentleman, but he was not so communicative in a strange household as his clerical brethren, smiling John Foster of Brighton and chatty Jonathan Homer of Newton. Mr. Emerson says, “He was a natural gentleman; no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited; his nature social, his house open to all men. — His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends were his study, and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door.” How like Goldsmith’s good Dr. Primrose! I do not know any writing of Mr. Emerson which brings out more fully his sense of humor, — of the picturesque in character, — and as a piece of composition, continuous, fluid, transparent, with a playful ripple here and there, it is admirable and delightful.

Another of his early companionships must have exercised a still more powerful influence on his character, — that of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. He gave an account of her in a paper read before the Woman’s Club several years ago, and published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for December, 1883. Far more of Mr. Emerson is to be found in this aunt of his than in any other of his relations in the ascending series, with whose history we are acquainted. Her story is an interesting one, but for that I must refer the reader to the article mentioned. Her character and intellectual traits are what we are most concerned with. “Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Herder, Locke, Madam De Staël, Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read in her manuscript, or recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that Milton and Young had a religious authority in their minds, and nowise the slight merely entertaining quality of modern bards. And Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, — how venerable and organic as Nature they are in her mind!”

There are many sentences cited by Mr. Emerson which remind us very strongly of his own writings. Such a passage as the following might have come from his Essay, “Nature,” but it was written when her nephew was only four years old.

“Malden, 1807, September. — The rapture of feeling I would part from for days devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its Author, — feels it is related to Him more than by any ties of creation, — it exults, too fondly, perhaps, for a state of trial. But in dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow, or appear to glow, with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the spirits with wonder and curiosity, — then, however awed, who can fear?”— “A few pulsations of created beings, a few successions of acts, a few lamps held out in the firmament, enable us to talk of Time, make epochs, write histories, — to do more, — to date the revelations of God to man. But these lamps are held to measure out some of the moments of eternity, to divide the history of God’s operations in the birth and death of nations, of worlds. It is a goodly name for our notions of breathing, suffering, enjoying, acting. We personify it. We call it by every name of fleeting, dreaming, vaporing imagery. Yet it is nothing. We exist in eternity. Dissolve the body and the night is gone; the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approval of God.”

Miss Mary Emerson showed something of the same feeling towards natural science which may be noted in her nephews Waldo and Charles. After speaking of “the poor old earth’s chaotic state, brought so near in its long and gloomy transmutings by the geologist,” she says: —

“Yet its youthful charms, as decked by the hand of Moses’ Cosmogony, will linger about the heart, while Poetry succumbs to science.”— “And the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite, far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry; its oceans, when beating the symbols of countless ages, than when covered with cargoes of war and oppression. How grand its preparation for souls, souls who were to feel the Divinity, before Science had dissected the emotions and applied its steely analysis to that state of being which recognizes neither psychology nor element.”— “Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness…. Scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do. Sublimity of character must come from sublimity of motive.”

So far as hereditary and family influences can account for the character and intellect of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we could hardly ask for a better inborn inheritance, or better counsels and examples.

* * * * *

Having traced some of the distinguishing traits which belong by descent to Mr. Emerson to those who were before him, it is interesting to note how far they showed themselves in those of his own generation, his brothers. Of these I will mention two, one of whom I knew personally.

Edward Bliss Emerson, who graduated at Harvard College in 1824, three years after Ralph Waldo, held the first place in his class. He began the study of the law with Daniel Webster, but overworked himself and suffered a temporary disturbance of his reason. After this he made another attempt, but found his health unequal to the task and exiled himself to Porto Rico, where, in 1834, he died. Two poems preserve his memory, one that of Ralph Waldo, in which he addresses his memory, —

“Ah, brother of the brief but blazing star,”

the other his own “Last Farewell,” written in 1832, whilst sailing out of Boston Harbor. The lines are unaffected and very touching, full of that deep affection which united the brothers in the closest intimacy, and of the tenderest love for the mother whom he was leaving to see no more.

I had in my early youth a key furnished me to some of the leading traits which were in due time to develop themselves in Emerson’s character and intelligence. As on the wall of some great artist’s studio one may find unfinished sketches which he recognizes as the first growing conceptions of pictures painted in after years, so we see that Nature often sketches, as it were, a living portrait, which she leaves in its rudimentary condition, perhaps for the reason that earth has no colors which can worthily fill in an outline too perfect for humanity. The sketch is left in its consummate incompleteness because this mortal life is not rich enough to carry out the Divine idea.

Such an unfinished but unmatched outline is that which I find in the long portrait-gallery of memory, recalled by the name of Charles Chauncy Emerson. Save for a few brief glimpses of another, almost lost among my life’s early shadows, this youth was the most angelic adolescent my eyes ever beheld. Remembering what well-filtered blood it was that ran in the veins of the race from which he was descended, those who knew him in life might well say with Dryden, —

 ”If by traduction came thy mind
  Our wonder is the less to find
  A soul so charming from a stock so good.”

His image is with me in its immortal youth as when, almost fifty years ago, I spoke of him in these lines, which I may venture to quote from myself, since others have quoted them before me.

 Thou calm, chaste scholar! I can see thee now,
  The first young laurels on thy pallid brow,
  O’er thy slight figure floating lightly down
  In graceful folds the academic gown,
  On thy curled lip the classic lines that taught
  How nice the mind that sculptured them with thought,
  And triumph glistening in the clear blue eye,
  Too bright to live, — but O, too fair to die.

Being about seven years younger than Waldo, he must have received much of his intellectual and moral guidance at his elder brother’s hands. I told the story at a meeting of our Historical Society of Charles Emerson’s coming into my study, — this was probably in 1826 or 1827, — taking up Hazlitt’s “British Poets” and turning at once to a poem of Marvell’s, which he read with his entrancing voice and manner. The influence of this poet is plain to every reader in some of Emerson’s poems, and Charles’ liking for him was very probably caught from Waldo. When Charles was nearly through college, a periodical called “The Harvard Register” was published by students and recent graduates. Three articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have the titles “Conversation,” “Friendship.” His quotations are from Horace and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take this as an example: —

“Men and mind are my studies. I need no observatory high in air to aid my perceptions or enlarge my prospect. I do not want a costly apparatus to give pomp to my pursuit or to disguise its inutility. I do not desire to travel and see foreign lands and learn all knowledge and speak with all tongues, before I am prepared for my employment. I have merely to go out of my door; nay, I may stay at home at my chambers, and I shall have enough to do and enjoy.”

The feeling of this sentence shows itself constantly in Emerson’s poems. He finds his inspiration in the objects about him, the forest in which he walks; the sheet of water which the hermit of a couple of seasons made famous; the lazy Musketaquid; the titmouse that mocked his weakness in the bitter cold winter’s day; the mountain that rose in the horizon; the lofty pines; the lowly flowers. All talked with him as brothers and sisters, and he with them as of his own household.

The same lofty idea of friendship which we find in the man in his maturity, we recognize in one of the Essays of the youth.

“All men of gifted intellect and fine genius,” says Charles Emerson, “must entertain a noble idea of friendship. Our reverence we are constrained to yield where it is due, — to rank, merit, talents. But our affections we give not thus easily.

‘The hand of Douglas is his own.’”

— “I am willing to lose an hour in gossip with persons whom good men hold cheap. All this I will do out of regard to the decent conventions of polite life. But my friends I must know, and, knowing, I must love. There must be a daily beauty in their life that shall secure my constant attachment. I cannot stand upon the footing of ordinary acquaintance. Friendship is aristocratical — the affections which are prostituted to every suitor I will not accept.”

Here are glimpses of what the youth was to be, of what the man who long outlived him became. Here is the dignity which commands reverence, — a dignity which, with all Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sweetness of manner and expression, rose almost to majesty in his serene presence. There was something about Charles Emerson which lifted those he was with into a lofty and pure region of thought and feeling. A vulgar soul stood abashed in his presence. I could never think of him in the presence of such, listening to a paltry sentiment or witnessing a mean action without recalling Milton’s line,

“Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed,”

and thinking how he might well have been taken for a celestial messenger.

No doubt there is something of idealization in all these reminiscences, and of that exaggeration which belongs to the laudator temporis acti. But Charles Emerson was idolized in his own time by many in college and out of college. George Stillman Hillard was his rival. Neck and neck they ran the race for the enviable position of first scholar in the class of 1828, and when Hillard was announced as having the first part assigned to him, the excitement within the college walls, and to some extent outside of them, was like that when the telegraph proclaims the result of a Presidential election, — or the Winner of the Derby. But Hillard honestly admired his brilliant rival. “Who has a part with * * * * at this next exhibition?” I asked him one day, as I met him in the college yard. “* * * * * the Post,” answered Hillard. “Why call him the Post?” said I. “He is a wooden creature,” said Hillard. “Hear him and Charles Emerson translating from the Latin Domus tota inflammata erat. The Post will render the words, ‘The whole house was on fire.’ Charles Emerson will translate the sentence ‘The entire edifice was wrapped in flames.’” It was natural enough that a young admirer should prefer the Bernini drapery of Charles Emerson’s version to the simple nudity of “the Post’s” rendering.

* * * * *

The nest is made ready long beforehand for the bird which is to be bred in it and to fly from it. The intellectual atmosphere into which a scholar is born, and from which he draws the breath of his early mental life, must be studied if we would hope to understand him thoroughly.

When the present century began, the elements, thrown into confusion by the long struggle for Independence, had not had time to arrange themselves in new combinations. The active intellects of the country had found enough to keep them busy in creating and organizing a new order of political and social life. Whatever purely literary talent existed was as yet in the nebular condition, a diffused luminous spot here and there, waiting to form centres of condensation.

Such a nebular spot had been brightening in and about Boston for a number of years, when, in the year 1804, a small cluster of names became visible as representing a modest constellation of literary luminaries: John Thornton Kirkland, afterwards President of Harvard University; Joseph Stevens Buckminster; John Sylvester John Gardiner; William Tudor; Samuel Cooper Thacher; William Emerson. These were the chief stars of the new cluster, and their light reached the world, or a small part of it, as reflected from the pages of “The Monthly Anthology,” which very soon came under the editorship of the Reverend William Emerson.

The father of Ralph Waldo Emerson may be judged of in good measure by the associates with whom he was thus connected. A brief sketch of these friends and fellow-workers of his may not be out of place, for these men made the local sphere of thought into which Ralph Waldo Emerson was born.

John Thornton Kirkland should have been seen and heard as he is remembered by old graduates of Harvard, sitting in the ancient Presidential Chair, on Commencement Day, and calling in his penetrating but musical accents: “Expectatur Oratio in Lingua Latina” or “Vernacula,” if the “First Scholar” was about to deliver the English oration. It was a presence not to be forgotten. His “shining morning face” was round as a baby’s, and talked as pleasantly as his voice did, with smiles for accents and dimples for punctuation. Mr. Ticknor speaks of his sermons as “full of intellectual wealth and practical wisdom, with sometimes a quaintness that bordered on humor.” It was of him that the story was always told, — it may be as old as the invention of printing, — that he threw his sermons into a barrel, where they went to pieces and got mixed up, and that when he was going to preach he fished out what he thought would be about enough for a sermon, and patched the leaves together as he best might. The Reverend Dr. Lowell says: “He always found the right piece, and that was better than almost any of his brethren could have found in what they had written with twice the labor.” Mr. Cabot, who knew all Emerson’s literary habits, says he used to fish out the number of leaves he wanted for a lecture in somewhat the same way. Emerson’s father, however, was very methodical, according to Dr. Lowell, and had “a place for everything, and everything in its place.” Dr. Kirkland left little to be remembered by, and like many of the most interesting personalities we have met with, has become a very thin ghost to the grandchildren of his contemporaries.

Joseph Stevens Buckminster was the pulpit darling of his day, in Boston. The beauty of his person, the perfection of his oratory, the finish of his style, added to the sweetness of his character, made him one of those living idols which seem to be as necessary to Protestantism as images and pictures are to Romanism.

John Sylvester John Gardiner, once a pupil of the famous Dr. Parr, was then the leading Episcopal clergyman of Boston. Him I reconstruct from scattered hints I have met with as a scholarly, social man, with a sanguine temperament and the cheerful ways of a wholesome English parson, blest with a good constitution and a comfortable benefice. Mild Orthodoxy, ripened in Unitarian sunshine, is a very agreeable aspect of Christianity, and none was readier than Dr. Gardiner, if the voice of tradition may be trusted, to fraternize with his brothers of the liberal persuasion, and to make common cause with them in all that related to the interests of learning.

William Tudor was a chief connecting link between the period of the “Monthly Anthology,” and that of the “North American Review,” for he was a frequent contributor to the first of these periodicals, and he was the founder of the second. Edward Everett characterizes him, in speaking of his “Letters on the Eastern States,” as a scholar and a gentleman, an impartial observer, a temperate champion, a liberal opponent, and a correct writer. Daniel Webster bore similar testimony to his talents and character.

Samuel Cooper Thacher was hardly twenty years old when the “Anthology” was founded, and died when he was only a little more than thirty. He contributed largely to that periodical, besides publishing various controversial sermons, and writing the “Memoir of Buckminster.”

There was no more brilliant circle than this in any of our cities. There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship. The “Anthology” was the literary precursor of the “North American Review,” and the theological herald of the “Christian Examiner.” Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity. It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of Laura Matilda’s sentimentalities. It talked about “the London Reviewers” with a kind of provincial deference. It printed articles with quite too much of the license of Swift and Prior for the Magazines of to-day. But it had opinions of its own, and would compare well enough with the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” to say nothing of “My Grandmother’s Review, the British.” A writer in the third volume (1806) says: “A taste for the belles lettres is rapidly spreading in our country. I believe that, fifty years ago, England had never seen a Miscellany or a Review so well conducted as our ‘Anthology,’ however superior such publications may now be in that kingdom.”

It is well worth one’s while to look over the volumes of the “Anthology” to see what our fathers and grandfathers were thinking about, and how they expressed themselves. The stiffness of Puritanism was pretty well relaxed when a Magazine conducted by clergymen could say that “The child,” — meaning the new periodical,— “shall not be destitute of the manners of a gentleman, nor a stranger to genteel amusements. He shall attend Theatres, Museums, Balls, and whatever polite diversions the town shall furnish.” The reader of the “Anthology” will find for his reward an improving discourse on “Ambition,” and a commendable schoolboy’s “theme” on “Inebriation.” He will learn something which may be for his advantage about the “Anjou Cabbage,” and may profit by a “Remedy for Asthma.” A controversy respecting the merits of Sir Richard Blackmore may prove too little exciting at the present time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle “Studiosus” addresses to “Alcander.” If the lines of “The Minstrel” who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from “The District of Main,” fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse “R.T. Paine, Jr., Esq.,” of tameness when he exclaims: —

 ”Rise Columbia, brave and free,
  Poise the globe and bound the sea!”

But the writers did not confine themselves to native or even to English literature, for there is a distinct mention of “Mr. Goethe’s new novel,” and an explicit reference to “Dante Aligheri, an Italian bard.” But let the smiling reader go a little farther and he will find Mr. Buckminster’s most interesting account of the destruction of Goldau. And in one of these same volumes he will find the article, by Dr. Jacob Bigelow, doubtless, which was the first hint of our rural cemeteries, and foreshadowed that new era in our underground civilization which is sweetening our atmospheric existence.

The late President Josiah Quincy, in his “History of the Boston Athenaeum,” pays a high tribute of respect to the memory and the labors of the gentlemen who founded that institution and conducted the “Anthology.” A literary journal had already been published in Boston, but very soon failed for want of patronage. An enterprising firm of publishers, “being desirous that the work should be continued, applied to the Reverend William Emerson, a clergyman of the place, distinguished for energy and literary taste; and by his exertions several gentlemen of Boston and its vicinity, conspicuous for talent and zealous for literature, were induced to engage in conducting the work, and for this purpose they formed themselves into a Society. This Society was not completely organized until the year 1805, when Dr. Gardiner was elected President, and William Emerson Vice-President. The Society thus formed maintained its existence with reputation for about six years, and issued ten octavo volumes from the press, constituting one of the most lasting and honorable monuments of the literature of the period, and may be considered as a true revival of polite learning in this country after that decay and neglect which resulted from the distractions of the Revolutionary War, and as forming an epoch in the intellectual history of the United States. Its records yet remain, an evidence that it was a pleasant, active, high-principled association of literary men, laboring harmoniously to elevate the literary standard of the time, and with a success which may well be regarded as remarkable, considering the little sympathy they received from the community, and the many difficulties with which they had to struggle.”

The publication of the “Anthology” began in 1804, when Mr. William Emerson was thirty-four years of age, and it ceased to be published in the year of his death, 1811. Ralph Waldo Emerson was eight years old at that time. His intellectual life began, we may say, while the somewhat obscure afterglow of the “Anthology” was in the western horizon of the New England sky.

The nebula which was to form a cluster about the “North American Review” did not take definite shape until 1815. There is no such memorial of the growth of American literature as is to be found in the first half century of that periodical. It is easy to find fault with it for uniform respectability and occasional dulness. But take the names of its contributors during its first fifty years from the literary record of that period, and we should have but a meagre list of mediocrities, saved from absolute poverty by the genius of two or three writers like Irving and Cooper. Strike out the names of Webster, Everett, Story, Sumner, and Cushing; of Bryant, Dana, Longfellow, and Lowell; of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, Sparks, and Bancroft; of Verplanck, Hillard, and Whipple; of Stuart and Robinson; of Norton, Palfrey, Peabody, and Bowen; and, lastly, that of Emerson himself, and how much American classic literature would be left for a new edition of “Miller’s Retrospect”?

These were the writers who helped to make the “North American Review” what it was during the period of Emerson’s youth and early manhood. These, and men like them, gave Boston its intellectual character. We may count as symbols the three hills of “this darling town of ours,” as Emerson called it, and say that each had its beacon. Civil liberty lighted the torch on one summit, religious freedom caught the flame and shone from the second, and the lamp of the scholar has burned steadily on the third from the days when John Cotton preached his first sermon to those in which we are living.

The social religious influences of the first part of the century must not be forgotten. The two high-caste religions of that day were white-handed Unitarianism and ruffled-shirt Episcopalianism. What called itself “society” was chiefly distributed between them. Within less than fifty years a social revolution has taken place which has somewhat changed the relation between these and other worshipping bodies. This movement is the general withdrawal of the native New Englanders of both sexes from domestic service. A large part of the “hired help,” — for the word servant was commonly repudiated, — worshipped, not with their employers, but at churches where few or no well-appointed carriages stood at the doors. The congregations that went chiefly from the drawing-room and those which were largely made up of dwellers in the culinary studio were naturally separated by a very distinct line of social cleavage. A certain exclusiveness and fastidiousness, not reminding us exactly of primitive Christianity, was the inevitable result. This must always be remembered in judging the men and women of that day and their immediate descendants, as much as the surviving prejudices of those whose parents were born subjects of King George in the days when loyalty to the crown was a virtue. The line of social separation was more marked, probably, in Boston, the headquarters of Unitarianism, than in the other large cities; and even at the present day our Jerusalem and Samaria, though they by no means refuse dealing with each other, do not exchange so many cards as they do checks and dollars. The exodus of those children of Israel from the house of bondage, as they chose to consider it, and their fusion with the mass of independent citizens, got rid of a class distinction which was felt even in the sanctuary. True religious equality is harder to establish than civil liberty. No man has done more for spiritual republicanism than Emerson, though he came from the daintiest sectarian circle of the time in the whole country.

Such were Emerson’s intellectual and moral parentage, nurture, and environment; such was the atmosphere in which he grew up from youth to manhood.

CHAPTER I. BIRTHPLACE. — BOYHOOD. — COLLEGE LIFE.

1803-1823. TO AET. 20.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 25th of May, 1803. He was the second of five sons; William, R.W., Edward Bliss, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles Chauncy. His birthplace and that of our other illustrious Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, were within a kite-string’s distance of each other. When the baby philosopher of the last century was carried from Milk Street through the narrow passage long known as Bishop’s Alley, now Hawley Street, he came out in Summer Street, very nearly opposite the spot where, at the beginning of this century, stood the parsonage of the First Church, the home of the Reverend William Emerson, its pastor, and the birthplace of his son, Ralph Waldo. The oblong quadrangle between Newbury, now Washington Street, Pond, now Bedford Street, Summer Street, and the open space called Church Green, where the New South Church was afterwards erected, is represented on Bonner’s maps of 1722 and 1769 as an almost blank area, not crossed or penetrated by a single passageway.

Even so late as less than half a century ago this region was still a most attractive little rus in urbe. The sunny gardens of the late Judge Charles Jackson and the late Mr. S.P. Gardner opened their flowers and ripened their fruits in the places now occupied by great warehouses and other massive edifices. The most aristocratic pears, the “Saint Michael,” the “Brown Bury,” found their natural homes in these sheltered enclosures. The fine old mansion of Judge William Prescott looked out upon these gardens. Some of us can well remember the window of his son’s, the historian’s, study, the light from which used every evening to glimmer through the leaves of the pear-trees while “The Conquest of Mexico” was achieving itself under difficulties hardly less formidable than those encountered by Cortes. It was a charmed region in which Emerson first drew his breath, and I am fortunate in having a communication from one who knew it and him longer than almost any other living person.

Mr. John Lowell Gardner, a college classmate and life-long friend of Mr. Emerson, has favored me with a letter which contains matters of interest concerning him never before given to the public. With his kind permission I have made some extracts and borrowed such facts as seemed especially worthy of note from his letter.

“I may be said to have known Emerson from the very beginning. A very low fence divided my father’s estate in Summer Street from the field in which I remember the old wooden parsonage to have existed, — but this field, when we were very young, was to be covered by Chauncy Place Church and by the brick houses on Summer Street. Where the family removed to I do not remember, but I always knew the boys, William, Ralph, and perhaps Edward, and I again associated with Ralph at the Latin School, where we were instructed by Master Gould from 1815 to 1817, entering College in the latter year.

“… I have no recollection of his relative rank as a scholar, but it was undoubtedly high, though not the highest. He never was idle or a lounger, nor did he ever engage in frivolous pursuits. I should say that his conduct was absolutely faultless. It was impossible that there should be any feeling about him but of regard and affection. He had then the same manner and courtly hesitation in addressing you that you have known in him since. Still, he was not prominent in the class, and, but for what all the world has since known of him, his would not have been a conspicuous figure to his classmates in recalling College days.

“The fact that we were almost the only Latin School fellows in the class, and the circumstance that he was slow during the Freshman year to form new acquaintances, brought us much together, and an intimacy arose which continued through our College life. We were in the habit of taking long strolls together, often stopping for repose at distant points, as at Mount Auburn, etc…. Emerson was not talkative; he never spoke for effect; his utterances were well weighed and very deliberately made, but there was a certain flash when he uttered anything that was more than usually worthy to be remembered. He was so universally amiable and complying that my evil spirit would sometimes instigate me to take advantage of his gentleness and forbearance, but nothing could disturb his equanimity. All that was wanting to render him an almost perfect character was a few harsher traits and perhaps more masculine vigor.

“On leaving College our paths in life were so remote from each other that we met very infrequently. He soon became, as it were, public property, and I was engrossed for many years in my commercial undertakings. All his course of life is known to many survivors. I am inclined to believe he had a most liberal spirit. I remember that some years since, when it was known that our classmate —— was reduced almost to absolute want by the war, in which he lost his two sons, Emerson exerted himself to raise a fund among his classmates for his relief, and, there being very few possible subscribers, made what I considered a noble contribution, and this you may be sure was not from any Southern sentiment on the part of Emerson. I send you herewith the two youthful productions of Emerson of which I spoke to you some time since.”

The first of these is a prose Essay of four pages, written for a discussion in which the Professions of Divinity, Medicine, and Law were to be weighed against each other. Emerson had the Lawyer’s side to advocate. It is a fair and sensible paper, not of special originality or brilliancy. His opening paragraph is worth citing, as showing the same instinct for truth which displayed itself in all his after writings and the conduct of his life.

“It is usual in advocating a favorite subject to appropriate all possible excellence, and endeavor to concentrate every doubtful auxiliary, that we may fortify to the utmost the theme of our attention. Such a design should be utterly disdained, except as far as is consistent with fairness; and the sophistry of weak arguments being abandoned, a bold appeal should be made to the heart, for the tribute of honest conviction, with regard to the merits of the subject.”

From many boys this might sound like well-meaning commonplace, but in the history of Mr. Emerson’s life that “bold appeal to the heart,” that “tribute of honest conviction,” were made eloquent and real. The boy meant it when he said it. To carry out his law of sincerity and self-trust the man had to sacrifice much that was dear to him, but he did not flinch from his early principles.

It must not be supposed that the blameless youth was an ascetic in his
College days. The other old manuscript Mr. Gardner sends me is marked
“‘Song for Knights of Square Table,’ R.W.E.”

There are twelve verses of this song, with a chorus of two lines. The Muses and all the deities, not forgetting Bacchus, were duly invited to the festival.

 ”Let the doors of Olympus be open for all
  To descend and make merry in Chivalry’s hall.”

* * * * *

Mr. Sanborn has kindly related to me several circumstances told him by
Emerson about his early years.

The parsonage was situated at the corner of Summer and what is now Chauncy streets. It had a yard, and an orchard which Emerson said was as large as Dr. Ripley’s, which might have been some two or three acres. Afterwards there was a brick house looking on Summer Street, in which Emerson the father lived. It was separated, Emerson said, by a brick wall from a garden in which pears grew (a fact a boy is likely to remember). Master Ralph Waldo used to sit on this wall, — but we cannot believe he ever got off it on the wrong side, unless politely asked to do so. On the occasion of some alarm the little boy was carried in his nightgown to a neighboring house.

After Reverend William Emerson’s death Mrs. Emerson removed to a house in Beacon Street, where the Athenaeum Building now stands. She kept some boarders, — among them Lemuel Shaw, afterwards Chief Justice of the State of Massachusetts. It was but a short distance to the Common, and Waldo and Charles used to drive their mother’s cow there to pasture.

* * * * *

The Reverend Doctor Rufus Ellis, the much respected living successor of William Emerson as Minister of the First Church, says that R.W. Emerson must have been born in the old parsonage, as his father (who died when he was eight years old) lived but a very short time in “the new parsonage,” which was, doubtless, the “brick house” above referred to.

* * * * *

We get a few glimpses of the boy from other sources. Mr. Cooke tells us that he entered the public grammar school at the age of eight years, and soon afterwards the Latin School. At the age of eleven he was turning Virgil into very readable English heroics. He loved the study of Greek; was fond of reading history and given to the frequent writing of verses. But he thinks “the idle books under the bench at the Latin School” were as profitable to him as his regular studies.

Another glimpse of him is that given us by Mr. Ireland from the “Boyhood Memories” of Rufus Dawes. His old schoolmate speaks of him as “a spiritual-looking boy in blue nankeen, who seems to be about ten years old, — whose image more than any other is still deeply stamped upon my mind, as I then saw him and loved him, I knew not why, and thought him so angelic and remarkable.” That “blue nankeen” sounds strangely, it may be, to the readers of this later generation, but in the first quarter of the century blue and yellow or buff-colored cotton from China were a common summer clothing of children. The places where the factories and streets of the cities of Lowell and Lawrence were to rise were then open fields and farms. My recollection is that we did not think very highly of ourselves when we were in blue nankeen, — a dull-colored fabric, too nearly of the complexion of the slates on which we did our ciphering.

Emerson was not particularly distinguished in College. Having a near connection in the same class as he, and being, as a Cambridge boy, generally familiar with the names of the more noted young men in College from the year when George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, and Francis William Winthrop graduated until after I myself left College, I might have expected to hear something of a young man who afterwards became one of the great writers of his time. I do not recollect hearing of him except as keeping school for a short time in Cambridge, before he settled as a minister. His classmate, Mr. Josiah Quincy, writes thus of his college days: —

“Two only of my classmates can be fairly said to have got into history, although one of them, Charles W. Upham [the connection of mine referred to above] has written history very acceptably. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert W. Barnwell, for widely different reasons, have caused their names to be known to well-informed Americans. Of Emerson, I regret to say, there are few notices in my journals. Here is the sort of way in which I speak of the man who was to make so profound an impression upon the thought of his time. ‘I went to the chapel to hear Emerson’s dissertation: a very good one, but rather too long to give much pleasure to the hearers.’ The fault, I suspect, was in the hearers; and another fact which I have mentioned goes to confirm this belief. It seems that Emerson accepted the duty of delivering the Poem on Class Day, after seven others had been asked who positively, refused. So it appears that, in the opinion of this critical class, the author of the ‘Woodnotes’ and the ‘Humble Bee’ ranked about eighth in poetical ability. It can only be because the works of the other five [seven] have been ‘heroically unwritten’ that a different impression has come to prevail in the outside world. But if, according to the measurement of undergraduates, Emerson’s ability as a poet was not conspicuous, it must also be admitted that, in the judgment of persons old enough to know better, he was not credited with that mastery of weighty prose which the world has since accorded him. In our senior year the higher classes competed for the Boylston prizes for English composition. Emerson and I sent in our essays with the rest and were fortunate enough to take the two prizes; but — Alas for the infallibility of academic decisions! Emerson received the second prize. I was of course much pleased with the award of this intelligent committee, and should have been still more gratified had they mentioned that the man who was to be the most original and influential writer born in America was my unsuccessful competitor. But Emerson, incubating over deeper matters than were dreamt of in the established philosophy of elegant letters, seems to have given no sign of the power that was fashioning itself for leadership in a new time. He was quiet, unobtrusive, and only a fair scholar according to the standard of the College authorities. And this is really all I have to say about my most distinguished classmate.”

Barnwell, the first scholar in the class, delivered the Valedictory Oration, and Emerson the Poem. Neither of these performances was highly spoken of by Mr. Quincy.

I was surprised to find by one of the old Catalogues that Emerson roomed during a part of his College course with a young man whom I well remember, J.G.K. Gourdin. The two Gourdins, Robert and John Gaillard Keith, were dashing young fellows as I recollect them, belonging to Charleston, South Carolina. The “Southerners” were the reigning College elegans of that time, the merveilleux, the mirliflores, of their day. Their swallow-tail coats tapered to an arrow-point angle, and the prints of their little delicate calfskin boots in the snow were objects of great admiration to the village boys of the period. I cannot help wondering what brought Emerson and the showy, fascinating John Gourdin together as room-mates.

CHAPTER II. 1823-1828. AET. 20-25.

Extract from a Letter to a Classmate. — School-Teaching. — Study of Divinity.— “Approbated” to Preach. — Visit to the South. — Preaching in Various Places.

We get a few brief glimpses of Emerson during the years following his graduation. He writes in 1823 to a classmate who had gone from Harvard to Andover: —

“I am delighted to hear there is such a profound studying of German and Hebrew, Parkhurst and Jahn, and such other names as the memory aches to think of, on foot at Andover. Meantime, Unitarianism will not hide her honors; as many hard names are taken, and as much theological mischief is planned, at Cambridge as at Andover. By the time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie.”

“You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city needs the excitement and impulse of literary example. The sight of broad vellum-bound quartos, the very mention of Greek and German names, the glimpse of a dusty, tugging scholar, will wake you up to emulation for a month.”

After leaving College, and while studying Divinity, Emerson employed a part of his time in giving instruction in several places successively.

Emerson’s older brother William was teaching in Boston, and Ralph Waldo, after graduating, joined him in that occupation. In the year 1825 or 1826, he taught school also in Chelmsford, a town of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, a part of which helped to constitute the city of Lowell. One of his pupils in that school, the Honorable Josiah Gardiner Abbott, has favored me with the following account of his recollections: —

The school of which Mr. Emerson had the charge was an old-fashioned country “Academy.” Mr. Emerson was probably studying for the ministry while teaching there. Judge Abbott remembers the impression he made on the boys. He was very grave, quiet, and very impressive in his appearance. There was something engaging, almost fascinating, about him; he was never harsh or severe, always perfectly self-controlled, never punished except with words, but exercised complete command over the boys. His old pupil recalls the stately, measured way in which, for some offence the little boy had committed, he turned on him, saying only these two words: “Oh, sad!” That was enough, for he had the faculty of making the boys love him. One of his modes of instruction was to give the boys a piece of reading to carry home with them, — from some book like Plutarch’s Lives, — and the next day to examine them and find out how much they retained from their reading. Judge Abbott remembers a peculiar look in his eyes, as if he saw something beyond what seemed to be in the field of vision. The whole impression left on this pupil’s mind was such as no other teacher had ever produced upon him.

Mr. Emerson also kept a school for a short time at Cambridge, and among his pupils was Mr. John Holmes. His impressions seem to be very much like those of Judge Abbott.

My brother speaks of Mr. Emerson thus: —

“Calm, as not doubting the virtue residing in his sceptre. Rather stern in his very infrequent rebukes. Not inclined to win boys by a surface amiability, but kindly in explanation or advice. Every inch a king in his dominion. Looking back, he seems to me rather like a captive philosopher set to tending flocks; resigned to his destiny, but not amused with its incongruities. He once recommended the use of rhyme as a cohesive for historical items.”

In 1823, two years after graduating, Emerson began studying for the ministry. He studied under the direction of Dr. Charming, attending some of the lectures in the Divinity School at Cambridge, though not enrolled as one of its regular students.

The teachings of that day were such as would now be called “old-fashioned Unitarianism.” But no creed can be held to be a finality. From Edwards to Mayhew, from Mayhew to Channing, from Channing to Emerson, the passage is like that which leads from the highest lock of a canal to the ocean level. It is impossible for human nature to remain permanently shut up in the highest lock of Calvinism. If the gates are not opened, the mere leakage of belief or unbelief will before long fill the next compartment, and the freight of doctrine finds itself on the lower level of Arminianism, or Pelagianism, or even subsides to Arianism. From this level to that of Unitarianism the outlet is freer, and the subsidence more rapid. And from Unitarianism to Christian Theism, the passage is largely open for such as cannot accept the evidence of the supernatural in the history of the church.

There were many shades of belief in the liberal churches. If De Tocqueville’s account of Unitarian preaching in Boston at the time of his visit is true, the Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau would have preached acceptably in some of our pulpits. In fact, the good Vicar might have been thought too conservative by some of our unharnessed theologians.

At the period when Emerson reached manhood, Unitarianism was the dominating form of belief in the more highly educated classes of both of the two great New England centres, the town of Boston and the University at Cambridge. President Kirkland was at the head of the College, Henry Ware was Professor of Theology, Andrews Norton of Sacred Literature, followed in 1830 by John Gorham Palfrey in the same office. James Freeman, Charles Lowell, and William Ellery Channing were preaching in Boston. I have mentioned already as a simple fact of local history, that the more exclusive social circles of Boston and Cambridge were chiefly connected with the Unitarian or Episcopalian churches. A Cambridge graduate of ambition and ability found an opening far from undesirable in a worldly point of view, in a profession which he was led to choose by higher motives. It was in the Unitarian pulpit that the brilliant talents of Buckminster and Everett had found a noble eminence from which their light could shine before men.

Descended from a long line of ministers, a man of spiritual nature, a reader of Plato, of Augustine, of Jeremy Taylor, full of hope for his fellow-men, and longing to be of use to them, conscious, undoubtedly, of a growing power of thought, it was natural that Emerson should turn from the task of a school-master to the higher office of a preacher. It is hard to conceive of Emerson in either of the other so-called learned professions. His devotion to truth for its own sake and his feeling about science would have kept him out of both those dusty highways. His brother William had previously begun the study of Divinity, but found his mind beset with doubts and difficulties, and had taken to the profession of Law. It is not unlikely that Mr. Emerson was more or less exercised with the same questionings. He has said, speaking of his instructors: “If they had examined me, they probably would not have let me preach at all.” His eyes had given him trouble, so that he had not taken notes of the lectures which he heard in the Divinity School, which accounted for his being excused from examination. In 1826, after three years’ study, he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. His health obliging him to seek a southern climate, he went in the following winter to South Carolina and Florida. During this absence he preached several times in Charleston and other places. On his return from the South he preached in New Bedford, in Northampton, in Concord, and in Boston. His attractiveness as a preacher, of which we shall have sufficient evidence in a following chapter, led to his being invited to share the duties of a much esteemed and honored city clergyman, and the next position in which we find him is that of a settled Minister in Boston.

CHAPTER III. 1828-1833. AET. 25-30.

Settled as Colleague of Rev. Henry Ware. — Married to Ellen Louisa Tucker. — Sermon at the Ordination of Rev. H.B. Goodwin. — His Pastoral and Other Labors. — Emerson and Father Taylor. — Death of Mrs. Emerson. — Difference of Opinion with some of his Parishioners. — Sermon Explaining his Views. — Resignation of his Pastorate.

On the 11th of March, 1829, Emerson was ordained as colleague with the Reverend Henry Ware, Minister of the Second Church in Boston. In September of the same year he was married to Miss Ellen Louisa Tucker. The resignation of his colleague soon after his settlement threw all the pastoral duties upon the young minister, who seems to have performed them diligently and acceptably. Mr. Conway gives the following brief account of his labors, and tells in the same connection a story of Father Taylor too good not to be repeated: —

“Emerson took an active interest in the public affairs of Boston. He was on its School Board, and was chosen chaplain of the State Senate. He invited the anti-slavery lecturers into his church, and helped philanthropists of other denominations in their work. Father Taylor [the Methodist preacher to the sailors], to whom Dickens gave an English fame, found in him his most important supporter when establishing the Seaman’s Mission in Boston. This was told me by Father Taylor himself in his old age. I happened to be in his company once, when he spoke rather sternly about my leaving the Methodist Church; but when I spoke of the part Emerson had in it, he softened at once, and spoke with emotion of his great friend. I have no doubt that if the good Father of Boston Seamen was proud of any personal thing, it was of the excellent answer he is said to have given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson. Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to” — [the place which a divine of Charles the Second’s day said it was not good manners to mention in church].— “‘It does look so,’ said Father Taylor, ‘but I am sure of one thing: if Emerson goes to’” — [that place]— “‘he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.’”

In 1830, Emerson took part in the services at the ordination of the Reverend H.B. Goodwin as Dr. Ripley’s colleague. His address on giving the right hand of fellowship was printed, but is not included among his collected works.

The fair prospects with which Emerson began his life as a settled minister were too soon darkened. In February, 1832, the wife of his youth, who had been for some time in failing health, died of consumption.

He had become troubled with doubts respecting a portion of his duties, and it was not in his nature to conceal these doubts from his people. On the 9th of September, 1832, he preached a sermon on the Lord’s Supper, in which he announced unreservedly his conscientious scruples against administering that ordinance, and the grounds upon which those scruples were founded. This discourse, as his only printed sermon, and as one which heralded a movement in New England theology which has never stopped from that day to this, deserves some special notice. The sermon is in no sense “Emersonian” except in its directness, its sweet temper, and outspoken honesty. He argues from his comparison of texts in a perfectly sober, old-fashioned way, as his ancestor Peter Bulkeley might have done. It happened to that worthy forefather of Emerson that upon his “pressing a piece of Charity disagreeable to the will of the Ruling Elder, there was occasioned an unhappy Discord in the Church of Concord; which yet was at last healed, by their calling in the help of a Council and the Ruling Elder’s Abdication.” So says Cotton Mather. Whether zeal had grown cooler or charity grown warmer in Emerson’s days we need not try to determine. The sermon was only a more formal declaration of views respecting the Lord’s Supper, which he had previously made known in a conference with some of the most active members of his church. As a committee of the parish reported resolutions radically differing from his opinion on the subject, he preached this sermon and at the same time resigned his office. There was no “discord,” there was no need of a “council.” Nothing could be more friendly, more truly Christian, than the manner in which Mr. Emerson expressed himself in this parting discourse. All the kindness of his nature warms it throughout. He details the differences of opinion which have existed in the church with regard to the ordinance. He then argues from the language of the Evangelists that it was not intended to be a permanent institution. He takes up the statement of Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians, which he thinks, all things considered, ought not to alter our opinion derived from the Evangelists. He does not think that we are to rely upon the opinions and practices of the primitive church. If that church believed the institution to be permanent, their belief does not settle the question for us. On every other subject, succeeding times have learned to form a judgment more in accordance with the spirit of Christianity than was the practice of the early ages.

“But, it is said, ‘Admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual.’ What harm doth it?”

He proceeds to give reasons which show it to be inexpedient to continue the observance of the rite. It was treating that as authoritative which, as he believed that he had shown from Scripture, was not so. It confused the idea of God by transferring the worship of Him to Christ. Christ is the Mediator only as the instructor of man. In the least petition to God “the soul stands alone with God, and Jesus is no more present to your mind than your brother or child.” Again: —

“The use of the elements, however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us. The day of formal religion is past, and we are to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The Jewish was a religion of forms; it was all body, it had no life, and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke and forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to that purpose; and with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance, — really a duty to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be acceptable to their understanding or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial?”

To these objections he adds the practical consideration that it brings those who do not partake of the communion service into an unfavorable relation with those who do.

The beautiful spirit of the man shows itself in all its noble sincerity in these words at the close of his argument: —

“Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. That is the end of my opposition, that I am not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the end of the world if it please men and please Heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces.”

He then announces that, as it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community that it is a part of a pastor’s duties to administer this rite, he is about to resign the office which had been confided to him.

This is the only sermon of Mr. Emerson’s ever published. It was impossible to hear or to read it without honoring the preacher for his truthfulness, and recognizing the force of his statement and reasoning. It was equally impossible that he could continue his ministrations over a congregation which held to the ordinance he wished to give up entirely. And thus it was, that with the most friendly feelings on both sides, Mr. Emerson left the pulpit of the Second Church and found himself obliged to make a beginning in a new career.

CHAPTER IV. 1833-1838. AET. 30-35.

Section 1. Visit to Europe. — On his Return preaches in Different Places. — Emerson in the Pulpit. — At Newton. — Fixes his Residence at Concord. — The Old Manse. — Lectures in Boston. — Lectures on Michael Angelo and on Milton published in the “North American Review.” — Beginning of the Correspondence with Carlyle. — Letters to the Rev. James Freeman Clarke. — Republication of “Sartor Resartus.”

Section 2. Emerson’s Second Marriage. — His New Residence in Concord. — Historical Address. — Course of Ten Lectures on English Literature delivered in Boston. — The Concord Battle Hymn. — Preaching in Concord and East Lexington. — Accounts of his Preaching by Several Hearers. — A Course of Lectures on the Nature and Ends of History. — Address on War. — Death of Edward Bliss Emerson. — Death of Charles Chauncy Emerson.

Section 3. Publication of “Nature.” — Outline of this Essay. — Its Reception. — Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Section 1. In the year 1833 Mr. Emerson visited Europe for the first time. A great change had come over his life, and he needed the relief which a corresponding change of outward circumstances might afford him. A brief account of this visit is prefixed to the volume entitled “English Traits.” He took a short tour, in which he visited Sicily, Italy, and France, and, crossing from Boulogne, landed at the Tower Stairs in London. He finds nothing in his Diary to publish concerning visits to places. But he saw a number of distinguished persons, of whom he gives pleasant accounts, so singularly different in tone from the rough caricatures in which Carlyle vented his spleen and caprice, that one marvels how the two men could have talked ten minutes together, or would wonder, had not one been as imperturbable as the other was explosive. Horatio Greenough and Walter Savage Landor are the chief persons he speaks of as having met upon the Continent. Of these he reports various opinions as delivered in conversation. He mentions incidentally that he visited Professor Amici, who showed him his microscopes “magnifying (it was said) two thousand diameters.” Emerson hardly knew his privilege; he may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral of Wilberforce. His impressions of each of the distinguished persons whom he visited should be looked at in the light of the general remark which, follows: —

“The young scholar fancies it happiness enough to live with people who can give an inside to the world; without reflecting that they are prisoners, too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost destructive of the best social power, as they do not have that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, however, found writers superior to their books, and I cling to my first belief that a strong head will dispose fast enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfaction of reality, the sense of having been met, and a larger horizon.”

Emerson carried a letter of introduction to a gentleman in Edinburgh, who, being unable to pay him all the desired attention, handed him over to Mr. Alexander Ireland, who has given a most interesting account of him as he appeared during that first visit to Europe. Mr. Ireland’s presentation of Emerson as he heard him in the Scotch pulpit shows that he was not less impressive and attractive before an audience of strangers than among his own countrymen and countrywomen: —

“On Sunday, the 18th of August, 1833, I heard him deliver a discourse in the Unitarian Chapel, Young Street, Edinburgh, and I remember distinctly the effect which it produced on his hearers. It is almost needless to say that nothing like it had ever been heard by them before, and many of them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all before them, — his audience becoming like clay in the hands of the potter. But I must confess that the pregnant thoughts and serene self-possession of the young Boston minister had a greater charm for me than all the rhetorical splendors of Chalmers. His voice was the sweetest, the most winning and penetrating of any I ever heard; nothing like it have I listened to since.

 ’That music in our hearts we bore
  Long after it was heard no more.’”

Mr. George Gilfillan speaks of “the solemnity of his manner, and the earnest thought pervading his discourse.”

As to the effect of his preaching on his American audiences, I find the following evidence in Mr. Cooke’s diligently gathered collections. Mr. Sanborn says: —

“His pulpit eloquence was singularly attractive, though by no means equally so to all persons. In 1829, before the two friends had met, Bronson Alcott heard him preach in Dr. Channing’s church on ‘The Universality of the Moral Sentiment,’ and was struck, as he said, with the youth of the preacher, the beauty of his elocution and the direct and sincere manner in which he addressed his hearers.”

Mr. Charles Congdon, of New Bedford, well known as a popular writer, gives the following account of Emerson’s preaching in his “Reminiscences.” I borrow the quotation from Mr. Conway: —

“One day there came into our pulpit the most gracious of mortals, with a face all benignity, who gave out the first hymn and made the first prayer as an angel might have read and prayed. Our choir was a pretty good one, but its best was coarse and discordant after Emerson’s voice. I remember of the sermon only that it had an indefinite charm of simplicity and wisdom, with occasional illustrations from nature, which were about the most delicate and dainty things of the kind which I had ever heard. I could understand them, if not the fresh philosophical novelties of the discourse.”

Everywhere Emerson seems to have pleased his audiences. The Reverend Dr. Morison, formerly the much respected Unitarian minister of New Bedford, writes to me as follows: —

“After Dr. Dewey left New Bedford, Mr. Emerson preached there several months, greatly to the satisfaction and delight of those who heard him. The Society would have been glad to settle him as their minister, and he would have accepted a call, had it not been for some difference of opinion, I think, in regard to the communion service. Judge Warren, who was particularly his friend, and had at that time a leading influence in the parish, with all his admiration for Mr. Emerson, did not think he could well be the pastor of a Christian church, and so the matter was settled between him and his friend, without any action by the Society.”

All this shows well enough that his preaching was eminently acceptable. But every one who has heard him lecture can form an idea of what he must have been as a preacher. In fact, we have all listened, probably, to many a passage from old sermons of his, — for he tells us he borrowed from those old sermons for his lectures, — without ever thinking of the pulpit from which they were first heard.

Among the stray glimpses we get of Emerson between the time when he quitted the pulpit of his church and that when he came before the public as a lecturer is this, which I owe to the kindness of Hon. Alexander H. Rice. In 1832 or 1833, probably the latter year, he, then a boy, with another boy, Thomas R. Gould, afterwards well known as a sculptor, being at the Episcopal church in Newton, found that Mr. Emerson was sitting in the pew behind them. Gould knew Mr. Emerson, and introduced young Rice to him, and they walked down the street together. As they went along, Emerson burst into a rhapsody over the Psalms of David, the sublimity of thought, and the poetic beauty of expression of which they are full, and spoke also with enthusiasm of the Te Deum as that grand old hymn which had come down through the ages, voicing the praises of generation after generation.

When they parted at the house of young Rice’s father, Emerson invited the boys to come and see him at the Allen farm, in the afternoon. They came to a piece of woods, and, as they entered it, took their hats off. “Boys,” said Emerson, “here we recognize the presence of the Universal Spirit. The breeze says to us in its own language, How d’ ye do? How d’ ye do? and we have already taken our hats off and are answering it with our own How d’ ye do? How d’ ye do? And all the waving branches of the trees, and all the flowers, and the field of corn yonder, and the singing brook, and the insect and the bird, — every living thing and things we call inanimate feel the same divine universal impulse while they join with us, and we with them, in the greeting which is the salutation of the Universal Spirit.”

We perceive the same feeling which pervades many of Emerson’s earlier Essays and much of his verse, in these long-treasured reminiscences of the poetical improvisation with which the two boys were thus unexpectedly favored. Governor Rice continues: —

“You know what a captivating charm there always was in Emerson’s presence, but I can never tell you how this line of thought then impressed a country boy. I do not remember anything about the remainder of that walk, nor of the after-incidents of that day, — I only remember that I went home wondering about that mystical dream of the Universal Spirit, and about what manner of man he was under whose influence I had for the first time come….

“The interview left impressions that led me into new channels of thought which have been a life-long pleasure to me, and, I doubt not, taught me somewhat how to distinguish between mere theological dogma and genuine religion in the soul.”

In the summer of 1834 Emerson became a resident of Concord, Massachusetts, the town of his forefathers, and the place destined to be his home for life. He first lived with his venerable connection, Dr. Ripley, in the dwelling made famous by Hawthorne as the “Old Manse.” It is an old-fashioned gambrel-roofed house, standing close to the scene of the Fight on the banks of the river. It was built for the Reverend William Emerson, his grandfather. In one of the rooms of this house Emerson wrote “Nature,” and in the same room, some years later, Hawthorne wrote “Mosses from an Old Manse.”

The place in which Emerson passed the greater part of his life well deserves a special notice. Concord might sit for its portrait as an ideal New England town. If wanting in the variety of surface which many other towns can boast of, it has at least a vision of the distant summits of Monadnock and Wachusett. It has fine old woods, and noble elms to give dignity to its open spaces. Beautiful ponds, as they modestly call themselves, — one of which, Walden, is as well known in our literature as Windermere in that of Old England, — lie quietly in their clean basins. And through the green meadows runs, or rather lounges, a gentle, unsalted stream, like an English river, licking its grassy margin with a sort of bovine placidity and contentment. This is the Musketaquid, or Meadow River, which, after being joined by the more restless Assabet, still keeps its temper and flows peacefully along by and through other towns, to lose itself in the broad Merrimac. The names of these rivers tell us that Concord has an Indian history, and there is evidence that it was a favorite residence of the race which preceded our own. The native tribes knew as well as the white settlers where were pleasant streams and sweet springs, where corn grew tall in the meadows and fish bred fast in the unpolluted waters.

The place thus favored by nature can show a record worthy of its physical attractions. Its settlement under the lead of Emerson’s ancestor, Peter Bulkeley, was effected in the midst of many difficulties, which the enterprise and self-sacrifice of that noble leader were successful in overcoming. On the banks of the Musketaquid was fired the first fatal shot of the “rebel” farmers. Emerson appeals to the Records of the town for two hundred years as illustrating the working of our American institutions and the character of the men of Concord: —

“If the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man’s capacity for self-government.”

What names that plain New England town reckons in the roll of its inhabitants! Stout Major Buttrick and his fellow-soldiers in the war of Independence, and their worthy successors in the war of Freedom; lawyers and statesmen like Samuel Hoar and his descendants; ministers like Peter Bulkeley, Daniel Bliss, and William Emerson; and men of genius such as the idealist and poet whose inspiration has kindled so many souls; as the romancer who has given an atmosphere to the hard outlines of our stern New England; as that unique individual, half college-graduate and half Algonquin, the Robinson Crusoe of Walden Pond, who carried out a school-boy whim to its full proportions, and told the story of Nature in undress as only one who had hidden in her bedroom could have told it. I need not lengthen the catalogue by speaking of the living, or mentioning the women whose names have added to its distinction. It has long been an intellectual centre such as no other country town of our own land, if of any other, could boast. Its groves, its streams, its houses, are haunted by undying memories, and its hillsides and hollows are made holy by the dust that is covered by their turf.

Such was the place which the advent of Emerson made the Delphi of New
England and the resort of many pilgrims from far-off regions.

On his return from Europe in the winter of 1833-4, Mr. Emerson began to appear before the public as a lecturer. His first subjects, “Water,” and the “Relation of Man to the Globe,” were hardly such as we should have expected from a scholar who had but a limited acquaintance with physical and physiological science. They were probably chosen as of a popular character, easily treated in such a way as to be intelligible and entertaining, and thus answering the purpose of introducing him pleasantly to the new career he was contemplating. These lectures are not included in his published works, nor were they ever published, so far as I know. He gave three lectures during the same winter, relating the experiences of his recent tour in Europe. Having made himself at home on the platform, he ventured upon subjects more congenial to his taste and habits of thought than some of those earlier topics. In 1834 he lectured on Michael Angelo, Milton, Luther, George Fox, and Edmund Burke. The first two of these lectures, though not included in his collected works, may be found in the “North American Review” for 1837 and 1838. The germ of many of the thoughts which he has expanded in prose and verse may be found in these Essays.

The Cosmos of the Ancient Greeks, the piu nel’ uno, “The Many in One,” appear in the Essay on Michael Angelo as they also appear in his “Nature.” The last thought takes wings to itself and rises in the little poem entitled “Each and All.” The “Rhodora,” another brief poem, finds itself foreshadowed in the inquiry, “What is Beauty?” and its answer, “This great Whole the understanding cannot embrace. Beauty may be felt. It may be produced. But it cannot be defined.” And throughout this Essay the feeling that truth and beauty and virtue are one, and that Nature is the symbol which typifies it to the soul, is the inspiring sentiment. Noscitur a sociis applies as well to a man’s dead as to his living companions. A young friend of mine in his college days wrote an essay on Plato. When he mentioned his subject to Mr. Emerson, he got the caution, long remembered, “When you strike at a King, you must kill him.” He himself knew well with what kings of thought to measure his own intelligence. What was grandest, loftiest, purest, in human character chiefly interested him. He rarely meddles with what is petty or ignoble. Like his “Humble Bee,” the “yellow-breeched philosopher,” whom he speaks of as

“Wiser far than human seer,”

and says of him,

 ”Aught unsavory or unclean
  Hath my insect never seen,”

he goes through the world where coarser minds find so much that is repulsive to dwell upon,

 ”Seeing only what is fair,
  Sipping only what is sweet.”

Why Emerson selected Michael Angelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the Essay.

“He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.”

Consciously or unconsciously men describe themselves in the characters they draw. One must have the mordant in his own personality or he will not take the color of his subject. He may force himself to picture that which he dislikes or even detests; but when he loves the character he delineates, it is his own, in some measure, at least, or one of which he feels that its possibilities and tendencies belong to himself. Let us try Emerson by this test in his “Essay on Milton:” —

“It is the prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour foremost of all men in literary history, and so (shall we not say?) of all men, in the power to inspire. Virtue goes out of him into others.” … “He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race.”— “Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity, — to draw after nature a life of man, exhibiting such a composition of grace, of strength, and of virtue as poet had not described nor hero lived. Human nature in these ages is indebted to him for its best portrait. Many philosophers in England, France, and Germany, have formally dedicated their study to this problem; and we think it impossible to recall one in those countries who communicates the same vibration of hope, of self-reverence, of piety, of delight in beauty, which the name of Milton awakes.”

Emerson had the same lofty aim as Milton, “To raise the idea of man;” he had “the power to inspire” in a preëminent degree. If ever a man communicated those vibrations he speaks of as characteristic of Milton, it was Emerson. In elevation, purity, nobility of nature, he is worthy to stand with the great poet and patriot, who began like him as a school-master, and ended as the teacher in a school-house which had for its walls the horizons of every region where English is spoken. The similarity of their characters might be followed by the curious into their fortunes. Both were turned away from the clerical office by a revolt of conscience against the beliefs required of them; both lost very dear objects of affection in early manhood, and mourned for them in tender and mellifluous threnodies. It would be easy to trace many parallelisms in their prose and poetry, but to have dared to name any man whom we have known in our common life with the seraphic singer of the Nativity and of Paradise is a tribute which seems to savor of audacity. It is hard to conceive of Emerson as “an expert swordsman” like Milton. It is impossible to think of him as an abusive controversialist as Milton was in his controversy with Salmasius. But though Emerson never betrayed it to the offence of others, he must have been conscious, like Milton, of “a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness,” which was as a shield about his inner nature. Charles Emerson, the younger brother, who was of the same type, expresses the feeling in his college essay on Friendship, where it is all summed up in the line he quotes: —

“The hand of Douglas is his own.”

It must be that in writing this Essay on Milton Emerson felt that he was listening in his own soul to whispers that seemed like echoes from that of the divine singer.

* * * * *

My friend, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, a life-long friend of Emerson, who understood him from the first, and was himself a great part in the movement of which Emerson, more than any other man, was the leader, has kindly allowed me to make use of the following letters: —

TO REV. JAMES F. CLARKE, LOUISVILLE, KY.

PLYMOUTH, MASS., March 12, 1834.

MY DEAR SIR, — As the day approaches when Mr. Lewis should leave Boston, I seize a few moments in a friendly house in the first of towns, to thank you heartily for your kindness in lending me the valued manuscripts which I return. The translations excited me much, and who can estimate the value of a good thought? I trust I am to learn much more from you hereafter of your German studies, and much I hope of your own. You asked in your note concerning Carlyle. My recollections of him are most pleasant, and I feel great confidence in his character. He understands and recognizes his mission. He is perfectly simple and affectionate in his manner, and frank, as he can well afford to be, in his communications. He expressed some impatience of his total solitude, and talked of Paris as a residence. I told him I hoped not; for I should always remember him with respect, meditating in the mountains of Nithsdale. He was cheered, as he ought to be, by learning that his papers were read with interest by young men unknown to him in this continent; and when I specified a piece which had attracted warm commendation from the New Jerusalem people here, his wife said that is always the way; whatever he has writ that he thinks has fallen dead, he hears of two or three years afterward. — He has many, many tokens of Goethe’s regard, miniatures, medals, and many letters. If you should go to Scotland one day, you would gratify him, yourself, and me, by your visit to Craigenputtock, in the parish of Dunscore, near Dumfries. He told me he had a book which he thought to publish, but was in the purpose of dividing into a series of articles for “Fraser’s Magazine.” I therefore subscribed for that book, which he calls the “Mud Magazine,” but have seen nothing of his workmanship in the two last numbers. The mail is going, so I shall finish my letter another time.

Your obliged friend and servant,

R. WALDO EMERSON.

CONCORD, MASS., November 25, 1834.

MY DEAR SIR, — Miss Peabody has kindly sent me your manuscript piece on Goethe and Carlyle. I have read it with great pleasure and a feeling of gratitude, at the same time with a serious regret that it was not published. I have forgotten what reason you assigned for not printing it; I cannot think of any sufficient one. Is it too late now? Why not change its form a little and annex to it some account of Carlyle’s later pieces, to wit: “Diderot,” and “Sartor Resartus.” The last is complete, and he has sent it to me in a stitched pamphlet. Whilst I see its vices (relatively to the reading public) of style, I cannot but esteem it a noble philosophical poem, reflecting the ideas, institutions, men of this very hour. And it seems to me that it has so much wit and other secondary graces as must strike a class who would not care for its primary merit, that of being a sincere exhortation to seekers of truth. If you still retain your interest in his genius (as I see not how you can avoid, having understood it and cooperated with it so truly), you will be glad to know that he values his American readers very highly; that he does not defend this offensive style of his, but calls it questionable tentative; that he is trying other modes, and is about publishing a historical piece called “The Diamond Necklace,” as a part of a great work which he meditates on the subject of the French Revolution. He says it is part of his creed that history is poetry, could we tell it right. He adds, moreover, in a letter I have recently received from him, that it has been an odd dream that he might end in the western woods. Shall we not bid him come, and be Poet and Teacher of a most scattered flock wanting a shepherd? Or, as I sometimes think, would it not be a new and worse chagrin to become acquainted with the extreme deadness of our community to spiritual influences of the higher kind? Have you read Sampson Reed’s “Growth of the Mind”? I rejoice to be contemporary with that man, and cannot wholly despair of the society in which he lives; there must be some oxygen yet, and La Fayette is only just dead.

Your friend, R. WALDO EMERSON.

It occurs to me that ‘t is unfit to send any white paper so far as to your house, so you shall have a sentence from Carlyle’s letter.

[This may be found in Carlyle’s first letter, dated 12th August, 1834.] Dr. Le Baron Russell, an intimate friend of Emerson for the greater part of his life, gives me some particulars with reference to the publication of “Sartor Resartus,” which I will repeat in his own words: —

“It was just before the time of which I am speaking [that of Emerson’s marriage] that the ‘Sartor Resartus’ appeared in ‘Fraser.’ Emerson lent the numbers, or the collected sheets of ‘Fraser,’ to Miss Jackson, and we all had the reading of them. The excitement which the book caused among young persons interested in the literature of the day at that time you probably remember. I was quite carried away by it, and so anxious to own a copy, that I determined to publish an American edition. I consulted James Munroe & Co. on the subject. Munroe advised me to obtain a subscription to a sufficient number of copies to secure the cost of the publication. This, with the aid of some friends, particularly of my classmate, William Silsbee, I readily succeeded in doing. When this was accomplished, I wrote to Emerson, who up to this time had taken no part in the enterprise, asking him to write a preface. (This is the Preface which appears in the American edition, James Munroe & Co., 1836. It was omitted in the third American from the second London edition, by the same publishers, 1840.) Before the first edition appeared, and after the subscription had been secured, Munroe & Co. offered to assume the whole responsibility of the publication, and to this I assented.

[Footnote 1: Revised and corrected by the author.]

“This American edition of 1836 was the first appearance of the ‘Sartor’ in either country, as a distinct edition. Some copies of the sheets from ‘Fraser,’ it appears, were stitched together and sent to a few persons, but Carlyle could find no English publisher willing to take the responsibility of printing the book. This shows, I think, how much more interest was taken in Carlyle’s writings in this country than in England.”

On the 14th of May, 1834, Emerson wrote to Carlyle the first letter of that correspondence which has since been given to the world under the careful editorship of Mr. Charles Norton. This correspondence lasted from the date mentioned to the 2d of April, 1872, when Carlyle wrote his last letter to Emerson. The two writers reveal themselves as being in strong sympathy with each other, in spite of a radical difference of temperament and entirely opposite views of life. The hatred of unreality was uppermost with Carlyle; the love of what is real and genuine with Emerson. Those old moralists, the weeping and the laughing philosophers, find their counterparts in every thinking community. Carlyle did not weep, but he scolded; Emerson did not laugh, but in his gravest moments there was a smile waiting for the cloud to pass from his forehead. The Duet they chanted was a Miserere with a Te Deum for its Antiphon; a De Profundis answered by a Sursum Corda. “The ground of my existence is black as death,” says Carlyle. “Come and live with me a year,” says Emerson, “and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years; (when the ‘History’ has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you.”

Section 2. In September, 1835, Emerson was married to Miss Lydia Jackson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The wedding took place in the fine old mansion known as the Winslow House, Dr. Le Baron Russell and his sister standing up with the bridegroom and his bride. After their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson went to reside in the house in which he passed the rest of his life, and in which Mrs. Emerson and their daughter still reside. This is the “plain, square, wooden house,” with horse-chestnut trees in the front yard, and evergreens around it, which has been so often described and figured. It is without pretensions, but not without an air of quiet dignity. A full and well-illustrated account of it and its arrangements and surroundings is given in “Poets’ Homes,” by Arthur Gilman and others, published by D. Lothrop & Company in 1879.

On the 12th of September, 1835, Emerson delivered an “Historical Discourse, at Concord, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town.” There is no “mysticism,” no “transcendentalism” in this plain, straightforward Address. The facts are collected and related with the patience and sobriety which became the writer as one of the Dryasdusts of our very diligent, very useful, very matter-of-fact, and for the most part judiciously unimaginative Massachusetts Historical Society. It looks unlike anything else Emerson ever wrote, in being provided with abundant foot-notes and an appendix. One would almost as soon have expected to see Emerson equipped with a musket and a knapsack as to find a discourse of his clogged with annotations, and trailing a supplement after it. Oracles are brief and final in their utterances. Delphi and Cumae are not expected to explain what they say.

It is the habit of our New England towns to celebrate their own worthies and their own deeds on occasions like this, with more or less of rhetorical gratitude and self-felicitation. The discourses delivered on these occasions are commonly worth reading, for there was never a clearing made in the forest that did not let in the light on heroes and heroines. Concord is on the whole the most interesting of all the inland towns of New England. Emerson has told its story in as painstaking, faithful a way as if he had been by nature an annalist. But with this fidelity, we find also those bold generalizations and sharp picturesque touches which reveal the poetic philosopher.

“I have read with care,” he says, “the town records themselves. They exhibit a pleasing picture of a community almost exclusively agricultural, where no man has much time for words, in his search after things; of a community of great simplicity of manners, and of a manifest love of justice. I find our annals marked with a uniform good sense. — The tone of the record rises with the dignity of the event. These soiled and musty books are luminous and electric within. The old town clerks did not spell very correctly, but they contrive to make intelligible the will of a free and just community.” … “The matters there debated (in town meetings) are such as to invite very small consideration. The ill-spelled pages of the town records contain the result. I shall be excused for confessing that I have set a value upon any symptom of meanness and private pique which I have met with in these antique books, as proof that justice was done; that if the results of our history are approved as wise and good, it was yet a free strife; if the good counsel prevailed, the sneaking counsel did not fail to be suggested; freedom and virtue, if they triumphed, triumphed in a fair field. And so be it an everlasting testimony for them, and so much ground of assurance of man’s capacity for self-government.”

There was nothing in this Address which the plainest of Concord’s citizens could not read understandingly and with pleasure. In fact Mr. Emerson himself, besides being a poet and a philosopher, was also a plain Concord citizen. His son tells me that he was a faithful attendant upon town meetings, and, though he never spoke, was an interested and careful listener to the debates on town matters. That respect for “mother-wit” and for all the wholesome human qualities which reveals itself all through his writings was bred from this kind of intercourse with men of sense who had no pretensions to learning, and in whom, for that very reason, the native qualities came out with less disguise in their expression. He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiosyncrasies; Alcott in speculations, which often led him into the fourth dimension of mental space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream — peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end, to say nothing of idolaters and echoes. He kept his balance among them all. It would be hard to find a more candid and sober record of the result of self-government in a small community than is contained in this simple discourse, patient in detail, large in treatment, more effective than any unsupported generalities about the natural rights of man, which amount to very little unless men earn the right of asserting them by attending fairly to their natural duties. So admirably is the working of a town government, as it goes on in a well-disposed community, displayed in the history of Concord’s two hundred years of village life, that one of its wisest citizens had portions of the address printed for distribution, as an illustration of the American principle of self-government.

After settling in Concord, Emerson delivered courses of Lectures in Boston during several successive winters; in 1835, ten Lectures on English Literature; in 1836, twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of History; in 1837, ten Lectures on Human Culture. Some of these lectures may have appeared in print under their original titles; all of them probably contributed to the Essays and Discourses which we find in his published volumes.

On the 19th of April, 1836, a meeting was held to celebrate the completion of the monument raised in commemoration of the Concord Fight. For this occasion Emerson wrote the hymn made ever memorable by the lines: —

 Here once the embattled farmers stood,
  And fired the shot heard round the world.

The last line of this hymn quickens the heartbeats of every American, and the whole hymn is admirable in thought and expression. Until the autumn of 1838, Emerson preached twice on Sundays to the church at East Lexington, which desired him to become its pastor. Mr. Cooke says that when a lady of the society was asked why they did not settle a friend of Emerson’s whom he had urged them to invite to their pulpit, she replied: “We are a very simple people, and can understand no one but Mr. Emerson.” He said of himself: “My pulpit is the Lyceum platform.” Knowing that he made his Sermons contribute to his Lectures, we need not mourn over their not being reported.

In March, 1837, Emerson delivered in Boston a Lecture on War, afterwards published in Miss Peabody’s “Aesthetic Papers.” He recognizes war as one of the temporary necessities of a developing civilization, to disappear with the advance of mankind: —

“At a certain stage of his progress the man fights, if he be of a sound body and mind. At a certain high stage he makes no offensive demonstration, but is alert to repel injury, and of an unconquerable heart. At a still higher stage he comes into the region of holiness; passion has passed away from him; his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle; he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but being attacked, he bears it, and turns the other cheek, as one engaged, throughout his being, no longer to the service of an individual, but to the common good of all men.”

In 1834 Emerson’s brother Edward died, as already mentioned, in the West India island where he had gone for his health. In his letter to Carlyle, of November 12th of the same year, Emerson says: “Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow.” It was of him that Emerson wrote the lines “In Memoriam,” in which he says, —

 ”There is no record left on earth
  Save on tablets of the heart,
  Of the rich, inherent worth,
  Of the grace that on him shone
  Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
  He could not frame a word unfit,
  An act unworthy to be done.”

Another bereavement was too soon to be recorded. On the 7th of October, 1835, he says in a letter to Carlyle: —

“I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other.”

Alas for human hopes and prospects! In less than a year from the date of that letter, on the 17th of September, 1836, he writes to Carlyle: —

“Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles, of whom I have spoken to you, — the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts, that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature, much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death, I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him.”

Section 3. In the year 1836 there was published in Boston a little book of less than a hundred very small pages, entitled “Nature.” It bore no name on its title-page, but was at once attributed to its real author, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Emersonian adept will pardon me for burdening this beautiful Essay with a commentary which is worse than superfluous for him. For it has proved for many, — I will not say a pons asinorum, — but a very narrow bridge, which it made their heads swim to attempt crossing, and yet they must cross it, or one domain of Emerson’s intellect will not be reached.

It differed in some respects from anything he had hitherto written. It talked a strange sort of philosophy in the language of poetry. Beginning simply enough, it took more and more the character of a rhapsody, until, as if lifted off his feet by the deepened and stronger undercurrent of his thought, the writer dropped his personality and repeated the words which “a certain poet sang” to him.

This little book met with a very unemotional reception. Its style was peculiar, — almost as unlike that of his Essays as that of Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” was unlike the style of his “Life of Schiller.” It was vague, mystic, incomprehensible, to most of those who call themselves common-sense people. Some of its expressions lent themselves easily to travesty and ridicule. But the laugh could not be very loud or very long, since it took twelve years, as Mr. Higginson tells us, to sell five hundred copies. It was a good deal like Keats’s

         ”doubtful tale from fairy-land
  Hard for the non-elect to understand.”

The same experience had been gone through by Wordsworth.

“Whatever is too original,” says De Quincey, “will be hated at the first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must be overcome by a counter-resistance to itself, in a better audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and seven years it is since William Wordsworth first appeared as an author. Twenty of these years he was the scoff of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with acclamations to the echo of his name.”

No writer is more deeply imbued with the spirit of Wordsworth than
Emerson, as we cannot fail to see in turning the pages of “Nature,” his
first thoroughly characteristic Essay. There is the same thought in the
Preface to “The Excursion” that we find in the Introduction to “Nature.”

   ”The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face;
    we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original
    relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and
    philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by
    revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

                           ”Paradise and groves
      Elysian, Fortunate Fields — like those of old
      Sought in the Atlantic Main, why should they be
      A history only of departed things,
      Or a mere fiction of what never was?”

“Nature” is a reflective prose poem. It is divided into eight chapters, which might almost as well have been called cantos.

Never before had Mr. Emerson given free utterance to the passion with which the aspects of nature inspired him. He had recently for the first time been at once master of himself and in free communion with all the planetary influences above, beneath, around him. The air of the country intoxicated him. There are sentences in “Nature” which are as exalted as the language of one who is just coming to himself after having been etherized. Some of these expressions sounded to a considerable part of his early readers like the vagaries of delirium. Yet underlying these excited outbursts there was a general tone of serenity which reassured the anxious. The gust passed over, the ripples smoothed themselves, and the stars shone again in quiet reflection.

After a passionate outbreak, in which he sees all, is nothing, loses himself in nature, in Universal Being, becomes “part or particle of God,” he considers briefly, in the chapter entitled Commodity, the ministry of nature to the senses. A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, “the Shakspeare of divines,” as he has called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural conveniences.

But “a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of Beauty” which is his next subject. There are some touches of description here, vivid, high-colored, not so much pictures as hints and impressions for pictures.

Many of the thoughts which run through all his prose and poetry may be found here. Analogy is seen everywhere in the works of Nature. “What is common to them all, — that perfectness and harmony, is beauty.”— “Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole.”— “No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty.” How easily these same ideas took on the robe of verse may be seen in the Poems, “Each and All,” and “The Rhodora.” A good deal of his philosophy comes out in these concluding sentences of the chapter: —

“Beauty in its largest and profoundest sense is one expression for the universe; God is the all-fair. Truth and goodness and beauty are but different faces of the same All. But beauty in Nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must therefore stand as a part and not as yet the highest expression of the final cause of Nature.”.

In the “Rhodora” the flower is made to answer that

“Beauty is its own excuse for being.”

In this Essay the beauty of the flower is not enough, but it must excuse itself for being, mainly as the symbol of something higher and deeper than itself.

He passes next to a consideration of Language. Words are signs of natural facts, particular material facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts, and Nature is the symbol of spirit. Without going very profoundly into the subject, he gives some hints as to the mode in which languages are formed, — whence words are derived, how they become transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.

“A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories.”

From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves when great exigencies call for them.

“The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year, without design and without heed, — shall not lose their lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolution, — these solemn images shall reappear in their morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of power, are put into his hands.”

It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of Wordsworth: —

              ”These beauteous forms,
  Through a long absence, have not been to me
  As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye;
  But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
  In hours of weariness sensations sweet
  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart.”

It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the comparison.

In Discipline, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will. Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp, because

“Time and space relations vanish as laws are known.”— “The moral law lies at the centre of Nature and radiates to the circumference.”— “All things with which we deal preach to us. What is a farm but a mute gospel?”— “From the child’s successive possession of his several senses up to the hour when he sayeth, ‘Thy will be done!’ he is learning the secret that he can reduce under his will, not only particular events, but great classes, nay, the whole series of events, and so conform all facts to his character.”

The unity in variety which meets us everywhere is again referred to. He alludes to the ministry of our friendships to our education. When a friend has done for our education in the way of filling our minds with sweet and solid wisdom “it is a sign to us that his office is closing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight in a short time.” This thought was probably suggested by the death of his brother Charles, which occurred a few months before “Nature” was published. He had already spoken in the first chapter of this little book as if from some recent experience of his own, doubtless the same bereavement. “To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.” This was the first effect of the loss; but after a time he recognizes a superintending power which orders events for us in wisdom which we could not see at first.

The chapter on Idealism must be read by all who believe themselves capable of abstract thought, if they would not fall under the judgment of Turgot, which Emerson quotes: “He that has never doubted the existence of matter may be assured he has no aptitude for metaphysical inquiries.” The most essential statement is this: —

“It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in Heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the Soul?”

We need not follow the thought through the argument from illusions, like that when we look at the shore from a moving ship, and others which cheat the senses by false appearances.

The poet animates Nature with his own thoughts, perceives the affinities between Nature and the soul, with Beauty as his main end. The philosopher pursues Truth, but, “not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relation of things to the empire of thought.” Religion and ethics agree with all lower culture in degrading Nature and suggesting its dependence on Spirit. “The devotee flouts Nature.”— “Plotinus was ashamed of his body.”— “Michael Angelo said of external beauty, ‘it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which He has called into time.’” Emerson would not undervalue Nature as looked at through the senses and “the unrenewed understanding.” “I have no hostility to Nature,” he says, “but a child’s love of it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.” — But, “seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God,” — as one vast picture, which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.

The unimaginative reader is likely to find himself off soundings in the next chapter, which has for its title Spirit.

Idealism only denies the existence of matter; it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. “It leaves God out of me.” — Of these three questions, What is matter? Whence is it? Where to? The ideal theory answers the first only. The reply is that matter is a phenomenon, not a substance.

“But when we come to inquire Whence is matter? and Whereto? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of consciousness. We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves.”— “As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.”

Man may have access to the entire mind of the Creator, himself become a “creator in the finite.”

“As we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the tiger rend us.”

All this has an Old Testament sound as of a lost Paradise. In the next chapter he dreams of Paradise regained.

This next and last chapter is entitled Prospects. He begins with a bold claim for the province of intuition as against induction, undervaluing the “half sight of science” as against the “untaught sallies of the spirit,” the surmises and vaticinations of the mind, — the “imperfect theories, and sentences which contain glimpses of truth.” In a word, he would have us leave the laboratory and its crucibles for the sibyl’s cave and its tripod. We can all — or most of us, certainly — recognize something of truth, much of imagination, and more of danger in speculations of this sort. They belong to visionaries and to poets. Emerson feels distinctly enough that he is getting into the realm of poetry. He quotes five beautiful verses from George Herbert’s “Poem on Man.” Presently he is himself taken off his feet into the air of song, and finishes his Essay with “some traditions of man and nature which a certain poet sang to me.”— “A man is a god in ruins.”— “Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, from woman the moon.” — But he no longer fills the mere shell he had made for himself; “he is shrunk to a drop.” Still something of elemental power remains to him. “It is instinct.” Such teachings he got from his “poet.” It is a kind of New England Genesis in place of the Old Testament one. We read in the Sermon on the Mount: “Be ye therefore perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” The discourse which comes to us from the Trimount oracle commands us, “Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions.” The seer of Patmos foretells a heavenly Jerusalem, of which he says, “There shall in no wise enter into it anything which defileth.” The sage of Concord foresees a new heaven on earth. “A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen.”

* * * * *

It may be remembered that Calvin, in his Commentary on the New Testament, stopped when he came to the book of the “Revelation.” He found it full of difficulties which he did not care to encounter. Yet, considered only as a poem, the vision of St. John is full of noble imagery and wonderful beauty. “Nature” is the Book of Revelation of our Saint Radulphus. It has its obscurities, its extravagances, but as a poem it is noble and inspiring. It was objected to on the score of its pantheistic character, as Wordsworth’s “Lines composed near Tintern Abbey” had been long before. But here and there it found devout readers who were captivated by its spiritual elevation and great poetical beauty, among them one who wrote of it in the “Democratic Review” in terms of enthusiastic admiration.

Mr. Bowen, the Professor of Natural Theology and Moral Philosophy in Harvard University, treated this singular semi-philosophical, semi-poetical little book in a long article in the “Christian Examiner,” headed “Transcendentalism,” and published in the January number for 1837. The acute and learned Professor meant to deal fairly with his subject. But if one has ever seen a sagacious pointer making the acquaintance of a box-tortoise, he will have an idea of the relations between the reviewer and the reviewed as they appear in this article. The professor turns the book over and over, — inspects it from plastron to carapace, so to speak, and looks for openings everywhere, sometimes successfully, sometimes in vain. He finds good writing and sound philosophy, passages of great force and beauty of expression, marred by obscurity, under assumptions and faults of style. He was not, any more than the rest of us, acclimated to the Emersonian atmosphere, and after some not unjust or unkind comments with which many readers will heartily agree, confesses his bewilderment, saying: —

“On reviewing what we have already said of this singular work, the criticism seems to be couched in contradictory terms; we can only allege in excuse the fact that the book is a contradiction in itself.”

Carlyle says in his letter of February 13, 1837: —

“Your little azure-colored ‘Nature’ gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintances that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the ‘Open Secret’ becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine, — with an ear for the Ewigen Melodien, which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things; not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.”

The first edition of “Nature” had prefixed to it the following words from Plotinus: “Nature is but an image or imitation of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; Nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.” This is omitted in after editions, and in its place we read: —

 ”A subtle chain of countless rings
  The next unto the farthest brings;
  The eye reads omens where it goes,
  And speaks all languages the rose;
  And striving to be man, the worm
  Mounts through all the spires of form.”

The copy of “Nature” from which I take these lines, his own, of course, like so many others which he prefixed to his different Essays, was printed in the year 1849, ten years before the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” twenty years and more before the publication of “The Descent of Man.” But the “Vestiges of Creation,” published in 1844, had already popularized the resuscitated theories of Lamarck. It seems as if Emerson had a warning from the poetic instinct which, when it does not precede the movement of the scientific intellect, is the first to catch the hint of its discoveries. There is nothing more audacious in the poet’s conception of the worm looking up towards humanity, than the naturalist’s theory that the progenitor of the human race was an acephalous mollusk. “I will not be sworn,” says Benedick, “but love may transform me to an oyster.” For “love” read science.

Unity in variety, “il piu nell uno” symbolism of Nature and its teachings, generation of phenomena, — appearances, — from spirit, to which they correspond and which they obey; evolution of the best and elimination of the worst as the law of being; all this and much more may be found in the poetic utterances of this slender Essay. It fell like an aerolite, unasked for, unaccounted for, unexpected, almost unwelcome, — a stumbling-block to be got out of the well-trodden highway of New England scholastic intelligence. But here and there it found a reader to whom it was, to borrow, with slight changes, its own quotation, —

                  ”The golden key
  Which opes the palace of eternity,”

inasmuch as it carried upon its face the highest certificate of truth, because it animated them to create a new world for themselves through the purification of their own souls.

Next to “Nature” in the series of his collected publications comes “The American Scholar. An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837.”

The Society known by these three letters, long a mystery to the uninitiated, but which, filled out and interpreted, signify that philosophy is the guide of life, is one of long standing, the annual meetings of which have called forth the best efforts of many distinguished scholars and thinkers. Rarely has any one of the annual addresses been listened to with such profound attention and interest. Mr. Lowell says of it, that its delivery “was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent!”

Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas found expression in it. This was to be expected in an address delivered before such an audience. Every real thinker’s world of thought has its centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off. But those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of “Nature” will find their way clearly enough through those of “The American Scholar.” It is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It begins with a note like a trumpet call.

“Thus far,” he says, “our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, astronomers announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?”

Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer the end of his being. The fable covers the doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, — a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man…. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things…. The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.”

This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old Burton: “Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis.” The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making. It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger’s time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of men’s thoughts and working faculties.

“In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking. In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites.”

Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence. “Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst.” It is hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.

“Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”

When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to become an object of idolatrous regard.

“Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. — One must he an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ — When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”

It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.

“Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. — The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours.”

Emerson does not use the words “unconscious cerebration,” but these last words describe the process in an unmistakable way. The beautiful paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with him, at least through the pages of this discourse. The reader shall have the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.

“There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.

“Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world must also soar and sing.”

Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by action, he speaks of the scholar’s duties. “They may all,” he says, “be comprised in self-trust.” We have to remember that the self he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in “The Sphinx “: —

     ”The heavens that now draw him
        With sweetness untold,
      Once found, — for new heavens
        He spurneth the old.”

“First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.”

And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid down to the American scholar of to-day. He does not spare his censure; he is full of noble trust and manly courage. Very refreshing it is to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these: —

“The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges…. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. — The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. — The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant.”

The young men of promise are discouraged and disgusted.

“What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.”

Each man must be a unit, — must yield that peculiar fruit which he was created to bear.

“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. — A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”

This grand Oration was our intellectual Declaration of Independence. Nothing like it had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, “Whether it be lawful to resist the chief magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.” It was easy to find fault with an expression here and there. The dignity, not to say the formality of an Academic assembly was startled by the realism that looked for the infinite in “the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan.” They could understand the deep thoughts suggested by “the meanest flower that blows,” but these domestic illustrations had a kind of nursery homeliness about them which the grave professors and sedate clergymen were unused to expect on so stately an occasion. But the young men went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them “Thus saith the Lord.” No listener ever forgot that Address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language more like that of immediate inspiration.

CHAPTER V. 1838-1843. AET. 35-40.

Section 1. Divinity School Address. — Correspondence. — Lectures on Human Life. — Letters to James Freeman Clarke. — Dartmouth College Address: Literary Ethics. — Waterville College Address: The Method of Nature. — Other Addresses: Man the Reformer. — Lecture on the Times. — The Conservative. — The Transcendentalist. — Boston “Transcendentalism.”— “The Dial.” — Brook Farm.

Section 2. First Series of Essays published. — Contents: History, Self-Reliance, Compensation, Spiritual Laws, Love, Friendship, Prudence, Heroism, The Oversoul, Circles, Intellect, Art. — Emerson’s Account of his Mode of Life in a Letter to Carlyle. — Death of Emerson’s Son. — Threnody.

Section 1. On Sunday evening, July 15, 1838, Emerson delivered an Address before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, which caused a profound sensation in religious circles, and led to a controversy, in which Emerson had little more than the part of Patroclus when the Greeks and Trojans fought over his body. In its simplest and broadest statement this discourse was a plea for the individual consciousness as against all historical creeds, bibles, churches; for the soul as the supreme judge in spiritual matters.

He begins with a beautiful picture which must be transferred without the change of an expression: —

“In this refulgent Summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm of Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn.”

How softly the phrases of the gentle iconoclast steal upon the ear, and how they must have hushed the questioning audience into pleased attention! The “Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s,” could not have wooed the listener more sweetly. “Thy lips drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue, and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of Lebanon.” And this was the prelude of a discourse which, when it came to be printed, fared at the hands of many a theologian, who did not think himself a bigot, as the roll which Baruch wrote with ink from the words of Jeremiah fared at the hands of Jehoiakim, the King of Judah. He listened while Jehudi read the opening passages. But “when Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth.” Such was probably the fate of many a copy of this famous discourse.

It is reverential, but it is also revolutionary. The file-leaders of Unitarianism drew back in dismay, and the ill names which had often been applied to them were now heard from their own lips as befitting this new heresy; if so mild a reproach as that of heresy belonged to this alarming manifesto. And yet, so changed is the whole aspect of the theological world since the time when that discourse was delivered that it is read as calmly to-day as a common “Election Sermon,” if such are ever read at all. A few extracts, abstracts, and comments may give the reader who has not the Address before him some idea of its contents and its tendencies.

The material universe, which he has just pictured in its summer beauty, deserves our admiration. But when the mind opens and reveals the laws which govern the world of phenomena, it shrinks into a mere fable and illustration of this mind. What am I? What is? — are questions always asked, never fully answered. We would study and admire forever.

But above intellectual curiosity, there is the sentiment of virtue. Man is born for the good, for the perfect, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. “The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws. — These laws refuse to be adequately stated. — They elude our persevering thought; yet we read them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s actions, in our own remorse. — The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. — As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus, of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.”

These facts, Emerson says, have always suggested to man that the world is the product not of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind, — that one mind is everywhere active.— “All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it.” While a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, “he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.”— “When he says ‘I ought;’ when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom.”

“This sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively creates all forms of worship. — This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.”

But this truth cannot be received at second hand; it is an intuition. What another announces, I must find true in myself, or I must reject it. If the word of another is taken instead of this primary faith, the church, the state, art, letters, life, all suffer degradation,— “the doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul.”

The following extract will show the view that he takes of Christianity and its Founder, and sufficiently explain the antagonism called forth by the discourse: —

“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, ‘I am Divine. Through me God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you if you say he was a man.’ The idioms of his language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of Miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this miracle shines as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.”

He proceeds to point out what he considers the great defects of historical Christianity. It has exaggerated the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has wronged mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us. “To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul.” The preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and dialogues by insulation and peculiarity.

Another defect of the traditional and limited way of using the mind of Christ is that the Moral Nature — the Law of Laws — is not explored as the fountain of the established teaching in society. “Men have come to speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given and done, as if God were dead.”— “The soul is not preached. The church seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. — The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past; that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that he speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity — a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of Man — is lost.”

When Emerson came to what his earlier ancestors would have called the “practical application,” some of his young hearers must have been startled at the style of his address.

“Yourself a new — born bard of the Holy Ghost, cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you, — are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind.”

Emerson recognizes two inestimable advantages as the gift of Christianity; first the Sabbath, — hardly a Christian institution, — and secondly the institution of preaching. He spoke not only eloquently, but with every evidence of deep sincerity and conviction. He had sacrificed an enviable position to that inner voice of duty which he now proclaimed as the sovereign law over all written or spoken words. But he was assailing the cherished beliefs of those before him, and of Christendom generally; not with hard or bitter words, not with sarcasm or levity, rather as one who felt himself charged with a message from the same divinity who had inspired the prophets and evangelists of old with whatever truth was in their messages. He might be wrong, but his words carried the evidence of his own serene, unshaken confidence that the spirit of all truth was with him. Some of his audience, at least, must have felt the contrast between his utterances and the formal discourses they had so long listened to, and said to themselves, “he speaks ‘as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.’”

Such teaching, however, could not be suffered to go unchallenged. Its doctrines were repudiated in the “Christian Examiner,” the leading organ of the Unitarian denomination. The Rev. Henry Ware, greatly esteemed and honored, whose colleague he had been, addressed a letter to him, in which he expressed the feeling that some of the statements of Emerson’s discourse would tend to overthrow the authority and influence of Christianity. To this note Emerson returned the following answer: —

“What you say about the discourse at Divinity College is just what I might expect from your truth and charity, combined with your known opinions. I am not a stick or a stone, as one said in the old time, and could not but feel pain in saying some things in that place and presence which I supposed would meet with dissent, I may say, of dear friends and benefactors of mine. Yet, as my conviction is perfect in the substantial truth of the doctrines of this discourse, and is not very new, you will see at once that it must appear very important that it be spoken; and I thought I could not pay the nobleness of my friends so mean a compliment as to suppress my opposition to their supposed views, out of fear of offence. I would rather say to them, these things look thus to me, to you otherwise. Let us say our uttermost word, and let the all-pervading truth, as it surely will, judge between us. Either of us would, I doubt not, be willingly apprised of his error. Meantime, I shall be admonished by this expression of your thought, to revise with greater care the ‘address,’ before it is printed (for the use of the class): and I heartily thank you for this expression of your tried toleration and love.”

Dr. Ware followed up his note with a sermon, preached on the 23d of September, in which he dwells especially on the necessity of adding the idea of personality to the abstractions of Emerson’s philosophy, and sent it to him with a letter, the kindness and true Christian spirit of which were only what were inseparable from all the thoughts and feelings of that most excellent and truly apostolic man.

To this letter Emerson sent the following reply: —

CONCORD, October 8, 1838.

“MY DEAR SIR, — I ought sooner to have acknowledged your kind letter of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it assails any doctrine of mine, — perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally, — certainly I did not feel any disposition to depart from my habitual contentment, that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been — from my very incapacity of methodical writing — a ‘chartered libertine,’ free to worship and free to rail, — lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature and religion. I have appreciated fully the advantages of my position, for I well know there is no scholar less willing or less able than myself to be a polemic. I could not give an account of myself, if challenged. I could not possibly give you one of the ‘arguments’ you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine stands; for I do not know what arguments are in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think; but if you ask me how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer. So that in the present droll posture of my affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised to the importance of a heretic, I am very uneasy when I advert to the supposed duties of such a personage, who is to make good his thesis against all comers. I certainly shall do no such thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me. I shall go on just as before, seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see; and, I suppose, with the same fortune that has hitherto attended me, — the joy of finding that my abler and better brothers, who work with the sympathy of society, loving and beloved, do now and then unexpectedly confirm my conceptions, and find my nonsense is only their own thought in motley, — and so I am your affectionate servant,” etc.

The controversy which followed is a thing of the past; Emerson took no part in it, and we need not return to the discussion. He knew his office and has defined it in the clearest manner in the letter just given,— “Seeing whatever I can, and telling what I see.” But among his listeners and readers was a man of very different mental constitution, not more independent or fearless, but louder and more combative, whose voice soon became heard and whose strength soon began to be felt in the long battle between the traditional and immanent inspiration, — Theodore Parker. If Emerson was the moving spirit, he was the right arm in the conflict, which in one form or another has been waged up to the present day.

In the winter of 1838-39 Emerson delivered his usual winter course of Lectures. He names them in a letter to Carlyle as follows: “Ten Lectures: I. The Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on Human Life.” Two or three of these titles only are prefixed to his published Lectures or Essays; Love, in the first volume of Essays; Demonology in “Lectures and Biographical Sketches;” and “The Comic” in “Letters and Social Aims.”

* * * * *

I owe the privilege of making use of the two following letters to my kind and honored friend, James Freeman Clarke.

The first letter was accompanied by the Poem “The Humble-bee,” which was first published by Mr. Clarke in the “Western Messenger,” from the autograph copy, which begins “Fine humble-bee! fine humble-bee!” and has a number of other variations from the poem as printed in his collected works.

CONCORD, December 7, 1838.

MY DEAR SIR, — Here are the verses. They have pleased some of my friends, and so may please some of your readers, and you asked me in the spring if I hadn’t somewhat to contribute to your journal. I remember in your letter you mentioned the remark of some friend of yours that the verses, “Take, O take those lips away,” were not Shakspeare’s; I think they are. Beaumont, nor Fletcher, nor both together were ever, I think, visited by such a starry gleam as that stanza. I know it is in “Rollo,” but it is in “Measure for Measure” also; and I remember noticing that the Malones, and Stevens, and critical gentry were about evenly divided, these for Shakspeare, and those for Beaumont and Fletcher. But the internal evidence is all for one, none for the other. If he did not write it, they did not, and we shall have some fourth unknown singer. What care we who sung this or that. It is we at last who sing. Your friend and servant, R.W. EMERSON.

TO JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

CONCORD, February 27, 1839.

MY DEAR SIR, — I am very sorry to have made you wait so long for an answer to your flattering request for two such little poems. You are quite welcome to the lines “To the Rhodora;” but I think they need the superscription [“Lines on being asked ‘Whence is the Flower?’”]. Of the other verses [“Good-by proud world,” etc] I send you a corrected copy, but I wonder so much at your wishing to print them that I think you must read them once again with your critical spectacles before they go further. They were written sixteen years ago, when I kept school in Boston, and lived in a corner of Roxbury called Canterbury. They have a slight misanthropy, a shade deeper than belongs to me; and as it seems nowadays I am a philosopher and am grown to have opinions, I think they must have an apologetic date, though I well know that poetry that needs a date is no poetry, and so you will wiselier suppress them. I heartily wish I had any verses which with a clear mind I could send you in lieu of these juvenilities. It is strange, seeing the delight we take in verses, that we can so seldom write them, and so are not ashamed to lay up old ones, say sixteen years, instead of improvising them as freely as the wind blows, whenever we and our brothers are attuned to music. I have heard of a citizen who made an annual joke. I believe I have in April or May an annual poetic conatus rather than afflatus, experimenting to the length of thirty lines or so, if I may judge from the dates of the rhythmical scraps I detect among my MSS. I look upon this incontinence as merely the redundancy of a susceptibility to poetry which makes all the bards my daily treasures, and I can well run the risk of being ridiculous once a year for the benefit of happy reading all the other days. In regard to the Providence Discourse, I have no copy of it; and as far as I remember its contents, I have since used whatever is striking in it; but I will get the MS., if Margaret Fuller has it, and you shall have it if it will pass muster. I shall certainly avail myself of the good order you gave me for twelve copies of the “Carlyle Miscellanies,” so soon as they appear. He, T.C., writes in excellent spirits of his American friends and readers…. A new book, he writes, is growing in him, though not to begin until his spring lectures are over (which begin in May). Your sister Sarah was kind enough to carry me the other day to see some pencil sketches done by Stuart Newton when in the Insane Hospital. They seemed to me to betray the richest invention, so rich as almost to say, why draw any line since you can draw all? Genius has given you the freedom of the universe, why then come within any walls? And this seems to be the old moral which we draw from our fable, read it how or where you will, that we cannot make one good stroke until we can make every possible stroke; and when we can one, every one seems superfluous. I heartily thank you for the good wishes you send me to open the year, and I say them back again to you. Your field is a world, and all men are your spectators, and all men respect the true and great-hearted service you render. And yet it is not spectator nor spectacle that concerns either you or me. The whole world is sick of that very ail, of being seen, and of seemliness. It belongs to the brave now to trust themselves infinitely, and to sit and hearken alone. I am glad to see William Channing is one of your coadjutors. Mrs. Jameson’s new book, I should think, would bring a caravan of travellers, aesthetic, artistic, and what not, up your mighty stream, or along the lakes to Mackinaw. As I read I almost vowed an exploration, but I doubt if I ever get beyond the Hudson.

Your affectionate servant, R.W. EMERSON.

On the 24th of July, 1838, a little more than a week after the delivery of the Address before the Divinity School, Mr. Emerson delivered an Oration before the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College. If any rumor of the former discourse had reached Dartmouth, the audience must have been prepared for a much more startling performance than that to which they listened. The bold avowal which fluttered the dovecotes of Cambridge would have sounded like the crash of doom to the cautious old tenants of the Hanover aviary. If there were any drops of false or questionable doctrine in the silver shower of eloquence under which they had been sitting, the plumage of orthodoxy glistened with unctuous repellents, and a shake or two on coming out of church left the sturdy old dogmatists as dry as ever.

Those who remember the Dartmouth College of that day cannot help smiling at the thought of the contrast in the way of thinking between the speaker and the larger part, or at least the older part, of his audience. President Lord was well known as the scriptural defender of the institution of slavery. Not long before a controversy had arisen, provoked by the setting up of the Episcopal form of worship by one of the Professors, the most estimable and scholarly Dr. Daniel Oliver. Perhaps, however, the extreme difference between the fundamental conceptions of Mr. Emerson and the endemic orthodoxy of that place and time was too great for any hostile feeling to be awakened by the sweet-voiced and peaceful-mannered speaker. There is a kind of harmony between boldly contrasted beliefs like that between complementary colors. It is when two shades of the same color are brought side by side that comparison makes them odious to each other. Mr. Emerson could go anywhere and find willing listeners among those farthest in their belief from the views he held. Such was his simplicity of speech and manner, such his transparent sincerity, that it was next to impossible to quarrel with the gentle image-breaker.

The subject of Mr. Emerson’s Address is Literary Ethics. It is on the same lofty plane of sentiment and in the same exalted tone of eloquence as the Phi Beta Kappa Address. The word impassioned would seem misplaced, if applied to any of Mr. Emerson’s orations. But these discourses were both written and delivered in the freshness of his complete manhood. They were produced at a time when his mind had learned its powers and the work to which it was called, in the struggle which freed him from the constraint of stereotyped confessions of faith and all peremptory external authority. It is not strange, therefore, to find some of his paragraphs glowing with heat and sparkling with imaginative illustration.

“Neither years nor books,” he says, “have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice rooted in me, that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men.” And yet, he confesses that the scholars of this country have not fulfilled the reasonable expectation of mankind. “Men here, as elsewhere, are indisposed to innovation and prefer any antiquity, any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, to the unproductive service of thought.” For all this he offers those correctives which in various forms underlie all his teachings. “The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect.” New lessons of spiritual independence, fresh examples and illustrations, are drawn from history and biography. There is a passage here so true to nature that it permits a half page of quotation and a line or two of comment: —

“An intimation of these broad rights is familiar in the sense of injury which men feel in the assumption of any man to limit their possible progress. We resent all criticism which denies us anything that lies In our line of advance. Say to the man of letters, that he cannot paint a Transfiguration, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal, and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius, which is a sort of stoical plenum annulling the comparative, and he is content; but concede him talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he is aggrieved.”

But it ought to be added that if the pleasure of denying the genius of their betters were denied to the mediocrities, their happiness would be forever blighted.

From the resources of the American Scholar Mr. Emerson passes to his tasks. Nature, as it seems to him, has never yet been truly studied. “Poetry has scarcely chanted its first song. The perpetual admonition of Nature to us is, ‘The world is new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe a virgin to-day.’” And in the same way he would have the scholar look at history, at philosophy. The world belongs to the student, but he must put himself into harmony with the constitution of things. “He must embrace solitude as a bride.” Not superstitiously, but after having found out, as a little experience will teach him, all that society can do for him with its foolish routine. I have spoken of the exalted strain into which Mr. Emerson sometimes rises in the midst of his general serenity. Here is an instance of it: —

“You will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. You will hear that the first duty is to get land and money, place and name. ‘What is this truth you seek? What is this beauty?’ men will ask, with derision. If, nevertheless, God have called any of you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early visions: I must eat the good of the land, and let learning and romantic expectations go, until a more convenient season;’ — then dies the man in you; then once more perish the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they have died already in a thousand thousand men. — Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you from every object in nature, to be its tongue to the heart of man, and to show the besotted world how passing fair is wisdom. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the starlit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof and house and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread; and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men’s possessions, in all men’s affections, in art, in nature, and in hope.”

The next Address Emerson delivered was “The Method of Nature,” before the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841.

In writing to Carlyle on the 31st of July, he says: “As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges nine days hence…. My whole philosophy — which is very real — teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet — for any spiritualist — in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue.” It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in a private letter.

The Oration shows the same vein of thought as the letter. Its title is “The Method of Nature.” He begins with congratulations on the enjoyments and promises of this literary Anniversary.

“The scholars are the priests of that thought which establishes the foundations of the castle.”— “We hear too much of the results of machinery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases. The rapid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansion of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; this luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.”— “While the multitude of men degrade each other, and give currency to desponding doctrines, the scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must reinforce man against himself.”

I think we may detect more of the manner of Carlyle in this Address than in any of those which preceded it.

“Why then goest thou as some Boswell or literary worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with whom so long the universe travailed in labor; darest thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable?”

That there is an “intimate divinity” which is the source of all true wisdom, that the duty of man is to listen to its voice and to follow it, that “the sanity of man needs the poise of this immanent force,” that the rule is “Do what you know, and perception is converted into character,” — all this is strongly enforced and richly illustrated in this Oration. Just how easily it was followed by the audience, just how far they were satisfied with its large principles wrought into a few broad precepts, it would be easier at this time to ask than to learn. We notice not so much the novelty of the ideas to be found in this discourse on “The Method of Nature,” as the pictorial beauty of their expression. The deep reverence which underlies all Emerson’s speculations is well shown in this paragraph: —

“We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions of manly joy. Not thanks nor prayer seem quite the highest or truest name for our communication with the infinite, — but glad and conspiring reception, — reception that becomes giving in its turn as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in infancy.”— “It is God in us which checks the language of petition by grander thought. In the bottom of the heart it is said: ‘I am, and by me, O child! this fair body and world of thine stands and grows. I am, all things are mine; and all mine are thine.’”

We must not quarrel with his peculiar expressions. He says, in this same paragraph, “I cannot, — nor can any man, — speak precisely of things so sublime; but it seems to me the wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is beyond explanation.”

“We can point nowhere to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars.” “In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature makes on us is this, that it does not exist to any one, or to any number of particular ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy.”

Here is another of those almost lyrical passages which seem too long for the music of rhythm and the resonance of rhyme.

“The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars, was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong.”

His feeling about the soul, which has shown itself in many of the extracts already given, is summed up in the following sentence: —

“We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I cannot tell if these wonderful qualities which house to-day in this mental home shall ever reassemble in equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they have before had a natural history like that of this body you see before you; but this one thing I know, that these qualities did not now begin to exist, cannot be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: before the world was, they were.”

It is hard to see the distinction between the omnipresent Deity recognized in our formal confessions of faith and the “pantheism” which is the object of dread to many of the faithful. But there are many expressions in this Address which must have sounded strangely and vaguely to his Christian audience. “Are there not moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted by individuals, but was only the Influenced; was God in distribution, God rushing into manifold benefit?” It might be feared that the practical philanthropists would feel that they lost by his counsels.

“The reform whose fame now fills the land with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous as each appears, are poor bitter things when prosecuted for themselves as an end.”— “I say to you plainly there is no end to which your practical faculty can aim so sacred or so large, that if pursued for itself, will not at last become carrion and an offence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses; then it will be a god, always approached, — never touched; always giving health.”

Nothing is plainer than that it was Emerson’s calling to supply impulses and not methods. He was not an organizer, but a power behind many organizers, inspiring them with lofty motive, giving breadth, to their views, always tending to become narrow through concentration on their special objects. The Oration we have been examining was delivered in the interval between the delivery of two Addresses, one called “Man the Reformer,” and another called “Lecture on the Times.” In the first he preaches the dignity and virtue of manual labor; that “a man should have a farm, or a mechanical craft for his culture.” — That he cannot give up labor without suffering some loss of power. “How can the man who has learned but one art procure all the conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all we think? — Perhaps with his own hands. — Let us learn the meaning of economy. — Parched corn eaten to-day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday is a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be free of all perturbation, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, and quit and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality for gods and heroes.”

This was what Emerson wrote in January, 1841. This “house with one apartment” was what Thoreau built with his own hands in 1845. In April of the former year, he went to live with Mr. Emerson, but had been on intimate terms with him previously to that time. Whether it was from him that Thoreau got the hint of the Walden cabin and the parched corn, or whether this idea was working in Thoreau’s mind and was suggested to Emerson by him, is of no great consequence. Emerson, to whom he owed so much, may well have adopted some of those fancies which Thoreau entertained, and afterwards worked out in practice. He was at the philanthropic centre of a good many movements which he watched others carrying out, as a calm and kindly spectator, without losing his common sense for a moment. It would never have occurred to him to leave all the conveniences and comforts of life to go and dwell in a shanty, so as to prove to himself that he could live like a savage, or like his friends “Teague and his jade,” as he called the man and brother and sister, more commonly known nowadays as Pat, or Patrick, and his old woman.

“The Americans have many virtues,” he says in this Address, “but they have not Faith and Hope.” Faith and Hope, Enthusiasm and Love, are the burden of this Address. But he would regulate these qualities by “a great prospective prudence,” which shall mediate between the spiritual and the actual world.

In the “Lecture on the Times” he shows very clearly the effect which a nearer contact with the class of men and women who called themselves Reformers had upon him.

“The Reforms have their higher origin in an ideal justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. They are quickly organized in some low, inadequate form, and present no more poetic image to the mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated. They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with personal and party heats, with measureless exaggerations, and the blindness that prefers some darling measure to justice and truth. Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefit of mankind are narrow, self-pleasing, conceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us, and we run mad also. I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near! — I do not like it better. It is done in the same way; it is done profanely, not piously; by management, by tactics and clamor.”

All this, and much more like it, would hardly have been listened to by the ardent advocates of the various reforms, if anybody but Mr. Emerson had said it. He undervalued no sincere action except to suggest a wiser and better one. He attacked no motive which had a good aim, except in view of some larger and loftier principle. The charm of his imagination and the music of his words took away all the sting from the thoughts that penetrated to the very marrow of the entranced listeners. Sometimes it was a splendid hyperbole that illuminated a statement which by the dim light of common speech would have offended or repelled those who sat before him. He knew the force of felix audacia as well as any rhetorician could have taught him. He addresses the reformer with one of those daring images which defy the critics.

“As the farmer casts into the ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will come when we too shall hold nothing back, but shall eagerly convert more than we possess into means and powers, when we shall be willing to sow the sun and the moon for seeds.”

He said hard things to the reformer, especially to the Abolitionist, in his “Lecture on the Times.” It would have taken a long while to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson’s teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the true gospel of liberty. But how much its last sentence covers with its soothing tribute!

“All the newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.”

The Lecture called “The Transcendentalist” will naturally be looked at with peculiar interest, inasmuch as this term has been very commonly applied to Emerson, and to many who were considered his disciples. It has a proper philosophical meaning, and it has also a local and accidental application to the individuals of a group which came together very much as any literary club might collect about a teacher. All this comes out clearly enough in the Lecture. In the first place, Emerson explains that the “new views,” as they are called, are the oldest of thoughts cast in a new mould.

“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism: Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.”

“The materialist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as one product of that. The idealist takes his departure from his consciousness, and reckons the world an appearance. — His thought, that is the Universe.”

The association of scholars and thinkers to which the name of “Transcendentalists” was applied, and which made itself an organ in the periodical known as “The Dial,” has been written about by many who were in the movement, and others who looked on or got their knowledge of it at second hand. Emerson was closely associated with these “same Transcendentalists,” and a leading contributor to “The Dial,” which was their organ. The movement borrowed its inspiration more from him than from any other source, and the periodical owed more to him than to any other writer. So far as his own relation to the circle of illuminati and the dial which they shone upon was concerned, he himself is the best witness.

In his “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” he sketches in a rapid way the series of intellectual movements which led to the development of the “new views” above mentioned. “There are always two parties,” he says, “the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.”

About 1820, and in the twenty years which followed, an era of activity manifested itself in the churches, in politics, in philanthropy, in literature. In our own community the influence of Swedenborg and of the genius and character of Dr. Channing were among the more immediate early causes of the mental agitation. Emerson attributes a great importance to the scholarship, the rhetoric, the eloquence, of Edward Everett, who returned to Boston in 1820, after five years of study in Europe. Edward Everett is already to a great extent a tradition, somewhat as Rufus Choate is, a voice, a fading echo, as must be the memory of every great orator. These wondrous personalities have their truest and warmest life in a few old men’s memories. It is therefore with delight that one who remembers Everett in his robes of rhetorical splendor, who recalls his full-blown, high-colored, double-flowered periods, the rich, resonant, grave, far-reaching music of his speech, with just enough of nasal vibration to give the vocal sounding-board its proper value in the harmonies of utterance, — it is with delight that such a one reads the glowing words of Emerson whenever he refers to Edward Everett. It is enough if he himself caught inspiration from those eloquent lips; but many a listener has had his youthful enthusiasm fired by that great master of academic oratory.

Emerson follows out the train of influences which added themselves to the impulse given by Mr. Everett. German scholarship, the growth of science, the generalizations of Goethe, the idealism of Schelling, the influence of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Carlyle, and in our immediate community, the writings of Channing, — he left it to others to say of Emerson, — all had their part in this intellectual, or if we may call it so, spiritual revival. He describes with that exquisite sense of the ridiculous which was a part of his mental ballast, the first attempt at organizing an association of cultivated, thoughtful people. They came together, the cultivated, thoughtful people, at Dr. John Collins Warren’s, — Dr. Channing, the great Dr. Channing, among the rest, full of the great thoughts he wished to impart. The preliminaries went on smoothly enough with the usual small talk, —

“When a side-door opened, the whole company streamed in to an oyster supper, crowned by excellent wines [this must have been before Dr. Warren’s temperance epoch], and so ended the first attempt to establish aesthetic society in Boston.

“Some time afterwards Dr. Channing opened his mind to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and with some care they invited a limited party of ladies and gentlemen. I had the honor to be present. — Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Dr. Convers Francis, Theodore Parker, Dr. Hedge, Mr. Brownson, James Freeman Clarke, William H. Channing, and many others gradually drew together, and from time to time spent an afternoon at each other’s houses in a serious conversation.”

With them was another, “a pure Idealist, — who read Plato as an equal, and inspired his companions only in proportion as they were intellectual.” He refers, of course to Mr. Alcott. Emerson goes on to say: —

“I think there prevailed at that time a general belief in Boston that there was some concert of doctrinaires to establish certain opinions, and inaugurate some movement in literature, philosophy, and religion, of which design the supposed conspirators were quite innocent; for there was no concert, and only here and there two or three men and women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual vivacity. Perhaps they only agreed in having fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy. Otherwise their education and reading were not marked, but had the American superficialness, and their studies were solitary. I suppose all of them were surprised at this rumor of a school or sect, and certainly at the name of Transcendentalism, given, nobody knows by whom, or when it was applied.”

Emerson’s picture of some of these friends of his is so peculiar as to suggest certain obvious and not too flattering comments.

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

“These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.”

The person who adopts “any presentiment, any extravagance as most in nature,” is not commonly called a Transcendentalist, but is known colloquially as a “crank.” The person who does not thank, by word or look, the friend or stranger who has pulled him out of the fire or water, is fortunate if he gets off with no harder name than that of a churl.

Nothing was farther from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each other than was reasonable, — so much occasionally that their pretensions became ridiculous. One was tempted to ask: “What forlorn hope have you led? What immortal book have you written? What great discovery have you made? What heroic task of any kind have you performed?” There was too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done. Aspiration too frequently got as far as the alpenstock and the brandy flask, but crossed no dangerous crevasse, and scaled no arduous summit. In short, there was a kind of “Transcendentalist” dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time.

In reading the following description of the “intelligent and religious persons” who belonged to the “Transcendentalist” communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait, — a friend and not a scoffer: —

“They are not good citizens, not good members of society: unwillingly they bear their part of the public and private burdens; they do not willingly share in the public charities, in the public religious rites, in the enterprise of education, of missions, foreign and domestic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the temperance society. They do not even like to vote.”

After arraigning the representatives of Transcendental or spiritual beliefs in this way, he summons them to plead for themselves, and this is what they have to say: —

“‘New, we confess, and by no means happy, is our condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and rust: but we do not like your work.’

‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’

‘We have none.’

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

‘We will wait.’

‘How long?’

‘Until the Universe beckons and calls us to work.’

‘But whilst you wait you grow old and useless.’

   ’Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish (as you call it), but
    I will not move until I have the highest command.’”

And so the dissatisfied tenant of this unhappy creation goes on with his reasons for doing nothing.

It is easy to stay away from church and from town-meetings. It is easy to keep out of the way of the contribution box and to let the subscription paper go by us to the next door. The common duties of life and the good offices society asks of us may be left to take care of themselves while we contemplate the infinite. There is no safer fortress for indolence than “the Everlasting No.” The chimney-corner is the true arena for this class of philosophers, and the pipe and mug furnish their all-sufficient panoply. Emerson undoubtedly met with some of them among his disciples. His wise counsel did not always find listeners in a fitting condition to receive it. He was a sower who went forth to sow. Some of the good seed fell among the thorns of criticism. Some fell on the rocks of hardened conservatism. Some fell by the wayside and was picked up by the idlers who went to the lecture-room to get rid of themselves. But when it fell upon the right soil it bore a growth of thought which ripened into a harvest of large and noble lives.

Emerson shows up the weakness of his young enthusiasts with that delicate wit which warns its objects rather than wounds them. But he makes it all up with the dreamers before he can let them go.

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

It must be confessed that it is not a very captivating picture which Emerson draws of some of his transcendental friends. Their faults were naturally still more obvious to those outside of their charmed circle, and some prejudice, very possibly, mingled with their critical judgments. On the other hand we have the evidence of a visitor who knew a good deal of the world as to the impression they produced upon him: —

“There has sprung up in Boston,” says Dickens, in his “American Notes,” “a sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists. On inquiring what this appellation might be supposed to signify, I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible would be certainly Transcendental. Not deriving much comfort from this elucidation, I pursued the inquiry still further, and found that the Transcendentalists are followers of my friend Mr. Carlyle, or, I should rather say, of a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson. This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold. Transcendentalism has its occasional vagaries (what school has not?), but it has good healthful qualities in spite of them; not least among the number a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her everlasting wardrobe. And therefore, if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist.”

In December, 1841, Emerson delivered a Lecture entitled “The Conservative.” It was a time of great excitement among the members of that circle of which he was the spiritual leader. Never did Emerson show the perfect sanity which characterized his practical judgment more beautifully than in this Lecture and in his whole course with reference to the intellectual agitation of the period. He is as fair to the conservative as to the reformer. He sees the fanaticism of the one as well as that of the other. “Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery; believes in a negative fate; believes that men’s tempers govern them; that for me it avails not to trust in principles, they will fail me, I must bend a little; it distrusts Nature; it thinks there is a general law without a particular application, — law for all that does not include any one. Reform in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated self-conceit; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to unnatural refining and elevation, which ends in hypocrisy and sensual reaction. And so, whilst we do not go beyond general statements, it may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists that each is a good half, but an impossible whole.”

He has his beliefs, and, if you will, his prejudices, but he loves fair play, and though he sides with the party of the future, he will not be unjust to the present or the past.

We read in a letter from Emerson to Carlyle, dated March 12, 1835, that Dr. Charming “lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called ‘The Transcendentalist,’ as the organ of a spiritual philosophy.” Again on the 30th of April of the same year, in a letter in which he lays out a plan for a visit of Carlyle to this country, Emerson says: —

“It was suggested that if Mr. C. would undertake a journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard, — a book to be called ‘The Transcendentalist;’ or, ‘The Spiritual Inquirer,’ or the like…. Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contribution to its pages, until its success could be assured.”

The idea of the grim Scotchman as editor of what we came in due time to know as “The Dial!” A concert of singing mice with a savage and hungry old grimalkin as leader of the orchestra! It was much safer to be content with Carlyle’s purring from his own side of the water, as thus: —

“‘The Boston Transcendentalist,’ whatever the fate or merit of it may prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of over in that Transoceanic parish! I shall certainly wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better.”

There were two notable products of the intellectual ferment of the Transcendental period which deserve an incidental notice here, from the close connection which Emerson had with one of them and the interest which he took in the other, in which many of his friends were more deeply concerned. These were the periodical just spoken of as a possibility realized, and the industrial community known as Brook Farm. They were to a certain extent synchronous, — the Magazine beginning in July, 1840, and expiring in April, 1844; Brook Farm being organized in 1841, and breaking up in 1847.

“The Dial” was edited at first by Margaret Fuller, afterwards by Emerson, who contributed more than forty articles in prose and verse, among them “The Conservative,” “The Transcendentalist,” “Chardon Street and Bible Convention,” and some of his best and best known poems, “The Problem,” “Woodnotes,” “The Sphinx,” “Fate.” The other principal writers were Margaret Fuller, A. Bronson Alcott, George Ripley, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, William H. Channing, Henry Thoreau, Eliot Cabot, John S. Dwight, C.P. Cranch, William Ellery Channing, Mrs. Ellen Hooper, and her sister Mrs. Caroline Tappan. Unequal as the contributions are in merit, the periodical is of singular interest. It was conceived and carried on in a spirit of boundless hope and enthusiasm. Time and a narrowing subscription list proved too hard a trial, and its four volumes remain stranded, like some rare and curiously patterned shell which a storm of yesterday has left beyond the reach of the receding waves. Thoreau wrote for nearly every number. Margaret Fuller, less attractive in print than in conversation, did her part as a contributor as well as editor. Theodore Parker came down with his “trip-hammer” in its pages. Mrs. Ellen Hooper published a few poems in its columns which remain, always beautiful, in many memories. Others, whose literary lives have fulfilled their earlier promise, and who are still with us, helped forward the new enterprise with their frequent contributions. It is a pleasure to turn back to “The Dial,” with all its crudities. It should be looked through by the side of the “Anthology.” Both were April buds, opening before the frosts were over, but with the pledge of a better season.

We get various hints touching the new Magazine in the correspondence between Emerson and Carlyle. Emerson tells Carlyle, a few months before the first number appeared, that it will give him a better knowledge of our young people than any he has had. It is true that unfledged writers found a place to try their wings in it, and that makes it more interesting. This was the time above all others when out of the mouth of babes and sucklings was to come forth strength. The feeling that intuition was discovering a new heaven and a new earth was the inspiration of these “young people” to whom Emerson refers. He has to apologize for the first number. “It is not yet much,” he says; “indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages, but it is better than anything we had. — The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know.” They did print “The Problem.” There were also some fragments of criticism from the writings of his brother Charles, and the poem called “The Last Farewell,” by his brother Edward, which is to be found in Emerson’s “May-day and other Pieces.”

On the 30th of August, after the periodical had been published a couple of months, Emerson writes: —

“Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism; and the Dial, poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public.”

Carlyle finds the second number of “The Dial” better than the first, and tosses his charitable recognition, as if into an alms-basket, with his usual air of superiority. He distinguishes what is Emerson’s readily, — the rest he speaks of as the work of [Greek: oi polloi] for the most part. “But it is all good and very good as a soul; wants only a body, which want means a great deal.” And again, “‘The Dial,’ too, it is all spirit like, aeri-form, aurora-borealis like. Will no Angel body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee man, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?”

Emerson, writing to Carlyle in March, 1842, speaks of the “dubious approbation on the part of you and other men,” notwithstanding which he found it with “a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion.” So, when Margaret Fuller gave it up, at the end of the second volume, Emerson consented to become its editor. “I cannot bid you quit ‘The Dial,’” says Carlyle, “though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! Perge, perge, nevertheless.”

In the next letter he says: —

“I love your ‘Dial,’ and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations and such like, — into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing. I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof.”

A curious way of characterizing himself as a critic, — but he was not always as well-mannered as the Houyhnhnms.

To all Carlyle’s complaints of “The Dial’s” short-comings Emerson did not pretend to give any satisfactory answer, but his plea of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, is very honest and definite.

“For the Dial and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers, — the boys, that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls, that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. Perhaps one of these days a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed.”

“All the bright boys and girls in New England,” and “‘The Dial’ dying of inanition!” In October, 1840, Emerson writes to Carlyle: —

“We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book. One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the state; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.”

Mr. Ripley’s project took shape in the West Roxbury Association, better known under the name of Brook Farm. Emerson was not involved in this undertaking. He looked upon it with curiosity and interest, as he would have looked at a chemical experiment, but he seems to have had only a moderate degree of faith in its practical working. “It was a noble and generous movement in the projectors to try an experiment of better living. One would say that impulse was the rule in the society, without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say, intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal routinary character of our educational, religious, social, and economical life in Massachusetts.” The reader will find a full detailed account of the Brook Farm experiment in Mr. Frothingham’s “Life of George Ripley,” its founder, and the first President of the Association. Emerson had only tangential relations with the experiment, and tells its story in his “Historic Notes” very kindly and respectfully, but with that sense of the ridiculous in the aspect of some of its conditions which belongs to the sagacious common-sense side of his nature. The married women, he says, were against the community. “It was to them like the brassy and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen without her chickens was but half a hen.” Is not the inaudible, inward laughter of Emerson more refreshing than the explosions of our noisiest humorists?

This is his benevolent summing up: —

“The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated. Letters were always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan.”

The public edifice called the “Phalanstery” was destroyed by fire in 1846. The Association never recovered from this blow, and soon afterwards it was dissolved.

Section 2. Emerson’s first volume of his collected Essays was published in 1841. In the reprint it contains the following Essays: History; Self-Reliance; Compensation; Spiritual Laws; Love; Friendship; Prudence; Heroism; The Over-Soul; Circles; Intellect; Art. “The Young American,” which is now included in the volume, was not delivered until 1844.

Once accustomed to Emerson’s larger formulae we can to a certain extent project from our own minds his treatment of special subjects. But we cannot anticipate the daring imagination, the subtle wit, the curious illustrations, the felicitous language, which make the Lecture or the Essay captivating as read, and almost entrancing as listened to by the teachable disciple. The reader must be prepared for occasional extravagances. Take the Essay on History, in the first series of Essays, for instance. “Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.” When we come to the application, in the same Essay, almost on the same page, what can we make of such discourse as this? The sentences I quote do not follow immediately, one upon the other, but their sense is continuous.

“I hold an actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? — How many times we must say Rome and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimau seal-hunter, for the Kamchatcan in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”

The connection of ideas is not obvious. One can hardly help being reminded of a certain great man’s Rochester speech as commonly reported by the story-teller. “Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Greece in her palmiest days never had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on! No people ever lost their liberty who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high!”

We cannot help smiling, perhaps laughing, at the odd mixture of Rome and rats, of Olympiads and Esquimaux. But the underlying idea of the interdependence of all that exists in nature is far from ridiculous. Emerson says, not absurdly or extravagantly, that “every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols.”

We have become familiar with his doctrine of “Self-Reliance,” which is the subject of the second lecture of the series. We know that he always and everywhere recognized that the divine voice which speaks authoritatively in the soul of man is the source of all our wisdom. It is a man’s true self, so that it follows that absolute, supreme self-reliance is the law of his being. But see how he guards his proclamation of self-reliance as the guide of mankind.

“Truly it demands something god-like in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!”

“Compensation” might be preached in a synagogue, and the Rabbi would be praised for his performance. Emerson had been listening to a sermon from a preacher esteemed for his orthodoxy, in which it was assumed that judgment is not executed in this world, that the wicked are successful, and the good are miserable. This last proposition agrees with John Bunyan’s view: —

 ”A Christian man is never long at ease,
  When one fright’s gone, another doth him seize.”

Emerson shows up the “success” of the bad man and the failures and trials of the good man in their true spiritual characters, with a noble scorn of the preacher’s low standard of happiness and misery, which would have made him throw his sermon into the fire.

The Essay on “Spiritual Laws” is full of pithy sayings: —

“As much virtue as there is, so much appears; as much goodness as there is, so much reverence it commands. All the devils respect virtue. — A man passes for that he is worth. — The ancestor of every action is a thought. — To think is to act. — Let a man believe in God, and not in names and places and persons. Let the great soul incarnated in some woman’s form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent day-beams cannot be hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature.”

This is not any the worse for being the flowering out of a poetical bud of George Herbert’s. The Essay on “Love” is poetical, but the three poems, “Initial,” “Daemonic,” and “Celestial Love” are more nearly equal to his subject than his prose.

There is a passage in the Lecture on “Friendship” which suggests some personal relation of Emerson’s about which we cannot help being inquisitive: —

“It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion…. Yet these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its object as a god that it may deify both.”

Was he thinking of his relations with Carlyle? It is a curious subject of speculation what would have been the issue if Carlyle had come to Concord and taken up his abode under Emerson’s most hospitable roof. “You shall not come nearer a man by getting into his house.” How could they have got on together? Emerson was well-bred, and Carlyle was wanting in the social graces. “Come rest in this bosom” is a sweet air, heard in the distance, too apt to be followed, after a protracted season of close proximity, by that other strain, —

 ”No, fly me, fly me, far as pole from pole!
  Rise Alps between us and whole oceans roll!”

But Emerson may have been thinking of some very different person, perhaps some “crude and cold companion” among his disciples, who was not equal to the demands of friendly intercourse.

He discourses wisely on “Prudence,” a virtue which he does not claim for himself, and nobly on “Heroism,” which was a shining part of his own moral and intellectual being.

The points which will be most likely to draw the reader’s attention are the remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America, for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of sad sincerity painful to recognize.

“Who that sees the meanness of our politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and forever safe; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him. Who does not sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.”

In the following Essay, “The Over-Soul,” Emerson has attempted the impossible. He is as fully conscious of this fact as the reader of his rhapsody, — nay, he is more profoundly penetrated with it than any of his readers. In speaking of the exalted condition the soul is capable of reaching, he says, —

“Every man’s words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.”

“The Over-Soul” might almost be called the Over-flow of a spiritual imagination. We cannot help thinking of the “pious, virtuous, God-intoxicated” Spinoza. When one talks of the infinite in terms borrowed from the finite, when one attempts to deal with the absolute in the language of the relative, his words are not symbols, like those applied to the objects of experience, but the shadows of symbols, varying with the position and intensity of the light of the individual intelligence. It is a curious amusement to trace many of these thoughts and expressions to Plato, or Plotinus, or Proclus, or Porphyry, to Spinoza or Schelling, but the same tune is a different thing according to the instrument on which it is played. There are songs without words, and there are states in which, in place of the trains of thought moving in endless procession with ever-varying figures along the highway of consciousness, the soul is possessed by a single all-absorbing idea, which, in the highest state of spiritual exaltation, becomes a vision. Both Plotinus and Porphyry believed they were privileged to look upon Him whom “no man can see and live.”

But Emerson states his own position so frankly in his Essay entitled “Circles,” that the reader cannot take issue with him as against utterances which he will not defend. There can be no doubt that he would have confessed as much with reference to “The Over-Soul” as he has confessed with regard to “Circles,” the Essay which follows “The Over-Soul.”

“I am not careful to justify myself…. But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.”

Perhaps, after reading these transcendental essays of Emerson, we might borrow Goethe’s language about Spinoza, as expressing the feeling with which we are left.

“I am reading Spinoza with Frau von Stein. I feel myself very near to him, though his soul is much deeper and purer than mine.

“I cannot say that I ever read Spinoza straight through, that at any time the complete architecture of his intellectual system has stood clear in view before me. But when I look into him I seem to understand him, — that is, he always appears to me consistent with himself, and I can always gather from him very salutary influences for my own way of feeling and acting.”

Emerson would not have pretended that he was always “consistent with himself,” but these “salutary influences,” restoring, enkindling, vivifying, are felt by many of his readers who would have to confess, like Dr. Walter Channing, that these thoughts, or thoughts like these, as he listened to them in a lecture, “made his head ache.”

The three essays which follow “The Over-Soul,” “Circles,” “Intellect,” “Art,” would furnish us a harvest of good sayings, some of which we should recognize as parts of our own (borrowed) axiomatic wisdom.

“Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk.”

“God enters by a private door into every individual.”

   ”God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take
    which you please, — you can never have both.”

   ”Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must
    carry it with us, or we find it not.”

But we cannot reconstruct the Hanging Gardens with a few bricks from
Babylon.

Emerson describes his mode of life in these years in a letter to
Carlyle, dated May 10, 1838.

“I occupy, or improve, as we Yankees say, two acres only of God’s earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six per cent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of freedom to spend, because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich, — rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity, — I call her Asia, — and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night; — these, and three domestic women, who cook, and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.”

A great sorrow visited Emerson and his household at this period of his life. On the 30th of October, 1841, he wrote to Carlyle: “My little boy is five years old to-day, and almost old enough to send you his love.”

Three months later, on the 28th of February, 1842, he writes once more: —

“My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life. You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by scarlatina. We have two babes yet, one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy’s I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain.”

This was the boy whose memory lives in the tenderest and most pathetic of Emerson’s poems, the “Threnody,” — a lament not unworthy of comparison with Lycidas for dignity, but full of the simple pathos of Cowper’s well-remembered lines on the receipt of his mother’s picture, in the place of Milton’s sonorous academic phrases.

CHAPTER VI. 1843-1848. AET. 40-45.

“The Young American.” — Address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies. — Publication of the Second Series of Essays. — Contents: The Poet. — Experience. — Character. — Manners. — Gifts. — Nature. — Politics. — Nominalist and Realist. — NewvEngland Reformers. — Publication of Poems. — Second Visit to England.

[Footnote 1: These two addresses are to be found in the first and
eleventh volumes, respectively, of the last collective edition of
Emerson’s works, namely, “Nature, Addresses, and Lectures,” and
“Miscellanies.”]

Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and feeling; American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism; American, so far as he belonged to any limited part of the universe. He believed in American institutions, he trusted the future of the American race. In the address first mentioned in the contents, of this chapter, delivered February 7, 1844, he claims for this country all that the most ardent patriot could ask. Not a few of his fellow-countrymen will feel the significance of the following contrast.

“The English have many virtues, many advantages, and the proudest history in the world; but they need all and more than all the resources of the past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that country for the mortifications prepared for him by the system of society, and which seem to impose the alternative to resist or to avoid it…. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; we only say, Let us live in America, too thankful for our want of feudal institutions…. If only the men are employed in conspiring with the designs of the Spirit who led us hither, and is leading us still, we shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of others’ censures, out of all regrets of our own, into a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.”

Thirty years have passed since the lecture from which these passages are taken was delivered. The “Young American” of that day is the more than middle-aged American of the present. The intellectual independence of our country is far more solidly established than when this lecture was written. But the social alliance between certain classes of Americans and English is more and more closely cemented from year to year, as the wealth of the new world burrows its way among the privileged classes of the old world. It is a poor ambition for the possessor of suddenly acquired wealth to have it appropriated as a feeder of the impaired fortunes of a deteriorated household, with a family record of which its representatives are unworthy. The plain and wholesome language of Emerson is on the whole more needed now than it was when spoken. His words have often been extolled for their stimulating quality; following the same analogy, they are, as in this address, in a high degree tonic, bracing, strengthening to the American, who requires to be reminded of his privileges that he may know and find himself equal to his duties.

On the first day of August, 1844, Emerson delivered in Concord an address on the Anniversary of the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West India Islands. This discourse would not have satisfied the Abolitionists. It was too general in its propositions, full of humane and generous sentiments, but not looking to their extreme and immediate method of action.

* * * * *

Emerson’s second series of Essays was published in 1844. There are many sayings in the Essay called “The Poet,” which are meant for the initiated, rather than for him who runs, to read: —

“All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.”

Does this sound wild and extravagant? What were the political ups and downs of the Hebrews, — what were the squabbles of the tribes with each other, or with their neighbors, compared to the birth of that poet to whom we owe the Psalms, — the sweet singer whose voice is still the dearest of all that ever sang to the heart of mankind?

The poet finds his materials everywhere, as Emerson tells him in this eloquent apostrophe: —

“Thou true land-bird! sea-bird! air-bird! Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger and awe and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou should’st walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”

“Experience” is, as he says himself, but a fragment. It bears marks of having been written in a less tranquil state of mind than the other essays. His most important confession is this: —

“All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.”

The Essay on “Character” requires no difficult study, but is well worth the trouble of reading. A few sentences from it show the prevailing tone and doctrine.

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

“There is a class of men, individuals of which appear at long intervals, so eminently endowed with insight and virtue, that they have been unanimously saluted as divine, and who seem to be an accumulation of that power we consider.

“The history of those gods and saints which the world has written, and then worshipped, are documents of character. The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendor around the facts of his death which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.”

In his Essay on “Manners,” Emerson gives us his ideas of a gentleman: —

“The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions and expressing that lordship in his behavior, not in any manner dependent and servile either on persons or opinions or possessions. Beyond this fact of truth and real force, the word denotes good-nature or benevolence: manhood first, and then gentleness. — Power first, or no leading class. — God knows that all sorts of gentlemen knock at the door: but whenever used in strictness, and with any emphasis, the name will be found to point at original energy. — The famous gentlemen of Europe have been of this strong type: Saladin, Sapor, the Cid, Julius Caesar, Scipio, Alexander, Pericles, and the lordliest personages. They sat very carelessly in their chairs, and were too excellent themselves to value any condition at a high rate. — I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person. — The person who screams, or uses the superlative degree, or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight. — I esteem it a chief felicity of this country that it excels in woman.”

So writes Emerson, and proceeds to speak of woman in language which seems almost to pant for rhythm and rhyme.

This essay is plain enough for the least “transcendental” reader. Franklin would have approved it, and was himself a happy illustration of many of the qualities which go to the Emersonian ideal of good manners, a typical American, equal to his position, always as much so in the palaces and salons of Paris as in the Continental Congress, or the society of Philadelphia.

“Gifts” is a dainty little Essay with some nice distinctions and some hints which may help to give form to a generous impulse: —

“The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing.”

“Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. — Fruits are acceptable gifts, because they are the flower of commodities, and admit of fantastic values being attached to them.”

“It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning from one who has had the ill-luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business, this of being served, and the debtor naturally wishes to give you a slap.”

Emerson hates the superlative, but he does unquestionably love the tingling effect of a witty over-statement.

We have recognized most of the thoughts in the Essay entitled “Nature,” in the previous Essay by the same name, and others which we have passed in review. But there are poetical passages which will give new pleasure.

   Here is a variation of the formula with which we are familiar: —
    ”Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought
    again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated,
    and the volatile essence is forever escaping again into the state of
    free thought.”

And here is a quaint sentence with which we may take leave of this
Essay: —

“They say that by electro-magnetism, your salad shall be grown from the seed, whilst your fowl is roasting for dinner: it is a symbol of our modern aims and endeavors, — of our condensation and acceleration of objects; but nothing is gained: nature cannot be cheated: man’s life is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow.”

This is pretty and pleasant, but as to the literal value of the prediction, M. Jules Verne would be the best authority to consult. Poets are fond of that branch of science which, if the imaginative Frenchman gave it a name, he would probably call Onditologie.

It is not to be supposed that the most sanguine optimist could be satisfied with the condition of the American political world at the present time, or when the Essay on “Politics” was written, some years before the great war which changed the aspects of the country in so many respects, still leaving the same party names, and many of the characters of the old parties unchanged. This is Emerson’s view of them as they then were: —

“Of the two great parties, which, at this hour, almost share the nation between them, I should say that one has the best cause, and the other contains the best men. The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, will, of course, wish to cast his vote with the democrat, for free trade, for wide suffrage, for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code, and for facilitating in every manner the access of the young and the poor to the sources of wealth and power. But he can rarely accept the persons whom the so-called popular party propose to him as representatives of these liberties. They have not at heart the ends which give to the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It indicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant. From neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the nation.”

The metaphysician who looks for a closely reasoned argument on the famous old question which so divided the schoolmen of old will find a very moderate satisfaction in the Essay entitled “Nominalism and Realism.” But there are many discursive remarks in it worth gathering and considering. We have the complaint of the Cambridge “Phi Beta Kappa Oration,” reiterated, that there is no complete man, but only a collection of fragmentary men.

As a Platonist and a poet there could not be any doubt on which side were all his prejudices; but he takes his ground cautiously.

“In the famous dispute with the Nominalists, the Realists had a good deal of reason. General ideas are essences. They are our gods: they round and ennoble the most practical and sordid way of living.

“Though the uninspired man certainly finds persons a conveniency in household matters, the divine man does not respect them: he sees them as a rack of clouds, or a fleet of ripples which the wind drives over the surface of the water. But this is flat rebellion. Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million of fresh particulars.”

New England Reformers. — Would any one venture to guess how Emerson would treat this subject? With his unsparing, though amiable radicalism, his excellent common sense, his delicate appreciation of the ridiculous, too deep for laughter, as Wordsworth’s thoughts were too deep for tears, in the midst of a band of enthusiasts and not very remote from a throng of fanatics, what are we to look for from our philosopher who unites many characteristics of Berkeley and of Franklin?

We must remember when this lecture was written, for it was delivered on a Sunday in the year 1844. The Brook Farm experiment was an index of the state of mind among one section of the Reformers of whom he was writing. To remodel society and the world into a “happy family” was the aim of these enthusiasts. Some attacked one part of the old system, some another; some would build a new temple, some would rebuild the old church, some would worship in the fields and woods, if at all; one was for a phalanstery, where all should live in common, and another was meditating the plan and place of the wigwam where he was to dwell apart in the proud independence of the woodchuck and the musquash. Emerson had the largest and kindliest sympathy with their ideals and aims, but he was too clear-eyed not to see through the whims and extravagances of the unpractical experimenters who would construct a working world with the lay figures they had put together, instead of flesh and blood men and women and children with all their congenital and acquired perversities. He describes these Reformers in his own good-naturedly half-satirical way: —

“They defied each other like a congress of kings; each of whom had a realm to rule, and a way of his own that made concert unprofitable. What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! One apostle thought all men should go to farming; and another that no man should buy or sell; that the use of money was the cardinal evil; another that the mischief was in our diet, that we eat and drink damnation. These made unleavened bread, and were foes to the death to fermentation. It was in vain urged by the housewife that God made yeast as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he does vegetation; that fermentation develops the saccharine element in the grain, and makes it more palatable and more digestible. No, they wish the pure wheat, and will die but it shall not ferment. Stop, dear nature, these innocent advances of thine; let us scotch these ever-rolling wheels! Others attacked the system of agriculture, the use of animal manures in farming; and the tyranny of man over brute nature; these abuses polluted his food. The ox must be taken from the plough, and the horse from the cart, the hundred acres of the farm must be spaded, and the man must walk wherever boats and locomotives will not carry him. Even the insect world was to be defended, — that had been too long neglected, and a society for the protection of ground-worms, slugs, and mosquitoes was to be incorporated without delay. With these appeared the adepts of homoeopathy, of hydropathy, of mesmerism, of phrenology, and their wonderful theories of the Christian miracles!”

We have already seen the issue of the famous Brook Farm experiment, which was a practical outcome of the reforming agitation.

Emerson has had the name of being a leader in many movements in which he had very limited confidence, this among others to which the idealizing impulse derived from him lent its force, but for the organization of which he was in no sense responsible.

He says in the lecture we are considering: —

“These new associations are composed of men and women of superior talents and sentiments; yet it may easily be questioned whether such a community will draw, except in its beginnings, the able and the good; whether these who have energy will not prefer their choice of superiority and power in the world to the humble certainties of the association; whether such a retreat does not promise to become an asylum to those who have tried and failed rather than a field to the strong; and whether the members will not necessarily be fractions of men, because each finds that he cannot enter into it without some compromise.”

His sympathies were not allowed to mislead him; he knew human nature too well to believe in a Noah’s ark full of idealists.

All this time he was lecturing for his support, giving courses of lectures in Boston and other cities, and before the country lyceums in and out of New England.

His letters to Carlyle show how painstaking, how methodical, how punctual he was in the business which interested his distant friend. He was not fond of figures, and it must have cost him a great effort to play the part of an accountant.

He speaks also of receiving a good deal of company in the summer, and that some of this company exacted much time and attention, — more than he could spare, — is made evident by his gentle complaints, especially in his poems, which sometimes let out a truth he would hardly have uttered in prose.

In 1846 Emerson’s first volume of poems was published. Many of the poems had been long before the public — some of the best, as we have seen, having been printed in “The Dial.” It is only their being brought together for the first time which belongs especially to this period, and we can leave them for the present, to be looked over by and by in connection with a second volume of poems published in 1867, under the title, “May-Day and other Pieces.”

In October, 1847, he left Concord on a second visit to England, which will be spoken of in the following chapter.

CHAPTER VII. 1848-1853. AET. 45-50.

The “Massachusetts Quarterly Review;” Visit to Europe. — England. — Scotland. — France.— “Representative Men” published. I. Uses of Great Men. II. Plato; or, the Philosopher; Plato; New Readings. III. Swedenborg; or, the Mystic. IV. Montaigne; or, the Skeptic. V. Shakespeare; or, the Poet. VI. Napoleon; or, the Man of the World. VII. Goethe; or, the Writer. — Contribution to the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.”

A new periodical publication was begun in Boston in 1847, under the name of the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review.” Emerson wrote the “Editor’s Address,” but took no further active part in it, Theodore Parker being the real editor. The last line of this address is characteristic: “We rely on the truth for aid against ourselves.”

On the 5th of October, 1847, Emerson sailed for Europe on his second visit, reaching Liverpool on the 22d of that month. Many of his admirers were desirous that he should visit England and deliver some courses of lectures. Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had paid him friendly attentions during his earlier visit, and whose impressions of him in the pulpit have been given on a previous page, urged his coming. Mr. Conway quotes passages from a letter of Emerson’s which show that he had some hesitation in accepting the invitation, not unmingled with a wish to be heard by the English audiences favorably disposed towards him.

“I feel no call,” he said, “to make a visit of literary propagandism in England. All my impulses to work of that kind would rather employ me at home.” He does not like the idea of “coaxing” or advertising to get him an audience. He would like to read lectures before institutions or friendly persons who sympathize with his studies. He has had a good many decisive tokens of interest from British men and women, but he doubts whether he is much and favorably known in any one city, except perhaps in London. It proved, however, that there was a very widespread desire to hear him, and applications for lectures flowed in from all parts of the kingdom.

From Liverpool he proceeded immediately to Manchester, where Mr. Ireland received him at the Victoria station. After spending a few hours with him, he went to Chelsea to visit Carlyle, and at the end of a week returned to Manchester to begin the series of lecturing engagements which had been arranged for him. Mr. Ireland’s account of Emerson’s visits and the interviews between him and many distinguished persons is full of interest, but the interest largely relates to the persons visited by Emerson. He lectured at Edinburgh, where his liberal way of thinking and talking made a great sensation in orthodox circles. But he did not fail to find enthusiastic listeners. A young student, Mr. George Cupples, wrote an article on these lectures from which, as quoted by Mr. Ireland, I borrow a single sentence, — one only, but what could a critic say more?

Speaking of his personal character, as revealed through his writings, he says: “In this respect, I take leave to think that Emerson is the most mark-worthy, the loftiest, and most heroic mere man that ever appeared.” Emerson has a lecture on the superlative, to which he himself was never addicted. But what would youth be without its extravagances, — its preterpluperfect in the shape of adjectives, its unmeasured and unstinted admiration?

I need not enumerate the celebrated literary personages and other notabilities whom Emerson met in England and Scotland. He thought “the two finest mannered literary men he met in England were Leigh Hunt and De Quincey.” His diary might tell us more of the impressions made upon him by the distinguished people he met, but it is impossible to believe that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy behind him. Carlyle’s merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and Swinburne’s carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long endured the asperities of Carlyle, and that “loud shout of laughter,” which Mr. Ireland speaks of as one of his customary explosions, would have been discordant to Emerson’s ears, which were offended by such noisy manifestations.

During this visit Emerson made an excursion to Paris, which furnished him materials for a lecture on France delivered in Boston, in 1856, but never printed.

From the lectures delivered in England he selected a certain number for publication. These make up the volume entitled “Representative Men,” which was published in 1850. I will give very briefly an account of its contents. The title was a happy one, and has passed into literature and conversation as an accepted and convenient phrase. It would teach us a good deal merely to consider the names he has selected as typical, and the ground of their selection. We get his classification of men considered as leaders in thought and in action. He shows his own affinities and repulsions, and, as everywhere, writes his own biography, no matter about whom or what he is talking. There is hardly any book of his better worth study by those who wish to understand, not Plato, not Plutarch, not Napoleon, but Emerson himself. All his great men interest us for their own sake; but we know a good deal about most of them, and Emerson holds the mirror up to them at just such an angle that we see his own face as well as that of his hero, unintentionally, unconsciously, no doubt, but by a necessity which he would be the first to recognize.

Emerson swears by no master. He admires, but always with a reservation. Plato comes nearest to being his idol, Shakespeare next. But he says of all great men: “The power which they communicate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.”

Emerson loves power as much as Carlyle does; he likes “rough and
smooth,” “scourges of God,” and “darlings of the human race.” He likes
Julius Caesar, Charles the Fifth, of Spain, Charles the Twelfth, of
Sweden, Richard Plantagenet, and Bonaparte.

“I applaud,” he says, “a sufficient man, an officer equal to his office; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master standing firm on legs of iron, well born, rich, handsome, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all men by fascination into tributaries and supporters of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword-like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. But I find him greater when he can abolish himself and all heroes by letting in this element of reason, irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresistible upward force, into our thoughts, destroying individualism; the power is so great that the potentate is nothing. —

“The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. — All that respects the individual is temporary and prospective, like the individual himself, who is ascending out of his limits into a catholic existence.”

No man can be an idol for one who looks in this way at all men. But Plato takes the first place in Emerson’s gallery of six great personages whose portraits he has sketched. And of him he says: —

“Among secular books Plato only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, ‘Burn the libraries; for their value is in this book.’ Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.” —

“In proportion to the culture of men they become his scholars.”— “How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night to be his men! — His contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. — But the inventor only knows how to borrow. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so. Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

The reader will, I hope, remember this last general statement when he learns from what wide fields of authorship Emerson filled his storehouses.

A few sentences from Emerson will show us the probable source of some of the deepest thought of Plato and his disciples.

The conception of the fundamental Unity, he says, finds its highest expression in the religious writings of the East, especially in the Indian Scriptures. “‘The whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who is identical with all things, and is to be regarded by the wise as not differing from but as the same as themselves. I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I.’ As if he had said, ‘All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy.’” All of which we see reproduced in Emerson’s poem “Brahma.”— “The country of unity, of immovable institutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in abstractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in practice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social institution of caste. On the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative: it resists caste by culture; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom.”— “Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance, the energy of each.”

But Emerson says, — and some will smile at hearing him say it of another,— “The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on both sides of every great question from him.”

The transcendent intellectual and moral superiorities of this “Euclid of holiness,” as Emerson calls him, with his “soliform eye and his boniform soul,” — the two quaint adjectives being from the mint of Cudworth, — are fully dilated upon in the addition to the original article called “Plato: New Readings.”

Few readers will be satisfied with the Essay entitled “Swedenborg; or, the Mystic.” The believers in his special communion as a revealer of divine truth will find him reduced to the level of other seers. The believers of the different creeds of Christianity will take offence at the statement that “Swedenborg and Behmen both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities in its bosom.” The men of science will smile at the exorbitant claims put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer. “Philosophers” will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called them “cockatrices,” “asps,” or “flying serpents;” “literary men” will not agree that they are “conjurers and charlatans,” and will not listen with patience to the praises of a man who so called them. As for the poets, they can take their choice of Emerson’s poetical or prose estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both. In “The Test,” the Muse says: —

 ”I hung my verses in the wind,
  Time and tide their faults may find;
  All were winnowed through and through,
  Five lines lasted good and true …
  Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
  Nor time unmake what poets know.
  Have you eyes to find the five
  Which five hundred did survive?”

In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and Goethe.

And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that “his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level. We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No bird ever sang in these gardens of the dead. The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning.” Yet Emerson says of him that “He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature.”

Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer, he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.

“Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” is easier reading than the last-mentioned Essay. Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him. But no other reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes him as being.

“There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thought: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.

“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. —

“Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel solid ground and the stones underneath. His writing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping the middle of the road. There is but one exception, — in his love for Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes and his style rises to passion.”

The writer who draws this portrait must have many of the same characteristics. Much as Emerson loved his dreams and his dreamers, he must have found a great relief in getting into “the middle of the road” with Montaigne, after wandering in difficult by-paths which too often led him round to the point from which he started.

As to his exposition of the true relations of skepticism to affirmative and negative belief, the philosophical reader must be referred to the Essay itself.

In writing of “Shakespeare; or, the Poet,” Emerson naturally gives expression to his leading ideas about the office of the poet and of poetry.

“Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality.” A poet has “a heart in unison with his time and country.”— “There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.”

When Shakespeare was in his youth the drama was the popular means of amusement. It was “ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch, and library, at the same time. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field.” Shakespeare found a great mass of old plays existing in manuscript and reproduced from time to time on the stage. He borrowed in all directions: “A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating.” Homer, Chaucer, Saadi, felt that all wit was their wit. “Chaucer is a huge borrower.” Emerson gives a list of authors from whom he drew. This list is in many particulars erroneous, as I have learned from a letter of Professor Lounsbury’s which I have had the privilege of reading, but this is a detail which need not delay us.

The reason why Emerson has so much to say on this subject of borrowing, especially when treating of Plato and of Shakespeare, is obvious enough. He was arguing in his own cause, — not defending himself, as if there were some charge of plagiarism to be met, but making the proud claim of eminent domain in behalf of the masters who knew how to use their acquisitions.

“Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare; and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us.”— “Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd. A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato’s brain and think from thence; but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors.”

After all the homage which Emerson pays to the intellect of Shakespeare, he weighs him with the rest of mankind, and finds that he shares “the halfness and imperfection of humanity.”

“He converted the elements which waited on his command into entertainment. He was master of the revels to mankind.”

And so, after this solemn verdict on Shakespeare, after looking at the forlorn conclusions of our old and modern oracles, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede, he says: “It must be conceded that these are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet-priest, who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with equal inspiration.”

It is not to be expected that Emerson should have much that is new to say about “Napoleon; or, the Man of the World.”

The stepping-stones of this Essay are easy to find: —

“The instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the incarnate democrat. —

“Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and at the highest point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of the newspapers.” As Plato borrowed, as Shakespeare borrowed, as Mirabeau “plagiarized every good thought, every good word that was spoken in France,” so Napoleon is not merely “representative, but a monopolizer and usurper of other minds.”

He was “a man of stone and iron,” — equipped for his work by nature as Sallust describes Catiline as being. “He had a directness of action never before combined with such comprehension. Here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next. He saw only the object; the obstacle must give way.”

“When a natural king becomes a titular king everybody is pleased and satisfied.” —

“I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society. — He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.”

But he was without generous sentiments, “a boundless liar,” and finishing in high colors the outline of his moral deformities, Emerson gives us a climax in two sentences which render further condemnation superfluous: —

   ”In short, when you have penetrated through all the circles of power
    and splendor, you were not dealing with a gentleman, at last, but
    with an impostor and rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of
    Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter.

“So this exorbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished, and absorbed the power and existence of those who served him; and the universal cry of France and of Europe in 1814 was, Enough of him; ‘Assez de Bonaparte.’”

It was to this feeling that the French poet Barbier, whose death we have but lately seen announced, gave expression in the terrible satire in which he pictured France as a fiery courser bestridden by her spurred rider, who drove her in a mad career over heaps of rocks and ruins.

But after all, Carlyle’s “carrière ouverte aux talens” is the expression for Napoleon’s great message to mankind.

“Goethe; or, the Writer,” is the last of the Representative Men who are the subjects of this book of Essays. Emerson says he had read the fifty-five volumes of Goethe, but no other German writers, at least in the original. It must have been in fulfilment of some pious vow that he did this. After all that Carlyle had written about Goethe, he could hardly help studying him. But this Essay looks to me as if he had found the reading of Goethe hard work. It flows rather languidly, toys with side issues as a stream loiters round a nook in its margin, and finds an excuse for play in every pebble. Still, he has praise enough for his author. “He has clothed our modern existence with poetry.”— “He has said the best things about nature that ever were said. — He flung into literature in his Mephistopheles the first organic figure that has been added for some ages, and which will remain as long as the Prometheus. — He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts and sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; spiritual, but not spiritualist. — I join Napoleon with him, as being both representatives of the impatience and reaction of nature against the morgue of conventions, — two stern realists, who, with their scholars, have severally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and seeming, for this time and for all time.”

This must serve as an ex pede guide to reconstruct the Essay which finishes the volume.

In 1852 there was published a Memoir of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in which Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing each took a part. Emerson’s account of her conversation and extracts from her letters and diaries, with his running commentaries and his interpretation of her mind and character, are a most faithful and vivid portraiture of a woman who is likely to live longer by what is written of her than by anything she ever wrote herself.

CHAPTER VIII. 1858-1858. AET. 50-55.

Lectures in various Places. — Anti-Slavery Addresses. — Woman. A Lecture read before the Woman’s Rights Convention. — Samuel Hoar. Speech at Concord. — Publication of “English Traits.” — The “Atlantic Monthly.” — The “Saturday Club.”

After Emerson’s return from Europe he delivered lectures to different audiences, — one on Poetry, afterwards published in “Letters and Social Aims,” a course of lectures in Freeman Place Chapel, Boston, some of which have been published, one on the Anglo-Saxon Race, and many others. In January, 1855, he gave one of the lectures in a course of Anti-Slavery Addresses delivered in Tremont Temple, Boston. In the same year he delivered an address before the Anti-Slavery party of New York. His plan for the extirpation of slavery was to buy the slaves from the planters, not conceding their right to ownership, but because “it is the only practical course, and is innocent.” It would cost two thousand millions, he says, according to the present estimate, but “was there ever any contribution that was so enthusiastically paid as this would be?”

His optimism flowers out in all its innocent luxuriance in the paragraph from which this is quoted. Of course with notions like these he could not be hand in hand with the Abolitionists. He was classed with the Free Soilers, but he seems to have formed a party by himself in his project for buying up the negroes. He looked at the matter somewhat otherwise in 1863, when the settlement was taking place in a different currency, — in steel and not in gold: —

 ”Pay ransom to the owner,
    And fill the bag to the brim.
  Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
    And ever was. Pay him.”

His sympathies were all and always with freedom. He spoke with indignation of the outrage on Sumner; he took part in the meeting at Concord expressive of sympathy with John Brown. But he was never in the front rank of the aggressive Anti-Slavery men. In his singular “Ode inscribed to W.H. Channing” there is a hint of a possible solution of the slavery problem which implies a doubt as to the permanence of the cause of all the trouble.

 ”The over-god
  Who marries Right to Might,
  Who peoples, unpeoples, —
  He who exterminates
  Races by stronger races,
  Black by white faces, —
  Knows to bring honey
  Out of the lion.”

Some doubts of this kind helped Emerson to justify himself when he refused to leave his “honeyed thought” for the busy world where

“Things are of the snake.”

The time came when he could no longer sit quietly in his study, and, to borrow Mr. Cooke’s words, “As the agitation proceeded, and brave men took part in it, and it rose to a spirit of moral grandeur, he gave a heartier assent to the outward methods adopted.”

* * * * *

No woman could doubt the reverence of Emerson for womanhood. In a lecture read to the “Woman’s Rights Convention” in 1855, he takes bold, and what would then have been considered somewhat advanced, ground in the controversy then and since dividing the community. This is the way in which he expresses himself:

“I do not think it yet appears that women wish this equal share in public affairs. But it is they and not we that are to determine it. Let the laws he purged of every barbarous remainder, every barbarous impediment to women. Let the public donations for education be equally shared by them, let them enter a school as freely as a church, let them have and hold and give their property as men do theirs; — and in a few years it will easily appear whether they wish a voice in making the laws that are to govern them. If you do refuse them a vote, you will also refuse to tax them, — according to our Teutonic principle, No representation, no tax. — The new movement is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman’s heart is prompted to desire, the man’s mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish.”

Emerson was fortunate enough to have had for many years as a neighbor, that true New England Roman, Samuel Hoar. He spoke of him in Concord before his fellow-citizens, shortly after his death, in 1856. He afterwards prepared a sketch of Mr. Hoar for “Putnam’s Magazine,” from which I take one prose sentence and the verse with which the sketch concluded: —

“He was a model of those formal but reverend manners which make what is called a gentleman of the old school, so called under an impression that the style is passing away, but which, I suppose, is an optical illusion, as there are always a few more of the class remaining, and always a few young men to whom these manners are native.”

The single verse I quote is compendious enough and descriptive enough for an Elizabethan monumental inscription.

 ”With beams December planets dart
  His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
  July was in his sunny heart,
  October in his liberal hand.”

Emerson’s “English Traits,” forming one volume of his works, was published in 1856. It is a thoroughly fresh and original book. It is not a tourist’s guide, not a detailed description of sights which tired the traveller in staring at them, and tire the reader who attacks the wearying pages in which they are recorded. Shrewd observation there is indeed, but its strength is in broad generalization and epigrammatic characterizations. They are not to be received as in any sense final; they are not like the verifiable facts of science; they are more or less sagacious, more or less well founded opinions formed by a fair-minded, sharp-witted, kind-hearted, open-souled philosopher, whose presence made every one well-disposed towards him, and consequently left him well-disposed to all the world.

A glance at the table of contents will give an idea of the objects which Emerson proposed to himself in his tour, and which take up the principal portion of his record. Only one place is given as the heading of a chapter, — Stonehenge. The other eighteen chapters have general titles, Land, Race, Ability, Manners, and others of similar character.

He uses plain English in introducing us to the Pilgrim fathers of the
British Aristocracy: —

“Twenty thousand thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for their types the swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they severally resembled.”

The race preserves some of its better characteristics.

“They have a vigorous health and last well into middle and old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still handsome. A clear skin, a peach-bloom complexion, and good teeth are found all over the island.”

English “Manners” are characterized, according to Emerson, by pluck, vigor, independence. “Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable.” They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal, loving routine and conventional ways; loving truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.

“They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; they use a studied plainness.”

“In an aristocratical country like England, not the Trial by Jury, but the dinner is the capital institution.”

“They confide in each other, — English believes in English.”— “They require the same adherence, thorough conviction, and reality in public men.”

   ”As compared with the American, I think them cheerful and contented.
    Young people in this country are much more prone to melancholy.”

Emerson’s observation is in accordance with that of Cotton Mather nearly two hundred years ago.

“New England, a country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those Melancholy Indispositions, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent Hands upon themselves at the last. These are among the unsearchable Judgments of God.”

If there is a little exaggeration about the following portrait of the Englishman, it has truth enough to excuse its high coloring, and the likeness will be smilingly recognized by every stout Briton.

“They drink brandy like water, cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into absurd follies with the gravity of the Eumenides. They stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their turbulent sense; leaving no lie uncontradicted; no pretension unexamined. They chew hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases, swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon Upas, taste every poison, buy every secret; at Naples, they put St. Januarius’s blood in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the ‘winking virgin’ to know why she winks; measure with an English foot-rule every cell of the inquisition, every Turkish Caaba, every Holy of Holies; translate and send to Bentley the arcanum, bribed and bullied away from shuddering Bramins; and measure their own strength by the terror they cause.”

This last audacious picture might be hung up as a prose pendant to
Marvell’s poetical description of Holland and the Dutch.

“A saving stupidity marks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle’s eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength. — High and low, they are of an unctuous texture. — Their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body. — Half their strength they put not forth. The stability of England is the security of the modern world.”

Perhaps nothing in any of his vigorous paragraphs is more striking than the suggestion that “if hereafter the war of races often predicted, and making itself a war of opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe), should menace the English civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their floating castles and find a new home and a second millennium of power in their colonies.”

In reading some of Emerson’s pages it seems as if another Arcadia, or the new Atlantis, had emerged as the fortunate island of Great Britain, or that he had reached a heaven on earth where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal, — or if they do, never think of denying that they have done it. But this was a generation ago, when the noun “shoddy,” and the verb “to scamp,” had not grown such familiar terms to English ears as they are to-day. Emerson saw the country on its best side. Each traveller makes his own England. A Quaker sees chiefly broad brims, and the island looks to him like a field of mushrooms.

The transplanted Church of England is rich and prosperous and fashionable enough not to be disturbed by Emerson’s flashes of light that have not come through its stained windows.

“The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel, and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman.

“The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogation in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.”

Sydney Smith had a great reverence for a bishop, — so great that he told a young lady that he used to roll a crumb of bread in his hand, from nervousness, when he sat next one at a dinner-table, — and if next an archbishop, used to roll crumbs with both hands, — but Sydney Smith would have enjoyed the tingling felicity of this last stinging touch of wit, left as lightly and gracefully as a banderillero leaves his little gayly ribboned dart in the shoulders of the bull with whose unwieldy bulk he is playing.

Emerson handles the formalism and the half belief of the Established Church very freely, but he closes his chapter on Religion with soft-spoken words.

“Yet if religion be the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering of all evil, souffrir de tout le monde, et ne faire souffrir personne, that divine secret has existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of Romilly, of Clarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in thousands who have no fame.”

“English Traits” closes with Emerson’s speech at Manchester, at the annual banquet of the “Free Trade Athenaeum.” This was merely an occasional after-dinner reply to a toast which called him up, but it had sentences in it which, if we can imagine Milton to have been called up in the same way, he might well have spoken and done himself credit in their utterance.

* * * * *

The total impression left by the book is that Emerson was fascinated by the charm of English society, filled with admiration of the people, tempted to contrast his New Englanders in many respects unfavorably with Old Englanders, mainly in their material and vital stamina; but with all this not blinded for a moment to the thoroughly insular limitations of the phlegmatic islander. He alternates between a turn of genuine admiration and a smile as at a people that has not outgrown its playthings. This is in truth the natural and genuine feeling of a self-governing citizen of a commonwealth where thrones and wigs and mitres seem like so many pieces of stage property. An American need not be a philosopher to hold these things cheap. He cannot help it. Madame Tussaud’s exhibition, the Lord-Mayor’s gilt coach, and a coronation, if one happens to be in season, are all sights to be seen by an American traveller, but the reverence which is born with the British subject went up with the smoke of the gun that fired the long echoing shot at the little bridge over the sleepy river which works its way along through the wide-awake town of Concord.

In November, 1857, a new magazine was established in Boston, bearing the name of “The Atlantic Monthly.” Professor James Russell Lowell was editor-in-chief, and Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, who were the originators of the enterprise, were the publishers. Many of the old contributors to “The Dial” wrote for the new magazine, among them Emerson. He contributed twenty-eight articles in all, more than half of them verse, to different numbers, from the first to the thirty-seventh volume. Among them are several of his best known poems, such as “The Romany Girl,” “Days,” “Brahma,” “Waldeinsamkeit,” “The Titmouse,” “Boston Hymn,” “Saadi,” and “Terminus.”

At about the same time there grew up in Boston a literary association, which became at last well known as the “Saturday Club,” the members dining together on the last Saturday of every month.

The Magazine and the Club have existed and flourished to the present day. They have often been erroneously thought to have some organic connection, and the “Atlantic Club” has been spoken of as if there was or had been such an institution, but it never existed.

Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club from the first; in reality before it existed as an empirical fact, and when it was only a Platonic idea. The Club seems to have shaped itself around him as a nucleus of crystallization, two or three friends of his having first formed the habit of meeting him at dinner at “Parker’s,” the “Will’s Coffee-House” of Boston. This little group gathered others to itself and grew into a club as Rome grew into a city, almost without knowing how. During its first decade the Saturday Club brought together, as members or as visitors, many distinguished persons. At one end of the table sat Longfellow, florid, quiet, benignant, soft-voiced, a most agreeable rather than a brilliant talker, but a man upon whom it was always pleasant to look, — whose silence was better than many another man’s conversation. At the other end of the table sat Agassiz, robust, sanguine, animated, full of talk, boy-like in his laughter. The stranger who should have asked who were the men ranged along the sides of the table would have heard in answer the names of Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Lowell, Whipple, Peirce, the distinguished mathematician, Judge Hoar, eminent at the bar and in the cabinet, Dwight, the leading musical critic of Boston for a whole generation, Sumner, the academic champion of freedom, Andrew, “the great War Governor” of Massachusetts, Dr. Howe, the philanthropist, William Hunt, the painter, with others not unworthy of such company. And with these, generally near the Longfellow end of the table, sat Emerson, talking in low tones and carefully measured utterances to his neighbor, or listening, and recording on his mental phonograph any stray word worth remembering. Emerson was a very regular attendant at the meetings of the Saturday Club, and continued to dine at its table, until within a year or two of his death.

Unfortunately the Club had no Boswell, and its golden hours passed unrecorded.

CHAPTER IX. 1858-1863: AET. 55-60.

Essay on Persian Poetry. — Speech at the Burns Centennial Festival — Letter from Emerson to a Lady. — Tributes to Theodore Parker and to Thoreau. — Address on the Emancipation Proclamation. — Publication of “The Conduct of Life.” Contents: Fate; Power; Wealth; Culture; Behavior; Worship; Considerations by the Way; Beauty; Illusions.

The Essay on Persian Poetry, published in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1858, should be studied by all readers who are curious in tracing the influence of Oriental poetry on Emerson’s verse. In many of the shorter poems and fragments published since “May-Day,” as well as in the “Quatrains” and others of the later poems in that volume, it is sometimes hard to tell what is from the Persian from what is original.

On the 25th of January, 1859, Emerson attended the Burns Festival, held at the Parker House in Boston, on the Centennial Anniversary of the poet’s birth. He spoke after the dinner to the great audience with such beauty and eloquence that all who listened to him have remembered it as one of the most delightful addresses they ever heard. Among his hearers was Mr. Lowell, who says of it that “every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds.” Judge Hoar, who was another of his hearers, says, that though he has heard many of the chief orators of his time, he never witnessed such an effect of speech upon men. I was myself present on that occasion, and underwent the same fascination that these gentlemen and the varied audience before the speaker experienced. His words had a passion in them not usual in the calm, pure flow most natural to his uttered thoughts; white-hot iron we are familiar with, but white-hot silver is what we do not often look upon, and his inspiring address glowed like silver fresh from the cupel.

I am allowed the privilege of printing the following letter addressed to a lady of high intellectual gifts, who was one of the earliest, most devoted, and most faithful of his intimate friends: —

CONCORD, May 13, 1859.

Please, dear C., not to embark for home until I have despatched these lines, which I will hasten to finish. Louis Napoleon will not bayonet you the while, — keep him at the door. So long I have promised to write! so long I have thanked your long suffering! I have let pass the unreturning opportunity your visit to Germany gave to acquaint you with Gisela von Arnim (Bettina’s daughter), and Joachim the violinist, and Hermann Grimm the scholar, her friends. Neither has E., — wandering in Europe with hope of meeting you, — yet met. This contumacy of mine I shall regret as long as I live. How palsy creeps over us, with gossamer first, and ropes afterwards! and the witch has the prisoner when once she has put her eye on him, as securely as after the bolts are drawn. — Yet I and all my little company watch every token from you, and coax Mrs. H. to read us letters. I learned with satisfaction that you did not like Germany. Where then did Goethe find his lovers? Do all the women have bad noses and bad mouths? And will you stop in England, and bring home the author of “Counterparts” with you? Or did —— write the novels and send them to London, as I fancied when I read them? How strange that you and I alone to this day should have his secret! I think our people will never allow genius, without it is alloyed by talent. But —— is paralyzed by his whims, that I have ceased to hope from him. I could wish your experience of your friends were more animating than mine, and that there were any horoscope you could not cast from the first day. The faults of youth are never shed, no, nor the merits, and creeping time convinces ever the more of our impotence, and of the irresistibility of our bias. Still this is only science, and must remain science. Our praxis is never altered for that. We must forever hold our companions responsible, or they are not companions but stall-fed.

I think, as we grow older, we decrease as individuals, and as if in an immense audience who hear stirring music, none essays to offer a new stave, but we only join emphatically in the chorus. We volunteer no opinion, we despair of guiding people, but are confirmed in our perception that Nature is all right, and that we have a good understanding with it. We must shine to a few brothers, as palms or pines or roses among common weeds, not from greater absolute value, but from a more convenient nature. But ’tis almost chemistry at last, though a meta-chemistry. I remember you were such an impatient blasphemer, however musically, against the adamantine identities, in your youth, that you should take your turn of resignation now, and be a preacher of peace. But there is a little raising of the eyebrow, now and then, in the most passive acceptance, — if of an intellectual turn. Here comes out around me at this moment the new June, — the leaves say June, though the calendar says May, — and we must needs hail our young relatives again, though with something of the gravity of adult sons and daughters receiving a late-born brother or sister. Nature herself seems a little ashamed of a law so monstrous, billions of summers, and now the old game again without a new bract or sepal. But you will think me incorrigible with my generalities, and you so near, and will be here again this summer; perhaps with A.W. and the other travellers. My children scan curiously your E.’s drawings, as they have seen them.

The happiest winds fill the sails of you and yours!

R.W. EMERSON.

In the year 1860, Theodore Parker died, and Emerson spoke of his life and labors at the meeting held at the Music Hall to do honor to his memory. Emerson delivered discourses on Sundays and week-days in the Music Hall to Mr. Parker’s society after his death. In 1862, he lost his friend Thoreau, at whose funeral he delivered an address which was published in the “Atlantic Monthly” for August of the same year. Thoreau had many rare and admirable qualities, and Thoreau pictured by Emerson is a more living personage than White of Selborne would have been on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

The Address on the Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in Boston in September, 1862. The feeling that inspired it may be judged by the following extract: —

“Happy are the young, who find the pestilence cleansed out of the earth, leaving open to them an honest career. Happy the old, who see Nature purified before they depart. Do not let the dying die; hold them back to this world, until you have charged their ear and heart with this message to other spiritual societies, announcing the melioration of our planet: —

 ”’Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
  And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.’”

The “Conduct of Life” was published in 1860. The chapter on “Fate” might leave the reader with a feeling that what he is to do, as well as what he is to be and to suffer, is so largely predetermined for him, that his will, though formally asserted, has but a questionable fraction in adjusting him to his conditions as a portion of the universe. But let him hold fast to this reassuring statement: —

“If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. — We are sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times.”

But the value of the Essay is not so much in any light it throws on the mystery of volition, as on the striking and brilliant way in which the limitations of the individual and the inexplicable rule of law are illustrated.

“Nature is no sentimentalist, — does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. — The way of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, — these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, — expensive races, — race living at the expense of race. — Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.”

Emerson cautions his reader against the danger of the doctrines which he believed in so fully: —

   ”They who talk much of destiny, their birth-star, etc., are in a
    lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they fear.”

But certainly no physiologist, no cattle-breeder, no Calvinistic predestinarian could put his view more vigorously than Emerson, who dearly loves a picturesque statement, has given it in these words, which have a dash of science, a flash of imagination, and a hint of the delicate wit that is one of his characteristics: —

“People are born with the moral or with the material bias; — uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Fraunhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a whig and that a free-soiler.”

Let us see what Emerson has to say of “Power:” —

“All successful men have agreed in one thing — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and the last of things.

“The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; — the key to all ages is, — Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear. This gives force to the strong, — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action. —

“We say that success is constitutional; depends on a plus condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that is of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and though rarely found in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the supernatural or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to take off its edge.”

The “two economies which are the best succedanea” for deficiency of temperament are concentration and drill. This he illustrates by example, and he also lays down some good, plain, practical rules which “Poor Richard” would have cheerfully approved. He might have accepted also the Essay on “Wealth” as having a good sense so like his own that he could hardly tell the difference between them.

“Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so as to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp, and three meals; in a horse or locomotive to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge and good will. Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. —

“To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the masterworks and chief men of each race. —

“The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, lest civilization should be undone.”

Who can give better counsels on “Culture” than Emerson? But we must borrow only a few sentences from his essay on that subject. All kinds of secrets come out as we read these Essays of Emerson’s. We know something of his friends and disciples who gathered round him and sat at his feet. It is not hard to believe that he was drawing one of those composite portraits Mr. Galton has given us specimens of when he wrote as follows: —

“The pest of society is egotism. This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that Nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.

“The antidotes against this organic egotism are, the range and variety of attraction, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, solitude.”

“We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be used; yet cautiously and haughtily, — and will yield their best values to him who can best do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter, where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.”

We must remember, too, that “the calamities are our friends. Try the rough water as well as the smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. Don’t be so tender at making an enemy now and then. He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners.”

Emerson cannot have had many enemies, if any, in his calm and noble career. He can have cherished no enmity, on personal grounds at least. But he refused his hand to one who had spoken ill of a friend whom he respected. It was “the hand of Douglas” again, — the same feeling that Charles Emerson expressed in the youthful essay mentioned in the introduction to this volume.

Here are a few good sayings about “Behavior.”

“There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, — now repeated and hardened into usage.”

Thus it is that Mr. Emerson speaks of “Manners” in his Essay under the above title.

   ”The basis of good manners is self-reliance. — Manners require time,
    as nothing is more vulgar than haste. —

   ”Men take each other’s measure, when they meet for the first
    time, — and every time they meet. —

“It is not what talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that constitutes friendship and character. The man that stands by himself, the universe stands by him also.”

In his Essay on “Worship,” Emerson ventures the following prediction: —

“The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith which is science. — There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms or psaltery or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry.”

It is a bold prophecy, but who can doubt that all improbable and unverifiable traditional knowledge of all kinds will make way for the established facts of science and history when these last reach it in their onward movement? It may be remarked that he now speaks of science more respectfully than of old. I suppose this Essay was of later date than “Beauty,” or “Illusions.” But accidental circumstances made such confusion in the strata of Emerson’s published thought that one is often at a loss to know whether a sentence came from the older or the newer layer.

We come to “Considerations by the Way.” The common-sense side of Emerson’s mind has so much in common with the plain practical intelligence of Franklin that it is a pleasure to find the philosopher of the nineteenth century quoting the philosopher of the eighteenth.

“Franklin said, ‘Mankind are very superficial and dastardly: they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it discouraged; but they have the means if they would employ them.’”

“Shall we judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely.” Here we have the doctrine of the “saving remnant,” which we have since recognized in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s well-remembered lecture. Our republican philosopher is clearly enough outspoken on this matter of the vox populi. “Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.”

Père Bouhours asked a question about the Germans which found its answer in due time. After reading what Emerson says about “the masses,” one is tempted to ask whether a philosopher can ever have “a constituency” and be elected to Congress? Certainly the essay just quoted from would not make a very promising campaign document. Perhaps there was no great necessity for Emerson’s returning to the subject of “Beauty,” to which he had devoted a chapter of “Nature,” and of which he had so often discoursed incidentally. But he says so many things worth reading in the Essay thus entitled in the “Conduct of Life” that we need not trouble ourselves about repetitions. The Essay is satirical and poetical rather than philosophical. Satirical when he speaks of science with something of that old feeling betrayed by his brother Charles when he was writing in 1828; poetical in the flight of imagination with which he enlivens, entertains, stimulates, inspires, — or as some may prefer to say, — amuses his listeners and readers.

The reader must decide which of these effects is produced by the following passage: —

“The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of everything into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors, and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. Every word has a double, treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.”

One is reminded of various things in reading this sentence. An ounce of alcohol, or a few whiffs from an opium-pipe, may easily make a day memorable by bringing on this imaginative delirium, which is apt, if often repeated, to run into visions of rodents and reptiles. A coarser satirist than Emerson indulged his fancy in “Meditations on a Broomstick,” which My Lady Berkeley heard seriously and to edification. Meditations on a “Shoe-box” are less promising, but no doubt something could be made of it. A poet must select, and if he stoops too low he cannot lift the object he would fain idealize.

The habitual readers of Emerson do not mind an occasional over-statement, extravagance, paradox, eccentricity; they find them amusing and not misleading. But the accountants, for whom two and two always make four, come upon one of these passages and shut the book up as wanting in sanity. Without a certain sensibility to the humorous, no one should venture upon Emerson. If he had seen the lecturer’s smile as he delivered one of his playful statements of a runaway truth, fact unhorsed by imagination, sometimes by wit, or humor, he would have found a meaning in his words which the featureless printed page could never show him.

The Essay on “Illusions” has little which we have not met with, or shall not find repeating itself in the Poems.

During this period Emerson contributed many articles in prose and verse to the “Atlantic Monthly,” and several to “The Dial,” a second periodical of that name published in Cincinnati. Some of these have been, or will be, elsewhere referred to.

CHAPTER X. 1863-1868. AET. 60-65.

“Boston Hymn.”— “Voluntaries.” — Other Poems.— “May-Day and other Pieces.”— “Remarks at the Funeral Services of Abraham Lincoln.” — Essay on Persian Poetry. — Address at a Meeting of the Free Religious Association.— “Progress of Culture.” Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University. — Course of Lectures in Philadelphia. — The Degree of LL.D. conferred upon Emerson by Harvard University.— “Terminus.”

The “Boston Hymn” was read by Emerson in the Music Hall, on the first day of January, 1863. It is a rough piece of verse, but noble from beginning to end. One verse of it, beginning “Pay ransom to the owner,” has been already quoted; these are the three that precede it: —

 ”I cause from every creature
    His proper good to flow:
  As much as he is and doeth
    So much shall he bestow.

 ”But laying hands on another
    To coin his labor and sweat,
  He goes in pawn to his victim
    For eternal years in debt.

 ”To-day unbind the captive,
    So only are ye unbound:
  Lift up a people from the dust,
    Trump of their rescue, sound!”

“Voluntaries,” published in the same year in the “Atlantic Monthly,” is more dithyrambic in its measure and of a more Pindaric elevation than the plain song of the “Boston Hymn.”

 ”But best befriended of the God
  He who, in evil times,
  Warned by an inward voice,
  Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
  Biding by his rule and choice,
  Feeling only the fiery thread
  Leading over heroic ground,
  Walled with mortal terror round,
  To the aim which him allures,
  And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
  Peril around, all else appalling,
  Cannon in front and leaden rain
  Him duly through the clarion calling
  To the van called not in vain.”

It is in this poem that we find the lines which, a moment after they were written, seemed as if they had been carved on marble for a thousand years: —

 ”So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
  So near is God to man,
  When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
  The youth replies, I can.”

“Saadi” was published in the “Atlantic Monthly” in 1864, “My Garden” in 1866, “Terminus” in 1867. In the same year these last poems with many others were collected in a small volume, entitled “May-Day, and Other Pieces.” The general headings of these poems are as follows: May-Day. — The Adirondacs. — Occasional and Miscellaneous Pieces. — Nature and Life. — Elements. — Quatrains. — Translations. — Some of these poems, which were written at long intervals, have been referred to in previous pages. “The Adirondacs” is a pleasant narrative, but not to be compared for its poetical character with “May-Day,” one passage from which, beginning,

“I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,”

is surpassingly imaginative and beautiful. In this volume will be found “Brahma,” “Days,” and others which are well known to all readers of poetry.

Emerson’s delineations of character are remarkable for high-relief and sharp-cut lines. In his Remarks at the Funeral Services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord, April 19, 1865, he drew the portrait of the homespun-robed chief of the Republic with equal breadth and delicacy: —

“Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair weather sailor; the new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years, — four years of battle-days, — his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country; the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.”

In his “Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association,” Emerson stated his leading thought about religion in a very succinct and sufficiently “transcendental” way: intelligibly for those who wish to understand him; mystically to those who do not accept or wish to accept the doctrine shadowed forth in his poem, “The Sphinx.”

— “As soon as every man is apprised of the Divine Presence within his own mind, — is apprised that the perfect law of duty corresponds with the laws of chemistry, of vegetation, of astronomy, as face to face in a glass; that the basis of duty, the order of society, the power of character, the wealth of culture, the perfection of taste, all draw their essence from this moral sentiment; then we have a religion that exalts, that commands all the social and all the private action.”

Nothing could be more wholesome in a meeting of creed-killers than the suggestive remark, —

— “What I expected to find here was, some practical suggestions by which we were to reanimate and reorganize for ourselves the true Church, the pure worship. Pure doctrine always bears fruit in pure benefits. It is only by good works, it is only on the basis of active duty, that worship finds expression. — The interests that grow out of a meeting like this, should bind us with new strength to the old eternal duties.”

In a later address before the same association, Emerson says:— “I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous dispensation, — certainly not to the doctrine of Christianity. — If you are childish and exhibit your saint as a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim takes his teachings out of nature, and permits official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings.”

The “Progress of Culture” was delivered as a Phi Beta Kappa oration just thirty years after his first address before the same society. It is very instructive to compare the two orations written at the interval of a whole generation: one in 1837, at the age of thirty-four; the other in 1867, at the age of sixty-four. Both are hopeful, but the second is more sanguine than the first. He recounts what he considers the recent gains of the reforming movement: —

“Observe the marked ethical quality of the innovations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman to a political status is itself an honorable testimony to the civilization which has given her a civil status new in history. Now that by the increased humanity of law she controls her property, she inevitably takes the next step to her share in power.”

He enumerates many other gains, from the war or from the growth of intelligence,— “All, one may say, in a high degree revolutionary, teaching nations the taking of governments into their own hands, and superseding kings.”

He repeats some of his fundamental formulae.

   ”The foundation of culture, as of character, is at last the moral
    sentiment.

   ”Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any
    material force, that thoughts rule the world.

“Periodicity, reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter.”

And most encouraging it is to read in 1884 what was written in 1867, — especially in the view of future possibilities. “Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are bad enough.” Non tali auxilio, we exclaim, with a shudder of remembrance, and are very glad to read these concluding words: “I read the promise of better times and of greater men.”

In the year 1866, Emerson reached the age which used to be spoken of as the “grand climacteric.” In that year Harvard University conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest honor in its gift.

In that same year, having left home on one of his last lecturing trips, he met his son, Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, at the Brevoort House, in New York. Then, and in that place, he read to his son the poem afterwards published in the “Atlantic Monthly,” and in his second volume, under the title “Terminus.” This was the first time that Dr. Emerson recognized the fact that his father felt himself growing old. The thought, which must have been long shaping itself in the father’s mind, had been so far from betraying itself that it was a shock to the son to hear it plainly avowed. The poem is one of his noblest; he could not fold his robes about him with more of serene dignity than in these solemn lines. The reader may remember that one passage from it has been quoted for a particular purpose, but here is the whole poem: —

TERMINUS.

 It is time to be old,
  To take in sail: —
  The god of bounds,
  Who sets to seas a shore,
  Came to me in his fatal rounds,
  And said: “No more!
  No farther shoot
  Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
  Fancy departs: no more invent;
  Contract thy firmament
  To compass of a tent.
  There’s not enough for this and that,
  Make thy option which of two;
  Economize the failing river,
  Not the less revere the Giver,
  Leave the many and hold the few,
  Timely wise accept the terms,
  Soften the fall with wary foot;
  A little while
  Still plan and smile,
  And, — fault of novel germs, —
  Mature the unfallen fruit.
  Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
  Bad husbands of their fires,
  Who when they gave thee breath,
  Failed to bequeath
  The needful sinew stark as once,
  The baresark marrow to thy bones,
  But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
  Inconstant heat and nerveless reins, —
  Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
  Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.

 ”As the bird trims her to the gale
  I trim myself to the storm of time,
  I man the rudder, reef the sail,
  Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
  ’Lowly faithful, banish fear,
  Right onward drive unharmed;
  The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
  And every wave is charmed.’”

CHAPTER XI. 1868-1873. AET. 65-70.

Lectures on the Natural History of the Intellect. — Publication of “Society and Solitude.” Contents: Society and Solitude. — Civilization. — Art. — Eloquence. — Domestic Life. — Farming. — Works and Days. — Books. — Clubs. — Courage. — Success. — Old Age. — Other Literary Labors. — Visit to California. — Burning of his House, and the Story of its Rebuilding. — Third Visit to Europe. — His Reception at Concord on his Return.

During three successive years, 1868, 1869, 1870, Emerson delivered a series of Lectures at Harvard University on the “Natural History of the Intellect.” These Lectures, as I am told by Dr. Emerson, cost him a great deal of labor, but I am not aware that they have been collected or reported. They will be referred to in the course of this chapter, in an extract from Prof. Thayer’s “Western Journey with Mr. Emerson.” He is there reported as saying that he cared very little for metaphysics. It is very certain that he makes hardly any use of the ordinary terms employed by metaphysicians. If he does not hold the words “subject and object” with their adjectives, in the same contempt that Mr. Ruskin shows for them, he very rarely employs either of these expressions. Once he ventures on the not me, but in the main he uses plain English handles for the few metaphysical tools he has occasion to employ.

“Society and Solitude” was published in 1870. The first Essay in the volume bears the same name as the volume itself.

In this first Essay Emerson is very fair to the antagonistic claims of solitary and social life. He recognizes the organic necessity of solitude. We are driven “as with whips into the desert.” But there is danger in this seclusion. “Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone and must; but coop up most men and you undo them. — Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. — The conditions are met, if we keep our independence yet do not lose our sympathy.”

The Essay on “Civilization” is pleasing, putting familiar facts in a very agreeable way. The framed or stone-house in place of the cave or the camp, the building of roads, the change from war, hunting, and pasturage to agriculture, the division of labor, the skilful combinations of civil government, the diffusion of knowledge through the press, are well worn subjects which he treats agreeably, if not with special brilliancy: —

“Right position of woman in the State is another index. — Place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to a woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing; breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit, in her rough mate, so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.”

My attention was drawn to one paragraph for a reason which my reader will readily understand, and I trust look upon good-naturedly: —

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

 ”’The pulses of her iron heart
      Go beating through the storm.’”

I cannot be wrong, it seems to me, in supposing those two lines to be an incorrect version of these two from a poem of my own called “The Steamboat:”

 ”The beating of her restless heart
    Still sounding through the storm.”

It is never safe to quote poetry from memory, at least while the writer lives, for he is ready to “cavil on the ninth part of a hair” where his verses are concerned. But extreme accuracy was not one of Emerson’s special gifts, and vanity whispers to the misrepresented versifier that

’tis better to be quoted wrong Than to be quoted not at all.

This Essay of Emerson’s is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the second extract for small capitals: —

“Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves.” —

“‘It was a great instruction,’ said a saint in Cromwell’s war, ‘that the best courages are but beams of the Almighty.’ HITCH YOUR WAGON TO A STAR. Let us not fag in paltry works which serve our pot and bag alone. Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way, — Charles’s Wain, Great Bear, Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us. Work rather for those interests which the divinities honor and promote, — justice, love, freedom, knowledge, utility.” —

Charles’s Wain and the Great Bear, he should have been reminded, are the same constellation; the Dipper is what our people often call it, and the country folk all know “the pinters,” which guide their eyes to the North Star.

I find in the Essay on “Art” many of the thoughts with which we are familiar in Emerson’s poem, “The Problem.” It will be enough to cite these passages: —

“We feel in seeing a noble building which rhymes well, as we do in hearing a perfect song, that it is spiritually organic; that it had a necessity in nature for being; was one of the possible forms in the Divine mind, and is now only discovered and executed by the artist, not arbitrarily composed by him. And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun. —

— “The Iliad of Homer, the songs of David, the odes of Pindar, the tragedies of Aeschylus, the Doric temples, the Gothic cathedrals, the plays of Shakspeare, all and each were made not for sport, but in grave earnest, in tears and smiles of suffering and loving men. —

— “The Gothic cathedrals were built when the builder and the priest and the people were overpowered by their faith. Love and fear laid every stone. —

“Our arts are happy hits. We are like the musician on the lake, whose melody is sweeter than he knows.”

The discourse on “Eloquence” is more systematic, more professorial, than many of the others. A few brief extracts will give the key to its general purport: —

“Eloquence must be grounded on the plainest narrative. Afterwards, it may warm itself until it exhales symbols of every kind and color, speaks only through the most poetic forms; but, first and last, it must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact. —

“He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight. —

— “The highest platform of eloquence is the moral sentiment. —

— “Its great masters … were grave men, who preferred their integrity to their talent, and esteemed that object for which they toiled, whether the prosperity of their country, or the laws, or a reformation, or liberty of speech, or of the press, or letters, or morals, as above the whole world and themselves also.”

“Domestic Life” begins with a picture of childhood so charming that it sweetens all the good counsel which follows like honey round the rim of the goblet which holds some tonic draught: —

“Welcome to the parents the puny struggler, strong in his weakness, his little arms more irresistible than the soldier’s, his lips touched with persuasion which Chatham and Pericles in manhood had not. His unaffected lamentations when he lifts up his voice on high, or, more beautiful, the sobbing child, — the face all liquid grief, as he tries to swallow his vexation, — soften all hearts to pity, and to mirthful and clamorous compassion. The small despot asks so little that all reason and all nature are on his side. His ignorance is more charming than all knowledge, and his little sins more bewitching than any virtue. His flesh is angels’ flesh, all alive. — All day, between his three or four sleeps, he coos like a pigeon-house, sputters and spurs and puts on his faces of importance; and when he fasts, the little Pharisee fails not to sound his trumpet before him.”

Emerson has favored his audiences and readers with what he knew about “Farming.” Dr. Emerson tells me that this discourse was read as an address before the “Middlesex Agricultural Society,” and printed in the “Transactions” of that association. He soon found out that the hoe and the spade were not the tools he was meant to work with, but he had some general ideas about farming which he expressed very happily: —

“The farmer’s office is precise and important, but you must not try to paint him in rose-color; you cannot make pretty compliments to fate and gravitation, whose minister he is. — This hard work will always be done by one kind of man; not by scheming speculators, nor by soldiers, nor professors, nor readers of Tennyson; but by men of endurance, deep-chested, long-winded, tough, slow and sure, and timely.”

Emerson’s chemistry and physiology are not profound, but they are correct enough to make a fine richly colored poetical picture in his imaginative presentation. He tells the commonest facts so as to make them almost a surprise: —

“By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have found there is a Concord under old Concord, which we are now getting the best crops from; a Middlesex under Middlesex; and, in fine, that Massachusetts has a basement story more valuable and that promises to pay a better rent than all the superstructure.”

In “Works and Days” there is much good reading, but I will call attention to one or two points only, as having a slight special interest of their own. The first is the boldness of Emerson’s assertions and predictions in matters belonging to science and art. Thus, he speaks of “the transfusion of the blood, — which, in Paris, it was claimed, enables a man to change his blood as often as his linen!” And once more,

“We are to have the balloon yet, and the next war will be fought in the air.”

Possibly; but it is perhaps as safe to predict that it will be fought on wheels; the soldiers on bicycles, the officers on tricycles.

The other point I have marked is that we find in this Essay a prose version of the fine poem, printed in “May-Day” under the title “Days.” I shall refer to this more particularly hereafter.

It is wronging the Essay on “Books” to make extracts from it. It is all an extract, taken from years of thought in the lonely study and the public libraries. If I commit the wrong I have spoken of, it is under protest against myself. Every word of this Essay deserves careful reading. But here are a few sentences I have selected for the reader’s consideration: —

“There are books; and it is practicable to read them because they are so few. —

“I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already within the four walls of my study at home. —

   ”The three practical rules which I have to offer are, 1. Never read
    any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books.
    3. Never read any but what you like, or, in Shakspeare’s phrase, —

     ”’No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en;
        In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.’”

Emerson has a good deal to say about conversation in his Essay on “Clubs,” but nothing very notable on the special subject of the Essay. Perhaps his diary would have something of interest with reference to the “Saturday Club,” of which he was a member, which, in fact, formed itself around him as a nucleus, and which he attended very regularly. But he was not given to personalities, and among the men of genius and of talent whom he met there no one was quieter, but none saw and heard and remembered more. He was hardly what Dr. Johnson would have called a “clubable” man, yet he enjoyed the meetings in his still way, or he would never have come from Concord so regularly to attend them. He gives two good reasons for the existence of a club like that of which I have been speaking: —

“I need only hint the value of the club for bringing masters in their several arts to compare and expand their views, to come to an understanding on these points, and so that their united opinion shall have its just influence on public questions of education and politics.”

“A principal purpose also is the hospitality of the club, as a means of receiving a worthy foreigner with mutual advantage.”

I do not think “public questions of education and politics” were very prominent at the social meetings of the “Saturday Club,” but “worthy foreigners,” and now and then one not so worthy, added variety to the meetings of the company, which included a wide range of talents and callings.

All that Emerson has to say about “Courage” is worth listening to, for he was a truly brave man in that sphere of action where there are more cowards than are found in the battle-field. He spoke his convictions fearlessly; he carried the spear of Ithuriel, but he wore no breastplate save that which protects him

 ”Whose armor is his honest thought,
    And simple truth his utmost skill.”

He mentions three qualities as attracting the wonder and reverence of mankind: 1. Disinterestedness; 2. Practical Power; 3. Courage. “I need not show how much it is esteemed, for the people give it the first rank. They forgive everything to it. And any man who puts his life in peril in a cause which is esteemed becomes the darling of all men.” — There are good and inspiriting lessons for young and old in this Essay or Lecture, which closes with the spirited ballad of “George Nidiver,” written “by a lady to whom all the particulars of the fact are exactly known.”

Men will read any essay or listen to any lecture which has for its subject, like the one now before me, “Success.” Emerson complains of the same things in America which Carlyle groaned over in England: —

“We countenance each other in this life of show, puffing advertisement, and manufacture of public opinion; and excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise. —

“Now, though I am by no means sure that the reader will assent to all my propositions, yet I think we shall agree in my first rule for success, — that we shall drop the brag and the advertisement and take Michael Angelo’s course, ‘to confide in one’s self and be something of worth and value.’”

Reading about “Success” is after all very much like reading in old books of alchemy. “How not to do it,” is the lesson of all the books and treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and the whole crew of “pauperes alcumistae,” all give the most elaborate directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself. “Success” in its vulgar sense, — the gaining of money and position, — is not to be reached by following the rules of an instructor. Our “self-made men,” who govern the country by their wealth and influence, have found their place by adapting themselves to the particular circumstances in which they were placed, and not by studying the broad maxims of “Poor Richard,” or any other moralist or economist. — For such as these is meant the cheap cynical saying quoted by Emerson, “Rien ne réussit mieux que le succès.”

But this is not the aim and end of Emerson’s teaching: —

“I fear the popular notion of success stands in direct opposition in all points to the real and wholesome success. One adores public opinion, the other private opinion; one fame, the other desert; one feats, the other humility; one lucre, the other love; one monopoly, and the other hospitality of mind.”

And so, though there is no alchemy in this Lecture, it is profitable reading, assigning its true value to the sterling gold of character, the gaining of which is true success, as against the brazen idol of the market-place.

The Essay on “Old Age” has a special value from its containing two personal reminiscences: one of the venerable Josiah Quincy, a brief mention; the other the detailed record of a visit in the year 1825, Emerson being then twenty-two years old, to ex-President John Adams, soon after the election of his son to the Presidency. It is enough to allude to these, which every reader will naturally turn to first of all.

But many thoughts worth gathering are dropped along these pages. He recounts the benefits of age; the perilous capes and shoals it has weathered; the fact that a success more or less signifies little, so that the old man may go below his own mark with impunity; the feeling that he has found expression, — that his condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his mind; the pleasure of completing his secular affairs, leaving all in the best posture for the future: —

“When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare, muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom which was old in infancy is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill, — at the end of life just ready to be born, — affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”

Other literary labors of Emerson during this period were the
Introduction to “Plutarch’s Morals” in 1870, and a Preface to William
Ellery Channing’s Poem, “The Wanderer,” in 1871. He made a speech at
Howard University, Washington, in 1872.

In the year 1871 Emerson made a visit to California with a very pleasant company, concerning which Mr. John M. Forbes, one of whose sons married Emerson’s daughter Edith, writes to me as follows. Professor James B. Thayer, to whom he refers, has more recently written and published an account of this trip, from which some extracts will follow Mr. Forbes’s letter: —

BOSTON, February 6, 1884.

MY DEAR DR., — What little I can give will be of a very rambling character.

One of the first memories of Emerson which comes up is my meeting him on the steamboat at returning from Detroit East. I persuaded him to stop over at Niagara, which he had never seen. We took a carriage and drove around the circuit. It was in early summer, perhaps in 1848 or 1849. When we came to Table Rock on the British side, our driver took us down on the outer part of the rock in the carriage. We passed on by rail, and the next day’s papers brought us the telegraphic news that Table Rock had fallen over; perhaps we were among the last persons on it!

About 1871 I made up a party for California, including Mr. Emerson, his daughter Edith, and a number of gay young people. We drove with B —— , the famous Vermont coachman, up to the Geysers, and then made the journey to the Yosemite Valley by wagon and on horseback. I wish I could give you more than a mere outline picture of the sage at this time. With the thermometer at 100 degrees he would sometimes drive with the buffalo robes drawn up over his knees, apparently indifferent to the weather, gazing on the new and grand scenes of mountain and valley through which we journeyed. I especially remember once, when riding down the steep side of a mountain, his reins hanging loose, the bit entirely out of the horse’s mouth, without his being aware that this was an unusual method of riding Pegasus, so fixed was his gaze into space, and so unconscious was he, at the moment, of his surroundings.

In San Francisco he visited with us the dens of the opium smokers, in damp cellars, with rows of shelves around, on which were deposited the stupefied Mongolians; perhaps the lowest haunts of humanity to be found in the world. The contrast between them and the serene eye and undisturbed brow of the sage was a sight for all beholders.

When we reached Salt Lake City on our way home he made a point of calling on Brigham Young, then at the summit of his power. The Prophet, or whatever he was called, was a burly, bull-necked man of hard sense, really leading a great industrial army. He did not seem to appreciate who his visitor was, at any rate gave no sign of so doing, and the chief interest of the scene was the wide contrast between these leaders of spiritual and of material forces.

I regret not having kept any notes of what was said on this and other occasions, but if by chance you could get hold of Professor J.B. Thayer, who was one of our party, he could no doubt give you some notes that would be valuable.

Perhaps the latest picture that remains in my mind of our friend is his wandering along the beaches and under the trees at Naushon, no doubt carrying home large stealings from my domain there, which lost none of their value from being transferred to his pages. Next to his private readings which he gave us there, the most notable recollection is that of his intense amusement at some comical songs which our young people used to sing, developing a sense of humor which a superficial observer would hardly have discovered, but which you and I know he possessed in a marked degree.

Yours always,

J.M. FORBES.

Professor James B. Thayer’s little book, “A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson,” is a very entertaining account of the same trip concerning which Mr. Forbes wrote the letter just given. Professor Thayer kindly read many of his notes to me before his account was published, and allows me to make such use of the book as I see fit. Such liberty must not be abused, and I will content myself with a few passages in which Emerson has a part. No extract will interest the reader more than the following: —

“‘How can Mr. Emerson,’ said one of the younger members of the party to me that day, ‘be so agreeable, all the time, without getting tired!’ It was the naive expression of what we all had felt. There was never a more agreeable travelling companion; he was always accessible, cheerful, sympathetic, considerate, tolerant; and there was always that same respectful interest in those with whom he talked, even the humblest, which raised them in their own estimation. One thing particularly impressed me, — the sense that he seemed to have of a certain great amplitude of time and leisure. It was the behavior of one who really believed in an immortal life, and had adjusted his conduct accordingly; so that, beautiful and grand as the natural objects were, among which our journey lay, they were matched by the sweet elevation of character, and the spiritual charm of our gracious friend. Years afterwards, on that memorable day of his funeral at Concord, I found that a sentence from his own Essay on Immortality haunted my mind, and kept repeating itself all the day long; it seemed to point to the sources of his power: ‘Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter the doctrine of eternity, which dissolved the poor corpse, and Nature also, and gave grandeur to the passing hour.’”

This extract will be appropriately followed by another alluding to the same subject.

“The next evening, Sunday, the twenty-third, Mr. Emerson read his address on ‘Immortality,’ at Dr. Stebbins’s church. It was the first time that he had spoken on the Western coast; never did he speak better. It was, in the main, the same noble Essay that has since been printed.

“At breakfast the next morning we had the newspaper, the ‘Alta California.’ It gave a meagre outline of the address, but praised it warmly, and closed with the following observations: ‘All left the church feeling that an elegant tribute had been paid to the creative genius of the Great First Cause, and that a masterly use of the English language had contributed to that end.’”

The story used to be told that after the Reverend Horace Holley had delivered a prayer on some public occasion, Major Ben. Russell, of ruddy face and ruffled shirt memory, Editor of “The Columbian Centinel,” spoke of it in his paper the next day as “the most eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience.”

The “Alta California’s” “elegant tribute” is not quite up to this rhetorical altitude.

“‘The minister,’ said he, ‘is in no danger of losing his position; he represents the moral sense and the humanities.’ He spoke of his own reasons for leaving the pulpit, and added that ‘some one had lately come to him whose conscience troubled him about retaining the name of Christian; he had replied that he himself had no difficulty about it. When he was called a Platonist, or a Christian, or a Republican, he welcomed it. It did not bind him to what he did not like. What is the use of going about and setting up a flag of negation?’”

“I made bold to ask him what he had in mind in naming his recent course of lectures at Cambridge, ‘The Natural History of the Intellect.’ This opened a very interesting conversation; but, alas! I could recall but little of it, — little more than the mere hintings of what he said. He cared very little for metaphysics. But he thought that as a man grows he observes certain facts about his own mind, — about memory, for example. These he had set down from time to time. As for making any methodical history, he did not undertake it.”

Emerson met Brigham Young at Salt Lake City, as has been mentioned, but neither seems to have made much impression upon the other. Emerson spoke of the Mormons. Some one had said, “They impress the common people, through their imagination, by Bible-names and imagery.” “Yes,” he said, “it is an after-clap of Puritanism. But one would think that after this Father Abraham could go no further.”

The charm of Boswell’s Life of Johnson is that it not merely records his admirable conversation, but also gives us many of those lesser peculiarities which are as necessary to a true biography as lights and shades to a portrait on canvas. We are much obliged to Professor Thayer therefore for the two following pleasant recollections which he has been good-natured enough to preserve for us, and with which we will take leave of his agreeable little volume: —

“At breakfast we had, among other things, pie. This article at breakfast was one of Mr. Emerson’s weaknesses. A pie stood before him now. He offered to help somebody from it, who declined; and then one or two others, who also declined; and then Mr. —— ; he too declined. ‘But Mr. —— !’ Mr. Emerson remonstrated, with humorous emphasis, thrusting the knife under a piece of the pie, and putting the entire weight of his character into his manner,— ‘but Mr. —— , what is pie for?’”

A near friend of mine, a lady, was once in the cars with Emerson, and when they stopped for the refreshment of the passengers he was very desirous of procuring something at the station for her solace. Presently he advanced upon her with a cup of tea in one hand and a wedge of pie in the other, — such a wedge! She could hardly have been more dismayed if one of Caesar’s cunei, or wedges of soldiers, had made a charge against her.

Yet let me say here that pie, often foolishly abused, is a good creature, at the right time and in angles of thirty or forty degrees. In semicircles and quadrants it may sometimes prove too much for delicate stomachs. But here was Emerson, a hopelessly confirmed pie-eater, never, so far as I remember, complaining of dyspepsia; and there, on the other side, was Carlyle, feeding largely on wholesome oatmeal, groaning with indigestion all his days, and living with half his self-consciousness habitually centred beneath his diaphragm.

Like his friend Carlyle and like Tennyson, Emerson had a liking for a whiff of tobacco-smoke: —

“When alone,” he said, “he rarely cared to finish a whole cigar. But in company it was singular to see how different it was. To one who found it difficult to meet people, as he did, the effect of a cigar was agreeable; one who is smoking may be as silent as he likes, and yet be good company. And so Hawthorne used to say that he found it. On this journey Mr. Emerson generally smoked a single cigar after our mid-day dinner, or after tea, and occasionally after both. This was multiplying, several times over, anything that was usual with him at home.”

Professor Thayer adds in a note: —

“Like Milton, Mr. Emerson ‘was extraordinary temperate in his Diet,’ and he used even less tobacco. Milton’s quiet day seems to have closed regularly with a pipe; he ‘supped,’ we are told, ‘upon … some light thing; and after a pipe of tobacco and a glass of water went to bed.’”

As Emerson’s name has been connected with that of Milton in its nobler aspects, it can do no harm to contemplate him, like Milton, indulging in this semi-philosophical luxury.

One morning in July, 1872, Mr. and Mrs. Emerson woke to find their room filled with smoke and fire coming through the floor of a closet in the room over them. The alarm was given, and the neighbors gathered and did their best to put out the flames, but the upper part of the house was destroyed, and with it were burned many papers of value to Emerson, including his father’s sermons. Emerson got wet and chilled, and it seems too probable that the shock hastened that gradual loss of memory which came over his declining years.

His kind neighbors did all they could to save his property and relieve his temporary needs. A study was made ready for him in the old Court House, and the “Old Manse,” which had sheltered his grandfather, and others nearest to him, received him once more as its tenant.

On the 15th of October he spoke at a dinner given in New York in honor of James Anthony Froude, the historian, and in the course of this same month he set out on his third visit to Europe, accompanied by his daughter Ellen. We have little to record of this visit, which was suggested as a relief and recreation while his home was being refitted for him. He went to Egypt, but so far as I have learned the Sphinx had no message for him, and in the state of mind in which he found himself upon the mysterious and dream-compelling Nile it may be suspected that the landscape with its palms and pyramids was an unreal vision, — that, as to his Humble-bee,

“All was picture as he passed.”

But while he was voyaging his friends had not forgotten him. The sympathy with him in his misfortune was general and profound. It did not confine itself to expressions of feeling, but a spontaneous movement organized itself almost without effort. If any such had been needed, the attached friend whose name is appended to the Address to the Subscribers to the Fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson’s house would have been as energetic in this new cause as he had been in the matter of procuring the reprint of “Sartor Resartus.” I have his kind permission to publish the whole correspondence relating to the friendly project so happily carried out.

To the Subscribers to the Fund for the Rebuilding of Mr. Emerson’s House, after the Fire of July 24, 1872:

The death of Mr. Emerson has removed any objection which may have before existed to the printing of the following correspondence. I have now caused this to be done, that each subscriber may have the satisfaction of possessing a copy of the touching and affectionate letters in which he expressed his delight in this, to him, most unexpected demonstration of personal regard and attachment, in the offer to restore for him his ruined home.

No enterprise of the kind was ever more fortunate and successful in its purpose and in its results. The prompt and cordial response to the proposed subscription was most gratifying. No contribution was solicited from any one. The simple suggestion to a few friends of Mr. Emerson that an opportunity was now offered to be of service to him was all that was needed. From the first day on which it was made, the day after the fire, letters began to come in, with cheques for large and small amounts, so that in less than three weeks I was enabled to send to Judge Hoar the sum named in his letter as received by him on the 13th of August, and presented by him to Mr. Emerson the next morning, at the Old Manse, with fitting words.

Other subscriptions were afterwards received, increasing the amount on my book to eleven thousand six hundred and twenty dollars. A part of this was handed directly to the builder at Concord. The balance was sent to Mr. Emerson October 7, and acknowledged by him in his letter of October 8, 1872.

All the friends of Mr. Emerson who knew of the plan which was proposed to rebuild his house, seemed to feel that it was a privilege to be allowed to express in this way the love and veneration with which he was regarded, and the deep debt of gratitude which they owed to him, and there is no doubt that a much larger amount would have been readily and gladly offered, if it had been required, for the object in view.

Those who have had the happiness to join in this friendly “conspiracy” may well take pleasure in the thought that what they have done has had the effect to lighten the load of care and anxiety which the calamity of the fire brought with it to Mr. Emerson, and thus perhaps to prolong for some precious years the serene and noble life that was so dear to all of us.

My thanks are due to the friends who have made me the bearer of this message of good-will.

LE BARON RUSSELL.

BOSTON, May 8, 1882.

BOSTON, August 13, 1872.

DEAR MR. EMERSON:

It seems to have been the spontaneous desire of your friends, on hearing of the burning of your house, to be allowed the pleasure of rebuilding it.

A few of them have united for this object, and now request your acceptance of the amount which I have to-day deposited to your order at the Concord Bank, through the kindness of our friend, Judge Hoar. They trust that you will receive it as an expression of sincere regard and affection from friends, who will, one and all, esteem it a great privilege to be permitted to assist in the restoration of your home.

And if, in their eagerness to participate in so grateful a work, they may have exceeded the estimate of your architect as to what is required for that purpose, they beg that you will devote the remainder to such other objects as may be most convenient to you.

Very sincerely yours,

LE BARON RUSSELL.

CONCORD, August 14, 1872.

DR. LE B. RUSSELL:

Dear Sir, — I received your letters, with the check for ten thousand dollars inclosed, from Mr. Barrett last evening. This morning I deposited it to Mr. Emerson’s credit in the Concord National Bank, and took a bank book for him, with his little balance entered at the top, and this following, and carried it to him with your letter. I told him, by way of prelude, that some of his friends had made him treasurer of an association who wished him to go to England and examine Warwick Castle and other noted houses that had been recently injured by fire, in order to get the best ideas possible for restoration, and then to apply them to a house which the association was formed to restore in this neighborhood.

When he understood the thing and had read your letter, he seemed very deeply moved. He said that he had been allowed so far in life to stand on his own feet, and that he hardly knew what to say, — that the kindness of his friends was very great. I said what I thought was best in reply, and told him that this was the spontaneous act of friends, who wished the privilege of expressing in this way their respect and affection, and was done only by those who thought it a privilege to do so. I mentioned Hillard as you desired, and also Mrs. Tappan, who, it seems, had written to him and offered any assistance he might need, to the extent of five thousand dollars, personally.

I think it is all right, but he said he must see the list of contributors, and would then say what he had to say about it. He told me that Mr. F.C. Lowell, who was his classmate and old friend, Mr. Bangs, Mrs. Gurney, and a few other friends, had already sent him five thousand dollars, which he seemed to think was as much as he could bear. This makes the whole a very gratifying result, and perhaps explains the absence of some names on your book.

I am glad that Mr. Emerson, who is feeble and ill, can learn what a debt of obligation his friends feel to him, and thank you heartily for what you have done about it. Very truly yours,

E.R. HOAR.

CONCORD, August 16, 1872.

MY DEAR LE BARON:

I have wondered and melted over your letter and its accompaniments till it is high time that I should reply to it, if I can. My misfortunes, as I have lived along so far in this world, have been so few that I have never needed to ask direct aid of the host of good men and women who have cheered my life, though many a gift has come to me. And this late calamity, however rude and devastating, soon began to look more wonderful in its salvages than in its ruins, so that I can hardly feel any right to this munificent endowment with which you, and my other friends through you, have astonished me. But I cannot read your letter or think of its message without delight, that my companions and friends bear me so noble a good-will, nor without some new aspirations in the old heart toward a better deserving. Judge Hoar has, up to this time, withheld from me the names of my benefactors, but you may be sure that I shall not rest till I have learned them, every one, to repeat to myself at night and at morning.

Your affectionate friend and debtor,

R.W. EMERSON.

DR. LE BARON RUSSELL

CONCORD, October 8, 1872.

MY DEAR DOCTOR LE BARON:

I received last night your two notes, and the cheque, enclosed in one of them, for one thousand and twenty dollars.

Are my friends bent on killing me with kindness? No, you will say, but to make me live longer. I thought myself sufficiently loaded with benefits already, and you add more and more. It appears that you all will rebuild my house and rejuvenate me by sending me in my old days abroad on a young man’s excursion.

I am a lover of men, but this recent wonderful experience of their tenderness surprises and occupies my thoughts day by day. Now that I have all or almost all the names of the men and women who have conspired in this kindness to me (some of whom I have never personally known), I please myself with the thought of meeting each and asking, Why have we not met before? Why have you not told me that we thought alike? Life is not so long, nor sympathy of thought so common, that we can spare the society of those with whom we best agree. Well, ’tis probably my own fault by sticking ever to my solitude. Perhaps it is not too late to learn of these friends a better lesson.

Thank them for me whenever you meet them, and say to them that I am not wood or stone, if I have not yet trusted myself so far as to go to each one of them directly.

My wife insists that I shall also send her acknowledgments to them and you.

Yours and theirs affectionately,

R.W. EMERSON.

DR. LE BARON KUSSELL.

The following are the names of the subscribers to the fund for rebuilding Mr. Emerson’s house: —

Mrs. Anne S. Hooper.
Miss Alice S. Hooper.
Mrs. Caroline Tappan.
Miss Ellen S. Tappan.
Miss Mary A. Tappan.
Mr. T.G. Appleton.
Mrs. Henry Edwards.
Miss Susan E. Dorr.
Misses Wigglesworth.
Mr. Edward Wigglesworth.
Mr. J. Elliot Cabot.
Mrs. Sarah S. Russell.
Friends in New York and Philadelphia, through Mr. Williams.
Mr. William Whiting.
Mr. Frederick Beck.
Mr. H.P. Kidder.
Mrs. Abel Adams.
Mrs. George Faulkner.
Hon. E.R. Hoar.
Mr. James B. Thayer.
Mr. John M. Forbes.
Mr. James H. Beal.
Mrs. Anna C. Lodge.
Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge.
Mr. H.H. Hunnewell.
Mrs. S. Cabot.
Mr. James A. Dupee.
Mrs. Anna C. Lowell.
Mrs. M.F. Sayles.
Miss Helen L. Appleton.
J.R. Osgood & Co.
Mr. Richard Soule.
Mr. Francis Geo. Shaw.
Dr. R.W. Hooper.
Mr. William P. Mason.
Mr. William Gray.
Mr. Sam’l G. Ward.
Mr. J.I. Bowditch.
Mr. Geo. C. Ward.
Mrs. Luicia J. Briggs.
Mr. John E. Williams.
Dr. Le Baron Russell.

In May, 1873, Emerson returned to Concord. His friends and fellow-citizens received him with every token of affection and reverence. A set of signals was arranged to announce his arrival. Carriages were in readiness for him and his family, a band greeted him with music, and passing under a triumphal arch, he was driven to his renewed old home amidst the welcomes and the blessings of his loving and admiring friends and neighbors.

CHAPTER XII. 1873-1878. AET. 70-75.

Publication of “Parnassus.” — Emerson Nominated as Candidate for the Office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University. — Publication of “Letters and Social Aims.” Contents: Poetry and Imagination. — Social Aims. — Eloquence. — Resources. — The Comic. — Quotation and Originality. — Progress of Culture. — Persian Poetry. — Inspiration. — Greatness. — Immortality. — Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of “The Minute-Man” at Concord. — Publication of Collected Poems.

In December, 1874, Emerson published “Parnassus,” a Collection of Poems by British and American authors. Many readers may like to see his subdivisions and arrangement of the pieces he has brought together. They are as follows: “Nature.”— “Human Life.”— “Intellectual.”— “Contemplation.”— “Moral and Religious.”— “Heroic.”— “Personal.”— “Pictures.”— “Narrative Poems and Ballads.”— “Songs.”— “Dirges and Pathetic Poems.”— “Comic and Humorous.”— “Poetry of Terror.”— “Oracles and Counsels.”

I have borrowed so sparingly from the rich mine of Mr. George Willis
Cooke’s “Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Life, Writings, and Philosophy,” that
I am pleased to pay him the respectful tribute of taking a leaf from his
excellent work.

“This collection,” he says,

“was the result of his habit, pursued for many years, of copying into his commonplace book any poem which specially pleased him. Many of these favorites had been read to illustrate his lectures on the English poets. The book has no worthless selections, almost everything it contains bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet Emerson’s personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections. With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls. — His poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections being made from him. The names of George Herbert, Herrick, Ben Jonson, and Milton frequently appear. Wordsworth appears forty-three times, and stands next to Shakespeare; while Burns, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and Chaucer make up the list of favorites. Many little known pieces are included, and some whose merit is other than poetical. — This selection of poems is eminently that of a poet of keen intellectual tastes. I not popular in character, omitting many public favorites, and introducing very much which can never be acceptable to the general reader. The Preface is full of interest for its comments on many of the poems and poets appearing in these selections.”

I will only add to Mr. Cooke’s criticism these two remarks: First, that I have found it impossible to know under which of his divisions to look for many of the poems I was in search of; and as, in the earlier copies at least, there was no paged index where each author’s pieces were collected together, one had to hunt up his fragments with no little loss of time and patience, under various heads, “imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris.” The other remark is that each one of Emerson’s American fellow-poets from whom he has quoted would gladly have spared almost any of the extracts from the poems of his brother-bards, if the editor would only have favored us with some specimens of his own poetry, with a single line of which he has not seen fit to indulge us.

In 1874 Emerson received the nomination by the independent party among the students of Glasgow University for the office of Lord Rector. He received five hundred votes against seven hundred for Disraeli, who was elected. He says in a letter to Dr. J. Hutchinson Sterling: —

“I count that vote as quite the fairest laurel that has ever fallen on me; and I cannot but feel deeply grateful to my young friends in the University, and to yourself, who have been my counsellor and my too partial advocate.”

Mr. Cabot informs us in his Prefatory Note to “Letters and Social Aims,” that the proof sheets of this volume, now forming the eighth of the collected works, showed even before the burning of his house and the illness which followed from the shock, that his loss of memory and of mental grasp was such as to make it unlikely that he would in any case have been able to accomplish what he had undertaken. Sentences, even whole pages, were repeated, and there was a want of order beyond what even he would have tolerated: —

“There is nothing here that he did not write, and he gave his full approval to whatever was done in the way of selection and arrangement; but I cannot say that he applied his mind very closely to the matter.”

This volume contains eleven Essays, the subjects of which, as just enumerated, are very various. The longest and most elaborate paper is that entitled “Poetry and Imagination.” I have room for little more than the enumeration of the different headings of this long Essay. By these it will be seen how wide a ground it covers. They are “Introductory;” “Poetry;” “Imagination;” “Veracity;” “Creation;” “Melody, Rhythm, Form;” “Bards and Trouveurs;” “Morals;” “Transcendency.” Many thoughts with which we are familiar are reproduced, expanded, and illustrated in this Essay. Unity in multiplicity, the symbolism of nature, and others of his leading ideas appear in new phrases, not unwelcome, for they look fresh in every restatement. It would be easy to select a score of pointed sayings, striking images, large generalizations. Some of these we find repeated in his verse. Thus: —

“Michael Angelo is largely filled with the Creator that made and makes men. How much of the original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man!”

And so in the well remembered lines of “The Problem”: —

“Himself from God he could not free.”

“He knows that he did not make his thought, — no, his thought made him, and made the sun and stars.”

 ”Art might obey but not surpass.
  The passive Master lent his hand
  To the vast soul that o’er him planned.”

Hope is at the bottom of every Essay of Emerson’s as it was at the bottom of Pandora’s box: —

“I never doubt the riches of nature, the gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, religion of our own.

— “Sooner or later that which is now life shall be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to the song.”

Under the title “Social Aims” he gives some wise counsel concerning manners and conversation. One of these precepts will serve as a specimen — if we have met with it before it is none the worse for wear: —

“Shun the negative side. Never worry people with; your contritions, nor with dismal views of politics or society. Never name sickness; even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will give you enough of it.”

We have had one Essay on “Eloquence” already. One extract from this new discourse on the same subject must serve our turn: —

“These are ascending stairs, — a good voice, winning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by the schools into correctness; but we must come to the main matter, of power of statement, — know your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what you know and believe; and are personally in it; and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.”

The italics are Emerson’s.

If our learned and excellent John Cotton used to sweeten his mouth before going to bed with a bit of Calvin, we may as wisely sweeten and strengthen our sense of existence with a morsel or two from Emerson’s Essay on “Resources”: —

“A Schopenhauer, with logic and learning and wit, teaching pessimism, — teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep, — all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if instead of these negatives you give me affirmatives; if you tell me that there is always life for the living; that what man has done man can do; that this world belongs to the energetic; that there is always a way to everything desirable; that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, and that man only rightly knows himself as far as he has experimented on things, — I am invigorated, put into genial and working temper; the horizon opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to the Cause of Causes.”

The Essay or Lecture on “The Comic” may have formed a part of a series he had contemplated on the intellectual processes. Two or three sayings in it will show his view sufficiently: —

“The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to be an honest or well-intended halfness; a non-performance of what is pretended to be performed, at the same time that one is giving loud pledges of performance.

“If the essence of the Comic be the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance, there is good reason why we should be affected by the exposure. We have no deeper interest than our integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke and by stroke of any lie we entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. It appears to be an essential element in a fine character. — A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him.”

These and other sayings of like purport are illustrated by well-preserved stories and anecdotes not for the most part of very recent date.

“Quotation and Originality” furnishes the key to Emerson’s workshop. He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not in any stealthy or shame-faced way, but proudly, royally, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription.

“All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. — We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation. —

“The borrowing is often honest enough and comes of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good.

   ”Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of
    it.” —

— “The Progress of Culture,” his second Phi Beta Kappa oration, has already been mentioned.

 — The lesson of self-reliance, which he is never tired of inculcating, is repeated and enforced in the Essay on “Greatness.”

“There are certain points of identity in which these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form in which greatness appears. — Stick to your own; don’t inculpate yourself in the local, social, or national crime, but follow the path your genius traces like the galaxy of heaven for you to walk in.

“Every mind has a new compass, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind. — We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.”

If to follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is concentration. — To the bias of the individual mind must be added the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.

“Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.” —

“The man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard of self degraded the adorer of the laws, — who by governing himself governed others; sportive in manner, but inexorable in act; who sees longevity in his cause; whose aim is always distinct to him; who is suffered to be himself in society; who carries fate in his eye; — he it is whom we seek, encouraged in every good hour that here or hereafter he shall he found.”

What has Emerson to tell us of “Inspiration?”

“I believe that nothing great or lasting can be done except by inspiration, by leaning on the secret augury. —

“How many sources of inspiration can we count? As many as our affinities. But to a practical purpose we may reckon a few of these.”

I will enumerate them briefly as he gives them, but not attempting to reproduce his comments on each: —

1. Health. 2. The experience of writing letters. 3. The renewed sensibility which comes after seasons of decay or eclipse of the faculties. 4. The power of the will. 5. Atmospheric causes, especially the influence of morning. 6. Solitary converse with nature. 7. Solitude of itself, like that of a country inn in summer, and of a city hotel in winter. 8. Conversation. 9. New poetry; by which, he says, he means chiefly old poetry that is new to the reader.

“Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.”

What can promise more than an Essay by Emerson on “Immortality”? It is to be feared that many readers will transfer this note of interrogation to the Essay itself. What is the definite belief of Emerson as expressed in this discourse, — what does it mean? We must tack together such sentences as we can find that will stand for an answer: —

“I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so.”

This is laying the table for a Barmecide feast of nonentity, with the possibility of a real banquet to be provided for us. But he continues: —

“Schiller said, ‘What is so universal as death must be benefit.’”

He tells us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of years he holds to be a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative. He argues from our delight in permanence, from the delicate contrivances and adjustments of created things, that the contriver cannot be forever hidden, and says at last plainly: —

“Everything is prospective, and man is to live hereafter. That the world is for his education is the only sane solution of the enigma.”

But turn over a few pages and we may read: —

“I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual; we are always balked of a complete success; no prosperity is promised to our self-esteem. We have our indemnity only in the moral and intellectual reality to which we aspire. That is immortal, and we only through that. The soul stipulates for no private good. That which is private I see not to be good. ‘If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live,’ said one of the old saints, ‘and these by any man’s suffering are enlarged and enthroned.’”

Once more we get a dissolving view of Emerson’s creed, if such a word applies to a statement like the following: —

— “I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality than we can give grounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is higher than we can write down in propositions, and therefore Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ is the best modern essay on the subject.”

Wordsworth’s “Ode” is a noble and beautiful dream; is it anything more? The reader who would finish this Essay, which I suspect to belong to an early period of Emerson’s development, must be prepared to plunge into mysticism and lose himself at last in an Oriental apologue. The eschatology which rests upon an English poem and an Indian fable belongs to the realm of reverie and of imagination rather than the domain of reason.

On the 19th of April, 1875, the hundredth anniversary of the “Fight at the Bridge,” Emerson delivered a short Address at the unveiling of the statue of “The Minute-Man,” erected at the place of the conflict, to commemorate the event. This is the last Address he ever wrote, though he delivered one or more after this date. From the manuscript which lies before me I extract a single passage: —

“In the year 1775 we had many enemies and many friends in England, but our one benefactor was King George the Third. The time had arrived for the political severance of America, that it might play its part in the history of this globe, and the inscrutable divine Providence gave an insane king to England. In the resistance of the Colonies, he alone was immovable on the question of force. England was so dear to us that the Colonies could only be absolutely disunited by violence from England, and only one man could compel the resort to violence. Parliament wavered, Lord North wavered, all the ministers wavered, but the king had the insanity of one idea; he was immovable, he insisted on the impossible, so the army was sent, America was instantly united, and the Nation born.”

There is certainly no mark of mental failure in this paragraph, written at a period when he had long ceased almost entirely from his literary labors.

Emerson’s collected “Poems” constitute the ninth volume of the recent collected edition of his works. They will be considered in a following chapter.

CHAPTER XIII. 1878-1882. AET. 75-79.

Last Literary Labors. — Addresses and Essays.— “Lectures and Biographical Sketches.”— “Miscellanies.”

The decline of Emerson’s working faculties went on gently and gradually, but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter, Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an echo before the voice whose words it was to shape for him when his mind faltered and needed a momentary impulse.

With her helpful presence and support he ventured from time to time to read a paper before a select audience. Thus, March 30, 1878, he delivered a Lecture in the Old South Church,— “Fortune of the Republic.” On the 5th of May, 1879, he read a Lecture in the Chapel of Divinity College, Harvard University,— “The Preacher.” In 1881 he read a paper on Carlyle before the Massachusetts Historical Society. — He also published a paper in the “North American Review,” in 1878,— “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” and one on “Superlatives,” in “The Century” for February, 1882.

But in these years he was writing little or nothing. All these papers were taken from among his manuscripts of different dates. The same thing is true of the volumes published since his death; they were only compilations from his stores of unpublished matter, and their arrangement was the work of Mr. Emerson’s friend and literary executor, Mr. Cabot. These volumes cannot be considered as belonging to any single period of his literary life.

Mr. Cabot prefixes to the tenth volume of Emerson’s collected works, which bears the title, “Lectures and Biographical Sketches,” the following: —

“NOTE.

“Of the pieces included in this volume the following, namely, those from ‘The Dial,’ ‘Character,’ ‘Plutarch,’ and the biographical sketches of Dr. Ripley, of Mr. Hoar, and of Henry Thoreau, were printed by Mr. Emerson before I took any part in the arrangement of his papers. The rest, except the sketch of Miss Mary Emerson, I got ready for his use in readings to his friends, or to a limited public. He had given up the regular practice of lecturing, but would sometimes, upon special request, read a paper that had been prepared for him from his manuscripts, in the manner described in the Preface to ‘Letters and Social Aims,’ — some former lecture serving as a nucleus for the new. Some of these papers he afterwards allowed to be printed; others, namely, ‘Aristocracy,’ ‘Education,’ ‘The Man of Letters,’ ‘The Scholar,’ ‘Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,’ ‘Mary Moody Emerson,’ are now published for the first time.”

Some of these papers I have already had occasion to refer to. From several of the others I will make one or two extracts, — a difficult task, so closely are the thoughts packed together.

From “Demonology”: —

“I say to the table-rappers

                                  ’I will believe
      Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know,’
      And so far will I trust thee, gentle Kate!”

“Meantime far be from me the impatience which cannot brook the supernatural, the vast; far be from me the lust of explaining away all which appeals to the imagination, and the great presentiments which haunt us. Willingly I too say Hail! to the unknown, awful powers which transcend the ken of the understanding.”

I will not quote anything from the Essay called “Aristocracy.” But let him who wishes to know what the word means to an American whose life has come from New England soil, whose ancestors have breathed New England air for many generations, read it, and he will find a new interpretation of a very old and often greatly wronged appellation.

“Perpetual Forces” is one of those prose poems, — of his earlier epoch, I have no doubt, — in which he plays with the facts of science with singular grace and freedom.

What man could speak more fitly, with more authority of “Character,” than Emerson? When he says, “If all things are taken away, I have still all things in my relation to the Eternal,” we feel that such an utterance is as natural to his pure spirit as breathing to the frame in which it was imprisoned.

We have had a glimpse of Emerson as a school-master, but behind and far above the teaching drill-master’s desk is the chair from which he speaks to us of “Education.” Compare the short and easy method of the wise man of old,— “He that spareth his rod hateth his son,” with this other, “Be the companion of his thought, the friend of his friendship, the lover of his virtue, — but no kinsman of his sin.”

“The Superlative” will prove light and pleasant reading after these graver essays. [Greek: Maedhen agan] — ne quid nimis, — nothing in excess, was his precept as to adjectives.

Two sentences from “The Sovereignty of Ethics” will go far towards reconciling elderly readers who have not forgotten the Westminster Assembly’s Catechism with this sweet-souled dealer in spiritual dynamite: —

“Luther would cut his hand off sooner than write theses against the pope if he suspected that he was bringing on with all his might the pale negations of Boston Unitarianism. —

   ”If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of
    Platonism, or of Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more
    truly, have not yet their own legitimate force.”

So, too, this from “The Preacher”: —

“All civil mankind have agreed in leaving one day for contemplation against six for practice. I hope that day will keep its honor and its use. — The Sabbath changes its forms from age to age, but the substantial benefit endures.”

The special interest of the Address called “The Man of Letters” is, that it was delivered during the war. He was no advocate for peace where great principles were at the bottom of the conflict: —

“War, seeking for the roots of strength, comes upon the moral aspects at once. — War ennobles the age. — Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen could not untie.”

“The Scholar” was delivered before two Societies at the University of Virginia so late as the year 1876. If I must select any of its wise words, I will choose the questions which he has himself italicized to show his sense of their importance: —

   ”For all men, all women, Time, your country, your condition, the
    invisible world are the interrogators: Who are you? What do you?
    Can you obtain what you wish? Is there method in your consciousness?
    Can you see tendency in your life? Can you help any soul?

“Can he answer these questions? Can he dispose of them? Happy if you can answer them mutely in the order and disposition of your life! Happy for more than yourself, a benefactor of men, if you can answer them in works of wisdom, art, or poetry; bestowing on the general mind of men organic creations, to be the guidance and delight of all who know them.”

The Essay on “Plutarch” has a peculiar value from the fact that Emerson owes more to him than to any other author except Plato, who is one of the only two writers quoted oftener than Plutarch. Mutato nomine, the portrait which Emerson draws of the Greek moralist might stand for his own: —

“Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction, in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science — natural, moral, or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings drew his attention and came to his pen with more or less fulness of record.

   ”A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an
    intellectual co-perception. Plutarch’s memory is full and his
    horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his.

“Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure. —

“I do not know where to find a book — to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s— ‘so rammed with life,’ and this in chapters chiefly ethical, which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental. — His vivacity and abundance never leave him to loiter or pound on an incident. —

“In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents.— ’Tis all Plutarch, by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this emperor.

“It is in consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I confess that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity for completing his studies.

“He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like another Berkeley, ‘Matter is itself privation.’ —

“Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the method. He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and prefers to sit as a scholar with Plato than as a disputant.

“His natural history is that of a lover and poet, and not of a physicist.

“But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character, and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life, and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. La Harpe said that ‘Plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever existed.’

   ”Plutarch thought ‘truth to be the greatest good that man can
    receive, and the goodliest blessing that God can give.’

   ”All his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is
    more delightful to do than to receive a kindness.

“Plutarch was well-born, well-conditioned — eminently social, he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends, and knew the high value of good conversation. —

“He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially marks him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by the force of morals.”

How much, of all this would have been recognized as just and true if it had been set down in an obituary notice of Emerson!

I have already made use of several of the other papers contained in this volume, and will merely enumerate all that follow the “Plutarch.” Some of the titles will be sure to attract the reader. They are “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England;” “The Chardon Street Convention;” “Ezra Ripley, D.D.;” “Mary Moody Emerson;” “Samuel Hoar;” “Thoreau;” “Carlyle.” —

Mr. Cabot prefaces the eleventh and last volume of Emerson’s writings with the following “Note”: —

“The first five pieces in this volume, and the ‘Editorial Address’ from the ‘Massachusetts Quarterly Review,’ were published by Mr. Emerson long ago. The speeches at the John Brown, the Walter Scott, and the Free Religious Association meetings were published at the time, no doubt with his consent, but without any active co-operation on his part. The ‘Fortune of the Republic’ appeared separately in 1879; the rest have never been published. In none was any change from the original form made by me, except in the ‘Fortune of the Republic,’ which was made up of several lectures for the occasion upon which it was read.”

The volume of “Miscellanies” contains no less than twenty-three pieces of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects. The five referred to as having been previously published are, “The Lord’s Supper,” the “Historical Discourse in Concord,” the “Address at the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Monument in Concord,” the “Address on Emancipation in the British West Indies,” and the Lecture or Essay on “War,” — all of which have been already spoken of.

Next in order comes a Lecture on the “Fugitive Slave Law.” Emerson says, “I do not often speak on public questions. — My own habitual view is to the well-being of scholars.” But he leaves his studies to attack the institution of slavery, from which he says he himself has never suffered any inconvenience, and the “Law,” which the abolitionists would always call the “Fugitive Slave Bill.” Emerson had a great admiration for Mr. Webster, but he did not spare him as he recalled his speech of the seventh of March, just four years before the delivery of this Lecture. He warns against false leadership: —

“To make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all foolish trust in others. — He only who is able to stand alone is qualified for society. And that I understand to be the end for which a soul exists in this world, — to be himself the counter-balance of all falsehood and all wrong. — The Anglo-Saxon race is proud and strong and selfish. — England maintains trade, not liberty.”

Cowper had said long before this: —

“doing good, Disinterested good, is not our trade.”

And America found that England had not learned that trade when, fifteen years after this discourse was delivered, the conflict between the free and slave states threatened the ruin of the great Republic, and England forgot her Anti-slavery in the prospect of the downfall of “a great empire which threatens to overshadow the whole earth.”

It must be remembered that Emerson had never been identified with the abolitionists. But an individual act of wrong sometimes gives a sharp point to a blunt dagger which has been kept in its sheath too long: —

“The events of the last few years and months and days have taught us the lessons of centuries. I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one State. I think we must get rid of slavery or we must get rid of freedom.”

These were his words on the 26th of May, 1856, in his speech on “The Assault upon Mr. Sumner.” A few months later, in his “Speech on the Affairs of Kansas,” delivered almost five years before the first gun was fired at Fort Sumter, he spoke the following fatally prophetic and commanding words: —

“The hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough. A harder task will the new revolution of the nineteenth century be than was the revolution of the eighteenth century. I think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new, it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy three thousand miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a net-work that immensely multiplies the dangers of war.

“Fellow-citizens, in these times full of the fate of the Republic, I think the towns should hold town meetings, and resolve themselves into Committees of Safety, go into permanent sessions, adjourning from week to week, from month to month. I wish we could send the sergeant-at-arms to stop every American who is about to leave the country. Send home every one who is abroad, lest they should find no country to return to. Come home and stay at home while there is a country to save. When it is lost it will be time enough then for any who are luckless enough to remain alive to gather up their clothes and depart to some land where freedom exists.”

Two short speeches follow, one delivered at a meeting for the relief of the family of John Brown, on the 18th of November, 1859, the other after his execution: —

“Our blind statesmen,” he says, “go up and down, with committees of vigilance and safety, hunting for the origin of this new heresy. They will need a very vigilant committee indeed to find its birthplace, and a very strong force to root it out. For the arch-Abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love, whose other name is Justice, which was before Alfred, before Lycurgus, before Slavery, and will be after it.”

From his “Discourse on Theodore Parker” I take the following vigorous sentence: —

“His commanding merit as a reformer is this, that he insisted beyond all men in pulpits, — I cannot think of one rival, — that the essence of Christianity is its practical morals; it is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading, or with ordinary city ambitions to gloze over municipal corruptions, or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier nations, or leaving your principles at home to follow on the high seas or in Europe a supple complaisance to tyrants, — it is hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you; and no love of religious music, or of dreams of Swedenborg, or praise of John Wesley, or of Jeremy Taylor, can save you from the Satan which you are.”

The Lecture on “American Civilization,” made up from two Addresses, one of which was delivered at Washington on the 31st of January, 1862, is, as might be expected, full of anti-slavery. That on the “Emancipation Proclamation,” delivered in Boston in September, 1862, is as full of “silent joy” at the advent of “a day which most of us dared not hope to see, — an event worth the dreadful war, worth its costs and uncertainties.”

From the “Remarks” at the funeral services for Abraham Lincoln, held in Concord on the 19th of April, 1865, I extract this admirably drawn character of the man: —

“He is the true history of the American people in his time. Step by step he walked before them; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, the true representative of this continent; an entirely public man; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.”

The following are the titles of the remaining contents of this volume: “Harvard Commemoration Speech;” “Editor’s Address: Massachusetts Quarterly Review;” “Woman;” “Address to Kossuth;” “Robert Burns;” “Walter Scott;” “Remarks at the Organization of the Free Religious Association;” “Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association;” “The Fortune of the Republic.” In treating of the “Woman Question,” Emerson speaks temperately, delicately, with perfect fairness, but leaves it in the hands of the women themselves to determine whether they shall have an equal part in public affairs. “The new movement,” he says, “is only a tide shared by the spirits of man and woman; and you may proceed in the faith that whatever the woman’s heart is prompted to desire, the man’s mind is simultaneously prompted to accomplish.”

It is hard to turn a leaf in any book of Emerson’s writing without finding some pithy remark or some striking image or witty comment which illuminates the page where we find it and tempts us to seize upon it for an extract. But I must content myself with these few sentences from “The Fortune of the Republic,” the last address he ever delivered, in which his belief in America and her institutions, and his trust in the Providence which overrules all nations and all worlds, have found fitting utterance: —

“Let the passion for America cast out the passion for Europe. Here let there be what the earth waits for, — exalted manhood. What this country longs for is personalities, grand persons, to counteract its materialities. For it is the rule of the universe that corn shall serve man, and not man corn.

“They who find America insipid, — they for whom London and Paris have spoiled their own homes, can be spared to return to those cities. I not only see a career at home for more genius than we have, but for more than there is in the world.

“Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own; the course of events is quite too strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow by the ship of the great Admiral which knows the way, and has the force to draw men and states and planets to their good.”

With this expression of love and respect for his country and trust in his country’s God, we may take leave of Emerson’s prose writings.

CHAPTER XIV. EMERSON’S POEMS.

The following “Prefatory Note” by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume of the series of Emerson’s collected works: —

“This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many. Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson’s approval, but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts found in the Essays.

“In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of time.

“As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of Mr. Emerson’s writings, the readings adopted by him in the “Selected Poems” have not always been followed here, but in some cases preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.

“A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of “May-Day,” in the part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature.”

Emerson’s verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.

Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.

It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases, — the flowers and jewels of his vocabulary.

Here is a prose sentence from Emerson’s “Works and Days:” —

“The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party; but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.”

Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference between prose and poetry: —

“DAYS.

 ”Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
  Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
  And marching single in an endless file,
  Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
  To each they offer gifts after his will,
  Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
  I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp,
  Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
  Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
  Turned and departed silent. I too late
  Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”

 — Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince’s ball! The full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives like edges of embroidery. That one word pleachéd, an heir-loom from Queen Elizabeth’s day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm that “In vino veritas” is not truer than In carmine veritas. As a further illustration of what has just been said of the self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson’s verse more especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily presence and infirmities in his poetry, — subjects he never referred to in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.

Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.

Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?

   ”The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
    them, of all men, the severest criticism is due.”

These are Emerson’s words in the Preface to “Parnassus.”

His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but with the context. Milton had been speaking of “Logic” and of “Rhetoric,” and spoke of poetry “as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.” This relative statement, it must not be forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some of the best of Milton’s own.

In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat at eighty degrees of Réaumur is a very different matter. The rank of poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry. Gray’s “Elegy,” it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that length. But what shall we say to the “Ars Poetica” of Horace? It is crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation. And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope’s “Essay on Man,” which has furnished more familiar lines than “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” both together? For all that, we know there is a school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of poet.

It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And after all, few will dare assert that “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is greater as a poem than Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” or Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” because no line in either of these poems is half so often quoted as

“To point a moral or adorn a tale.”

We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson’s poetry with Emerson’s own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing to Carlyle: —

“I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters, suburban men.”

But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland: —

   ”He once said to me, ‘I am not a great poet — but whatever is of me
    is a poet.’”

These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and different periods.

Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his self-distrust and his consciousness of the “vision,” if not “the faculty, divine,” are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic confessional: —

 ”A dull uncertain brain,
  But gifted yet to know
  That God has cherubim who go
  Singing an immortal strain,
  Immortal here below.
  I know the mighty bards,
  I listen while they sing,
  And now I know
  The secret store
  Which these explore
  When they with torch of genius pierce
  The tenfold clouds that cover
  The riches of the universe
  From God’s adoring lover.
  And if to me it is not given
  To fetch one ingot thence
  Of that unfading gold of Heaven
  His merchants may dispense,
  Yet well I know the royal mine
    And know the sparkle of its ore,
  Know Heaven’s truth from lies that shine, —
    Explored, they teach us to explore.”

These lines are from “The Poet,” a series of fragments given in the “Appendix,” which, with his first volume, “Poems,” his second, “May-Day, and other Pieces,” form the complete ninth volume of the new series. These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of Emerson’s self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading “The Poet.”

Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this passage from “Merlin” sufficiently shows: —

 ”Thy trivial harp will never please
  Or fill my craving ear;
  Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
  Free, peremptory, clear.
  No jingling serenader’s art
  Nor tinkling of piano-strings
  Can make the wild blood start
  In its mystic springs;
  The kingly bard
  Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
  As with hammer or with mace;
  That they may render back
  Artful thunder, which conveys
  Secrets of the solar track,
  Sparks of the supersolar blaze.

* * * * *

 Great is the art,
  Great be the manners of the bard.
  He shall not his brain encumber
  With the coil of rhythm and number;
  But leaving rule and pale forethought
  He shall aye climb
  For his rhyme.
  ’Pass in, pass in,’ the angels say,
  ’In to the upper doors,
  Nor count compartments of the floors,
  But mount to paradise
  By the stairway of surprise.’”

And here is another passage from “The Poet,” mentioned in the quotation before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus: —

 ”A Brother of the world, his song
  Sounded like a tempest strong
  Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
  And stars from the ecliptic road.
  Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
  He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
  As melts the iceberg in the seas,
  As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
  As snow-banks thaw in April’s beam,
  The solid kingdoms like a dream
  Resist in vain his motive strain,
  They totter now and float amain.
  For the Muse gave special charge
  His learning should be deep and large,
  And his training should not scant
  The deepest lore of wealth or want:
  His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
  Every maxim of dreadful Need;
  In its fulness he should taste
  Life’s honeycomb, but not too fast;
  Full fed, but not intoxicated;
  He should be loved; he should be hated;
  A blooming child to children dear,
  His heart should palpitate with fear.”

We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson’s chief favorites. In his poems “The Test” and “The Solution,” we find that the five whom he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.

Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from “The Harp:” —

 ”And this at least I dare affirm,
  Since genius too has bound and term,
  There is no bard in all the choir,
  Not Homer’s self, the poet-sire,
  Wise Milton’s odes of pensive pleasure,
  Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
  Nor Collins’ verse of tender pain,
  Nor Byron’s clarion of disdain,
  Scott, the delight of generous boys,
  Or Wordsworth, Pan’s recording voice, —
  Not one of all can put in verse,
  Or to this presence could rehearse
  The sights and voices ravishing
  The boy knew on the hills in spring.” —

In the notice of “Parnassus” some of his preferences have been already mentioned.

Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of description are not odious.

The difference between Emerson’s poetry and that of the contemporaries with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular. The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something definite, a fixed quantity, than for a + b’s and x^{2’s}, — symbols used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments, — he reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates undertook to “hew Mount Athos to the shape of man” in the likeness of Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes “Cheshire’s haughty hill” stand before us an impersonation of kingly humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.

This is the fascination of Emerson’s poetry; it moves in a world of universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet, never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object, as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of Fraunhofer’s lines to the man of science.

Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest heavens: like Milton, —

 ”He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
  The living throne, the sapphire blaze
  Where angels tremble while they gaze,
  HE SAW” —

Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.

Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere: —

 ”Thou can’st not wave thy staff in air,
  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
  And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.”

He called upon the poet to

 ”Tell men what they knew before;
  Paint the prospect from their door.”

And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or into a milking-pail.

This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted moods he would have us

 ”Give to barrows, trays and pans
  Grace and glimmer of romance.”

But in his Lecture on “Poetry and Imagination,” he says: —

“What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet.”

The “grace and glimmer of romance” which was to invest the tin pan are forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the “realists” have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr. Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and exclamation, with which the reader was expected to “pepper” the pages as he might see fit.

French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that

 ”In the mud and scum of things
  There alway, alway something sings.”

Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments, and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not for a mere sensational effect.

What a range of subjects from “The Problem” and “Uriel” and “Forerunners” to “The Humble-Bee” and “The Titmouse!” Nor let the reader who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the singularly impressive home-poem, “Hamatreya,” beginning with the names of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord, — probably the same he owned after the last of them: —

“Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,”

and ending with the austere and solemn “Earth-Song.”

Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born singer. Think of making “feeble” rhyme with “people,” “abroad” with “Lord,” and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make rhyme without actual verbicide: —

 ”Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
  And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck”-are!

And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?

 ”In Adirondac lakes
  At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed.”

It was surely not difficult to say —

“At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide.” And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.

There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often, indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line. It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the supreme artist, and Milton, the “mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,” knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of the “North American Review” in defence of its use. Willis was fond of it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed, — may even have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse. But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson’s?

 ”Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
  Of minds that each can stand against the world
  By its own meek and incorruptible will?”

These lines that lift their backs up in the middle — span-worm lines, we may call them — are not to be commended for common use because some great poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.

As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in triolets, or attempt any cat’s-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.

If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking lagena? — Read his poem to the Aeolian harp (“The Harp”) and his model betrays itself: —

 ”These syllables that Nature spoke,
  And the thoughts that in him woke
  Can adequately utter none
  Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
  Therein I hear the Parcae reel
  The threads of man at their humming wheel,
  The threads of life and power and pain,
  So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
  And best can teach its Delphian chord
  How Nature to the soul is moored,
  If once again that silent string,
  As erst it wont, would thrill and ring.”

There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians by placing “The Sphinx” at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension, not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it, but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come by and by to the verse: —

 ”Have I a lover
    Who is noble and free? —
  I would he were nobler
    Than to love me.”

The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas — l’amour.

The third poem in the volume, “The Problem,” should have stood first in order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson’s poems. All his earlier verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst of song in a poetic nature. “Each and All,” “The Humble-Bee,” “The Snow-Storm,” should be read before “Uriel,” “The World-Soul,” or “Mithridates.” “Monadnoc” will be a good test of the reader’s taste for Emerson’s poetry, and after this “Woodnotes.”

In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of descriptive epithets he reminds me of the tenui-rostrals. His subtle selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants, as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the poem called “Destiny”: —

 ”Alas! that one is born in blight,
  Victim of perpetual slight:
  When thou lookest on his face,
  Thy heart saith ‘Brother, go thy ways!
  None shall ask thee what thou doest,
  Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
  Or listen when thou repliest,
  Or remember where thou liest,
  Or how thy supper is sodden;’
  And another is born
  To make the sun forgotten.”

Of all Emerson’s poems the “Concord Hymn” is the most nearly complete and faultless, — but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a poem as Collins might have written, — it has the very movement and melody of the “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson,” and of the “Dirge in Cymbeline,” with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one conspicuous line,

“And fired the shot heard round the world,”

must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn, musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom and her martyrs.

These poems of Emerson’s find the readers that must listen to them and delight in them, as the “Ancient Mariner” fastened upon the man who must hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them, and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the question, let him read the paragraph of “May-Day,” beginning, —

“I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,”

“Sea-shore,” the fine fragments in the “Appendix” to his published works, called, collectively, “The Poet,” blocks bearing the mark of poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct, and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the “Threnody,” a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has the dignity of “Lycidas” without its refrigerating classicism, and with all the tenderness of Cowper’s lines on the receipt of his mother’s picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in the language, — with Shelley’s “Adonais,” and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis,” leaving out of view Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” as of wider scope and larger pattern.

Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold’s remark on the want of “evolution” in Emerson’s poems. One is struck with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete “Christabel,” and his “Abyssinian Maid,” and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of. We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away half the artist’s life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic and artistic anaemia and insufficiency, — the opposite of what we find showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another century or two of acclimation.

Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties. He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal respiratory measure, — octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The “fatal facility” for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.

Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by

“The light that never was on sea or land,”

we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.

Emerson’s poetry is eminently subjective, — if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two of his own chapters in his “Modern Painters.” These are the chapter on “The Pathetic Fallacy,” and the one which follows it “On Classical Landscape.” In these he treats of the transfer of a writer’s mental or emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by the singular name mentioned, “the pathetic fallacy,” because, he says, “he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature, imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself.”

Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy” may be found almost anywhere in Emerson’s poems. Here is one which offers itself without search: —

 ”Daily the bending skies solicit man,
  The seasons chariot him from this exile,
  The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
  The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
  Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
  Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.”

The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the sympathetic illusion, his readers might have looked upon it more justly.

It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the resemblances between Emerson’s poetry and that of other poets. Two or three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others may be mentioned.

In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged to him.

“Good-by, proud world,”

recalls Spenser and Raleigh. “The Humble-Bee” is strongly marked by the manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell’s

 ”Annihilating all that’s made
  To a green thought in a green shade,”

may well have suggested Emerson’s

 ”The green silence dost displace
  With thy mellow, breezy bass.”

“The Snow-Storm” naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by comparison with either.

“Woodnotes,” one of his best poems, has passages that might have been found in Milton’s “Comus;” this, for instance: —

 ”All constellations of the sky
  Shed their virtue through his eye.
  Him Nature giveth for defence
  His formidable innocence.”

Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were original.

So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many moods, but with one pervading spirit: —

 ”Melting matter into dreams,
  Panoramas which I saw,
  And whatever glows or seems
  Into substance, into Law.”

We think in reading his “Poems” of these words of Sainte-Beuve: —

“The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious, and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to complete in your turn.”

Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow to empty themselves, we cannot always say, — it is enough to enjoy them as they flow by us.

Incompleteness — want of beginning, middle, and end, — is their too common fault. His pages are too much like those artists’ studios all hung round with sketches and “bits” of scenery. “The Snow-Storm” and “Sea-Shore” are “bits” out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far as they go, but forcing us to ask, “Where is the painting for which these scraps are studies?” or “Out of what great picture have these pieces been cut?”

We do not want his fragments to be made wholes, — if we did, what hand could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer’s, and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any versifying drill-sergeant, — if we wanted them reshaped whom could we trust to meddle with them?

His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden brilliancy.

After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons, we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson’s poems which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a hyacinth, — any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its articulating representatives should call us by name.

All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery of style. “The style is of [a part of] the man himself,” said Buffon, and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, “The style is the man.”

The “personal equation” which differentiates two observers is not confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought; that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own, with a curiosa felicitas which captivates and enthrals the reader who comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues, shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.

CHAPTER XV.

Recollections of Emerson’s Last Years. — Mr. Conway’s Visits. — Extracts from Mr. Whitman’s Journal. — Dr. Le Baron Russell’s Visit. — Dr. Edward Emerson’s Account. — Illness and Death. — Funeral Services.

Mr. Conway gives the following account of two visits to Emerson after the decline of his faculties had begun to make itself obvious: —

“In 1875, when I stayed at his house in Concord for a little time, it was sad enough to find him sitting as a listener before those who used to sit at his feet in silence. But when alone with him he conversed in the old way, and his faults of memory seemed at times to disappear. There was something striking in the kind of forgetfulness by which he suffered. He remembered the realities and uses of things when he could not recall their names. He would describe what he wanted or thought of; when he could not recall ‘chair’ he could speak of that which supports the human frame, and ‘the implement that cultivates the soil’ must do for plough. —

“In 1880, when I was last in Concord, the trouble had made heavy strides. The intensity of his silent attention to every word that was said was painful, suggesting a concentration of his powers to break through the invisible walls closing around them. Yet his face was serene; he was even cheerful, and joined in our laughter at some letters his eldest daughter had preserved, from young girls, trying to coax autograph letters, and in one case asking for what price he would write a valedictory address she had to deliver at college. He was still able to joke about his ‘naughty memory;’ and no complaint came from him when he once rallied himself on living too long. Emerson appeared to me strangely beautiful at this time, and the sweetness of his voice, when he spoke of the love and providence at his side, is quite indescribable.” —

One of the later glimpses we have of Emerson is that preserved in the journal of Mr. Whitman, who visited Concord in the autumn of 1881. Mr. Ireland gives a long extract from this journal, from which I take the following: —

“On entering he had spoken very briefly, easily and politely to several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle pushed back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one, remained silent through the whole talk and discussion. And so, there Emerson sat, and I looking at him. A good color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the same.”

Mr. Whitman met him again the next day, Sunday, September 18th, and records: —

“As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a smile.”

Dr. Le Baron Russell writes to me of Emerson at a still later period: —

“One incident I will mention which occurred at my last visit to Emerson, only a few months before his death. I went by Mrs. Emerson’s request to pass a Sunday at their house at Concord towards the end of June. His memory had been failing for some time, and his mind as you know was clouded, but the old charm of his voice and manner had never left him. On the morning after my arrival Mrs. Emerson took us into the garden to see the beautiful roses in which she took great delight. One red rose of most brilliant color she called our attention to especially; its ‘hue’ was so truly ‘angry and brave’ that I involuntarily repeated Herbert’s line, —

‘Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,’ —

from the verses which Emerson had first repeated to me so long ago. Emerson looked at the rose admiringly, and then as if by a sudden impulse lifted his hat gently, and said with a low bow, ‘I take off my hat to it.’”

Once a poet, always a poet. It was the same reverence for the beautiful that he had shown in the same way in his younger days on entering the wood, as Governor Rice has told us the story, given in an earlier chapter.

I do not remember Emerson’s last time of attendance at the “Saturday Club,” but I recollect that he came after the trouble in finding words had become well marked. “My memory hides itself,” he said. The last time I saw him, living, was at Longfellow’s funeral. I was sitting opposite to him when he rose, and going to the side of the coffin, looked intently upon the face of the dead poet. A few minutes later he rose again and looked once more on the familiar features, not apparently remembering that he had just done so. Mr. Conway reports that he said to a friend near him, “That gentleman was a sweet, beautiful soul, but I have entirely forgotten his name.”

Dr. Edward Emerson has very kindly furnished me, in reply to my request, with information regarding his father’s last years which will interest every one who has followed his life through its morning and midday to the hour of evening shadows.

“May-Day,” which was published in 1867, was made up of the poems written since his first volume appeared. After this he wrote no poems, but with some difficulty fitted the refrain to the poem “Boston,” which had remained unfinished since the old Anti-slavery days. “Greatness,” and the “Phi Beta Kappa Oration” of 1867, were among his last pieces of work. His College Lectures, “The Natural History of the Intellect,” were merely notes recorded years before, and now gathered and welded together. In 1876 he revised his poems, and made the selections from them for the “Little Classic” edition of his works, then called “Selected Poems.” In that year he gave his “Address to the Students of the University of Virginia.” This was a paper written long before, and its revision, with the aid of his daughter Ellen, was accomplished with much difficulty.

The year 1867 was about the limit of his working life. During the last five years he hardly answered a letter. Before this time it had become increasingly hard for him to do so, and he always postponed and thought he should feel more able the next day, until his daughter Ellen was compelled to assume the correspondence. He did, however, write some letters in 1876, as, for instance, the answer to the invitation of the Virginia students.

Emerson left off going regularly to the “Saturday Club” probably in 1875. He used to depend on meeting Mr. Cabot there, but after Mr. Cabot began to come regularly to work on “Letters and Social Aims,” Emerson, who relied on his friendly assistance, ceased attending the meetings. The trouble he had in finding the word he wanted was a reason for his staying away from all gatherings where he was called upon to take a part in conversation, though he the more willingly went to lectures and readings and to church. His hearing was very slightly impaired, and his sight remained pretty good, though he sometimes said letters doubled, and that “M’s” and “N’s” troubled him to read. He recognized the members of his own family and his old friends; but, as I infer from this statement, he found a difficulty in remembering the faces of new acquaintances, as is common with old persons.

He continued the habit of reading, — read through all his printed works with much interest and surprise, went through all his manuscripts, and endeavored, unsuccessfully, to index them. In these Dr. Emerson found written “Examined 1877 or 1878,” but he found no later date.

In the last year or two he read anything which he picked up on his table, but he read the same things over, and whispered the words like a child. He liked to look over the “Advertiser,” and was interested in the “Nation.” He enjoyed pictures in books and showed them with delight to guests.

All this with slight changes and omissions is from the letter of Dr. Emerson in answer to my questions. The twilight of a long, bright day of life may be saddening, but when the shadow falls so gently and gradually, with so little that is painful and so much that is soothing and comforting, we do not shrink from following the imprisoned spirit to the very verge of its earthly existence.

But darker hours were in the order of nature very near at hand. From these he was saved by his not untimely release from the imprisonment of the worn-out bodily frame.

In April, 1882, Emerson took a severe cold, and became so hoarse that he could hardly speak. When his son, Dr. Edward Emerson, called to see him, he found him on the sofa, feverish, with more difficulty of expression than usual, dull, but not uncomfortable. As he lay on his couch he pointed out various objects, among others a portrait of Carlyle “the good man, — my friend.” His son told him that he had seen Carlyle, which seemed to please him much. On the following day the unequivocal signs of pneumonia showed themselves, and he failed rapidly. He still recognized those around him, among the rest Judge Hoar, to whom he held out his arms for a last embrace. A sharp pain coming on, ether was administered with relief. And in a little time, surrounded by those who loved him and whom he loved, he passed quietly away. He lived very nearly to the completion of his seventy-ninth year, having been born May 25, 1803, and his death occurring on the 27th of April, 1882.

Mr. Ireland has given a full account of the funeral, from which are, for the most part, taken the following extracts: —

“The last rites over the remains of Ralph Waldo Emerson took place at Concord on the 30th of April. A special train from Boston carried a large number of people. Many persons were on the street, attracted by the services, but were unable to gain admission to the church where the public ceremonies were held. Almost every building in town bore over its entrance-door a large black and white rosette with other sombre draperies. The public buildings were heavily draped, and even the homes of the very poor bore outward marks of grief at the loss of their friend and fellow-townsman.

“The services at the house, which were strictly private, occurred at 2.30, and were conducted by Rev. W.H. Furness of Philadelphia, a kindred spirit and an almost life-long friend. They were simple in character, and only Dr. Furness took part in them. The body lay in the front northeast room, in which were gathered the family and close friends of the deceased. The only flowers were contained in three vases on the mantel, and were lilies of the valley, red and white roses, and arbutus. The adjoining room and hall were filled with friends and neighbors.

“At the church many hundreds of persons were awaiting the arrival of the procession, and all the space, except the reserved pews, was packed. In front of the pulpit were simple decorations, boughs of pine covered the desk, and in their centre was a harp of yellow jonquils, the gift of Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Among the floral tributes was one from the teachers and scholars in the Emerson school. By the sides of the pulpit were white and scarlet geraniums and pine boughs, and high upon the wall a laurel wreath.

“Before 3.30 the pall-bearers brought in the plain black walnut coffin, which was placed before the pulpit. The lid was turned back, and upon it was put a cluster of richly colored pansies and a small bouquet of roses. While the coffin was being carried in, ‘Pleyel’s Hymn’ was rendered on the organ by request of the family of the deceased. Dr. James Freeman Clarke then entered the pulpit. Judge E. Rockwood Hoar remained by the coffin below, and when the congregation became quiet, made a brief and pathetic address, his voice many times trembling with emotion.”

I subjoin this most impressive “Address” entire, from the manuscript with which Judge Hoar has kindly favored me: —

“The beauty of Israel is fallen in its high place! Mr. Emerson has died; and we, his friends and neighbors, with this sorrowing company, have turned aside the procession from his home to his grave, — to this temple of his fathers, that we may here unite in our parting tribute of memory and love.

“There is nothing to mourn for him. That brave and manly life was rounded out to the full length of days. That dying pillow was softened by the sweetest domestic affection; and as he lay down to the sleep which the Lord giveth his beloved, his face was as the face of an angel, and his smile seemed to give a glimpse of the opening heavens.

“Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his fame is established and secure. Throughout this great land and from beyond the sea will come innumerable voices of sorrow for this great public loss. But we, his neighbors and townsmen, feel that he was ours. He was descended from the founders of the town. He chose our village as the place where his lifelong work was to be done. It was to our fields and orchards that his presence gave such value; it was our streets in which the children looked up to him with love, and the elders with reverence. He was our ornament and pride.

                   ”’He is gone — is dust, —
      He the more fortunate! Yea, he hath finished!
      For him there is no longer any future.
      His life is bright — bright without spot it was
      And cannot cease to be. No ominous hour
      Knocks at his door with tidings of mishap.
      Far off is he, above desire and fear;
      No more submitted to the change and chance
      Of the uncertain planets. —

     ”’The bloom is vanished from my life,
      For, oh! he stood beside me like my youth;
      Transformed for me the real to a dream,
      Clothing the palpable and the familiar
      With golden exhalations of the dawn.
      Whatever fortunes wait my future toils,
      The beautiful is vanished and returns not.’

“That lofty brow, the home of all wise thoughts and high aspirations, — those lips of eloquent music, — that great soul, which trusted in God and never let go its hope of immortality, — that large heart, to which everything that belonged to man was welcome, — that hospitable nature, loving and tender and generous, having no repulsion or scorn for anything but meanness and baseness, — oh, friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer, guide! is there no more that we can do now than to give thee this our hail and farewell!”

Judge Hoar’s remarks were followed by the congregation singing the hymns, “Thy will be done,” “I will not fear the fate provided by Thy love.” The Rev. Dr. Furness then read selections from the Scriptures.

The Rev. James Freeman Clarke then delivered an “Address,” from which I extract two eloquent and inspiring passages, regretting to omit any that fell from lips so used to noble utterances and warmed by their subject, — for there is hardly a living person more competent to speak or write of Emerson than this high-minded and brave-souled man, who did not wait until he was famous to be his admirer and champion.

“The saying of the Liturgy is true and wise, that ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’ But it is still more true that in the midst of death we are in life. Do we ever believe so much in immortality as when we look on such a dear and noble face, now so still, which a few hours ago was radiant with thought and love? ‘He is not here: he is risen.’ That power which we knew, — that soaring intelligence, that soul of fire, that ever-advancing spirit, — that cannot have been suddenly annihilated with the decay of these earthly organs. It has left its darkened dust behind. It has outsoared the shadow of our night. God does not trifle with his creatures by bringing to nothing the ripe fruit of the ages by the lesion of a cerebral cell, or some bodily tissue. Life does not die, but matter dies off from it. The highest energy we know, the soul of man, the unit in which meet intelligence, imagination, memory, hope, love, purpose, insight, — this agent of immense resource and boundless power, — this has not been subdued by its instrument. When we think of such an one as he, we can only think of life, never of death.

“Such was his own faith, as expressed in his paper on ‘Immortality.’ But he himself was the best argument for immortality. Like the greatest thinkers, he did not rely on logical proof, but on the higher evidence of universal instincts, — the vast streams of belief which flow through human thought like currents in the ocean; those shoreless rivers which forever roll along their paths in the Atlantic and Pacific, not restrained by banks, but guided by the revolutions of the globe and the attractions of the sun.”

* * * * *

“Let us then ponder his words: —

         ’Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know
          What rainbows teach and sunsets show?
          Voice of earth to earth returned,
          Prayers of saints that inly burned,
          Saying, What is excellent
          As God lives, is permanent;
          Hearts are dust, hearts’ loves remain;
          Hearts’ love will meet thee again.

* * * *

         House and tenant go to ground
          Lost in God, in Godhead found.’”

After the above address a feeling prayer was offered by Rev. Howard M. Brown, of Brookline, and the benediction closed the exercises in the church. Immediately before the benediction, Mr. Alcott recited the following sonnet, which he had written for the occasion: —

     ”His harp is silent: shall successors rise,
      Touching with venturous hand the trembling string,
      Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise,
      And wake to ecstasy each slumbering thing?
      Shall life and thought flash new in wondering eyes,
      As when the seer transcendent, sweet, and wise,
      World-wide his native melodies did sing,
      Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories?
      Ah, no! That matchless lyre shall silent lie:
      None hath the vanished minstrel’s wondrous skill
      To touch that instrument with art and will.
      With him, winged poesy doth droop and die;
      While our dull age, left voiceless, must lament
      The bard high heaven had for its service sent.”

“Over an hour was occupied by the passing files of neighbors, friends, and visitors looking for the last time upon the face of the dead poet. The body was robed completely in white, and the face bore a natural and peaceful expression. From the church the procession took its way to the cemetery. The grave was made beneath a tall pine-tree upon the hill-top of Sleepy Hollow, where lie the bodies of his friends Thoreau and Hawthorne, the upturned sod being concealed by strewings of pine boughs. A border of hemlock spray surrounded the grave and completely lined its sides. The services here were very brief, and the casket was soon lowered to its final resting-place.

“The Rev. Dr. Haskins, a cousin of the family, an Episcopal clergyman, read the Episcopal Burial Service, and closed with the Lord’s Prayer, ending at the words, ‘and deliver us from evil.’ In this all the people joined. Dr. Haskins then pronounced the benediction. After it was over the grandchildren passed the open grave and threw flowers into it.”

So vanished from human eyes the bodily presence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his finished record belongs henceforth to memory.

CHAPTER XVI. EMERSON. — A RETROSPECT.

Personality and Habits of Life. — His Commission and Errand. — As a Lecturer. — His Use of Authorities. — Resemblance to Other Writers. — As influenced by Others. — His Place as a Thinker. — Idealism and Intuition. — Mysticism. — His Attitude respecting Science. — As an American. — His Fondness for Solitary Study. — His Patience and
Amiability. — Feeling with which he was regarded. — Emerson and Burns. — His Religious Belief. — His Relations with Clergymen. — Future of his Reputation. — His Life judged by the Ideal Standard.

Emerson’s earthly existence was in the estimate of his own philosophy so slight an occurrence in his career of being that his relations to the accidents of time and space seem quite secondary matters to one who has been long living in the companionship of his thought. Still, he had to be born, to take in his share of the atmosphere in which we are all immersed, to have dealings with the world of phenomena, and at length to let them all “soar and sing” as he left his earthly half-way house. It is natural and pardonable that we should like to know the details of the daily life which the men whom we admire have shared with common mortals, ourselves among the rest. But Emerson has said truly “Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their home and street life was trivial and commonplace.”

The reader has had many extracts from Emerson’s writings laid before him. It was no easy task to choose them, for his paragraphs are so condensed, so much in the nature of abstracts, that it is like distilling absolute alcohol to attempt separating the spirit of what he says from his undiluted thought. His books are all so full of his life to their last syllable that we might letter every volume Emersoniana, by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

From the numerous extracts I have given from Emerson’s writings it may be hoped that the reader will have formed an idea for himself of the man and of the life which have been the subjects of these pages. But he may probably expect something like a portrait of the poet and moralist from the hand of his biographer, if the author of this Memoir may borrow the name which will belong to a future and better equipped laborer in the same field. He may not unreasonably look for some general estimate of the life work of the scholar and thinker of whom he has been reading. He will not be disposed to find fault with the writer of the Memoir if he mentions many things which would seem very trivial but for the interest they borrow from the individual to whom they relate.

Emerson’s personal appearance was that of a scholar, the descendant of scholars. He was tall and slender, with the complexion which is bred in the alcove and not in the open air. He used to tell his son Edward that he measured six feet in his shoes, but his son thinks he could hardly have straightened himself to that height in his later years. He was very light for a man of his stature. He got on the scales at Cheyenne, on his trip to California, comparing his weight with that of a lady of the party. A little while afterwards he asked of his fellow-traveller, Professor Thayer, “How much did I weigh? A hundred and forty?” “A hundred and forty and a half,” was the answer. “Yes, yes, a hundred and forty and a half! That half I prize; it is an index of better things!”

Emerson’s head was not such as Schopenhauer insists upon for a philosopher. He wore a hat measuring six and seven eighths on the cephalometer used by hatters, which is equivalent to twenty-one inches and a quarter of circumference. The average size is from seven to seven and an eighth, so that his head was quite small in that dimension. It was long and narrow, but lofty, almost symmetrical, and of more nearly equal breadth in its anterior and posterior regions than many or most heads.

His shoulders sloped so much as to be commented upon for this peculiarity by Mr. Gilfillan, and like “Ammon’s great son,” he carried one shoulder a little higher than the other. His face was thin, his nose somewhat accipitrine, casting a broad shadow; his mouth rather wide, well formed and well closed, carrying a question and an assertion in its finely finished curves; the lower lip a little prominent, the chin shapely and firm, as becomes the corner-stone of the countenance. His expression was calm, sedate, kindly, with that look of refinement, centring about the lips, which is rarely found in the male New Englander, unless the family features have been for two or three cultivated generations the battlefield and the playground of varied thoughts and complex emotions as well as the sensuous and nutritive port of entry. His whole look was irradiated by an ever active inquiring intelligence. His manner was noble and gracious. Few of our fellow-countrymen have had larger opportunities of seeing distinguished personages than our present minister at the Court of St. James. In a recent letter to myself, which I trust Mr. Lowell will pardon my quoting, he says of Emerson: —

“There was a majesty about him beyond all other men I have known, and he habitually dwelt in that ampler and diviner air to which most of us, if ever, only rise in spurts.”

From members of his own immediate family I have derived some particulars relating to his personality and habits which are deserving of record.

His hair was brown, quite fine, and, till he was fifty, very thick. His eyes were of the “strongest and brightest blue.” The member of the family who tells me this says: —

“My sister and I have looked for many years to see whether any one else had such absolutely blue eyes, and have never found them except in sea-captains. I have seen three sea-captains who had them.”

He was not insensible to music, but his gift in that direction was very limited, if we may judge from this family story. When he was in College, and the singing-master was gathering his pupils, Emerson presented himself, intending to learn to sing. The master received him, and when his turn came, said to him, “Chord!” “What?” said Emerson. “Chord! Chord! I tell you,” repeated the master. “I don’t know what you mean,” said Emerson. “Why, sing! Sing a note.” “So I made some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, ‘That will do, sir. You need not come again.’”

Emerson’s mode of living was very simple: coffee in the morning, tea in the evening, animal food by choice only once a day, wine only when with others using it, but always pie at breakfast. “It stood before him and was the first thing eaten.” Ten o’clock was his bed-time, six his hour of rising until the last ten years of his life, when he rose at seven. Work or company sometimes led him to sit up late, and this he could do night after night. He never was hungry, — could go any time from breakfast to tea without food and not know it, but was always ready for food when it was set before him.

He always walked from about four in the afternoon till tea-time, and often longer when the day was fine, or he felt that he should work the better.

It is plain from his writings that Emerson was possessed all his life long with the idea of his constitutional infirmity and insufficiency. He hated invalidism, and had little patience with complaints about ill-health, but in his poems, and once or twice in his letters to Carlyle, he expresses himself with freedom about his own bodily inheritance. In 1827, being then but twenty-four years old, he writes: —

 ”I bear in youth the sad infirmities
  That use to undo the limb and sense of age.”

Four years later: —

 ”Has God on thee conferred
    A bodily presence mean as Paul’s,
  Yet made thee bearer of a word
    Which sleepy nations as with trumpet calls?”

and again, in the same year: —

 ”Leave me, Fear, thy throbs are base,
  Trembling for the body’s sake.” —

Almost forty years from the first of these dates we find him bewailing in “Terminus” his inherited weakness of organization.

And in writing to Carlyle, he says: —

“You are of the Anakirn and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution.”

Again, “I am the victim of miscellany — miscellany of designs, vast debility and procrastination.”

He thought too much of his bodily insufficiencies, which, it will be observed, he refers to only in his private correspondence, and in that semi-nudity of self-revelation which is the privilege of poetry. His presence was fine and impressive, and his muscular strength was enough to make him a rapid and enduring walker.

Emerson’s voice had a great charm in conversation, as in the lecture-room. It was never loud, never shrill, but singularly penetrating. He was apt to hesitate in the course of a sentence, so as to be sure of the exact word he wanted; picking his way through his vocabulary, to get at the best expression of his thought, as a well-dressed woman crosses the muddy pavement to reach the opposite sidewalk. It was this natural slight and not unpleasant semicolon pausing of the memory which grew upon him in his years of decline, until it rendered conversation laborious and painful to him.

He never laughed loudly. When he laughed it was under protest, as it were, with closed doors, his mouth shut, so that the explosion had to seek another respiratory channel, and found its way out quietly, while his eyebrows and nostrils and all his features betrayed the “ground swell,” as Professor Thayer happily called it, of the half-suppressed convulsion. He was averse to loud laughter in others, and objected to Margaret Fuller that she made him laugh too much.

Emerson was not rich in some of those natural gifts which are considered the birthright of the New Englander. He had not the mechanical turn of the whittling Yankee. I once questioned him about his manual dexterity, and he told me he could split a shingle four ways with one nail, — which, as the intention is not to split it at all in fastening it to the roof of a house or elsewhere, I took to be a confession of inaptitude for mechanical works. He does not seem to have been very accomplished in the handling of agricultural implements either, for it is told in the family that his little son, Waldo, seeing him at work with a spade, cried out, “Take care, papa, — you will dig your leg.”

He used to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of the words.

There are stories which show that Emerson had a retentive memory in the earlier part of his life. It is hard to say from his books whether he had or not, for he jotted down such a multitude of things in his diary that this was a kind of mechanical memory which supplied him with endless materials of thought and subjects for his pen.

Lover and admirer of Plato as Emerson was, the doors of the academy, over which was the inscription [Greek: maedeis hageometraetos eseito] — Let no one unacquainted with geometry enter here, — would have been closed to him. All the exact sciences found him an unwilling learner. He says of himself that he cannot multiply seven by twelve with impunity.

In an unpublished manuscript kindly submitted to me by Mr. Frothingham, Emerson is reported as saying, “God has given me the seeing eye, but not the working hand.” His gift was insight: he saw the germ through its envelop; the particular in the light of the universal; the fact in connection with the principle; the phenomenon as related to the law; all this not by the slow and sure process of science, but by the sudden and searching flashes of imaginative double vision. He had neither the patience nor the method of the inductive reasoner; he passed from one thought to another not by logical steps but by airy flights, which left no footprints. This mode of intellectual action when found united with natural sagacity becomes poetry, philosophy, wisdom, or prophecy in its various forms of manifestation. Without that gift of natural sagacity (odoratio quaedam venatica), — a good scent for truth and beauty, — it appears as extravagance, whimsicality, eccentricity, or insanity, according to its degree of aberration. Emerson was eminently sane for an idealist. He carried the same sagacity into the ideal world that Franklin showed in the affairs of common life.

He was constitutionally fastidious, and had to school himself to become able to put up with the terrible inflictions of uncongenial fellowships. We must go to his poems to get at his weaknesses. The clown of the first edition of “Monadnoc” “with heart of cat and eyes of bug,” disappears in the after-thought of the later version of the poem, but the eye that recognized him and the nature that recoiled from him were there still. What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-minded worshippers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between the incoming and the outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience and good temper. We might have feared that he lacked the sensibility to make such intrusions and offences an annoyance. But when Mr. Frothingham gratifies the public with those most interesting personal recollections which I have had the privilege of looking over, it will be seen that his equanimity, admirable as it was, was not incapable of being disturbed, and that on rare occasions he could give way to the feeling which showed itself of old in the doom pronounced on the barren fig-tree.

Of Emerson’s affections his home-life, and those tender poems in memory of his brothers and his son, give all the evidence that could be asked or wished for. His friends were all who knew him, for none could be his enemy; and his simple graciousness of manner, with the sincerity apparent in every look and tone, hardly admitted indifference on the part of any who met him were it but for a single hour. Even the little children knew and loved him, and babes in arms returned his angelic smile. Of the friends who were longest and most intimately associated with him, it is needless to say much in this place. Of those who are living, it is hardly time to speak; of those who are dead, much has already been written. Margaret Fuller, — I must call my early schoolmate as I best remember her, — leaves her life pictured in the mosaic of five artists, — Emerson himself among the number; Thoreau is faithfully commemorated in the loving memoir by Mr. Sanborn; Theodore Parker lives in the story of his life told by the eloquent Mr. Weiss; Hawthorne awaits his portrait from the master-hand of Mr. Lowell.

How nearly any friend, other than his brothers Edward and Charles, came to him, I cannot say, indeed I can hardly guess. That “majesty” Mr. Lowell speaks of always seemed to hedge him round like the divinity that doth hedge a king. What man was he who would lay his hand familiarly upon his shoulder and call him Waldo? No disciple of Father Mathew would be likely to do such a thing. There may have been such irreverent persons, but if any one had so ventured at the “Saturday Club,” it would have produced a sensation like Brummel’s “George, ring the bell,” to the Prince Regent. His ideas of friendship, as of love, seem almost too exalted for our earthly conditions, and suggest the thought as do many others of his characteristics, that the spirit which animated his mortal frame had missed its way on the shining path to some brighter and better sphere of being.

Not so did Emerson appear among the plain working farmers of the village in which he lived. He was a good, unpretending fellow-citizen who put on no airs, who attended town-meetings, took his part in useful measures, was no great hand at farming, but was esteemed and respected, and felt to be a principal source of attraction to Concord, for strangers came flocking to the place as if it held the tomb of Washington.

* * * * *

What was the errand on which he visited our earth, — the message with which he came commissioned from the Infinite source of all life?

Every human soul leaves its port with sealed orders. These may be opened earlier or later on its voyage, but until they are opened no one can tell what is to be his course or to what harbor he is bound.

Emerson inherited the traditions of the Boston pulpit, such as they were, damaged, in the view of the prevailing sects of the country, perhaps by too long contact with the “Sons of Liberty,” and their revolutionary notions. But the most “liberal” Boston pulpit still held to many doctrines, forms, and phrases open to the challenge of any independent thinker.

In the year 1832 this young priest, then a settled minister, “began,” as was said of another,— “to be about thirty years of age.” He had opened his sealed orders and had read therein:

Thou shalt not profess that which thou dost not believe.

Thou shalt not heed the voice of man when it agrees not with the voice of God in thine own soul.

Thou shalt study and obey the laws of the Universe and they will be thy fellow-servants.

Thou shalt speak the truth as thou seest it, without fear, in the spirit of kindness to all thy fellow-creatures, dealing with the manifold interests of life and the typical characters of history.

Nature shall be to thee as a symbol. The life of the soul, in conscious union with the Infinite, shall be for thee the only real existence.

This pleasing show of an external world through which thou art passing is given thee to interpret by the light which is in thee. Its least appearance is not unworthy of thy study. Let thy soul be open and thine eyes will reveal to thee beauty everywhere.

Go forth with thy message among thy fellow-creatures; teach them they must trust themselves as guided by that inner light which dwells with the pure in heart, to whom it was promised of old that they shall see God.

Teach them that each generation begins the world afresh, in perfect freedom; that the present is not the prisoner of the past, but that today holds captive all yesterdays, to compare, to judge, to accept, to reject their teachings, as these are shown by its own morning’s sun.

To thy fellow-countrymen thou shalt preach the gospel of the New World, that here, here in our America, is the home of man; that here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.

Thy life shall be as thy teachings, brave, pure, truthful, beneficent, hopeful, cheerful, hospitable to all honest belief, all sincere thinkers, and active according to thy gifts and opportunities.

* * * * *

He was true to the orders he had received. Through doubts, troubles, privations, opposition, he would not

“bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward.”

All through the writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that “intense inane” where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was done, not so much

“As ever in his great Taskmaster’s eye,”

as in the ever-present sense of divine companionship.

He was called to sacrifice his living, his position, his intimacies, to a doubt, and he gave them all up without a murmur. He might have been an idol, and he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw all about him. He gave up a comparatively easy life for a toilsome and trying one; he accepted a precarious employment, which hardly kept him above poverty, rather than wear the golden padlock on his lips which has held fast the conscience of so many pulpit Chrysostoms. Instead of a volume or two of sermons, bridled with a text and harnessed with a confession of faith, he bequeathed us a long series of Discourses and Essays in which we know we have his honest thoughts, free from that professional bias which tends to make the pulpit teaching of the fairest-minded preacher follow a diagonal of two forces, — the promptings of his personal and his ecclesiastical opinions.

Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation. It was largely made up of young persons of both sexes, young by nature, if not in years, who, tired of routine and formulae, and full of vague aspirations, found in his utterances the oracles they sought. To them, in the words of his friend and neighbor Mr. Alcott, he

“Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer.”

Nor was it only for a few seasons that he drew his audiences of devout listeners around him. Another poet, his Concord neighbor, Mr. Sanborn, who listened to him many years after the first flush of novelty was over, felt the same enchantment, and recognized the same inspiring life in his words, which had thrilled the souls of those earlier listeners.

 ”His was the task and his the lordly gift
  Our eyes, our hearts, bent earthward, to uplift.”

This was his power, — to inspire others, to make life purer, loftier, calmer, brighter. Optimism is what the young want, and he could no more help taking the hopeful view of the universe and its future than Claude could help flooding his landscapes with sunshine.

“Nature,” published in 1836, “the first clear manifestation of his genius,” as Mr. Norton calls it, revealed him as an idealist and a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. If he had been independent in circumstances, he would doubtless have developed more freely in these directions. But he had his living to get and a family to support, and he must look about him for some paying occupation. The lecture-room naturally presented itself to a scholar accustomed to speaking from the pulpit. This medium of communicating thought was not as yet very popular, and the rewards it offered were but moderate. Emerson was of a very hopeful nature, however, and believed in its possibilities.

— “I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room, — so free and so unpretending a platform, — a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety, rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession.” So writes Emerson to Carlyle in 1841.

It would be as unfair to overlook the special form in which Emerson gave most of his thoughts to the world, as it would be to leave out of view the calling of Shakespeare in judging his literary character. Emerson was an essayist and a lecturer, as Shakespeare was a dramatist and a play-actor.

The exigencies of the theatre account for much that is, as it were, accidental in the writings of Shakespeare. The demands of the lecture-room account for many peculiarities which are characteristic of Emerson as an author. The play must be in five acts, each of a given length. The lecture must fill an hour and not overrun it. Both play and lecture must be vivid, varied, picturesque, stimulating, or the audience would tire before the allotted time was over.

Both writers had this in common: they were poets and moralists. They reproduced the conditions of life in the light of penetrative observation and ideal contemplation; they illustrated its duties in their breach and in their observance, by precepts and well-chosen portraits of character. The particular form in which they wrote makes little difference when we come upon the utterance of a noble truth or an elevated sentiment.

It was not a simple matter of choice with the dramatist or the lecturer in what direction they should turn their special gifts. The actor had learned his business on the stage; the lecturer had gone through his apprenticeship in the pulpit. Each had his bread to earn, and he must work, and work hard, in the way open before him. For twenty years the playwright wrote dramas, and retired before middle age with a good estate to his native town. For forty years Emerson lectured and published lectures, and established himself at length in competence in the village where his ancestors had lived and died before him. He never became rich, as Shakespeare did. He was never in easy circumstances until he was nearly seventy years old. Lecturing was hard work, but he was under the “base necessity,” as he called it, of constant labor, writing in summer, speaking everywhere east and west in the trying and dangerous winter season.

He spoke in great cities to such cultivated audiences as no other man could gather about him, and in remote villages where he addressed plain people whose classics were the Bible and the “Farmer’s Almanac.” Wherever he appeared in the lecture-room, he fascinated his listeners by his voice and manner; the music of his speech pleased those who found his thought too subtle for their dull wits to follow.

When the Lecture had served its purpose, it came before the public in the shape of an Essay. But the Essay never lost the character it borrowed from the conditions under which it was delivered; it was a lay sermon, — concio ad populum. We must always remember what we are dealing with. “Expect nothing more of my power of construction, — no ship-building, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together.”— “Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.” We have then a moralist and a poet appearing as a Lecturer and an Essayist, and now and then writing in verse. He liked the freedom of the platform. “I preach in the Lecture-room,” he says, “and there it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius.” In England, he says, “I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors.” But he did not tend to overvalue the calling which from “base necessity” he followed so diligently. “Incorrigible spouting Yankee,” he calls himself; and again, “I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received.” Lecture-peddling was a hard business and a poorly paid one in the earlier part of the time when Emerson was carrying his precious wares about the country and offering them in competition with the cheapest itinerants, with shilling concerts and negro-minstrel entertainments. But one could get a kind of living out of it if he had invitations enough. I remember Emerson’s coming to my house to know if I could fill his place at a certain Lyceum so that he might accept a very advantageous invitation in another direction. I told him that I was unfortunately engaged for the evening mentioned. He smiled serenely, saying that then he supposed he must give up the new stove for that season.

No man would accuse Emerson of parsimony of ideas. He crams his pages with the very marrow of his thought. But in weighing out a lecture he was as punctilious as Portia about the pound of flesh. His utterance was deliberate and spaced with not infrequent slight delays. Exactly at the end of the hour the lecture stopped. Suddenly, abruptly, but quietly, without peroration of any sort, always with “a gentle shock of mild surprise” to the unprepared listener. He had weighed out the full measure to his audience with perfect fairness.

 [Greek: oste thalanta gunhae cheruhaetis halaethaes
  Aetestathmhon hechon echousa kahi heirion hamphis hanhelkei
  Ishazous ina paishin haeikhea misthon haraetai,]

or, in Bryant’s version,

 ”as the scales
  Are held by some just woman, who maintains
  By spinning wool her household, — carefully
  She poises both the wool and weights, to make
  The balance even, that she may provide
  A pittance for her babes.” —

As to the charm of his lectures all are agreed. It is needless to handle this subject, for Mr. Lowell has written upon it. Of their effect on his younger listeners he says, “To some of us that long past experience remains the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless of what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of ‘Chevy Chase,’ and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called us with assurance of victory.”

There was, besides these stirring notes, a sweet seriousness in Emerson’s voice that was infinitely soothing. So might “Peace, be still,” have sounded from the lips that silenced the storm. I remember that in the dreadful war-time, on one of the days of anguish and terror, I fell in with Governor Andrew, on his way to a lecture of Emerson’s, where he was going, he said, to relieve the strain upon his mind. An hour passed in listening to that flow of thought, calm and clear as the diamond drops that distil from a mountain rock, was a true nepenthe for a careworn soul.

An author whose writings are like mosaics must have borrowed from many quarries. Emerson had read more or less thoroughly through a very wide range of authors. I shall presently show how extensive was his reading. No doubt he had studied certain authors diligently, a few, it would seem, thoroughly. But let no one be frightened away from his pages by the terrible names of Plotinus and Proclus and Porphyry, of Behmen or Spinoza, or of those modern German philosophers with whom it is not pretended that he had any intimate acquaintance. Mr. George Ripley, a man of erudition, a keen critic, a lover and admirer of Emerson, speaks very plainly of his limitations as a scholar.

“As he confesses in the Essay on ‘Books,’ his learning is second hand; but everything sticks which his mind can appropriate. He defends the use of translations, and I doubt whether he has ever read ten pages of his great authorities, Plato, Plutarch, Montaigne, or Goethe, in the original. He is certainly no friend of profound study any more than of philosophical speculation. Give him a few brilliant and suggestive glimpses, and he is content.”

One correction I must make to this statement. Emerson says he has “contrived to read” almost every volume of Goethe, and that he has fifty-five of them, but that he has read nothing else in German, and has not looked into him for a long time. This was in 1840, in a letter to Carlyle. It was up-hill work, it may be suspected, but he could not well be ignorant of his friend’s great idol, and his references to Goethe are very frequent.

Emerson’s quotations are like the miraculous draught of fishes. I hardly know his rivals except Burton and Cotton Mather. But no one would accuse him of pedantry. Burton quotes to amuse himself and his reader; Mather quotes to show his learning, of which he had a vast conceit; Emerson quotes to illustrate some original thought of his own, or because another writer’s way of thinking falls in with his own, — never with a trivial purpose. Reading as he did, he must have unconsciously appropriated a great number of thoughts from others. But he was profuse in his references to those from whom he borrowed, — more profuse than many of his readers would believe without taking the pains to count his authorities. This I thought it worth while to have done, once for all, and I will briefly present the results of the examination. The named references, chiefly to authors, as given in the table before me, are three thousand three hundred and ninety-three, relating to eight hundred and sixty-eight different individuals. Of these, four hundred and eleven are mentioned more than once; one hundred and fifty-five, five times or more; sixty-nine, ten times or more; thirty-eight, fifteen times or more; and twenty-seven, twenty times or more. These twenty-seven names alone, the list of which is here given, furnish no less than one thousand and sixty-five references.

 Authorities. Number of times mentioned.
  Shakespeare…..112
  Napoleon………84
  Plato…………81
  Plutarch………70
  Goethe………..62
  Swift…………49
  Bacon…………47
  Milton………..46
  Newton………..43
  Homer…………42
  Socrates………42
  Swedenborg…….40
  Montaigne……..30
  Saadi…………30
  Luther………..30
  Webster……….27
  Aristotle……..25
  Hafiz…………25
  Wordsworth…….25
  Burke…………24
  Saint Paul…….24
  Dante…………22
  Shattuck (Hist. of
    Concord)…….21
  Chaucer……….20
  Coleridge……..20
  Michael Angelo…20
  The name of Jesus occurs fifty-four times.

It is interesting to observe that Montaigne, Franklin, and Emerson all show the same fondness for Plutarch.

Montaigne says, “I never settled myself to the reading of any book of solid learning but Plutarch and Seneca.”

Franklin says, speaking of the books in his father’s library, “There was among them Plutarch’s Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage.”

Emerson says, “I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers.”

Studies of life and character were the delight of all these four moralists. As a judge of character, Dr. Hedge, who knew Emerson well, has spoken to me of his extraordinary gift, and no reader of “English Traits” can have failed to mark the formidable penetration of the intellect which looked through those calm cerulean eyes.

Noscitur a sociis is as applicable to the books a man most affects as well as to the companions he chooses. It is with the kings of thought that Emerson most associates. As to borrowing from his royal acquaintances his ideas are very simple and expressed without reserve.

“All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

What Emerson says of Plutarch applies very nearly to himself.

“In his immense quotation and allusion we quickly cease to discriminate between what he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into the ports of every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop to discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all.”

Mr. Ruskin and Lord Tennyson have thought it worth their while to defend themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Emerson would never have taken the trouble to do such a thing. His mind was overflowing with thought as a river in the season of flood, and was full of floating fragments from an endless variety of sources. He drew ashore whatever he wanted that would serve his purpose. He makes no secret of his mode of writing. “I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick-kiln instead of a house.” His journal is “full of disjointed dreams and audacities.” Writing by the aid of this, it is natural enough that he should speak of his “lapidary style” and say “I build my house of boulders.”

“It is to be remembered,” says Mr. Ruskin, “that all men who have sense and feeling are continually helped: they are taught by every person they meet, and enriched by everything that falls in their way. The greatest is he who has been oftenest aided; and if the attainments of all human minds could be traced to their real sources, it would be found that the world had been laid most under contribution by the men of most original powers, and that every day of their existence deepened their debt to their race, while it enlarged their gifts to it.”

The reader may like to see a few coincidences between Emerson’s words and thoughts and those of others.

Some sayings seem to be a kind of family property. “Scorn trifles” comes from Aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and reappears in her nephew, Ralph Waldo.— “What right have you, Sir, to your virtue? Is virtue piecemeal? This is a jewel among the rags of a beggar.” So writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Lecture “New England Reformers.”— “Hiding the badges of royalty beneath the gown of the mendicant, and ever on the watch lest their rank be betrayed by the sparkle of a gem from under their rags.” Thus wrote Charles Chauncy Emerson in the “Harvard Register” nearly twenty years before.

 ”The hero is not fed on sweets,
  Daily his own heart he eats.”

The image comes from Pythagoras via Plutarch.

Now and then, but not with any questionable frequency, we find a sentence which recalls Carlyle.

“The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy or whiffling. The slow, deep English mass smoulders with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long memory, and in hottest heat a register and rule.”

Compare this passage from “English Traits” with the following one from
Carlyle’s “French Revolution”: —

“So long this Gallic fire, through its successive changes of color and character, will blaze over the face of Europe, and afflict and scorch all men: — till it provoke all men, till it kindle another kind of fire, the Teutonic kind, namely; and be swallowed up, so to speak, in a day! For there is a fire comparable to the burning of dry jungle and grass; most sudden, high-blazing: and another fire which we liken to the burning of coal, or even of anthracite coal, but which no known thing will put out.”

 ”O what are heroes, prophets, men
  But pipes through which the breath of man doth blow
  A momentary music.”

The reader will find a similar image in one of Burns’s letters, again in one of Coleridge’s poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a letter of Leibnitz.

“He builded better than he knew”

is the most frequently quoted line of Emerson. The thought is constantly recurring in our literature. It helps out the minister’s sermon; and a Fourth of July Oration which does not borrow it is like the “Address without a Phoenix” among the Drury Lane mock poems. Can we find any trace of this idea elsewhere?

In a little poem of Coleridge’s, “William Tell,” are these two lines:

 ”On wind and wave the boy would toss
  Was great, nor knew how great he was.”

The thought is fully worked out in the celebrated Essay of Carlyle called “Characteristics.” It reappears in Emerson’s poem “Fate.”

 ”Unknown to Cromwell as to me
  Was Cromwell’s measure and degree;
  Unknown to him as to his horse,
  If he than his groom is better or worse.”

It is unnecessary to illustrate this point any further in this connection. In dealing with his poetry other resemblances will suggest themselves. All the best poetry the world has known is full of such resemblances. If we find Emerson’s wonderful picture, “Initial Love” prefigured in the “Symposium” of Plato, we have only to look in the “Phaedrus” and we we shall find an earlier sketch of Shakespeare’s famous group, —

“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet.”

Sometimes these resemblances are nothing more than accidental coincidences; sometimes the similar passages are unconsciously borrowed from another; sometimes they are paraphrases, variations, embellished copies, éditions de luxe of sayings that all the world knows are old, but which it seems to the writer worth his while to say over again. The more improved versions of the world’s great thoughts we have, the better, and we look to the great minds for them. The larger the river the more streams flow into it. The wide flood of Emerson’s discourse has a hundred rivers and thousands of streamlets for its tributaries.

It was not from books only that he gathered food for thought and for his lectures and essays. He was always on the lookout in conversation for things to be remembered. He picked up facts one would not have expected him to care for. He once corrected me in giving Flora Temple’s time at Kalamazoo. I made a mistake of a quarter of a second, and he set me right. He was not always so exact in his memory, as I have already shown in several instances. Another example is where he speaks of Quintus Curtius, the historian, when he is thinking of Mettus Curtius, the self-sacrificing equestrian. Little inaccuracies of this kind did not concern him much; he was a wholesale dealer in illustrations, and could not trouble himself about a trifling defect in this or that particular article.

Emerson was a man who influenced others more than others influenced him. Outside of his family connections, the personalities which can be most easily traced in his own are those of Carlyle, Mr. Alcott, and Thoreau. Carlyle’s harsh virility could not be without its effect on his valid, but sensitive nature. Alcott’s psychological and physiological speculations interested him as an idealist. Thoreau lent him a new set of organs of sense of wonderful delicacy. Emerson looked at nature as a poet, and his natural history, if left to himself, would have been as vague as that of Polonius. But Thoreau had a pair of eyes which, like those of the Indian deity, could see the smallest emmet on the blackest stone in the darkest night, — or come nearer to seeing it than those of most mortals. Emerson’s long intimacy with him taught him to give an outline to many natural objects which would have been poetic nebulae to him but for this companionship. A nicer analysis would detect many alien elements mixed with his individuality, but the family traits predominated over all the external influences, and the personality stood out distinct from the common family qualities. Mr. Whipple has well said: “Some traits of his mind and character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed the safest course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess that it is the nature of genius ‘to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history.’”

* * * * *

Emerson’s place as a thinker is somewhat difficult to fix. He cannot properly be called a psychologist. He made notes and even delivered lectures on the natural history of the intellect; but they seem to have been made up, according to his own statement, of hints and fragments rather than of the results of systematic study. He was a man of intuition, of insight, a seer, a poet, with a tendency to mysticism. This tendency renders him sometimes obscure, and once in a while almost, if not quite, unintelligible. We can, for this reason, understand why the great lawyer turned him over to his daughters, and Dr. Walter Channing complained that his lecture made his head ache. But it is not always a writer’s fault that he is not understood. Many persons have poor heads for abstractions; and as for mystics, if they understand themselves it is quite as much as can be expected. But that which is mysticism to a dull listener may be the highest and most inspiring imaginative clairvoyance to a brighter one. It is to be hoped that no reader will take offence at the following anecdote, which may be found under the title “Diogenes,” in the work of his namesake, Diogenes Laertius. I translate from the Latin version.

“Plato was talking about ideas, and spoke of mensality and cyathity [tableity, and gobletity]. ‘I can see a table and a goblet,’ said the cynic, ‘but I can see no such things as tableity and gobletity.’ ‘Quite so,’ answered Plato, ‘because you have the eyes to see a goblet and a table with, but you have not the brains to understand tableity and gobletity.’”

This anecdote may be profitably borne in mind in following Emerson into the spheres of intuition and mystical contemplation.

Emerson was an idealist in the Platonic sense of the word, a spiritualist as opposed to a materialist. He believes, he says, “as the wise Spenser teaches,” that the soul makes its own body. This, of course, involves the doctrine of preexistence; a doctrine older than Spenser, older than Plato or Pythagoras, having its cradle in India, fighting its way down through Greek philosophers and Christian fathers and German professors, to our own time, when it has found Pierre Leroux, Edward Beecher, and Brigham Young among its numerous advocates. Each has his fancies on the subject. The geography of an undiscovered country and the soundings of an ocean that has never been sailed over may belong to romance and poetry, but they do not belong to the realm of knowledge.

That the organ of the mind brings with it inherited aptitudes is a simple matter of observation. That it inherits truths is a different proposition. The eye does not bring landscapes into the world on its retina, — why should the brain bring thoughts? Poetry settles such questions very simply by saying it is so.

The poet in Emerson never accurately differentiated itself from the philosopher. He speaks of Wordsworth’s Ode on the Intimations of Immortality as the high-water mark of the poetry of this century. It sometimes seems as if he had accepted the lofty rhapsodies of this noble Ode as working truths.

    ”Not in entire forgetfulness,
      And not in utter nakedness,
  But trailing clouds of glory do we come
      From God, who is our home.”

In accordance with this statement of a divine inheritance from a preexisting state, the poet addresses the infant: —

   ”Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
     On whom those truths do rest
  Which we are toiling all our lives to find.” —

These are beautiful fancies, but the philosopher will naturally ask the poet what are the truths which the child has lost between its cradle and the age of eight years, at which Wordsworth finds the little girl of whom he speaks in the lines, —

            ”A simple child —
    That lightly draws its breath
  And feels its life in every limb, —
    What should it know of death?”

What should it, sure enough, or of any other of those great truths which Time with its lessons, and the hardening of the pulpy brain can alone render appreciable to the consciousness? Undoubtedly every brain has its own set of moulds ready to shape all material of thought into its own individual set of patterns. If the mind comes into consciousness with a good set of moulds derived by “traduction,” as Dryden called it, from a good ancestry, it may be all very well to give the counsel to the youth to plant himself on his instincts. But the individual to whom this counsel is given probably has dangerous as well as wholesome instincts. He has also a great deal besides the instincts to be considered. His instincts are mixed up with innumerable acquired prejudices, erroneous conclusions, deceptive experiences, partial truths, one-sided tendencies. The clearest insight will often find it hard to decide what is the real instinct, and whether the instinct itself is, in theological language, from God or the devil. That which was a safe guide for Emerson might not work well with Lacenaire or Jesse Pomeroy. The cloud of glory which the babe brings with it into the world is a good set of instincts, which dispose it to accept moral and intellectual truths, — not the truths themselves. And too many children come into life trailing after them clouds which are anything but clouds of glory.

It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new doctrine, — new to his young disciples, — of planting themselves on their instincts, consulting their own spiritual light for guidance, — trusting to intuition, — without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which listened to his teachings. Too much was expected out of the mouths of babes and sucklings. The children shut up by Psammetichus got as far as one word in their evolution of an original language, but bekkos was a very small contribution towards a complete vocabulary. “The Dial” was well charged with intuitions, but there was too much vagueness, incoherence, aspiration without energy, effort without inspiration, to satisfy those who were looking for a new revelation.

The gospel of intuition proved to be practically nothing more or less than this: a new manifesto of intellectual and spiritual independence. It was no great discovery that we see many things as truths which we cannot prove. But it was a great impulse to thought, a great advance in the attitude of our thinking community, when the profoundly devout religious free-thinker took the ground of the undevout and irreligious free-thinker, and calmly asserted and peaceably established the right and the duty of the individual to weigh the universe, its laws and its legends, in his own balance, without fear of authority, or names, or institutions.

All this brought its dangers with it, like other movements of emancipation. For the Fay ce que voudras of the revellers of Medmenham Abbey, was substituted the new motto, Pense ce que voudras. There was an intoxication in this newly proclaimed evangel which took hold of some susceptible natures and betrayed itself in prose and rhyme, occasionally of the Bedlam sort. Emerson’s disciples were never accused of falling into the more perilous snares of antinomianism, but he himself distinctly recognizes the danger of it, and the counterbalancing effect of household life, with its curtain lectures and other benign influences. Extravagances of opinion cure themselves. Time wore off the effects of the harmless debauch, and restored the giddy revellers to the regimen of sober thought, as reformed spiritual inebriates.

Such were some of the incidental effects of the Emersonian declaration of independence. It was followed by a revolutionary war of opinion not yet ended or at present like to be. A local outbreak, if you will, but so was throwing the tea overboard. A provincial affair, if the Bohemian press likes that term better, but so was the skirmish where the gun was fired the echo of which is heard in every battle for freedom all over the world.

* * * * *

Too much has been made of Emerson’s mysticism. He was an intellectual rather than an emotional mystic, and withal a cautious one. He never let go the string of his balloon. He never threw over all his ballast of common sense so as to rise above an atmosphere in which a rational being could breathe. I found in his library William Law’s edition of Jacob Behmen. There were all those wonderful diagrams over which the reader may have grown dizzy, — just such as one finds on the walls of lunatic asylums, — evidences to all sane minds of cerebral strabismus in the contrivers of them. Emerson liked to lose himself for a little while in the vagaries of this class of minds, the dangerous proximity of which to insanity he knew and has spoken of. He played with the incommunicable, the inconceivable, the absolute, the antinomies, as he would have played with a bundle of jack-straws. “Brahma,” the poem which so mystified the readers of the “Atlantic Monthly,” was one of his spiritual divertisements. To the average Western mind it is the nearest approach to a Torricellian vacuum of intelligibility that language can pump out of itself. If “Rejected Addresses” had not been written half a century before Emerson’s poem, one would think these lines were certainly meant to ridicule and parody it.

      ”The song of Braham is an Irish howl;
       Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
  And nought is everything and everything is nought.”

Braham, Hazlitt might have said, is so obviously the anagram of Brahma that dulness itself could not mistake the object intended.

Of course no one can hold Emerson responsible for the “Yoga” doctrine of Brahmanism, which he has amused himself with putting in verse. The oriental side of Emerson’s nature delighted itself in these narcotic dreams, born in the land of the poppy and of hashish. They lend a peculiar charm to his poems, but it is not worth while to try to construct a philosophy out of them. The knowledge, if knowledge it be, of the mystic is not transmissible. It is not cumulative; it begins and ends with the solitary dreamer, and the next who follows him has to build his own cloud-castle as if it were the first aerial edifice that a human soul had ever constructed.

Some passages of “Nature,” “The Over-Soul,” “The Sphinx,” “Uriel,” illustrate sufficiently this mood of spiritual exaltation. Emerson’s calm temperament never allowed it to reach the condition he sometimes refers to, — that of ecstasy. The passage in “Nature” where he says “I become a transparent eyeball” is about as near it as he ever came. This was almost too much for some of his admirers and worshippers. One of his most ardent and faithful followers, whose gifts as an artist are well known, mounted the eyeball on legs, and with its cornea in front for a countenance and its optic nerve projecting behind as a queue, the spiritual cyclops was shown setting forth on his travels.

Emerson’s reflections in the “transcendental” mood do beyond question sometimes irresistibly suggest the close neighborhood of the sublime to the ridiculous. But very near that precipitous border line there is a charmed region where, if the statelier growths of philosophy die out and disappear, the flowers of poetry next the very edge of the chasm have a peculiar and mysterious beauty. “Uriel” is a poem which finds itself perilously near to the gulf of unsounded obscurity, and has, I doubt not, provoked the mirth of profane readers; but read in a lucid moment, it is just obscure enough and just significant enough to give the voltaic thrill which comes from the sudden contacts of the highest imaginative conceptions.

Human personality presented itself to Emerson as a passing phase of universal being. Born of the Infinite, to the Infinite it was to return. Sometimes he treats his own personality as interchangeable with objects in nature, — he would put it off like a garment and clothe himself in the landscape. Here is a curious extract from “The Adirondacs,” in which the reader need not stop to notice the parallelism with Byron’s —

 ”The sky is changed, — and such a change! O night
  And storm and darkness, ye are wondrous strong.” —

Now Emerson: —

 ”And presently the sky is changed; O world!
  What pictures and what harmonies are thine!
  The clouds are rich and dark, the air serene,
  So like the soul of me, what if’t were me?”

We find this idea of confused personal identity also in a brief poem printed among the “Translations” in the Appendix to Emerson’s Poems. These are the last two lines of “The Flute, from Hilali”: —

 ”Saying, Sweetheart! the old mystery remains,
  If I am I; thou, thou, or thou art I?”

The same transfer of personality is hinted in the line of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”:

             ”Be thou, Spirit fierce,
  My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!”

Once more, how fearfully near the abyss of the ridiculous! A few drops of alcohol bring about a confusion of mind not unlike this poetical metempsychosis.

The laird of Balnamoon had been at a dinner where they gave him cherry-brandy instead of port wine. In driving home over a wild tract of land called Munrimmon Moor his hat and wig blew off, and his servant got out of the gig and brought them to him. The hat he recognized, but not the wig. “It’s no my wig, Hairy [Harry], lad; it’s no my wig,” and he would not touch it. At last Harry lost his patience: “Ye’d better tak’ it, sir, for there’s nae waile [choice] o’ wigs on Munrimmon Moor.” And in our earlier days we used to read of the bewildered market-woman, whose Ego was so obscured when she awoke from her slumbers that she had to leave the question of her personal identity to the instinct of her four-footed companion: —

 ”If it be I, he’ll wag his little tail;
  And if it be not I, he’ll loudly bark and wail.”

I have not lost my reverence for Emerson in showing one of his fancies for a moment in the distorting mirror of the ridiculous. He would doubtless have smiled with me at the reflection, for he had a keen sense of humor. But I take the opportunity to disclaim a jesting remark about “a foresmell of the Infinite” which Mr. Conway has attributed to me, who am innocent of all connection with it.

The mystic appeals to those only who have an ear for the celestial concords, as the musician only appeals to those who have the special endowment which enables them to understand his compositions. It is not for organizations untuned to earthly music to criticise the great composers, or for those who are deaf to spiritual harmonies to criticise the higher natures which lose themselves in the strains of divine contemplation. The bewildered reader must not forget that passage of arms, previously mentioned, between Plato and Diogenes.

* * * * *

Emerson looked rather askance at Science in his early days. I remember that his brother Charles had something to say in the “Harvard Register” (1828) about its disenchantments. I suspect the prejudice may have come partly from Wordsworth. Compare this verse of his with the lines of Emerson’s which follow it.

 ”Physician art thou, one all eyes;
  Philosopher, a fingering slave,
  One that would peep and botanize
  Upon his mother’s grave?”

Emerson’s lines are to be found near the end of the Appendix in the new edition of his works.

 ”Philosophers are lined with eyes within,
  And, being so, the sage unmakes the man.
  In love he cannot therefore cease his trade;
  Scarce the first blush has overspread his cheek,
  He feels it, introverts his learned eye
  To catch the unconscious heart in the very act.
  His mother died, — the only friend he had, —
  Some tears escaped, but his philosophy
  Couched like a cat, sat watching close behind
  And throttled all his passion. Is’t not like
  That devil-spider that devours her mate
  Scarce freed from her embraces?”

The same feeling comes out in the Poem “Blight,” where he says the “young scholars who invade our hills”

 ”Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not,
  And all their botany is Latin names;”

and in “The Walk,” where the “learned men” with their glasses are contrasted with the sons of Nature, — the poets are no doubt meant, — much to the disadvantage of the microscopic observers. Emerson’s mind was very far from being of the scientific pattern. Science is quantitative, — loves the foot-rule and the balance, — methodical, exhaustive, indifferent to the beautiful as such. The poet is curious, asks all manner of questions, and never thinks of waiting for the answer, still less of torturing Nature to get at it. Emerson wonders, for instance, —

“Why Nature loves the number five,”

but leaves his note of interrogation without troubling himself any farther. He must have picked up some wood-craft and a little botany from Thoreau, and a few chemical notions from his brother-in-law, Dr. Jackson, whose name is associated with the discovery of artificial anaesthesia. It seems probable that the genial companionship of Agassiz, who united with his scientific genius, learning, and renown, most delightful social qualities, gave him a kinder feeling to men of science and their pursuits than he had entertained before that great master came among us. At any rate he avails himself of the facts drawn from their specialties without scruple when they will serve his turn. But he loves the poet always better than the scientific student of nature. In his Preface to the Poems of Mr. W.E. Channing, he says: —

“Here is a naturalist who sees the flower and the bud with a poet’s curiosity and awe, and does not count the stamens in the aster, nor the feathers in the wood-thrush, but rests in the surprise and affection they awake.” —

This was Emerson’s own instinctive attitude to all the phenomena of nature.

Emerson’s style is epigrammatic, incisive, authoritative, sometimes quaint, never obscure, except when he is handling nebulous subjects. His paragraphs are full of brittle sentences that break apart and are independent units, like the fragments of a coral colony. His imagery is frequently daring, leaping from the concrete to the abstract, from the special to the general and universal, and vice versa, with a bound that is like a flight. Here are a few specimens of his pleasing audacities: —

“There is plenty of wild azote and carbon unappropriated, but it is naught till we have made it up into loaves and soup.” —

“He arrives at the sea-shore and a sumptuous ship has floored and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic.” —

“If we weave a yard of tape in all humility and as well as we can, long hereafter we shall see it was no cotton tape at all but some galaxy which we braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.” —

“Tapping the tempest for a little side wind.” —

“The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment and bind them fast in one web.” —

He is fond of certain archaisms and unusual phrases. He likes the expression “mother-wit,” which he finds in Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and other old writers. He often uses the word “husband” in its earlier sense of economist. His use of the word “haughty” is so fitting, and it sounds so nobly from his lips, that we could wish its employment were forbidden henceforth to voices which vulgarize it. But his special, constitutional, word is “fine,” meaning something like dainty, as Shakespeare uses it,— “my dainty Ariel,”— “fine Ariel.” It belongs to his habit of mind and body as “faint” and “swoon” belong to Keats. This word is one of the ear-marks by which Emerson’s imitators are easily recognized. “Melioration” is another favorite word of Emerson’s. A clairvoyant could spell out some of his most characteristic traits by the aid of his use of these three words; his inborn fastidiousness, subdued and kept out of sight by his large charity and his good breeding, showed itself in his liking for the word “haughty;” his exquisite delicacy by his fondness for the word “fine,” with a certain shade of meaning; his optimism in the frequent recurrence of the word “melioration.”

We must not find fault with his semi-detached sentences until we quarrel with Solomon and criticise the Sermon on the Mount. The “point and surprise” which he speaks of as characterizing the style of Plutarch belong eminently to his own. His fertility of illustrative imagery is very great. His images are noble, or, if borrowed from humble objects, ennobled by his handling. He throws his royal robe over a milking-stool and it becomes a throne. But chiefly he chooses objects of comparison grand in themselves. He deals with the elements at first hand. Such delicacy of treatment, with such breadth and force of effect, is hard to match anywhere, and we know him by his style at sight. It is as when the slight fingers of a girl touch the keys of some mighty and many-voiced organ, and send its thunders rolling along the aisles and startling the stained windows of a great cathedral. We have seen him as an unpretending lecturer. We follow him round as he “peddles out all the wit he can gather from Time or from Nature,” and we find that “he has changed his market cart into a chariot of the sun,” and is carrying about the morning light as merchandise.

* * * * *

Emerson was as loyal an American, as thorough a New Englander, as home-loving a citizen, as ever lived. He arraigned his countrymen sharply for their faults. Mr. Arnold made one string of his epithets familiar to all of us,— “This great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America.” This was from a private letter to Carlyle. In his Essay, “Works and Days,” he is quite as outspoken: “This mendicant America, this curious, peering, itinerant, imitative America.” “I see plainly,” he says, “that our society is as bigoted to the respectabilities of religion and education as yours.” “The war,” he says, “gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation.” All his life long he recognized the faults and errors of the new civilization. All his life long he labored diligently and lovingly to correct them. To the dark prophecies of Carlyle, which came wailing to him across the ocean, he answered with ever hopeful and cheerful anticipations. “Here,” he said, in words I have already borrowed, “is the home of man — here is the promise of a new and more excellent social state than history has recorded.”

Such a man as Emerson belongs to no one town or province or continent; he is the common property of mankind; and yet we love to think of him as breathing the same air and treading the same soil that we and our fathers and our children have breathed and trodden. So it pleases us to think how fondly he remembered his birthplace; and by the side of Franklin’s bequest to his native city we treasure that golden verse of Emerson’s: —

 ”A blessing through the ages thus
  Shield all thy roofs and towers,
  GOD WITH THE FATHERS, SO WITH US,
  Thou darling town of ours!”

Emerson sympathized with all generous public movements, but he was not fond of working in associations, though he liked well enough to attend their meetings as a listener and looker-on. His study was his workshop, and he preferred to labor in solitude. When he became famous he paid the penalty of celebrity in frequent interruptions by those “devastators of the day” who sought him in his quiet retreat. His courtesy and kindness to his visitors were uniform and remarkable. Poets who come to recite their verses and reformers who come to explain their projects are among the most formidable of earthly visitations. Emerson accepted his martyrdom with meek submission; it was a martyrdom in detail, but collectively its petty tortures might have satisfied a reasonable inquisitor as the punishment of a moderate heresy. Except in that one phrase above quoted he never complained of his social oppressors, so far as I remember, in his writings. His perfect amiability was one of his most striking characteristics, and in a nature fastidious as was his in its whole organization, it implied a self-command worthy of admiration.

* * * * *

The natural purity and elevation of Emerson’s character show themselves in all that he writes. His life corresponded to the ideal we form of him from his writings. This it was which made him invulnerable amidst all the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as existing about Boileau, —

“Ne disons pas mal de Nicolas, — cela porte malheur.”

(Don’t let us abuse Nicolas, — it brings ill luck.) The cooped-up dogmatists whose very citadel of belief he was attacking, and who had their hot water and boiling pitch and flaming brimstone ready for the assailants of their outer defences, withheld their missiles from him, and even sometimes, in a movement of involuntary human sympathy, sprinkled him with rose-water. His position in our Puritan New England was in some respects like that of Burns in Presbyterian Scotland. The dour Scotch ministers and elders could not cage their minstrel, and they could not clip his wings; and so they let this morning lark rise above their theological mists, and sing to them at heaven’s gate, until he had softened all their hearts and might nestle in their bosoms and find his perch on “the big ha’ bible,” if he would, — and as he did. So did the music of Emerson’s words and life steal into the hearts of our stern New England theologians, and soften them to a temper which would have seemed treasonable weakness to their stiff-kneed forefathers. When a man lives a life commended by all the Christian virtues, enlightened persons are not so apt to cavil at his particular beliefs or unbeliefs as in former generations. We do, however, wish to know what are the convictions of any such persons in matters of highest interest about which there is so much honest difference of opinion in this age of deep and anxious and devout religious scepticism.

It was a very wise and a very prudent course which was taken by Simonides, when he was asked by his imperial master to give him his ideas about the Deity. He begged for a day to consider the question, but when the time came for his answer he wanted two days more, and at the end of these, four days. In short, the more he thought about it, the more he found himself perplexed.

The name most frequently applied to Emerson’s form of belief is Pantheism. How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word can tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief in the omnipresence of the Deity?

Theodore Parker explained Emerson’s position, as he understood it, in an article in the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review.” I borrow this quotation from Mr. Cooke: —

“He has an absolute confidence in God. He has been foolishly accused of Pantheism, which sinks God in nature, but no man Is further from it. He never sinks God in man; he does not stop with the law, in matter or morals, but goes to the Law-giver; yet probably it would not be so easy for him to give his definition of God, as it would be for most graduates at Andover or Cambridge.”

We read in his Essay, “Self-Reliance “: “This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms.”

The “ever-blessed ONE” of Emerson corresponds to the Father in the doctrine of the Trinity. The “Over-Soul” of Emerson is that aspect of Deity which is known to theology as the Holy Spirit. Jesus was for him a divine manifestation, but only as other great human souls have been in all ages and are to-day. He was willing to be called a Christian just as he was willing to be called a Platonist.

Explanations are apt not to explain much in dealing with subjects like this. “Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?” But on certain great points nothing could be clearer than the teaching of Emerson. He believed in the doctrine of spiritual influx as sincerely as any Calvinist or Swedenborgian. His views as to fate, or the determining conditions of the character, brought him near enough to the doctrine of predestination to make him afraid of its consequences, and led him to enter a caveat against any denial of the self-governing power of the will.

His creed was a brief one, but he carried it everywhere with him. In all he did, in all he said, and so far as all outward signs could show, in all his thoughts, the indwelling Spirit was his light and guide; through all nature he looked up to nature’s God; and if he did not worship the “man Christ Jesus” as the churches of Christendom have done, he followed his footsteps so nearly that our good Methodist, Father Taylor, spoke of him as more like Christ than any man he had known.

Emerson was in friendly relations with many clergymen of the church from which he had parted. Since he left the pulpit, the lesson, not of tolerance, for that word is an insult as applied by one set of well-behaved people to another, not of charity, for that implies an impertinent assumption, but of good feeling on the part of divergent sects and their ministers has been taught and learned as never before. Their official Confessions of Faith make far less difference in their human sentiments and relations than they did even half a century ago. These ancient creeds are handed along down, to be kept in their phials with their stoppers fast, as attar of rose is kept in its little bottles; they are not to be opened and exposed to the atmosphere so long as their perfume, — the odor of sanctity, — is diffused from the carefully treasured receptacles, — perhaps even longer than that.

Out of the endless opinions as to the significance and final outcome of
Emerson’s religious teachings I will select two as typical.

Dr. William Hague, long the honored minister of a Baptist church in Boston, where I had the pleasure of friendly acquaintance with him, has written a thoughtful, amiable paper on Emerson, which he read before the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. This Essay closes with the following sentence: —

“Thus, to-day, while musing, as at the beginning, over the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, we recognize now as ever his imperial genius as one of the greatest of writers; at the same time, his life work, as a whole, tested by its supreme ideal, its method and its fruitage, shows also a great waste of power, verifying the saying of Jesus touching the harvest of human life: ‘HE THAT GATHERETH NOT WITH ME SCATTERETH ABROAD.’”

“But when Dean Stanley returned from America, it was to report,” says Mr. Conway “(‘Macmillan,’ June, 1879), that religion had there passed through an evolution from Edwards to Emerson, and that ‘the genial atmosphere which Emerson has done so much to promote is shared by all the churches equally.’”

What is this “genial atmosphere” but the very spirit of Christianity? The good Baptist minister’s Essay is full of it. He comes asking what has become of Emerson’s “wasted power” and lamenting his lack of “fruitage,” and lo! he himself has so ripened and mellowed in that same Emersonian air that the tree to which he belongs would hardly know him. The close-communion clergyman handles the arch-heretic as tenderly as if he were the nursing mother of a new infant Messiah. A few generations ago this preacher of a new gospel would have been burned; a little later he would been tried and imprisoned; less than fifty years ago he was called infidel and atheist; names which are fast becoming relinquished to the intellectual half-breeds who sometimes find their way into pulpits and the so-called religious periodicals.

It is not within our best-fenced churches and creeds that the self-governing American is like to find the religious freedom which the Concord prophet asserted with the strength of Luther and the sweetness of Melancthon, and which the sovereign in his shirt-sleeves will surely claim. Milton was only the precursor of Emerson when he wrote: —

“Neither is God appointed and confined, where and out of what place these his chosen shall be first heard to speak; for he sees not as man sees, chooses not as man chooses, lest we should devote ourselves again to set places and assemblies, and outward callings of men, planting our faith one while in the old convocation house, and another while in the Chapel at Westminster, when all the faith and religion that shall be there canonized is not sufficient without plain convincement, and the charity of patient instruction, to supple the least bruise of conscience, to edify the meanest Christian who desires to walk in the spirit and not in the letter of human trust, for all the number of voices that can be there made; no, though Harry the Seventh himself there, with all his liege tombs about him, should lend their voices from the dead, to swell their number.”

The best evidence of the effect produced by Emerson’s writings and life is to be found in the attention he has received from biographers and critics. The ground upon which I have ventured was already occupied by three considerable Memoirs. Mr. George Willis Cooke’s elaborate work is remarkable for its careful and thorough analysis of Emerson’s teachings. Mr. Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Emerson at Home and Abroad” is a lively picture of its subject by one long and well acquainted with him. Mr. Alexander Ireland’s “Biographical Sketch” brings together, from a great variety of sources, as well as from his own recollections, the facts of Emerson’s history and the comments of those whose opinions were best worth reproducing. I must refer to this volume for a bibliography of the various works and Essays of which Emerson furnished the subject.

From the days when Mr. Whipple attracted the attention of our intelligent, but unawakened reading community, by his discriminating and appreciative criticisms of Emerson’s Lectures, and Mr. Lowell drew the portrait of the New England “Plotinus-Montaigne” in his brilliant “Fable for Critics,” to the recent essays of Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Henry Norman, and Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Emerson’s writings have furnished one of the most enduring pièces de résistance at the critical tables of the old and the new world.

He early won the admiration of distinguished European thinkers and writers: Carlyle accepted his friendship and his disinterested services; Miss Martineau fully recognized his genius and sounded his praises; Miss Bremer fixed her sharp eyes on him and pronounced him “a noble man.” Professor Tyndall found the inspiration of his life in Emerson’s fresh thought; and Mr. Arnold, who clipped his medals reverently but unsparingly, confessed them to be of pure gold, even while he questioned whether they would pass current with posterity. He found discerning critics in France, Germany, and Holland. Better than all is the testimony of those who knew him best. They who repeat the saying that “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country,” will find an exception to its truth in the case of Emerson. Read the impressive words spoken at his funeral by his fellow-townsman, Judge Hoar; read the glowing tributes of three of Concord’s poets, — Mr. Alcott, Mr. Channing, and Mr. Sanborn, — and it will appear plainly enough that he, whose fame had gone out into all the earth, was most of all believed in, honored, beloved, lamented, in the little village circle that centred about his own fireside.

It is a not uninteresting question whether Emerson has bequeathed to the language any essay or poem which will resist the flow of time like “the adamant of Shakespeare,” and remain a classic like the Essays of Addison or Gray’s Elegy. It is a far more important question whether his thought entered into the spirit of his day and generation, so that it modified the higher intellectual, moral, and religious life of his time, and, as a necessary consequence, those of succeeding ages. Corpora non agunt nisi soluta, and ideas must be dissolved and taken up as well as material substances before they can act. “That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die,” or rather lose the form with which it was sown. Eight stanzas of four lines each have made the author of “The Burial of Sir John Moore” an immortal, and endowed the language with a classic, perfect as the most finished cameo. But what is the gift of a mourning ring to the bequest of a perpetual annuity? How many lives have melted into the history of their time, as the gold was lost in Corinthian brass, leaving no separate monumental trace of their influence, but adding weight and color and worth to the age of which they formed a part and the generations that came after them! We can dare to predict of Emerson, in the words of his old friend and disciple, Mr. Cranch: —

 ”The wise will know thee and the good will love,
    The age to come will feel thy impress given
  In all that lifts the race a step above
    Itself, and stamps it with the seal of heaven.”

It seems to us, to-day, that Emerson’s best literary work in prose and verse must live as long as the language lasts; but whether it live or fade from memory, the influence of his great and noble life and the spoken and written words which were its exponents, blends, indestructible, with the enduring elements of civilization.

* * * * *

It is not irreverent, but eminently fitting, to compare any singularly pure and virtuous life with that of the great exemplar in whose footsteps Christendom professes to follow. The time was when the divine authority of his gospel rested chiefly upon the miracles he is reported to have wrought. As the faith in these exceptions to the general laws of the universe diminished, the teachings of the Master, of whom it was said that he spoke as never man spoke, were more largely relied upon as evidence of his divine mission. Now, when a comparison of these teachings with those of other religious leaders is thought by many to have somewhat lessened the force of this argument, the life of the sinless and self-devoted servant of God and friend of man is appealed to as the last and convincing proof that he was an immediate manifestation of the Divinity.

Judged by his life Emerson comes very near our best ideal of humanity. He was born too late for the trial of the cross or the stake, or even the jail. But the penalty of having an opinion of his own and expressing it was a serious one, and he accepted it as cheerfully as any of Queen Mary’s martyrs accepted his fiery baptism. His faith was too large and too deep for the formulae he found built into the pulpit, and he was too honest to cover up his doubts under the flowing vestments of a sacred calling. His writings, whether in prose or verse, are worthy of admiration, but his manhood was the underlying quality which gave them their true value. It was in virtue of this that his rare genius acted on so many minds as a trumpet call to awaken them to the meaning and the privileges of this earthly existence with all its infinite promise. No matter of what he wrote or spoke, his words, his tones, his looks, carried the evidence of a sincerity which pervaded them all and was to his eloquence and poetry like the water of crystallization; without which they would effloresce into mere rhetoric. He shaped an ideal for the commonest life, he proposed an object to the humblest seeker after truth. Look for beauty in the world around you, he said, and you shall see it everywhere. Look within, with pure eyes and simple trust, and you shall find the Deity mirrored in your own soul. Trust yourself because you trust the voice of God in your inmost consciousness.

There are living organisms so transparent that we can see their hearts beating and their blood flowing through their glassy tissues. So transparent was the life of Emerson; so clearly did the true nature of the man show through it. What he taught others to be, he was himself. His deep and sweet humanity won him love and reverence everywhere among those whose natures were capable of responding to the highest manifestations of character. Here and there a narrow-eyed sectary may have avoided or spoken ill of him; but if He who knew what was in man had wandered from door to door in New England as of old in Palestine, we can well believe that one of the thresholds which “those blessed feet” would have crossed, to hallow and receive its welcome, would have been that of the lovely and quiet home of Emerson.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by Edward W. Emerson

The Emersons first appeared in the north of England, but Thomas, who landed in Massachusetts in 1638, came from Hertfordshire. He built soon after a house, sometimes railed the Saint’s Rest, which still stands in Ipswich on the slope of Heart-break Hill, close by Labour-in-vain Creek. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the sixth in descent from him. He was born in Boston, in Summer Street, May 25, 1803. He was the third son of William Emerson, the minister of the First Church in Boston, whose father, William Emerson, had been the patriotic minister of Concord at the outbreak of the Revolution, and died a chaplain in the army. Ruth Haskins, the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was left a widow in 1811, with a family of five little boys. The taste of these boys was scholarly, and four of them went through the Latin School to Harvard College, and graduated there. Their mother was a person of great sweetness, dignity, and piety, bringing up her sons wisely and well in very straitened circumstances, and loved by them. Her husband’s stepfather, Rev. Dr. Ripley of Concord, helped her, and constantly invited the boys to the Old Manse, so that the woods and fields along the Concord River were first a playground and then the background of the dreams of their awakening imaginations.

Born in the city, Emerson’s young mind first found delight in poems and classic prose, to which his instincts led him as naturally as another boy’s would to go fishing, but his vacations in the country supplemented these by giving him great and increasing love of nature. In his early poems classic imagery is woven into pictures of New England woodlands. Even as a little boy he had the habit of attempting flights of verse, stimulated by Milton, Pope, or Scott, and he and his mates took pleasure in declaiming to each other in barns and attics. He was so full of thoughts and fancies that he sought the pen instinctively, to jot them down.

At college Emerson did not shine as a scholar, though he won prizes for essays and declamations, being especially unfitted for mathematical studies, and enjoying the classics rather in a literary than grammatical way. And yet it is doubtful whether any man in his class used his time to better purpose with reference to his after life, for young Emerson’s instinct led him to wide reading of works, outside the curriculum, that spoke directly to him. He had already formed the habit of writing in a journal, not the facts but the thoughts and inspirations of the day; often, also, good stories or poetical quotations, and scraps of his own verse.

On graduation from Harvard in the class of 1821, following the traditions of his family, Emerson resolved to study to be a minister, and meantime helped his older brother William in the support of the family by teaching in a school for young ladies in Boston, that the former had successfully established. The principal was twenty-one and the assistant nineteen years of age. For school-teaching on the usual lines Emerson was not fitted, and his youth and shyness prevented him from imparting his best gifts to his scholars. Years later, when, in his age, his old scholars assembled to greet him, he regretted that no hint had been brought into the school of what at that very time “I was writing every night in my chamber, my first thoughts on morals and the beautiful laws of compensation, and of individual genius, which to observe and illustrate have given sweetness to many years of my life.” Yet many scholars remembered his presence and teaching with pleasure and gratitude, not only in Boston, but in Chelmsford and Roxbury, for while his younger brothers were in college it was necessary that he should help. In these years, as through all his youth, he was loved, spurred on in his intellectual life, and keenly criticised by his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, an eager and wide reader, inspired by religious zeal, high-minded, but eccentric.

The health of the young teacher suffered from too ascetic a life, and unmistakable danger-signals began to appear, fortunately heeded in time, but disappointment and delay resulted, borne, however, with sense and courage. His course at the Divinity School in Cambridge was much broken; nevertheless, in October, 1826, he was “approbated to preach” by the Middlesex Association of Ministers. A winter at the North at this time threatened to prove fatal, so he was sent South by his helpful kinsman, Rev. Samuel Ripley, and passed the winter in Florida with benefit, working northward in the spring, preaching in the cities, and resumed his studies at Cambridge.

In 1829, Emerson was called by the Second or Old North Church in Boston to become the associate pastor with Rev. Henry Ware, and soon after, because of his senior’s delicate health, was called on to assume the full duty. Theological dogmas, such as the Unitarian Church of Channing’s day accepted, did not appeal to Emerson, nor did the supernatural in religion in its ordinary acceptation interest him. The omnipresence of spirit, the dignity of man, the daily miracle of the universe, were what he taught, and while the older members of the congregation may have been disquieted that he did not dwell on revealed religion, his words reached the young people, stirred thought, and awakened aspiration. At this time he lived with his mother and his young wife (Ellen Tucker) in Chardon Street. For three years he ministered to his people in Boston. Then having felt the shock of being obliged to conform to church usage, as stated prayer when the spirit did not move, and especially the administration of the Communion, he honestly laid his troubles before his people, and proposed to them some modification of this rite. While they considered his proposition, Emerson went into the White Mountains to weigh his conflicting duties to his church and conscience. He came down, bravely to meet the refusal of the church to change the rite, and in a sermon preached in September, 1832, explained his objections to it, and, because he could not honestly administer it, resigned.

He parted from his people in all kindness, but the wrench was felt. His wife had recently died, he was ill himself, his life seemed to others broken up. But meantime voices from far away had reached him. He sailed for Europe, landed in Italy, saw cities, and art, and men, but would not stay long. Of the dead, Michael Angelo appealed chiefly to him there; Landor among the living. He soon passed northward, making little stay in Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called him home.

He landed at Boston within the year in good health and hope, and joined his mother and youngest brother Charles in Newton. Frequent invitations to preach still came, and were accepted, and he even was sounded as to succeeding Dr. Dewey in the church at New Bedford; but, as he stipulated for freedom from ceremonial, this came to nothing.

In the autumn of 1834 he moved to Concord, living with his kinsman, Dr. Ripley, at the Manse, but soon bought house and land on the Boston Road, on the edge of the village towards Walden woods. Thither, in the autumn, he brought his wife. Miss Lidian Jackson, of Plymouth, and this was their home during the rest of their lives.

The new life to which he had been called opened pleasantly and increased in happiness and opportunity, except for the sadness of bereavements, for, in the first few years, his brilliant brothers Edward and Charles died, and soon afterward Waldo, his firstborn son, and later his mother. Emerson had left traditional religion, the city, the Old World, behind, and now went to Nature as his teacher, his inspiration. His first book, “Nature,” which he was meditating while in Europe, was finished here, and published in 1836. His practice during all his life in Concord was to go alone to the woods almost daily, sometimes to wait there for hours, and, when thus attuned, to receive the message to which he was to give voice. Though it might be colored by him in transmission, he held that the light was universal.

   “Ever the words of the Gods resound,
      But the porches of man’s ear
    Seldom in this low life’s round
      Are unsealed that he may hear.”

But he resorted, also, to the books of those who had handed down the oracles truly, and was quick to find the message destined for him. Men, too, he studied eagerly, the humblest and the highest, regretting always that the brand of the scholar on him often silenced the men of shop and office where he came. He was everywhere a learner, expecting light from the youngest and least educated visitor. The thoughts combined with the flower of his reading were gradually grouped into lectures, and his main occupation through life was reading these to who would hear, at first in courses in Boston, but later all over the country, for the Lyceum sprang up in New England in these years in every town, and spread westward to the new settlements even beyond the Mississippi. His winters were spent in these rough, but to him interesting journeys, for he loved to watch the growth of the Republic in which he had faith, and his summers were spent in study and writing. These lectures were later severely pruned and revised, and the best of them gathered into seven volumes of essays under different names between 1841 and 1876. The courses in Boston, which at first were given in the Masonic Temple, were always well attended by earnest and thoughtful people. The young, whether in years or in spirit, were always and to the end his audience of the spoken or written word. The freedom of the Lyceum platform pleased Emerson. He found that people would hear on Wednesday with approval and unsuspectingly doctrines from which on Sunday they felt officially obliged to dissent.

Mr. Lowell, in his essays, has spoken of these early lectures and what they were worth to him and others suffering from the generous discontent of youth with things as they were. Emerson used to say, “My strength and my doom is to be solitary;” but to a retired scholar a wholesome offset to this was the travelling and lecturing in cities and in raw frontier towns, bringing him into touch with the people, and this he knew and valued.

In 1837 Emerson gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Cambridge, The American Scholar, which increased his growing reputation, but the following year his Address to the Senior Class at the Divinity School brought out, even from the friendly Unitarians, severe strictures and warnings against its dangerous doctrines. Of this heresy Emerson said: “I deny personality to God because it is too little, not too much.” He really strove to elevate the idea of God. Yet those who were pained or shocked by his teachings respected Emerson. His lectures were still in demand; he was often asked to speak by literary societies at orthodox colleges. He preached regularly at East Lexington until 1838, but thereafter withdrew from the ministerial office. At this time the progressive and spiritually minded young people used to meet for discussion and help in Boston, among them George Ripley, Cyrus Bartol, James Freeman Clarke, Alcott, Dr. Hedge, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. Perhaps from this gathering of friends, which Emerson attended, came what is called the Transcendental Movement, two results of which were the Brook Farm Community and the Dial magazine, in which last Emerson took great interest, and was for the time an editor. Many of these friends were frequent visitors in Concord. Alcott moved thither after the breaking up of his school. Hawthorne also came to dwell there. Henry Thoreau, a Concord youth, greatly interested Emerson; indeed, became for a year or two a valued inmate of his home, and helped and instructed him in the labors of the garden and little farm, which gradually grew to ten acres, the chief interest of which for the owner was his trees, which he loved and tended. Emerson helped introduce his countrymen to the teachings of Carlyle, and edited his works here, where they found more readers than at home.

In 1847 Emerson was invited to read lectures in England, and remained abroad a year, visiting France also in her troublous times. English Traits was a result. Just before this journey he had collected and published his poems. A later volume, called May Day, followed in 1867. He had written verses from childhood, and to the purified expression of poetry he, through life, eagerly aspired. He said, “I like my poems best because it is not I who write them.” In 1866 the degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred on him by Harvard University, and he was chosen an Overseer. In 1867 he again gave the Phi Beta Kappa oration, and in 1870 and 1871 gave courses in Philosophy in the University Lectures at Cambridge.

Emerson was not merely a man of letters. He recognized and did the private and public duties of the hour. He exercised a wide hospitality to souls as well as bodies. Eager youths came to him for rules, and went away with light. Reformers, wise and unwise, came to him, and were kindly received. They were often disappointed that they could not harness him to their partial and transient scheme. He said, My reforms include theirs: I must go my way; help people by my strength, not by my weakness. But if a storm threatened, he felt bound to appear and show his colors. Against the crying evils of his time he worked bravely in his own way. He wrote to President Van Buren against the wrong done to the Cherokees, dared speak against the idolized Webster, when he deserted the cause of Freedom, constantly spoke of the iniquity of slavery, aided with speech and money the Free State cause in Kansas, was at Phillips’s side at the antislavery meeting in 1861 broken up by the Boston mob, urged emancipation during the war.

He enjoyed his Concord home and neighbors, served on the school committee for years, did much for the Lyceum, and spoke on the town’s great occasions. He went to all town-meetings, oftener to listen and admire than to speak, and always took pleasure and pride in the people. In return he was respected and loved by them.

Emerson’s house was destroyed by fire in 1872, and the incident exposure and fatigue did him harm. His many friends insisted on rebuilding his house and sending him abroad to get well. He went up the Nile, and revisited England, finding old and new friends, and, on his return, was welcomed and escorted home by the people of Concord. After this time he was unable to write. His old age was quiet and happy among his family and friends. He died in April, 1882.

EDWARD W. EMERSON.

January, 1899.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts — Emerson’s final resting place

Emerson’s grave